Hear me out: what if, instead of maintaining a roster, we just send directed presence to every open chat and tell everyone #XMPP doesn't have a server-side contact list anymore? Obviously, the server could still infer the exact same information, but that's true for Signal as well, and nobody seems bothered by this either.
@Daniel Gultsch would this allow in some way for sharing contact lists and bookmarks between different clients, as long as they stay connected for a while at the same time?
AFAIK, Signal does not have presences or any "last seen"-type information. But I guess "contact list" can be inferred server-side with messages passing through anyway. Maybe there is a mitigation in Signal servers about that too? It's still centralized and Signal servers are a massive single point of failure operated by an org in an authoritarian country, so I don't care enough to actually investigate any of it anyway.
Elena ``of Valhalla''
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