distributing relay knowledge among chatters (TBD)
This is the core reason that centralization is currently necessary. So admitting that it’s an unsolved problem for a federated alternative is basically reinforcing Signal’s point.
“Don’t buy based on future promises”.
Matrix promised a lot. So have almost every single ai techbro. If delta manages it then great, but if you’ve only done one thing on the list then you really haven’t proved anything.
this seems needlessly combative… prevailing opinions are exactly as signal says… think differently? great! let’s do it, talk about it, see how it goes, and when the solution has scaled in the real world to what it’s competing against then you can feel superior as the one that had the vision to see it
but scaling is hard, and distributed tech is hugely inefficient
there are so many unknowns
anyone can follow a random “getting stared with web framework X” guide to make a twitter clone… making a twitter clone that handles the throughput that twitter does, that takes legitimately hard computer science (fuck twitter, but it remains both a good and common example)
heck even lemmy has huge issues with sync at its current tiny scale when there’s any reasonable latency involved… i remember only months ago when aussie.zone was getting updates days late because of a 300ms latency to EU/US and lemmys sequential handling of outboxes (afaik)
Indeed! Ever since XMPP was argued to be superior to everything else, I’ve come to just say “build it and show us.” No one cares about having multiple chat apps on their devices -if it’s good enough, it will be added along side Signal first, then replace it only when it’s clearly better.
right? like yeah i remember XMPP being cool n all, but all the experiences suuuuucked, not to mention (back in the day… i think its fixed now?) figuring out how the hell to get video calling working… “what extension does your client support?” is not a question a lay-person will ask: centralised systems don’t have extensions… they have “the way it’s done” and that’s it
but scaling is hard, and distributed tech is hugely inefficient
How is it inefficient for a chat app? If anything, a distributed architecture is the ideal for this use case. It’s only potentially a problem if you need to have huge group chats, which is definitely not the common use case for a chat app, but even then I think Delta Chat’s optimized relays can handle that.
see how it goes, and when the solution has scaled in the real world to what it’s competing against then you can feel superior as the one that had the vision to see it
Delta chat uses existing email infrastructure, which has already proven its ability to scale. Nigerian princes probably send more emails per hour than the entire global Signal network.
I’m guessing inefficient in a sense that with distributed you need more computational power in total than with centralised
inefficient in the sense that
- traffic go over the internet rather than internal networks which means the routing is much longer, over slower links
- not to mention that in distributed systems information frequently is duplicated many times rather than referenced on some internal system (sending out an email to 20 people duplicates that email 20 times across many providers rather than simply referencing an internal ID… you can just centralise content and send out a small notification message, but that’s generally not what people are talking about when they’re talking about modern distributed systems)
- each system can’t trust any other, so there’s a lot more processing that each node has to do in order to maintain a consistent internal state: validating and transforming raw data for itself - not usually a particularly big task, but multiplied by millions per second it adds up fast
- hardware scaling is simply not as easy either… with centralised systems you have, say, 1000 servers at 95% capacity (whatever that means): you can run them close to capacity because your traffic is generally insulated from load spikes due to volume, and generally you wouldn’t get 5% more load faster than you can scale up another server. in distributed systems (or rather smaller systems, because that’s implicit here unless you’re just running the hardware and software to duplicate the whole network, which would take more servers anyway due to the other inefficiencies and now you’re multiplying them) you need to have much more “room to breathe” to absorb load spikes
- things like spares and redundancy for outage mitigations also become more expensive: if you have 1000 servers, having a couple of hot spares (either parts or entire systems depending on system architecture and uptime requirements) isn’t that big of a deal but in a distributed system you probably need those hot spares, but all of a sudden every instance needs those hot spares somewhere (though this can be seen as a similar issue to traffic issue: spares of all kinds are just unused capacity, so the higher your ratio the more under-utilised your hardware)
- this is all without getting into the human effort of building systems… instance owners all need to manage their infrastructure which means that the mechanisms to handle things like upgrade without downtime, scaling, spam protection, bots, etc have all been built many many times
NONE of this is to say that they’re worse. in many ways the have a lot of advantages, but it’s not a clear-cut win in a lot of cases either… as with most things in life “it depends”. distributed systems are resistant to whole-network outages (at the expense of many more partial network outages), they’re resistant to censorship, they implicitly have a machine to machine interface, so the network as a whole is implicitly automatable (that might be a bad thing for things like spam, privacy, bots, etc), but people tend to generally be pro-bots and pro-3rd party apps
Idk what to say to this. Is it true? I don’t know, and you probably don’t either. That’s a weird way to look at it and I doubt anyone has measured the power costs of the global email network.
It’s also useless for decision-making. What matters is a question like “how much would it cost me to host a server and contribute to the network?”. Even if the total global cost is billions of dollars, the network will continue to grow because nobody has to pay all of it.
Sorry if this sounds critical but is delta any better than the matrix protocol? It looks similar enough
Also side note I wish integrating all of these together was an option like prowlarr is for the *arr torrent stack
It looks similar enough
They are not the same usecase. Matrix tries to have large public groups with message histories similar to Discord where as Delta Chat is more like WhatsApp, covering mostly private conversations in 1:1 or small groups.
I just tried creating an account on Deltachat. The onboarding generates an account and password for you in the client, you can see them in the settings, but otherwise you don’t have to worry about it.
Quite better than Matrix, and the app is also more intuitive.
they could at least use a european datacenter like infomaniak if they really had to use aws style infrastructure
Deltachat? Aren’t they reliant on email servers that leak meta data?
From, the only info that’s leaked is:
- message date
- sender/receiver addresses
- message size
So not nothing, but probably not a serious risk for most people, unless you decide to use an identifiable address for sending/receiving. Idk how Signal protects metadata, but it requires a real phone number, so it’s probably not as secure as people think.
Delta doesn’t support perfect forward secrecy nor post quantum encryption. It’s more secure than people think.
For chat alone they are right.
For real time communication (like calls), you need global data centers. Hyperscalers aren’t required but make it easier to deploy globally since you rely only on a single provider.
Why wouldn’t P2P work for real time comms?
Could this violate Signal’s security model?
Your country would be able to determine exactly with whom you’re speaking by nature of IP’s being public.
It’s arguably more difficult if there’s a server intermediary, especially when speaking to someone in a different country.
Unless things have changed, calls on signal between you and people on your contact list are p2p. This is necessary to have a call experience like what people are used to. The latency of going through a relay makes conversation more difficult. Yes that does mean that someone on the network can see that there is a signal call between the 2 ip addresses (but they wouldn’t know the identities of the users) https://signal.org/blog/signal-video-calls/
Ah, alright. Fair enough.
Though in that case my earlier assumption about AWS doesn’t hold true either.
Signal has the option to relay calls, but it is off by default.
Deltachat unfortunately doesn’t support any secure email login methods, which makes it of limited utility for a lot of cases.
You mean for businesses?
