XMPP Service Operators - 2020-09-08

tom: you really think that users should always toggle status all the time to match real life? Why would anyone waste all this time and mental work? What for?

No I don't think users should manually toggle status

I just want to know the level of engagement I can expect back from people in a group chat

It's also part of social signalling, like how you read a person's face IRL. I compare their presence to if they've responded to gauge if what I said was not interesting to them or perhaps upset them

It's also very creepy to me when I'm in a role playing chat and there's a couple people who never say anything and just idle, but always say they are online

I wonder if they are datamining or if they are interested in the conversation, but just never get pinged because nobody mentions them

Because they don't chat

Unless mentioned

Imagine playing D&D IRL, and there's like 5 people sitting in the background watching you but never saying a word. You'd probably feel pretty nervous

tom: you may set conversation to set away status when off-screen

Indeed. I asked someone about that and they showed me a screenshot about that sitting.

For what regards Conversations status doesn't matter

It doesn't even have the UI for it

Why it should care?

Because there are other XMPP clients out there that people use other than conversations, and if wall these walled gardens have taught us anything it is that good interoperability is important

I think it's safe to assume that if one is using XMPP, they understand that. Or at the very least sympathize with it

tom: > No I don't think users should manually toggle status Then why do you repeat that you want?

tom: > I just want to know the level of engagement I can expect back from people in a group chat If I'm discussing something in another MUC, am I online or not? I won't post in yours...I'm busy.... And ffs I'm context switching like this a lot of times, I can't come to your room OR others to set AWAY everytime I'm doing something else...elsewhere...but I'm still online...

> It's also part of social signalling, like how you read a person's face IRL. I compare their presence to if they've responded to gauge if what I said was not interesting to them or perhaps upset them But you are not in my face....why compare to that?

Licaon_Kter: I think you may have misunderstood what I am saying if that is what you think I want. Let me clarify. I do NOT want users to have to manually set their status. I do want conversations to announce their presence as away with a custom status message (auto-away) or similar when the user has not interacted with their phone in the last 15 minutes. This would bring it more consistent with other client behaviors. This change would not be visible to the conversations user if you say conversations doesn't care about status. This would however be a very large improvement to other users of the muc

If conversations started signalling my status by default I'd turn it off tbqh. I don't want to alert any chat room I'm in every time I pick up my phone.

Actually....do set policies...hey...kick them if they have C and never away for 24h...I'm sure everything will work out....fewer users but as you wish

Mike I don't see any problems with users opting to do that, but I do dislike that is the default behavior of conversations

tom: > If I'm discussing something in another MUC, am I online or not? I won't post in yours...I'm busy.... ?????

» If I'm discussing something in another MUC, am I online or not? I won't post in yours...I'm busy.... Yes your online I would say

I think we've beaten this to death, honesty. I think it's a reasonable default in this day and age when "away" is such a meaningless state on a modern mobile device.

You obviously don't, so ... I dunno. Conversations devs get the final call and you can accept it or fork it.

I disagree that a mobile phone is such a special snowflake scenario that it needs to diverge from all other XMPP client behavior

There were similar devices available before cellphones were popular that did speak XMPP

tom: > Yes your online I would say I won't answer you....above you said I HAVE TO ANSWER

tom: "all the other" people use Whatsapp... Are you "such a special snowflake"?

NO i think your misreading me again Licaon_Kter

tom: > I'll say something and it could be hours before i get a response ....

Did I missread?

Anyway you got your answers

I think whatsapp and other walled garden proprietary fad services are out of scope and topic for an XMPP ops chat

Unless we are talking about network transports

tom: yeah, use swiping generalisations like "all the other" and $hit ldke snowflake when it suits you.....

well they're obviously more popular with end users so something about their client UX at least needs to be looked at critically to see what they're doing right .

mike: monopolies and closed networks, that's all

All the other xmpp clients reffering to the clients connected to this room right now that are not Conversations

nah accessibility of client software is a big factor. ease of signup especially. can't build a network if people can't join easily.

I didn't lose 99% of my users to discord because of any technical merit, it was purely UX.

Was it though mike?

Or was it purely because discord had a lot of money to blow on marketing and paying popular youtubers to shill their platform

Like how Microsoft Windows is popular because Microsoft of 90% marketing and it comes installed by default on OEM machines

Despite making decisions unpopular with users like removing start menus, spying, and constantly reccomending onedrive

And breaking down, getting viruses

Updating itself nonstop

well given a bunch of them straight up said as much, yes I do believe it was UX. ... and now we're talking aobut windows. I'm out.

I'd bet if if you employed a marketing strategy as encroaching and expansive as microsoft's and discord's you would have just as many users

I don't think you should believe it when you asked and they said UX

I mean take it with a grain of salt sure

But most consumers don't know what they want

What they really want is to be told what to use and how to use it.

And not have to make decisions for themselves

It's unfortunately but it's why marketing gets as far as it does and the reason many things in the world today are the way they are

I'd highly suggest talking to a professional salesperson and picking their brain

Or even if you've ever worked in consumer electronics in your life

There is also an institutionalization aspect to it. A lot of people have used nothing but proprietary walled garden services for so long that they begin finding comfort in it. Very much like a person who has spent most of his life in a prison begins to find comfort in the routine. In not having to be responsible for themselves. They get told when to eat, what to eat, how much to eat, when to sleep, when to wake up, when to pleasure and when to exercise. A free man has to make choices and be resonsible for earning the income to pay for food, what food he wants to buy, where, how to cook it. These choices can be scary to an institutionalized person. And like a prisoner who spent most of his life in a prison is overwhelmed when discharge and thinks about, often times committing another heinous crime in order to get back into the prison consumers find themselves back at the will of dataminers and tyrants

» used to describe a person who has been living in an insitution (such as a prison) for a very long time and is no longer able to live an independent life in the outside world

A similar thing happens in wild animals. Where if you take in a injured wild animal for too long, their hunting instincts could go away requiring the animal to live in captivity for the rest of it's life to survive

Especially from a young age

tom: there're protocol specifics, C isn't breaking anything on that part

It doesn't handle presence states in it's UI, the only thing it can do is adding autoaway when it's offscreen

Tell your users to enable that

Maranda: I will, but a common thing I hear and I agree with is "I don't want it to say I'm online if I just check my phone real quick." Do you, the devs, or anyone else have opposition to adding an option in there to set away after offscreen for over 15 minutes?

tom: send a ticket to change conversations default if you really want

the additional option to set "autoaway" will not hurt, but if it's not set by default, it will not be used by 99% of users

I think WhatsApp's 'last online' timestamp is a better indicator for what you want to know.

(Which Conversations and a few other clients have as well, except it doesn't work too well there.)

oh, btw, there is also "this user has read until this point" feature in Conversations, which could indicate they are at least aware of what's going on in the MUC

Right, that's more useful to me usually. Presence or 'last online' seems to be about deciding whether or not to write a message right now seems sensible (i.e., how likely is it my contact(s) will read it in time). Whereas in _most_ cases I just write the message anyway, and might later be interested whether they've seen it in time, or whether I need to phone them (always assuming it's about something time-critical).

XMPP's traditional presence thing seems mostly useless to me, _except_ that we (wife and me) use Conversations' feature to set DND when the phone is muted. So DND tells me I can write a message without having to worry I'll ring the phone while she's in a meeting or asleep or whatever. Basically the opposite of the original DND meaning :-)

you abuse DnD actually 😀

that's a super practical thing though.

yeah

You *also* know you won't get a response immediately

Which is why I've shamelessly stolen that feature into yaxim as well :D

It's not patented?

you can't patent this stuff in the EU, and I'm not going to travel to the US of A

I was hoping Siskin could implement this too, but apparently iOS doesn't give apps the ability to access that :/

you can't access silenced state?

That's what I've been told

And regarding the "abuse" - back when "do not disturb" actually meant that, it never actually stopped people messaging you anyway

and many people stayed dnd always, which prevented *me* from messaging them

I think the new interpretation is far more compatible with reality

My phone is always set to 'vibrate only'. Now I wonder if I always appear as DND too…

Conversations lets you choose whether "vibrate" maps to dnd, or if only "silent" does

"So DND tells me I can write a message without having to worry I'll ring the phone while she's in a meeting or asleep". I never really care about people's status.. How do I know what timezone it is for the recipients I'm currently writing to. What if they're all different, should I tell the MUC to only send to some and not all?

Ah ok. It's not ticked here. 😃

If getting notifications annoys them, they can change their notifications settings

per-jid notification settings when?

:)

This also assumes people don't abuse, and I think that's a fair assumption

If they do well then you ignore them or sth

There is another botnet spamming people now

Ads for some onion site. It works by sending a roster request to people.

You don't have to accept it

But, the spammer later starts an OTR session

And sends ads

tom: "I don't think you should believe it when you asked and they said UX" I think this is extremely arrogant. Nontechnical folk frequently migrate to 'the next big thing' and UX has much to do with why.

It seems to be coming from a different domain each time. Last one troll.ml

» <Vaughan> tom: "I don't think you should believe it when you asked and they said UX" I think this is extremely arrogant. Nontechnical folk frequently migrate to 'the next big thing' and UX has much to do with why. I think that is a largely incomplete and naive view Vaughan. Where users will say oh this UI is better than some other one, but really that's got maybe 2% to do with it. Where most of the migration happens because of their psychology being exploited

Again consumers don't know what they want

They just want someone to sell them something and tell them what to use

Especially when it comes to computers

Most people don't think like you or I

In fact, thinking is painful for them. They think thinking is a chore

tom: I'm not saying UX is the whole story. Network effects have a lot to do with it too. But much of what you are saying is arrogant as you credit others with little intelligence or agency. There may be people in this very room who have only recently discovered xmpp and think it might be, at least in part, a path to freedom. Yet what they'll discover is that they are held in contempt by some members of this community. If you want to win converts, best not start by insulting them.

I'm merely stating an observation. If it offends someone, that's not the intention but not something I can do anything about either.

Kudos to anyone searching for a path to freedom

People like apps with better ux

If you disagree, I emplore you to try an experiment

Don't sell XMPP as a path to freedom to most people

Sell it to them like they are expected to use it

And magically they will try to conform

All that really matters is the perception of popularity

Not freedom, for most people

What do you recommend for xmpp desktop client !

?

Really depends on who I'm recommending to

To a power user or someone looking for freedom I'd recommend psi+ or Profanity

To someone just looking to conform I'd just tell them to use Dino

Profanity has omemi ?

Omemo

Yes

Gajim is working well

But has awful gui

I would agree with you. I used Gajim until 0.16.9

Then held out there for a while until switching to psi+

I don't recommend gajim anymore because I know it's heavily associated with GNOME3 since 1.x and I associate GNOME3/gnome foundation with Embrace Extend Extinguish tactics

At least it's compliant though and implements a fair number of xeps

Why gnome3 with e3 tactics ?

Based on how they treat other projects. Look through the bug tracker of deluge for instance where they were asking if deluge was a 'GNOME APP'

And the refusal to implement window manager agnostic standards

Search "MPV drops GNOME support"

Requiring systemd to build

For a while, and program that used GTK3 has forced client-side-decorations

In general the GNOME ecosystem doesn't play well with the GNU and BSD ecosystem. Kind of it's own thing

There is a lot of rough edges like this that usually have to be patched downstream. But if your a package maintainer, or you use a more bleeding edge distribution you deal with these problems first hand