June 19, 2026
Building YGOOW in the open
YGOOW started two decades ago with a single idea: share data freely and anonymously, without accounts and without surveillance. The world wasn’t ready. It is now.
The messenger we’re building keeps that idea and adds the cryptography to make it real:
- No identity on the server. The relay is deaf — it stores opaque blocks and timestamps, nothing about who talks to whom.
- Access by key, not permission. Who reads a message is decided entirely by who holds the key.
- Tor by choice. Hide your IP and location over Tor v3, slip past censorship with bridges, or use a plain connection — your call, clearly labelled.
We just reached a milestone worth noting: the Android app connects end to end over an embedded Tor client to our onion service — a real encrypted round-trip with no IP and no location leaving the device. The hard plumbing works.
This blog is where we’ll document the build honestly — what’s done, what’s hard, and where each protection ends. Because the projects that hide their limits are the ones you shouldn’t trust.
More soon. Your key, your rules — everything else is redacted.