Dev

This week the Session team worked on adding a setting which allows for more control over receiving message requests from communities and open groups. We also continued work on updated push notifications and disappearing messages. LibSession was also in the crosshairs with our new groups implementation making good progress. The Oxen core team completed an important smart contract optimisation which will reduce gas usage when validating BLS signatures signed by many Service Node operators. Finally, the Lokinet team made further progress on integrating libQUIC into Lokinet and made some changes to how reliable communications between nodes will be handled in the future. 

Session

Session Android

• Add new settings option to disable receiving message requests from communities/open group servers

• Remove unused RecoveryPhraseRestoreActivity

• Remove unused longmessage package

• Hide send button when message contains only whitespace

• Ongoing work to update push notifications

• Ongoing work to improve overhaul disappearing messages 

Session Desktop

• Add new settings option to disable receiving message requests from communities/open group servers 

• Experimented with db typings using kysely

• Remove integration tests from main repo (these have moved to their own repo here)

Session iOS 

• Get release 2.4.0 ready

• Add new settings option to disable receiving message requests from communities/open group servers

• Ongoing refactoring of in app screens to use SwiftUI

LibSession 

• Update wrapper to support disappearing messages

• Update wrapper build instructions

• Add info in community messages to indicate whether a user accepts message requests

• Ongoing implementation of closed groups

Oxen/SENT Core  

• Get BLS key negation working inside EVM contracts, this allows us to validate messages signed by the Service Node network much more efficiently on the EVM chain. This will be essential if we migrate the Oxen token to SENT on an EVM chain. 

Lokinet

• Add a bridge layer for making ZMQ requests over libquic

• Fix graceful connection close handling

• Integration libquic into Lokinet (WIP)

• Fix compilation issues with latest gcc and clang compiler versions

Marketing

Howdy again! Last week in marketing we had two core focuses - create and maintain. This meant we continued to blaze ahead on the Oxen branding transition, in addition to ensuring that our focus on Session and Lokinet doesn’t lag behind. To this end the team found itself spread across the SENT branding strategy, the community AMA and a wide array of Session content. 

Josh, Cam and Alex reviewed some design iterations for the new branding, and continued to refine the identity of the new Session Token. We continued to workshop strategies and directions alongside the core development team, finalising the third review of the principle branding. This leaves us ready for another round of community engagement and feedback, which as we’ve stressed across all of our channels, is vitally important to the transition process.

We also dropped the ORC-8 Community AMA that was mentioned in the previous Lab Update. In the interest of  transparency and accountability, we collected and answered the burning questions that our community had about ORC-8. We know this transition signals a big shift for the project, which is why we assembled all of the top brass for a full hour to thoroughly answer questions from all perspectives. For those of you who are of a more literary persuasion, we also produced a blog which includes a summary of all the answers.

Wes set about preparing the next season of Session Tapes – putting together a reach out packet and working with Tim to identify possible guests in and around the privacy space. We’re excited to collaborate with digital privacy advocates and build the awareness of the show. We also looked into the first stages of setting up a curated monthly newsletter to make better use of our ever growing email list. 

Finally Alex worked hand in hand with our support team to design and carry out some user interviews. For us to build tech that matters/helps our community, we need to hear from them – so we hosted a few digital meetings, which gave us invaluable insight into the user experience across Session. 

As always folks, we’ll see you next week.