Discussion
I've used DeltaChat for about 7 years. I even managed to get a few family and friends to install it for a while, so we the built-in AutoCrypt would encrypt our emails. But none of them stuck with it.
Until recently DC continued to be a great mobile app for my personal email account. However, the devs are slowly moving away from supporting my use case, in favour of DC being a client for dedicated ChatMail servers. Which leaves me scratching my head as to its utility.
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@strypey
It turns out that SMTP/IMAP was not that good of a protocol for IM after all. Maybe they should have dedicated their resources to build something similar on top of an open standard dedicated to chat, contributing protocol extensions if necessary. :-P
Reinventing the wheel is fun and I can't blame anyone for doing so. But sometimes, we are doing Big (surveillance) Tech a favor by splitting our efforts. Anyway, I'll build a DC/#XMPP gateway if I ever get a person to talk to in there.
So my question is; why would we use ChatMail for messaging apps instead of XMPP or Matrix?
I'm not trying to dunk on DeltaChat or its developers here. On the contrary, I'm truly grateful to them for the work the work put into it over the years, and impressed by what they've achieved.
I'm genuinely curious to know what the advantages are. What kinds of specific use cases ChatMail can handle better that preexisting decentralised chat protocols, and why/ how.
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@strypey DeltaChat has a user experience that trumps alternative decentralized E2EE apps.
Other Matrix/XMPP apps could improve - but when? Many people miss group moderation in DeltaChat .. but maybe that's the old paradigm, you could also filter client-side if you don't like something instead of deciding for others...
Also DeltaChat currently depends on one company owned by one person (according to public CoC extracts) ... I would prefer a steward-owned or foundation for the project.
@strypey If you already build and make self-hosted email servers, it is a no brainer.They just need to figure out mod/group controls.
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