I’ve been using Delta Chat for a long time.
In the beginning, the main benefit of Delta Chat was that everyone could use their existing email addresses (I know it’s still possible). This was a significant advantage over XMPP, as not many email providers gave XMPP addresses with email addresses.
Now, I’m confused about the benefits of using Delta Chat, especially since there’s a focus on encouraging people to use email chat servers.
Could you share your thoughts on this?
Specifically, what are the top 3 reasons to choose Delta Chat now?
It depends on what is important to you. A subjective list:
Delta Chat has an easy-to-use app for all major platforms (Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows, Ubuntu Touch) - but tbh, just try it out and see for yourself which UX you prefer, there is not much point in me telling you which app has the better UX (or what your friends prefer, if you want to introduce them to a federated messenger)
Multi-Device “just works” with Delta Chat
Encryption “just works”, incl. some easy-to-use protection against MitM attacks by scanning QR codes
Compatible with E-Mail - even if it’s not the primary user focus anymore since many non-technical users found it confusing, technical users can still easily use their own email server
I agree with @Hocuri, it depends on what are your goals.
My goal was to find a free software, community grassroots, secure, and (very important!) user-friendly alternative for my friends and relatives on WhatsApp. Delta Chat ticked all these boxes, remarkably in their mobile apps. XMPP alternatives feel more geeky in comparison and the mobile apps don’t feel as user-friendly, light, simple…
It’s been several weeks, and I haven’t received any complaints from these new Delta Users familiar with WhatsApp – other than the expected “none of my friends use this” but well, user by user maybe one day… And it’s not that their friends have heard about XMPP either.
(By the way, same reason why I didn’t go for a Matrix-based alternative either.)
One technical advantage of Delta Chat over XMPP is delay tolerance. You can put Delta Chat on top of any store-and-forward network and get all the features: encryption, groups, audio messages, WebXDCs etc. In XMPP to use OMEMO you need a publish-subscribe service and to share files you need HTTP upload server or connection to the same network to transfer a file over Jingle.
For example, it works over HF radio by copying emails using UUCP: Hermes // rhizomatica
You can run email over landline phone network (PSTN).
We previously (2021) built a prototype of Delta Chat running over Yggdrasil using yggmail, completely without email servers: GitHub - deltachat/AndroidYggmail
You can also run email on top of http://www.nncpgo.org/ or https://winlink.org/ or https://reticulum.network/ if you put some effort, but you don’t need to change Delta Chat for this to work.
In any case, there are no plans to drop non-chatmail server support. If you don’t need mobile Google/Apple-mediated push notifications and have your own self-hosted or local friendly email server such as provided by your hackerspace, at least create a second fallback account there in case your chosen chatmail server is down or you have trouble connecting to it. But if you only have a “webmail” such as Gmail, there is no advantage using it.
User-visible consequence of delay tolerance is that you can do pretty much everything offline: create new groups, change avatars and group names, enable/disable disappearing messages, leave groups, send WebXDC and start using it before you get online. Once you get online, the messages from the queue will be sent out.
I just tested in Conversations 2.17.9, creating a group offline failed with “You are not connected. Try again later.” toast when I created a group, selected the name and participants and clicked “>” button. It also simply lost the group so I have to go online and redo group creation from scratch.
I think another advantage is the diversity of the existing extremely robust email ecosystem. There are tons of servers and client programs that have been around for decades and all work together. Any of those COULD decide to add features like Autocrypt, CounterMITM, QR code account portability, read receipts, Jitsi video calls, WebXDC apps, etc. in a way that’s compatible with Delta Chat, and then the entire ecosystem will be stronger.
The servers don’t need support for Autocrypt, SecureJoin (aka CounterMITM) etc., you can already use Delta Chat with lots of different email servers, it has even been tested with Winmail Pro for Linux whatever it has inside.
I also used matrix for a while, because I liked the idea of linking the chats I used so that I could slowly move around.
However, I cooled off a bit when I saw that the much-promoted p2p version at the 2022 fosdem was dropped and when I saw that slowly the anonymity policy was being dropped.
(First you could use matrix without being registered as irc, then you could register without specifying an email, then it became mandatory, then I dropped it).
I think deltachat and matrix are very different, matrix perhaps still being the best alternative when trying to find users directly on the network while deltachat is used to talk to people you already know.
Honestly the lack of a central server makes me like deltachat a lot and actually I prefer using non-chatmail accounts because that gives me the possibility to see precisely in the webmail what is going on and because I prefer that push notifications are not there.
However, I appreciate the presence of chatmails because they add the ability to have disposable accounts and to have a dedicated server development that you can pull up if you need to.
And it’s not that their friends have heard about XMPP either.