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  #deltachat is now evolving for 9 years. Among the currently active 15-20 contributors a majority joined 5+ years ago, with some joining in the very first year and a few only joining last year. Patience and perseverance is underrated when it comes to producing something that challenges the status quo of centralized mainstream messaging. Several competitors dropped out by now while many of us feel we are only getting started. A good read on the patience topic: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/...

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  Who ever is in the vicinity of Hannover in lower sachsony this coming Friday, is invited to consider joining one of our long-term contributors for an afternoon session on "the new and old internet" in the Auditorium at https://liminale.digital/ Likely in german language. Nice stickers will be available :)

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  We are migrating notifications.delta.chat, one of the few centralized systems we (need to) have - if you experience trouble with missed Google/Apple PUSH notifications, let us know. If you use the f-droid version, you are not affected. It should be over soon though :)

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  RE: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@stefano/116702145454686241 The world-wide #chatmail relay network is growing in various wonderful ways. #freebsd joined the world-wide federated secure communication party and BSD cafe offers a public relay at https://chatmail.bsd.cafe :) Thanks @stefano @feld and @outofcreativity !

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  next #deltachat #ios version is coming with #liquidglass 🥛 thanks Amzd for the work. though frustrating being forced by #bigtech to do things that may not be loved and feel superfluous, it's wanted by many meanwhile. there are still some things to tweak, we created an issue at https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-ios/issues/3157 . on-point help is welcome - and already ongoing thanks to some new contributors ❤️

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  Congratulations and shout out to our long-term collaborators from the @n0iroh@mastodon.social project for releasing Iroh V1! A major ugprade of the probably best Peer-to-Peer Rust networking library today: https://www.iroh.computer/blog/v1 In case you missed it: When running apps like https://webxdc.org/#amzd-radio-station chat members joins in a realtime and private Peer-to-Peer network using Iroh, and can listen to music together. The media streams travel via gossipping Peer-to-Peer con...

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  Telegram is an extreme security risk for its users, its developers and operators, holding data and metadata for over a billion people on central servers! Our decentralized zero-metadata messaging approach is diametrically opposed to such big-platform designs https://delta.chat/en/2026-03-31-zero But there is more: #chatmail relays are zero-state: you can wipe the relay's disks, create a new fresh setup, and users just continue chatting. Operators have actually done this. An *actually* sta...

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  It's hard these days to find a unifying description, or know about all the people and communities involved in #deltachat #chatmail #webxdc developments. One shared sentiment probably is wanting to develop anti-authoritarian technologies and cultures around it, and being opposed to authoritarian tech policy moves in the West, chat control, age verification, prescribing Google/Apple control, enforcing digital app use etc It's also a reason we are only posting on the fediverse bridged to...

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  A note on "#deltachat is going proprietary with #chatmail relays": 1) It's all based on IETF standards, with configuration and custom integration code fully FOSS and documented at: https://chatmail.at/doc/relay/ with hundreds of permission-free deployments. 2) We know of several alternative relay implementations and deployments 3) Own servers or big email providers can be used (YMMV) However it's fair to criticize our relentless focus on E2EE, and our moving away from emai...

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  Reminder: There are no accounts in the classic sense anywhere with #chatmail or #deltachat. It's all private profiles on end user devices which co-ordinate in a #p2p fashion. Chat profiles *use* email (relay) addresses for transporting messages through a federated e2ee-restricted SMTP network. A chat profile or chat group has zero data on the server. It's radically different from classic email servers, Whatsapp, Signal, XMPP and Matrix servers which host and control chat id...

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  2.51+ releases are rolling into stores: Video/Audio Calls and Channels are not experimental but part of the default feature set now 💫 Calls and channels are always end-to-end encrypted, and only you and your contacts know each other's identity and metadata (avatars, names, keys etc.) For calls, Delta uses a minimal Rust WebRTC turn server https://github.com/chatmail/chatmail-turn#turn-server-for-chatmail-relays running on hundreds of relays worldwide. It helps to establish P2P media...

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  What do you think is unique about the #deltachat project in the realm of secure cross-platform messaging? You tell us :)

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  Good news among the bad news! If the recent #0day attacks against Linux kernel+servers were launched against #chatmail relays, privacy of chatting with #deltachat is preserved. Why? Because we already assume the server could be actively hostile, and still not read or see any avatar, names or messages. Since the March 2.48 zero-metadata releases relays/servers do not see cryptographic identities, and get no chance to launch "machine-in-the-middle" (MITM) attacks. https:...

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  Denmark and other EU governments still pursue #chatcontrol. They still want to permanently legalize client-side scanning but postponed making it mandatory. They also want to increase age-verification controls which risk to ruin what little is left of privacy in current digital spaces, taken hostage already by US corps. Ourselves? We double down on providing the most private, reliable and fun messaging experience, with a growing federating #chatmail relay network across the globe.

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  Good news! It's getting harder to keep track of new #chatmail relays :) Recently several public relays were added to the https://chatmail.at/relays list, in Warsaw, Helsinki, Romania and Barcelona.🧡 If you have #deltachat installed on mobile, you can go to any chatmail relay website in the list and click on a link there to create a chat profile. It's wonderful to hear about collectives setting up chat infrastructure like the recent https://xat.fedi.cat from @fedicat and @eXO...

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  We don't think any institution or state has the right to prevent families and friends from private chatting, physically or digitally. But the Cyber Authority China (CaC) seems to take offense: - they made Apple remove #deltachat iOS for mainland china - their great firewall appears to block some #chatmail relays - if you ask DeepSeek directly about Delta Chat, it doesn't want to talk It's pretty sad, really. Everybody on this planet needs, and has a human right to private comm...

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  Congrats to @protonprivacy@mastodon.social for beating us on introducing Post-Quantum Cryptography into mail messaging! No worries. We'll implement https://autocrypt2.org which additionally offers reliable deletion / forward secrecy during 2026 :) We are working with Proton cryptographers on OpenPGP specifications, and they are now moving towards using @rpgp@mastodon.social , the end-to-end encryption we are using. Everything will be based on RFC9580 (#OpenPGP v6) ... the eocsystem is...

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  Russia asked for access to Delta Chat user data ... so we had some explaining to do :) Cheers to decentralized app designs and the e-mail system's separation of apps and message transport, something that Whatsapp, Telegram and the likes fail to offer ... https://delta.chat/en/2020-05-01-roskamnadzor

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  RE: https://chaos.social/@delta/116505223145222985 All of the advances in #deltachat apps and the growth of the #chatmail relay network, wouldn't be possible without public funds and private donations, an estimated 800K EUR in 2026 ❤️ money goes to ~16 FOSS contributors with no money left for president, board or director salaries 🖤 Signal uses >50 Million per year, Telegram and Whatsapp 100's Millions, and they are all not building permission-free decentralized chat infra and apps, l...

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  We’ve been busy building and releasing but it’s high time to share some major news: @sovtechfund@mastodon.social is investing nearly €500K into #chatmail This 18-month commitment supports chatmail maintainers keeping the core infrastructure secure and evolving, which is the backbone for: #DeltaChat @arcanechat @deltatouch@social.tchncs.de Parla on Gnome (cc @pancake@infosec.exchange ) and many chat bots A huge thank you to the Sovereign Tech Fund for investing in open, secure and decen...

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  Yesterday, 20 people from the https://safesisters.org community onboarded with #DeltaChat in Lusaka, Zambia. Everything worked! Usability, privacy and #OfflineFirst ops were appreciated and #webxdc app based organizing met strong interest. Many participants engage in addressing challenges from surveillance state actors, family and partner abuse. Moreover, people with visual impairment were happy about Android's screen reader support. It's events like this that validate our ef...

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  "it's always the receiver that determines the meaning of a message" is a famous opening quote at the first symposium on self organizing systems in Chicago, 1959. This and many other findings from those circles re-appear in our day to day discussions. We are doing next steps towards automating planet-wide decentralized onboarding, including in Internet islands, without resorting to a central list of relays. Good news: we have now officially lost track of even the number of existi...

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  Making sure that deleted messages are actually deleted and unrecoverable is more involved than most folks think. The FBI could recently recover deleted Signal messages from an iOS phone because the notifications you see on your phone were stored in an extra database. Apple has now fixed this, also making #deltachat iOS users safer. Few know that so called "forward secrecy" is all about deleted messages becoming unrecoverable, see https://autocrypt2.org for our plans https://www.hei...

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  #deltachat user profiles are private and invisible to the public. No one can discover you, or your children, via phone numbers or any other public handle. Chat profiles exist only on user devices. No PIN and no "SMS verification code" ever asked or needed. The lack of "public discovery" also means you don't auto-discover others via phone numbers or other public handles. Getting in contact with others is "opt in": you scan a QR code or click an invite link to...

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  This morning nine.testrun.org was briefly unavailable, some network problem. A good time to remind everyone to add a second relay to your #deltachat app: 1. Go to https://chatmail.at/relays randomly choose one of the listed relay pages and copy the invitation code to your clipboard 2. In delta chat settings go to advanced/relays and tap "add relay" and paste the invitation code 3. That's it. If one relay is unavailable you still can receive and send messages. ht...

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  "Popularity is overrated" is an often occuring phrase in our circles. Which is of course nonsense because only what is popular, counts, right? Only what everybody else does is a valid choice, right? #deltachat #chatmail and #webxdc are used in private places and communities that people are molding for themselves. We are just providing tools and approaches that work ... At least most of the time 😅 "Nothing works all the time" is another project mantra. Brb preparing the next...

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  End-to-End encryption is one of the good things we have with the current internet and app ecosystems. But it is under constant threat -- be it from EU's #chatcontrol, UK's "online safety bill" or the current renewed "EARN IT" effort in the US: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/earn-it-bill-back-again-seeking-scan-our-messages-and-photos .... anyone of these efforts succeeding would be a dangerous dam break. Let's collectively mak...

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  Apart from the new #Gnome effort, there also is an interesting experiment of a #Rust terminal-client with #Ratatui -- for others to start from should they feel they need some enjoyable distraction :) https://git.sakamoto.pl/j-g00da/deltarat-experiments #Chatmail clients typically use the Rust core library which provides all networking, cryptography, persistence, real-time networking, mail relay/server interop. Documentation to help with writing clients is scattered, but at least there are pl...

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  @anon_4601 did you try enabling "Debug Calls"? See also https://delta.chat/en/2026-03-31-zero#native-calls-on-android-and-ios

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  @rakoo@blah.rako.space no, user numbers are getting.increasingly unknown even to us. We tried to express this. That more people are joining the fun and contributing in various ways, is what we experience and appreciate. All three key efforts,#chatmail #deltachat and #webxdc are community efforts.