Frequently Asked Questions

The following post contains a list of questions (and their answers) that we often receive. Still not finding what you're looking for? Reach out.

What is Tlon?

Tlon is the company that builds Tlon Messenger. Our history is unique: we've been around since 2014, but we've only recently shifted from research and development to releasing a product.

Since the beginning, we've pursued the multifaceted mission of transforming how humans connect online, from their network to their software, with the ultimate goal of restoring personal control over these critical resources.

During the first decade of Tlon's existence, we imagined, designed, engineered, then matured a new computing system. To realize our goals of 1) building beautiful tools for staying connected 2) giving people ownership of their digital life, we had to start from scratch.

What do we mean by starting from scratch? We believe that the existing software stack makes it impossible to adequately give people control over their tools. So we developed our own.

Then, we deployed this new stack, creating a peer-to-peer network where each node is its own personal cloud computer. Stabilizing the network took some time. But within a few years, we were ready to start tinkering with a user interface.

We've gone through a few iterations, but we've finally hit our mark with Tlon Messenger (TM). TM is the only app you own, and the only app that gives you peace of mind about living online. Right now TM is just a messenger, but we plan to evolve it into a broader toolkit, a social OS.

Our world is permanently networked, and apps aren't going anywhere. But with TM, we've established a new category. Familiar to use, totally singular under the hood, TM is your identity, your enduring archive, and your certainty that everything you do on the app belongs to you.

Tlon is the story of an ambitious, perhaps unfeasible mission, and the quiet patience required to get there. Our team is diligent, enthusiastic, and completely dedicated to building a set of tools that deliver true ownership, for ourselves and for our networked world.

What is Tlon Messenger?

Tlon Messenger is Tlon's flagship app, the first app of its kind, and the only app you own.

On the surface, TM provides a place for groups of people—friends, family, coworkers, collaborators—to connect and go about their business, trusting that no third party is mining their conversations and no one but the intended audience is reading their conversations.

TM is organized into groups large and small. Some groups are made up of only a handful of friends, some groups have members numbering in the hundreds, or thousands. More likely than not, you joined a small group maintained by the person who invited you.

Groups are organized into channels, which represent our feature toolkit. You can also direct message people outside of the group structure. TM's channels currently include: chat, gallery, and notebook.

Chat channels are for group communication, where your garden club would organize its next meetup. Gallery channels are for link and media collection, where your family stores treasured photos. Notebook channels are for writing, where you take project notes.

Under the hood, TM is a new category of app. While ownership, particularly, of an app is a hard concept to materialize, we'll give it a shot.

TM is built on a peer-to-peer network. Signing up for an account with TM gives you your own node and identity on this network. Think of a node as a cloud computer, yours to keep and customize. Think of your identity as a phone number, yours to keep even if you change carriers.

On a peer-to-peer network, nodes connect directly to other nodes. When you send a message on TM, your computer sends it straight to your friend's computer. No middlemen.

When you send a message on any other messaging platform, your message pings through the service's servers before it eventually makes its way to your intended recipient. Sometimes those messages get stored, often those messages get mined.

Even though you can't hold your TM node like you can the screen you're reading this on, you can take it with you and run it yourself. We'll even show you how, below.

How is TM different from other apps?

TM may look like other apps, but its engineering is fundamentally different (as described here). Because your TM account gives you both an identity and a node on a peer-to-peer network, your messages, media, and social graph are yours to control, but also keep, forever.

What does this mean in practice? Imagine you joined a popular messenger a few years back. All your friends joined too. Soon, you were using it every day. You relied on this popular messenger as a phonebook, scrapbook, and journal.

At first, this popular messenger impressed you with its promises. We won't read your messages. We won't sell your information to advertisers. But pretty soon, with one update to their terms of service, this app starts to do just that.

Then, the company that developed the app gets sold to MEGACORP. Your data is even more compromised. But you're stuck; you can't move to a different platform because moving your social network, already entrenched, and all its associated data is too difficult.

Just when you've begrudgingly accepted your fate, forever stuck on a platform you dislike, the MEGACORP that purchased your once favorite app decides it's not growing enough to justify its existence, choosing to instead wind down operations of the entire app.

So now your platform is gone, along with your data and your social graph. With TM not only will this never happen, it can't.

We're the only company that can promise your app will still work even if we stop shipping updates (if you're wondering why TM is free and how we plan to make money, jump to read this section.)

TM is built on an open source network with open source software. You can run your node on your own machine if you choose (more on that below). You can keep using our software if you choose to run your own node, and as it will continue to exist if we ever stop shipping updates.

So, to sum it all up, TM is different because it's the only app built to last forever, no matter where or how you run your node.

What is a peer-to-peer network? What is a node? What is an ID?

Understanding how you can own TM, an app, starts with understanding the basics of a peer-to-peer network, TM's foundation. Let's start from the top.

A peer-to-peer network is a distributed system of nodes where every node is itself an endpoint. When a message gets passed on a peer-to-peer network, the message pings directly from the sender to the intended receiver.

When you send a message through a network that isn't peer-to-peer (most of the apps you rely on aren't), the message pings from your phone, to the app developer's servers, which are more likely than not owned by a third company, and finally delivered to the intended receiver.

Your TM account is a node on our peer-to-peer network. Your node is technically a virtual machine, but practically a personal computer in the cloud. Just like a hard drive, everything you write, send, store, and customize saves to your node.

Your node is identified on our peer-to-peer network as a unique ID. Technically this ID is an ERC-721 non-fungible token: a single 32-bit number hosted on the Ethereum blockchain. Every ID is yours to keep, forever.

Practically, this ID functions like a phone number. If you want to switch carriers, or host your node yourself, you can keep the same number. Much like a phone number can get marked as spam, your ID also accrues a reputation on the network.

How do you run a node yourself?

Right now Tlon, the company that develops TM, hosts your network node. But you always have a right to exit and host your node yourself, with all its data and your associated identity.

A note, however on hosting your node yourself: it's pretty technical, which is why using a hosting provider appeals to the majority of people. NativePlanet also makes standalone hardware which provides a point-and-click interface for self-hosting.

Relying on a hosting provider, like us, to maintain your ship's software updates and uptime still fulfills the promise of ownership, but self-hosting gives you ultimate control.

Before you get started, we suggest some baseline familiarity with the UNIX command line. You'll also want to understand that if you self-host, we can help you troubleshoot software issues, but we can no longer support maintenance on your node. Sounds good?

Let's get into it, steps bulleted below:

1. Log into your account; visit your dashboard here: https://tlon.network/dashboard
2. Click the dropdown next to your ID name, then go to Settings
3. Click 'Reveal master ticket' and confirm, download your master ticket. A note on this step: your master ticket is cryptographic property, containing your private ownership keys and seed phrase. Keep it safe. We cannot recover your master ticket once you exit our hosting platform.
4. Click the 'Export Urbit' button.
5. Your node's archive will begin downloading. You can extract this archive and run it on any Linux server (e.g. DigitalOcean) or your desktop.
6. Downloading your node's archive will take it offline from Tlon's infrastructure to prevent double-booting.
7. Read this user guide to download the Vere binary for running your node.
8. Unzip the file you downloaded. You'll see a directory with your ID name; this is your pier.
9. Run the ship from your computer's terminal with the Vere binary (e.g. ./urbit sempel-palnet) to confirm it works.
10. Dock the pier with ./urbit dock sampel-palnet.
11. Then, run it from the on with ./sampel-palnet/.run

And by the way: congratulations, you won the game.

How secure is Tlon Messenger?

TM is built on a peer-to-peer network. Every TM account is a network node. When a message is sent from one node to another node, the packets are encrypted.

TM the app is not currently end-to-end encrypted, but we're actively developing E2E and will release it once the capability is fully battle-tested.

How does Tlon plan to make money?

When a company develops open source software and gives it away for free the question of why inevitably arises. Fair enough. The economics of software as a service don't have to be complicated, even though they often are.

Right now we're focused on growth, which is to say, we're not wedded to a specific subscription plan—but which is also not to say we will never instantiate a tiered payment structure.

In the long term, we're likely to offer hosting services (e.g. more file storage) for a fee. We'll always offer TM's basic toolkit as a free service.