I wanted to build exactly what you’ve made, and then I saw Delta.chat. Kudos, this is amazing, and I’ll try migrating everyone I know to this (non-)platform I am (was) the founder of https://closeknit.app, and want to use an encrypted email backend instead of centrally hosted servers.
Expected behavior
I want to able to provide structure and actionable items on messages. My use-case is creating a mutual-aid network, where resources can be shared, borrowed, sold, help offered, events created, etc. I’d like to be able to do it as a plugin, or as an enhancement.
Actual behavior
Currently, the chat is of a general messenger form.
First up great idea - connecting the people again in the smartphone addiction age.
How do discover / get in contact with your neighbors over an app?
I believe this is the most difficult step.
Is it like a tinder radar or something location based?
There are ideas for chat resources to share resources like
state for group shared webapps (like a pad, todo list or even data for games)
a group shared calendar
But those chat resources probably won’t be implemented in the near future.
Also most email providers limit the number of recipients for a message so groups can only be as large as the person with the smallest limit on recipients, that means if someones provider only allows sending to 20 people the max group size for that person is 20.
So I’m not sure if email/deltachat is right for your project.
The original concept revolved around a GIS database, which would help you locate neighbours in the proximity of your home address. There would be a physical validation step in the form of a snail-mail envelope to ensure everyone else that your claim to live somewhere holds. However, the validation step cost money (around $2), and I either had to “sell out” - e.g. go the NextDoor route, and sell people’s data, and/or access to “locals”, or get people to pay directly for the services + upfront cost of sending the envelope. I chose not to do the former for ethical reasons, and the latter simply gained too little traction.
Getting back to Delta Chat, I’m starting to like the idea of an auxiliary bot (or bots); I like the interface, as well as the back-end. What the interface is lacking in structure, can be compensated by a clever text interface (with some elements of NLP) - and as bot-maker, I’d only have to worry about the logic and deployment.
My Lingua Franca is Scala, so expect me to produce either a Java, or a Scala bot interface sometime soon
There are a few github projects for offline UUCP style communication by proximity and online relay. Some use WiFi direct and some bluetooth. PubSub might be a good model for that
I am (was) the founder of https://closeknit.app, and want to use an encrypted email backend instead of centrally hosted servers.
