Everyone is free to make such service, or host a chatmail relay and ask for donations, but for Delta Chat project the goal is to host as little as possible, not to become the hoster of everyone’s relay.
Nothing in the existing clients prevents them from using commercially-provided servers. Many DC users also use self-hosted servers or servers they run on a hosting service.
By default the standard server software allows open registration, and is so cheap to run that charging users is not worthwhile. There are probably well over a hundred free-to-use servers out there, so anyone asking people to pay for the same service might not get many takers.
It should be cheap, until it isn’t. I have joined a meme group chat and the usual issue is someone’s storage is full while they are away
I also experienced the full storage when i turn on multi device mode, while it maybe a bug, it doesn’t help with my anxiety
and i may want to no need to discuss it with current free chatmail server admin, it is easier to just pay someone
and with paid server maybe we can run bots, jitsi video call server, and so on
while paying someone maybe possible outside the chat application, some people may just want the convenient, and okay with paying the commissions, just like someone paying the Wordpress/Discourse hosting even if they can do it cheaper by directly install it themselves
imagine just clicking the add relay button, click pay, then storage increased, even if the relay need to be changed there
Hmm, it’s easier and faster to set up your own server and just “join the federation,” meaning you can communicate with other servers and have as much space for yourself as you want. You can invite anyone to your server, but why bother? I’m responsible for someone else, and I’m willing to take money, but responsibility for someone else isn’t my thing.
That’s the point though. I am quite capable to manage my own chatmail servers, but i am not really sure if i want to manage it even for my friends/family.
I have had my own father pay for wordpress.com knowing it is from Automattic, the founder of Wordpress itself, even though i can download the software from wordpress.org and install it on my own server.
That said, perhaps before creating my own client to do this feature, maybe i will see if i can do it on a simple website first, then after the server created, as usual adding the relay should be just a click.
Paid servers will also have quotas, if presumably larger ones. Sending large meme images would tend to use up space faster. If you want to use Deltachat with existing commercial mailservers you can, no problem. A DC-specific paid mailserver does not seem to offer any advantages.
You can run bots using the existing free servers, or indeed any server; bots are just automated mail-answering agents. There are also free Jitsi servers, and they used to be integrated into Deltachat, but now audio and video chat is done with Iroh instead.
Integrating payment methods into Deltachat is an interesting idea (what method? Wero? NLnet-supported GNU Thaler, which uses blind cryptographic signatures?). By all means start a separate thread on this proposal.
The more interesting uses for payment methods do not seem to be buying mail storage, though. If a person can use DC to buy more storage, they could just use DC to download the mail and obviate the need for more storage.
Bumping this as I would definitely be interested in paying someone to host a chatmail server for my family. We would mostly use it to share family pictures and videos, which is why we would need more storage than the one usually provided.
Does anybody know any provider for such service? Something like https://www.pikapods.com/ would be great.
Random food for thought from an old systems tech as to “is this the right solution for the need?” specifically to your intent for large binary files (images/video).
binary files are horrible for SMTP/IMAP - we tech nerds have been trying for decades to get people to stop sending large files in email. Every binary object has to be mime (base64) encoded, a text output format, which is massively larger and uncompressed. Using DC as the storage is wasting a ton of space as opposed to just hosting the binary files with a webserver or something else (and think about the wasted network packets transmitting the extra data, just to be decoded back into a smaller binary file)
DC relays are ephemeral - they are not your backup strategy. How is the family going to backup all those videos/images over the long term? DC relies on the devices keeping a copy of the file, the one on the server gets erased eventually. Leading to…
…every single device has a copy of every video and image in it’s own DC cache, as it’s fundamentally distributed email. Each device has it’s own storage needs to deal with, being used by different people. Every single DC account has a copy of that video on the relay until it expires.
If you were to approach me as the tech being paid, those are the immediate things I thing of - it’s not putting up a relay and relaxing the limits which is hard. It would be about understanding your group’s expectations and possibly looking at a way to store your video/etc. data on a shared server and link them into DC chats or something like that (webxddc?). We’d have to talk details, but I’m not interested in work just talking shop. hth!
Just to clarify, in my use case I wouldn’t use DC as the main source of storage for the pictures and videos. Those would be managed using another tool.
DC in this scenario would mostly the communication channel, where you send a picture of your child daily or a small video, and then the grandparents can see it and comment/react.
The long term storage of those videos would be something else.
Also note that the +33% redundancy of base64 evaporates almost completely if it is compressed during transit and storage (either via a driver or a file system that has it built-in)
Honestly, if you have the skills to run these other solutions (awesome), running the chatmail relay yourself is a very (very) low impact task on your life. A basic VPS anywhere that port 25 isn’t blocked and maybe an initial hour to sort out getting DNS and your new install working (something always goes wrong, you know how it is). A big enough vdisk to store temporary files.[1]
Every once in awhile a new bundle of the chatmail code is released, you re-run the tooling and it’s deployed. Day to day you ignore that it exists because it just works (I mean that, nothing crashes - just works quietly in the corner). If you start to care, you add monitoring and stuff but you can choose not to care as well. Runs on older Debian 12 LTS which was just officially handed over as LTS this month and 11 LTS went EOL.
Food for thought! Of all the self-hosted things we run across as tech nerds, DC relays fall into that “set and forget” bucket of just works. The tradeoff is you give the whole VPS over to the DC relay solution and do not try and co-host other things with it. You can however use it as a regular Debian server in that the chatmail code does not break it’s Debian-ness.
[1] one could edit the defaults not only to allow larger filesizes like you want, but also increase the cleanup intervals on-server so that cached content is removed quicker, to reduce the ongoing high-water mark of your storage
Thank you for the comment, but my private life is quite busy at the moment, and even though it may not seem a lot, starting to self host even a small service like DC is quite a big task for now.
Snikket offers managed hosting for 6$ per month, I checked with them, you can send up to 1 GB of photos/videos per day, so that would fit my use case perfectly. Snikket Chat | Get Started
I really like Delta Chat, it’s my main messenger at the moment, but a I’m now looking for a messenger where my family can send photos and videos on a regular basis, Snikket seems a better fit with the formula above.