We are impressed with the new website, and the way it provides all the info needed to engage in distributed diverse action to prevent the EU from preparing the ground for, or sliding into, authoritarianism by breaking end-to-end encryption for everyone. Germany and France are particularly important to engage with and we'll see what we can do from our circles. We don't know the people behind but big kudos! #chatcontrol
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!
Prediction: most messenger projects will move to a single core implementation model, probably #Rust based, in the next few years. The gains both for the development process are just too big. It's all about UI and UX agility, implementation quality and delivery to users. Funding and money? We had/have to make do with ~1/50th of what other cross platform messenger app efforts had available. It forced and forces us to economic choices which is not a bad thing in an overall bloated IT industry.
Signal and Matrix were founded in popular opposition to the email system but End-to-End encrypted instant messaging via emails works now, and reliably, with #deltachat V2 app releases, and with #chatmail relays forming a growing secure email network that minimizes metadata and enforces TLS and E2EE messaging. You can't really argue with working code, can you? Contrary to popular belief SMTP and DKIM and IMAP are no holy ingredients and can be improved upon btw. See eg image
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 :)
Amount of hours spent to keep a default #chatmail onboarding relay with 500k active addresses running: near zero. Glancing at stats sometimes: two million messages per day. CPU and IO load at 20% max. 500gb raid1 ssd meandering around 60 percent full. There is room for various optimizations but no big need currently. end-to-end encryption with metadata minimization is best if servers are boring. No clustering or enterprise license needed, no "SRE team" either.
Good news! Our developments are back into full swing with major new releases expected throughout 2025 ๐Ÿฅณ After the shock February dry-up of funding grants we recently secured substantial private donations, wonderfully helping to hit the ground running ๐Ÿงก #deltachat #chatmail and #webxdc developments currently use ~600k EUR per year to support a dozen experts and contributors, to in turn help the wider contributor communities, as well as to realize major new features.
For refining #deltachat UIs and UX we are looking at many other messengers regularly. But we are curious. Which messenger UX/UI do you like most and suggest we take cues from?
Two of our teams just gave talks at the @npub1uk4v...z2gq 2025 conference in Lille: @npub1uqem...za0f tells the story of "federated messaging" waves and her usable security research, emphasizing "availability" as a key issue -- @npub1y6pn...pcc3 starts off with prioritizing usable security and walks through #chatmail transport layer security goals and #deltachat end-point security status, upcoming releases and prospective work on improving metadata and other goals
Internet fragmentation is real in many countries and regions today but did you know that this "Sometimes-Internet" was the reality of the 1980ties when #email evolved? #chatmail relays are cheap, secure, fast, ephemeral and resilient server setups for the growing Sometimes-Internet, using cryptography for planetary-scale interop: - E2EE-only, strict TLS+DKIM - no spam-check magic - delay/cut-off tolerant - messages removed after download - addresses removed if stale - push notifications image