Everyone returns to email in the end. We are there already. #whatsapp wants you to add your email to secure your account ... despite all the nay sayers and numerous well funded attempts and claims to kill #email not even WA can do it. #deltachat #chatmail and #webxdc are about deep collab between people, projects and operators to evolve email from within. It is not just about SMTP and IMAP and MIME and OpenPGP which are all exchangeable and can be improved ... Which we set out to do. Cheers.

Comparing #XMPP against #email protocols is too limited. What sets #deltachat apart is *vertical integration* and being driven by UI/UX considerations. Cross-platform Apps and Bots use the Rust core library which connects with #chatmail relays and classic email servers based on a higher level API -- abstracting over SMTP, MIME, #OpenPGP etc. See https://chatmail.at

#webxdc apps in turn use an even higher level stable API abstracting over email/xmpp/... see https://webxdc.org/docs/

Considering that both #XMPP and #Matrix re-invented #decentralized communication while #email was already there, makes #deltachat more interesting.

The fact that DC didn't invent a new protocol for #InstantMessaging and just used the protocol which was already there, and also that how far has it gone, is mind blowing.

At first when I was chatting with @treefit, I already was developing a Matrix client(#chooj) for #KaiOS and it was the only decentralized IM which I was using and investing resources into. I was skeptical but then I thought it would be a good idea to invest into DeltaChat, as well as Matrix. His argument, of course, wasn't good. He was arguing that we need multiple options in the case one of decentralized IMs fail. However this convinced me to give DC a try.

But now, I see that DC has very unique advantages no other messenger has. Their moto is "playing the long term" game. Unlike Matrix which suddenly exploded, DC moves very slowly. As an advantage, DC is much more consistent, hassle free, has less bugs(in my experience) and has better UI/UX than many Matrix clients. But it has got several disadvantages. Matrix has tons more features which DC hasn't got or has added them just recently such as editing messages and reactions. And it is not yet suitable for public groups, like the ones we've got in the Matrix network.

Overall, if you want secure chat with friends or family or other people you trust, DeltaChat is a very good option and the experience is very good. And I haven't seen something like #webxdc in any other IM. However if you want something like #Discord guilds for a community, Matrix is the way to go.

BTW, DC currently lacks funding, thanks to what #Trump did with #OpenTechnologyFund(#OTF). If you can help in anyway, financial or otherwise, it will be extra valuable at this point.

@rohden Heh, you caught it :) Indeed bots running some LLM for audio transcription or image generation exist. But they are not part of the UI/UX of #deltachat itself, or of its #chatmail core Rust library. Bots and #webxdc apps are behind extension points where we intentionally don't control or even know what people use.

#whatsapp has been feverishly copying #telegram features the last year. Both are now in a battle who enshittifies faster. Mr. Durov announced that #Telegram, sitting on the biggest cleartext data and metadata pile second only to #Meta, is to integrate "AI" the next days, see https://youtu.be/JBCY3ZE9Rz0?t=10135s ...

Let them fight. We stubbornly continue to focus on resilient private messaging for families, groups and communities, with end-to-encrypted #webxdc apps and decentralized agency at all levels.

By design, end-to-end-encrypting #deltachat and #webxdc apps only need ephemeral transport. It's a big deal. Let's compare:

- #matrix home servers maintain a cryptographic forever-chain of cleartext social-graph metadata.

- #WhatsApp servers maintain cleartext metadata visible to Meta.

- #Signal keeps encrypted metadata, hosted at GAFAM

#chatmail relays do not persist any social graph state, also not in encrypted form. A key goal of our designs: chatmail operators can sleep well at night :)

The last two days saw the number of push notifications spike. Sometimes 80K Google Play push notifications happened per hour, while the baseline was more around 10-20K. These spikes probably indicate Internet availability. #deltachat is offline-first: you can write messages and attach media, create groups, use #webxdc apps, setup a second device etc. all without any Internet. Once it returns queued messages are sent out and cause push notifications. #OfflineFirst is crucial for resiliency.

It had to happen: in-chat multi-player #Quake III Arena #webxdc app, running over @n0iroh and using the fine work of https://ioquake3.org/ folks. Quake3 app is 1.2MB but you need to download once a game file of ~50 MB. It's only one level.

Realtime-P2P-networked multiplayer gaming arranged through securely end-to-end encrypted email, from a group chat!

Both Quake3's in-game chat as well as game play messages have forward-secrecy. What a weird future, eh? :)

https://webxdc.org/apps/#wofwca-quake3

@scott @peter if you need any advise or support let us know :) We particular recommend onboarding with a pre-existing group because then the biggest roadblock, "who can I chat with", is mitigated. Many families, little orgs and ad-hoc groups like attendees in a conference talk, successfully started using #deltachat this way and particularly appreciated #webxdc apps that provide an in-chat interactive experience.

1 cent per five years .... is the current marginal hosting cost for a #chatmail address, with which #deltachat apps facilitate world-wide private messaging including interactive #webxdc apps that run end-to-end encrypted in any chat group.

<1 Million EUR per year is the estimated marginal hosting costs for 350 Million EU citizens. Such scaling requires, however, research and development, including careful UX and #cryptography work. Related writing from @gordon

https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/cryptography-scales-trust

Yesterday, 20 people from the https://safesisters.org community onboarded with #DeltaChat in Lusaka, Zambia. Everything worked! Usability, privacy and #OfflineFirst ops were appreciated and #webxdc app based organizing met strong interest. Many participants engage in addressing challenges from surveillance state actors, family and partner abuse. Moreover, people with visual impairment were happy about Android's screen reader support.

It's events like this that validate our efforts!

You can run r2 or any of it’s tools inside @delta here’s a sample #webxdc app embedding all the assembler/disassemblers of radare2 https://github.com/radareorg/r2wasm/tree/master/xdc