this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2025
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I get that WhatsApp is not a platform to use if you care about your privacy, but WTF is "Delta Chat" and why would I switch to it rather than say Signal?
I agree that Signal is nice, but I think the point here is that Delta Chat is decentralized
Imo it's already difficult enough to convince friends and family to use Signal. Delta Chat would be even more difficult to pull off.
It's hard to get techies to see that, plan for the lease savy user.
How is it different? In my experience it’s easier as they’ve already heard of email.
The difference is signal has millions of users and most people have already maybe heard of it.
The other difference is that promoting more and more obscure, useless shit ruins your credibility for when you're trying to get them to Lemmy or Signal or Mastodon.
Signal is an absolutely fine product and doesn't need to be decentralized right now.
So is Matrix and it's way more popular. But recommending anything other than Signal at this point is a waste. Fediverse chat is a more complex conversion for many who are still in the connect via phone number stage for chat. Fediverse is an easier story for other platforms.
As I've understood, Delta chat is based on the IMAP protocol and uses the infrastructure of your email provider. Thus, it uses no own server infrastructure, but has the also the downsides of the protocol and some issues with many email providers.
Wikipedia.de - Delta Chat (no English version available yet)
This turned out to be the deal-breaker for me. GMX kept locking me out of my account because of the DeltaChat messages. They're (of course) full of cyphertext and to email providers this must look a look like spam.
The open-to-abuse nature of email claims yet another victim.
On the other hand, GMX (and web.de) is a notoriously bad influence on email communication and will randomly block mailservers if they feel like it while flooding all of their own users with spam. The world would be a better place without 1&1 / united internet.
But it's a free Europe-based provider that's not US big tech. A better suggestion?
To be clear, I use a paid service (Mailbox.org) for my main email, as everyone should do.
I agree with your recommendation. As for free/freemium email providers, there's Tuta for one. I'm hoping that there are others.
Right, they don't support the advanced login protocols some providers like outlook require. That was a deal breaker, because deltachat was pretty much the last encrypted messaging service which worked in China.