April 30, 2026
Free speech, but make it messy
SimpleX Channels, SimpleX Network Consortium and Community Crowdfunding
Private speech dream or buggy censorship mess? The comments are already at war
TLDR: SimpleX says its new Channels and planned consortium will protect public speech and stop company control of the network. But the biggest community reaction is raw distrust, with critics accusing the project of censorship, weak independence, and even crashy app performance.
SimpleX just announced a big, idealistic swing: public Channels that let people read posts without exposing who owns them or who subscribes, plus a new network consortium meant to stop any one company from grabbing the steering wheel. On paper, it’s a freedom-of-speech power move with a community crowdfunding pitch attached — basically, “we want privacy, independence, and money that won’t sell us out.”
But in the comment section? The mood is less polite applause and more record-scratch suspicion. The loudest reaction came from user nohell, who flat-out said they don’t trust founder Evgeny and blasted his alleged “bow to the law” stance as the opposite of what a privacy-hungry, anti-censorship crowd wants. That one comment packs in nearly every grenade in this debate: distrust of leadership, fear that official servers still censor content, and the brutal accusation that the app is so unstable it can “leak memory until it crashes the host.” Ouch.
So while SimpleX is trying to sell a future of safer public speech, critics are asking a much messier question: what good is freedom talk if the current system still feels controlled, censored, or crash-prone? That clash is the real story here. The dream is noble, the governance plan sounds serious, but the comments are giving major “trust us? absolutely not” energy — and that tension is exactly why people are watching.
Key Points
- •SimpleX announced v6.5 beta with SimpleX Channels, a public publishing model focused on participation privacy.
- •The article says channel content is visible to relay operators, but channel owners and subscribers remain unidentified to operators, each other, and the network.
- •Each channel uses multiple relays, and channel owners hold their own keys; publishers can also run their own chat relays.
- •SimpleX says it will launch the SimpleX Network Consortium within a few months through an agreement between SimpleX Chat and the new SimpleX Network Foundation.
- •The article says community crowdfunding and a commercial business model are being combined to fund the network while governance structures protect network neutrality.