Because I don’t like the idea of changing what a mode does that the user had selected, I already see complaints about increased data usage.
Yes its the same system underneath, so this would need adjustment. We should upgrade the whole contact request thing in general, also because it gets really messy with many messages and it sometimes shows weird info message ("X left/joined the group"s of chats you deleted, or split groups for example).
For the contactRequestChatListItem there is already an proposal for an alternative way to indicate new contact requests to the user: (see especially the image in the first post) Make Contact Requests more visible
the “redesign”/ux improvement is necessary there as well as described above.
In this case the user chooses all and so its not surprising when all messages are downloaded.
I don’t know the exact logic of when contact requests are downloaded, but I think they are handled like other messages, only that they are stored in the “deaddrop/contactrequest”-pseudo-chat.
I believe we should think about how we can improve this, maybe create the chats (give them some kind of deadrop attribute) so that the contact requests could be chats instead of messages.
But its also important to look whether a mini change could already bring an improvement, so a recent suggestion (I believe I heard it from @r10s) was to only show the last message of a contact request person/thread/chat) that would already clean up the contact request chat a fair bit.
I don’t do much core development currently so I don’t know the exact inner workings in this area.
Also we’re touching too much topics at the same time so lets identify them and split them up into their own smaller feature proposals.