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.
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.
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?