Note by @fastfinge

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

OMG what am I even doing This is a huge project it's going to need Jingle and that needs WebRTC and then file transfers and voice messages and oh also localization and sounds and hotkeys and settings and multi-account support and Oh God. even with AI this will take fifteen years why did I get out of bed today and choose this for myself

Only 3 Easy Payments of $19.95 @feld@friedcheese.us

@fastfinge there's always Delta Chat which solved almost all of these problems already :)

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@feld I dropped Jami and signal from my life for the same reason. “Just use the official clients” is not an open protocol. Not even if the client and server are open source.

Only 3 Easy Payments of $19.95 @feld@friedcheese.us

@fastfinge you're completely wrong we have third party clients and more coming all the time

github.com/trufae/parla

lambadalambda.github.io/estuary/

Unreleased tui client by @jae

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@feld @jae Nope. These are just running deltachat-core or libdeltachat, from what I can tell. If I want a library in C#, there is none. If I want to write my own library in C#, without depending on deltachat-core, I can't. There's no list of RFCs I can look at, nothing like xeps or IRCV3 caps, etc. It's just "use our library".

Only 3 Easy Payments of $19.95 @feld@friedcheese.us

@fastfinge @jae there is no "library" to write. It's PGP emails and SMTP/IMAP. Go ahead and do it yourself, there's nothing proprietary being implemented. It's just emails.

Name a feature that you think is some secret proprietary thing

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@feld @jae It's not, though. Deltachat does weird shit with email headers to anonymize everything. I couldn't just read a message from deltachat in my regular email client. And I have no idea how they're doing federation and key exchange and things. But it's all based on weird links that require deltachat's domains and servers to exist and be running. I can't just type an email in the chat client and send a deltachat message.

Only 3 Easy Payments of $19.95 @feld@friedcheese.us

@fastfinge @jae

key exchange

It's Autocrypt, there's an RFC for it

Mime headers being encrypted? There's an RFC for it

The subject header being changed to [...] is a client / chatmail server implementation detail unnecessary

The Date header being smeared +- a few days is a client implementation detail too

None of that is required

All you needed to do to read the message in your email client is decrypt it. There are users reading messages in Thunderbird/Mutt/Proton Mail

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@feld @jae Interesting that everyone uses libdeltachat or deltaachat-core, then. There is no ecosystem of standards compliant implimentations. And seemingly no clear idea what that would even mean to deltachat.

Only 3 Easy Payments of $19.95 @feld@friedcheese.us

@fastfinge @jae because deltachat-core is a nice implementation of the core protocols in a simple Rust package and presents a clean JSON-RPC API for you to build anything you want on top of it. And none of that has anything to do with accessibility anyway, that's all in the UI. So as long as you have a UI you can control, you're fine

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@feld @jae That's what we thought with Twitter and Reddit. Then they discontinued the API's. Those are just two recent examples of something that has happened dozens of times in the last 25 years. Slack discontinuing IRC is another. If I depend on an API that could be taken away at any moment, I have nothing. If there are no competing and interoperable implementations of the standard, you're just at the whims of the owner of the one true version.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@feld @jae If I don't like the c# library I'm using to build XMPP, I can rip it out and pick another one. There are like 6 to choose from. If they disable an API I needed, I can build it myself, or use a different library. Those are not options with deltachat.

Only 3 Easy Payments of $19.95 @feld@friedcheese.us

@fastfinge @jae why aren't they options? You can write your own little core in C# with pgp/imap/smtp and do it yourself and have your own API forever if you really want

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@feld @jae Because the only way to find out all the implementation decisions deltachat has made is to examine the code. They're "based on" the standards they list, not compliant with them. If I write a core just with those standards as written, It's not going to work correctly with the deltachat app.

Only 3 Easy Payments of $19.95 @feld@friedcheese.us

@fastfinge @jae until it was disabled by default on relays relatively recently, plaintext emails completely worked. Group chats. Video/image attachments. There's nothing quite as special about it as you think. If the MIME header is in the encrypted part, it reads that one. If it's plaintext, it reads that one.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@feld @jae And when this changed, how were the authors of third party clients notified? Was there an open discussion period at a standards committee or a request for comment? No, because the assumption is that everyone should just use libdeltachat. That's not how open standards work.

Only 3 Easy Payments of $19.95 @feld@friedcheese.us

@fastfinge @jae that wasn't a client change that was a server change and people who didn't want it didn't deploy that server change.

you can still right now connect DeltaChat to regular email servers and send messages around unencrypted. I wouldn't recommend it but you can do it.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@feld @jae But my client connects to the servers. If they make a change it's going to just break my client without notice. That's a change that needs to be reflected by a new version of some standards document, somewhere.

Only 3 Easy Payments of $19.95 @feld@friedcheese.us

@fastfinge @jae connects to which servers? if you choose to use someone else's server, yes, you get their limitations like how large of an attachment they'll allow.

nobody is forcing you to use any servers operated by DeltaChat or running the Chatmail configuration

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@feld @jae And what if I send a message to another deltachat user on a different server from mine? How should that be handled? Will they refuse it if it's plaintext? What will I get in return, and how do I surface that to my user? I'm certain it's going to be different from how an email client would handle it. Either way, there's no, you know, standards document documenting these kind of implementation requirements for my third party client. And no infrastructure for warning me when they are about to change, so I can let my user's know we're only compliant with chatmail standard version 5, but an update to bring the new features and requirements of chatmail version 8 is coming soon.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@feld @jae Also, if I choose not to implement deltachat apps in my chatmail client, what is the method of capability negotiation that I should use to indicate that to the deltachat app, and let that user/app know what features I do and do not support? What if I create shiny feature X? How do I tell deltachat to indicate support for that feature? Without those bits, any third party chatmail client is going to just break randomly for users, and nobody on either end will know why.

Only 3 Easy Payments of $19.95 @feld@friedcheese.us

@fastfinge @jae

Also, if I choose not to implement deltachat apps in my chatmail client, what is the method of capability negotiation that I should use to indicate that to the deltachat app

You don't have to do anything, like Parla for example doesn't support WebXDC apps at all because it doesn't have a browser engine to run them in. The app is just a zip file with a .xdc extension. You could choose to just ignore those messages or display the attachment for download or do whatever you want really

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@feld @jae So then my grandmother gets strange inexplicable zip files from her cousin who wants to play a Wheel of Fortune game together. And neither my grandmother nor my cousin can understand why it's not working. My cousin, in fact, would have no way of knowing the app she sent did not run. That's a terrible experience all around.

Only 3 Easy Payments of $19.95 @feld@friedcheese.us

@fastfinge @jae what client is your grandmother running? A custom one that you wrote and you didn't implement all the functionality yet?

I gotta say Samuel it sounds to me like you really want to reinvent XMPP and the XEP hell where you never know what the other person's client actually supports

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@feld @jae But because the standards are defined, and capability negotiation is part of them, you always know what the other person's client supports, and what both of your servers will allow. With deltachat, that's impossible. And my grandmother uses the console and runs a text based client. She can never run deltachat apps. But her client can never tell any other client it interacts with about that limitation.