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matrix-doc/proposals/3032-presence-revamp.md

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MSC3032: Thoughts on updating presence

This is deliberately a loose-form, draft MSC to note down my current thoughts on how we might improve the presence system and integrate it with profiles-as-rooms (MSC1769).

PUT /_matrix/client/r0/presence/{userId}/status

status_msg becomes deprecated. In it's place there's a new state event in the user's MSC1769 profile room, m.status. It's not a field in the m.profile object because it's intended to be updated fairly frequently and we don't need to update the whole profile each time (this would be inefficient and risk data races).

presence stays, with the additional value of busy as per MSC3026, but this endpoint is explicitly for the user setting their presence manually, eg. selecting 'busy' or 'unavailable' from a checkbox in the UI.

set_presence in /sync

This is differentiated from PUT /_matrix/client/r0/presence/{userId}/status by being explicitly for automatic updates from clients, eg.:

  • A client supplies unavailable if it doesn't believe the user is paying attention (eg. they haven't moved the mouse ina while).
  • A client supplies busy if the user is on a call in that client.

Effective presence

The homeserver can then combine the multiple sources of presence information from the clients and the user-set value to determine an effective presence for the user. This is a black-box as far as the spec is concerned, but semantics will be along the lines of 'if any status is busy, the user is busy'.

Question: if a user sets themselves 'busy', what status do they set when they're free again? 'online'?

Publishing presence

Homeservers take the effective presence and publish it as an m.presence state event in the user's profile room. You subscribe to a user's presence by peeking into their profile room.

m.presence events go away entirely after some deprecation period.

Question: How would we restrict the set of people allowed to see presence info (ie. assuming we allow a wider set of people to see the user's profile) Question: What happens if a user send an m.presenceevent to their profile room? Should they be allowed to?

GET /_matrix/client/r0/presence/{userId}/status

Also goes away.

Presence for the smartphone generation

The presence status enum was designed in a time when smartphones were relatively new and it was still assumed that if you weren't at your computer, you were unavailable. This isn't true now we all carry our computers in our pockets. This probably requires only a small change in how we interpret the values though:

  • online: Actively using a client right this moment
  • unavailable: No particular status / default. It's assumed the user may be available and respond if you message them, or maybe not.
  • busy: Unavailable to talk.
  • offline: It should be assumed that messages won't reach the user.