Last time I looked (which was a while ago), “cross compatible with email” is only technically true, and kind of misleading.
If you try to send messages from Delta to a traditional email user, the recipient will reply with something like, “Wtf is this? Please stop.” Yes they can read your messages, but it’s hella annoying to traditional email users to maintain a conversation longer than 2 messages.
When you consider the fact that you should pretty much ONLY talk to fellow Delta Chat users, the app basically becomes equivalent in functionality to any other messaging app that requires no additional account setup (SimpleX, etc.). Yet the security of Delta is almost always worse due to lack of forward secrecy / ratcheting / etc.
EDIT: I will give credit where it’s due: they at least removed the misleading “email compatibility” message from their home page, choosing to emphasize rather that they are using open standards. That is a plus.
If you try to send messages from Delta to a traditional email user, the recipient will reply with something like, “Wtf is this? Please stop.” Yes they can read your messages, but it’s hella annoying to traditional email users to maintain a conversation longer than 2 messages.
Why is it so annoying? What does the email user see?
the email subject was always something like, “message from xxxx”
threading didn’t work
most annoyingly, any sort of “management” actions were also emails. so people would get spammed with emails just saying that a message was read, or changes in username or group membership
My memory is fuzzy on all those details, but the point is: it’s basically unusable with traditional email clients.
I love the use of email as an underlying protocol, delta gets accessability, robustness, and interop for free (for some definitions of). It could conceivably have leaky-abstraction cracks, but I dig it, and think that taking care to look like a normal chat app to users has encouraged considerate and user-serving UI design with a clear use-case (even if the devs could articulate that use-case better that i can >u<).
I’ve seriously considered working on OpenKeychain integration, to scratch my own itch. If you don’t know, it’s an Android keyring app that supports PGP keys stored on NFC smart-cards like a Yubikey. Last I checked, the dev community is aware of the interest and has touched base with the OK devs but are prioritizing cross-platform features (fair enough). There’s an Android fork called DeltaLab (now ArcaneChat) that would also accept a contribution. I haven’t checked to see if this has been addressed, but would love to make time for a crack at it – a sponser could make that happen sooner c:
In this space more broadly, I tried Telegram once bc of a specific friend or service provider, and woww that app is juicy (in the game-dev sense)! There’s an open-source Android fork called Nebula, and I really wish that smooth smooth UI could be ported off Telegram’s bespoke proto, onto basically anything else, Deltachat or XMPP (a skin for Pidgen?). That I couldn’t possibly justify time for, to do right it’d be team-scale project. DeltaChat took (takes) a huge amount of work to get to where it is today and I’m really glad it’s been able to ^u^
It is nice to have a unique chat app on every mobile device I own even an old nexus 7 2013 or an iPhone 8 plus and be able to send and receive short strings back and forth between all these devices.
Previous discussions on this service:
https://lobste.rs/domains/delta.chat
Neat! I didn’t know lobster.rs had a URL to find stories by domain.
Last time I looked (which was a while ago), “cross compatible with email” is only technically true, and kind of misleading.
If you try to send messages from Delta to a traditional email user, the recipient will reply with something like, “Wtf is this? Please stop.” Yes they can read your messages, but it’s hella annoying to traditional email users to maintain a conversation longer than 2 messages.
When you consider the fact that you should pretty much ONLY talk to fellow Delta Chat users, the app basically becomes equivalent in functionality to any other messaging app that requires no additional account setup (SimpleX, etc.). Yet the security of Delta is almost always worse due to lack of forward secrecy / ratcheting / etc.
EDIT: I will give credit where it’s due: they at least removed the misleading “email compatibility” message from their home page, choosing to emphasize rather that they are using open standards. That is a plus.
Why is it so annoying? What does the email user see?
I don’t remember exactly, but…
My memory is fuzzy on all those details, but the point is: it’s basically unusable with traditional email clients.
sounds pretty annoying, but also easy to configure an email client to deal with it which can’t be said for messaging apps like SimpleX.
I love the use of email as an underlying protocol, delta gets accessability, robustness, and interop for free (for some definitions of). It could conceivably have leaky-abstraction cracks, but I dig it, and think that taking care to look like a normal chat app to users has encouraged considerate and user-serving UI design with a clear use-case (even if the devs could articulate that use-case better that i can >u<).
I’ve seriously considered working on OpenKeychain integration, to scratch my own itch. If you don’t know, it’s an Android keyring app that supports PGP keys stored on NFC smart-cards like a Yubikey. Last I checked, the dev community is aware of the interest and has touched base with the OK devs but are prioritizing cross-platform features (fair enough). There’s an Android fork called DeltaLab (now ArcaneChat) that would also accept a contribution. I haven’t checked to see if this has been addressed, but would love to make time for a crack at it – a sponser could make that happen sooner c:
In this space more broadly, I tried Telegram once bc of a specific friend or service provider, and woww that app is juicy (in the game-dev sense)! There’s an open-source Android fork called Nebula, and I really wish that smooth smooth UI could be ported off Telegram’s bespoke proto, onto basically anything else, Deltachat or XMPP (a skin for Pidgen?). That I couldn’t possibly justify time for, to do right it’d be team-scale project. DeltaChat took (takes) a huge amount of work to get to where it is today and I’m really glad it’s been able to ^u^
It is nice to have a unique chat app on every mobile device I own even an old nexus 7 2013 or an iPhone 8 plus and be able to send and receive short strings back and forth between all these devices.