Discussion
"The option “Move automatically to DeltaChat Folder” as well as other legacy options will be removed in the next weeks.
...
Only if you share the same email address for chatting and classic usage, which is discouraged since some time, the encrypted messages in the Inbox may be annoying."
https://delta.chat/en/legacy-move
This is news to me @delta.
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@strypey Yeah, hypothetically a soft fork that just reinstates those two options wouldn't be a heavy thing to maintain.
But it might also be the case that they removed them because the removal simplifies code all over the place and allows for some rewrites.
@clacke Is this a good argument for cleanly separating backend code from interface code and having them talk to each other through a documented API? Seems like it is to me, but I'm aware that's a rank amateur's hot take.
@strypey Nice separation between UI, business logic and technical code is a good thing, factoring that technical code in a way that separates concerns from each other is even better.
It's what we're supposed to be doing, but live code we see out there is seldom structured to that level.
I haven't seen the Delta code, it might be glorious. I'm just saying it might not be, in which case maintaining a soft fork would be hard work.
And I'm to a degree making the assumption that they would have kept the backward-compatibility in, if it were easy to maintain.
@clacke The impression I get is that the changes were made to discourage the 'Delta Chat as email client with optional E2EE chat' use case, in favour of the 'all chatmail, all the time' use case. But you could be right.
@deutrino @strypey When "is it this or is it this", it's always both. 😊
If the edge cases were easy to compartmentalize, I expect they would have kept them in ... and if keeping the non-Chatmail backwards compatibility were a top priority, effort would have been made to *make* them easy to compartmentalize.
As for me, I'm not interacting with anyone outside my family and my self-chats with grocery lists and body weight tracking, so for me it will make sense to stay forever on the January 2026 version until something breaks horribly.
@clacke @strypey this is reminding me of Signal ditching SMS ... shit, that was over a decade ago now. and welp, it's 2026 and I don't use whatever fork came about to offer Signal protocol over SMS.
btw, if it comes to that, I went thru like 3 shitty Chatmail servers and finally found a good one I can recommend. one of the other issues that Delta Chat needs to resolve is that it's still too easy to incompetently run a Chatmail server.
@clacke @strypey it's ironic bc last fall I and @replytomaikel tested many P2P E2EE chat apps and ended up on XMPP… and XMPP is the one I still use on a daily basis (with fucking SimpleX a distant second, but that's bc it has lots of adoption amongst extreme privacy freaks) … Delta Chat is the most interesting to me in a future-possibilities way, tho.
none of those ecosystems are mature in the sense of "pick most any client and server (if applicable) and everything Just Works As You'd Expect."
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@deutrino
> none of those ecosystems are mature in the sense of "pick most any client and server (if applicable) and everything Just Works As You'd Expect."
I'm not sure that's possible. In any decentralised network I've experienced over 30 years online, there's always going to be new, experimental, and itch-scratching projects. This is still true of email, so it seems like an iron law.
@strypey @clacke @replytomaikel hmm, yeah, it may be the most true for email but that's because email has been around for nearly 50 years.
XMPP could've been so much less bad in this regard, but that ain't the branch of the multiverse we live in. there are some good attempts to curate a standard server setup + list of recommended apps. but weirdly one of the issues (on Linux) is that there is no desktop app that's both highly mature and has a good UI (IMNSHO; I don't like heavily GNOMEd apps).
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@deutrino
> there are some good attempts to curate a standard server setup + list of recommended apps
@snikket_im are kind of doing that by maintaining soft forks of XMPP software that represents the best-of-breed (in their opinion). I did a little bit of work for it a few years back, eg drafting much of their FAQ;
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> there is no desktop app that's both highly mature and has a good UI
That's one thing holding Snikket back. Their solution was to follow Element's lead and start writing a client SDK to do all the protocol handling.
Although I'm not sure how much desktop adoption matters in 2026. Most people using the net now have a mobile, but only a small proportion also have a laptops or desktops (mostly geeks, gamers, and professional media creators).
@strypey Android is also in a bit of a weird state, with eleventy Conversations forks (I use Monocles)
@deutrino
> I use Monocles
That's my XMPP app too. I thought it was a fork of blabber.im, but turns out you're right. I used to use vanilla Conversations. Not sure why I stopped.
@strypey one of the more annoying effects of chronic sensory overload is never being able to remember why I made a choice I made unless I write it down.
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