6 ms·

> Know anyone? My family tests this type of software often enough. I know my daughter, [[j3d1h]], desperately hopes for a secure replacement to Discord for her

by h0p3 3y ago

> Know anyone? My family tests this type of software often enough. I know my daughter, [[j3d1h]], desperately hopes for a secure replacement to Discord for her [[friend]] groups. She's sitting on the couch with me right now writing up what she's missing most in your software. Here is what she said: ``` just my opinion, man -how are profiles going to work? do you have an individual username for each community, or will your profile eventually be the same across all the communities you're in? -profiles you can customize to servers *can be* useful, so long as you can still trace them back to the user's actual profile. otherwise that might enable masquerading as other users -users able to mark as invisible (appearing offline without actually being so)? good to have in many situations imo, obscuring information from people who may be a danger to you -how is name collision handled? in a large community, you're bound to have a few people who want the same name (and i get it, your screen name can be very personal) -discord's old solution, a username and 4 digit id (e.g. felix#1234), seemed convenient and effective to me, but there must be tons of solutions; i like having a way to easily distinguish two users with the same screen name -personally blocking users you are uncomfortable interacting with, kicking users from communities vs. banning repeat offenders in a more permanent way, temporarily muting a spamming user? -kicking vs. banning can be an important distinction; i'd rather kick you if you're just inactive all the time, you're free to rejoin whenever you like -i like keeping it very, very clear what does (or does not) happen when you block, kick, ban, etc; a user shouldn't have to "test" features like these -important to keep in mind that you rarely (or never) want a user to completely disappear; i always want to leave the option to get back in touch, unban, unmute, etc. -a friends system is useful for this; maybe i don't want anyone i haven't marked as a friend to DM me -selectively muting different portions of the app (e.g. i *only* want to be notified of a DM or @ mention, or *only* notifications from *this* community, or no notifications from this channel except @ mentions) -what if i want to be notified whenever this phrase pops up in a community? might be a question of how easily you can build your own scripts *on top of* Quiet (which i would quite like to do) -are voice and/or video planned, both in communities as well as dms? -muting + deafening + turning off camera, nothing in a voice/video chat should be mandatory (owners shouldn't be able to *un*mute someone, but owners muting others can be useful) -maybe i want to mute that user, but allow everyone else to hear them? turn this one up and that one down on my end? -audio controls that make sense. if there's a layer of noise cancellation, leave the option to turn it off in case it messes with your audio, etc. -taking microphone input as it is works just fine, though i can see some users disliking that (mostly people who don't know how/can't modify their settings *outside* of Quiet) -i've seen many communities in other applications where multiple "owners" existed, as it can make a more safe/welcoming community -if one owner in any way becomes untrustworthy, having someone with equal permissions in place to get rid of them and undo damage can help; whether they can remove each other or not seems like an important decision -question about the threat model; members are not capable of sending messages that appear to be from another member, which implies that owners *are* capable of this? that could become a serious issue if true -user discovery outside of communities, preferably just typing in a username they send you elsewhere? -will it be possible to delete an entire community? can an owner do this in situations where members don't agree? -searching channels (and more advanced searches; sent by this user, with an image attached, in this channel; hopefully accessible to users even if they can't do regex on the fly, lol) -i've found it frustrating not to be able to search every community i'm in at once for something i said; is that feasible? -any distinction between a community and a DM with 3+ users in it? -i don't personally see the point, but some apps have this nitpicky, visual polish, further off details -dark mode, and in my opinion, ideally a way to customize everything more thoroughly -if thorough customization, maybe a way to save/export those settings to share? -maybe the ability to see separate messages sent in a row - is that a message in 3 lines, or 3 messages? just hovering and seeing one line highlighted (and the timestamp for just that line)? -embedding video and audio files in a convenient manner? -replying to messages, pinning them to channels (so they can be easily found again) seem very useful -channel organization and categories; i don't always want the art channels open, i want #announcements at the top, etc. -messages marked as read/unread can be useful, something to carefully think about -sometimes i like knowing that someone has read my message; sometimes i like the safety that comes with people *not* being able to know. if i had to pick, it'd be the latter, users can always prove they have read something by responding to it -client side unread; i'd like to pick up from the last message i read in this channel -having channels visually marked that there are unread messages is nice -keyboard navigation beyond pressing tab is super useful; a screen you can reach to describe these shortcuts is equally so ```

holmesworcester 3y ago
This is excellent. Will read this tomorrow thoroughly.
h0p3 3y ago
> Right now user keys are stored on their machines and nowhere else, but you have to just copy a directory to move them or back them up. I hope you'll consider adding more control over the keys within the application itself. Ideally, I should be able to generate my own private key from scratch, paste it in, and recover at least a bare identity (this can be bootstrapped further). I should be able to hand someone just a public key for any of the functions we may need; these keys should be easy to copy and paste into and out of the application. Key control pedagogy is not fun, but it's ultimately required for us to own the means of production; I think you've a difficult usability fence to straddle here, and perhaps a ladder to construct. > Soon we'll let people recover accounts from their linked devices (e.g. from your computer if your phone is lost) and we may have some social recovery solution within communities for DMs, though that might not be feasible. What feasibility concerns do you have? > Phones will need to be given some more limited view of the network for large communities to remain performant, and we will need to add retention limits for messages and images otherwise drive space will be the bottleneck, but there is no reason why we cannot handle very large communities. Lawd, I'm a preachy sumbitch here. I have yet to find a tool that I think does this really well. It's probably going to be crucial to have not only sane default but strong controls available to users. I am pretty worried you won't escape some elements of federation or at least asking users to rely upon friends or additional devices. Can kids across the planet safely pirate arbitrary files on their phones together? That's the bar, homie. You know whom we serve, and I think you're doing it. I [[hope]] we don't fail. Do not make the mistake that [[Aether]] did on retention, please. Users must have the opportunity to pin/seed with complete persistence. Any tool (e.g. [[Session|2021.09.25 - Computer Musings: Session Fucked]]) that has forced me to lose my identity or my messages is not a tool I'm going to recommend to anyone again. I understand you may wish to minimize the prices the average person must pay to manage their data, but at some level, there is so substitute for having the user be responsible for it. Joining a room without having to traverse and download an entire graph of content will be important. Low-end phone performance (not the mobile devices you and I can afford) is such a hard and important problem that I wouldn't be surprised to find that what you're making at the moment is ultimately a prototype. I obviously [[hope]] I'm wildly wrong about that. > We would love to pursue this if our users ask for it. So far there isn't a strong signal that users need it. Then please ignore my desire. Your task is already absurdly difficult as it is. > It's like, docs are an organization's mouth and messaging is an organization's brain. You care more about the privacy of your brain. But technically this would be a fun challenge and I'm sure we could build something great. It's so interestingly phrased, I feel uniquely qualified to speak on this matter. I probably hold a contrarian position. This is obviously an imperfect way to do it, but I'll leave the tool up for a while; you'll find the link in this room (channel is your handle): ukkmcdhhymxki3plly2w7mkweafijihwhldwnmt6yzwan6rmtuin7zid. > But technically this would be a fun challenge and I'm sure we could build something great. There are other CRDTs we could use. Speaking of a narrow challenge, E2EE P2P Tiddlywiki isn't that far off. You might consider hitting [[Sir Jeremy Ruston|2023.08.08 - TW-Community: Hello]] up (TW5-Bob is also dope; and Jed would understand what you're doing well, imho). > This would probably be straightforward. What's your use case? I provide access to my constantly updating site (almost exclusively consisting of a single ~60MB html file growing at ~8MB of pure text a year on average) over multiple networks, and few are designed for such a thing (you're already got a foundation for something better than Zeronet and Beaker [both venerable projects, obviously]). I [[share]] mutable directories with many folk, some of whom I cannot [[trust]] (I often have to use Whonix). I need a turnkey multi-platform open-source replacement to Resilio Sync that people are comfortable using. I understand you will be limited by IPFS here as well; I can share 6TB of an evolving curated library using just a couple gigs of RAM on Resilio Sync (with selective syncing on mobile), and I can speedily and efficiently share my `/home/h0p3` (millions of files) across my devices with it as well. I hope to be able to recover identities, contents and all, seeded on these networks. Writing a Discord-killer is already a [[monster]] of a task (bless you), but mutable torrents with a solid chat-based community is where you can walk on water where no one else has.

by h0p3 3y ago

holmesworcester 3y ago

This is excellent. Will read this tomorrow thoroughly.

h0p3 3y ago

> Right now user keys are stored on their machines and nowhere else, but you have to just copy a directory to move them or back them up. I hope you'll consider adding more control over the keys within the application itself. Ideally, I should be able to generate my own private key from scratch, paste it in, and recover at least a bare identity (this can be bootstrapped further). I should be able to hand someone just a public key for any of the functions we may need; these keys should be easy to copy and paste into and out of the application. Key control pedagogy is not fun, but it's ultimately required for us to own the means of production; I think you've a difficult usability fence to straddle here, and perhaps a ladder to construct. > Soon we'll let people recover accounts from their linked devices (e.g. from your computer if your phone is lost) and we may have some social recovery solution within communities for DMs, though that might not be feasible. What feasibility concerns do you have? > Phones will need to be given some more limited view of the network for large communities to remain performant, and we will need to add retention limits for messages and images otherwise drive space will be the bottleneck, but there is no reason why we cannot handle very large communities. Lawd, I'm a preachy sumbitch here. I have yet to find a tool that I think does this really well. It's probably going to be crucial to have not only sane default but strong controls available to users. I am pretty worried you won't escape some elements of federation or at least asking users to rely upon friends or additional devices. Can kids across the planet safely pirate arbitrary files on their phones together? That's the bar, homie. You know whom we serve, and I think you're doing it. I [[hope]] we don't fail. Do not make the mistake that [[Aether]] did on retention, please. Users must have the opportunity to pin/seed with complete persistence. Any tool (e.g. [[Session|2021.09.25 - Computer Musings: Session Fucked]]) that has forced me to lose my identity or my messages is not a tool I'm going to recommend to anyone again. I understand you may wish to minimize the prices the average person must pay to manage their data, but at some level, there is so substitute for having the user be responsible for it. Joining a room without having to traverse and download an entire graph of content will be important. Low-end phone performance (not the mobile devices you and I can afford) is such a hard and important problem that I wouldn't be surprised to find that what you're making at the moment is ultimately a prototype. I obviously [[hope]] I'm wildly wrong about that. > We would love to pursue this if our users ask for it. So far there isn't a strong signal that users need it. Then please ignore my desire. Your task is already absurdly difficult as it is. > It's like, docs are an organization's mouth and messaging is an organization's brain. You care more about the privacy of your brain. But technically this would be a fun challenge and I'm sure we could build something great. It's so interestingly phrased, I feel uniquely qualified to speak on this matter. I probably hold a contrarian position. This is obviously an imperfect way to do it, but I'll leave the tool up for a while; you'll find the link in this room (channel is your handle): ukkmcdhhymxki3plly2w7mkweafijihwhldwnmt6yzwan6rmtuin7zid. > But technically this would be a fun challenge and I'm sure we could build something great. There are other CRDTs we could use. Speaking of a narrow challenge, E2EE P2P Tiddlywiki isn't that far off. You might consider hitting [[Sir Jeremy Ruston|2023.08.08 - TW-Community: Hello]] up (TW5-Bob is also dope; and Jed would understand what you're doing well, imho). > This would probably be straightforward. What's your use case? I provide access to my constantly updating site (almost exclusively consisting of a single ~60MB html file growing at ~8MB of pure text a year on average) over multiple networks, and few are designed for such a thing (you're already got a foundation for something better than Zeronet and Beaker [both venerable projects, obviously]). I [[share]] mutable directories with many folk, some of whom I cannot [[trust]] (I often have to use Whonix). I need a turnkey multi-platform open-source replacement to Resilio Sync that people are comfortable using. I understand you will be limited by IPFS here as well; I can share 6TB of an evolving curated library using just a couple gigs of RAM on Resilio Sync (with selective syncing on mobile), and I can speedily and efficiently share my `/home/h0p3` (millions of files) across my devices with it as well. I hope to be able to recover identities, contents and all, seeded on these networks. Writing a Discord-killer is already a [[monster]] of a task (bless you), but mutable torrents with a solid chat-based community is where you can walk on water where no one else has.