SOGS (Session Open Group Server) is a self-hosted community server that works in Session messenger. It allows anyone to host a public chat space where users can communicate securely through onion routing.

The problem

The official SOGS implementation in Python, called PySogs, is a nightmare to set up and maintain. It only works on one specific Ubuntu version, it requires dependencies even when installing it as binary, and even then it's not guaranteed to work because you might end up getting one of the cryptic errors. On top of that it's not maintained, outdated, slow and over the years collected so much stinky code that it's hard to even read it, let alone improve or modify. It also lacks user-friendly UI and relies on CLI arguments.

The solution

I made a free and 100% open-source reimplementation of PySogs in TypeScript with Bun runtime focusing on ease of use, performance and security. It features an interactive CLI which user can navigate with arrow keys, a custom-crafted in-house plugin system for easy extensibility, full compatibility with PySogs database for easy migration and documentation on all of its parts.

Plugins

One of the long-awaited features — antispam — is built-in via plugins. It presents user with a simple image captcha rendered with Server JS Canvas APIs. Another useful plugin is topic moderation which deletes messages based on blocked keywords or using GPT moderation (opt-in).

Security

It also supports the new 25-prefix for Session IDs that in theory should be more secure and not vulnerable to the unblinding exploit (see below).