The feature is self-explanatory, given the popularity of this type of feature present on WhatsApp and various social media.
I don’t think that this feature fits well in to the deltachat eco system.
The encyption is not the problem, but sending this to everyone in you contact list will be considered spam by the email users and because it contains mostly images/small videos it will waste much data.
So technically its possible, but I don’t think it would be a good idea, because it adds too much complexity.
So its out of scope for delta chat in my opinion.
I think this feature would fit better in opensource social media such as https://pixelfed.org/, https://joinmastodon.org/ or https://diasporafoundation.org/
there was the idea to use the “footer” (from settings/my-profile) as sort of a status text (in the sense of the “old” whatsapp-status)
currently, it is only shown in non-deltas, however, we could also show that in the contact’s profile.
updates would be come along with normal messages, so no explicit message is sent out for that.
maybe that would be a beginning, to have at least a thing as a “motto of the day” , some additional hints etc. but, also here, as far as i know, currently, no one is working on that.
I initially thought of this feature as a form of protest. I read on your blog “New Study on Multi-tool and Organizational messenger usage” and thought how interesting a tool similar to WhatsApp status would be to show for all contacts images and videos of protests, other texts calling people to protest and etc. ; but the essence of this feature is actually aimed at social media.
I implemented it in
wow! wow! wow!
Currently status is associated with a contact. It is just the last signature received from the user.
There is no “Chat status” and it’s not clear what it maps to in conventional email. We can of course implement it for DC only, as a header, but that would be yet another incompatibility to classic email clients.
It probably makes sense to implement “pinned posts”, saved and resent to all the new group members, but that should be another Feature request.
The feature has been merged into Android and will be available in the next nightly:
There is a way to mimic WhatsApp’s status feature quite well with DC.
To do this, one first have to create a broadcast list and select the recipients.
After that, disappearing messages must be set to 24 hours
A cloud service is also required. That shouldn’t be a problem as many email accounts have one.
Usually these services allow creating a temporary link for files in the cloud.
So one create such a link for selected images in the cloud and send it via broadcast list.
Recipients can now see the 24 hour link in their chat history.
By clicking on it, the images will be displayed in the browser.
In my experience, the timer only affects messages sent via broadcast list and not normal messages sent to people on the list.
With GMX it looks like this:
Some services also allow slide shows:
A while ago I wanted to propose a custom message type for it.
These link mails from all DC contacts would then be displayed in a separate list and not in the normal chat history and would disappear after 24 hours, similar to WhatsApp.
However, I feared that this would be too cumbersome for broadcasters since the links would have to be created outside of DC. I also had security concerns because many would probably click on the links without hesitation.
Yeah Instagram stories are really just broadcast channels with 24 hour expiration. The rest is a UX detail. Sort them in a horizontal feed across the top, ordered by recency. That would also solve the issue right now that channels look the same as chats.
The main question is how do you solve the invites to story channels smoothly. Maybe each profile automatically gets a Story channel where the name just matches their profile name, and each of their contacts is auto-invited. Another UX question…
But why would you need a cloud service? It’s just email right? Email is good at sending html. Stories are just tiny little web pages.
My friend just did this in his alternate client he’s making.
Each channel is a story-like circle across a horizontal feed across the top. New posts in those channels re-sort the feed. There’s a little “reply” text field on the bottom of each story you’re viewing (which is perfect because right now the private reply is all you can do to interact with channels anyway).
