ideas thread

[realityfabric]

I'm reading through the thoughts.txt file and I wanted to respond to some things.

How do we detect a valid friendship?
only if both identities have each other in a friend-circle, then a friendship is valid.
if not, there has to be a message like "friendship denied"
(https://github.com/RetroShare/rssocialnet/blob/master/thoughts.txt#L71)

I think the mutual friend circle thing is an interesting idea, but I do not think that an explicit message of denial of friendship should be necessary. Perhaps friend requests should time out after a while, and a message should be shown to the one who requested the friendship that no response has been received? I don't know of any services that explicitly announce that you have been denied friendship, or that announce that you've been blocked.

But who will subscribe and spread my public wall?
https://github.com/RetroShare/rssocialnet/blob/master/thoughts.txt#L79

Perhaps instead of walls being passed along only through subscription the profile ids should be passed along like in the People tab on RetroShare, and then posts could be passed along through tunnels. Walls should not be infinite, but should be paginated, or should at least only load as requested. Posts could be shared with the File Sharing system so allow larger posts to be downloaded faster than via direct download from a single peer.

Private Messages

• private chat and chatlobbies
  • C: arg. Chat is based on SSL ids. That is contradictory. And we cannot use distant chat. I think that chat should be suspended for now until we find a proper system.
• private distant chat/messages
  • C: => distant messages between GXS ids.

https://github.com/RetroShare/rssocialnet/blob/master/thoughts.txt#L205

Why can't we use distant chat? I think that all messaging should be handled by RetroShare itself, even if RS SocialNet creates a web ui for those features.

Idea: create a status service for gxs-ids
status is a volatile value like online, offline
status gets distributed to and by all contacts in the friendslist circle
https://github.com/RetroShare/rssocialnet/blob/master/thoughts.txt#L213

I don't know if this is necessary, or necessarily a good idea. Sharing online/offline status with friends only is good, but shouldn't this information only be shared with friends you trust enough to connect with directly in RetroShare? If included it should be optional.

-> create pgp-key and gxs-identity with same name at start
https://github.com/RetroShare/rssocialnet/blob/master/thoughts.txt#L349

I think this is a bad idea, because from what I can tell identities are revealed to the network, or at least to Friends-of-Friends. I think a better idea is prompting the user to make an identity, and perhaps having the default identity name as the same as the PGP name, but allow the user to modify it before the GSX-ID is actually created.

[electron128]

Why can't we use distant chat? I think that all messaging should be handled by RetroShare itself, even if RS SocialNet creates a web ui for those features.

The distand chat between gxs which we have now did not exist at this time. Distant chat was between PGP-Keys (or SSL?), and it required an invitation link to start it.

Distant chat today works excatly like we want it for rssocialnet.

[realityfabric]

The distand chat between gxs which we have now did not exist at this time. Distant chat was between PGP-Keys (or SSL?), and it required an invitation link to start it.
Distant chat today works excatly like we want it for rssocialnet.

I thought that might be the case, good to know.

[rodneyrod]

RS will possibly be introducing one way authentication once GPG (PGP) has integrated that feature and it's been out in the wild for a bit.