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Reply content type proposal #22

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Reply content type proposal
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60 changes: 60 additions & 0 deletions XIPs/xip-reply-content-type.md
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---
xip:
title: Reply Content Type
description: Content type for reply messages
author: Kunal Mondal
status: Draft
type: Standards Track
category: XRC
created: 2023-03-24
---

## Abstract

This XRC proposes a reply content type that can be used to give clients the functionality of replying to a message.
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Suggested change
This XRC proposes a reply content type that can be used to give clients the functionality of replying to a message.
This XRC proposes a reply content type that allows linking a message with a prior message that it responds to.


## Motivation

When it comes to having a comfortable conversation, replying to messages is an absolute no brainer as it gives users the freedom to converse without any miscommunications. In order to provide users a real messaging platform, XMTP needs to provide this capability.
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I don't think I buy this argument. XMTP conversations provide a way to order messages in natural response patterns. A message in a conversation can be presumed to be a response to messages preceding it in a conversation. I'd grant that this is somewhat lose structure and that there may be cases where a more refined substructure would be useful, is that what you're after with this proposal? (threads within conversations?) Could you elaborate more on what you're trying to achieve with this?

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@ImShivraj ImShivraj Mar 28, 2023 •
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Although XMTP conversations provide a way to order messages in a natural response pattern and the response to
preceding message is possible, the problem comes when a users send multiple messages and it is inconvient
for the peer to just simply respond to each one for them one by one in sequence. It definitely doesn't seem
like a good UX when it comes to having seemless 1 on 1 conversations.

image

How are we suposed to respond to this ? It is a natural instinct to reply to the newest message first so here
comes the problem where the "natural response pattern" doesn't work and so the other user's responses will
seem like jumbled messages and it causes severe miscommunications.

Introducing the functionality to reply to particular messages solves this and lets users freely respond in any
sequence they want and also prohibit any possible miscommunication.

image

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I don't think I buy this argument. XMTP conversations provide a way to order messages in natural response patterns. A message in a conversation can be presumed to be a response to messages preceding it in a conversation. I'd grant that this is somewhat lose structure and that there may be cases where a more refined substructure would be useful, is that what you're after with this proposal? (threads within conversations?) Could you elaborate more on what you're trying to achieve with this?

Threads within conversations can be a good option but it doesn't seem to have much use case when it comes to 1 on 1 conversations. There are just 2 people in a chat conversing and why would they want to make a completely new thread to separate the conversation from the original one ? Although threads' refined substructure could be pretty great for a group chat as there's substantial use case. In the future, when group chats are introduced to XMTP, thread conversations is definitely a go to feature.

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These are great motivational examples. I think this is the right content for the Motivation section.


## Specification

Proposed content type:
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Proposed content type:
Proposed content type ID:


```js
{
authorityId: "xmtp.org"
typeId: "reply"
versionMajor: 0
versionMinor: 1
}
```

The reply message MUST include the following parameters:
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@mkobetic mkobetic Mar 28, 2023 •
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I don't think this is sufficient. How does a codec decode this message if its full structure is not known? How do you decode something if all you know about it is that it should have a string field in it, but the rest is unknown?

The reference implementation suggests that you intend a Reply to be a wrapper around a nested EncodedContent structure. If so, it needs to be explicitly shown here. Also if the intended encoding format is protobuf, the spec should include the protobuf spec of the structures. The spec must spell out in complete detail how things are expected to be encoded.

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Apparently I misunderstood that parameters above refer to the EncodedContent parameters. It would probably help to be more explicit. I think showing it here as a field of an object like this is probably not helping with the confusion. Maybe show it in the context of the EncodedContent object?


```ts
{
// The ID of the message that is being replied to
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What is the ID of the message? Where does it come from. Are implementors of this XIP free to chose what they want to use as an ID?

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What is the ID of the message? Where does it come from. Are implementors of this XIP free to chose what they want to use as an ID?

Here the ID refers's to the id from the XMTP message wrapper.

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@mkobetic mkobetic Mar 30, 2023 •
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I'm assuming you're referring to https://github.com/xmtp/proto/blob/main/proto/message_contents/message.proto#L63. Unfortunately the protocol spec doesn't define the value. I think we'll need to rectify that for this reference to work. If different SDKs compute the ID differently (which likely isn't the case today, but it could be), then the reference will be broken in different contexts.

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And again, I'm asking the questions because the XIP should answer them.

inReplyToID: string
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Shouldn't the message also contain the encodedContent field here?

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Apparently what I missed earlier is that parameters above refer to the EncodedContent parameters. It would probably help to be more explicit there. And I'd agree that showing it here as a field of an object like this is probably not helping with the confusion. Maybe show it in the context of the EncodedContent object?

}
```

The content of the encoded message is an EncodedContent object, serialized in the protobuf format (since we're guaranteed to always have the ability to deserialize that.)

The content type of the reply's `EncodedContent` MUST be allowed. By default, the only allowed content type is `ContentTypeText`, but additional types can be optionally allowed as well.
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What is the purpose of this allowed type notion. What does make a content type allowed? What is the process of making a type allowed?


## Backward compatibility

Clients encountering messages of this type must already be able to deal with messages of an unknown content type, so whatever considerations they're making there should work here too.
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It sounds like there are no backward compatibility concerns with this proposal, then let's just say that with the fewest words possible.

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We should strongly encourage users of the Reply content type to use fallbackText whenever possible, given this is rolling out into a world where most clients do not support replies.

The codecs can help a bit here. If the child content has a fallback, we could bubble that up to make it the fallback of the parent. That way even if your client doesn't support Replies, you can still read the message. If the child content is of type text, we could also make that text the fallback of the parent.


## Reference implementation

- [PR implementation for the JS SDK](https://github.com/xmtp/xmtp-js-content-types/blob/baed02476cd94c6ceef24c107a86a162efaec678/reply/src/Reply.ts)

## Security considerations

Having different message content structure in content types breaks the uniformity which might be risky, but this is also the case for other content types, since there's no server side validation of message contents (besides size). The same protections we have now would be in place while the same pitfalls we have would still be there as well.
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I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Content types is a mechanism that allows different content structures in messages. What risks are you referring to?


## Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via [CC0](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).