Modern XMPP project discussion - 2019-10-14

https://docs.modernxmpp.org/client/design/#multiple-accounts "Support for multiple accounts is OPTIONAL." I think for a Modern XMPP client, multiple accounts are important. It depends on the application, how it's managed (like profanity -a accountname - one process per account or within one application like Conversations / ChatSecure,..). If it is "optional" the developer may do not care about it and I'm sure, it will require redesign of the application to manage it later.

DebXWoody: this is about clients for normal users mainly.

DebXWoody, if you consider "separate processes for separate accounts" then it can always be done

just isolate them well enough

(okay, may not work for mobilve clients because mobile OSes suck)

but I would in fact not count multi-account support which bases on separate processes.

Some Androids (Samsung?) actually have a hack that isolates a messaging application of your choice and duplicates it

so you can have multiple accounts

Because none of the modern messaging applications support that

"Secure" "Folder"

and most people don't care

all we need is an easy to deploy dockerized j2j transport!

DebXWoody: yeah, poezio doesn't have that, and now it looks very much painful to add it.

same for yaxim

but this is only one side of the medal. the other side is: for every action you want performed, you end up with a "please choose account first" dialog

and the latter is the main reason why I'm not going to refactor yaxim

Ge0rG: we actually talked about something like that at the sprint. There are traces in the pad on the wiki if you feel courageous enough.

Ge0rG: yes but!

pep.: I don't.

pep.: but I need your help with an unrelated poezio issue in a different channel ;)

Everybody nowadays is saying "anonymity in muc is overloaded, get yourself another account". Very well, but if my client doesn't support that it's going to be annoying

And that's going to be an issue for people I think

does matrix support multiple accounts? nobody cares about anonymity in there.

Yeah well, is that an example we want to follow

no

I do care, and I don't want to be crippled by that

I'm a normal user and I do have a account for personal chat and for work. I would like to switch on and off my accounts as needed. Maybe the work account at holiday. Even if you have more instances of an application, the developer hast to take care of handling the files / logs / .... It was just my personal feeling on this "OPTIONAL". Anyway, there should be at least a note about it, to let the developer know about this kind of issues. BTW, i like the idea of modernxmpp.org.

DebXWoody: in any case, it's not like modernxmpp was going to mandate multiple accounts support, whatever people think about the UX bits, it is a certain amount of work to put in it. OPTIONAL is fine, I might prefer RECOMMENDED, but I'm happy it's not a MUST NOT :)

> Even if you have more instances of an application, the developer hast to take care of handling the files / logs / ....

false

if everything fails, you can still chroot the entire application

Ge0rG [10:33]: > does matrix support multiple accounts? nobody cares about anonymity in there. not in the slightest

but with e.g. poezio it should be sufficient to set XDG_CONFIG_HOME and XDG_DATA_HOME environment variables

(and possibly XDG_RUNTIME_DIR)

DebXWoody, yes, I would at some point like to put in "if you do implement multiple accounts, this is how you should do X, Y, Z"

It becomes hard, e.g. if you have the same contact in two accounts

Some clients merge them, some keep them separate

for jabbercat, I want to keep them separate and show the scaled-down (dummy-)avatar of the local account in the lower right corner of the avatar of the contact.

jonas’: you mean it you want to run a different instance of poezio. Which is not multiaccount

jonas’, not saying that's not sensible, but it's still got great potential for confusion

e.g. opening up a contact's chat and not seeing conversation history you expect to see

But you can ultimately blame this on the user for having the same contact in two accounts :)

But it could be something like a bot that you have a legitimate reason for wanting to access from your personal and work account separately

I think I would like how conversation does it with the groups/activity + a tag for the account itself

In reality I think most normal people just don't separate their work and personal stuff in this way

(It doesn't have any tag for the account atm, but the rest is there)

Many people happily use WhatsApp for business and personal communications at the same time

Also you don't need to add that tag all the time, just on duplicates

MattJ, yes..

pep., yes