XSF Discussion - 2023-09-17

Hi

psychhim: hello

How u doing bro? What is this room about?

If you do not know, then I would ask why are you here?

its > Discussion room of the XMPP Standards Foundation an standard you can read at xmpp.org

This isn't a group most stumble on. But if you are interested in what's going on in XMPP, then you are at the right place.

I really loved XMPP! Definitely I will like to be here

Thank you

Then welcome :)

:)

If you follow the link above you can read more and find out more.

Checked out. Getting more interested.

Thanks

In XMPP public rooms, there's no way sending encrypted messages. Is it right?

Depending on what you mean by encrypted, all connections benefit from TLS encryption. Unless your server is poorly configured. ✏

psychhim, it is possible but according to https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0384.html a "Multi-User Chat room that supports OMEMO MUST be configured non-anonymous and SHOULD be configured members-only."

it definitely will not work in this room, for example, because JIDs are anonymised

Dear Members, this year I have the honor to participate the Google Mentor Summit 2023, 13-15th Oct at Sunnyvale, Google Campus. As I will have more or less a representing role (and I take this seriously), I offer to also take your word from the XMPP Community. So if you have any suggestions, experiences or points to share and recommendations, I offer to take note an potentially try to bring them into communication. Last but not least, I may try to held a short introduction to XMPP as technology and the idea behind it I held at the Elbe-Sprint. Anymore feedback and input here is also appreciated. https://sites.google.com/view/gsoc2023mentorsummit/home Cheers, Ed

Thanks for doing that emus !

It's a pleasure!

Congratulations!

Thanks!

That's awesome, thank you!!

Has anyone ever implemented or thought of "bots" in MUCs like slack/discord have? ie they register some /commands and provide auto completion etc, example: /giphy search-term would find a giphy video that matches and let you pick another if you didn't like the first then send it, it would come "from you" but "sent with giphy" or so?

Obviously possible the muc could just provide some adhoc commands form for these or something, unsure of good UI there

Yes, ive always thought ad hoc commands provides a better and richer way to accomplish this kind of goal

sounds complicated especially for this giphy case, would this not be much better implemented in the client directly, querying the giphy API

than telling a bot, to send some giphy results ✏

then some MUCs have this bot, and others not ..

Sure, but not every client will

What stops a client from doing an ad-hoc command when the user types /some-command

Giphy was just an example, this is how other platforms do bots though apparently

Zash: nothing. That woul be an interesting ui

Also, what stops a client from sending the ad-hoc command to a bot in the room?

i heard of bots in telegram they seem very big

but never heard specifically what they do

so i would be interested in simple examples

Some folks were explaining to me on IRC what discord had that IRC/XMPP did not, and my takeaway was only: 1. This kind of bot 2. Entering/leaving video and voice MUCs with many users

Media search, polls, dice are certain common simple examples

https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0439.html is another model that might fit

the question is do we need a XEP for that? is it not rather the people that write bots that are missing, than the spec that does not provide a way to do it

No we have bots, but they are IRC like bots

Yes mostly true. We might need some extensions to ad hoc for eg list of options with images

Nothing super-wrong with `!command` style bots.

My experiments with WebXDC are also related to this

After working on some Matrix deployment I thought about some sort of bot "store", that'd let you build an ui where you add bots to rooms. Probably just need a list of jids somewhere and regular MUC invites.

As long as we don't do it with an <iframe> :)

I prefer to install integrations to the MUC rather than "bots" like that for most things, but certainly there is room for both

List of JIDs to browse we have a good spec for already (disco#list)

singpolyma, that is more likely to be specific to the MUC server software

Hooking up integrations that integrate via some protocol would probably be different.

Maybe what we are missing is a guide and an easy way for people to wrote bots and add them to the room?

Its popular in discord afaik

And to have the UI be good

Yeah

Bots that hook into client UI is also a bit more complex in an open ecosystem.

Discord style bots aren't possible protocol wise yet, really

We aren't missing much, just someone to put all the existing bits together

I guess if you want them to be *bots* in the classic sense you're right. They can't message as you

Are we talking some sort of rewrite?

But the MUC can, but then we need a protocol for integration at that level (which could be just ad hoc stanza forwarding to a "bot" jid)

Words, they are hard lol, we have what I and IRC users would call bots, we do not have what discord/slack users call bots, they are different things

XEP-0356: Privileged Entity with MUC privileges?

Basically all of the slack/discord bots are effectively ad hoc command on the MUC

"IRC style bots" that connect and have the powers of regular clients, while those other system have specialized bot APIs, right?

correct

Zash: right. And irc style basically always talk to the whole room. These often give some UI privately to the user and then message either as themselves or as you

xmpp forms finally seeing some love?

Yeah its as moparisthebest Said the pieces are probably there already. I mean forms can have media and everything

Its just somebody (tm) to put it all together

> Basically all of the slack/discord bots are effectively ad hoc command on the MUC I'm unclear if, mapped to XMPP, it's per room or per server, or the thing we are missing which is group of rooms ↺

Not in option yet, but it's easy to add. I support svg in option already for reasons

MSavoritias fae.ve: weren't you working on groups of rooms

Like with shared admins etc

Not yet no

It was just talk

You did bring it up... Ah ok good

Even if it's installed server wide the action is still at the room level

moparisthebest, we are missing that but are groups of rooms extremely useful? i dont even understand it on discord, slack, or libera/freenode

> Even if it's installed server wide the action is still at the room level Yes ↺

I do commit to write at some point

most of the time i see just an "offtopic" channel (and i guess we see that here too)

But i dont think relevant nere necesseriuy

and like, beats me why people just dont pick a random social channel lol

well, on slack it makes more sense (but companies using slack itself doesnt make sense)

Can you have bots post as you on Slack? What I've seen recently looks like they just post as "themselves", but the command to activate them goes via some private channel.

so basically the functional purpose for groups or uh, what does matrix call them now, is with a bunch of rooms run by one entity that happens to need stricter consistent control over all their rooms

Like we could do with forms or adhoc to the room.

i know on discord it's possible to output any name/avatar through the webhook api

> Can you have bots post as you on Slack? What I've seen recently looks like they just post as "themselves", but the command to activate them goes via some private channel. Yes, the giphy bot I mentioned does this ↺

> Even if it's installed server wide the action is still at the room level Yeah. Probably it should be at a room level for simplicity. ↺

discord distinguishes this by putting BOT next to the name, which has the bad effect of relays on discord (e.g. the matrix bridge) showing all relayed users as bots, and zoomers asking me why i have that next to my name

Could you have a bot that you PM some command and it replies with some stuff, and then _you_ re-post that to the channel?

You can do that now sure, no one would say it's as integrated

let's make the automation manual

i dont find much value in bots anyway so no strong opinion here

Entirely doable in a client today, should work fine with most current bot even.

ohhh you mean the client picks it up haha sorry for being smart

would this necessitate some kind of intent in the message that it should be reposted