https://delta.chat/en/help#e2ee
I gave it another try last week
- the onboarding automatically creates a username/password on the server you selected, more details here: https://chaos.social/@delta/115479392746850836
- E2EE using openpgp
- fast and light on resources
It’s still in development, it’s not a fully fledged replacement for Matrix yet, but I could see it replace Signal at some point.
For a list of servers: https://chatmail.at/relays
I just got my friends and family to actually use Signal and even promote it to others. If I switched to Deltachat or Matrix, they’d tell me to fuck off. My hope is that signal moves towards Matrix’s model. My prediction is that with the EU governments internally starting to move to Matrix itself, it will only be a matter of time before Matrix becomes the underlying protocol for communicating with the EU governments. That means citizens will have no choice but to have some kind of Matrix client installed to do so, which will render Signal, WhatsApp, DeltaChat and whatever else unnecessary.
DeltaChat is a stopgap for email. WhatApp is a scourge and Signal is driver for security.
The major advantage of Matrix (not sure if DeltaChat can do the same) is the support for a lot of bridges, and how easily can you host it.
Matrix has a really good and robust ansible project, with which you can set up your own sever in like an hour, assuming you have a place where to host it (I use Hetzner for like 7$ a month) and a domain. Adding bridges and configuring the ansible only needed like changing 5 config lines at most, and it’s very well documented. It’s also super easy to maintain, I “just update” every few weeks and it’s so robustly written, that it lets me know what changed and what config I need to update. I never had an issue with it in the past two or three years I’ve been using it.
And then the bridges - I did not need to convince others to switch, becuase I run Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and Messenger bridges on my Matrix server, which does bridge all of the apps into my Matrix server. Sure, they still get your conversations data, but at least you don’t have to have their spyware installed on your phone/PC and have it all consolidated into one Matrix app. I can also slowly convince people to switch to the more secure messengers like Signal, but don’t have to drop contact if they decide not to.