Obviously preventing people from sending or visiting URLs is a poor choice, and obviously some people want previews. Security isn’t stopping people from doing things, or even stopping them from doing insecure things; it’s stopping them from doing insecure things by accident or needlessly. @9er is right that this would need careful integration with existing functionality like proxying. A bot sort of does this; @Leanderl, does adding a preview bot to your chat not work for you?
@Minim no, I haven’t found a way to add a chatbot to one on one conversations with my daughter (who uses SnapChat and Messenger to my horror). I guess Delta chat is not an app for “normal users” who want things to work out of the box and live outside Big tech’s clutches… There are additional considerations. It seems the target audience are people who’d prefer burner phones.
It’s just lack of developer’s time. Stay calm, and use fresh releases.
Create a group with her, and add the bot there.
I feel it’s hard to keep a nice tone of conversation when reading this. It feels like you think it didn’t occur to me, which, well, is not conducive to a good conversation. When you indirectly suggest the person you’re talking to is slightly less nimble in the use of their mental faculties It did occur to me and I dismissed it as an option for the non burner phone crowd.
- I can’t open the door to my car on the driver’s side.
— Climb in through the passenger door and slide over to the driver’s side. Problem solved,
Leanderl, it is very hard to judge these things when talking to a complete stranger in text format. When I first spoke to @9er I very seriously underestimated their technical and English competence. No offense is intended.
Can you add a bot to any group? What happens when you add a bot contact?
I noted
but it not clearly states why the group chat may be inacceptable.
Personally I don’t like the fact that in such group chat any bot will see cleartext content of all chat messages, and if it runs on someone else’s server, it may be unacceptable. Actually I prefer not to trust any server, even my own.
But I do not know your particular circumstances, what is acceptable for you in this case and what’s not.
But such group chat you can set up right now.
Client-side solution for previews will eventually be implemented, I’m sure, but AFAIK there are other priorities right now.
Does anyone know the address of the link preview bot that sends the previews as a webxdc app?
In my opinion, creating a group with one person or having direct contact are exactly the same thing, the only difference being that you can add other contacts to the conversation (such as a bot).
I would be against creating the preview directly from the client precisely because I like the idea that DC does not connect to the web.
However, I agree that adding a bot to a room means sharing all messages with it, and perhaps this problem could be solved simply by playing around with the DC interface.
In my opinion, when quotes will be added (I imagine that sooner or later it will be possible to talk to a person by specifying @contact), the same syntax could be used as in Telegram for “inline bots”.
In practice, it could work like this:
-
You are in a group and you quote a contact in this way
@contact_name message. -
If the contact is in the group, the person simply receives a notification that he have been named (so this happens on his client).
-
If the contact is not in the group but someone that you have in your contact list, the message is also sent to that contact privately trough your client
-
Let’s pretend that contact is a bot. If in its next message it reply with something like
output: reply, the output is automatically sended from your client into the group (bot > you > group).
This way it is possible to mimic the use of inline bots without the need for a central server and without the bot having to be inserted into the room, while at the same time having a similar experience like a client functionality more than bot intervention.
BTW for now it’s possible to establish one-to-one conversation with preview bot, send some URL to the bot, and forward bot’s responce (preview picture and copy of webpage) to another one-to-one conversation.
I really think link preview is a necessary feature and i used a bot (WebPreview Bot) as per recommendation. But now that stopped working since a few months and i cant find another one…
Does anyone know of a working link preview bot?
Thanks 
Works great!
Is there a way to share that bot with others (non techies, newbies) without directing them to this forum thread? I cant seem to copy the link, it opens in delta (or arcane, im using both) at once. Is there a web url you can send people to connect with the bot?
I’m doing some #diday events and would, if possible like to recommend Delta over Signal. The missing link preview is big pain point for regular people.
I’m On Android/eOS
Here is the link copied: https://i.delta.chat/#92D29C61CC43498EBF5262A9D86DCE5BE3DEBC8A&i=TlI3d7ofYAgnSNQb4UXCout9&s=d-Y6-_oq5Vm4bWwNBf0715Y1&a=xlejbqqfj%40chat.lylapol.com&n=WebPreview+Bot
I feel like I’m missing something here.
- Putting a bot into your chat is literally creating a back door to your conversation.
- Even if you host the bot yourself, it’s still cluttering up the conversation UI with what feels like spam messages
- A bot solution for link previews means that only 0.5% of users will get link previews.
- If you’re pasting a link, that means that you’ve already been to the website yourself. So what is the issue with generating the link preview yourself for everyone else?
It sounds like there are no blockers here, just would need someone to add the settings to enable the feature and implement the url detection and subsequent fetching.
Is it correct that a PR for this would be accepted?
There are multiple issues with this. Here are links to some replies in the discussion above which answer your question:
Simon’s proposal for privacy preserving rich links also addresses this:
SimpleX (the most privacy obsessed messenger in existence right now) allows link previews. Not to mention Signal also allows them.
Could it be that most people in this thread don’t know what they’re talking about?
I never want link previews. It’s an invasion of my privacy.
They are generated by the sender, not by you. Let’s think deeply about what our realistic threat vector is and not just virtue signal “privacy theater” please.
What is the point you are making? If you take the time to read the discussion above you will see that people here are generally not against DC allowing link previews either, on the contrary they are making meaningful suggestions how DC can implement link previews in a way that respects user agency and privacy preference.
This is literally the whole point of Simon’s feature proposal which is linked above and has received so far only positive feedback and no objections from anybody in this forum.
Ad hominem attacks are neither constructive nor respectful. The other people in this forum have shown an intelligent understanding of the nuances of this subject, engaged meaningfully with the replies in the thread, and made constructive suggestions how to implement link previews while avoiding pitfalls.
Its not clear what is the source of this quote or who you are arguing against.
Everybody here already understands this. Its stated explicitly in the OP and multiple times in the thread as well as Simon’s linked feature proposal.
link preview should be on by default and while adding an X button to dismiss the preview makes sense, I wouldn’t even consider necessary to add any setting to disable them permanently
as @Low said this is everywhere even SimpleX and Signal, and it is what users expect, and I share the view that if you are sharing a link you already opened it so there is no big deal generating preview, besides core will probably cache the preview so it is not done every time if you share in several chats, there is no privacy problem here with link previews, if it is not done yet is because it requires some work in core and UIs and there are other priorities at the moment, hopefully they will arrive this year
I also think a bot is no solution and in fact THAT is a big privacy issue if you need to add bots to group
I disagree. I never want to generate a link preview when sending, and never want to see them while reading. Mastodon at least generates “detached previews” such that apps like Fedilab can disable them reader-side. It annoys me greatly I cannot disable the webUI from creating them or forcing me to look at them. As noted above, Github/Gitlab/Codeberg previews are generally useless.
I would prefer Delta uses the same approach technically; if enabled opt-in by the sender generate a link preview as an object separate from the message it was culled from, so that it could be ignored/disabled on the reader side (“ignore objects of type linkpreview”). Give control to both ends of the conversation.