this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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I get that WhatsApp is not a platform to use if you care about your privacy, but WTF is "Delta Chat" and why would I switch to it rather than say Signal?
I agree that Signal is nice, but I think the point here is that Delta Chat is decentralized
So is Matrix and it's way more popular. But recommending anything other than Signal at this point is a waste. Fediverse chat is a more complex conversion for many who are still in the connect via phone number stage for chat. Fediverse is an easier story for other platforms.
Imo it's already difficult enough to convince friends and family to use Signal. Delta Chat would be even more difficult to pull off.
How is it different? In my experience it’s easier as they’ve already heard of email.
The difference is signal has millions of users and most people have already maybe heard of it.
The other difference is that promoting more and more obscure, useless shit ruins your credibility for when you're trying to get them to Lemmy or Signal or Mastodon.
Signal is an absolutely fine product and doesn't need to be decentralized right now.
As I've understood, Delta chat is based on the IMAP protocol and uses the infrastructure of your email provider. Thus, it uses no own server infrastructure, but has the also the downsides of the protocol and some issues with many email providers.
Wikipedia.de - Delta Chat (no English version available yet)
This turned out to be the deal-breaker for me. GMX kept locking me out of my account because of the DeltaChat messages. They're (of course) full of cyphertext and to email providers this must look a look like spam.
The open-to-abuse nature of email claims yet another victim.
On the other hand, GMX (and web.de) is a notoriously bad influence on email communication and will randomly block mailservers if they feel like it while flooding all of their own users with spam. The world would be a better place without 1&1 / united internet.
But it's a free Europe-based provider that's not US big tech. A better suggestion?
To be clear, I use a paid service (Mailbox.org) for my main email, as everyone should do.
Right, they don't support the advanced login protocols some providers like outlook require. That was a deal breaker, because deltachat was pretty much the last encrypted messaging service which worked in China.
Because delta chat is using an open protocol (email) and you can run your own servers meaning it is decentralized unlike Signal. Also it is actually anonymous unlike Signal, so you don’t need to give anyone your phone number and people can’t find where you live just by knowing your username.
So not an instant messaging protocol but rather a technology that the whole world would do differently if they could go back in time?
Could you be more concrete? In what relevant way do you think it does not work as an instant messenger? Keep in mind that Delta Chat is not a theoretical thing and it works as well as any other messenger.
Regarding SMTP:
~~That said, it looks like Delta Chat doesn't actually use SMTP, having scanned through the website. Though I'm honestly unsure either way as it was only a scan.~~
Never mind:
PGP is a very curious choice. A quick Google search says a downside of this is that it does not provide "forward secrecy". From the Wikipedia page on forward secrecy, it prevents things like the following.
If an adversary can steal (or obtain through a court order) this static (long term) signing key, the adversary can masquerade as the server to the client and as the client to the server and implement a classic man-in-the-middle attack.
Thanks for pointing this out. I'm guessing part of this is why so many messengers either create a new protocol or choose XMPP
Yes, I really have t looked into this before. I just vaguely remembered jokes about PGP from a security class a while back, so looked it up. It does look like the encryption scheme used in XMPP does solve this issue.
Wikipedia saves the day again:
OMEMO is an extension to the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) for multi-client end-to-end encryption developed by Andreas Straub. According to Straub, OMEMO uses the Double Ratchet Algorithm "to provide multi-end to multi-end encryption, allowing messages to be synchronized securely across multiple clients, even if some of them are offline".[1] The name "OMEMO" is a recursive acronym for "OMEMO Multi-End Message and Object Encryption". It is an open standard based on the Double Ratchet Algorithm and the Personal Eventing Protocol (PEP, XEP-0163).[2] OMEMO offers future and forward secrecy and deniability with message synchronization and offline delivery.
I get that you're using AI directly related to your point, but it's still a lot of shitty AI spam.
Use it for your own research, but don't foist that on us.
I asked specifically for relevant issues and you just link general issues with smtp that have no impact on Delta Chat?
Delta Chat sends encrypted messages over it so that’s irrelevant.
Your phone can run LLMs, it can send a couple packets. Also this “chattyness” can be seen as an advantage as it is extremely robust and works on any network however inconsistent.
Yeah duh? It’s decentralized. You can’t ensure that the recipient doesn’t take down their server?…
Etc. I feel like I’m wasting my time replying to all these because it seems you didn’t even take the time to read them yourself.
I'm here trying to learn about Delta Chat and why you think it's a good app given the drawbacks of the approach they've taken. Over the years there's been an incredible amount of messengers pop up, 90 million from Google alone and none have opted for SMTP. There's surely a reason for that. From what I've learned, mostly thanks to Gemini, because holy fuck the Delta Chat website feels like something from 20 years ago and is purposely vague, the solution that Delta has gone for is just to add more layers. Again, something that the world has repeatedly opted against. I'm trying to understand why it's considered a good idea in this case and why so many teams and startups have decided not to use this methodology until now?
Jesus Christ, being curious shouldn't feel like a chore.
It's considered a good idea because it runs over omnipresent, already-existent, distributed infrastructure. In other words, for this particular chat app, you don't even need to create an account. That is at very least an interesting and noteworthy feature.
So if you don't need to create an account, how do you know you're talking to who you think you're talking to?
I can see this being valuable as a Lemmy style service where I'm sharing information and reading information but want to be anonymous. But not a good service if I want to talk to my mom about a sensitive subject and protect my privacy.
You use your email provider's credentials to log into the app, which then creates an IMAP folder called delta-chat which houses all those conversations.
You'd verify it's your mom by starting a chat with "[email protected]" she'd verify it's you by making sure it's coming from "[email protected]"
As a heads up, the person you're arguing with seems to be using an LLM to generate text.
I would down vote and move on. It's not a real discussion.
Downvote for what? What part is wrong?
Wasting other people's time.
If you want to use an LLM that's fine, but if you're cutting and pasting it into a discussion you should warn other people that it's not human generated.
And most of it isn't wrong, it's just a giant wall of text that's largely irrelevant to the conversation.
Wall of text? I provided information requested and then went back and provided more information to clear up a claim I got wrong. Let's not focus on how we get the information, but rather what the information is. If it's not for you personally, just move on.
Thank you
If you use your email, it's anonymous but you have to use your email which is almost never anonymous and has your phone number. Also you sometimes have to "Create an app-specific password" that delta chat will use and gain full access to your email account, which is way worse than signal or any other application. And for some accounts, you have to use your real password, and maybe disable the spam protection.
Am I wrong somewhere or is that a really stupid idea?
During onboarding of the app you only choose a name and get a random email address
If you struggle making a new email address, this is not for you.
Which applies to 99% of people making Delta Chat not a viable alternative to WhatsApp.
The Fediverse has the same problem that Linux, and Open Source in general, struggles with. The barriers to entry and network effects work against widespread adoption.
Until technology is packaged in a way that makes it dead simple and/or unavoidable, people won’t make the effort to move en masse.
Our words must be dead simple too.
'Open source' is a very ambiguous, confusing, phrase that makes it too easy for anti-libre software to scam.
So XMPP?
Should definitely be the go-to
You do not need to give your number anymore to use Signal.
You cannot make a Signal account without phone number so that’s not true.
you need a phone number to make an account. but you can chat with others without divulging your phone number
Unregistered users can't chat, so a number must be divulged to Signal, as OP said.
But we are not obliged to share it with our correspondents.
Unregistered users can't chat, so it needs a number, as OP said.
Yeah I’d rather not share my identity though. Seems like an odd requirement for a “private” messenger
Private ≠ anonymous.
Signal is not anonymous.
Signal is neither of those
Signal is private in that other people can't intercept your messages, including signal. The signal app is open-source so you can be relatively certain it's not tracking your decrypted messages, unlike closed-source apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or any other private social media.
Signal is not anonymous from an account standpoint, because you need a phone number to sign up, even if you can choose not to display it in your account.
This does nothing to fix the problem.