#deltachat is a private messaging app. It'd be easy enough to offer various public groups to boost onboarding, and let everyone play. But one would land in a large group that isn't very private, with lots of needs for moderation tooling, troll handling and other social-media issues. Not our current cup of tea.
We are grateful for the many folks here onboarding their families, projects or friends, founding special-interest chats, setting up #chatmail relays etc. This is wonderful, cheers!
@ferrex you are right. #Olvid is pretty well done regarding UX for boarding and getting in contact, largely similar to how #deltachat does onboarding, with interesting differences. Something to learn from (we think in bot directions). Thanks for pointing this out to us! Do you happen to know any olvid people in the fediverse? It's not an open source project and work with a central transport server, no federation etc, but still interesting to engage with from a UX standpoint.
Many experts caught up in the past crypto/decentralization discourse fail to recognize one key innovation area of #deltachat and #chatmail efforts:
A user interface (UI) and experience (UX) that mimicks and closely resembles Whatsapp and Telegram ... who both have a central cleartext database of identities, social graphs and, in the case of Telegram, also messages and media, of billions of users!
We prefer to ground every discussion in UX/UI terms and measure security by outcomes for users.
What if a state tries to mandate us as #deltachat app devs/distributors to shut down a chat profile?
Nothing. It can't be done.
We have no list of chat identities, have no handle or data about them, and don't mediate the message transfer.
However, EU #Chatcontrol politicians and Russian authorities would want us to insert backdoors into our FOSS code. But that is nothing than can happen overnight, and we are fine with friendly forks already. Resilient private internet communication ftw :)
@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.
Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!
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 #chatmailchatmail.at
Finally we, as app distributors, want to fully disentangle from any "default" server. Testrun will become history :)
Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!
I agree. @delta did a great job with this UX. Built upon the email protocol (with e2ee encryption added) they are just as decentralized and federated as email, or for that matter Mastodon. They are a great deal MORE decentralized than Signal or say, BlueSky now. But their UX did an excellent job "hiding" the complexity. Others decentralized/federated platforms should learn from this example! #deltachat chaos.social/@delta/1154793927…
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 :)
Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!
I agree, #Deltachat is awesome for superfast account creation, then sharing the account by QR code. No password set or stored, no phone number or email given, no password manager grumbled about necessitating
@delta@chaos.social desktop Linux client installed from an official arch repo for some reason doesn't work on my Arch Linux with Wayland and Sway installed. After the launching through wmenu nothing happens. When launching through a terminal emulator I got an error:
[28650:1101/162426.452376:ERROR:ui/ozone/platform/x11/ozone_platform_x11.cc:250] Missing X server or $DISPLAY
[28650:1101/162426.452426:ERROR:ui/aura/env.cc:257] The platform failed to initialize. Exiting.
SolutionLaunch Delta Chat client by the following command:
Hey @delta! Reading this delta.chat/en/2025-05-22-brows… got me thinking. I live in Firefox but miss Chrome’s one-click “Install PWA as app”. What about a Tauri-based helper + a Firefox extension that wraps a PWA into a desktop app in one step? Hosting stays light: the PWA is cached; relays/self-hosted instances can serve the client. Keeps control with admins. Interested? 👍🏻
As part of the project to port Delta Chat Desktop from Electron to Tauri1, we’ll showcase a setup where our Desktop app runs in Firefox and does not depend on Electron or Chromium anymore. This vid...
We also just reposted his invitation to a Puerto Rico group, because we think the way this group is instigated is exactly right: ask for people to drop into a DM, or like with the borken.social Fediverse instance: show an invite link only for authenticated users 🎯
Non-public invites maintain some privacy and sense of joiners and brings e2ee messaging to instance communities.
Ja sé que tots sou molt racionals, però en el #DeltaChat, quan entres dins dels grups, en el fons de pantalla, a part de clar/obscur podria existir també la opció d'insertar una imatge des de la teva galeria, per canviar el fons?
Countering toxicity and fake takes is not just a technical question (moderation, admins etc) but one of social curation both collectively and privately: which people and groups do you/we trust for what. No tool can automate that.
#deltachat is for private e2ee messaging and mutually curated group chats, and not random social media propelled onboarding. We are with #Signal here and not with #simplex and #matrix who offer public anonymous discovery of large chat groups with lots of unknown folks.
thanks for trying and telling about your experiences!
We generally recommend to use #deltachat for private chatting and your "300 people group" does not sound quite like that. Delta Chat is not geared and not well suited for groups of hundreds of people, today. Are the issues you noted related to such larger groups? If not, would you mind sharing a few, maybe on the support.delta.chat forum?
Today, we were nicely surprised by @gianmarcogg03 with a new comprehensive (italian) #deltachat introduction video, going through initial setup, groups and chatting, second device setup, #webxdc apps, bots, calls and playing Quake -- all the nice things you can do these days :)
Ho fatto un tutorial su @delta@chaos.social, un sistema di messaggistica istantanea libero e privato basato sulle e-mail, ma con un'esperienza utente molto simile a WhatsApp, se non migliore.
:peertube: PeerTube: https://videos.gianmarco.
...but there is one thing that #Deltachat does not provide while it works perfectly fine with #Signal ... the desktop client that works on #FreeBSD and is available in #FreeBSD pkg(8) packages.
The 'web' approach (such as web.whatsapp.com for WhatsApp) would also satisfy my needs - I can use a client in the browser - but if there is no 'native' client and no browser client option for #FreeBSD - that means total NO-GO for me.
I find it bold stating that #DeltaChat doesn’t need a hyperscaler like #Signal does when it is based on… email servers. Where there is no audio/video calling. Where every sender and recipient server knows who is communicating with whom. Where you need to trust every decentralized server to not keep that information. Maybe be less smug if you can’t provide metadata protection. 🙄 @deltachaos.social/@delta/1154540411…
Signal's president claimed it takes billions to replicate the availability and reliability of "hyperscalers" (AWS/Google/Microsoft/Cloudfare) that Signal uses.
Signal's president claimed it takes billions to replicate the availability and reliability of "hyperscalers" (AWS/Google/Microsoft/Cloudfare) that Signal uses.
Base tech resilience comes from tools that can be used offline. #deltachat apps are offline-first in that you can create chats, send messages, look at messages/media and trigger establishung contact via qr code scans. And you can use #webxdc apps (with checklist, calendars, editors, shopping lists etc) because they not only don't require Internet but are barred from accessing it, providing privacy that doesn't require #gdpr or consent or login.
@ati1 Re: #DeltaChat on #Librem5. I just tested the experimental direct 1:1 calls and it worked great : ) The call ring sounded loud and clear on my Librem 5!
We are aware of roskomnadzor just having ramped up their blocking efforts in #russia against #deltachat 's default onboarding chatmail relay. Signal, Whatsapp are degraded/blocked for a longer time already.
1) Delta Chat has first class shadow-socks proxy support (try ss:// links you can find ... Delta has management-proxy UX)
2) many other chatmail relays work fine and inter-chatmail/email server traffic continues unimpeded
3) if you can help with analyzing please drop into our DMs.
La gente de #DeltaChat vuelven a impresionar 🤯 ahora con llamadas P2P (**en beta**)... Donde los servidores no necesitan hacer NADA especial, ni siquiera actualizarse. Todo sigue funcionando bajo estándares de #email. 😍
Hay algo mágico en una aplicación que consigue ser tan independiente incluso de su propia infraestructura. 🪄
Believe it or not: #deltachat is growing audio/video calls starting with the currently rolling 2.22 releases ... A few people already had two hour long stable calls :)
Calls are an experimental option while we continue to work on reliability, UX/UI revisions, and configuration of TURN servers on #chatmail relays and in clients.
We want calls to reliably work across all major platforms, networks and phones, including #UbuntuTouch
Всем привет! Возможно ли сделать звонок, если использовать только классические сервера электронной почты? Мои попытки позвонить закончились неудачно - сам вызов проходит, но ни звука, ни видео.
Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!
I've been on the hunt for some accessible, easily self-hosted (on prem or datacenter) chat solution for a while now, and I've been looking very closely at deltachat/chatmail.
Not gonna lie, the fact that just uses mature SMTP facilities for transport is making me weirdly aroused.
If anyone has experience running their own chatmail server or just using deltachat in general, I'd be glad to hear from you.
There is no single central #Signal server. Signal uses #AWS cloud, plus Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud and Cloudflare, all under US legislation. If any of these clouds goes down or becomes otherwise problematic, chatting degrades or fails.
Chatmail provides FOSS infrastructure for interoperable, secure, speedy and reliable end-to-end encrypted messaging. Check out clients as Arcane Chat, Bots or Delta Chat today!
With @signalapp having a problem because AWS us-east-1 is having trouble, I'm looking at installing @delta as a side-channel for situations like this ... does anyone know if it does video?
I know it's a chat function, and I'm not asking for miracles. It's a genuine question about capabilities.
I see there are web apps, and capabilities to integrate things, so I'm wondering what's available in the base install.
Upcoming Delta Chat release will come with experimental integrated (ringing!) calls feature! 📞🎶 Help us test the new feature: here is Delta Chat 2.22.0 - choose your flavor and mind your backups: 🍋 https://download.delta.
Emoji reaction UI/UX has been reworked
