Introduction

Over the past decade there has been a huge growth in popularity of instant messengers and for the last few years instant messengers are also becoming a content distribution media and the main news source for many people.

With such popularity, security, anonymity and censorship concerns grow. The most current methods of protecting user data are focused on message encryption. While such methods work fine for protecting message content, it leaves out metadata security completely.

All current popular messanging platforms are centralized and heavily use user metadata such as IP or phone number to identify users. This leads to the state-level or corporate actors use of metadata as a method of tracking user activity, or even leads to security breaches due to the use of third-party services (https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/%204850133017242-Twilio-Incident-What-Signal-Users-Need-to-Know-).

Tingl is a response to this growing risk. It attempts to build such ecosystem that allows you to control your own content, metadata and build your own indemendent communities.

Firstly, Tingl does not rely on central servers, instead it introduces a decentralized network of incentivized services working as a transport layer. It guarantees any user can access the network and makes it difficult to limit access for authorities.

Secondly, Tingl makes sure that IP address cannot be linked to message. This is accomplished by using an onion routing protocol.

Thirdly, Tingl does not use phone number to identify a user in the network. Pseudonymous public keys are used instead.

Fourhtly, Tingl provides tools for content creators to host and distribute their contenty and build communities without relying on central servers and leaking metadata.