That flexibility gives you the freedom to chose the communications platform according to your self-interests. And in today's targeted ads economy, those self-interests matter too much to neglect in favor of staying connected with everyone.
There's got to be a logical fallacy for "people did x before y technology." Yes they did. And we still collectively found out that we could do it better with that thing, and that is the new standard. But you're free to go back to delivering letters by horse if that suits you.
I can post a story on Instagram, and somebody that I have't talked to in years might reply and we have a conversation and reconnect, or maybe it's just a simple gesture, but it's still meaningful and appreciated. But if I said "well I'm here on Mastodon now and anyone who truly matters will come find me," that's just not happening. And then I'm frustrated and complain about being lonely and yell at everyone to switch to Mastodon. Really bringing people together. But at least I didn't have to stomach seeing an ad that might actually pertain to my signaled interests.
I'm pretty actively involved with my friends and just have the union of all messaging apps and even I frequently forget to respond to messages I've started to read because something else happens: baby cries etc
According to my expectations, resetting your computer app and data and reconnecting to your account should result in an more or less empty message history.
What is the backend for it? It's hard for me to find on their website. If it's also Telegram, than what's the point?
I would also like to point out that Telegram has very smooth chats sync across devices because those are NOT end2end encrypted by default.
It uses SMTP/IMAP to propagate and store individual messages. This means that DeltaChat it will work with your usual email account (it will create an IMAP folder named DeltaChat), but if you install the app and say “Yeah, just let me in!”, it will create a random username for you on one of its own chatmail servers.
It may sound like a bad thing to use email, but it works very, very well. Most people won't even notice.
See e.g.:
Kinda surprised to find this on privacy policy of the default chatmail instance:
> unconditionally removes messages after 20 days
Didn't see any warning about this in the GUI or the chatmail page.
Does this mean after 20 days the messages on my app will disappear? or just they'll only be available on my local app after that point?
In any case, that's a pretty big red flag that it's not clear.
https://delta.chat/en/help#what-happens-if-i-turn-on-delete-...
https://github.com/chatmail/relay/blob/96a1dbac08441034c5990...
https://github.com/chatmail/relay/blob/96a1dbac08441034c5990...
You obviously must trust that the server runs this configuration, but you can always run your own chatmail, or regular postfix. (If you don't need "federation" with other mail servers, you don't even need port 25 open).
However, you can also configure your app to delete messages from the server sooner.
»By default, Delta Chat stores all messages locally on your device. If you e.g. want to save storage space at your mail provider, you can configure Delta Chat to delete old already-received messages on the server automatically. They still remain on your device until you delete them there, too.«
https://delta.chat/en/help#what-happens-if-i-turn-on-delete-...
One problem I did run into was “allowed number of outgoing emails”. If you use groups in DeltaChat, even a small grouop of say 10 members will incur a lot of outgoing messages. The provider I originally used has a limit of 200 emails per day, so that was a showstopper.
If you use DeltaChat's chatmail server (which will happen per default if you don't provide an email account of your own), this will not be a problem.
I host my own email server and I am pretty sure chats will be instant with it as well as with their servers.
However, some email providers implement various throttling mechanisms.
If you are OK waiting for message to arrive or be dropped silently, you may continue to use Google and Microsoft email.
[0] https://support.delta.chat/t/list-of-all-known-client-projec...
Even WhatsApp has sync by now (even if it's artificially limited and works differently).
It's cool that it uses email, but it's also not. Email is a notoriously painful standard to run a server for. I have ran a Matrix and Mastodon server, and I'm still running a BlueSky PDS, but I've never even tried to run an email server, since I know I'll get blocked the moment I try it for having a residential IP, and that it's a lot of work.
So most people will be stuck with commercial providers, with the largest happening to be Google, which needs users to set up an app password for DeltaChat to work. You've already lost most users at that point. Other large providers don't work or require setups: https://providers.delta.chat/
Then there's ChatMail relays, which are supposedly interoperable with email, but from the documentation it's very unclear to what extent that is. Not to mention that the possibility of them getting blacklisted by mainstream providers is very high, as they do text message analysis which doesn't work on encrypted blobs.
At this point, I have to ask: is email the right tool for the job? With all these drawbacks, it seems it would have been better to go with another standard, written from scratch.
People tend to have all sorts of reservations against DeltaChat, even if they haven't tried it, and I just haven't experienced those problems.
I have tried DeltaChat with my own mailserver, and with Gmail, FastMail and DeltaChat's chatmail, and it has worked flawlessly. If it hadn't, I wouldn't be a fan.
This is obviously only anecdotal, so other people may report other experiences.
If used as chat only, and with dedicated chatmail servers, the number of theoretical problems diminishes significantly. Using it as an email client and/or with standard email providers introduces potential points of failure, but not more than email to email.
DeltaChat uses AutoCrypt to provide gpg/pgp encrypted “email” + metadata, and the chatmail servers are set up to refuse unencrypted messages (thus avoiding the spam problem).
The optimal experience is acheived by using DeltaChat the way it was intended: DeltaChat to DeltaChat communication, and I'd say that using the chatmail servers is also preferable to using custom IMAP/SMTP servers (whether they are hosted by the big providers, smaller providers, or self-hosted). You _can_ use DeltaChat to communicate to email-only recipients, but it provides for a sub-optimal experience.
I've been running my own mail services for close to 30 years now starting with handcrafted Sendmail configurations, now running Exim and Postfix. Running your own mail services isn't the scary problem it is made out to be.
There's the rub. 30 years ago this was true. Old systems have been grandfathered in.
A combination of rising spam and things like fraud via email have caused especially large services to be so much more aggressive in blocking. If your email has been around forever it's generally trusted.
The company I work for has been around for 15 years and we spent the first 5 or so getting yahoo and live/hotmail/outlook to accept our mail reliably despite proper dns/dkim/spf.
Self hosted on residential IP today is near impossible. Your only hope is pay to not be on a residential IP and even then strap in for years of struggle to get the biggest free providers to accept you as legitimate. Exacerbated by their thorough lack of actual support contacts.
This matches my experience from roughly 10 years ago. Even with a non-residential IP address, correct SPF, etc, it took months to navigate the biggest providers' obstacle courses for whitelisting. After succeeding with those, plenty of smaller providers remained to identify and work through one by one. And then, every so often, an already-completed one would revert.
It was not impossible, but even for someone experienced in email system internals, it was a slog that seemed never to be 100% done. I don't expect it's any easier today.
This is sad, but also a reminder that nothing that matters should be tied to proprietary walled gardens. All of those are ephemeral.
Anyone I care to stay in contact with, I communicate via email. An open standard owned by nobody, so it cannot go away. My email has been the same for 30 years and will be the same forever. If you knew me in the mid 90s or later, you know how to reach me.
People will call the bad guys "hackers" (should be crackers!), in French they will say "show me the digits" when they mean "numbers" and so on.
If everyone uses Whatsapp then you will be alone with these apps nobody heard about. You can try to evangelize them but their friends use WhatsApp.
It's a choice between hard core values and keeping in touch.
In France (and basically in all European countries, maybe except Germany, where all privacy things are very intense so maybe they use something else), WhatsApp is the go-to app.
Not only do most people use it, but you have services that suggest WhatsApp as one of the contact channels. This is not because they love WhatsApp for some reason - rather because people use it (and they want to make it easier to contact them).
You talk about "WhatsApp groups for X", never heard about "Signal groups for X". In rare instances, this would be Telegram (but usually specialized groups)
Probably because people are just about completely done with Facebook/Meta.
Signal is seen as the best option for privacy.
There were attempts here (including mine, arguably feeble) to persuade people to switch, but Whatsapp is too much ingrained.
There are many other alternatives out there, e.g. SimpleX, but many — if not most — suffer from the inability to synchronize chats across several devices.
DeltaChat should pose no problems to users coming from WhatsApp, having more or less the same UI as I remember from WhatsApp back then. DeltaChat is an amazing app, check it out:
https://delta.chat/en/
You needn't even disclose who you are.