For me personally a status is not important, but it is a popular feature in WhatsApp and other messengers. With a feature like that it would probably be easier to convince people to use DC. Experience shows that it is always difficult to convince people of something new if they have to give up popular things for it.
One can argue that this is less a messenger function than a social media function and therefore they should better use the Fediverse. On the other hand, services like Pixelfed are not encrypted and therefore do not offer the level of privacy that DC offers.
As far as I know, the operators of Fediverse instances can view all information on their servers.
Please correct me if I’m wrong here. In addition, the purpose of the Fediverse is to publish content and not just distribute it to a small private circle.
Broadcast lists are also not encrypted. Probably it would bother many users if their mailboxes were constantly emailed with status reports from their contacts.
So I think it’s worth considering whether a status in DC would be possible.
Recently I read something about shared mailboxes.
These are email accounts that can be used by multiple users at the same time.
Since then, I’ve been thinking about whether it is possible to implement a status feature for DC with such a mailbox.
What might it look like in reality?
DC now has its own mail server and in the future there will probably be more chatmail servers from other operators. When creating a chatmail account, a second one is automatically created.
This is the shared account.
For example:
Main account: abcdefghi@nine.testmail.org
Shared account: abcdefghi_s@nine.testmail.org
The suffix “_s” stands for “shared”.
The storage space of the main account could be reduced from 100 MiB to 90 MiB.
The 10 MiB freed up would be used for the shared one.
This means that no additional memory would be needed on the server.
The shared account has to be configured in a way that only the owner of the main account can store mails in it and all others have only reading rights.
If a user adds a contact via QR code, the address and password of the shared account are also transmitted. When creating a status, an e-mail with the image or video attached is saved in the shared account. Of course it would be an advantage if DC could save several images in one attachment.
DC checks the shared accounts from time to time for new messages.
If new ones are available, they will be downloaded and displayed as a status unless the feature has been deactivated. After 24 hours the server deletes the message.
If a user wants certain contacts not to see his status, DC could interpret the others as a kind of invisible group and forward them a new, randomly generated password.
The profile picture could also be updated faster via the shared account.
Perhaps other possible applications would emerge over time.
In order to keep the server load low, the number of users who are allowed to access an account could be limited.