Notices by Delta Chat (delta@chaos.social)

Dear @simplex .... Could you elaborate on this tweet? We aim for both censorship resistance and privacy and are curious about your take there ....

The #EUGoingDark 42-point plan for after the election has it all: breaking e2e encryption, "lawful" data retention, prohibiting encrypting metadata, threatening jail to developers for non compliance ..... If we thought authoritarian political currents are moving against privacy then this is an entirely new level ... https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/first-insight-42-key-points-of-the-secret-eugoingdark-surveillance-plan-for-the-new-eu-commission/

P.s. we need more #chatmail servers and contributors so that our #deltachat app-dev conglomerate provides resilience against such authoritarian pipe dreams

@GerhardD ten years ago it was folk knowledge that "email is insecure, slow, has too much metadata" but now it's 2024 and delta chat and chatmail are not a theory but an audited reality of existing apps and servers that work, secure and fast and with minimal metadata and no personal data. "Gmail" is not a fitting conceptual frame for what we are doing even though our efforts are interoperable with it and people can use guaranteed end to end encryption through Gmail.

As you know, governmental forces within the EU, the US, the UK, Russia and others are in a hot competition on who gets to be the first to subvert end-to-end encryption. A few days ago, we got another letter from Roskomnadzor, the #russia telco authority, to help them get at user data or metadata for #deltachat users. But there is no central registry of e-mail addresses, messages or decryption keys. So we declined. Sorry, not sorry.

Reclaiming Peer-to-Peer Web technology with #webxdc out of the ashes of "Web3": our 2024 opening post on the topic :) https://delta.chat/en/2024-02-15-webxdc-m3

Psst: we are looking for more folks experienced with Web app development with a knack for P2P technology .... #deltachat

A wild community experiment that can not but fail? Probably but whatever, welcome to **massive multi-device** usage of #deltachat on #chatmail :) it's an account not shared between your own devices but between all devices who can import the backup file that is currently circulating .... Bringing you an anonymous e2ee encrypted forum without individual user identities, with autodeletion from server after a week .... also adressable wirh e2ee messaging .... #DepartmentOfCrazy

@rakoo stay tuned :) but we will not compromise on reliability, efficiency and ease of use which means we tread carefully. Instead of a distributed hash table (dht) we are to use the massively scaled e-mail system for bootstrapping P2P connectivity and paradigms. Any P2P system needs a bootstrapping mechanism, if not email it would be "root" servers and they are way less federated and decentralized than email :) but more when the time comes as we prefer delivering working code not ideas.

Delta Chat has "use but minimize" in its DNA when engaging with specs and standards. Autocrypt and #securejoin for guaranteed e2ee, #Chatmail servers with secure chat focus, #webxdc apps with html/css focus .... are the strategic examples of engaging with real internet standards but carefully curating the subset to go for .... Almost all standards are way too complex and unfitting for real world issues ... Our approach is neccessarily pragmatic because we lack resources to be idealism driven

How to get somewhat sufficient funding remains a question, however economic our approach is. We avoided VC funding and rather went for public tax-based funds because our efforts are driven by what we consider to be in the public interest. It is said that humanity can be morally.judged by how well those are doing who are living through the worst. We often focus on users in imminently dangerous situations but this is not where you can or want to earn money from, let alone surplus.

News from our direct action R&D #deltalab : Addressable communities. End to end encrypted. No state on servers.

Attached: first a chat from deltafans with the hispanohablantes community ... where someone from the Spanish side invites deltafans folks to join it.

Second is the Spanish community chatlist where lots of chatting is going on ... Also includes the chat with the deltafans community.

Both are independently running and can adress/ be adressed with a messenger UX you already know.

A major milestone in our 6+ years long project history: With the rolling 1.46 #deltachat app releases you can start chatting without a pre-existing e-mail address, and benefit from push notifications (instant message delivery) also on Android. We also highlight ways to get in contact with bots and humans, and how #chatmail makes e-mail cheap again https://delta.chat/en/2024-05-31-instant-onboarding

Often overlooked from our "but e-mail!" skeptics: Any sufficiently advanced P2P messenger will eventually re-invent a custom, partial form of e-mail ... because users want to communicate when their apps are offline or not foregrounded and active at the same time. See https://briarproject.org/download-briar-mailbox/ for a recent example.

Delta Chat goes the reverse route by providing a secure and interoperable e-mail based messaging experience and then adds P2P tech like https://webxdc.org on top.

The problem with asking the experts about something genuinely new is, according to Heinz von Foerster, that they will only explain to you why it can't work or why it is a bad idea. We had no shortage of such experts in the past years :) However, common objections like
"e-mail is too slow", "secure e-mail is not possible", "you can not do a Whatsapp-style interface on top of e-mail" are having an increasingly hard time to be upheld because of the reality of Delta Chat apps working :)

Delta Chat is an in-between project: often ignored as a messenger by e-mail companies/experts and then ignored by messenger companies/experts because of its use and interoperability with e-mail. As Heinz von Foerster once said: "If you are doing something genuinely new then don't ask the experts. If you do something that has already been done, then, by all means, ask the experts." FWIW many experts have verified Delta Chat's security mechanics https://delta.chat/en/help#security-audits :)

Seems the french surveillance practises (Hadopi) identifying people behind IP addresses have been legalized by a top EU court. Fwiw #chatmail servers remove any IP address traces after two days and collect no personal data whatsoever. Maybe it's time for a french themed chatmail server similar to the de,pl,us ones? https://delta.chat/en/chatmail

Messaging transports better be dumb and do the bare minimum to get the job done for end-to-end encrypting apps. Compared to #matrix homeservers #chatmail servers are two orders of magnitude more dumb, consume two orders of magnitude less resources and are blazing fast and don't require extra (central?!) identity and integration servers. With delta all intelligence, including general purpose https://webxdc.org/apps and protection against compromised networks and servers, lives on the end device.

@crepererum @stillgreenmoss @ben @besendorf OpenMLS is an almost decade- long effort with the IETF work starting in 2018. We have studied it and are following developments but one known big issue is its dependency on "total message ordering" which can not be easily obtained in federated settings. Several people, including Matrix folks, have tried to remedy it but we do not know of any practical solution to make OpenMLS work reasonably well for non-centralised settings.

#deltachat just got four major usability improvements as the 1.44 releases are rolling out
💗 Reactions on all platforms
💗 iOS Push notifications
💗 Multi-account desktop sidebar
💗 share invite links via other messengers. Enjoy :)
https://delta.chat/en/2024-03-12-jumbo44

Given the experiences of the last decade it's healthy to distrust #decentralized tech if

- it's mainly developed by a centralized power structure
- the involved technology is very complex
- there is coin or VC funding involved

#deltachat has 1/100th, if even that, of what other popular messenging projects have in terms of moneys. But our distributed top-notch expertise in UI, crypto, networking tech and our federated collaborative practises across these concerns, try to make up for it ...

Apart from the currently 53 #webxdc apps in the "xstore" (say hi to xstore@testrun.org) there are apparently at least double as many in circulation .... people post random little webxdc apps which then get used throughout several chats -- it's wild out there and no central platforms in sight ;)