Contact List & Renaming Contacts

[trymeouteh]

To add a layer to Synapse to allow matrix accounts to store a encrypted contacts list of their matrix friends will be handy and here is what can be done with such as feature.

• Clients can access this contacts list
• Contact lists will be saved on the matrix homeserver, only accessible to the user and can be synced to other clients like messages
• Contact list is encrypted, it cannot be stored unencrypted
• Ability to create contact groups and put contacts into groups for organization
• Contact list will save the following fields (Name, Matrix address, groups)
• Ability to save public and private rooms in contacts
• Room in contacts will have the following fields (Name, matrix room id/hashtag, groups)

By having contacts, you can set a name you will know to a friend who has an obscure name and matrix address such as cyberguy2001 to something like John Smith that you will know or renaming a room name to something more familiar. Additional contact fields could be added such as email, notes, birthday, anniversary, phone number, etc but I think the bare minimum that is needed is Name, Matrix address/room and groups.

This will mean contacts will be kept more private since using a contacts application on a phone which people use to save their emails and phone numbers can be read by other apps, by having a built in matrix contacts system that does backup to your account and is encrypted will be a more private answer.

[clokep]

This sounds like it is probably a spec issue since it is talking about features that span both homeservers and clients. I've transferred this to the relevant repo.

[Thatoo]

If matrix-server could sync contacts with carddav, it would be really nice.

[Mart-Bogdan]

It would be really useful!

As most other messaging apps allows this (not for rooms but for contacts, but for rooms it would be extra ++).

I even know few persons who are using Emoji or Unicode Space character as display name in Telegram.

I think only Facebook Messenger won't allow one to rename contacts, but IDK, I didn't use it much.

[Mart-Bogdan]

related to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/3015

[vranki]

* Contact list is encrypted, it cannot be stored unencrypted

Just make sure this doesn't require full E2EE capability. Users and clients must have option not to use E2EE if they don't want to. Metadata of which users are interacted with is anyway available to server.