Signal's president claimed it takes billions to replicate the availability and reliability of "hyperscalers" (AWS/Google/Microsoft/Cloudfare) that Signal uses.

#chatmail and #deltachat are about disproving this claim by

1) making relays super cheap (DONE)

2) enabling chat profiles to use multiple relays redundantly (WIP)

3) distributing relay knowledge among chatters (TBD).

Fat servers, corporate overlords and billionaires: not needed and better to not exist for a convivial e2ee future :)

quick heads up. Our impressions: #matrix is going strong with public sector entities, and it's where most dynamics happened at the conf.

We are rather focused on private and resilient messaging where servers don't play a big role; as we want #chatmail relays to be dirt cheap to operate, no pro version needed. Our focus is on informal usage, groups, family, friends, affinity or interest groups, whereas matrix is increasingly focusing on corporate/ organizational use cases. YMMV

Our project is one of constant exit planning and circumvention considerations ... as times and tech are getting more shitty.

We don't bet on a single basket, and not a single state or jurisdiction, and certainly not AWS/Google/Microsoft US clouds which run #Signal servers.

No single hoster, platform or language (we do a lot of Rust, granted) and no single device or vendor. At #chatmail protocol levels we regard nothing as holy, and look for simplicity and robustness, and convivial community 🖤

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

Feedback and debugging happens at support.delta.chat/t/help-test…

Help testing upcoming Delta Chat release with calls 📞!

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.

^Delta.Chat

Good news! It's getting harder to keep track of new #chatmail relays :)

Recently several public relays were added to the chatmail.at/relays list, in Warsaw, Helsinki, Romania and Barcelona.🧡

If you have #deltachat installed on mobile, you can go to any chatmail relay website in the list and click on a link there to create a chat profile.

It's wonderful to hear about collectives setting up chat infrastructure like the recent xat.fedi.cat from @fedicat and @eXOfasia

Chatmail: Relays

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!

^chatmail.at

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.

#DeltaChat #ChatMail #SelfHosted #HomeLab

Not taking Venture Capital money means:

- No pressure to maximize monetization of usage (for every million of VC funding you need to find ~100+ Million in value later).

- No prioritization of growing fast with PR campaigns that promise the moon and stumble on the ground

- No billionaire who ultimately profits

Instead, we seek public funding and private contributions for #chatmail #deltachat and #webxdc developments.

Thanks to everyone who is helping and already test-driving things :)

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.

With #deltachat you can choose #chatmail relays ( chatmail.at/relays ) which distributes the risk across a wider network. We are currently working on the multi-transport feature to finally remove any central point of chat failure chaos.social/@delta/1153621448…

Chatmail: Relays

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!

^chatmail.at

Woah! Only now did we discover a great blog post from @wq who discusses the progression from hosting a #Matrix , a #Snikket and a #SimpleX server, to now running a #chatmail relay runtimeterror.dev/self-hosted-…

It's an excellent read, with lots of good advise, including having a public "hello" profile and another unpublished chat profile for private chatting. #deltachat apps have pervasive multi-profile support (and multi-device support) so it's pretty easy to establish such a two-profile setup.

We do not aim for #deltachat to be another social media app. No #ai summaries or suggestions. No public directory of contacts. No discovery via outside identifiers (mobile phone or email). Just you and your contacts privately messaging, in a solid simple user interface on all platforms. End-to-End encryption enforced on two layers. #chatmail relays know and retain nothing, no content or metadata. #webxdc apps allow for custom interactions on top of chats.

Contributors and donations welcome!

The UK's national drought group is falling ridiculously short when recommending to delete old emails. How about

- stop building any new data centers, progressively tax on their size and resource consumption, no free riding

- legislatively focus on software to become more resource efficient (hint: AI hurts not helps with that)

In any case, #chatmail relays unconditionally remove emails, no user action needed. Everything interesting happens on end devices see en.reset.org/decentralised-eff…

Decentralised, Efficient, Open: Delta Chat Is Our Favourite Instant Messenger – Digital for Good | RESET.ORG

Delta Chat is exceptionally energy-efficient—and offers unique features that make it a genuine alternative to WhatsApp and other messengers.

^{Lana O'Sullivan (RESET - Digital for Good)}

Amount of hours spent to keep a default #chatmail onboarding relay with 500k active addresses running: near zero.

Glancing at stats sometimes: two million messages per day. CPU and IO load at 20% max. 500gb raid1 ssd meandering around 60 percent full. There is room for various optimizations but no big need currently.

end-to-end encryption with metadata minimization is best if servers are boring. No clustering or enterprise license needed, no "SRE team" either.

github.com/chatmail/relay/

GitHub - chatmail/relay: chatmail service deployment scripts and docs

chatmail service deployment scripts and docs . Contribute to chatmail/relay development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

Hey folks. I've noticed #DeltaChat hasn't got a page in #Wikipedia. Do you know sources which would prove its notability so we could create a page for it?

Boosts appreciated. If you don't know sources, someone else might.

#AskFedi #Email #IM #Messenger #chatmail #chatmailrelay #FOSS #opensource #tech #technology #software

Two of our teams just gave talks at the @passthesaltcon 2025 conference in Lille:

@Xeniax tells the story of "federated messaging" waves and her usable security research, emphasizing "availability" as a key issue
passthesalt.ubicast.tv/videos/… --

@hpk starts off with prioritizing usable security and walks through #chatmail transport layer security goals and #deltachat end-point security status, upcoming releases and prospective work on improving metadata and other goals
passthesalt.ubicast.tv/videos/…

@Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺 @Jayson Smith @Nick Giannak III The 25 port requirement is for self hosting #chatmail relay not for using the app. There are apps for other platforms such as deltachat for IOS, deltachat or arcanechat for android.
As for the deltachat-desktop app interface, unfortunatelly it's an electron app. However it's best used with the screen reader switched into focus mode.
I'll try to give you a bit of overview explaining how I am using it.
When I launch deltachat-desktop the focus is placed into a search field. If you alt+tab from its window and return back the focus will move to the chat input area if you have active conversation.
Regardless of which of these is in focus use tab and shift+tab to navigate at this point.
So I'll use the search field as a starting point as if you have no conversations this is the element you will land on after creating or importing your account from the backup.
Tabbing away from the search field you will land on the Scan QR code button. You can activate it to share your code for others to scan or to scan a code from someone else. Also we are all blind here in this conversation so I guess we won't be scanning QR codes, we'll copy and paste invite links that is also supported here. So the QR code dialog has two tabs QR invite code and Scan QR code. These are exposed as buttons to screen readers. If you activate one of these buttons the content in this dialog window changes. If you would like to join the chat you will press Scan QR code here and you will find the Paste button.
I assume QR code or invite links handling is now a bit clearer so I'll continue describing the main window.
When using tab to navigate pressing the tab key while the Scan QR button on the main window is in focus, you will land in the list of conversations. You can use up and down arrow key to navigate, enter key to activate here. Unfortunatelly the items are again exposed as buttons so it might be a bit embarrasing at first.
If you continue navigating with the tab key from the list of conversations you will land on the new conversation button.
If you continue with the tab key you will move from the new conversation button into the active conversation window. The conversation name is presented. Activating the button named after the active conversation will open a dialog window with user profile of your chat partner or profile of a group chat if the active conversation is a group chat indeed. In the profile window you can see last seen info of the chat partner, their signature, their chat handle, a button for sending them a message that is mainly usefull when you are looking at a profile of a group member, and an ability to share the contact with other contacts. There is a profile menu button that displays a context sensitive menu with more actions such as setting your own local display name for the contact.
I'm now done explaining the profile window and imagine we are back in the active conversation view focused on the chat name button.
Using tab key to navigate from here lands on the tabs changing the main conversation content. You can use these to change from conversation to the media.
Then there is a main menu button. In fact it includes conversation specific menu entries such as search in chat, dissapearing messages and others.
Moving forward with the tab key from the main menu button you will land on the message list of the active conversation. Use up and down arrow to navigate here to read the messages. And use applications key or shift+F10 to open a context menu for the selected message. Text messages have no other content but audio messages, messages with reactions or other attachments might have other focusable elements in the tab order. I think this part is pretty self explanatory once you manage to start chatting. One thing other messengers don't have is shared apps. Apps can be posted to the chat and message with the app will have a button to start the app that will then open in a new window. There are various apps made for deltachat and other webxdc capable messengers, such as the shopping list, simple group collaborative editor and similar. I am looking to the future when more screen reader users will adopt this and we can bring some of the fun things we liked to enjoy back in the days on IRC such as playing quiz or card games in the chat. This might be a nice platform for allowing this.
Then there is an attachment button, visually it's to the left of the chat input area, then chat input area it-self, smileys and record voice messages button.
After the record voice message button you will wrap to the top, of the application window landing on the profile chooser. This part needs a bit of a11y love as the profile names are not exposed to screen readers. These have role tab and you can use up and down arrow keys to navigate here. The last item in this list is a create profile button.
Yes, you can have multiple chat profiles if you like. And it's really damn easy to create a new deltachat profile. The most valuable thing on your profile is the list of contacts as you are verified criptographically. Loosing the empty profile is not a problem as you can create a new one whenever you like.
The final destination of this walkthrough through the deltachat-desktop main window is the settings button.

Huh, this turned to be a looong post. I believe it clears a few things up for you.

Thinking more about it perhaps I should report some of the little things such as avoid using button roles for the list items, consider using roving tab index for the tabs so only one of them is focusable at a time to get rid of a bit of confusion to the @Delta Chat github issues.

@Winter blue tardis🇧🇬🇭🇺 @Jayson Smith @Nick Giannak III If you are still testing deltachat, I managed to run my #chatmail relay and it's working for a few weeks for me.
I have created a groupchat where I'd like to invite other screen reader users.
As I have posted a few times recently, #deltachat people do really care about screen reader #a11y so while testing and something is not working the way you would expect lets describe it in details, and report it properly.

Here's the link to that group chat I'm talking about
i.delta.chat/#6FE1642916908F1A…

Comparing #XMPP against #email protocols is too limited. What sets #deltachat apart is *vertical integration* and being driven by UI/UX considerations. Cross-platform Apps and Bots use the Rust core library which connects with #chatmail relays and classic email servers based on a higher level API -- abstracting over SMTP, MIME, #OpenPGP etc. See chatmail.at

#webxdc apps in turn use an even higher level stable API abstracting over email/xmpp/... see webxdc.org/docs/

Chatmail

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!

^chatmail.at

1 cent per five years .... is the current marginal hosting cost for a #chatmail address, with which #deltachat apps facilitate world-wide private messaging including interactive #webxdc apps that run end-to-end encrypted in any chat group.

<1 Million EUR per year is the estimated marginal hosting costs for 350 Million EU citizens. Such scaling requires, however, research and development, including careful UX and #cryptography work. Related writing from @gordon

newsletter.squishy.computer/p/…

#chatmail relays can serve 200k+ users on a small physical machine, are easy to setup and even easier to maintain. Chatmail relays enforce end-to-end encryption and rely on cryptographic verification for interoperability instead of IP reputation and spam checking magic. Tomorrow (Sunday) evening, @compl4xx will give a hands-on setup workshop in Hamburg cfp.eh22.easterhegg.eu/eh22/ta…

#easterhegg2025 #eh22

How to setup a chatmail server, optimized for Delta Chat Easterhegg 2025

With Signal, Whatsapp, and other centralized messengers suddenly running their servers in an authoritarian territory, we need a decentralized alternative.

^{cfp.eh22.easterhegg.eu}

The trajectory of E2E-encryption is about de-platforming: There shall be no central machines that can control the edges/peers, and the social groups and virtual centers they freely form.

Our #deltachat R&D around #chatmail relays and #webxdc apps all aim to realize such a "zero-platforms" fully E2E-encrypted interaction model. However, this is *not* just about cryptographic cleverness. Rather it is about usable anti-authoritarian designs, as explicitly stated in January delta.chat/en/2025-01-23-webxd…

Delta Chat: Replacing billionairish platforms with ZIP files

How can we evolve and deploy web apps without allowing developers or operators to become a “billionaire in the middle”? There are many ways to try to address this challenge and some involve the tec...

^delta.chat

new security milestone reached: #chatmail relay servers are hardened to only transfer end-to-end encrypted e-mail with metadata minimization. No cleartext message can enter or leave the secure chatmail network anymore.

We now talk about "chatmail relays" rather than servers as they only ephemerally store messages until delivery. Dirt cheap to run.

We opened up our #rust "chatmail core" infrastructure library and set up an overview of the community driven ecosystem ...

chatmail.at

The downside of our project approach was that we often got experts being very dismissive on re-using email and #OpenPGP ... and there still is some opposition which often subsides when actually trying #deltachat and #chatmail, looking at security audits and our strong usable security focus.

There may also be surprising upsides. The UK "Online Safety Bill" which attacks end-to-end encryption integrity seems to not apply for ... e-mail. Because everyone knows, e-mail is unencrypted, right? :)

With #deltachat #chatmail and #webxdc developments we aim to instigate a new modern foundation for secure E-Mail and a resilient Web without platforms. We are building a kind of #minecraft system for modern decentralized messaging.

But who are we building it for?

For all who need reliable trustable means of modern private communication.

While our work needs hackers and experts it's not designed for them. @tante raises interesting and important related thoughts tante.cc/2025/03/03/who-is-fre…

Who is Free Software for?

For a while I have been arguing that maybe there are some issues with the whole “Open*” movements, their founding myths and ideologies (see for example my talk at Fluconf). This criticism comes from a place of love.

^{tante (Smashing Frames)}

The #chatmail #fosdem talk from @compl4xx is public. It goes into topics such as

- why chatmail servers?
- how to setup a server with your child
- (avoiding) spam filtering
- metadata and guaranteed end to end encryption in #deltachat
- #cryptographic #interoperability for email message routing

Thanks to attendees for the great energy even if was the last talk on the day and also for questions and conversations afterwards!

ftp.fau.de/fosdem/2025/k4601/f…