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The Message Papers Part I: On Social Interaction


From: Sutter, Benjamin
Subject: The Message Papers Part I: On Social Interaction
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2017 23:05:14 -0500

Hello, Guilers. I'm a relatively new face for most likely all of you, if you've seen me at all (I'm bms_ on IRC, which is where I've been), but today I'd like to write the first of my papers on the extensible, federated instant messenger: Message (msg). I'll begin with a brief description of the program before I move into some theory on social systems.

Message is an instant messenger written in Guile and designed with small, tight-knit communities in mind. Crafted to foster socialization naturally, instead of through intrusive alarms and alerts, Message (the command is msg) servers can be started with one command. In fact, it's the same command that starts the client. In theory, anyone who can run the client and can run a small server. Message configurations (think .guilerc or .emacs) are written in GNU Guile Scheme, the same language through which the program can be extended. There will never be a central server for Message, as the entire design focuses on small, friendly communities, rather than large, forbidding groups like you often find on IRC. Message is currently in very early development and I do not have an up-to-date Git repository or website to use as a central location for updates and news. However, I can often be contacted as bms_ on #guile, #guix, or #gnu at Freenode or at this e-mail. Now onto my theories on humans and why small groups are better than large.

###

Oftentimes I've gone to join an IRC channel just to find that the current memberlist is huge and there's very rarely anyone there to say "hello" back to me. I attribute this to the prevalent -- and incorrect -- notion that social interactions don't matter when we're talking about code. For years, this lack of the exact social cues which I've so begrudgingly grown accustomed to in real life has frightened me away from even giving myself a real introduction. Now, I don't see how humans, as social creatures, could possibly see a good reason to not say "hello" in response to "hello", but online interactions tend to remove the stress that face-to-face interactions have on saying the right stuff. To an extent, this is helpful. You're given time to formulate ideas, but it seems awfully impolite and even asocial to ignore newcomers to your group.

I'm not going to blame anybody because there's no one to blame. Instead, I have some ideas to fix the problem.

  1. Keep groups small and intimate: No one likes joining a group to find that it's memberlist is in the 1000's. Now, I realize that this isn't optimal in all instances. Some groups are naturally large. I will never put any fixed limit on server memberlist size in Message. I will only encourage small groups.
  2. Don't allow multiple users with the same name in one server at the same time: Part of the importance of small groups is knowing who's who. You can't do that with ten different incarnations of Kevin online.
  3. Good friends need privacy: Therefore, every message should be encrypted by default and without any extra work for the user.
  4. Don't discourage private messages or pings: This isn't quite as specific to any one implementation, but it always bothers me when administrators in a group disallow average users from messaging or pinging them without being requested to. It doesn't hurt anybody.
  5. On that note, groups should be democratic: Choices that affect the group (permanent banishment, name changes, new rules) should be voted on by every active member of the group. Naturally, the server administrator has the power to veto any decisions made by the masses, but even his decisions should be liable to democratic law.
  6. Be nice: As with the PM/ping rule, I can't do anything in Message to help this, but in general, please be good to everyone else. It makes the groups happier as a whole.
I hope that this paper was informative, inspiring, and also a good announcement for the Message project. I'd ask for development help, as I'm the only one, but currently I don't have easy means to collaborate (Git, my own mailing lists, etc.). Eventually, I'll submit to the GNU Project and then maybe I'll be better off in that regard. Anyway, if you've made it this far, thanks for reading and please do try to continue to follow the project. I'll keep you updated.

Sincerely,
Ben Sutter,
bms_

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