Reinforce decentralization

Feature Proposal
1

Delta Chat was decentralized by default on its first years. Fortunately, the arrival of Chatmail and automatic onboarding greatly boosted the expansion of Delta Chat. But unfortunately, because of its default settings, we see in practice Delta Chat is no longer the decentralized app it used to be. Every new default-setting installation for the last years has been making Delta Chat less decentralized in practice.

I was told there is some important ongoing development that may modify this behaviour. As I do not know when that development will be finished and if it will fix this centralization issue, I would like to propose a quick fix just to address the problem now and show everyone that Delta Chat cares for in-practice decentralization as a priority task.

My proposal is:

  1. Agree on some conditions (like stability) public Chatmail servers should meet in order to be included in a shorlist of elegible Chatmail servers for automatic onboarding.

  2. Change current Delta Chat onboarding process so that the option tree becomes something like:

  • Create new profile
    • Automatic (easy)
      This option would be similar to the current default option where the user’s name is asked and the ‘Agree & Create Profile’ button’ is showed but now the account would be created randomly choosing one of the Chatmail servers from the shortlist
    • Manual (advanced)
      • Chatmail
        Either leave as it is now, or ideally have a dropdown menu or similar to choose server, with information or links to them
      • Classic email
        Leave as it is now
      • Scan invitation code
        Leave as it is now
  • I already have a profile
    Leave as it is now

Thank you

3 Likes
2

hi @amuuza thanks a lot for your feedback, believe it or not, we Delta Chat developers think/analyze a lot about things before making it, almost never it is lack of great ideas to solve a problem, we already knew we could do something like what you proposed, but we can not randomly onboard people in some random chatmail server that might disappear overnight, so to warranty stability, we went with a default trusted on-boarding by us so things were stable until we implemented multi-transport, that then will make it less problematic if one instance goes down because people would have several addresses available at the same time

we are currently working on this and it should be available in the upcoming months, it is already happening and being worked on actively, so no need for more ideas or solutions, you just have to wait and enjoy! in the meantime you could make time feel to move faster by taking a read here: Contribute - Delta Chat

2 Likes
3

I hope users will be able to decide for themselves which servers they want to connect to, because it feels like my freedom of choice has been taken away. It should be up to the user to decide where and how they want to connect, not the developers.

4

idea is that it shouldn’t matter much, and yes while it is nice for you, an advanced user, to decide and fiddle with this, most people don’t know or want to deal with selecting in a list of random and equally sketchy-looking list of servers, but ofc you will be able to choose, add/remove etc. initially might be even manual without automatic selection

1 Like