Decentralization Unchained (Psst ... want a UI/UX dev job?)

December 15, 2022 by olga, xenia

What do indigenous communities in the Amazon rainforest, friends in Cuba, families in Iran, activists from Russia, a monastery in Cambodia, and many folks in the Fediverse have in common?

Artwork Decentralization Unchained

You guessed it: they’re using or interested in Delta Chat because it is:

Why don’t we spend more time on promotion?

Since the beginnings of Delta Chat in a small city north of Hamburg almost five years ago, we have posted little about the wonderful and diverse ways people use our apps. We usually prefer to share completed releases instead of pre-announcing or trying to create hype by boasting about users and growth. Avoiding popularity is not merely born out of humility, but also realism as we can only address so much feedback and suggestions. If we are over capacity, feature requests and ideas turn into pressure and stress. This post is not a pre-announcement but a ride through what’s currently developing, about how we are doing things and about job offers to join our UX-oriented developments.

Sharing web apps in a chat (webxdc)

Sharing web apps in a chat (webxdc) was released in mid-2022. Dozens of grassroots-ported games are now played everyday in chat groups and through mailing lists. Collaborative tooling apps (polls, checklists, calendars, editors) are evolving. No permission from us, or any app store, is needed to create and distribute your apps. People new to programming succeeded in delivering working usable apps via a zip file containing an index.html, some assets and JS/Typescript/CSS as preferred. One of our more experienced and playful developers recently whipped up a chat app that runs inside a chat group — makes more sense if you consider a chat web app running on top of an anonymizing mailing list: suddenly people could do ephemerally e2e-encrypted private communications on top 🤯

Our Poll example app is 6 kilobytes large and, as with all webxdc apps shared in a chat, it features these wonderful properties and UX conveniences:

UX and privacy researchers and hackers from diverse projects such as CryptPad, DAT, IPFS, Peermaps and Libreoffice agree: Web tech combined with decentralized chat (aka “webxdc”) is a rare jewel worth refining.

Movements in the woods and underground…

With a wide variety of users, developers, partners, and co-operative projects we discuss many wants and needs: Supporting emoji-reactions, having Telegram-style larger channels, evolving WhatsApp-style communities, encryption improvements, seamless multi-device setup, and even the holy grails of Peer-to-Peer messaging. The somewhat incredible thing is that we are actually progressing around several of these topics. We just don’t like to pre-announce much. This post here is a bit of an exception to prove the rule 🙂.

Delta Chat app developments are a usability and UX-driven effort and we have experienced UX and user researchers with us. Security considerations play a day-to-day role. However, the “most secure protocol” is useless if few are able to understand or use it. “Usable security” itself remains an evasive concept if we can’t facilitate its implementation in real-life apps. Between usability, security, and implementation considerations there is no natural hierarchy: each constrains and influences the others. In 2023, in collaboration with TeamUSEC we want to perform systematic user and field-testing around security topics, in part following up on the often-quoted usable security study “When Signal hits the fan”.

Never underestimate the importance of testing

Luckily, we have a wonderful testing community with key contributors sorting out issues with users and discussing with developers. One from Austria kept reminding us about specific connectivity problems even if they rarely occur and are hard to re-produce: the issues were fixed the last week, which increased resiliency for everyone. Did you know that most Delta Chat features are first tested on a Caribbean island? Some were originally developed in the DeltaLab app: a friendly fork of Delta Chat Android only available in the Cuban app store.

Ways out and around the dreaded onboarding problem

Using a pre-existing e-mail account is one of Delta Chat’s core features, but also happens to be an impediment for many when getting started with Delta Chat. Supplying the e-mail address and password is enough for autoconfiguration to quickly succeed, but not without problems and, although plenty of e-mail providers work with Delta Chat, several have unnecessary limitations and complications. We are experimenting with single-click or QR-code based sign-up that quickly bootstraps a working e-mail account and configures it with Delta Chat. A newly joining sysadmin has setup a new server in an hour and onboarded a couple of friends, now all happily using Delta Chat.

Some Delta Chat testers sitting on the ground

We have several ongoing efforts to launch what we call Automatic Accounts: Any Delta Chat user on any platform could choose to get a single-click account with an optimized baseline chat experience. We avoid centralizing platform dynamics by simplifying migration to other e-mail providers: freedom only arises if exit without sanctions is possible (and there is somewhere to go). When our prospective Automatic Account offering reaches its limits, you will need to migrate, and Automatic Accounts have the design goal of making this easy.

The coming migrations

Speaking of migrations, we have more followers on the Fediverse than on Twitter and interesting conversations are evolving on the Fediverse. Aren’t e-mail addresses and fediverse addresses strangely similar? Aren’t e-mail servers and ActivityPub servers both federated? Don’t ActivityPub and E-Mail protocols share a culture of a diverse variety of players and different real-use implementations? Wouldn’t federated social media with proper end-to-end encrypted chatting be a nice twist? What if you could use a QR-code scan from Delta Chat to login to a Fediverse instance, and then have an integrated Web/Messaging experience? Ecological and social contexts are changing and migrations out of need or choice need support, not new barriers and walled gardens.

Our Rust-core architecture (tm) and its UI bindings…

Delta Chat was the first fully Rust-based chat app available on all platforms, and may still be the only one. Rust is a system-level memory-safe language, largely hailed for its safety and efficiency, and ending two decades of a popular perspective considering virtual machines as the holy grail of programming languages technology. Rust enables large-scale collaboration between developers on a wide variety of platforms without runtime-overheads. C and C++ could never deliver this at similar scale, however foundational they have been and are for today’s state of things. Our Rust core implements all networking, message processing, encryption, chat and contact persistence, and offers a documented UX-oriented API for UIs and bots. Core is licensed under the MPL and thus more permissive than our user interface developments which are largely licensed under the GPL.

Our apps and bots use Rust-core bindings for Java, Swift, TypeScript and Python. While our mobile apps use the long-evolved CFFI (C-Foreign-Function-Interface), our Desktop app introduces JSON-RPC (JSON Remote-Procedure-Calls), directly talking to core without a C-layer. New asynchronous python bindings doing away with all CFFI were started this week with first bots being ported to it.

For mailing-lists, SuperGroups, Mastodon, screenshots, downloading, and other fun experiments, bots based on Rust-core are being deployed for both fun and practical contexts. But this post is getting long and twisted enough already so more on released bots some other time …

We are looking for experienced React/Web, Java/Android and Swift/iOS developers

Desktop background image screenshot Our Desktop app uses Web technology (React, TypeScript), currently via Electron, but maybe someday via Tauri so there’s no need to ship a full browser with the app. The desktop app is regularly released and published to Windows, MacOS, and Linux distribution channels. There are many things to improve regarding platform integration, bug fixing and bringing about new or refined UI/UX interactions.

Our Android app is a 2019-fork of Signal’s Java app, diverged in some areas because we orient ourselves around the interfaces of Telegram and WhatsApp. The Android app remains our “flagship” app that is available in various stores, among them Google Play and F-Droid. Our iOS app is a self-development using UIKit and Swift bindings to core. It is the youngest sibling in our offerings and also needs more love.

What we offer and how we (don’t) work

For both Desktop and mobile development we offer 80-120 hours-per-month contracts. Payment is not bad, but certainly not what some corporate entities pay. Read more about our funding sources here. We are happy to discuss situational arrangements and adaptations. Contributing and collaborating happens remote mostly but several of us tend to meet every few months in Freiburg (black forest), elsewhere in Germany (Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig…), and from time to time in more remote locations like Kyiv or Havanna. We typically invite and converse with folks from interesting or befriended projects, collocated in decentralization, internet freedom, and queer fusion spaces.

Picture of a dc related party

Several of us avoid flying, and some are involved in Friday-for-Futures or adjacent activities. If we gather somewhere remote then usually for weeks rather than days, and without seeking much publicity. We try to avoid constant busyness and urgency as it prevents enjoyable collaboration. We aim to arrange ourselves empathically and keep dates and clock time scheduling to a minimum.

Currently, there are around a dozen weekly committers to our repositories, with a bit more than half of them receiving funding either through employment contracts (if in Germany) or freelancing (if international). Another dozen people and maintainers from other projects are involved in background discussions and hack sessions around “what’s interesting to do next, maybe together”. We work with people located on several continents, some of them exiled, some of them migrants of choice, some of them in more stable and resource-rich environments.

Help us to further improve UX and UIs for everyone

If you are interested in helping us and our users with beautiful front end developments, please contact us via e-mail at delta@merlinux.eu with some background on your prior projects or apps. A CV is not necessary but welcome if you have one around. If we determine a base fit, we typically arrange a one month paid test period for both sides. We’ll organize an onboarding group for you and guide you through first issues and peoples involved.

Can’t consider a job yourself but know someone who might be interested? We’d appreciate if you would forward this post to whatever channels you find appropriate. Thanks for reading and helping!

Beautiful Cat with Delta Chat sticker


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