Notices by Delta Chat (delta@chaos.social)

Are you interested in enshittification-resistant application development?

After almost two years of collaboration with the wonderful @n0iroh team, we are happy to announce that Delta Chat 1.48 apps on all platforms contain top-notch Peer-to-Peer networking support, including hole-punching and forward-secret end-to-end encryption. It is exposed through the new #webxdc realtime APIs and there are some nice initial showcase apps 🎉

https://delta.chat/en/2024-11-20-webxdc-realtime

Working based on interoperable specifications is value to users and developers. Development teams get the freedom to exchange component implementations which is beneficial to the user. Other developers can team up to replace a whole tool or app with another interoperable one, providing a second level of "freedom to exit". Its true for #activitypub and is true for our e-mail Standards and #openpgp based end-to-end encryption. Protocols are the fundamental source to provide freedom of exit.

@oceane @lrvick oh, we are very much working with and for people in heavily repressive situations and they often use #deltachat when signal, threema, WhatsApp don't work .... And even if they do. Why? Because our apps provide instant onboarding without phone numbers, multi-profile and multi-device support and a pretty secure audited and analysed key management protocol without key servers. Plus support for state of the art circumvention proxying. There is a whole lot more than PFS to consider.

@nlnet just announced four accepted NGI proposals within the EU Mobifree project which we are a small part of.
https://social.nlnet.nl/@nlnet/statuses/01JCDZET8YR8F7XHXF4SSE7QPJ

Happy to see https://fosstodon.org/@termux
https://nlnet.nl/project/OpenAGPS/
https://lambdanative.org/
and https://nlnet.nl/project/ATL/
receive funding.

Don't you prefer the @EUCommission to fund a thousand of such wonderful infrastructural and diverse FOSS projects instead of throwing more money after AI things, only amounting to a drop in the giant AI money ocean, anyway?

basic #pricacy tip ... If you are interested in, or relying on, end-to-end encryption then do yourself a favor and ensure your keyboard app (Gboard anyone?) does not have network access.

You can sleep better knowing your Keyboard app does not transfer stuff somewhere, let alone feed some AI machinery, right?

Keyboard apps also often have access to clipboard buffers, so copy+paste is also leaking if your keyboard app happily talks with servers.

@lps @strypey @praveen for making Delta a full-fledged e-mail client, we would need people and funds ... FYI thunderbird alone operates on >6 million yearly, not to speak of Outlook, GMail, GMX etc. DC has less than 500K yearly. For now, we rather focus on decentralized secure open-signup messaging with interactive apps, interoperable with e-mail. With sufficient growth there, we may also able to focus more on DC as an e-mail app again ... which several of us sympathize with :)

@lps @strypey @praveen The K-9 main developer @cketti is indeed working with Mozilla for two years now, together with a colleague, and they are building Thunderbird-Android -- we talk from time to time with @thunderbird folks but there are no joint dev plans. As to the precise relation of Thunderbird and Mozilla, it's better to ask/inquire with them but last we heart, they run on the administrative infrastructure of Mozilla, but Thunderbird has their own separate accounting/leadership.

@feld when you select the deltachat-ios-target and an iOS-simulator, it should just ... build without any changes required.
If you try to build it with a real device selected (next to the target) instead a simulator, you'd need to change the team, bundle identifier etc.
Is it possible that you try to compile it with a real devices selected? If not, please open an issue on GitHub: https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-ios/issues/new/choose

@feld are you trying to run the iOS app in the iOS simulator or an a real iOS device?

@feld @itwillbefine would you still be able to follow changes, e.g. have your repo based on the source chatmail git one? If not, it may become time to release the custom python "filtermail" and "doveauth" modules to PyPI, so it can be changed for both.

@itwillbefine did you find something yet? You'd be welcome to try setting up a chatmail server and use delta chat apps and bots with it. There would need to be a tweak to set it up as non-federating but that's not hard. https://delta.chat/chatmail provides more info. Otherwise feel free to ask.

Our end-to-end encryption engine rPGP just got a big update, fully supporting OpenPGP "cryptorefresh" RFC9850 ... Many thanks to @hko and dignifiedquire for fearlessly pushing ahead in the security machine room ... Please give them a 💜 and also @NGIZero who funded it !
https://fosstodon.org/@hko/113198947595455844

@lutindiscret @raphaelrobert @phoenix_r_d @1739d937dc8c0c7370aa27585938c119e25c41f6c441a5d34c6d38503e3136ef thanks for the pointer, and looking forward to see what comes out of the OpenMLS rust developments. We presume however it's not yet easy to use it in decentralized settings where group-membership is not strictly ordered. Or did that restriction change?

Delta Chat 1.38 releases: WebXDC apps can now exchange data with other tools and run on other messengers! We've implemented a little Calendar and Draw app to showcase the two new APIs and besides have other good news for the nascent privacy-guaranteeing Next-Generation-Internet ... just a "start" button for chat-shared apps with no GDPR or cookie-consents, no coins, no app or account hosting and thus no logins ;) https://delta.chat/en/2023-06-28-webxdc-import-export

Third time is a charm!

Watch us tirelessly explaining to Roskomnadzor how e-mail works! The three innovations in our third reply are that we

a) request the international law their request is grounded on (as if they would care)

b) communicate that their assumptions, even according to russian laws, are wrong (as if they would care)

c) state explicitly that Delta Chat is unlike WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram (doh!)

#chatcontrol-delenda-est

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

While we do have criticisms of its centralized architecture and other choices we highly regard Signal for ushering in a decade of popularizing end-to-end encryption. We particularly appreciate @Mer__edith doing excellent communication work there. It's disingenuous that tech-billionaires Musk/Dorsey fuel attacks on her and another female colleague, hinting at Telegram as a more secure messenger. Comparing security of Signal with Telegram simply results in "Type Error: incompatible arguments".

#DeltaTouch, the native #UbuntuTouch version of delta chat just announced they are going for full webxdc app support in the summer .... There also is an experimental way to run it on #nixos to get a desktop that is not based on Elektron. Shout-out to @lk108 who is heading this great work even if it's "niche" for now .... DeltaTouch is pretty close to mainline features and arguably the best messenger on that os! https://social.tchncs.de/@deltatouch/112446568813809144

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 :)