We hereby challenge _all_ other messaging apps, FOSS or not, to provide a more convenient private onboarding experience than #deltachat

1. Install app
2. "Create new profile"
3. Enter nick name, tap "Agree and continue"
4. Tap "+" and "new contact" and provide/scan qr code/link

Voila! A secure private chat, familiar to those coming from Whatsapp or Telegram (without "AI", with #a11y).

Note: chat identities are private and can not be queried or discovered. Servers keep no track or metadata

This entry was edited (2 days ago)

Peter Vágner reshared this.

in reply to Delta Chat

I considered myself "tech-savvy", but DeltaChat was my first software of that kind (e2e private messenger) and my contact was far from me, and not a "tech-savvy" person. So it was not obvious for me that I had to instruct my contact who is far away about additional "off-the-band" actions need for us to add each other to contact.
Now i aware of all that, but my contact got discouraged with that complexity and don't want to try again.
Have to keep using whatsapp (it sometimes get blocked).
in reply to Magical Cat

@koteisaev sorry it didn't work out. IIt's clear there is room for improvement, and to make it more obvious how to setup contact. Currently, it helps a lot if someone guides the process for a group aka "Now click this link/scan this QR to join our group" after which the person immediately has secure contact to everyone in the group. Already, we spent hundreds of hours to arrive at where we are. Will be some effort to improve it further across all platforms.
in reply to Scott Murray

@scott @koteisaev we think we know pretty exactly what you mean and why you hesitate. It's a healthy approach! Also some of our own contributors hold off on introducing it into some of their groups and for good reasons. It's important to understand and read the room before suggesting. There usually is only one try. An interesting related read ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welc…
in reply to Frederik Braun �

servce choice is a tricky question right now and one which we carefully avoid confronting initial users with, during the default onboarding experience. Right now, we regard it as safe to use any of the listed chatmail.at/relays (manually curated). We are working towards "randomized" onboarding by further minimizing metadata seen by relays, and introduce multi-relay support so that choices don't easily leave you stranded in case of blocking/failure.
This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to Fabrice Desré

we hear you but it's the truth: by onboarding to #deltachat today you are diving into an experimental testrun of "the future of email" , also known as #chatmail chatmail.at

Finally we, as app distributors, want to fully disentangle from any "default" server. Testrun will become history :)

This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to Peter Vágner

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This entry was edited (2 days ago)
in reply to Elena Brescacin

@Elena Brescacin For matrix and XMPP there are some decent so called puppeting bridges for telegram, facebook messenger / instagram. I am using these and the other party even doesn't know I am using matrix behind the scene. Then there are other bridges such as whatsapp and discord working reportedly well. For @Delta Chat there is telegram relay for groups github.com/simplebot-org/simpl…
in reply to Elena Brescacin

@Elena Brescacin Okay, so you are with your @Delta Chat app running on windows and you are about to start a new chat.

You have these options:

  • Press ctrl+n or find a new chat button.
  • Once the dialog comes up you can search your existing contacts. You have just started so most likelly you have the list empty.
  • You can then use tab and shift+tab to navigate and find New contact button.
  • As the new contact dialog comes up it's ready to take a photo of a QR code. So if this is an initial contact with a friend sitting next to you you can just point your camera to his phone and it will beep once the QR code is captured properly.
  • Or if you have no one around you can paste an invite link (use tab or shift+tab key to navigate to find a paste button) and paste the link someone has given to you.
  • Or you can visit the link anyone has shared with you in your web browser without using deltachat new conversation / new contact features. If delta chat is installed on your system, you will be prompted to open it to join a chat someone has invited you into.

Conversely if you are about to invite someone else to chat with you on deltachat, you can invite them like this:

  • Use tab and shift+ tab key to navigate on the main screen of the deltachat desktop app until you find the button saying Scan QR code.
  • It opens a tabbed like interface with two features viewing your QR code and allowing to scan QR code from your chat partner.
  • If you have no one else to scan your QR code with their camera, use tab or shift+tab to navigate and look for copy link button. Pressing that will allow you to generate an invite link you can share with someone you wish to chat. You can make this initial contact details exchange through SMS, through email or any other platform.

If you enter the chat, as an addition to standard navigation shortcut keys such as tab, shift+tab, arrow keys, applications key, deltachat has some usefull shortcut keys on its own and those are:

  • ctrl+m: chat text input entry
  • ctrl+f: conversation search
  • ctrl+shift+f: message search in an conversation
  • ctrl+slash: key commands reference

If you like to try this right now, here is an invite link to screen reader users chat I have created a few months ago when other screen reader users were interested in trying out deltachat.

I am alone lurking in this chat for now, so bear with me if I won't be able to respond in real time.

i.delta.chat/#6FE1642916908F1A…

in reply to Elena Brescacin

@Elena Brescacin For me there are multiple reasons why to prefer @Delta Chat over other similar apps and platforms.

It's free, open-source, self-hostable, respecting privacy, giving control to users rather than to someone else who might have the whole platform under his control.

However most prominent reason why it's so appealing to me is that screen reader #accessibility is being taken so seriously and actionably from the dev team. They have no contracts, no investors, no one time opportunities pushing for accessibility features and they are working on these features from the bottom of their hearts.

Do you think so called gate keepers would care to implement some of their accessibility if they have not been pushed to do so? Why do you think it takes so long to fix some accessibility related discrepancies in the most popular messaging apps?

I think this invisible message should be warmly understood by the blindness community and other communities where it makes such a significant impact.

Aren't you happy you do have verry accessible messaging app at your disposal you can freely use to its maximum?

XMPP is good however it's not yet screen reader accessible on the major platforms.
Matrix is also good it's even fully accessible technically however it still can be improved in this regard and it's more difficult to adopt. Further accessibility improvements are more difficult to get implemented when I am comparing to delta chat.

There were other attempts at a messaging app such as tox in the past that were verry promising however screen reader accessibility has never been recognized like this.

in reply to Peter Vágner

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in reply to Elena Brescacin

@Elena Brescacin Well, to say a metaphor, I understand it looks as we are standing on the opposide side of the bridge. Verifying your mobile phone and your email address with facebook / whatsapp / telegram / fill in other platform of your choice is not an issue for you, but exchanging a QR code or a link is. If you like you can even print the QR code on your t-shirt and get your chat partners to scan it from there. Of course I am trying to joke here, but @Delta Chat does allow such a flexibility.
in reply to Peter Vágner

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in reply to Peter Vágner

@pvagner

> They have no contracts, no investors, no one time opportunities pushing for accessibility features

I am afraid this is not true. Most of the accessibility work in the past ~year has been funded by NLnet, as part of nlnet.nl/project/DeltaTauri/ project. Of course the developers were the ones to request a grant for that, but the work wasn't done for free.
I think Delta Chat wouldn't be where it is right now without the money.

Also see delta.chat/en/help#how-are-del…

in reply to WofWca

@WofWca Oh, I've idealized it too much. Please accept my apologies for spreading inaccurate info.

The other feelings from my previous post are still true, it's very usefull, I like it and the screen reader accessibility is improving even further beyond that project.

Let's see if your dedication pays off and more people will be able to adopt using it and motivate you to keep up with the accessibility related work.

in reply to LΞX/NØVΛ

@lexinova Message retention more or less negates the benefit of forward secrecy. If an attacker gets your secret key information they for sure are going to get your old messages. Since most people want to keep their old messages around forward secrecy is not very important for encrypted messaging.

articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgp… (my article)

in reply to LΞX/NØVΛ

@lexinova @upofadown FWIW there are some non-electron clients chatmail.at/clients and an upcoming post about an experimental Tauri one. The current #deltachat desktop electron-based client tries to both size-bloat/ram wise do better, and also e.g. bars the frontend rendering process from doing any Internet connections which are purely done via the Rust core library, for all #chatmail clients.
in reply to LΞX/NØVΛ

@lexinova you don't need perfect forward secrecy... first of all, it is useless if you don't use short-term disappearing messages, second, it is useful if you can have only a single profile like on Signal, where you mix sending memes to your mom with planing a government boicot in the same account, any serious activist will use a dedicated profile they can just throw away, together with all its suspicious chats, this is super easy to do in Delta Chat, impossible with Signal

@delta

in reply to LΞX/NØVΛ

@lexinova glad you have such a privacy conscious family, most people don't want to put the efforts of saving every family photo or important message in Saved Messages, and then you are not protecting those with PFS anyways

also, for PFS to work your enemy needs to control or have access to the server you use, which is easier with a centralized server but not so much with decentralized platforms like Delta Chat,

can you point out when PFS saved anyone? never

in reply to adb

@adbenitez never say never, and again because you don't need it does not mean it's not good.

Also you put a little too much trust on the operator of your decentralized server of the one that relay it.

operator can go rogue, or the server can be seized and run (many federal agency trough the world take over and run the server to catch as much as possible).

But what do i know i'm only a CISO after all

@adb
This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to LΞX/NØVΛ

@lexinova I didn't say it is not good to have, I say it is not a reason for you to upfront reject any solution if it doesn't have the typical fusswords out of context

about the operator of the relay I use, yes, I trust him, it is MYSELF, I don't need to trust a 3rd party...

if I would need to do some dangerous business I would create a new account which takes 3 taps and use that then easily delete it with all its chats and contacts, you never replied to this point of using multi-account, well

in reply to LΞX/NØVΛ

even if you had a state level attacker coming after you they're more likely to compromise the software supply chain and backdoor your virtual keyboard or be able to screenshot and exfiltrate without you knowing. Then they don't need your key anyway because capturing the traffic is so much harder

With delta, your client to server is TLS 1.3 with PFS anyway so they gotta break that first

This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to feld

@feld @adbenitez was not thinking of state attack, just that many unknown are generated trough email relay

that mean (for example) if half the user use relay that run on AWS, amazon can theorically shadow copy them crack them, no pfs = everything is cooked

again it's a threat i took out of my pocket and i'm pretty sure pfs also protect other kind of attack i didn't think off.

@adb @feld
in reply to LΞX/NØVΛ

if some flaw like that appears, it's not me that's cooked -- it's the entire internet, corporations, governments...

encryption HAS to withstand being in the hands of an adversary. Otherwise what good is full disk encryption? If they have their hands on your disk and you really think that it could get cracked in a week or a year, why waste your time? It would be better to just take extreme caution to physically protect access to it.

I trust the math. And I also don't have any faith at all in quantum CPUs. Until I can order one and it does EXACTLY what they claim it can do, it's a fantasy. I say this all the time: the quantum CPU is the new cold fusion.

in reply to LΞX/NØVΛ

Look at it this way, if AES-256 wasn't random enough, banks wouldn't use it to secure connections your TLS sessions and likely communications between them. There are known attacks against AES-128 which leak information in a few rounds and are very far from working at full 10 rounds. They don't completely break the encryption. There are known attacks against Chacha20 which leak information at ~6 rounds, far from the full 20 rounds.

The reason why you can blindly trust modern-enough encryption is because it is known how hard the math problems are. Same with large primes (like in RSA) and EC cryptography. It is approximately known how difficult the discrete log problems are.

And the reason why some people are freaking out about quantum computers is because there are known algorithms that can potentially break RSA far quicker than regular computers and cut security of AES by half at best. But quantum computers capable of running those algorithms are at best 5+ years from even potentially existing. If they will ever exists, nobody knows yet.

This entry was edited (15 hours ago)
in reply to Phantasm

> And the reason why some people are freaking out about quantum computers is because there are known algorithms that can potentially break RSA far quicker than regular computers and cut security of AES by half at best.

but ONLY if quantum computing can leave the "theory" stage and we can produce a real CPU with enough qubits to do the work and store the state duplicated across enough other qubits for error correction purposes. And keep them in the state we want. Which will require extremely clean and reliable power.

> New research: RSA-2048 encryption keys can be broken with single qubit and 3 oscillators. The catch? You’ll need about 10 followed by 45 million zeros joules of energy—roughly comparable to several medium-sized stars, or 10^44,999,986 Hiroshima bombs. Good luck! arxiv.org/pdf/2412.13164

And people think AI is a waste of fucking energy? I'm not holding my breath.

in reply to Andrey [0xdc, 0x09];

@darkcat09 @shuro we are working on randomizing onboarding to the growing set of chatmail relays. See also chaos.social/@delta/1153621448…
in reply to Kalle Kniivilä

@kallekn @shuro publishing existence of relays and someone using them for a block is a tricky issue, indeed. We have preliminary discussions mostly around learning about new relays during chatting with others, and then being able to automatically use those, without any central list anywhere. IOW, the information which chatmail relays exist should be distributed across the planet with no central oversight.
in reply to Kalle Kniivilä

@Kalle Kniivilä sadly our censors are not completely dumb and run device farms to detect even undisclosed servers which apps connect to one way or another. This way they managed to render Tor practically non-functional without private bridge servers as all public ways to distribute them eventually lead to blocks. So it doesn't matter much :(

@Delta Chat

in reply to Шуро

@shuro @kallekn fair points but there is one key difference with Tor: people already form social private contexts in their messaging groups. Using chatting between actual people for distributing relay knowledge can not be replicated by having thousands of device robots in some cellar because the app will only give you the same initial relays. New information comes in through chats, and not even we, as developers, see those relays.
in reply to Delta Chat

Onboarding is cool until step 4.
People don't like scanning QRs: when people add my Signal, even if the username is shown on my screen right below a QR code, nobody scanned the QR yet. Everybody just typed the username. Scanning QRs kinda sucks.
And it's rather impractical when the person is not next to me. At which point sending a long link also is meh (or, depending on context, just not possible).
in reply to Kenny

@kbruen Scanning QR codes is a pretty well known UX metaphor these days but indeed not well suited for setting up a chat with a remote person (unless in a video call). We are certainly going to circle back to this UX issue. Meanwhile in reality it's often the case that two people start to chat, then do a group chat, and invite others to join that group which allows to instantly get access to all people in the chat without having to do the qr/link dance with each member.
in reply to Crazy Pony

1) there are bridges ("matterdelta") which provide interop with Matrix, XMPP, Telegrram, ssh and anything that Matterbridge provides. It doesn't preserve end-to-end encryption and so bridging bot choice is tricky.

2) There are growing efforts around 3rd party #chatmail clients chatmail.at/clients. Interoperability is "free" between all chatmail clients (#deltachat being the prominent one). Unlike #Signal we welcome third parties to the party :)

This entry was edited (1 day ago)

Delta Chat reshared this.

in reply to Nick

@ratcatcher @crazy_pony in terms of core functionality there is no difference between ArcaneChat and Delta Chat -- both are chatmail clients using the same core library which performs all networking/encryption/contact/group/chat/realtime-setup etc.
ArcaneChat is maybe a bit more of an experiments-pushing client, and some of its features made it back to mainline, and arcanechat is continously rebasing on mainline, in turn.
in reply to rootnode

@rootnode yes, you can use email addresses from any modern email service that provides a certain level of security. Just make sure you use a *dedicated* address. Using email addresses that are simultanously used by non-chatmail clients are not supported, however. In prior times we tried to make it work but it detrimental to security outcomes and easily gets confusing for users. So email addresses are fine but need to be dedicated for chatting via chatmail clients.
in reply to rootnode

@rootnode "add second device'" is found in settings of an established chat profile. It's about setting up multiple devices for the same chat chat profile.

To use a different email address it's "create new profile" and then "use other server". If you have further questions or suggestions maybe better use support.delta.chat

in reply to Delta Chat

the last step can be challenging. You need to be close and have working camera (yes, people have broken cameras) to scan QR, or have an already established communication channel to send the link, which in slme situations defeats the purpose.

There should be some human readable / easy to memorize or pronounce "nickname", "username", "ID" or something, so than you can tell someone "just type John Doe once you install DeltaChat to find me".

in reply to Sheri Gulam

@vort3 you have a point and it's kind of funny that even though #chatmail uses the email system, one can't just give out an email address. The challenge is to establish automatic end-to-end encryption while maintaining identity privacy (in Delta Chat we want chat profiles to be fully private and decentralized so can't just do some central registry). There are some ideas on how to bring back the ease of telling your address and people contacting you. Just more involved than it sounds :)
in reply to Delta Chat

@abolitionmedia Hello, I was just appreciating your work. Maybe we should set up a couple of these servers. I have an extra vps and will test one this week. Thought it worth a mention. I installed this, and it looks pretty good. The fact it's not fully p2p seems a disadvantage, but it looks like the server is not hard to set up. Hopefully not. chaos.social/@delta/1154793927…


We hereby challenge _all_ other messaging apps, FOSS or not, to provide a more convenient private onboarding experience than #deltachat

1. Install app
2. "Create new profile"
3. Enter nick name, tap "Agree and continue"
4. Tap "+" and "new contact" and provide/scan qr code/link

Voila! A secure private chat, familiar to those coming from Whatsapp or Telegram (without "AI", with #a11y).

Note: chat identities are private and can not be queried or discovered. Servers keep no track or metadata


in reply to Çois

@frankiezafe default onboarding currently has 700MB per user but that's rarely ever reached and might be lowered again. Messages are removed server-side unconditionally after 20 days. More info nine.testrun.org/info.html
Other relays have different limits (often higher) chatmail.at/relays and people can onboard through the respective relay website after installing delta chat.
in reply to Peter Vágner

correct, the in-app QR code scanner for this part just looks for a URL encoded in the QR image that has to match:

dcaccount:some.chatmail.server/new

it doesn't parse or load anything else; it's completely safe.

QR codes are not inherently dangerous. They just hold text. No different than a link you click on, but we aren't going out of our way to avoid sharing links to things either