nine.testrun.org is owned by deltachat developers. it is about as trustworthy as, say, matrix.org. the only better alternative would be self hosting.
the question is not what is the best, most secure, most private, option, but what has the right balance between easy onboarding, ease of use, security and privacy. and maybe deltachat is not the best possible, but it is pretty good. remember, when security and privacy are to onerous then you don't have security or privacy because people will refuse to use the tool.
>the only better alternative would be self hosting.
Which doesn't really work in practice. The closer you move to the user, the more the threat of creepy buddy watching over metadata of people they know grows. Medium sized institution like university or a company might run their own, but that's also somewhat risky.
>the question is not what is the best, most secure, most private, option, but what has the right balance between easy onboarding, ease of use, security and privacy.
No. The question is, given an architecture that imposes fundamental limitations on what can be achieved, which tools under that domain have best privacy by design system, where the UX and features are maximized with ingenious design, is the best.
Fundamental architectural limitations:
Does Delta Chat use data diodes? No? Then it can't have key exfiltration security, but it can have message forwarding.
Does Delta Chat use Tor Onion Services? No? Then it can't have proper metadata privacy for users' identity from the server, but it can have offline messages.
These are fundamental trade-offs.
DeltaChat is content-private by design. It might be metadata-private by policy (internal policy that server on nine.testrun.org does not collect metadata), but until that is tested in court like Signal is, we can't know for sure.
Signal is content-private by policy. Cwtch uses Tor Onion Services so it's metadata-private by design.
Now, it's fine to argue which is the best inside one league.
Element/Matrix is E2EE with double ratchet protocol, so it has both forward secrecy and future secrecy, which DeltaChat doesn't have.
It's only once security is more or less exactly on par, that you should be comparing general UX. Really usable but insecure tool might turn into really unusable tool when you sit in prison for your political opinions, or because you revealed your ethnicity and ICE caught on.
>maybe deltachat is not the best possible, but it is pretty good
It's not the worst out there. At least it tries to do things properly. It's just that given that there's insane obstacle of moving people to a safe platform, DeltaChat is just another distraction. Until it does what competition does security wise, and improves on their UX, it doesn't get the top podium.
>when security and privacy are to onerous then you don't have security or privacy
Sure, but when you're in prison for using crap tool, you won't have liberty, security, or privacy.
It's only once security is more or less exactly on par, that you should be comparing general UX.
ideally yes, but that is not what the average user will do, and it is not what i can use as an argument to get people to switch to something more secure. convenience over security is still a user preference.
i get your point, but that falls on deaf ears among family and friends. especially using prison as an argument is really not helping. i mean by the same argument we should not be having this conversation on hackernews, because clearly we are trying to subvert the authorities by suggesting that people should keep their communication secret.
The closer you move to the user, the more the threat of creepy buddy watching over metadata of people they know grows.
actually i don't follow that argument. it is more likely that my data gets caught up with someone accessing a larger server than my own server. if someone targets my own server they may as well target all my messaging clients and get all the data from there.
The thing is, if there's three users that know each other, using one server run by one of the three, then by definition there is one person with access to metadata of the 1:1 conversation between the two other users. If you are the one running the server, then your buddies are taking the risk that you're the creepy buddy.
The proper way to address this is with p2p messaging, like Cwtch, where each user is running server for their own account. Cwtch also experimentally supports caching ciphertexts on a server that's hosting the group chats that all members will have access to anyway, so there's no peer metadata to eavesdrop on.
well, that depends on your threat model. for me, an acquaintance finding out who i am talking to isn't a threat. a threat is profiling by big companies. and already by either running my own server or using a smaller paid email service, that threat is drastically reduced.
in fact this particular threat that you describe is more likely to happen at a university server where a rogue admin may use their privilege to snoop on people they want to stalk for whatever reason, as opposed to the friend that i chose because i trust them, like say the admin of the server of the local linux user group or the hackerspace that i am a member of.
in fact i am more likely to trust anyone that i know in person, simply because even if that person decides to snoop on me we can work that our in person, and the likely hood for it happening is low because it would affect our friendship. and i would guess that this is true for most people.
at some point you have to trust someone, and the closer you are to that person, the easier it will be to resolve problems.
That stalking thing also happens in personal peer networks. For the messaging app to have any relevance, you're going to want most of your peers in and once there's a few hundred people in, there's power to be abused.
University students don't get to run infrastructure of the facility, and at least in my uni, the old beard IT staff members and faculty don't really hang out with the students aside course environments or support groups, so there's a bigger gap. There's also salaries and careers in the line.
But bickering about who's trustworthy is pointless when there's trustless architectures for those situations already.
That stalking thing also happens in personal peer networks
i am not saying it can't happen, but that the smaller the group the easier it is to assess the risk and the consequences. and for that reason i prefer smaller groups.
in austria and germany hiring students for part time sysadmin work is very common. i did those jobs and on the other hand stories from staff stalking that cute student they saw one day do exist.
But bickering about who's trustworthy is pointless
agreed. it all comes down to personal experience and preference.
when there's trustless architectures for those situations already
the problem is that the choice is not made in a vacuum. what good is a system if my friends don't want to use it. for almost my contacts i had to follow the choices of the others. very rarely someone followed my choice. and when they do i have to consider their technical capacity and tolerance to difficulties.
the question is not what is the best, most secure, most private, option, but what has the right balance between easy onboarding, ease of use, security and privacy. and maybe deltachat is not the best possible, but it is pretty good. remember, when security and privacy are to onerous then you don't have security or privacy because people will refuse to use the tool.