4 ms·

Yeah, any kind of aggregation would help. But XMPP dictates that you "MUST" broadcast presence messages to all subscribers every time it changes. (Many open s

by oofbey 5y ago

Yeah, any kind of aggregation would help. But XMPP dictates that you "MUST" broadcast presence messages to all subscribers every time it changes. (Many open standards are very forceful in their language about such things.) Most chat systems have done away with it. Slack has it, but that's about it. For anything you use from your phone, what does it even mean?

georgyo 5y ago
> Most chat systems have done away with it. Slack has it, but that's about it. Slack, Discord, Matrix, FB Messenger, Instagram all have it to name a few. The only ones that don't have it are SMS replacement apps (Whatsapp, Signal) and IRC. I for one greatly rely on presence. It very often informs if I should or should not send a message to someone.
- detaro 5y ago
  IRC has away-status at least.
- mulmen 5y ago
  > I for one greatly rely on presence. It very often informs if I should or should not send a message to someone. Do you have an example? I certainly don’t operate this way. I just fire off a message. The status only informs my expectation of when a reply might arrive. In the absence of a status I have no expectation of a reply. With mobile devices I still get immediate replies frequently because of notifications. So I don’t rely on status.
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  In my experience away status is uninformative. It's often inaccurate - transitions too early, you can also send the message in the gap between afk and status transition. On the other hand when I'm at the keyboard, it doesn't mean I'm free for chat and can easily reply 10 minutes after I receive the message.
- namdnay 5y ago
  + Teams, Jabber, Sametime, Hipchat, FB workplace i.e. basically every corporate chat system
detaro 5y ago
oh, it's a core thing and not open for extensions changing it or being disabled? That's indeed unfortunate.
- oofbey 5y ago
  Core indeed. The first P in XMPP standards for Presence.
grishka 5y ago
Huh? 100% of instant messaging apps I use daily have presence. Telegram has it, VKontakte also has it, Discord has it. Not sure about Matrix, but I open it maybe once a month.
- detaro 5y ago
  Matrix has it, but it's e.g. disabled on the matrix.org instance because of performance issues.
  - grishka 5y ago
    Ah ok. I'm indeed on matrix.org, I did check if there's presence before posting that comment, and didn't see any. I do keep wondering though what's the deal with the performance of the Matrix protocol. From reading the overview in the spec, it doesn't feel like there's anything that could have a significant performance cost. It's essentially a standardized but extensible REST API that passes JSON objects over HTTP. Is it that the existing server implementations aren't optimized very well?
    - Arathorn 5y ago
      It used to be that Synapse (the server) hadn’t been optimised much, but we have been going through doing so. Presence just hasn’t come to the top of the list yet as we think there are more important features to prioritise. The reason there is stuff to optimise is that Matrix passes JSON around over HTTP in a byzantine fault tolerant manner: every time you send an event you have to sign it and justify why you’re allowed to send it, and every time you receive one you need to execute that proof effectively and do a merge resolution algorithm to authenticate the event and store it in the right context - very similar to how Git works, but with events rather than commits. A naive implementation of this can be very heavy. We’ve improved it by 3-4x over the last year or so, and there are other big algorithmic improvements in general on the horizon too.
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
My client has status settings that allows to disable automatic away status, so online-offline is the only status change unless you manually set away status.

by oofbey 5y ago

georgyo 5y ago

> Most chat systems have done away with it. Slack has it, but that's about it. Slack, Discord, Matrix, FB Messenger, Instagram all have it to name a few. The only ones that don't have it are SMS replacement apps (Whatsapp, Signal) and IRC. I for one greatly rely on presence. It very often informs if I should or should not send a message to someone.

detaro 5y ago
IRC has away-status at least.
mulmen 5y ago
> I for one greatly rely on presence. It very often informs if I should or should not send a message to someone. Do you have an example? I certainly don’t operate this way. I just fire off a message. The status only informs my expectation of when a reply might arrive. In the absence of a status I have no expectation of a reply. With mobile devices I still get immediate replies frequently because of notifications. So I don’t rely on status.
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
In my experience away status is uninformative. It's often inaccurate - transitions too early, you can also send the message in the gap between afk and status transition. On the other hand when I'm at the keyboard, it doesn't mean I'm free for chat and can easily reply 10 minutes after I receive the message.
namdnay 5y ago
+ Teams, Jabber, Sametime, Hipchat, FB workplace i.e. basically every corporate chat system

detaro 5y ago

oh, it's a core thing and not open for extensions changing it or being disabled? That's indeed unfortunate.

oofbey 5y ago
Core indeed. The first P in XMPP standards for Presence.

grishka 5y ago

Huh? 100% of instant messaging apps I use daily have presence. Telegram has it, VKontakte also has it, Discord has it. Not sure about Matrix, but I open it maybe once a month.

detaro 5y ago
Matrix has it, but it's e.g. disabled on the matrix.org instance because of performance issues.
- grishka 5y ago
  Ah ok. I'm indeed on matrix.org, I did check if there's presence before posting that comment, and didn't see any. I do keep wondering though what's the deal with the performance of the Matrix protocol. From reading the overview in the spec, it doesn't feel like there's anything that could have a significant performance cost. It's essentially a standardized but extensible REST API that passes JSON objects over HTTP. Is it that the existing server implementations aren't optimized very well?
  - Arathorn 5y ago
    It used to be that Synapse (the server) hadn’t been optimised much, but we have been going through doing so. Presence just hasn’t come to the top of the list yet as we think there are more important features to prioritise. The reason there is stuff to optimise is that Matrix passes JSON around over HTTP in a byzantine fault tolerant manner: every time you send an event you have to sign it and justify why you’re allowed to send it, and every time you receive one you need to execute that proof effectively and do a merge resolution algorithm to authenticate the event and store it in the right context - very similar to how Git works, but with events rather than commits. A naive implementation of this can be very heavy. We’ve improved it by 3-4x over the last year or so, and there are other big algorithmic improvements in general on the horizon too.

GoblinSlayer 5y ago

My client has status settings that allows to disable automatic away status, so online-offline is the only status change unless you manually set away status.