Private/Direct Messages and Federation
Nick
Public
Seen by 71
Hi, I'd like to start a discussion on Diaspora's private messaging and federation with other services.
Currently diaspora only allows you to message a contact who is already sharing with you - which is highly limiting. I would be in favour of it allowing you to contact any user - though this obviously brings up issues about spam ( a discussion of which is starting up separately for posts, rather than messages, here: https://www.loomio.org/discussions/4686). I would be in favour of a facebook type way of dealing with this which has a main and an 'other' inbox for messages from people who are not already contacts.
However I think we need to go beyond this and find a way to make the messaging useful for contacting a wider range of people - an obvious starting point for which would be supporting email contacts (email contacts could also be included in aspects similiar to the google plus implementation). This would I guess involve adding a minimalist email server to diaspora pods...
I guess another thing for messaging to federate with might be xmpp (see discussion here for realtime chat: https://www.loomio.org/discussions/3678) but I don't know if xmpp supports asynchronous (email type rather than real time) messaging? There definitely needs to be a bit of thought put into how diaspora deals with realtime vs. non real time messaging.
Flaburgan Wed 17 Jul 2013 1:29PM
Add them to an aspect which has no other contacts in it.
Write a post, @-mentioning them.
Make the post limited only to that aspect.
That's what I call a hack =P (but it's nice, yeah).
So what about a setting saying "I want to be able to use my diaspora handle as an email"?
goob Wed 17 Jul 2013 5:18PM
Fla, that's completely different, and I'd be more than happy with that. What you are talking about, enabling a user to say 'I want to be able to use my diaspora handle as an email', is giving someone who has chosen to share their email address with Diaspora the ability to receive emails sent to that address. What I have a problem with is someone using Diaspora uploading other people's email addresses, without necessarily having their permission to do so, to Diaspora in order to send them emails from Diaspora.
The first is someone making a choice about their own email address, and is fine; the latter is someone making a choice for someone else on their behalf about how their email address is used, which is not fine.
You can see what I'm getting at, even if you disagree, can't you?
Flaburgan Thu 18 Jul 2013 7:34AM
@goob what I propose (it could probably be improved) is something like this:
Instead of using is own non-interoperable private message system, diaspora* could use e-mail to do that. This would mean that our diaspora handle would become a real e-mail address, and that every email received on this address would be displayed in the private message interface of diaspora. This interface could be improved to allow us to send e-mail to recipients who are not diaspora users, simply e-mail users.
Moreover, we could also manage our e-mail / private message (this would become the same thing) from an e-mail client (like thunderbird) on desktop or on mobile.
But, as you pointed out, this would allow anyone (diaspora users who are not your contact, more, anyone with an email) to send you private message in diaspora. Some people (like you) don't want to receive message from non contact, so I propose to add a setting which would block (redirect to a spam folder) any e-mail sent by someone not in your contact. This would be the default behavior.
With a setting like that, we can easily keeping the exact actual behavior, or choose to massively improve the private message feature.
goob · Wed 17 Jul 2013 11:40AM
The difference is that someone has to discover my email address in order to send me an email. I'm careful about whom I give my address to, so only people I want to email me can send me emails. This is analogous to the current situation in Diaspora, in which only people I have added to an aspect can send me private messages.
It's a question of visibility: in Diaspora anyone can find my account easily, when they see a comment I have made on a public post, for example. If they could then send me private messages, I would find that annoying, yes. It happened a number of times when Diaspora was first running, before the 'mutual sharing' limitation was brought in for private messages - people would send me unsolicited private messages, and it was annoying and intrusive (to use your word from another discussion). If it was possible once again for people whom I hadn't chosen to share with to send me private messages, it would make me limit the help I felt able to offer to people asking for help in public posts, because it meant I was opening myself up to unwanted and unsolicited contact.
And yes: I do find the small amount of spam I receive by email to be annoying! It's an annoyance I have to live with and have worked hard over years to minimise, but it is certainly not something I would willingly add to. And I don't think Diaspora should become a conduit for such unwanted contact.
If there is really a case for implementing this - and some of Nick's examples in the most recent post are ones which would be useful to users - it must be made opt-in, not compulsory or opt-out.
One way of effectively sending someone a private message is as follows:
This is what I've done on the several occasions when I've felt I've needed to contact someone privately e.g. to warn them about something they'd said publicly which gave away private information.