jdev - 2020-09-13

refering to https://blog.prosody.im/great-invitations/

The “magic link” feature provides the most seamless flow. The user follows the link to install the app, and the invite token is magically discovered by the app after it is installed.

is this something smartphone specific, or is there a technic to make that happen on desktop?

lovetox: this is a feature of Google Play called install referrers. https://developer.android.com/google/play/installreferrer

pep., the user tells you its tor, i talk about the case when a user configures the proxy in the client

if he configures it on the system you can’t know anything anyway, so not much to handle there

lovetox: a magic link for desktop is probably possible with certain constraints

Ge0rG reported that MS Teams even does something along these lines

yeah seems i can do this on windows

linux seems a bit impossible

MattJ: I'm sure the "magic" in MS Teams is that you get a small personalized installer&downloader EXE

I can imagine downloading a generated install script

https://nsis.sourceforge.io/ReadCustomerData

nsis is a popular installer on windows

Looks neat, that's exactly what's needed

I'm sure similar could be done on Linux, but it's harder yes :)

Since there are so many possible Linux environments

nsis script language is .. i hate it

hmm, place magic file in ~/.local/share/$xmpp-client/my-magic-file and execute xmpp-client? question is probably "who does place the magic file?"

bingo ..

`curl | sudo sh` problem solved!!

There are so many ways :)

Scraping browser history

Ok ok

Assuming the page remains open, it could also try to connect to a server on localhost

And when the XMPP client is installed, it opens a listening port

And then offers to use the invite instead of the normal account setup flow

Generating an install.sh is a less sneaky way, probably also the simplest and most adaptable

But not quite as user-friendly I imagine

Hmmmmmm

you also need to select your distribution etc.

Do these container/sandbox things support anything suitable?

I doubt it because they generally aren't installed by default and thus have the same bootstrap issue, unless there are distros where they are installed by default and have a protocol handler

I just checked whether apt:// allowed custom repositories, apparently not (well not enabled by default anyway)

Could clipboard sniffing work? Detect an xmpp uri in the clipboard and do something?

I think some torrent apps do that for magnet links

Oooh

but why would it be in the clipboard?

clicking a link does not add it to the clipboard

I think javascript can solve that?

lovetox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Clipboard_API

> The clipboard-write permission is granted automatically to pages when they are in the active tab.