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Delta Chat

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 13:13:42

iOS already has it, and other stores will soon have it ... long-awaited, and sometimes assumed to be impossible, features:

- Edit or delete your past messages. Finally you can typo-fix and retract your messages!

- Delete other's messages at once from all your own devices. Housekeeping bliss!

- Bookmark/Save any message to "Saved message". Better chances to find things back!

Your reaction?

(Sidenote: we are very tight on budget and appreciate donations delta.chat/en/donate -- cheers!)

45% Wow, finally. I was waiting for this!
60% Great but wait, how is this possible with e-mail?
7% Sounds good but also a bit scary!
6% Don't need it. But friends might appreciate it.

174 Stimmen, bis Di 18.03.2025 13:13:42

Ivan GJ

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 13:16:44

@delta
You are incredible. How are you able to crush everyone else so fast?

is seriously amazing. Thank you.

Christian Thäter

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 13:20:23

@delta Details please. Will the edit/history stay visible?

Delta Chat

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 13:27:03

@cehteh there is a marker for edited messages but no versioned history and no tombstone. The current UX was done after comparing with several other messengers. Current release is also the result of pragmatic implementation considerations and comes with the expectation that there will be refinements in later releases but based on real-world experiences rather than theoretic concerns (which we are aware of).

Feel free to open discussion topics on support.delta.chat if needed.

Lyyn ☮️

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 13:48:42

@delta @cehteh Why there is no "I actively don't like this change" in the quiz? About "retracting" "your" messages. Please, if you really want to cater to what other messengers are doing (unfortunately) at least add a big warning that this is best effort, depends entirely on cooperation from other clients/devices in the chat and does not provide any guarantees. Especially considering that people can use regular email clients which will never (hopefully) support that.
And ideally I would love to see a toggle to silently disable this behaviour of respecting deletion "orders" locally. This way you will avoid confrontation with your own userbase. You don't want to go the path of "your client will respect orders from some remote party regardless of what you want", right?

Alan

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 19:37:06

@lyyn @delta @cehteh

It's true that a negative answer would make the quiz less biased, but also remember that a lot of Mastodon instances only let you make a quiz with maximum four answers. I don't think my reaction is covered by any of the available quiz answers even though I would describe my reaction as mostly positive.

This has been a highly requested feature by Delta Chat users, so I don't think they made this feature just to cater to what other messengers are doing.

Delta Chat

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 19:56:54

@alandes @lyyn @cehteh feature requests of "edit" and "delete" were so often repeated that we thought that even if someone does not like them they would still recognize it's a popularly requested feature.
In any case, we did what we could right now with providing this often requested feature. We'll address real-world feedback as it comes up -- in particular from at-risk and under-repression groups. Use cases there are often quite different from what people in safer situations imagine.

Christian Thäter

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 20:36:21

@delta @alandes @lyyn

I second that. I like the edit and delete features. For future I only wish this will eventually become more 'bullet proof' like I mentioned. *Without* sacrificing the UX.

This means that it should be clear that either of this features is kindof 'voluntary' because a recipient can always keep a copy of the earlier message saved elsewhere. This should (and must) be transparently communicated to users. 1/2

Lyyn ☮️

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 20:24:10

@delta @cehteh I must say that I do like how delta chat innovates all the time, I do really like that. Even though I'm a bit skeptical about PFS and now the way "retractable" messages are implemented. I actually participated in DeltaChat's workshops at CCC and I'm really interested in where it is going. I'm just hoping to find some ideas which differ from the current "consensus" on how this feature should be implemented. Some apps are going the "you don't own your device" way, with account bans for using "unauthorized" clients (looking at Telegram here), to Signal, which just silently ignores the issue (but at lease makes edit versions visible). I do think message deletion is an interesting feature, for example in some situations I trust the other party to delete some message sooner than I can in some bad situation. -->

Lyyn ☮️

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 20:24:36

@delta @cehteh --> If, again, I trust the other party enough not to abuse this. But in 1 on 1 chats with people I don't necessarily trust I would really love to be able to take it safe and not give them this power over my device, and this should be a valid use case, where the software does what is right for it's user, not for somebody else.

Delta Chat

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 20:37:06

@lyyn @cehteh thanks lynn for your careful considerations and take. One often occurring thought in our discussions is: don't complicate things because of edge cases. In private messaging, we consider talking to an "adversary" as an edge case. Moreover, if it happens attackers typically just use plain social engineering especially if they have time to develop a relation first. Infiltrators and other abusers typically don't resort to technical means for manipulation, extraction and attack.

Christian Thäter

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 20:43:40

@delta @lyyn

Exactly that is my idea behind saying we need more resilience against rubberhose attacks. Reduce attack surface (social enginering ones), make such attacks futile. No bulletproof crypto algorithm can substitute that and i see times coming where people need such features.

Lyyn ☮️

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 20:48:28

@delta @cehteh I'm generally okay when some feature is not implemented because of simplification or different priorities. In this scenario there can be a fork with "advanced functionality", and not in a bad sense. With this feature, though, people (and companies) tend to think that making software "do the right thing" is more important than making it obey its user. And in such situation this fork with "advanced functionality" becomes some kind of "hacking tool" for "bad actors" which want to do something socially unacceptable. I don't think that not deleting messages is something bad. It should be something people should think of as a possibility, not hoping that some company or software will give them guarantees about. And not having this toggle reinforces people's belief that it is "right" and "reasonable" to expect the deletion to work. "On Telegram if somebody does this they get banned, and here I can feel safe too, because there is no way to disable this".

Delta Chat

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 21:02:14

@lyyn @cehteh we'll see what users report from their real-life situations, shall we? Deletion is never guaranteed to work, from no messenger. Message receival is also not guaranteed to work. Many messengers show a "tick" to signal the message is sent. But it might never arrive on any end device. Delta's FAQ also says about read-receipts: "a read-receipt does not mean that someone has really read, let alone understood your message". Reality is a mess :)

Joost

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 18:16:48

@delta well, is it covered by an RFC?

bjoern

Föderation EN Mo 17.03.2025 18:42:00

@Jhelberg @delta in theory, it is covered by RFC 2076, 3.6 which we were using in the first place. in practise, it turns out that that part was used in the past for slightly different things. to not mix that up, we went for a dedicated header.

see and maybe join discussion at github.com/chatmail/core/pull/