I was curious whether Lemmy has ever considered (or discussed) adding some form of group chat / group messaging functionality, to the already existing DM system.
One area where this could be especially useful is community mod-mail or instance admin-mail.
Right now, if a user wants to contact a community’s moderators (or instance admins), they generally have to message individuals one by one. A group chat or shared inbox system would allow:
Users to message all community moderators at once
Users to contact instance admins as a group
Mods/admins to see and respond collaboratively in a single thread
This would be similar in spirit to Reddit’s mod-mail system, but adapted to Lemmy’s federated model.
Potential benefits:
Easier and clearer communication for users
Less duplicated effort for mods/admins
Better moderation transparency and coordination
A single canonical place for moderation-related messages
From a user’s perspective, it would feel like contacting “the mods” as a single entity rather than guessing who to message
I’m curious:
Has this been discussed before?
Are there technical or federation-related reasons this might be difficult?
Would this be something better handled at the client level, or would it require core Lemmy support?
EDIT: I would have posted this to the GitHub, but GitHub never works for me, no matter what GitHub account I use, so I just decided to post it here instead.
this gets asked regularly, but its completely outside of lemmys tech stack in an already fragile, wild-west ecosystem.
this can be done by any instance owner/dev who wants to build that product. good luck.
What about, instead of having the DM/GC feature in-house, Lemmy instead integrated a separate protocol like:
Matrix
XMPP
Delta Chat
Session
Briar
SimpleX
OMEMO (XMPP Extension)
etc.
And used that instead, for the DM/GC?
That way, Lemmy wouldn’t have to donate resources to DM/GC, but users would still be able to message each other.
And not have to have two separate accounts on two different platforms.
Why not just go to any of those apps?
it is: a. outside the scope of the lemmy platform b. an already solved comm stack that would need integration, already achievable by capable devs.
devs only have so much time to do shit, and lemmy as it is still requires a ton of development as the fediverse matures. there is no appetite, or value-add for those devs to add another rabbit hole to their project.
but its open source. you really want something done? go fucking do it.