fediverse handles are parsed as email addresses

[wakest]

fediverse handles look like @[email protected] and they are currently being parsed as email addresses (including when being right clicked, the menu says "Copy E-Mail")

• Operating System
  • tested on Mac/iOS/Android
• Delta Chat Version:
  • Delta Chat Desktop | 1.48.0 (git: v1.33.0-1163-g0349c14e)
  • iOS | 1.50.3
• Expected behavior:
  • there is still a bit of uncertainty as to how to handle fediverse handles in apps, so for the time being they should probably just be rendered as plain text

[adbenitez]

This looks as I was imagining mentions in Delta Chat, (mentioning someone by address/id like: @wakest ) but since we currently don't support mentions and it is not clear if we will implement it like that in the end (with multi-address support we will probably will need to use identity pub key as id to mention someone or so) I guess we could disable the linkification in that case for now, but otherwise there is no real difference between an email address and a mastodon handle and the situation will still happen if someone mentions the handle without the @ at the start, on the other hand the linkification is useful for copying the handle to clipboard easily, ex in Android

[Simon-Laux]

Desktop already uses a custom message-parser, so I moved to issue there.

Initially I wanted to treat these addresses as fediverse addresses, but after a short discussion with other devs we came to the conclusion, that we might want to use this format ourselves for mentions (and I made a pr for that #49).

About Mentions

Recently I discussed this again with Holger and we noticed again that for mentions there are more questions, since email addresses won't be static in the future (with AEAP they are already not static, but that feature is experimental and not widely used yet).
So we can't use:

• displayname -> trivial to change
• email address -> will change more (email migration and the planned feature of using multiple email addresses simultaneously)
• cyptographic identity -> will also likely be changeable once we add key rotation

Core will keep up with those changes, so locally/in the database we might be able to contact ids, but they are different for everyone, so thats not a solution for the wire/email format.

Visually the mentions feature will be type @ and then you get a dropdown/selection with the display names of the group members like in other messengers. But the topic here is about the internal representation (what is actually stored in the database and in the actual email messages).

(in discord and other messengers custom emojis and mentions are also represented differently in the UI than what their actual text is - see https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-renders-rich-messages-on-the-android-app)

About now

I think for now the best way is to remove linkification from the handles until we decide what to do in the future.