katamari "ellen" j kaplan ๐Ÿ’• kat or kata for short ๐Ÿ’• bi, polyam, trans, writer, devrel nerd, coaster enthusiast ๐Ÿ’• 30~
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dev support lead @discord ๐Ÿช„ opinions โ‰  my employer's

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wife @jkap ๐Ÿ’• aqua suit by craftycovenco ๐Ÿ’• #pluralgang ฮ˜ฮ”

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every time i think "i wonder if i could use ____ instead of that one chat app" i realize ____ doesn't have pluralkit, and it repels me from even trying.

at this point i consider pk a fundamental accessibility tool. i can't express who i am--more really more who we are--without it. but ultimately it's just tools that, from a plurality standpoint, just make sense. you have one @, and you can use that one [body] to host multiple instances of [you] online. it just attributes the posts made by that [body] to various [drivers].

that's something that could just be... there by default. apps all being built by large shareholder-bound corporations run by neurotypical individuals makes it feel improbable, but it's probably not. just a native command to switch headmates and what have you, built-in management for system members and profiles and such. does all the things that one chat app does, except it's specifically designed around plural folks.

would probably do it even better than that one chat app, too, because the way webhooks operate on that one chat app is [comment redacted].

it'd be cool. even if it was a fork of matrix that required self-hosting and could only really be useful for small groups of friends, like, that's all i need. i don't need a social network, i just need a little chat app that's as robust as that one chat app but scaled for groups of 2-20 people and hosted on a machine that you own.


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in reply to @kadybat's post:

god, I keep thinking about this. even just like... a plugin on your client only, where you can select a headmate and have it automatically append a nametag to the beginning of your message instead of you having to type it out every time, like:

NinethLions โ€” Today at 4:20 PM
[Phosphor] just like this

even that would be better than nothing!

I remember mIRC having really basic scripting, I'm sure it's a feature of any acceptably robust IRC client. Of course on IRC you can also just /nick to change your actual username on the fly too.

YEAH, understandable... and I feel like it would be possible to hack together some kind of IRC client that does something for avatars, even if it's as horrible as "every message is turned into JSON and every client that's part of the chat has to independently save everyone's avatars," but there's also the issue that IRC doesn't let you attach images if you wanted to like, share art.

now I AM paging through the matrix docs though and being like. aaaa. where's the version for this that's For Dumbasses Who Don't Understand Technical Shit. where's the version that skips all the explanations and just goes right to "this is the shape of the object that contains message data, this is the shape that user data exists in" so I can horribly tack on some extra fields on top of it

I guess there could also be like, convenient commands like /[one letter you picked] to just. Switch the account without switching ANYTHING else around? And a corresponding "account grouping" that would ensure that all the accounts in the group are invited to all the same places including DMs etc.

PluralKit rules. I use it extensively.

But also, even for non-plural people I can see a ton of utility in being able to customize your experience on a post-by-post basis. I've seen people use PluralKit for nonsense like just having a list of 10 or 12 avatars of the same anime waifu with different facial expressions and then they're like "mad:That really pisses me off" and pluralkit picks the angry chat avatar. And don't get me started on text-only GMing a campaign with multiple NPCs played by one GM.

But the people who run these programs would never give us such freedom. They don't believe in the Curb Cut Principle.

i was theorycrafting literally last night about how to implement this in matrix. i need to get a bit more familiar with it to see what can be implemented where. but fuck i want this in matrix so much

since last time you posted about this, we figured out how we'd actually want to implement this for matrix as an appservice. does mean you'd have to use a custom matrix server unless you could could matrix.org to support it (but also... matrix server for plurals??? hmmmmmm). because i think i can make it apply globally such that no matter where you send your message, it can proxy you. but im not 100% sure how this will interact with DMs yet so i need to actually try it

there's a big activation barrier of my actually writing the code to do this but i feel like after looking at how the discord<->matrix bridge works i have a better idea for how you'd do this because that has all the core functionality there already, just not wired up to proxy tags