Get to Know Tlon Messenger

Tlon Messenger is a simple social messaging app that belongs to you 100%.

Tlon Messenger (TM for short) is a straightforward, utilitarian tool for bringing together friends, family, and collaborators. TM has the essential tools to chat, write, and share links and images.

While TM looks familiar at first glance, it’s nothing like the apps and services we’re surrounded with.

We take the meaning of the word ‘tool’ pretty seriously. A great tool is one that can never change without your consent, take advantage of you, or disappear out from under you.

Most importantly, a great tool is yours. All of today’s apps and services depend on a company to run them, so we had to invent a new system from scratch for people to connect. We built TM from the ground up. TM runs on a completely new, wholly decentralized platform for personal computing in the cloud that’s owned by its users.

Because TM is owned by its users, it's immune to the pressures that cause most of our software to sell our data, exploit our attention, and take advantage of us. Even better, TM is yours to customize, hack on, and even run yourself.

We built TM with great care so that it can evolve alongside the people who depend on it. While TM starts as a social messenger, it’s built to evolve into an open, decentralized super app that can be wildly customized.

Let’s walk through what TM is today and how it will evolve in the coming decade.

Today, Tlon Messenger is a simple tool for bringing together small groups to communicate and stay connected.

TM lets you build groups that share channels or create DMs to chat peer-to-peer. Groups can be customized by arranging chat, gallery, and notebook channels into complex combinations to suit teams, squads, clubs, or whatever shape of secret society you’re building.

We use TM as a company with a rich arrangement of different channels so we can chat about ongoing work, talk through new proposals in longform posts, and discuss references. We use TM with our community to publish our work, field support requests, and share things we’re excited about. We use TM with our friends to keep—and stay—up to date.

TM is a bit like a messenger (think Signal or Telegram), but it’s much more customizable. TM is also a bit like productivity tools like Discord or Slack, but it’s calmer, cleaner, and more purposeful.

Most importantly, unlike those apps, TM runs on a node that belongs to you. All of your data lives on that node, which means that it can’t be centrally indexed, used for training, or sold to a giant corporation or advertisers. Along with your data, your node can run all of your bots, hooks, mods, or whatever programs you use to augment your communications. These programs all run locally against your data, without ever leaking data to a developer or third party.

You can install TM from any major app store on (almost) any phone. You can also access TM on your computer via a web browser. We’ll run your TM node for you at first, but you can download it, take us out of the loop, and run it yourself at any time.

Everyone deserves a means of staying connected that they can trust.

We built TM to be approachable, convenient, and 100% yours from top to bottom. We don’t optimize TM to maximize engagement; we optimize TM to maximize the value you get from using it.

In the long run we don’t just want to communicate and collaborate together—we want to compute.

Keep reading to learn more about Tlon Messenger's future.