cross-posted from: https://azorius.net/p/qG94yLvqfYjf3l14Ty-The-chat-has-entered-azorius

Pushed a big change to enable group chat.

This kinda seems like feature creep, but looking at successful forums, I think many of them have an irc (or a fucking discord) on the side. Or you resort to an adhoc chat post. So I think it’s fairly important. It’s not very complicated, either.

It’s not on by default, and can be enabled on a per group basis.

But does it fedi? Obvi! Well, within reason, and with certain caveats.

It’s based on the ChatMessage type, addressed to the group, and federated via Announce/Create/ChatMessage like other group activities. So nothing special.

Honk required a small fix because it wasn’t expected chats to be announced. Not sure how other software would react. The fix was pretty simple and obvious, just not something I anticipated. The tricky part is getting addressing right and replying to the group, not only the poster.

  • gabe [he/him]A
    4·
    2 years ago

    It looks very interesting but that interface needs a lot of work :/

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      I think it’s on version 0.2 or something! It came out pretty recently (like last month or so). So yea, plenty to be done.

      That being said, I’m not sure bare-bones roughly-edged platforms are a bad thing at all for the fediverse!

      • For self hosting, a simple and hackable platform can often be preferable just because of how light weight its resource reqiurements are.
      • And the simpler it is, the easier it is for you or others to make it what you want.
      • It’s also probably a good place to try out new ideas. With this being an example. Chat has not received much love from any platform really AFAICT. Awesome to see someone addressing it.
  • poVoq@slrpnk.net
    4·
    2 years ago

    Pixelfed is also adding something like that, and Pleroma also had it for a long time. But personally I think it is a bad idea to re-invent the wheel badly on protocols that were not designed for chat.

    It is not very difficult to link a fediverse instance to a XMPP server and get proper high performance and e2e encrypted secure chat with it.

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Fair enough. Still, given that each platform seems to have some DM/chat interface that is probably misleading to most users in how much it isn’t really that at all … having something more chat like might be better than nothing … unless it’s just removed?