Private/Direct Messages and Federation

See also this discussion about posts and email-federation: https://www.loomio.org/discussions/5305

I'm against this. The reason for only allowing people to send private messages once a mutual connection has been made, is because that gives each person the control over who can send them private messages. If I place you in an aspect, I'm saying that I'm happy for you to send me private messages. If I don't want you to send me private messages, I don't place you in an aspect and then you can't send me private messages. This is an important principle, and is one of the pillars Diaspora was founded on - that each person has control over their interactions.

I can't see any positive reason for allowing people to contact privately whoever the hell they like, and can only see benefits for spammers, trolls and other abusers of the system.

If you've got more information on why you think this would be a good idea for Diaspora (rather than for privacy-abusing networks such as Facebook and Google+), please do explain them.

Personally, I don't want just anybody sending me private messages. Maybe we could do this opt-in style if there's enough demand for it? Check this box if you want to receive messages from non-contacts.

Facebook actually does this really well :) Contacts messages show up, any others go to others box and you can check them if you like.

But for D* for defo this should be opt in.

We're already discussing how best to integrate XMPP with the project on a purely IM/chat level: https://www.loomio.org/discussions/3678

The one major blocking issue is how do you solve for the Heroku use case? Heroku can't support XMPP natively, so people would have to configure and host a separate server on another VPS/box in order to use XMPP chat. For basic realtime IM that's fine, because it's not really a requirement for usage of the app, but ripping out messages and forcing people to set up a new server and maybe even have to start contributing money for the VPS that hosts the XMPP server…that doesn't seem right to me.

@tomscott I think we already voted on the Heroku thing and people voted to not design Diaspora* according to how Heroku works, so we should respect that and ignore the Heroku constraint.

After all, Heroku pods don't have to offer chat. It should always be opt-in for pods.

@jasonrobinson it's sort-of a different problem, now. we discussed and came to a consensus on XMPP as an optional feature. what the OP is describing here is more of a required feature, wherein we are dropping support for anyone who can't run an XMPP server. that just seems like the wrong way to encourage more people to set up pods. not to mention that AFAIK joindiaspora.com is hosted (sponsored) on Heroku, so any features we add won't be immediately available on the reference implementation of our pod. totally ignoring Heroku as a host and going about our business with a complete disregard for how it works is not feasible.

And if a pod such as jd.com really wants to have the optional chat feature, they can always move host from Heroku to another host. As Jason says, it was decided that we shouldn't develop around a particular service which some podmins choose to use, and I think that's an important principle.

I think there are problems with the proposal other than incompatibility with Heroku, as I explained before.

Let's focus on email here and don't go out of topic. I personally this is an interesting idea (i already thank about it years ago, discussing with a friend): emails are completely decentralized and work very well, why do not use it for diaspora*? I even think about building the complete federation on SMTP instead of Salomon. Now that the federation becomes a separated part of the code (thanks to @florianstaudacher ) it would be awesome to try it on a fork.

Anyway, about the particular use case of private message, implementing it using SMTP instead of our own protocol is a good idea in my opinion: maximum of interoperability, not so hard to do (some pods already allow to redirect from the handle to an email) but maybe a little big, even if pods already send emails, don't know if add that implicates to integrate a mail server to diaspora...

From the user point of view, I disagree with @goob : everybody can send you emails, yeah, there is spam, but does this really annoying you? I don't think so. Being contactable by e-mail by anybody is a good thing imo.

Imagine, diaspora is embedding an smtp server, that means your handle becomes a real e-mail address. First, no need to another address to receive notifications, etc (it offers freely a privacy respectful email address, and that's nice, bye bye gmail), email address which can be used to everything like any traditional email. Moreover, the private message of diaspora just becomes a webmail for this address, you'll be able to consult it everywhere. In the other hands, you can check your emails (so private message and more) from your mobile or thunderbird easily.

I personally love this idea and don't see a problem to be contactable by anyone having an email, even the non-diaspora people. Moreover, we can easily put a filter which will block everything which is sent by a non-contact.

The only problem I see here (and it's not a small one): it implicates to integrate an SMTP server to Diaspora, and this is pretty huge.

Making this an opt-in (or opt-out) feature would be a great solution in my opinion.

OK, so there are a number of reasons why I think it is important why you should be able to contact someone who is not already sharing with you:

a) To tell them about yourself, why you're trying to get in touch with them, and why you might want to be 'friends'/'contacts'.

b) To contact someone whose post you've seen (maybe in a public hashtagged discussion) about what they've said, maybe with some private information, perhaps with something specific that they've requested people to contact them about. In certain wikileaks type scenarios, you might now even want to comment publicly saying 'add me to an aspect'.

• because currently it is not clear to diaspora users that you have to choose to share with them (outward communication) to be able to receive messages from them (inwards communication).

• Lastly, because I see diaspora not as just a plaything social network, but as part of a wider project for a decentralised web. Currently many people use facebook increasingly as an alternative to email.I think that's a really bad thing,but we have to see how people are using it and why - and one of the reasons is because it is a good way of people contacting people. I think diaspora will fail if it cannot be part of an alternative to this.

@flaburgan - I have no particular knowledge so can't comment here but implementing an smtp server I can imagine is a big issue!