Dev

This week the Session dev team moved well into their focus on chunk 2 of Closed groups, with all teams now making significant progress on chunk 2. The Session team also continued wrapping up the final parts of disappearing messages, with some final changes to clock positioning and logic, and making any corrections to issues pointed out in QA. The core team continued making progress updating the EVM contract implementations to be more production ready, finishing review 5/7 of the major functions. The Lokinet team has started work on addressing several persistent issues concerning the management of Router contacts. This work will transition from the use of separate files overseen by the operating system to a cleaner approach utilising an SQLite database. This implementation streamlines the Router Contact management process significantly.

Session

Session Android

• Stop video calls rotating when rotation is disabled (Thanks to community member rugveddarwhekar)

• Ongoing work on rebuilding disappearing messages

• Ongoing work on rebuilding closed groups

Session Desktop

• Use Maxmind DB to resolve Service Node IP address geolocations (Thanks to community member IanMacd for writing a majority of this PR)

• Ongoing work on rebuild of disappearing messages

• Ongoing work on rebuilding closed groups 

Session iOS 

• Ongoing work on rebuilding closed groups 

• Ongoing work on rebuild of disappearing messages 

Oxen Core  

EVM migration

• Continue review and refactor of EVM contracts to be more production ready

• Move back onto Oxen core work to start making adjustments to the Oxen blockchain to transition its role into the “Oxen workchain”

Lokinet

• Replace the logic around handling router contacts as files on disk with a SQLite database

• Continue working on path build and onion messages

• Ongoing work on messaging refactor

LibQUIC

• Update a bunch of dependencies in libquic

• Static build fixes (mostly for Apple builds)

Marketing

Hot off the press (or rather fresh off the airwaves) this week — we dropped a new video on our Session TV youtube channel.  “Top 3 Reasons to Switch to a Private Messenger in 2023” has had a great early reception from the community, and anticipate this style of content will perform well with people who are newer to the privacy ecosystem. In addition to this, our video content is set to keep on rolling with Cam and Tom having finished filming for our next piece. Tom is set to handle the editing for that next week — so expect that in your feed soon.

Session Token wise, we continued to work on Setting up our new discord server for the Session Token community. With the last finishing touches, such as bots, rules and copy, coming together as we speak – we’re about to start internally testing the hub within the team before launching this to the community. 

Alex, Sam and Wes continued working on written content for the OPTF, which will drop together as a collection of written content here. These pieces range in focus, with Wes working on an article discussing Session’s audience growth patterns whilst Alex is working on an article about online anonymity. 

Finally looking across our socials, we had some really high performing content that went out last week. On our X (formerly known as Twitter), we put out a research call to find out how people first found out about Session and had nearly 70 responses overnight. Although it was gathered in an ad hoc way, these insights are super valuable to learn how people are finding out about Session — we don’t track you, after all. Over on Mastodon, we’re well on track to hit our Q4 goals, including both engagement and follower growth. We’ve achieved 40 percent of our target follower growth well ahead of schedule and posts like this continue to do well.