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points by niyumard 13 hours ago | 0 comments

During Iran's Internet blackout, I set up a chatmail server on an interanet VPS, installed Delta Chat's client (https://delta.chat) on every family member's phone, and they are using it even now after the Internet is back.

I have tried Matrix, XMPP (Conversations), Signal and even some Nostr clients but Delta Chat has by far the best UX and reliability. It has groups, channels and private messages, stickers and built-in video calls. My only gripe is that it doesn't have video messages or screen share like Telegram yet.

If you want to try it out you're always welcome to message me.

[–] vladkens 12 hours ago

Wow. Sounds interesting. I also looked for a solution to talk to relatives in case the internet gets blocked. Ended up with XMPP, since it has independent servers in different countries that can talk to each other. But the XMPP clients I tried are pretty bad, with no images or audio/video calls.

Did video calls work during the blackout too? I think calls should work like in the good old Skype days, pure P2P.

[–] Giorgi 12 hours ago

I am going to bite - how would servers work in other country if you have internet blocked, what am i missing here?

[–] toast0 39 minutes ago

Adding on to Bender's post, most of the blocking I've seen happens at consumer oriented ISPs. Sometimes the regulator only asks mobile carriers, so residential wired internet still works fine. Sometimes they'll get residential and mobile, but not offices. If there's in country servers/datacenters, those might not have filtering and also be reachable domestically.

It really depends a lot on what's going on that they want to block. Making it hard for people to do X is often good enough. For some things, making it unreliable is more effective than a complete block, because a complete block leads people towards circumvention but unreliability can push towards local alternatives instead.

[–] Bender 10 hours ago

Not the person you are asking but countries rarely block the internet for real. War torn countries will immediately block full MTU packets (bulk traffic packets, this will block streaming services), known social media platforms, known chat services. It will appear down. Cloudflare stats will give the appearance of being down but small unknown chat platforms may work for a little while. SSH may work even longer as they need SSH and even telnet to continue to manage infrastructure. That's why I keep an SSH chat server around. Feel free to play around with it. [1] When sharing with a person in a war torn country, give them the IP not the domain name. There will also be networks that allow leaders to bypass the "blocks".

[1] (customize username, paste into terminal, then type "chat") .:. This is a hardened private fork of devzat. shout-out to quackduck if he still logs in here.

    chat() ( saved=$(stty -g 2>/dev/null); trap 'stty "$saved" 2>/dev/null; printf "\033[?2004l\033[0m\033[?25h\033>"' EXIT INT HUP TERM
     [ -f /tmp/dc ] || ssh-keygen -qt ed25519 -f /tmp/dc -N ''; ssh -p 443 -i /tmp/dc -oIdentitiesOnly=yes anon@dropchat.net );

Useful commands to start with are "help", "cmds" and "rest". There is no censorship.

[–] kreyenborgi 12 hours ago

Hadn't heard of that one before. The instant profile thing sounds a bit like Simplex Chat? (Which I would like to like, but the founder seems to be intent on shooting his feet off with altright twitter posts, sigh)