support a channel to post automatic feedback to a user

SergNikitin commented 2 years ago

We want to have a way to send information to our users in cases like

Mazed needs to issue a password reset link to a user (on initial registration or on explicit user request afterwards)
we want to notify users of new features, news etc
more

SergNikitin commented 2 years ago

In theory users may prefer different ways of communication, from classic emails to something more modern like chat applications. Telegram bot will be our first stab at this since

everyone who volunteered for customer interviews (and therefore is likely to become an early adopter) uses Telegram
Telegram is easy to integrate with (especially compared to older tech like email webservers)
We have longer-term plans for Telegram integration, including user-initiated actions like "add a doc node via sending a message to a bot", "provide feedback about Mazed through a bot" etc

SergNikitin commented 2 years ago

Looked into features of Telegram bots & their integration APIs. TLDR - great for "Share button" workflows we have planned, awkward at best for password recovery workflows.

The good

for the tasks bots are designed to solve, integration is indeed very straightforward. As far as I can tell, bots are designed to help in scenarios where it is natural for a human to make the first step like
- conversational experiences (like when a person has textual conversation with a bot, answers bot's questions etc)
- experiences when a user sends something to the bot, like a message they want to save
lots of frameworks to choose from, some are widely used (10k+ stars on Github), including Typescript, Python & Rust
(optionally) can run the bot server (not just the bot itself) locally, on our resources

The bad

1. ill-suited for introductory experiences

As repeated througout the docs (for example, here),

Bots can't initiate conversations with users. A user must either add them to a group or send them a message first.

This means that functionality where a user didn't have a chance to start a conversation with our bot (like #118) will be less straightforward for the user - they won't instantly receive a message when they click "Register" in the Mazed UI. We'll be able to send them a message only after they

first, manually open a chat with the bot (this step can be simplified by giving a bot link to the user, like https://t.me/mazed_bot), but that's bad experience in my opinion
second, manually click a "Start" button in their Telegram UI
and now we can send something to them

It won't help if they give us their Telegram ID in advance - Telegram will not allow a bot to contact a person that didn't explicitly say through TG UI that they want to be contacted.

2. ill-suited as a "stable" communication channel

As described in the previous section, bots can't always reach their recipient. If a user decided to delete their chat with the bot then

we won't be notified
attempts to send messages will fail

On top of that, Telegram itself doesn't have a built-in way to track "all users that opened a chat with a specific bot", so if we ever want to initiate an "unscheduled" message (like "here are the updates that we rolled out during past week") we'll have to persist the list of user IDs ourselves.

So Telegram bots

are a weird tool for crucial identity management activities like "password recovery". It is unlikely that a user will completely brick their access to it since they can always re-add the bot back in Telegram, but conversations with bots are not viewed as "important" by Telegram users. I think it'll be a mess similar to "oh, have you checked the junk folder in your email?", but even more embarrassing
require more implementation work to perform a duty of "news poster" - Telegram Channels are a better fit

SergNikitin commented 2 years ago

Briefly looked at email as the obvious alternative gorilla in the room and there is a good article on why running your own email server infrastructure is a dumb idea.

They do however suggest that just paying somebody else to do the heavylifting is relatively hassle-free. Fastmail, one of the offers from the article, charges $3 for a single account (and that includes 600 aliases, like auth@mazed.com, news@mazed.com etc). Not even sure if a paid one is needed at this point, the main perk seems to be "privacy" and a fancy domain name (instead of something like mazed-auth@gmail.com, mazed-help@gmail.com)

Programmatically, with a server up and running the rest seems easy and email providers give all the credentials for programmatic access it seems.

SergNikitin commented 2 years ago

For the reasons described above we have decided to postpone the telegram bot plans. We are likely to come back to them later as a way to submit more things to Mazed as new notes, but not to post feedback to a user.

For our immediate needs email is sufficient and has been integrated already in https://github.com/Thread-knowledge/smuggler/pull/56

mazed-dev / truthsayer