this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
145 points (78.7% liked)
Fediverse
29506 readers
2326 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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]"