Contact management: Grouping multiple contacts into one contact in the Contact list view of your account

[ktlinux]

Is the feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

As more people join the other platforms of the Fediverse (Pixelfed, PeerTube etc.) they might have multiple accounts, each dedicated to posting various types of content. They may also have multiple accounts on multiple servers as well. If you get bored or for some whatever other reason you want to unfollow, block or ignore the person, you'd have to search for each of that person's accounts.

Describe the feature you'd like

I was thinking about a way for a person to merge/unmerge multiple follows in a single entry, with all the actual profiles hidden under a dropdown arrow, or with the fedi adresses listed below their name. It's kinda like in your phone (on Android at least, in Google Contacts), where under the same contact you can call them, send them a WhatsApp message (or whatever app you have installed, even through XMPP), send them money through Revolut (again, if you have it installed) etc.

You could collapse/uncollapse this view to see all the person's profiles. You could block/ignore/unfollow the person, and the action could be sent to all the accounts in that bundled view. The "bundle" could be kept in the block/ignored view so you could unblock/unignore it whenever you'd want. Or, if you'd like to hyperorganize things, if you've already blocked one of these "bundles" or group of contacts or whatever you call it, but the blocked person still created another account to harass you, you could even add that to the blocked bundle and have the person blocked automatically.

And last but not least it could make up for a tidier contact list.

What do you say?

Describe alternatives you've considered

There are, indeed, already some ways you can group contacts, such as the circles, but they're more like distribution lists/custom feeds. You cannot actually manage the contacts with these. I was thinking about this for contact management more.

[annando]

Sounds like some interesting idea. I only need a clue how to do this.

[foss-]

I don't see the benefits outweighing the effort to implement this. This adds another layer to an already complex settings backend and frontend, introduces potential bugs and problems and overhead to maintain the feature.

Can you give an example of another platform doing this and share a few screenshots of their implementation?

[ktlinux]

I don't see the benefits outweighing the effort to implement this. This adds another layer to an already complex settings backend and frontend, introduces potential bugs and problems and overhead to maintain the feature.

Can you give an example of another platform doing this and share a few screenshots of their implementation?

I was thinking about something like your phone's address book

You can see that it automatically recognized that it is about the same person and merged the entries in the contact list into a single one. I was thinking of a possibility for someone to do this exact same thing, but manually on Friendica.

The thing is that most other platforms (Facebook, Xitter, YouTube etc.) assume that someone will only have one account on their platform, even forcing you to do so. Thus, most people only have one Facebook account, one YouTube account etc. You cannot follow X's Facebook account, then the Xitter one, then the YouTube one with the same account. That's why there's generally no such feature on the said platforms, either.