I was really excited about an app called Delta Chat that created a chat-like experience over email. And so I installed it and got my family to use it and hooked it up to my mail server that I have with my web host. And it was kind of disappointing. It never worked as well as I wanted. Notifications didn't come in as expected. And it was kind of difficult to use.
Fast forward several years, and my son mentioned a chat app called Arcane Chat. And so I looked into it and was astonished to find that it's basically very similar to Delta Chat, and completely compatible with it. Instead of using regular email servers, it makes use of chatmail servers instead. which are a restricted form of the email protocol that enforce security and make a few other changes that make hosting it much easier.
I've been using it for the past several months with my family and it's completely replaced both XMPP and Signal for us. I'm currently using somebody else's chatmail server for our accounts, but I'm seriously considering getting a $5 VPS and hosting one myself.
deltachat also recommends its own servers now, so effectively arcanechat is just another deltachat client, or rather both are chatmail clients, and possibly both use the same relay implementation
So I went to [0] and [1] and still cannot understand what it is. This is a problem with a lot of opensource: landing pages fail to explain the "what". I get we're all techies and love to dive straight into the "how", but it really doesn't help when you're not in the "chatmail" club.
it is a messaging infrastructure with clients and relays that's based on SMTP as the message protocol. technically a chatmail client is an SMTP/IMAP client. and while you can use any SMTP server (i do), the relays they provide are designed to be more privacy focused (only allows encrypted messages and connections).
Exactly that's why i am such a big fan of Deltachat, it builds (not replace) on a already existing infrastructure called email (use your own server, the provided one or some of the big ones) it's like easy pgp email presented as a chat ;)
Also one plus, email is the last service that gets blocked in a country.
I really don't understand why email isn't used more for this. I know there are apps that do, but really don't get why it's not more popular. dang near everyone has an email account and I can't send someone using iCloud email an email just as easily as I can't send one to someone on gmail or outlook. I don't have to have some special app or twelve.
Or use LXMF on Reticulum. https://github.com/markqvist/LXMF
I've never heard of Reticulum, and I think my finger is on the pulse. It doesn't even have a wiki article!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reticulum_(disambiguation)
A good link for finding out about RNS is https://reticulum.network which is run by its developer.
Regarding Wikipedia, after some digging:
- It looks like the Spanish Wiki has a page. [0]
- There is an ongoing draft for the English Wiki, denied (due to the draft not having enough referenced reputable sources) but not deleted [2]
- The disambiguation page was edited to include it (but reverted presumably because it couldn't link to anywhere without a page)
[0] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reticulum_Network_Stack
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Reticulum_(networking)
Strange that it does not honestly.
Its more niche than meshstastic / meshcore. But it works as well. It's start to be mainstream in radio circle.
Downside : does not run on ESP32 only. You need a computer involved.
I find it funny that it starts with email and then proceed to dismiss it in favour of building a bunch of things from scratch.
I have used email as a decentralised messaging protocol for software.
It works just fine, and we got a lot for free, including queueing, retries, federated lookup etc.
And it made debugging so easy: Just Cc: messages, or send messages from your email client.
It underpinned part of the initial infrastructure for the demo registrar platform and the email forwarding for the .name top level domain.
I was really excited about an app called Delta Chat that created a chat-like experience over email. And so I installed it and got my family to use it and hooked it up to my mail server that I have with my web host. And it was kind of disappointing. It never worked as well as I wanted. Notifications didn't come in as expected. And it was kind of difficult to use.
Fast forward several years, and my son mentioned a chat app called Arcane Chat. And so I looked into it and was astonished to find that it's basically very similar to Delta Chat, and completely compatible with it. Instead of using regular email servers, it makes use of chatmail servers instead. which are a restricted form of the email protocol that enforce security and make a few other changes that make hosting it much easier.
I've been using it for the past several months with my family and it's completely replaced both XMPP and Signal for us. I'm currently using somebody else's chatmail server for our accounts, but I'm seriously considering getting a $5 VPS and hosting one myself.
https://delta.chat/en/
https://arcanechat.me/
deltachat also recommends its own servers now, so effectively arcanechat is just another deltachat client, or rather both are chatmail clients, and possibly both use the same relay implementation
> chatmail
So I went to [0] and [1] and still cannot understand what it is. This is a problem with a lot of opensource: landing pages fail to explain the "what". I get we're all techies and love to dive straight into the "how", but it really doesn't help when you're not in the "chatmail" club.
[0] https://chatmail.at/
[1] https://github.com/chatmail
it is a messaging infrastructure with clients and relays that's based on SMTP as the message protocol. technically a chatmail client is an SMTP/IMAP client. and while you can use any SMTP server (i do), the relays they provide are designed to be more privacy focused (only allows encrypted messages and connections).
Exactly that's why i am such a big fan of Deltachat, it builds (not replace) on a already existing infrastructure called email (use your own server, the provided one or some of the big ones) it's like easy pgp email presented as a chat ;)
Also one plus, email is the last service that gets blocked in a country.
I really don't understand why email isn't used more for this. I know there are apps that do, but really don't get why it's not more popular. dang near everyone has an email account and I can't send someone using iCloud email an email just as easily as I can't send one to someone on gmail or outlook. I don't have to have some special app or twelve.