Hi, I’ve been reading (parts of) MIX again. I might share some stray observations at some point (Like why isn’t the submission-id not reusing the origin-id) but those are all rather insignificant.
Today I want to discuss something else that has been worrying me for quite a while. I have mentioned that in a thread somewhere but it didn’t get a lot of attention. I understand that a lot of the core designers of MIX are mostly after 'something like Slack' or other work place-y things. However I’m coming from a 'personal IM' usecase aka 'The WhatsApp Clone' and I feel that some of my use cases are not covered very well by MIX and I would appreciate if MIX could cover my use case as well and not brush it of as and afterthought just-do-an-extension-later kind of problem. (By the way I’m not just talking as the developer of Conversations here but as someone who implements 'proper' closed source non-federating WhatsApp clones.) So let me paint you a picture of my use case. In WhatsApp the user creates an account; usually tied to a phone number - but that’s not the point; and sets a Name and an Avatar. That name isn’t unique. It would be pretty stupid if WhatsApp would prevent me from calling myself 'Daniel' and would force me to call myself 'Daniel12345'. That name and avatar is my identity on that chat system. When I’m in a group chat with someone I’m still holding on to that identity. People in that group chat expect to see that name and that avatar. So when it comes to MUC my 'Identity Name' doesn’t map to MUC nick names. MUC Nick names are unique. My identity name might not be. So usually when I create WhatsApp-like group chats I set the nick to something unique (most of the times the local part of my JID) and then simply never display it but gather the 'true identity' by other means. (Those other means can become pretty complicated and hacky) So MIX in that regard is pretty close to MUC in that nick names are unique for example. At least they are are somewhat optional. They are not as much second class citizens as I would hope they would be - but at least they are optional enough that I can ignore them. But if I ignore them I have to discover the true identity of a JID somehow. (That is display name (stored in a PEP node for example) and avatar. In previous talks about MIX we have discussed creating 'avatar' and other nodes on the mix channel. However even if we have those it would basically mean that if I change something on my avatar or display name I would then need to change them on every MIX channel I’m joined in. That is pretty bad. So one wild idea would be to do some automatic PEP subscription thing. So the PAM - who knows what real JIDs I’m in channels with - would automatically subscribe me to their PEP nodes. And only once per JID - even if I'm in multiple rooms with that person - and then unsubscribe me once I’m no longer in a group with that person (either because I left those groups or because they left.) - Something like that. I don’t want to narrow it down to that particular solution; I’m open for everything. However I just wanted to describe that use case - I think it is an important use case - that may or may not be on the minds of the 'people behind MIX' that really needs a first class solution. (As opposed to leaving this to some random extensions someone in the future might come up with.) cheers Daniel _______________________________________________ Standards mailing list Info: https://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/standards Unsubscribe: [email protected] _______________________________________________
