!!!!!ATTENTION!!!!
Check out docs/API/chats.md
for a description and API docs. Description is also given here.
Implemented features
-
Attachments -
Deletion of own messages -
Removal of remote messages -
Mark as read -
lastMessage -
Streaming endpoint for chats -
Notification rework -
Basic formatting: linkify -
Make newlines work again -
Fix unread counts -
Add read
endpoint for single chat messages -
Check out enum type for notification types -
Move notification migration code to migration and out of the Notification module -
Validate with Mime.valid?
-
Move all after-transaction code to after the transaction -
Chats: change id to flake id -
ChatController: Mark-as-read rethought.
Chats
Chats are a way to represent an IM-style conversation between two actors. They are not the same as direct messages and they are not Status
es, even though they have a lot in common.
Why Chats?
There are no 'visibility levels' in ActivityPub, their definition is purely a Mastodon convention. Direct Messaging between users on the fediverse has mostly been modeled by using ActivityPub addressing following Mastodon conventions on normal Note
objects. In this case, a 'direct message' would be a message that has no followers addressed and also does not address the special public actor, but just the recipients in the to
field. It would still be a Note
and is presented with other Note
s as a Status
in the API.
This is an awkward setup for a few reasons:
- As DMs generally still follow the usual
Status
conventions, it is easy to accidentally pull somebody into a DM thread by mentioning them. (e.g. "I hate @badguy so much") - It is possible to go from a publicly addressed
Status
to a DM reply, back to public, then to a 'followers only' reply, and so on. This can be become very confusing, as it is unclear which user can see which part of the conversation. - The standard
Status
format of implicit addressing also leads to rather ugly results if you try to display the messages as a chat, because all the recipients are always mentioned by name in the message. - As direct messages are posted with the same api call (and usually same frontend component) as public messages, accidentally making a public message private or vice versa can happen easily. Client bugs can also lead to this, accidentally making private messages public.
As a measure to improve this situation, the Conversation
concept and related Pleroma extensions were introduced. While it made it possible to work around a few of the issues, many of the problems remained and it didn't see much adoption because it was too complicated to use correctly.
Chats explained
For this reasons, Chats are a new and different entity, both in the API as well as in ActivityPub. A quick overview:
- Chats are meant to represent an instant message conversation between two actors. For now these are only 1-on-1 conversations, but the other actor can be a group in the future.
- Chat messages have the ActivityPub type
ChatMessage
. They are notNote
s. Servers that don't understand them will just drop them. - The only addressing allowed in
ChatMessage
s is one single ActivityPub actor in theto
field. - There's always only one Chat between two actors. If you start chatting with someone and later start a 'new' Chat, the old Chat will be continued.
-
ChatMessage
s are posted with a different api, making it very hard to accidentally send a message to the wrong person. -
ChatMessage
s don't show up in the existing timelines.