Over the years, Delta Chat has matured to be an easy-to-use, secure, and even fast messenger for all platforms, based on the massive e-mail server network. We'll give an overview of the ways Delta Chat is used today and how it is developed by a dozen active contributors. This talk will highlight our recent introduction of realtime chat-shared apps that use e-mail OpenPGP-encrypted messaging to establish a private Peer-to-Peer network among chat group members. In this talk we will demonstrate how these apps work in real-time. We'll also report on several interesting situations where Delta Chat is used today in context of partial shutdowns or strict internet censorship.

Description:

In the beginning, Delta Chat was a fun little experiment, an experimental solution to the network effects problem: “nobody uses secure messengers! But everyone has E-Mail… 🤔" Since then it has come a long way. From a cross-platform set of messenger apps with freely chosen e-mail servers to using audited and well analyzed end-to-end encryption, our project is based on IETF and W3C approved protocols and specifications. We interoperate with the massively distributed SMTP e-mail routing network as well as other e-mail based apps or webmailers and socially are in collaborative relations with numerous other projects, including XMPP-based messengers and standardization specialists.

Delta Chat was among the first messengers to adopt Rust (2019) as its core implementation language and provide all-platform apps. Together with XMPP-projects like Cheogram and Monocles we are evolving a new paradigm and quasi-standard called "webxdc" that enables integration of web apps into chat groups, giving users full control over app distribution. Webxdcs provide a unique Peer-to-Peer model for deploying collaborative standards based software.