@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.
@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".
@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
@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.
@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.
@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
@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.
@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.
If I don't like the c# library I'm using to build XMPP, I can rip it out and pick another one
which already implies they each have different features or lack thereof, which is exactly the exact same situation you have in XMPP with a lot of fragmentation,
in fact, it is better if people don't create their own chatmail core implementation
if Delta Chat becomes evil, the core is open and you can just fork it and keep using it, no one can take anything away from you
@arcanechat@feld@jae If deltachat doesn’t want people indipendantly authoring libraries that use its protocol it is not an open standard. End of story.
@fastfinge if you don't want to have a shared-effort security-audited implementation that everyone uses, but instead waste resources with several people re-implementing the wheel and causing incompatibility between clients, assuming people want to have to deal with "ah Paul your client don't support this and that"
then in fact, you will only make more damage than help the chatmail ecosystem, please, keep ruining xmpp 🙏
@arcanechat@fastfinge@jae if XMPP's design by committee process was in any way conducive to producing good results we'd have multiple high quality cross-platform XMPP clients right now that would make nobody care about Telegram or Signal or Whatsapp because literally all the same functionality is implemented (the XEPs are there, it should be possible!) and it would have the largest network effect because zero lock-in, so there would be no excuse to not be using XMPP
But there's zero high quality cross-platform XMPP clients because this process doesn't work
and then Delta Chat makes the right decisions:
- build a quality core everyone can use which guarantees compatibility and an even playing field of security (not even Signal can claim this -- e.g., each app has a completely different networking implementation)
- build an app for each major platform and make them as identical as possible -- originally built off a good design that users are comfortable with: the actual Telegram client
- publish them all under the same name/logo because modern users think of "platforms" not "protocols"
- do the groundwork to be prepared if the app ever gets blocked/banned or Merlinux sued/shutdown so the same Delta Chat app can be published under a different name by someone else
- work hard to produce RFCs that are useful for everyone, not just Delta Chat (e.g., AutoCrypt v2 is meant to be used for ANY protocol, not just Delta Chat / email -- which is also co-published by someone from IETF/ACLU, an active OpenPGP member, and a Delta Chat member)
- provide a ton of documentation and user support resources
- provide a realtime feedback channels to all interested parties who are running their own Chatmail Relays
- bend over backwards to provide extensive backwards compatibility
- be actively involved with helping real groups of disadvantaged people around the world who suffer under oppressive governments, actually fly to remote places and provide information and training
- provide more details of the project's funding methodology than probably any other open source project that has existed
- actually go to court to fight for users' rights (e.g., Delta Chat in Russia last summer)
but this is just not enough for some people and either the project is considered too opaque/proprietary, or gets complaints that they shouldn't be using email this way
@feld@arcanechat@jae Those all sound like intentionally promoting lock in to me. The long and short of it is: tomorrow deltachat could wake up and decide it doesn’t care about screen readers anymore. When they do, I’m locked out. That makes deltachat a danger to me and my community, and is just not possible to lock us out of xmpp in the same way, even if people wanted to. Until that changes, I have to treat deltachat the same way I treat any other hostile closed protocols: don’t depend on, promote, or trust it.
@fastfinge@feld@arcanechat i have macular degeneration. im moving to screen reader mode more frequently and eventually totally as its rapid. this affects me also now that ive had time to digest this very short thread
@jae@feld@arcanechat I should clarify that deltachat is currently really really good about accessibility. But so was Twitter, once. Organizations change. And if you have a disability, you always have to have a plan for that, for every tool you use. When accessibility breaks, you need to be certain you have a way out. Preferably one that doesn’t involve forcing all of your friends to change apps, yet again. I don’t care how much they love you: you can probably get them to change once. But not twice.
@fastfinge@arcanechat@jae which XMPP client are you using that has good accessibility, is open source, and you don't have to worry about rotting in the app store and eventually just getting removed?
