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Onboarded my 12yo niece to @delta yesterday. They were looking for a solution to chat with her peer group split between iOS and Android, many of whom don't have sim cards in their devices (+ parents rightly resistant to use big social apps).

We installed and were chatting within 2 minutes, with hardly a mention that this is going on over email (good thing IMO). Now their challenge is to spread it to the others in the group

Great work #FOSS projects meeting people where they are!
@Delta Chat
Emil Jacobs - Collectifission
Never heard of @delta before now and I'm instantly impressed: a lightweight app, available on all platforms, with an onboarding that simply asks for your name and setting up a profile picture.

Looking a bit deeper, it doesn't support PFS like Signal, but their explanation for it makes sense.

In short: how did I never hear of this before? 🙂
@Delta Chat

Delta Chat hat dies geteilt

feld
You've never heard of it because techbros refuse to look beyond the words "email" and "pgp" as they think they understand what is going on here and that it's bad because "legacy email + pgp was fraught with problems" and "email has a bad metadata leak issue" (wrong, it's scrubbed here). They also immediately think "I don't want chat in my email, and how is this going to interact with my other email clients?".

You should not try to use a normal email address with Delta unless you absolutely have to. It takes one click to generate an anonymous account on an existing Chatmail server and then you share your invite link or QR code with anyone you want to reach.

It uses email protocols simply as a router of E2EE data packets wrapped in modern pgp encryption (audited, written in Rust). The emails are immediately deleted from the server when received (unless multi-device is enabled for your account; then they're expired on a timer) And when you use dedicated Chatmail servers there are zero concerns about messages being caught up in spam filters, etc, because those are completely unnecessary and have been eliminated from the tech stack.

Take a look at the latest HN submission for it and you'll see a giant wall of idiots leaving comments that prove they never even read the technical details of how it works.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43262510
Delta Chat
To be fair "instant onboarding" was not there until mid-2024, so many users who tried Delta Chat before with their existing email providers and shared mailbox might remember bad experiences. Now that we default to chatmail profiles and don't recommend shared usage of mailboxes when using existing email servers, we started to get way more positive feedback.
@collectifission @davidbenque
@Emil Jacobs - Collectifission @David Benqué
sirjofri
It is perfectly fine to use a normal mail server, too. I use a normal mail server whoch has never heard about chatmail or deltachat, and it works perfectly fine. A separate profile is still highly recommended.
@delta @collectifission @davidbenque
@Emil Jacobs - Collectifission @Delta Chat @David Benqué
feld
you cannot have push notifications without a Chatmail server though and it puts you at risk of having your messages blocked or delayed by spam filtering etc

If you're only using Chatmail servers this issue is nonexistent and messages are delivered in under a second
sirjofri
Yeah, though I didn't have an issue like that, honestly. I had to set up a few things, and I don't need "push" notifications for now (imap push is good enough). Though I'm also using it for social media yet, not private messaging.
@delta @collectifission @davidbenque
@Emil Jacobs - Collectifission @Delta Chat @David Benqué
feld
if you have Android I assume that IMAP push will work OK. Unsure if DeltaChat on Android uses IMAP push when in the background, actually...

It definitely won't work on iOS though because apps aren't allowed to run in the background for more than a short period of time. You have to use a normal push notification. That's also how the official iOS email app works. Google, Fastmail, and Apple all send push notifications that way. (I thought Outlook and Yahoo added it too; unclear). So if you have your own self-hosted email server it won't be able to push notifications to you.
Delta Chat
#deltachat for many years did not have push notifications on android and worked fine on most phones. In some cases people had to enable a permanent background notification to keep IDLE alive. But most often, messages are received in the background on Android without push.
sirjofri
I guess deltachat has something like a specialized background activity for this that's small enough and optimized so it doesn't consume too many resources?
@feld @collectifission @davidbenque
@Emil Jacobs - Collectifission @feld @David Benqué
Delta Chat
the delta android background code is tuned over many years to work with as many phones and versions as possible but new androids may introduce problems, and some vendors very aggressively kill background apps. Push notifications are a problem that wouldnt exist with better technical and social arrangements how to run resource efficient code and networking on phones. Google and apple and Huawei say it's about battery saving but that's dubious, really
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Delta Chat hat dies geteilt

Radasbona
all you need to do is implement #unifiedpush like all the other foss apps needing push.

I have one background connection for mastodon/signal/telegram/findmydevice/matrix,davx5..... and a second for deltachat. 🙄
#unifiedpush
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