Another idea: “stories” app
You know, like Instagram, WhatsApp, now Telegram, Signal.
Though I think it’s not really going to be as capable and useful as built-in stories can be because you rarely have a group chat that has all the people that you would like to see your story. E.g. you don’t have a group chat that has your school friends and university friends together.
Which is making me think of per-account instead of per-chat webxdc apps
TOTP 2FA app, shared with users in the chat.
Inspiration was telegram, which has a mini app for this now, that stores secrets on telegram servers (probably in plain text), we can do this too, but encrypted (if your chat is encrypted) and usable to share tokens with a whole group.
Could additionally be protected/encrypted by a password that you type in to unlock for added security in unencrypted group chats.
design we can copy from google authenticator,
and we could use these lib otplib - npm and yjs?
Maybe it would be possible to develop a webxdc app for this purpose that accesses a Pixelfed account and displays it in the internal browser. This way, other people’s inboxes wouldn’t be cluttered up. Not everyone wants to see the status of a contact.
you can actually create a broadcast list with all the contacts you want, it will work as expected they will not see each other in the group, instead they will receive the app in a read-only “channel” (mailing list) that could be named “WofWca’s stories” then they can only see and not modify the app which is what you want, a read-only stories, the problem is that these broadcast are unencrypted currently, so yeah more native integration in delta chat core would be nice
btw, in Durov’s channel he confessed that Telegram team really didn’t like or want to add stories at the beginning, more in Telegram where channels where already possible. even then they added it in the end because the big demand from the users, most of the contact requests for them was requesting to add these stories, like it or not, it is a fact most people like them and they are kind of a personal channel without too much compromise (auto-deletion of messages and sharing only with family and friends, people opt-in to see your “channel”/stories etc in your profile without cluttering they chat-list etc.)
I made one:
There is an Automerge-based Pixelpusher app at GitHub - automerge/pixelpusher: pushin' pix
Announcement: Pixelpusher: Real-time peer-to-peer collaboration with React
I have another idea but please promise me you folks will let me implement it.
Werewolf is hard without a bot playing the game master to disabling cheating and maybe webxdc whisper messages (send updates only to a subset of peers, though this could also be worked around with cryptography).
So depends on the scope of the project idea. like should cheating be made hard or is it ok without cheat protection.
Also it is time sensitive so you either need longer round durations or play over chatmail or wait for the introduction of peer channels for realtime messages between peers.
You are right. Perhaps a bot is more suited for the task than a WebXDC app. There is already a bot for IRC and I’ve been a long time player on the late freenode. The name is lykos:
However regarding DeltaChat, if we could have these two things, a werewolf bot would work great:
and without a bot it is possible to know who caused the “X got killed” message also by seen-recently etc so it is super easy to cheat
WebRTC is specifically disabled because it breaks the privacy and security promised by webxdc.
So unless WebRTC changes in the future so that it doesn’t betray user data then this is not gonna happen. Maybe if enough people express a wish for a safe and private WebRTC to the relevent standards commitees and browser makers this might be possible in the future.
Maybe it would be good to post a quick recap of existing webxdc apps as well as the capabilities and limitations of webxdc in order to give newcomers some idea to work from.
Yeah I see. We even have addons for browsers to disable WebRTC for all or specific websites. How about WebSocket? Or some other special transport? Like if per @hpk we’ll have videochat transports in DeltaChat, we could use the same transport, UDP or TCP whichever so that apps could communicate in real time together, too. And yeah if we are gonna use WebRTC for video/voice chats, why not having it for WebXDC as well?
there is sth. at Compatibility - Webxdc
(the page can be improved using the “Edit” link in the upper right corner)
I assume the reason is that you trust the DC app and DC developers but you might not trust an unfamiliar app which your friend sends you, so if you know that webxdc apps are unable to exfiltrate your data, you might feel safer to run them without needing to trust them so much. But only the webxdc developers can tell you if this is the actual reason.
Cool idea but with internet limitations of webxdc is it even possible to access a Pixelfed account? However an “offline” Pixelfed app would be interesting.
Another idea would be a blog for people who just want to share it with contacts only.
Or an app like PolarSteps which is like a combination between a personal travel blog and digital scrapbook that travelers can share with friends and family who want to follow their journey. (But I think that webxdc limitations here mean you can’t automatically geo-tag posts and if you want to have good maps without downloading them on demand this maybe will bloat the file size of the app.)
That was just a half-baked idea.
I was wondering if Pixelfed could somehow be used to expand DC’s capabilities, as it is already the case with Jitsi. A story mode is unimportant to me personally, but it is a popular feature among WhatsApp users. So it would probably be easier to convince them to use DC.
Pixelfed allows users to specify who can see their posts and has recently also offered a story mode in beta, but the posts are not encrypted. This means the operators have access to their users’ data. That’s why in my opinion it wouldn’t be an option for DC.
But a webxdc app with similar function/interface to Pixelfed is still a cool idea. It would be ideal for people who want to share a small number of pictures with friends/family with maxium privacy. But because there is no server storage it might need careful design to avoid quickly filling up your phone storage if you or your friends want to share very many pictures.