I’m working on a custom chatmail client and one thing that I’m thinking about is making it less intimidating to create and use channels (that’s a different topic though).
Anyway, Instagram has a feature called Notes https://help.instagram.com/427590629371317/
They look like this:
They’re little short texts that appear at the top of the conversations list in the messaging screen. The idea is to encourage connection and conversation without “flexing” or “looking cool” etc. It’s just one note at a time. When you type one, it replaces the last one.
I think I can achieve this by
- giving each new user a Notes channel by default (some consistent naming like _notes or something)
- putting that somewhere on their profile (maybe in the bio section with a little key:value type format)
- upon connection, people can subscribe to the channel by default (if using the same app of course, but it’ll be in their bio if not)
- then the channel just has one message. Every time you write a new note, it’s just an edit of the previous one
- subscribers can send a few reactions on your note or reply to it (goes to your DM)
Any thoughts on this implementation? As far as I know, there are no limits on the number of edits a message can have. New subscribers would need to be resent the message upon subscribing, but channels already do that now. So I think it’s technically viable at worst and actually a really good implementation at best. I’m not clear though on how notifications and updates are pushed regarding edits though.
I’m sure the questionable parts of my implementation would be the “auto creating the channel” and “auto subscribing” bits. But it would all remain backwards compatible (only a bit ugly having a channel link in your bio)