Notices by Delta Chat (delta@chaos.social)

@freddy 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 https://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.

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!

@blazr with 2.22.0 you can try out calling, look for "Debug Calls" in the experimental settings :)

Instead of big email providers, we actually recommend self-hosting https://chatmail.at/relays, or using one of the existing public ones. This is basically how we aim to do scaling, horizontal instead of centralized.

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

Great post from @Jdm2 about his getting away from WhatsApp and looking into #deltachat

https://write.as/jdm2/deltachat-y-arcanechat-son-las-definitivas-alternativas-a-whatsapp

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.

@Yuvalne if jurisdiction would not matter then Signal wouldn't threaten to pull out of Europe if the EU goes for #chatcontrol . True, jurisdiction for a server can not decrypt E2EE messages but it can attack services as a whole, or demand metadata info (which account ID belongs to which phone number etc.) behind the scenes.

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 :)

https://mastodon.uno/@gianmarcogg03/115462294953394774

containing peertube, odysee and youtube links (latter provides English subtitles)

Fun fact: devs noticed some tiny but embarrassing glitches in the UI which are now getting fixed as we speak :)

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 :)

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 https://support.delta.chat/t/help-testing-upcoming-delta-chat-release-with-calls/4220/17

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

Recently several public relays were added to the https://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 https://xat.fedi.cat from @fedicat and @eXOfasia

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 ( https://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 https://chaos.social/@delta/115362144863345662

What an announcement from #Telegram owner Pawel Durov! To provide just a few critical notes, he

- makes believe he is just a commoner, and not the billionaire owner of one of the largest message, media and metadata *cleartext* databases on earth

- skips over Global Warming

- refers to "fathers and forefathers" of the Internet ... apparently never heard of Radia Perlman, Margaret Hamilton or Ada Lovelace?

- conveniently excludes Russia and its authoritarian politics from his critique

etc.

Forget warn apps and mobiles: when it comes to neighborhoods there are many non-digital ways to help each other. Without needing permission from billionaires.

Whistles!

https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/09/17/in-little-village-residents-are-blowing-actual-whistles-to-warn-neighbors-about-ice/

While classic cleartext email providers, also Thunderbird with its Thundermail efforts, are aiming to be a more trustworthy alternative to Gmail/calendar/drive etc ...

#deltachat and #chatmail efforts go all-in on end-to-end encryption and metadata minimization, with decentralized transport relays playing much lesser roles than #Signal's Amazon/Microsoft/Google servers. At the same time, #webxdc apps provide unprecedented extensibility, eg checkout the great TOTP app https://webxdc.org/apps/#rtn-totp

There now is a recording of the ad-hoc #datenspuren "usable end-to-end" talk from friday evening, german audio only https://app.media.ccc.de/v/ds25-603-usable-end-to-end-security-with-delta-chat-and-chatmail

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 https://runtimeterror.dev/self-hosted-chatmail-relay-for-delta-chat/

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.

#deltachat is being used in virtually all world regions where one or more other messengers fail to work. We recently released a major milestone (V2 security hardening releases) that prepared the ground for chat profiles to have multiple #chatmail relays at once ... failure or blocking of a single relay would not disrupt chatting anymore. But multi transport also helps with the "centralization problem in decentralized systems" ... https://delta.chat/en/2025-06-04-surge-donations#funding-for-a-globally-scaled-chatmail-relay-network
(Funding is looking good currently btw!)

V2 #deltachat is rolling out after weeks of internal testing, a major milestone revising how end-to-end encryption works and bringing more beautiful contact and group profiles, direct access to chat-shared apps in the title bar and a "new email" action with setting a subject for those using a classic server.

Best of all, users and developers don't need to co-ordinate anything for upgrading to V2 despite the massive security rework behind the scenes :)

https://delta.chat/en/2025-08-04-encryption-v2