Modern XMPP project discussion - 2021-08-26

love the discussion about Matrix in scrollback, lol, it's nice to hear someone else making the same arguments against it that I've been making for awhile now. Looks like I found a nice MUC here to drop by occasionally :)

:)

question: is there an off-topic corollary to this channel? I love to chit-chat with like-minded folks but I don't want to fill up this channel with off-topic chatter

> Holger> I clients are missing support for important features, the reason is missing manpower, not spec modularity. Or design decisions..

giggles, xmpp:xmpp@chat.yax.im?join

is there anybody working on an XMPP client that's trying out any kind of novel UI or behaviors?

Not sure

You reminded me of a project someone proposed years ago... a client for children that showed lots of fish swimming around, and each fish was a contact

As they came online they would swim into the screen, and if they went offline they would swim out of view

haha that's actually very creative

I read someone ranting on IRC not too long ago about how multi-user chat should be represented as a DAG instead of as a tree (as in threaded chats) or as a flat list (like this one) and I can't stop thinking about it

There was a client once where you could add #tags to each message and then filter on that. Sad that it never went anywhere. Would have been interesting to keep track of threads that way.

of all things, Mattermost has that feature lol

Zash: identichat? 😄

No, some Psi-looking thing

lol, no, in my experience it's largely ignored and people are confused by it because they expect #thing to be a channel

> of all things, Mattermost has that feature lol Is it practical? Do mattermost ppl use it a lot? #hashtag #threads #mattermost ✏

but instead #thing is a tag and ~thing is a channel? idk

The aquarium proposal: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Summer_of_Code_2006_Project_Ideas#Coccinella:_an_aquarium_for_kids

Hash tags is something I've thought about for Communiqué, but like a lot of things it's blocking on me writing my own chat view instead of just using a text box.

Does anybody in this channel use or contribute to movim?

Tedious to remember to type #hashtag for each message tho, I imagine. But it would allow some non-linear conversation flows

I was just thinking for quick search, not threads. If you replied it could auto add the tags though

that's an interesting idea

Nothing prevents you from referencing multiple other messages in a reply, to build DAG-ish threads. Except implementation status of references ...

Certainly possible in email, tho I've only figured out how to do so in mutt relatively recently

Not seen anywhere else

I think I disagree with the DAG thing. While I think it makes sense in theory to have a message be in response to multiple other messages (and in fact, I do that all the time with my quotes), I feel like it would just make the conversation more convoluted and hard to read. A tree at least sort of possibly encourages people to write two shorter messages, which I think is likely to be easier to follow. Just thinking out loud though.

“20:54:44 Zash> Tedious to remember to type #hashtag for each message tho, I imagine.”, much less so if your UI is designed for e.g. microblogging, where everyone seems to always remember to put as many tags as possible.

> Does anybody in this channel use or contribute to movim? I almost mentioned movim in response to your question, but hesitated after looking at the website. Still not really sure what it's for tbh...

Would be nice to have some of their devs in here

Zash, how do you do that in mutt?

Can it like, merge two branches of a thread which have diverged?

`t` to tag multiple messages, then something like `;r` to reply to all of them. Not sure how it gets presented tho

movim is supposed to be a fully-featured server & client for XMPP but the documentation on the site is extremely sparse and I couldn't get it working when I tried to set it up

If there was a contributor present I was going to offer to write better documentation in exchange for help setting it up LOL

Most of the various XMPP projects have their own channels

giggles, it is just a client, can use any existing server.

oh you're totally right, that's why I set up this Prosody instance. I totally forgot.

Prosody was easy to set up in comparison 😛

I invited edhelas here, but he doesn’t seem to be on his computer atm.

I don't know if it counts as a "novel" UI or not, but I keep thinking that having a way to go into a Vim style visual mode would be nice. If you edited a message and it's supported it would send a last message correction thing, or it could use a mix of in-band real time text and last message correction so that the other side can see it being edited if supported.

It would require a custom extension to sync whatever you had selected, but I think that would be a nice tool for teaching.

Fun novel ui idea (that someone may have already done, I read about it, forgot, and now am just remembering): XMPPfs. /roster/soandso@example.com is a file. Writing to it sends a message. Tail it in a pane to see message history. Split thst tmux pane and watch ls /roster to get an updated one. Touch new files in that tree to add a user.

that's hilarious

I kind of love it

I feel like someone did that, but I might just be remembering the IRC client

See https://github.com/contyk/jj and https://www.klemkow.org/slcon2_sj/index.html

oh nice, I probably saw that at some point and forgot

giggles: a modern design for windows users has UWPX

looks nice but it's not really what I meant by novel

I meant something really out there, the fish thing was actually a pretty good example

just out of curiosity, if anybody had decided that they were going to eschew compatibility with other clients to do something totally new

ok, where is this client actually?

something crazy like E2EE-only? or only MIX instead of MUC?

what's MIX?

E2EE-only is an interesting idea

key exchange could prove challenging in some scenarios with that idea, I imagine

MIX is the next generation group chat protocol. MUC (XEP-0045 Multi-User Chat) is the current one as used here.

cool, I should check it out