250 lines
10 KiB
ReStructuredText
250 lines
10 KiB
ReStructuredText
========
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Presence
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========
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A description of presence information and visibility between users.
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Overview
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========
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Each user has the concept of Presence information. This encodes a sense of the
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"availability" of that user, suitable for display on other user's clients.
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Presence Information
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====================
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The basic piece of presence information is an enumeration of a small set of
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state; such as "free to chat", "online", "busy", or "offline". The default state
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unless the user changes it is "online". Lower states suggest some amount of
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decreased availability from normal, which might have some client-side effect
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like muting notification sounds and suggests to other users not to bother them
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unless it is urgent. Equally, the "free to chat" state exists to let the user
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announce their general willingness to receive messages moreso than default.
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Home servers should also allow a user to set their state as "hidden" - a state
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which behaves as offline, but allows the user to see the client state anyway and
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generally interact with client features such as reading message history or
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accessing contacts in the address book.
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This basic state field applies to the user as a whole, regardless of how many
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client devices they have connected. The home server should synchronise this
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status choice among multiple devices to ensure the user gets a consistent
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experience.
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Idle Time
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---------
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As well as the basic state field, the presence information can also show a sense
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of an "idle timer". This should be maintained individually by the user's
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clients, and the homeserver can take the highest reported time as that to
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report. Likely this should be presented in fairly coarse granularity; possibly
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being limited to letting the home server automatically switch from a "free to
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chat" or "online" mode into "idle".
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When a user is offline, the Home Server can still report when the user was last
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seen online, again perhaps in a somewhat coarse manner.
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Device Type
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-----------
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Client devices that may limit the user experience somewhat (such as "mobile"
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devices with limited ability to type on a real keyboard or read large amounts of
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text) should report this to the home server, as this is also useful information
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to report as "presence" if the user cannot be expected to provide a good typed
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response to messages.
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Presence List
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=============
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Each user's home server stores a "presence list" for that user. This stores a
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list of other user IDs the user has chosen to add to it (remembering any ACL
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Pointer if appropriate).
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To be added to a contact list, the user being added must grant permission. Once
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granted, both user's HS(es) store this information, as it allows the user who
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has added the contact some more abilities; see below. Since such subscriptions
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are likely to be bidirectional, HSes may wish to automatically accept requests
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when a reverse subscription already exists.
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As a convenience, presence lists should support the ability to collect users
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into groups, which could allow things like inviting the entire group to a new
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("ad-hoc") chat room, or easy interaction with the profile information ACL
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implementation of the HS.
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Presence and Permissions
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========================
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For a viewing user to be allowed to see the presence information of a target
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user, either
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* The target user has allowed the viewing user to add them to their presence
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list, or
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* The two users share at least one room in common
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In the latter case, this allows for clients to display some minimal sense of
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presence information in a user list for a room.
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Home servers can also use the user's choice of presence state as a signal for
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how to handle new private one-to-one chat message requests. For example, it
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might decide:
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"free to chat": accept anything
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"online": accept from anyone in my addres book list
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"busy": accept from anyone in this "important people" group in my address
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book list
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API Efficiency
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==============
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A simple implementation of presence messaging has the ability to cause a large
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amount of Internet traffic relating to presence updates. In order to minimise
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the impact of such a feature, the following observations can be made:
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* There is no point in a Home Server polling status for peers in a user's
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presence list if the user has no clients connected that care about it.
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* It is highly likely that most presence subscriptions will be symmetric - a
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given user watching another is likely to in turn be watched by that user.
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* It is likely that most subscription pairings will be between users who share
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at least one Room in common, and so their Home Servers are actively
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exchanging message PDUs or transactions relating to that Room.
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* Presence update messages do not need realtime guarantees. It is acceptable to
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delay delivery of updates for some small amount of time (10 seconds to a
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minute).
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The general model of presence information is that of a HS registering its
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interest in receiving presence status updates from other HSes, which then
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promise to send them when required. Rather than actively polling for the
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currentt state all the time, HSes can rely on their relative stability to only
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push updates when required.
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A Home Server should not rely on the longterm validity of this presence
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information, however, as this would not cover such cases as a user's server
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crashing and thus failing to inform their peers that users it used to host are
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no longer available online. Therefore, each promise of future updates should
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carry with a timeout value (whether explicit in the message, or implicit as some
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defined default in the protocol), after which the receiving HS should consider
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the information potentially stale and request it again.
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However, because of the likelyhood that two home servers are exchanging messages
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relating to chat traffic in a room common to both of them, the ongoing receipt
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of these messages can be taken by each server as an implicit notification that
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the sending server is still up and running, and therefore that no status changes
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have happened; because if they had the server would have sent them. A second,
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larger timeout should be applied to this implicit inference however, to protect
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against implementation bugs or other reasons that the presence state cache may
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become invalid; eventually the HS should re-enquire the current state of users
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and update them with its own.
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The following workflows can therefore be used to handle presence updates:
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1 When a user first appears online their HS sends a message to each other HS
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containing at least one user to be watched; each message carrying both a
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notification of the sender's new online status, and a request to obtain and
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watch the target users' presence information. This message implicitly
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promises the sending HS will now push updates to the target HSes.
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2 The target HSes then respond a single message each, containing the current
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status of the requested user(s). These messages too implicitly promise the
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target HSes will themselves push updates to the sending HS.
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As these messages arrive at the sending user's HS they can be pushed to the
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user's client(s), possibly batched again to ensure not too many small
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messages which add extra protocol overheads.
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At this point, all the user's clients now have the current presence status
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information for this moment in time, and have promised to send each other
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updates in future.
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3 The HS maintains two watchdog timers per peer HS it is exchanging presence
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information with. The first timer should have a relatively small expiry
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(perhaps 1 minute), and the second timer should have a much longer time
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(perhaps 1 hour).
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4 Any time any kind of message is received from a peer HS, the short-term
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presence timer associated with it is reset.
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5 Whenever either of these timers expires, an HS should push a status reminder
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to the target HS whose timer has now expired, and request again from that
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server the status of the subscribed users.
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6 On receipt of one of these presence status reminders, an HS can reset both
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of its presence watchdog timers.
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To avoid bursts of traffic, implementations should attempt to stagger the expiry
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of the longer-term watchdog timers for different peer HSes.
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When individual users actively change their status (either by explicit requests
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from clients, or inferred changes due to idle timers or client timeouts), the HS
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should batch up any status changes for some reasonable amount of time (10
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seconds to a minute). This allows for reduced protocol overheads in the case of
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multiple messages needing to be sent to the same peer HS; as is the likely
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scenario in many cases, such as a given human user having multiple user
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accounts.
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API Requirements
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================
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The data model presented here puts the following requirements on the APIs:
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Client-Server
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Requests that a client can make to its Home Server
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* get/set current presence state
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Basic enumeration + ability to set a custom piece of text
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* report per-device idle time
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After some (configurable?) idle time the device should send a single message
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to set the idle duration. The HS can then infer a "start of idle" instant and
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use that to keep the device idleness up to date. At some later point the
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device can cancel this idleness.
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* report per-device type
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Inform the server that this device is a "mobile" device, or perhaps some
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other to-be-defined category of reduced capability that could be presented to
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other users.
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* start/stop presence polling for my presence list
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It is likely that these messages could be implicitly inferred by other
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messages, though having explicit control is always useful.
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* get my presence list
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[implicit poll start?]
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It is possible that the HS doesn't yet have current presence information when
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the client requests this. There should be a "don't know" type too.
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* add/remove a user to my presence list
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Server-Server
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-------------
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Requests that Home Servers make to others
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* request permission to add a user to presence list
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* allow/deny a request to add to a presence list
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* perform a combined presence state push and subscription request
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For each sending user ID, the message contains their new status.
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For each receiving user ID, the message should contain an indication on
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whether the sending server is also interested in receiving status from that
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user; either as an immediate update response now, or as a promise to send
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future updates.
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Server to Client
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----------------
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[[TODO(paul): There also needs to be some way for a user's HS to push status
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updates of the presence list to clients, but the general server-client event
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model currently lacks a space to do that.]]
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