Support for multiple accounts

[sternenseemann]

I think long-term-wise it would be good to have mutli-user-support in place. For IRC support jackline would definately need such an mechanism for managing IRC and XMPP at the same time.

Additionally it would just allow the convenience of using multiple XMPP accounts (and later multiple IRC networks) at the same time.

Related to #104.

[cfcs]

Why would you need multiple XMPP accounts? Can't you use federation?

[sternenseemann]

What is that? Never heard of it.

[cfcs]

XMPP servers can talk to each other through a mechanism called "site-to-site" (S2S): https://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/s2s-components.html

This generally means that alice@foo.org can talk to bob@bar.org by having foo.org connect to bar.org.

I believe the original motivation for not allowing multiple users, besides keeping the complexity down, was to discourage people using multiple accounts in the same jackline instance in an attempt to achieve anonymity, since it is usually possible to identify such configurations through passive fingerprinting, a risk that many users aren't aware of.

[hannesm]

My initial motivation to not support multiple accounts was to reduce complexity, I'm currently rewriting lots of code to get rid of mutable and global state...

Passive fingerprinting is a risk, to mitigate I'd introduce per-account commands (such as connecting to only a single command).

[toastal]

motivation

I can think of two

1. Redundancy. You might want to keep a backup for your self-hosted server in case it is down and fallback to the big boys at Conversations/Blabber/etc. in that event (or vice versa really).

2. Accounts for different personas. Maybe you like to admin as admin@. Maybe you take business inquiries at a different more ‘profession’ account name like john.smith@ instead of your usual username noXscope420blazitBOI@. Maybe your workplace uses XMPP, and requires you use an account real.name@big.corp. Maybe you’re into a niche hobby that you don’t want associated with your main account, say ‘furries’ for your fursona@. [insert other privacy/anonymity reason].

Having just one client open can really simplify a user’s experience, but it comes at a just of UX for the maintainer such as how select which user to message as user A vs user B. Email is also decentralized and federated, but many users choose to have multiple (or infinity with throwaway services) accounts.

[cfcs]

I handle personas through this wrapper https://github.com/cfcs/jackline-gtk/tree/run_in_tabs FWIW

EDIT: As the branch name suggests, it makes tabs. Each tab is its own jackline instances with its own config, and clicking the systray icon (when there's a notification) switches tabs to the relevant one. I've been pretty happy with this solution for the last six years.