unironically interested in hearing what literally any and everyone wants in a chat or social media client
infodump at me so i know how to make a customizable generic client support your needs--
I'm not sure if you are thinking about chat clients for existing protocols, or chat services altogether, so I'll mention things that are relevant in either case.
In chat I want the conversation style of ytalk back: one where you see the other person's keystrokes as they type.
In mobile clients (of chat or social media) I would wish for an input method that doesn't rely heavily on word prediction, auto-correct, automatic capitalization, etc. and was still fast enough to comfortably type with it. I'm not sure what could give me that short of a chording minikeyboard.
In any clients I would want to have search functionality that can search through all the conversations I've ever was involved in (obviously unless I caused them to be deleted). Stemming _and_ "advanced search" are both a significant plus.
If we're talking about Fediverse social media client, I would want it to be more explicit about ActivityPub: ActivityPub has messages with recipients, cc, etc. (just like emails) and yet Mastodon and similar services try to hide that behind a layer of abstraction that seems designed to resemble other social networks (see e.g. the sharing choices for a post, or the lack of any sharing options whatsoever for boosts). For me this layer just adds confusion.
For social media, I think I would like a more email-like thread support. Web client of Mastodon currently is cumbersome when dealing with long and branching threads.
In chat I would dearly want to be able to send a "silent message": one that doesn't cause the recipient to be notified (and obviously is clearly marked as such). This would allow me to fret less about how should I try to reach people: if we had a conversation about <foo> over chat, I can simply continue it there even if it's the middle of the night and I don't want to potentially wake them up.
@robryk primarily i am making a modular client that i can plug existing protocols into (the first protocol is mastodon, because that's what i know ill use a lot of and wont have to be reverse engineered, or get me banned, like discord)
im still saving this information--
@dialupdoll Then threads, exposing ActivityPub concepts, offline search and input methods for mobile are most relevant.
One other thing that comes to mind if you expect people to ever use this as a more chat-like thing: being able to specify what messages cause a notification.
One other (maybe minor, but one that would contribute to the experience incrementally) thing that I didn't think of before is: filters at least as expressive as Sieve that allow messages to be grouped, notifications to be emitted or suppressed etc.
@robryk i think i might be too young to grok this
@robryk the idea is to expose text and activitypub concepts and contexts with a simple permissions model, so you could make, say, a backup system that works on all text versions of methods
@robryk core idea being you can just put markup or json in the text-version (preferably markup like markdown confusing as the names may be) and i want all supported apis/protocols to be MOSTLY compatible with each other thanks to an activitypub-esque backend design
@robryk of course that's fucking ambitious but i want to make a better pidgin so i was already aiming pretty high
all it can do right now is support the arbitrary abstractions and post to mastodon rn
@dialupdoll Actually, you gave me an idea: would it maybe make sense to have a client that translates so that you can use a vanilla MUA? It could do that either by fetching stuff into a mailbox format, or by exposing something like IMAP to the MUA. One thing I can't really figure out is how to deal with boosts and with threads where some messages only were sent "directly" to me.
Maybe translation to Usenet would make more sense?