On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 1:23 PM, Tom Ritter <[email protected]> wrote: > On 20 August 2014 12:33, Joseph Bonneau <[email protected]> wrote: > > *We discussed some of the challenges around group chat and why it is > > fundamentally different than 2-party chat. Most of the room yawned at > this > > discussion. The feeling was that 2-party chat still is predominant (and > > probably will continue to be). We may need stronger evidence that users > > really care about multi-party chat to justify the high complexity this > adds > > to messaging protocols (which raises the possibility of bugs and has a > real > > security cost). We could also use stronger evidence of what UX users > > actually want out of a multi-party chat client. > > I'm surprised by this, it isn't actually my experience. But perhaps > the issue isn't that a majority of people use group chat, but that a > majority of people expect group chat to be available if they want to > use it. GChat, Facebook Chat and iMessage all have group chat > functionality and if one were to remove it, I'm not sure people would > be happy.
As I said, that's not my opinion. I've certainly operated under the assumption that group chat is an important problem that must be solved in the long run. I think it's a good perspective though-if users very rarely have sensitive multiparty chats, it may not be worth building around this case if it distracts us from solving the 99% case well. Not supporting multiparty chat at all may be a bad choice if people end up switching to something insecure because they want a group chat. But it might be worth discussing simpler models like pairwise two-party chat which is vulnerable to a malicious participant re-ordering messages. What if people rarely have group chats, and when they do it's typically with a small group of people they generally trust? It would of course be nice to have some data on what use cases people actually want and would use.
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