we would like to discuss multihoming, not to be confused with account switching.
multihoming is the ability to become resistant to both instance shutdowns and also defederation issues. fediverse shows the issue with instance shutdowns very clearly, tho instance shutdowns don’t seem to be much relevant to delta chat, since your contact list stays with you. nevertheless, multihoming would still help with defederation.
importantly, multihoming allows instance admins to defederate more freely. since you’re on multiple instances, your admins know you won’t feel the effects of defederation as strongly as on e.g. fedi, so they can do a better job moderating the network more strongly. if we want to fight against spam and win, this is necessary.
it also promotes the smallification of instances. this is a very good thing: with smaller instances you get more decentralization and you also make instances easier/cheaper to run. and thanks to the previous point, your users can still communicate with whoever they want/need.
multihoming improves the experience for everyone: admins can control their instances, users can control their communications, and it reduces conflict between users and admins! it’s also a VERY HARD problem to solve (we’d know, we’re making our own multihomed social media, and multihoming is by far the hardest problem we’re trying to solve), but that’s where it’d be useful to have a lot of ppl trying to solve the problem.
The ideas to have mulitple “transports” (email servers or even other ways to deliver messages) and switching to OpenPGP key instead of the email address as the primary identifier for contacts are in discussion, but the work has not started yet.
Delta Chat already supports account migration, but existing mechanism is limited, you can only have one email address at a time and contacts that don’t get to know your new address will not be able to reach you: Introducing Automatic E-mail Address Porting (AEAP) - Delta Chat
Running a chatmail instance is already very cheap, you can run it on the cheapest VPS you can find or Raspberry Pi.
There is nothing admins can moderate on Delta Chat, the messages are private and encrypted, and admins are not supposed to see message contents.
Is multihoming related to the concept of nomadic identity?
Certainly the ability to resist instance shutdowns or temporary outages would add a lot more resilience!
Sounds interesting. Good luck!
It’s up to your email server to block email from disreputable domains.
Chatmail servers won’t let you send email to other domains unless the message is encrypted or you are replying to an email, which helps to limit spam from chatmail addresses.
I believe that messages from unknown contacts also get quarantined until you approve them.
The team at Delta Chat probably have some other countermeasures they can use as well.
But so far I haven’t heard of Delta Chat having a spam problem like fedi, maybe because people use it quite differently to fedi, or maybe because Delta Chat isn’t as widely known or as widely used.
it’s related but with less of a focus on the identity itself and more of a focus on identification, if that makes sense?
it lets you discover alts, makes them interchangeable/redundant, and so on. there’s no focus on DID URIs (we consider them a scam) and more focus on discoverability and resilience.
and it can be done entirely client-side, with some compromises. (hey – isn’t delta chat also all about doing things entirely client-side, with some compromises?) server/protocol support does give some niceties tho