A #deplatformed chat app

I acknowledge that modern chat apps (whatsapp, telegram, signal, etc) provide a specific experience and serve some unique purposes. They are:

• Instantaneous
• Asynchronous
• Conversation-centered, as opposed to message or topic-centered like emails
• Inline attachments, that flow as the conversation
• Contact-centered (or group): every contact/group shows its unique, infinite conversation. You cannot usually start more than one conversation with the same contact (unless in different groups)
• Support audio messages
• Support video calls
• End-to-end encryption (if you trust their implementation)

Some of them also support channels or broadcasts (one-way groups), message feedbacks, bots, etc.

To easily implement all these features at once, most chat apps rely on a single service provider, to which each user must sign up. As already explained, this conveniently initiates a network effect for the incumbents (like whatsapp), making migrations extremely unlikely.

When the first chat apps appeared (irc) the most prominent innovations where their being instantaneous and conversation-centered, allowing large groups to easily communicate together with short ephemeral messages, avoiding the pollution of personal email.

If we look more closely at the above listed chat features, we should note that most of them are just user interface features, and not platform features. It’s just the user interface (UI) of the chat app that chooses to display each message exchanged with a contact, or a group of contacts, in an infinite continuous flow, with inline attachments. It’s again the UI which chooses to only list contacts and groups and not single messages by date or topic.

Let’s take telegram: its app is open source. We could theoretically build another telegram UI app which looks exactly as a classical email app, listing the messages by date regardless of their being exchanged with a contact or part of a group conversation. Or by topic, dimension, etc.

Such a UI would be probably unusable.

The developers of the N-th chat app did the opposite: they built a UI app that looks like a chat, but really reads emails.

DeltaChat: An email app, with a modern chat UI

DeltaChat really looks like whatsapp or telegram: instant messages in infinite conversations with inline attachments, tap to record and listen audio messages, end-to-end encryption. Except that it is basically a chat user interface to emails. When you send a short message to your contact, or a group of contacts, a special email will actually be generated and sent through your email provider, whatever it is.

The generated email is a normal message, containing your text, audio message, photo attachment, as any normal email would do. You can fully access it with any email client. But it contains some specific codes in the mail headers which will let other DeltaChat app recogize the message as a conversation fragment.

Using standard email conventions, the message can also be end-to-end encrypted. And it can contain invitation to join an audio-video call over your own trusted provider (like Jitsi), which will ring on receiver’s DeltaChat.

The network effect is mitigated because everybody has an email: if the recipient does not have DeltaChat, he simply receives a standard-looking email. The DeltaChat end will see all replies as part of the conversation, while the standard-email end will see them as separate messages.

Someone might say that email is not instantaneous. Welcome to the 2000s: it was not, when first chat apps appeared, but it cerainly is today.

What about polluting the mailbox? DeltaChat creates a separate DeltaChat folder, where it stores all your conversations.

A summary of the advantages

• Everybody uses its own provider. No central control is possible.
• You retain the property of all messages on your mail provider.
• Everybody has an email, which mitigates the network barrier for new comers (the but nobody uses it objection)
• eMail is actually instantaneous (and has always been asynchronous)

The Switch

I would stress on the second point. Retaining the property of the messages is absolutely crucial in business use, and was my main reason to adopt this solution. I had many customers contacting me over whatsapp, sending documents, photos and requests. I always felt that keeping that data in facebook’s hands was a liability. Yes, you can backup, but then you need to set up a separate channel for wherever your whatsapp content goes.

I wanted to stop that, way before I knew about DeltaChat. I wanted to keep all my business communication within my business security perimeter, all under the same backup policies. DeltaChat was perfect in that: it is just another email folder, secured as the rest of the email, with the same backup system.

All of the above is not a bad idea also for private, personal emails. So, few weeks ago I finally sent this simple message to all whatsapp, telegram and signal contacts and groups I recently interacted with.

I am deplatforming from any service obsoleted by email, as this one. My address is dp[]mythsmith/it and I use deltachat.

And I removed all accounts on those services.

Happy deplatforming!