this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2025
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Delta Chat

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Delta Chat is a new chat app that sends messages via e-mails, encrypted if possible, with Autocrypt. You do not have to sign up anywhere, just use your existing e-mail account with Delta Chat.

https://delta.chat/en/

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founded 2 years ago
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Self-hosted Delta Chat?

I've been thinking more about the hurtle of getting friends and family to use federated/self-hosted services. One of the issues to onboarding is people not "getting" the idea of picking an instance. This has led, in part, to "default" instances, like mastadon.social, that grow so large it almost defeates the idea.

I've been thinking that I really wish #DeltaChat had a web client. I have had a MUCH more difficult time getting folks to try that out than even #fediverse SNS. But I was thinking how the heck are you going to pull that off without @delta having to host the overhead for a robust web client and possibly host a gigantic server system that has to grow exponentially to keep everyone's email from all the possible email providers, really defeating the goal of their project.

This morning, I thought of a possible solution to both problems. What if you have a built-in transfer requirement. So you start with a default, say pleb.joinmastodon.org or noob.delta.chat and after a certain time (3 months or something) you have to either transfer to a new instance, including hosting your own client for in browser decryption web access to your encrypted mail chats or your account (in the case of #mastodon) or web client access (in the case of Delta Chat) is shut off.

Do you think this could work?

@delta_chat

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[โ€“] delta@chaos.social 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

@fuat2mb @delta_chat it's a neat idea to postpone server choice until later, and onboard with some default.

#deltachat apps are currently learning to use multiple addresses at once ("multi-transport"), along with cryptographic hardening against evil server operators. The goal is to provide multi-server onboarding by default, and to automate server migrations (although for a while there will be an advanced settings interface where it's manually managed). You'd be onboarding "to the network" :)

[โ€“] lardier@troet.cafe 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

@delta
I hope that the manual setup will be maintained in the long term. I run DeltaChat through my email package with my own domain. The path up to and including the server is secure enough for me.
@fuat2mb @delta_chat