thanks! I've been thinking about doing this for a couple years now and yesterday was the day when I decided I'm just gonna start. I rang some doorbells and invited random neighbours to my place for tonight^^

Signal with QR-Codes is a good idea, thank u!

Slight correction to his advice:

Delta Chat (the app itself) is available on iOS, android, windows, mac, and Linux. There is a fork on android called ArcaneChat, but it isn't the only app available and the "official" one is also (as in both are) on F-Droid as well as Play Store.

I also recommend a Delta Chat "Group" if you want a group chat, or Delta Chat "Channel" if you want to be the sole poster for disseminating "news." If group chat be aware: there are no moderators or admins or anything, all users have the same power, this means any user can kick any other user. It's mostly meant for families and friends groups where that won't be an issue, but a neighborhood chat would also likely be fine depending on your neighbors lol.

Yes, pretty much just put a QR code and it should work, it should take them to the app store directly to Delta Chat, and then once they DL and make an acct they may have to scan it again.

You would use Delta Chat as the client for the chats, with a separate chatmail address made during set-up, completely divorced from TBird or your email. You CAN use a traditional email to communicate with DC but it isn't recommended anymore and it's a whole thing, good luck getting your neighbors to set up a new email just for chatmails and set up autocrypt on it properly to communicate with encrypted chatmails, and yes you can use unencrypted email but it's still advised to be a dedicated address and tbh why not just use email if you're not going to encrypt it?

To your users who don't know shit about what's under the hood it'll just look like whatsapp, they'll have an easier time accepting "new app."

So I'll just provide a QR-Code to the grouchat and they are in?

Yes!

Is Arcane available for both IOs and Android?

Oh okay, my bad. I forgot about iOS 😅 ArcaneChat is available only for Android, but DeltaChat is available on both. They are inter-operable, so you can tell Android users to use ArcaneChat and iOS users to use DeltaChat. Or use DeltaChat for both. ArcaneChat just adds a couple features like Markdown.

And do I need a new inbox programm or an extra email if we use emsil like chat? I use thunderbird and I feel like there would be a lot of alerts popping up?

DeltaChat creates an account on its own kind of servers automatically so you don't have to worry about that.

It's really not that bad. As the other person said, the UX is down to the client you choose. It's an open protocol that everyone already has an account on.

But if you can persuade everyone onto signal, then that's probably going to be better. I thought you were saying that wasn't possible as they "don't care about privacy".