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Today I was reminded that old online chats offered context awareness for the people online: you knew you won't be a bother to a friend who has a smiley flower as a status; and you knew you might not be getting a quick reply from someone who's Away.

Today I don't even know if my friends are online or not. The messenger apps make the assumption that everyone is online, and if not, they will receive a push notification, and will reply to you as soon as possible. But this assumption is barely true. I bet it makes lives harder, especially for ND people

(Edited for a pixel-perfect screenshot)

This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to Juan

I wonder if the decision to implement it in XMPP was conscious, or it was just a copy of what everyone else was doing at the time. XMPP just survived since the times
This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to Nina Kalinina

it is "presence subscription" or something like that, and you're right: it is a standard that started back then. It was "instant messaging"
This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to Juan

@reidrac Teams has something similar but I have been using it for two months and not sure what the Icons mean.

Find it interesting that Signal.org that AFAIK uses the same protocol as WhatsApp allows to schedule messages. Telegram could schedule as well. Outlook emails also offer you to delay post if person is away.

But WhatsApp does not have the delay feature. Maybe because it's business model is Mata data and this removes purity from the data?

@Juan
This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to Andrés (personal views)

@amunizp @reidrac I wonder how Signal and Outlook implement the feature; could it be that they simply don't send a push?
in reply to Nina Kalinina

@amunizp @reidrac I don't know about Signal, but Outlook on the Web will delay delivering a message until the set time is reached (the email will hang out in your drafts folder until then). If the recipient is on a different mail server, the message will not be forwarded by your mail server until the set time. Outlook for Windows will keep the message in your outbox until the set time if you use the built-in scheduled send function, but it also supports the Exchange Server scheduled send mentioned above.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

@reidrac Being able to set your status was very common when xmpp first came out. It's also still pretty common in pbx systems.
@Juan
in reply to Nina Kalinina

@reidrac xmpp has specifications for pretty much every feature found somewhere else (useful or not). But presence was so important that it is part of the protocol core, and even of its name! Whereas concehts like "group chats" are later extenions.

Some "modern" clie/ts don't really make the presence visible, however, or let you control it.

@Juan
in reply to Nina Kalinina

@reidrac
Thanks to this thread I've spent all afternoon setting up and playing with the #xmpp server, #prosody.

I got to set my status as AFK for the first time in 20+ years!

Thank you.

in reply to Nina Kalinina

@reidrac

I was involved with Jabber (before it was called XMPP) shortly after that decision was made, so when people still remembered why.

A big part of it was that Jabber wanted to support lossless bridging between different IM systems. Being able to run an ICQ, MSNM, AIM, and so on bridge on your Jabber server meant users could switch immediately and retain their existing contacts. If only a subset of Jabber features worked with those contacts, that gave them an incentive to switch (and a good migration path). If only a subset of other-system features worked, that made it much harder.

The ICQ protocol had this fixed set of states. One of the other messengers had status messages as free-form text. As a result, XMPP built in both. And, because it was XML, you could also put a load of other things in (e.g. the music that you’re listening to).

I wrote a little daemon (20ish years ago) that would record status messages and push them to a microblogging platform (back when Twitter was one among many and not a clear winner), so you could use a Jabber client to publish microblogging things in realtime to your contacts and more slowly to other people.

@Juan
in reply to JM Horner

@jmhorner it does, especially because it doesn't look like a stolen ID ("hey I'm such a h4x0r I got my pretty ID from someone who didn't need it")
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I haven't logged in to it in a long time... but I am pretty sure mail.ru is still running it these days.
in reply to JM Horner

I don't think so! But there's Nina Chat and Escargot - nina.chat and escargot.chat
This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to Nina Kalinina

See, I used to turn this off. I hate people knowing when I'm online. I always assumed the default is "not available".
I think it says a lot that at some point in the mobile phone era, the default became "available."
in reply to distinctivestatic

@distinctivestatic I think setting it to "invisible" should be the default. Perhaps, G+ style, you'd want to expose your presence to one group of people but not the other. But on a sad rainy day when you really want to talk to someone, you'd set the status to "free to talk" and will enjoy a sudden reach out by an old friend, maybe. Plus, you won't need to assume things about your friends, you'd know if it's okay to message them if you feel like doing it
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Invisible still assumes someone is there, though. Invisibly haunting like a ghost.
I do like the idea of having different "levels" of access, though.
in reply to distinctivestatic

@distinctivestatic yeah, Google Plus circles were created exactly for this purpose, if I'm not misremembering. But Google being Google, and Facebook being Facebook, we ended up with what we have now.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

oh yeah. way back in 2001, i worked somewhere where everyone used IM by default - and if i was in a do-not-interact mood i'd wait for someone's icon to say Away before i sent them anything i didn't need an immediate response to, safe in the knowledge that i could deal with it in step time instead
in reply to leah & glitches & bits, oh my!

@millihertz Regardless of status indication or not, I have spent much of my career desperately trying to convince people to JUST ASK THE QUESTION when using IM, chat, etc, rather than sending a "you there?" and then vanishing if you don't ACK it within 3 seconds.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I still sometimes have to send the nohello.net link

I've also just politely requested people to simply ask the question or provide info else I will assume the hello is the start of some message and just wait instead of responding.

This has had a decent success rate but if it fails I'll go with the link. Once people understand that if they want my attention they need to actually give me info, they start using async messaging as intended.

@swetland @millihertz

in reply to Nina Kalinina

when I flashed LineageOS, all push notifications that relied on google's proprietary code broke.

It was awesome.

in reply to Nina Kalinina

This happens less because of privacy issues. Often you have to turn it on, if that option even exists.
in reply to Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏

@alan which is understandable but also very stupid; most chat apps out there are phone number based, that's a far worse privacy violation
in reply to Nina Kalinina

It's complicated. I clearly don't mind a customer having my phone number, but I might not want to let them know I'm online at 10:30pm, thus giving them permission to ping me with something that belongs in work hours. Same with bosses, etc. Ideally you want to be able to turn that on or off for each one of your contacts, but OMG that would make the user interface too haaaaaaard! Can't have that. simple simple, just one button max. sigh.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I mostly consider status indicators to be useless. I message people whenever and if I'm lucky they can respond when I message them, otherwise the conversation is asynchronous
in reply to [BUG] Lunya :3

@lunacb and this is fine, too! Perhaps even a special status to indicate this mode could be useful: "I'll read your message when I can, I'll reply when I feel like it, kthx".
in reply to Nina Kalinina

@ifixcoinops I always set my status as ”away” where possible, I don’t want to give the impression that I’ll reply right away so that I can check notifications when it suits me
in reply to Nina Kalinina

rant about messengers

Sensitive content

in reply to Anton Klinger

rant about messengers

Sensitive content

in reply to Anton Klinger

re: rant about messengers

Sensitive content

in reply to Nina Kalinina

The chat function of the Google suit has a similar feature. But it resets after a while and doesn't have as many choices. So it's pretty useless compared to what we had with ICQ.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Some third party clients allowed to set your own short status string. I don't know if they showed up in the original ICQ client. But it worked if both used the same open source client.
This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to steeph 🎆 ٩(˘◡˘)۶

@steeph mayve it abused the Away message functionality, if so it would work between clients to an extent
in reply to Nina Kalinina

This is a good time to admin I never knew the difference between the first two options...
in reply to Blackthorn

@Blackthorn I think this is a matter of personal preference. I used "Free for chat" when I was bored and would prefer messaging over anything else; I had "Online" for situations when I had other things to do but didn't mind a distraction all that much. Sometimes I'd start with "Free for chat" but switched to "Online" after having a couple of chat windows open - to indicate that I'm not might be available for a long/deep conversation
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Free for chat connected you with people using the "random chat" function. It was fun, when suddenly someone from the other end of the world messaged you because you're free for chat.

@Blackthorn

in reply to allo

@allo
Ohhh I didn't know there was a random chat thingy! Too bad I'm 25 years too late to try it out. Oh well...
@allo
in reply to Blackthorn

@Blackthorn the best next things after random chat is your local instance feed: mastodon.gamedev.place/public/…
in reply to allo

I never had an ICQ number. I just used AIM/Yahoo/MSN via Pidgin and Adium. That's an interesting feature.

I was one of the last holdouts on AIM, still messaging the one or two people on there in the last year it was alive. I do miss that era for sure. I still have some ancient AIM logs stored somewhere.

in reply to djsumdog

@djsumdog @allo @Blackthorn there is a moden server for AIM/MSN/ICQ: nina.chat/

I'm thinking of maybe joining, but then maybe I'm better off joining XMPP.

in reply to Nina Kalinina

My phone has been on "Do not disturb" for 7 years now. No notification sound ever. It is good. Bit apprehensive to see if there's any notifications when I go and pick it up though. I disabled all notifications for the more "aggressive" apps so sometimes people yell at me for not replying whithin a minute.
in reply to Cyril M.

@cyril_malec same here. I used to switch off the internet connection on my phone when I wasn't using it, but people called me weirdo for that ;(
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Oh I've been there 🥲 So I understand. Peace of mind shouldn't come with this kind of price, but maybe I'm being naive. Oh well.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I totally agree. The "Focus" settings on an iPhone sort of work this way, but not like old AIM... I could reliably hold "office hours" and block messages completely when I was away.

The assumption the user is "always on" is a bad one.

in reply to Nina Kalinina

105041562 from muscle memory. That was a long time ago.
This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I also miss this occasionally meeting some friend online. But I guess the difference is less about apps and their implementation, but about Smartphones. Back then, someone who was online, was also at home.
in reply to Santhor

@santhor I've been thinking about this, and I disagree! Most of the time, I was on the move, with Jimm on J2ME and QIP on Windows CE, and so were my friends!
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Nice, so even when on the move you took the time to set your online status accordingly? It would be nice to add this feature again, but I'm afraid few people would actually use it. (I never actively set the state, but it would show when I am at the computer.)
in reply to Santhor

@santhor when I was online from the phone, it was showing everyone that I'm "online (mobile)" or "away (mobile)", hinting that my replies could be shorter than if I was using a computer.

I think people don't use it because there is an assumption that everyone is always, permanently, terminally, online. If we foster the habit of "getting online is an action", people will be using it!

in reply to Nina Kalinina

I used to think there should be this kind of priority system in phones: You would assign a priority (say, 1 to 9) to each of your contacts and also set your own priority. Then, only calls from people who are important enough to bother you right now would get through. Of course, the system would be more useful if a caller could also choose the priority of their own call, but then you would have to punish contacts who misused the feature.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

A great example of how computers used to be better. ...Before they became so powerful that they slowed down...
in reply to Nina Kalinina

my phone is permanently on DnD, because there is no way to stop every fucking app from pinging at me all the time. Every time they update, they add a new category of notification so they can demand my attention. While there are types of notifications I might like to have, it's too much effort to selectively enforce "leave me the hell alone", so nobody gets to ping at me. Such toxic design.

I used to love gadgets and getting new ones, but now it's days/weeks to make it tolerable.

in reply to Joe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉

@swelljoe I used to simply turn the data off on my phone, but then I started working for Facebook, and the coworkers quickly explained to me that DnD is the only way to survive. I kept turning off the data anyway 😁

As for the gadgets: Palm OS 5 devices are as neat as they used to be when they just came out. I also am having lots of fun with my Nintendo DSi and Gameboy Micro!

in reply to Nina Kalinina

there are Apps that show if your friends are online, but most people deaktivate that feature for privacy.
in reply to ejim

@ejim that's the thing; it is a bit creepy that Steam wants to tell all my "friends" that I'm online, but at the same time I'm happy to signal to them that I won't mind playing Portal 2 or Civ V together. For chat apps specifically, I want to let people know that I'm open for a chat when I am open for a chat.
@ejim
in reply to Nina Kalinina

👋 sharing one thought - next text, ask the friends to disable their push notifications.

sounds wild. hear me out. 👀

this enables you to free your mind from learned behaviors designed to disrupt whatever you might be doing in real life in favor of what some other human or even algorithm decided. yes, even if it is your bestie wanting to share a cute cat video - especially if it's a designed-to-deflate news headline. nope! 🙅‍♀️

opt into your phone existing in your life via your personal, inalienable free will. this seems like the strongest, way to take active control of reframing one's relationship with one's devices at present. 💃

**not trying to show up as a reply guy - just offering what seems to be working well fired me and sharing if others find use in it. ✌️💙

in reply to Nina Kalinina

the only problem was that it's really hard to consistently/reliably keep that status updated..

Discord has it too. Typically people use custom status just for memes and not as actual status, and other ones are just set permanently and forgotten about, haha. But the automatic online/offline is sorta helpful occasionally (though way too often someone's "online" just because of leaving a PC running in the background haha)

in reply to Val Packett 🧉

@valpackett yeah, my Discord is permanently "away". But my ICQ used to switch between "Away" and "Online" depending on my usage of the app - it'd switch to Away when I was coding, but would switch back to Online when I opened the app. Discord allows me to set "Away for 1/2/4/8 hours" but won't show my actual status based on my actual activity. :<

If we don't count "Nina plays gdb" and "Atsuko plays KiCad", of course.

in reply to Nina Kalinina

luckily I can set do not disturb on a timer on my phone.
iMessage folks receive a banner if they text me. Others don’t get that context.

Otherwise I generally limit notifications from apps and never have work apps on my phone

in reply to Nina Kalinina

I feel like you needed that for ICQ though because you could search and chat up random people on that IM, if I remember correctly. I feel like used it in the late 90s, so it's a good while ago.
in reply to TobiWanKenobi

@TobiWanKenobi Yes! But then, I get messages from random people in other messengers even these days, and not always spam, so...
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Hmm, I'm not speaking against those features. Although my memory of it is kinda blurry, I did like ICQ. MSN Messenger was also a rather decent IM as far as I recall.
Then again, those were IMs from another era. Nowadays most messenger apps are catered towards reading your data, spamming you with ads, and being obnoxious.
in reply to TobiWanKenobi

@TobiWanKenobi T_T true that. Endless spam of "Are you interested in work? £100-150 per hour"... *sigh*
in reply to Nina Kalinina

It's like 90sNerdTurrets. I see that image and my mouth is going like: 233810060

Does it still exist?

in reply to Sarathai

@sarathai There is nina.chat/ that would allow you to log in to ICQ. But the original servers are down.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

It's none of my business to whom you're related to. 😀
Kidding aside, thanks for reminding me of that time. And I completly agree with you. We, I suppose, are the small portion of a generation who grew up with the internet, used it properly, and transitioned into what we have now. We sometimes forget how it was in the beginning.
Better
in reply to Nina Kalinina

And I just realized, you were talking about your name. Sorry, it's hot (the temperature) and it's late. Nighty night!
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I've said for many years (and will continue to die on that hill)

Chat services peaked at MSN Messenger 6.2!

Specifically 6.2 though. Everything after that in MSN Messenger was downhill

7.0 added "Winks" who the fuck liked using those?

7.5 added Nudge. And then people learned that nudging was controlled by the *sender* so you could spam it endlessly with a simple patch. A great way to end up slapped upside the head

8.0 onward had the "Windows Live Mesenger" gross UI rework

in reply to Nina Kalinina

Also the cool live chat session mode it had where you get to see what they're writing as they type it.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Huh, makes me wonder if I have any where it's not a thing.

Like IRC I feel like culturally it's idle/away unless active, XMPP does presence, Slack Web puts you offline constantly, …

in reply to Nina Kalinina

Honestly speaking, I don’t remember anyone using these status. What I remember is that almost everyone had the Invisible status and added only a few people to the list of those who can see through this invisibility. This eventually led to messages like “Here?” to start conversations.
in reply to Unconverged Gradient 🧐🇵🇹

@unconverged I suppose this is a cultural thing, isn't it? Could also be related to the era: were you _always_ online, or were you online only every now and then?
in reply to Nina Kalinina

most likely this is indeed a cultural thing. I was talking about the times when you need to stay at home and have your PC turned on to be connected. By the times when mobile networks became cheap and fast enough to be widely adopted almost everyone has moved to the social networks. ICQ was mostly a remnant of the old times, not a popular thing, not to mention IRC.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

when I was just starting to use the internet as a kid, it was gchat. So many good conversations happened in the panel on the left of Gmail, and the status icons made it all possible. I know that descended from a long line of other online chat systems. I was really sad when gchat was phased out, and my friends and I had to develop new communication habits together.

You make a good point about the assumption that everyone is online. The closest thing I have to statuses these days is in Slack, but those feel less trustworthy in terms of auto-updating, and since push notifications are sent anyways they don't serve much of a purpose.

in reply to Jacob Hall

@jacob yep! Yep.... Yes T_T

By the by, I got the inspiration from reading blog.danpetrolito.xyz/i-built-… about a tool that would show "presence" in Discord. And then I found one of many papers from the olden days that actually did some research on the topic of "online presence" oppl.info/publication/oppl-200…

in reply to Jernej Simončič �

@jernej__s the first image was taken from ResearchGate's render of a paper about online presence. I found the original PDF from 2004 on the author's website, and managed to extract a crispy screenshot TIFF from it!
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I'm still confused by the number of people who are apologetic for not immediately answering. I keep reassuring them, I'm totally comfortable with async communication.

I leave a message, you get it when you can and unless I'm calling, texting and otherwise throwing up signal flares, that's all fine.

in reply to Nina Kalinina

heh. Privacy invisible was my default. I chatted with the people i wanted to most.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

For my work Slack, I've added "Walking the dog" and "Heads-down working time." People seem to prioritize well with a little information.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

@zachleat ahhh the picture triggered so many memories. Mostly of me being invisible lol
in reply to Nina Kalinina

iMessage kind of doing that, notifying about „Do not disturb" mode or other focus modes. That's actually kind of nice UI, as you get this information when you try to write a message.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I met my wife in an online video chat room. I was living in the south and she was in Canada. We enjoyed the same things, and eventually, created our own online video chat site with internet radio stations playing in their own rooms, etc. We had our own station (still own the domain name). At one point, our little Video Chat site (FanCamTastic!) had several thousands of users and our little radio station broadcast to thousands of listeners around the world. (Radio Bijoux).
in reply to Nina Kalinina

The people that tuned in to our shows were pretty much fans (I guess like folks listen to podcasts now) and would tune in just to catch up with what was going on, request tunes, make dedications to other online friends, and cut up in chat rooms. It was like a Friday night out with buddies would be the closest thing I can think of. We all looked forward to it.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

the question is: how can we move back to that? Maybe it's nostalgia, but connecting online used to be so much more fun.
in reply to flxzt

@flxzt I think we might need to foster meaning. Learn to foster meaning. Or something.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

i notice that both Discord and Teams make a halfhearted attempt to follow this protocol.

I have Discord on my phone, so really I'm only 'away' when I'm asleep.

in reply to Fish Id Wardrobe

@fishidwardrobe I feel like Discord has this "away" function in the same way as Steam - "hey, don't join my game for now, there's nothing yet". Plus it doesn't support automated away/present
in reply to Fish Id Wardrobe

@fishidwardrobe Slack has a similar behaviour, and I think it's kind of neat. At work, Slack custom statuses are linked with the calendar, so it perfect if you want to ruin someone's presentation by a pop-up notification.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Probably the only reason why I kinda like Discord. People don't use its status feature a lot but at least it exists. I think a more relaxed (but very opposite) default for messengers would be to treat them like e-mail: Answers will come but you have no idea when. Which also includes that e-mail kinda feels more important, reducing the amount of messenger chat messages that are never answered ("oops forgot", "your chat moved to the bottom before I replied" etc) 🙄
in reply to Nina Kalinina

yes! 100 times this!

Just to be able to wake up in the middle of the night with insomnia and take a look to see who else is kicking around was priceless. Asynchronous conversation just doesn't cut it.

in reply to Nina Kalinina

ok, but the real question: how to make the ICQ flower icon brown?
in reply to Nina Kalinina

169147503 lol, 20 years later I still remember the damn number any time
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I miss that stuff so so much… Been thinking about it for a while now. (and yes, i’m ND)

And as a general thing, I hate the untold assumption that everyone would always be online nowadays

in reply to Nina Kalinina

@powerllama It absolutely makes my life harder, as a data point of one 🤷🏼‍♀️
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Slack has this but because a lot of us use it for work there's a bunch of social pressure to never be away.
in reply to mausmalone

@mausmalone indeed. I personally decided not to install work Slack on my personal phone; it is inconvenient at times, but at least I know there's no sudden "hey, a quick question if you're still around" at 10 PM.

Sadly, not everyone can afford this...

in reply to Nina Kalinina

I wonder at what point it just became _expected_ for us to use our own purchased phone and paid-for phone service to do work stuff. I've been in tech long enough to remember when if you needed to use a phone for work, they were expected to provide it for you. Now EVERYBODY has to supply their own phone for MFA at minimum.
in reply to mausmalone

@mausmalone Does it by any chance have an invisible mode? I always use that in anything I can these days for the reasons the OP kind of goes into already. I feel like you could successfully argue to a business that you have to keep it in invisible mode due to spam or something. They'd probably buy that.
in reply to Nazo

@nazokiyoubinbou @mausmalone Slack uses corporate account logins, there is no spam, for better or worse :<
in reply to Nina Kalinina

@mausmalone I assumed something to that effect, but I wonder if there isn't something like that you could say.

I doubt they'd think it through very well, lol.

in reply to Nina Kalinina

well ... yes and no. It depends on how you set it up. I'm currently on 5 Slack workspaces and only 4 of them are actually work. One is a shop-talk group for higher-ed WordPress users and on THAT workspace they allow vendors.

Anyhow, sure I could go "Away" on that workspace, but not on the other 4.

This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Why I intentionally turn off "show my activity" in every app. Also no "pop over notifications" allowed. I don't like context switching/interruptions. I've heard people argue that we should go back to calling people more often, and be more open to random phone calls, but even back in landline days there were socially accepted norms of when it was ok to call people time-wise. We successfully made that more explicit with IM statuses, then lost it again.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Yes, this is a thing I miss. They also switch to away automatically after a period of time in addition to letting the person do a more fine tune control with those other options.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Can't even disable push notifications on discord, only delay them up to ten minutes of inactivity.
I'm feeling pretty violent about it!
in reply to Machine Lord Zero

@MachineLordZero have you considered using a web version? I feel like the app doesn't offer all that much more functionality compared to discord.com/app
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I have considered, but I prefer using separate programs for stuff when possible 'cause my browser usage is pretty extreme.
in reply to Machine Lord Zero

@MachineLordZero plot twist: you can convert a website into an "app"! Chrome's "Install the page as an app" will make the page behave like an app - it'll have its own window, etc etc, but it'll share the profile with your browser. It might even use less resources than yet another Electron.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Huh, neat, though I'm trying not to increase any usage of chrome.
I don't even use it directly, using the Iron browser instead.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

One thing I'd like would be if I could update Better Discord without having to reinstall it. Every time I've tried so far has resulted in me being back to regular Discord.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

This. I remember in Poland everyone was using Gadu-Gadu and I could set whatever “status” I wanted depending on how I felt about talking to anyone at the moment. Freedom comes with choice and not with having something always on.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Back then, I rarely saw most of those. Most people were only ever available, away, or offline.

I imagine that's because all of those were set automatically by the computer. A person would be listed as “offline” if the computer was turned off or modem disconnected, “away” if the computer was idle, or “available” if the computer was actively being used.

This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to argv minus one

These days, most people have a smartphone that they're almost never truly away from and has an always-on network connection, so the whole concept of presence status doesn't make much sense now.
in reply to argv minus one

@argv_minus_one except it does, in a world where there is no expectation that people would reply to incoming messages immediately, being a slave to their phone
in reply to Nina Kalinina

turning off read receipts is essential for any messaging app that offers it. People don't see when I "read" their message and I don't see when they read mine.

I do miss the context statuses of ICQ, MSN Messenger and the like though. Wouldn't object to seeing something like that come back somewhere

in reply to Nina Kalinina

Yeah! ICQ. Now THAT was a cool chat app.

(4229782, I'm prettttty sure - although I haven't used it in a decade)

oh wait. did some digging. I was right! Ha ha, hilarious. Uselses information ftw!

but yeah - those notifiers, SO helpful. Holy heck yes.

in reply to Nina Kalinina

Interesting. I would usually think “if everyone is on, NO ONE is on” and that, similar to texting or email, the un-statused blindness would lead to the assumption of “if they’re there and they want to, they’ll answer, but I don’t have to expect anything.”

On ICQ I was usually perma-offline anyway. Don’t think I saw anyone really lean into the myriad of statuses; would usually think that kind of “choice fidelity” would lead to its own stress.

in reply to CT

@cthellis I think both "they will get a notification and reply" and "idk maybe they're not online right now and I want to have a focused chat so maybe I won't message first" could happen at the current model.

Lots of people in the comments mentioned that they didn't really use any statuses beyond Online and Away, and I think it is fine too!

@CT
in reply to Nina Kalinina

that’s a really interesting point. Most of the time, you can’t tell if ‘online’ means ‘happy to chat right now’ or ‘busy with something else, but still technically checking messages’ or anything else.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Interestingly business-grade chat apps still have this (3CX phone systems, Microsoft Teams).

It's just consumer-facing products that have removed it for some reason..

in reply to Nina Kalinina

I used ICQ back then, and I remember those icons got pretty much meaningless over time, as people were under no obligation to keep their status up to date with reality. You could only assume other people's reply habits based on prior interactions. Just as it is now: you don't know people's notification settings, and there's no expectations of immediate replies in general.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I always left up a permanent away message with some song lyrics or a joke or a little poem I was into that week or so...
in reply to Nina Kalinina

you are so right about this. The expectation of constant availability is very unhealthy and I think we are all familiar with the negative effects.

Even on sites/apps where you're still able to set a status, people don't respect it.

On top of that, I passionately despise read receipts. I feel like the only effects of that are unnecessary anxiety, drama, possessiveness and control (they only make sense for important work/school e-mails imo)

in reply to Nina Kalinina

I miss the hell out of being able to set statuses like that. I'm not a fan of Discord but they let you do this... So does VRChat. But so many other modern messengers utterly fail at this and it's infuriating
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I've been using #XMPP for the last year or so, wondering if the halcyon ICQ days of yore are still to be had.

After testing it with several friends connecting to my own self-hosted #Prosody server, here's what I found:

- Yes it all works, on all XMPP clients. But MacOS/iPadOS/iOS clients are not all that mature at this time. The #Linux (#Gajim, despite no video or audio calls) and #Android (#Conversations) XMPP clients are the best, IMHO. Always favor those, I say, and they are confidently installable and reliable today.
- Yes, use OMEMO encryption on personal chats. But when it comes to group chats, OMEMO is not necessarily the right move.
- If you don't need privacy in an XMPP group, then don't create a private group, but rather a _public_ group (the safer choice for reliability of message delivery). No OMEMO is possible in a public group, and the messages propagating around will be reliable, even to clients who vanish and re-appear after prolonged absences.
- If you really need OMEMO encryption in a group chat, create a _private_ group, not a public group. **Clients who vanish from the group for prolonged periods may miss out on some of the messages when they return (say, a few weeks later)**.
- I kept a wiki with several more quirks noted, which came up, and felt confusing and frustrating to my (non-geek) friends using XMPP.

As to your Apple-ecosystem-confined friends, at this moment in time, maybe talk to them 1:1 in #Fluffychat/Matrix, which affords encryption, and is all #OpenSource, like everything above. (Groups in #Matrix have a track record of failing for everybody in them very badly every 2 or 3 years or so.)

This entry was edited (19 hours ago)

Nina Kalinina reshared this.

in reply to Dusty

@d1
Can I suggest Delta Chat to you both?

Decentralised, can self-host if preferred, no KYC, no phone numbers, anonymous, group chats, multi platform, multi OS, synchronised accounts across devices/platforms/OS's.

Even works on TAILS OS.

I'm using it on an iPhone XS iOS 18.5, a 2015 MacBook Pro running Linux Mint and a Samsung S9 running Lineage OS, fully synchronised.

Great UI, awesome UX.

Well worth a look at least...

delta.chat/en/

This entry was edited (17 hours ago)
in reply to Jupiter

@avoca I've tried #deltachat myself, and I'm not confident they have group chats working all that well. When you try to *leave* a group chat, you can sort of be gravitated back into it again, against your wishes. You have to keep deleting the remnant messages which keep appearing, as though you are using a plunger.
in reply to Dusty

@d1
Always improving, and very receptive to suggestions for improvements.

I use multiple Profiles a lot for non family chats. That way you can just delete the profile when a group or contact reaches end-of-use status.

You can always rejoin.

This entry was edited (17 hours ago)
in reply to Jupiter

@avoca #Deltachat feels Alpha quality to me, *once you stray off the path of plain old 1:1 encrypted text messages, with possible file attachments, including voice memos* - which Deltachat is brilliant at (uniform clients on all supported platforms is greatly appreciated).

The #XMPP world is more "Beta-quality" feeling to me - is the lesser of evils for those geeky types who can manage its quirky landscape, and still feel like they're having fun.

*The devil is in the details* for all these ecosystems: XMPP, #Matrix, and Deltachat.

If you want something to "just work", I say use #Signal and refrain from complaining about its centralized nature. At least something "just works" today in this domain (end-to-end encrypted instant messaging, which is also reasonably private), which is reliable and trustworthy *for now*.

This entry was edited (17 hours ago)
in reply to Dusty

@d1 @avoca If #deltachat is "alpha quality", I wonder what Whatsapp is. No really multidevice support, changing phone is a mess.. But nonetheless, people love it. I think mostly it is not that something is better, it is just what people are used to.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Integrating IMs into social media is still questionable practice. Ones that do (since friendster at least) treat IMs like a store front clerk chat who must be around if they're online. I missed ICQ-style availability.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

it is for this that my phone is perpetually on do not disturb. A short list of less than a dozen people may make it ping me for emergencies; otherwise I look at it when I look at it.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

instant messaging application should require a special action from the sender so that the notification virbates/rings the phone. Most messages are not that urgent
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Tom Scott discussed this and believes the change occurred when companies switched from "computer first" to "phone first" instead. youtu.be/11PseWcwfSI
in reply to Admiral Memo

@AdmiralMemo sounds like a fair evaluation of "when", but I still don't think that this is necessarily "why". Lots of people in my circle used ICQ on mobile and leveraged the status system.

Curiously, every now and then Facebook tries to bring the status back in Messenger, but I'm not sure it worked out

in reply to Nina Kalinina

when the internet was a place for active enjoyment... You would actively look for people to chat, for content to read, for music to listen ("you wouldn't steal a purse" energy hehe). Being available online was an intermittent status. In my opinion, everything was more meaningful about this world. Miss those days... 🥲
in reply to Nina Kalinina

my experience with ICQ was that people hardly used that though, esp. with dialup because why would you be afk and paying except when downloading. Later without metering mostly auto afk or so it would not pop up during games(if it even worked rhst way, been a while), but maybe my people were just weird. Like, useful sometimes but not daily used feature.
in reply to wink

@wink that is true, but also consider: it means people weren't always online, there wasn't an expectation that someone would reply immediately if they're offline; but you could somewhat expect a reply if someone actually was online.

Imagine being able to login to WhatsApp once a day to check messages and chat with friends, rather than getting push notifications 200 times a day

@wink
in reply to Nina Kalinina

Yeah I know, I like the feature (like the outlook calendar integration that marks you as busy in slack) - no harm in adding it for modern clients, I just remember it wasn't used so much in ICQ in my circles.
Also as someone who has most notifications off and manually checks when he feels like it, it simply is not a problem for me, with the tradeoff of responding hours late :/
in reply to Nina Kalinina

@storm hooray, finally someone other than me complaining about this.

I feel less alone in this presenceless future.

in reply to Nina Kalinina

I remember that. Also remember being blown away by ICQ. That was such an innovation for the time.

In a way, the same status indicator exists today, at least on the receiver side, but it's hidden in complex layers upon layers of phone settings 😞

in reply to vladcampos

@vladcampos DND on a receiving side is a must, I hope more people will learn about it. But I feel there's immense value in the signal one could give to their friends "hey I'm around and available, talk to me if you want"
in reply to Nina Kalinina

1/2
To be fair, I like not knowing when people are online and not, and people not knowing that of me. I also always turn off the typing and online messages when possible. I feel seeing those statusen causes anxiousness. "he read it/is online, why doesn't he reply". "he's typing, why does it take so long".
in reply to Cambionn

2/2
I would argue, people assume others reply asap, not the app. And that's those people's fault.

The thing I love about chats is that people can reach me when they have time, and I can reply when I have time for it in my own pace. Think about that thing you keep forgetting to ask me at midnight? Sure send a message. My phone is on DND-mode and I'll read it and reply after I wake up and have time, no rushing. (I don't do this to others unless I know they feel like this too).

This entry was edited (19 hours ago)
in reply to Cambionn

@Cambion async comms is totally valid! I suppose people either learn about their friends' habits or, if nothing else, having a status as permanent DND is a good signal for that. Though the wording in "DND" could be improved
in reply to Nina Kalinina

is status no longer a thing? every chat app i can think of has it in some way
in reply to xrvs

@xarvos it is a thing in corporate lands (Slack, Teams) and gaming lands (Discord, Steam), but isn't really a thing in WhatsApp, Signal, and so on
@xrvs
in reply to Nina Kalinina

also like, why can't i send a message but ask for the other side to just quietly receive the message, no popup or beep-boop. The user can see the number of unread messages...
in reply to Nina Kalinina

We have chosen this way. Look around yourself and see, how people reacts, when phone beeps - lot of them stops everything and just jump away to check the phone no matter what they were actually doing. I even noticed, that some people actually tend to remind me "your phone beeped" even though they just seen me intentionally leave it for later 😀
in reply to Nina Kalinina

@Nina Kalinina
That depends on definition of being pushed.

If there is no threat, then it's not a push, but a decision (imho)

in reply to Schmaker

@schmaker it is a default behaviour that is difficult to override, I'd say that's harassment
in reply to Jakub Iwanowski

@dzajew it's always the little things! I can give you an opposite example: Ctrl+A to select all didn't work in most scenarios in Windows 95/98
in reply to Nina Kalinina

thanks for this wonderful memory of ICQ 😊 First experience of online messaging.
Indeed things have changed. The assumption "always online and available " is bad indeed.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I miss ICQ, the "Search for a random chat partner", the Uh-oh! sounds and the flower icons.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

ICQ gave me a special feeling back in these days... No other messenger did that. Still know my number..
This entry was edited (17 hours ago)
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I imagine this just reflects the shift to mobile. Before then, if someone was sat at the computer you could be sure they were paying attention to it - and if they were not, the computer would be off. But with mobile it's just always there. The software can't tell if the user is free to chat, busy, or sleeping. And few users are going to manually change status twenty times a day.
in reply to Qybat

@Qybat as I've mentioned elsewhere, this isn't strictly true. There was a period in time between advent of J2ME ICQ and, I suppose, popularity of WhatsApp and alike, where it wasn't a given that a person is at their computer when they're online.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I must admit I actually really like the async way modern chats use.

I can have a conversation with my friends over multiple days, no need to check if they're available or not, they'll reply when they have time. No pressure.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

@me
On a very surface level, yes, but not really, no. I can't send you a burst of messages with 10 seconds between each one without it being super annoying to you by email.

Also not made for rapid exchanges , like if you reply to my message while I'm writing one, I won't be able to read it without reloading the page or something

Also not sure you can jump in a call seemlessly from an email exchange, it's just not made for realtime communication

in reply to Beldarak

@me to be clear, what I like is the fact you can do both realtime and async with chats.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

@me sure but you'll agree Discord and Gmail don't offer the same realtime experience
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I was just thinking of this today, and I feel like it's the main reason I talk a whole lot less with people online in general.
in reply to Nina Kalinina

I'm a little bit sad, that #Gajim by @gajim removed #XEP-0108: #UserActivity

xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0108.h…

I used it to signal my colleagues when I'm at lunch break etc.

@d1

in reply to Nina Kalinina

I don't even have to miss it, I still get it just the way I always have in my XMPP client :3

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