Gajim - 2025-08-10

Is there a way to make animation display without user interaction ? example, the following image, I post it, it appears, no user interaction needed

https://chat.domn.net:5443/upload/500b07a7efeff7dd5a382d5bf3fa0d30cec686c6/rRANvqBuoyeV0Pwh1XdRMz91s7ae9wJmX7TN44tF/63dce8cf-c8e5-4835-b9c2-41a2aa3e5bee.png

but when I post this version it looks like a file

https://chat.domn.net:5443/upload/500b07a7efeff7dd5a382d5bf3fa0d30cec686c6/8uBezZt4RaMiuMsPeJ0N72wezVRnXKCLnkNI2uYI/2025-08-10_00h36s05_x.mp4

nondescript, not visible without extra user intervention and installation of external viewer software

What format conversion is needed to make it display in gajim without further user intervention or the installation of external software ?

Good day. I think that it would be beneficial to add a toggle button render CSV code into table. ```csv , date, participant, group chat, , 2023-06-07, Mr. White, white@gate.i2p, , 2024-08-03, Mrs. White, white@mate.i2p, ``` ✏

Sounds like a extreme niche feature

But I could imagine that we provide extension points to the code widget to do this with a plugin

shodan: there are no video previews in Gajim yet. And even once they are implemented, there would be no autoplay, since that would be annoying

>since that would be annoying I disagree I think it is requiring user to perform extra action that is annoying and interrupts the flow of the discussion I think it should autoplay with sound in private chats It should one-click-play with opengraph-style preview frame in public chats, (and server should obtain opengraph frame on behalf of client for privacy reasons) in all cases, pausing is the default action of clicking anywhere on the "preview" there should be a seekbar, mute button and volume overlay on the "preview" that autofades away then cursor is not over it double click should fullscreen the "preview"

Mhm and what if someone sends you 2 videos ? Should they play both with sound?

not autoplaying video is like if every text message had spoiler text enabled imagine if every single text message required a click before it could be read

the second video plays when the first one is finished , like a regular queue

videos without sound, or less than X seconds, should automatically loop

until interrupted by a subsequent video

all these questions, should just be user configurable parameters with global defaults and with a per-user override setting

So everytime you open a chat with 3 videos they should play from the top one after another and then loop from the top?

silent video that are on-screen and less than the defined limit, loop forver

also live video stream should display immediately (example udp://224.0.0.1:10000)

in other words, if I push a button on my cell phone and point my phone at something, my interlocutor sees and hears from my camera immediately without interruption, negociation, handshaking or delays

Or we spare the few 1000 lines of crazy play logic and user plays the video they want with a click. ✏

well if I want to show you a pretty animated triangle, I want you to see a pretty animated triangle, not push buttons and thinking about user actions, that just ruins the moment ✏

Yes but what if I don't want to see your pretty triangle play continuously without me wanting it

Even if such features would exist, the default will always to not play it. Because you should not get to decide what and when other people need to hear or look at something. The default would always be that people can decide themself

you could also say what if I don't want to see your words, hear you speak, watch your images at some point you're talking to me and you have to hear what I have to say, or hang up I can understand some people are annoying and the software should have an option to say "that user I want confirmation request before seeing anything they send me" but that should not be the default assumption for a private chat. It should be the default assumption for a public chat

toggle autoplay in a chat would be an always visible button in the upper corner, right there ->

https://chat.domn.net:5443/upload/500b07a7efeff7dd5a382d5bf3fa0d30cec686c6/jCG70g3i8BGHL47O3gdpg8BAsNHP3BeU9trqwAvp/fa27b734-7cda-4c0b-ac2b-8da3cdf98eaf.png

and it should apply to images audio video streams and 3d models and whatever else media exists in the future

?smell?

Say, did you you have to perform a supplemental user action to even see that picture ?

Yes of course

I decide myself which media I download, who knows what crazy stuff you send

That is strange, I imagine largely do not ever see most posted pictures then ? ✏

To the point that, it's considered pointless in xmpp to even send a picture, at all ?

As in, pictures are somehow, "not part of the conversation"

If you find it pointless that people can decide themself if they want to look at something ..

I assume they will not make the decision, not perform the action, not see the thing and therefore not worth the effort to send it in the first place

The burden of the decision itself, kills the medium

it also kills spontaneity, timing and flow of the discussion

I have a friends group chat, one of the friend has notifications turned off, maybe he never enabled them I'm not sure as a result, he has to take action to look into the chat which he does maybe every other week by which time there are dozens of pages of content, he scrolls maybe one or two pages back and understandably misses the rest functionally, that friend is not part of the discussion because of the friction in the process and it's all probably just because he doesn't know how make the notification audio-silent

this whole thing I'm talking about is kind of like that if the video plays but there's no sound , you have to flip the mute button and rewind, but you've already seen the beginning, the viewing experience is damaged If it's not the default, then there's no way to have an undamaged experience

The medium ends up limiting what shape the conversation can take it cannot ever be a smooth experience when there are required user interactions in the way I think making those mandatory friction point the default (let alone a possibility, is how IRC died

You can't force your contact to look at things. Your contact have control over what they _want_ to see. And that includes if they want to hear your or if they want to play any video. This will not change.

Oh they want to see it, there is no doubt about that. They could turn it off if they wanted to. But the current off by default means, they're largely not ever going to see it I hope you see the distinction By making it off by default for everyone then it's not ever going to work unless someone does hand holding to the user to turn it on and they do that for every user look I understand that some user don't want to autoplay animation but most people do want it, because they don't want to take an extra action on every message they receive again, it's like if every message came with spoiler tag on, and you had to click every message to see it I can understand some persons might want that, but they are a very small minority and it should not be the default

If you have any doubt, just look at commercial social software, they have done the research, auto play is enable on most of them because it's what nearly everyone wants

I just tested with Whatsapp it does not autoplay videos

And that's about the biggest messenger around

facebook autoplays, pretty sure instagram does, tik tok does,

imagine if tiktok had the user press a confirmation click on every video, they'd just be youtube, the flow of it in an integral part of the experience

Of course the goal on this platform is to watch short videos

That's not the goal of using Gajim

the goal of xmpp is to send messages and have the user on the other side see them I think that thinking of images and sound as different from text, is just an artifact of 1990s computing limitations

And I'm pretty sure if a website autoplays video is a setting in the browser and not by the website

in firefox autoplay is on by default you can turn it off per-website or off globally, and you have a whitelist function if it's off globally

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/block-autoplay

Its off by default according to site

Which mirrors my experience

I also think it's not useful to conflate messengers with other social platforms.

If you want to make comparisons do it with other messengers

But we can also postpone the discussion until we have a video player

I would think those things should be figured out before it's implemented

most computers I've been to, youtube and facebook auto plays I mean the logic is simple, if you don't want it, turn it off if it's off by default, then it will always be cumbersome I imagine it was also a huge fight just to make image preview ON by default as well, is it going to be that fight for every new media type ?

the lack of opengraph preview is, the number one complaint of all my users

and I had to drag them one by one to my xmpp server already and I had to say "either you install gajim or you come to my house to talk to me"

shodan: facebook, instagram, tiktok and youtube are platforms looking to maximize engangement, so they can show you more ads and/or report bigger numbers to their investor. The comparison with a foss app is apples-to-oranges comparison

Autoplaying videos is something that probably most users don't want, but you can make it a plugin for the few that do

> the lack of opengraph preview is, the number one complaint of all my users certainly a good feature, would be even better if the server does it

Just make sure to implement something like rate-limit to avoid accidentally launching a DoS attack against a website that doesn't have OpenGraph.

Accessing a website with og is no different to one without, I would say? One offers structured info, one doesn't

If anyone is interested in some background on this and the challenges it has https://www.mysk.blog/2020/10/25/link-previews/

Open Graph are xml tags in the content of a html page

Displaying open graph means downloading the html page and parsing the og xml tags

Relevant issue https://dev.gajim.org/gajim/gajim/-/issues/11640

I was thinking more like https://github.com/modernxmpp/modernxmpp/issues/40

luca: that is exactly what's discussed

Search is working fine for me but whenever i try to focus on a message thats far back in history, gajim will forcibly load the entire history from that point onward and it won't let me actually see the message because it keeps scrolling to the bottom. is this a known issue or should I report it? 2.3.3 on windows

It known but I think there is no issue

Usually if you click on the message a second time it's focused

Maybe mesonium wants to look at the scroll code, as he now has extensive scrolled window knowledge from his media browser 😁

lovetox: actually thought about looking into it

Just had no time for it yet

Not because I have extensive knowledge (do I really?) but rather because it nags me seriously 😄

> Maybe mesonium wants to look at the scroll code, as he now has extensive scrolled window knowledge from his media browser 😁 😁 ↺

I've been through the discussion about auto-play quickly. If I may add my two cents as a user : Auto play of video is a very bad practice from a UI perspective. Generally, making an action without the user input is bad practice. It's very prone to errors and abuse (think a trick video Ith abusive or violent content auto playing, and all other minor cases). It's been a battle in the HTML standard to prevent auto play from video and enforce it. Major companies always finding or asling for workarounds. Not only comparing social networks or platforms with instant messaging is irrelevent, like it was well mentionned, it's juste not a good point. What YouTube, Facebook, Insta… are doing is bad practice. ✏

> Usually if you click on the message a second time it's focused unfortunately not, it takes like five minutes until it loads the history in question before i can actually focus it ↺

the message itself loads immediately but its just impossible to fight the autoscroll

craftxbox: I've also seen this happen sometimes

craftbox: if you mash-click the message in the search results, that can stop the autoscrolling

> in firefox autoplay is on by default > you can turn it off per-website or off globally, and you have a whitelist function if it's off globally you should never start playback without user interaction or explicit opt-in to automatic playback. especially if it has to download extra data to do so. firefox only allows it because chrome does, and chrome really only allows it because of youtube. to wit, no chat program i have ever used (Discord, Telegram, Signal, Slack, Skype, iMessage, Google Messages, Hangouts, etc.) has had automatic playback enabled by default, because there's no good reason to have auto-play in a messaging application.

> unfortunately not, it takes like five minutes until it loads the history in question before i can actually focus it Another way to trigger that behaviour is by "Browsing history by date" (if you choose, for example, one month ago in this MUC). ↺