jdev - 2025-04-09

Can I get an account on the wiki? (It said to ask here for that) ✏

Is there some XEP or a draft already regarding silent messages? (I wonder if it's even worth a separate XEP or just an extension to XEP-0334). Also, are there any conditions when a notification should be typically triggered, besides of personal messages, mentions in MUCs and replies in MUCs?

Would it require protocol, or just a client feature? Coordinating across clients would need something, but how useful would that be?

theTedd: silent messages need to be implemented in the protocol by their nature. There are similar features in Telegram ("Send without sound") and Discord (a toggle to disable mentioning the author of a replied message) already.

So it's mentions without triggering a notification?

Yup.

Clients will normally notify after they scan the message text and find your name - there's no protocol involved to tell them to notify you; mentions is an explicit feature to do the former, so you could include a name and omit the mention label, but this wouldn't stop clients from scanning the text. If it were implemented, only supporting clients would avoid notifying, but all others still would

theTedd: replies don't really need including the nickname to the message to trigger a notification anymore. Hints in general also don't affect clients which don't support them, yet they're also not crucial really. Currently I don't map silent messages from Telegram in some specific way, they're just usual messages. Having a hint to suppress notifications at least in some modern clients would be nice.

bodqhrohro: you could always put non break spaces inside nicks

that will make them not look like mentions, without a protocol change

ugly in band signaling I know

but so are mentions themselves in contemporary MUC design

wgreenhouse: I already explicitly stated that XEP-0461 replies might not include the nickname at all and they still trigger a notification. Also, silent messages might be needed not just in MUCs, but in PM as well.

bodqhrohro: ah yes, sorry

XEP-461 being able to trigger notifications silently is really a bug that needs fixed...

BTW, I had a discussion in a Russian chat that mentions in their current design poorly fit inflected languages, yet this is out of scope already and I couldn't come up with a technical solution for that which wouldn't be over-engineered.

that makes sense (names decline, mentions in most clients hit an entire word or don't)

moparisthebest: back in early 10s when I used MUCs actively I definitely found it annoying that in high-volume discussions it's easy to lose track of what message I'm replying to. Replies in their modern way are really a revolution, especially given their simplicity, and I wonder why nothing like that was invented before (because there were no stable message IDs?) Even some TUI Matrix clients support them lol. ✏

threads were around early (in the basic rfcs), I guess lack of a good ui idea for them

wgreenhouse: yup, though threads are a separate concept from replies in many IMs already.

Even though threads in XMPP predate all of that, AFAIR.

> XEP-461 being able to trigger notifications silently is really a bug that needs fixed... I'm not aware of any client that has this bug ↺