I ditched WhatsApp back in 2021 (and lost a couple og long-distance friends in the process), and I communicate mostly over DeltaChat, XMPP (née Jabber), and Signal, in that order of preference.
There are many other alternatives out there, e.g. SimpleX, but many — if not most — suffer from the inability to synchronize chats across several devices.
DeltaChat should pose no problems to users coming from WhatsApp, having more or less the same UI as I remember from WhatsApp back then. DeltaChat is an amazing app, check it out:
Yes, it is kind of sad. I did give said friends (who were strictly online friends in faraway countries that I had never met in “real life”) the option of a handful of other instant messaging means of reaching me, and I also made sure to convey that the reason was my zero-tolerance for Facebook/Meta and not because I wanted to ditch them as friends. I have also tried to reach out through email and sms, and didn't get a response, so that's where it landed.
The context makes a big difference here. Human connections are indeed very important. But people used to manage those satisfactorily even before the advent of instant long-range communication systems. They still managed to keep each other updated and alerted about important events. Today's digital interpersonal connections feel important more because of the fear of losing them, than because of their actual worth. I realized this after having switched my communication media (chat apps, phone numbers, etc) numerous times. Many connections drop off in the process. But people with relations that truly matter always find a way to reestablish it.
That flexibility gives you the freedom to chose the communications platform according to your self-interests. And in today's targeted ads economy, those self-interests matter too much to neglect in favor of staying connected with everyone.
But people used to manage those satisfactorily even before the advent of instant long-range communication systems. They still managed to keep each other updated and alerted about important events.
There's got to be a logical fallacy for "people did x before y technology." Yes they did. And we still collectively found out that we could do it better with that thing, and that is the new standard. But you're free to go back to delivering letters by horse if that suits you.
I can post a story on Instagram, and somebody that I have't talked to in years might reply and we have a conversation and reconnect, or maybe it's just a simple gesture, but it's still meaningful and appreciated. But if I said "well I'm here on Mastodon now and anyone who truly matters will come find me," that's just not happening. And then I'm frustrated and complain about being lonely and yell at everyone to switch to Mastodon. Really bringing people together. But at least I didn't have to stomach seeing an ad that might actually pertain to my signaled interests.
Some people just won't notice your message and then they'll forget to download and setup the app. It's normal. People have lives distinct from the messaging.
I'm pretty actively involved with my friends and just have the union of all messaging apps and even I frequently forget to respond to messages I've started to read because something else happens: baby cries etc
I can relate to the common man that's just never been able to muster up the energy to give a crap. I use what the people I know use. I've felt way more annoyance towards that one friend using some obscure platform than I ever have about Mark Zuckberg "sharing my data." Truly two kinds of people on this issue.
I also ditched WhatsApp long ago. And while I probably "lost" a few connections with people I knew from other countries, I stay managed to stay in touch with people who are important to me. Either because they downloaded Signal just to talk to me (I have a few friends who like to emphasize passive aggressively that every time we talk, LOL), or use Apple Messages, SMS or good old email.
It's cool that it uses email, but it's also not. Email is a notoriously painful standard to run a server for. I have ran a Matrix and Mastodon server, and I'm still running a BlueSky PDS, but I've never even tried to run an email server, since I know I'll get blocked the moment I try it for having a residential IP, and that it's a lot of work.
So most people will be stuck with commercial providers, with the largest happening to be Google, which needs users to set up an app password for DeltaChat to work. You've already lost most users at that point. Other large providers don't work or require setups: https://providers.delta.chat/
Then there's ChatMail relays, which are supposedly interoperable with email, but from the documentation it's very unclear to what extent that is. Not to mention that the possibility of them getting blacklisted by mainstream providers is very high, as they do text message analysis which doesn't work on encrypted blobs.
At this point, I have to ask: is email the right tool for the job? With all these drawbacks, it seems it would have been better to go with another standard, written from scratch.
There is so much scaremongering about running mail servers that it almost looks as if interested parties are trying to dissuade people from running servers using this well-known open protocol and instead tell them to use whatever proprietary or single-sourced product. In reality running a mail server is not difficult at all, it hardly takes resources and once configured it tends to run fine without needing much in the way of maintenance. The main pain points seem to be the need to configure a bunch of DNS records for things like SPF and DKIM. Spam is solved using a filter like Spamassassin and possibly a graylist so that boogeyman is vanquished for now - I'm still waiting for the next wave of LLM-generated spam which is less easily recognised for what it is, this far is has not shown up yet. You may need to add some exceptions to the graylist for some of the bigger, non-standards-compliant services like anything run by Microsoft and you may need to use a "smart server" - an SMTP proxy for outgoing mail - if port 25 is blocked on your connection but these are not hard to configure.
I've been running my own mail services for close to 30 years now starting with handcrafted Sendmail configurations, now running Exim and Postfix. Running your own mail services isn't the scary problem it is made out to be.
>I've been running my own mail services for close to 30 years now...
There's the rub. 30 years ago this was true. Old systems have been grandfathered in.
A combination of rising spam and things like fraud via email have caused especially large services to be so much more aggressive in blocking. If your email has been around forever it's generally trusted.
The company I work for has been around for 15 years and we spent the first 5 or so getting yahoo and live/hotmail/outlook to accept our mail reliably despite proper dns/dkim/spf.
Self hosted on residential IP today is near impossible. Your only hope is pay to not be on a residential IP and even then strap in for years of struggle to get the biggest free providers to accept you as legitimate. Exacerbated by their thorough lack of actual support contacts.
> The company I work for has been around for 15 years and we spent the first 5 or so getting yahoo and live/hotmail/outlook to accept our mail reliably despite proper dns/dkim/spf
This matches my experience from roughly 10 years ago. Even with a non-residential IP address, correct SPF, etc, it took months to navigate the biggest providers' obstacle courses for whitelisting. After succeeding with those, plenty of smaller providers remained to identify and work through one by one. And then, every so often, an already-completed one would revert.
It was not impossible, but even for someone experienced in email system internals, it was a slog that seemed never to be 100% done. I don't expect it's any easier today.
People tend to have all sorts of reservations against DeltaChat, even if they haven't tried it, and I just haven't experienced those problems.
I have tried DeltaChat with my own mailserver, and with Gmail, FastMail and DeltaChat's chatmail, and it has worked flawlessly. If it hadn't, I wouldn't be a fan.
This is obviously only anecdotal, so other people may report other experiences.
If used as chat only, and with dedicated chatmail servers, the number of theoretical problems diminishes significantly. Using it as an email client and/or with standard email providers introduces potential points of failure, but not more than email to email.
Perhaps I should also add that DeltaChat is really just an email client with a user interface that is optimized for chat, and the chatmail servers are just IMAP/SMTP mail stacks optimized for DeltaChat.
DeltaChat uses AutoCrypt to provide gpg/pgp encrypted “email” + metadata, and the chatmail servers are set up to refuse unencrypted messages (thus avoiding the spam problem).
The optimal experience is acheived by using DeltaChat the way it was intended: DeltaChat to DeltaChat communication, and I'd say that using the chatmail servers is also preferable to using custom IMAP/SMTP servers (whether they are hosted by the big providers, smaller providers, or self-hosted). You _can_ use DeltaChat to communicate to email-only recipients, but it provides for a sub-optimal experience.
> and lost a couple og long-distance friends in the process
This is sad, but also a reminder that nothing that matters should be tied to proprietary walled gardens. All of those are ephemeral.
Anyone I care to stay in contact with, I communicate via email. An open standard owned by nobody, so it cannot go away. My email has been the same for 30 years and will be the same forever. If you knew me in the mid 90s or later, you know how to reach me.
I tried to stop using WhatsApp, but failed. I even promote Signal to my WhatsApp contacts (if they were to switch, Signal would be the most likely option). I succeeded with most of the people I talk to the most. Unfortunately, the majority of my contacts are still only on WhatsApp (and even less appropriate messengers like Telegram and Instagram). WhatsApp remains the lesser evil. I hope that one day I'll be able to stop using the last major tech service I rely on (at least those that don't allow anonymous access via a web browser), but today is not that day :(
I think this is by n0_computer, the same people behind iroh.computer . If you care about, or just want to learn about, peer-to-peer and a Rust library for p2p that just works then check it out! They have great explanatory videos on YouTube as well. I'm a big fan!
Oh really? I am curious how Signal won with WhatsApp.
In France (and basically in all European countries, maybe except Germany, where all privacy things are very intense so maybe they use something else), WhatsApp is the go-to app.
Not only do most people use it, but you have services that suggest WhatsApp as one of the contact channels. This is not because they love WhatsApp for some reason - rather because people use it (and they want to make it easier to contact them).
You talk about "WhatsApp groups for X", never heard about "Signal groups for X". In rare instances, this would be Telegram (but usually specialized groups)
I believe Delta Chat is opportunistic PGP over email, so it's not comparable to something like Matrix or Signal. I suppose it might suffice if you have very basic privacy needs.
According to my expectations, resetting your computer app and data and reconnecting to your account should result in an more or less empty message history.
The last time I added a new device to Signal, I was given the option to sync old messages. Not all of them, but I think it was the last 60 days, which I think is enough.
It uses SMTP/IMAP to propagate and store individual messages. This means that DeltaChat it will work with your usual email account (it will create an IMAP folder named DeltaChat), but if you install the app and say “Yeah, just let me in!”, it will create a random username for you on one of its own chatmail servers.
It may sound like a bad thing to use email, but it works very, very well. Most people won't even notice.
You obviously must trust that the server runs this configuration, but you can always run your own chatmail, or regular postfix. (If you don't need "federation" with other mail servers, you don't even need port 25 open).
However, you can also configure your app to delete messages from the server sooner.
»By default, Delta Chat stores all messages locally on your device. If you e.g. want to save storage space at your mail provider, you can configure Delta Chat to delete old already-received messages on the server automatically. They still remain on your device until you delete them there, too.«
Delta chat uses email. So you can chat with anyone that has an email address. If they happen to use the app too it'll feel more like a chat for them as well.
Well, for a starter you will be limited to what email servers provide, which doesn't include video conferences, which most instant messaging solutions include these days
Not in my experience. It feels like chatting on Signal or any other instant messenger, except there are no typing indicators, especially if you use DeltaChat's chatmail server (the default if you just say “let me in”).
Wait, is that true over regular email too? Say I have a back and forth one liner emails every few minutes? It's competent for the provider to throttle or block these?
I haven't run into that problem, but yes, it's possible.
One problem I did run into was “allowed number of outgoing emails”. If you use groups in DeltaChat, even a small grouop of say 10 members will incur a lot of outgoing messages. The provider I originally used has a limit of 200 emails per day, so that was a showstopper.
If you use DeltaChat's chatmail server (which will happen per default if you don't provide an email account of your own), this will not be a problem.
It does, and I did try it for a couple of years — I even ran my own server. None of my close friends cared to try it, and I preferred XMPP myself, so I took down the server and delete the app.
There are many other alternatives out there, e.g. SimpleX, but many — if not most — suffer from the inability to synchronize chats across several devices.
DeltaChat should pose no problems to users coming from WhatsApp, having more or less the same UI as I remember from WhatsApp back then. DeltaChat is an amazing app, check it out:
https://delta.chat/en/
You needn't even disclose who you are.