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#openpgp traditions and #signal both bind a cleartext identifier, phone number or email address, to a cryptographic key. It opens up attack vectors as the servers/orgs controlling this binding can interfere.
#deltachat avoids such cleartext identity bindings by creating random #chatmail addresses, as transport only. The cryptographic key becomes the identifier and we want it hidden from the transport layer. Only people being in end-to-end encrypted chat need to identify each other, after all.
Some of you may have heard of #simplex which likes to elevate itself as "the first messenger without user-ids" ... a goal, similar to ours, of not letting the transport layer know about who talks. Only we are doing it in the email system, fully interoperable with tens of thousands of existing email servers and other #openpgp endpoints. The email system is much more than SMTP/IMAP or even openpgp btw ... there is plenty of room for radical shifts and new takes. We are just starting :)
@delta You imply Chatmail is interoperable with non-Chatmail email. My understanding so far has been that Chatmail -- the newly-default mode of DeltaChat that runs on specially-configured servers -- breaks DeltaChat's core benefit of being able to communicate with anyone with an email address; this is due to Chatmail's mandatory encryption and novel key exchange protocol that isn't widely supported or used. OpenPGP and AutoCrypt do enjoy some support in niche MUAs, but most email users are on Gmail or Outlook¹ which don't support either. It may be possible to do this excruciatingly manually or with a specialized external tool (which doesn't exist), but for most people, this breaks the main reason anyone would choose DeltaChat over, say, XMPP+OMEMO.
¹ okay maybe Outlook does, if you configure it, maybe only if you're a paying enterprise user, and only OpenPGP and not AutoCrypt.
@blake @delta
"this breaks the main reason anyone would choose DeltaChat over, say, XMPP+OMEMO."
I think if people use xmpp and delta chat for a while, the reason why they keep on using delta chat is not email compatibility. People should just try out.
(I still keep on using xmpp next to delta chat because I think it can be useful to have more than one open protocol)
@ulfi @delta Whether or how often you use a certain chat app depends on who you can talk to with it. For example, I wouldn't use WhatsApp if I didn't have a friend whose parents won't let them use anything else. And I would use Signal, DeltaChat, or Conversations/XMPP if someone I knew also used that app. (There are actually a couple people I know on Fedi I use Signal with from time to time.)
Now, assuming you and all your friends have both apps, which one you'd use then depends on how comfortable those are to use. For example, if your friends are in a group chat and group chats tend to break on one (cough cough XMPP), you'd pick the other one. If one is slow and drops messages, or is missing some important feature the other one has, such as anonymous¹ messages, chat apps, or formatting, you're going to use the other one. You're right that there is an edge towards DeltaChat on this one, though on occasion XMPP does still win (and Signal sits in the middle).
¹ XMPP MUCs have a semi-anonymous mode where the group's admin can see the members' real JIDs, but other members can't. Maybe you're a woman and you don't want men from your group chat sliding into your DMs. DeltaChat could possibly recreate this using the mailing-list pattern, but standard DeltaChat group chats can't support it.
@blake @ulfi there are many dynamics why people choose to use X or Y or both. Delta is used increasingly by families, friends, organizers and activists in repressive contexts but it can not convert "the masses". We intentionally stay clear from VC funding even if it could help buy hype and mind share and accelerated developments like it did with matrix. Our approach aims to reliably function in an increasingly fragmenting/splintering Internet, where other solutions fail, now or in the future.
And also just owning my data. I have a group chat with a couple friends that we have maintained for well over 10 years. There is an incredible amount of useful information in there spanning science, technology, politics, and finance. We migrated it to Telegram in 2019 and as of last month it's on DeltaChat.
My backup of that chat on Telegram was over 30GB and 250,000 messages. There's another chat we have specifically about finance and it was about half that size.
But at any time Telegram could decide to delete all history older than a couple months because it's too expensive to host for free. Now I have an option where I truly have full control of the data and server infra but get a clean modern chat UX across multiple devices and OSes. It's everything I wanted, and any missing pieces can be filled in later.
"¹ XMPP MUCs have a semi-anonymous mode .. DeltaChat group chats can't support it."
For Delta Chat one sometimes need to think different. The solution here is to create a new anonymous chat profile, as rakoo said. Profiles in Delta Chat are very powerfull and can be created easily.
But I agree that there may also be situations where xmpp better fits the needs of the users. DC is currently more focused on private groups than on public ones.
@ulfi @rakoo @delta Creating a new profile is creating a new identity, not hiding your identity in a chat. You get a completely separated conversation list and profile info, which may be what you want sometimes, but what if you just wanted to not have people from a chat be able to DM you? For every chat you want to do this in, now you need a separate profile? Now when you want to open that chat you have to switch to that profile first. That's not a solution, that's a clunky workaround at best, completely unrelated at worst.
That being said, some kind of grouped or unified inbox that does this under the hood (maybe with sendable aliases?) might not be a bad idea.