Please help us get rough stats as we don't have technical means to collect such stats, by design.
Do you use #deltachat or are considering it? Which kind of operator do you use?
to complicate ongoing state-level blocking attempts. Please keep setting up #chatmail relays -- and thanks to all the early adopters and carers!
July 2025 some key contributors will do sessions in #Lille, France at @npub1uk4v...z2gq
and discuss the state of efforts to scale #deltachat #chatmail and #webxdc to billions of people and bots, without any central points of control.
"if your social media network can go down it is not decentralized" they say and rightfully so. Same is true for much other infrastructure ... Energy, water, internet utilities ... And of course messaging. If your messenger can go down it's not decentralized. During 2025 we aim to make #deltachat and #chatmail infrastructure in particular into the most resilient and mass-user accessible private messenging utility out there ... If it isn't already :)
Today we are unveiling two brand new features by ... drum-roll ... doing nothing:
- No "AI" integration involved or planned. Consequently, you don't need to teach your relatives how to disable AI!
- No proprietary server components: servers are fast, efficient and freely replicable, no permissions needed!
Moreover, our apps are easier to use and onboard with than SIM/phone number based apps: Multi-device and Multi-profile handling is a piece of cake.
#deltachat #whatsapp #signal #matrix
#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 one of the developers will give a hands-on setup workshop in Hamburg
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
Easter/April offer π£ if you are onboarding a small group of family/friends to #deltachat and/or want to setup a insta-federated #chatmail relay let us know about any issues. Just post on fediverse and tag us. In case of bugs/issues we'll see to privately set up a support chat to help sort out any issues, or file accordingly to our development tracker. We want Delta to work flawlessly for private chatting and to better understand any remaining irritations or problems. Thanks and enjoy :)
#deltachat is geared and optimized for private messaging even though it's successfully used for 100+ people chats as well. Doing large scale chats has two challenges:
- implementing scalable encryption so increased number of recipients does not increase message size/cpu cost for the sender
- grow good moderation tooling because public channels/chats invite a lot of spam, unwanted stuff
For large chats today we recommend to control who joins, and maybe use a separate chat profile.
#openpgp traditions and #signal both bind a cleartext identifier, phone number or email address, to a cryptographic key. It opens up attack vectors as the servers/orgs controlling this binding can interfere.
#deltachat avoids such cleartext identity bindings by creating random #chatmail addresses, as transport only. The cryptographic key becomes the identifier and we want it hidden from the transport layer. Only people being in end-to-end encrypted chat need to identify each other, after all.
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 ...
