Creating a chat/messaging environment

#1

I just had an interesting chat with Bing when I asked if there were any plugins or implementations of a TW environment that had messaging, channels, and a reply feature. (Something I want to use in a collaborative wiki site.) It kept insisting there was a Tiddlychat plugin that did just this and gave me some useless links to other kinds of plugins. Finally, it just admitted there was no such thing. Don’t know whether to LOL or cry.
So here I am asking the actual intelligence of this community if anyone has experimented with this idea or if there are any obscure plugins that do it. I have some ideas that rely too heavily on tags but need some help thinking it through.

#2

Welcome @EdM

Yes, there has being consideration of this with an approach called federation, but chat was just one possibility within it.

  • The comments plugin is a hint at chat threads within tiddlywiki
  • The technology behind Announcing the MultiWikiServer Plugin may enable this as well.
  • Node wikis especially Bob can have multiple users so you could build a chat facility on top of it, but it remains a little difficult to publish safely on the internet, but not in a trused local area network.

While I would not disagree with including chat within the TiddlyWiki platform it is seriously important to look outside the tiddlywiki box. It is possible to integrate other chat services within tiddlywiki, just as you could with any other website.

  • That is you visit a tiddlywiki and engage in a chat but this is hosted elsewhere, it is just interacted with as if it was your tiddlywiki.
    • Tools can be developed to later import chats for a permanent record
  • I am sure we can find a list of these and share if you are interested.
  • Using this approach you can leverage the community, history and expertise embedded in an external solution.
#3

Yes, indeed. If MWS achieves its goals, making a chat application would be something many of the experienced users here would be able to easily accomplish in an evening.

The crucial new capabilities in MWS for making a chat application are:

  • Instantaneous updates from the server to all connected browsers means that posts would be available immediately to other users
  • A separate bag for each user provides enough security to ensure that users can mess around with posts of others

The components of a very simple chat application built on MWS might be:

  • A bag for each user that they alone can write to, but everyone can read
  • A bag for the application itself; all the remaining features in this list would be implemented as tiddlers in the application bag
  • A simple schema whereby a field called “room” on a post indicates which chat room it should appear in
    • There may be merit in using hierarchical room names like engineering/projects/alpha or mktg/ideas. It would simplify filtering for messages by department as engineering/* or mktg/*
  • A recipe for each user that includes the bags of other users, the application bag, and the users own bag as the topmost bag
  • A template showing the list of available rooms
  • A template showing the messages in a particular room, with a form at the bottom for creating a post, with the “room” field pre-populated with the current room name

With all of that in place, users would be able to switch between rooms, seeing messages from other users instantaneously, and post their own messages. All the essentials of a traditional chat application.

There are endless variations that could be explored. Perhaps a more elaborate security model that allows individual posts to be protected. Or a variant that encrypts all chat traffic within the browser, with the server only seeing anonymous cryptographic blobs. Or it could be rejigged to emphasise sharing images – if we can handle gigabytes of images then one could build a Flickr clone.

I’ve hated Slack since I was first obliged to use it, and Teams is worse. So, as somebody who loathes the status quo in chat applications, I’m really excited to see what this highly inventive community will come up with.

4 Likes
#4

Thanks for that! As a barely fair-to-middling TW user, I’m not very up to speed on its secure multi-user capabilities. I’m intrigued by a serverless environment by using something like Syncthing, although that may be a bridge too far for some users to set up and manage and I would have enough to support without that. You’ve convinced me that channeling in an external chat platform may be the best way to go for now, until an entirely internal TW solution matures. Any hints on which external platforms may have the easiest integration? Our team currently uses Discord, but I don’t much like its limitations or UI.

Specific collection of and documentation of Intergrations with tiddlywiki
#5

To start, Search here, discord has being done, see my unanswered post here Discourse in TiddlyWiki

However if any chat environment you use provides a way to embed a thread on a website this can be adapted to tiddlywiki since tiddlywiki uses standard internet Tecnologies, most thing you can integrate with any website, can be integrated with tiddlywiki.

  • You may paste some html into a tiddler
  • You may place some include code in a tiddler with one of the raw tags.
  • You may tie conversations to a particular tiddler, maybe even start a new chat based on the tiddler title.

Just ask if you need integration help for a chat environment you can’t find an integration for.

#6

OK, thanks! You’ve given me a much better idea of some elements I hadn’t thought of. I’m at a stage where I think I could develop something in a week (not an evening) with just a bit more education, now that I know better where to focus that learning.
For the record, I aspire to develop an all-in-one team collaboration workspace with integrated messaging, project/task management, calendaring, a personnel directory and some light duty document management. Sort of a Slack-like thing but much more tweakable and flexible. It’s pushing the envelope, I know, but I reckon if such a thing can be elegantly designed and packaged, it might be a killer app for teams looking for such a platform.

#7

I need to build a server-side application to test an interface to the upcoming MWS system. A chat system is pretty much the ‘Hello World!’ of multi-user systems.

Not saying going to replace Messager or What’s App anytime soon - but anyone interested in discussing a simple Chat feature set to test and highlight the capabilities of MWS - let me know.

Do not need to be a dev - just if interested, maybe some documentation, bug reports, stuff. Some moral support would be needed - a little love goes a long way.

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#8

It’s not really a chat, but there are comment plugins using third party servives that work really well: