Your support keeps Taftan alive and free

Right now, millions of people are waking up to an internet that has been quietly closed around them. Websites blocked, messaging apps throttled, whole networks switched off for days at a time. They are cut off from news, from learning, from family abroad, and from the everyday tools the rest of us never think twice about.

Taftan is part of that work: a free messenger that carries encrypted messages between phones over sound, light, and ordinary images, with no servers, no accounts, and no internet at all, so it keeps working when everything else has been switched off. It is genuinely free, and it always will be. It needs no servers to run, but it takes constant work to build, harden, and keep it ahead of anyone who would block it, and for months I have carried that work myself. Every contribution goes straight back into making it stronger and putting it into more hands.

I believe access to information is a basic human right, and that we are all bound up in one another. In the words of the poet Saadi, the children of Adam are limbs of one body; when one is in pain, the others cannot stay at rest. To reach the open internet is to reach knowledge, to reach each other, and to reach the tools of the modern world. That is not a luxury; it is part of the ground a freer, fairer future is built on.