Users should be able to hide messages from their own view (SPEC-108)

[matrixbot]

Somehow we've got this far without users being able to delete messages from their view of a conversation (n.b. this is different to redactions). We obviously need to support it - especially for 1:1 chat.

(Imported from https://matrix.org/jira/browse/SPEC-108)

(Reported by @ara4n)

[matrixbot]

Jira watchers: @illicitonion @kegsay @ara4n

[matrixbot]

What exactly needs to be specced here?

• If they are just deleting their view of the world, then surely just DELETE FROM messages WHERE event_id = ?
• If they are deleting shared state, we have redactions.

-- @kegsay

[matrixbot]

Users can now redact their own messages. This probably covers enough of this use-case for us to care about.

-- @illicitonion

[matrixbot]

Please don't close bugs which describe features which are still open.

Redaction obliterates a message from all participants in a room.

Deletion lets you clean up your view of a conversation (e.g. deleting images you don't want to see or store, or ugly big messages) without impacting anyone else.

It's a valid use case which is entirely separate from redaction - although I agree it's probably lower than P1 priority. The correct thing here is to deprioritise the bug rather than declare it invalid and close it.

-- @ara4n

[matrixbot]

In answer to Kegan's question: it's basically a matter of implementing per-message ACLs (or possibly filters), such that a user can say "please stop showing me this event". Unsure how 'delete from messages' would achieve this.

-- @ara4n

[gergelypolonkai]

Couldn't this be done with (or similar to) account data? In that case the only thing to do is speccing a special type key that can be used by clients. The doc on account_data mentions that custom types should be namespaced, so I would assume there are “reserved” (m.*) types. As account_data is not specced in such depth, maybe some love on that API can solve this issue.