Tor announces the termination of Tor Messenger
In October 2015, Tor Project released a beta version of the Tor Messenger client. Tor Messenger Based on Mozilla’s Instantbird, all chat traffic is transmitted via Tor, supporting Jabber (XMPP), IRC, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, Twitter, and Yahoo. However, after releasing 10 beta versions, Tor Project decided to terminate its development.
There are multiple reasons.
First, the Instantbird code based on Tor Messenger has been left unmaintained. “Tor Messenger is based on Instantbird (see the original blog post on why we picked Instantbird), a product that is no longer maintained by its developers. While the chat features will be ported over to Thunderbird as they share the same codebase, the UI itself is no longer developed. The necessity of porting to Thunderbird also gave us the opportunity to step back and assess progress — the adoption of Tor Messenger was low and the real need is for metadata-free alternatives.”
Second, it cannot solve the problem of metadata leakage. “As described above, a centralized client-server architecture suffers from metadata leaks and Tor Messenger inherits those problems while being unable to mitigate them. Metadata leaks information about participants and their social graphs, and while it does not reveal the actual data, it can reveal patterns about your communication: who your friends are, when you talk to them, how much you talk to them, etc.”
In addition, the Tor Project lacks sufficient manpower to respond to feature requests or fix bugs. Tor developers said they still believe that Tor can be used for messaging applications, but do not have enough resources to achieve this willingness. They can only let the community decide its fate.
