Tlon Messenger Tomorrow

Galen Wolfe-Pauly
image of orange poppies

Today, TM is a simple social messenger. In time, TM is built to grow into an open and decentralized super app that’s as easy to use as any social app and as extensible as the early personal computers.

Why do we think that’s possible?

Because the entire stack powering TM is completely general purpose, open source, and the network is owned by its users. This means that TM doesn’t depend on a company to continue to exist and can be customized by its users in a totally open and permissionless way.

Let’s unpack that a bit.

Everyone has their own node

Your TM account is backed by a self-contained node that can run on any cloud server and most home computers. When you sign up, we'll create one for you, but you can also run a node yourself. Or, if you sign up with us and someday decide you want to run your own node we’ll let you export and keep it. (No conventional app company would ever let you do this. Nor is any decentralized or federated protocol nearly as easy to move around between machines.)

Everyone owns their data, everything is peer-to-peer

Every TM node talks directly to every other TM node. Each user owns their data. There’s no single database to inspect and no single middleman mining your data. Infrastructure nodes help set up connections between nodes, but then every node talks directly. TM is a social network in the most genuine sense: it’s a real network between peers.

Everyone owns their bots, hooks, mods, and mini-programs

Every TM node is an entirely general-purpose virtual machine that can run local bots, hooks, and mods (sort of like mini-programs). The TM mini-programs all run locally on your node and never leak data to a developer. This means you can run mini-programs composably, freely, and for as long as you like without thinking of companies and developers as liabilities.

Everyone owns their identity

Every TM username is actually an NFT. We don’t particularly care about cat JPGs, but we do care a lot about property rights. Your TM username is a synthetic name like ~ravmel-ropdyl that you can keep and even custody yourself. Think of a TM username kind of like a phone number for the digital world. Anyone can contact you there no matter where your node is, forever.

We went to completely unreasonable lengths to ensure that you can trust this platform from top to bottom. People have been calling us crazy for a long time, and in a way they’re right. We think this insane effort was completely worth it. Sometimes things have to be thought through carefully from first principles.

The future of computing is personal again

By building a completely open, general-purpose platform as our foundation, TM can evolve to suit the needs of the people that use it beyond what we’ve seen in centralized tools.

In the past decade, we’ve seen the rise of WeChat, Kakao Talk, and now Telegram as flexible, social-first apps that cover a wide range of use cases. These super apps are a preview of what the future of personal computing can be. We can go much further.

How exactly? We can’t be precisely sure, of course. The point of building a platform is to support the creativity of people and enable them to experiment with new things.

At a high level, we imagine TM to become the place that:

  • New projects start their very first conversations, knowing that they can add the tools and extensions they need all in one place
  • Technical teams stay connected, monitor their infrastructure, automate their workflows, and communicate with customers without ever leaking bits
  • Secret societies collaborate, coordinate events, do business, publish, and stay connected without worrying about being watched over or moderated
  • Families store the ever-growing archive of communications that they expect to pass down across generations, beyond the lifespan of any company
  • Groups of friends keep up with one another in bespoke, customized ways with bots, mini-programs, and mods
  • We interact with AI models that can take action and control a computing environment without having to lock in to a specific platform or service

Our greatest hope is that we’re surprised with what TM makes possible and the cool things you do with it in the future. The power of personal computing is that it’s a vehicle for invention.

We took great care in building this system so that it can support the kind of nuanced, evolving, collaborative, and cooperative relationships that we see in the physical world. We not only want to enshrine our ability to speak freely—but also to act freely. To act freely you have to compute freely.

The key to a system that we can trust is building it such that it can be taken apart, inspected, and improved upon. The way we see it, the infrastructure we use to connect has to be something that we all own and share a stake in.

While TM starts as a simple messenger, we see it as the beginning of how we move from the social networks of the past to the social computing of the future.