Improve ignoring users

[aaronraimist]

matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals#1142 / https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Jex7lDAwmv0KcgyL9oeGfUCsjw0CWSqedPKZ1ViSVis/edit is a good start but with the current spec it isn't possible for a user to know that they have received a message from an ignored user or choose to temporarily view an ignored message without unignoring the user. In the current spec, once a user has been ignored their messages are no longer passed to the client.

See https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/6819 or element-hq/element-web#7521 for feature requests

I was going to try to write up a proposal but I couldn't really decide what was the best way to go about this so I'm just opening this issue for now to see what others think.

One solution would be to use the extra object that was added for future enhancement to do something like

{
    "ignored_users": {
        "@someone:domain.com": {
            "hard_ignore": true
        }
    },
    "type": "m.ignored_user_list"
}

but this wouldn't be backwards compatible. It would be up to the client to filter out the ignored messages and determine whether they should be completely hidden (hard ignored) or "muffled" (soft ignored) and optionally viewable. I also don't know what the best word is to describe the different types of ignore so feel free to let me know if you have a better idea.

Another solution would be to add something like a m.muffled_user_list in addition to the existing m.ignored_user_list. The server would continue to do the existing behavior of not sending events from users on the m.ignored_user_list but would send events to the client for users on the m.muffled_user_list. It would be up to the client to stop displaying those events while optionally allowing the user to view them if they wanted to.

[aaronraimist]

You should have the option to ignore pings from a user while still seeing their messages

[aaronraimist]

Another thing that would be nice to have in the more granular ignores would be the ability to prevent people from pinging you https://matrix.to/#/!YTvKGNlinIzlkMTVRl%3Amatrix.org/%24UnzrzdB8xQRmOAva8edGtpAZ2vdbc6vWOVsPyIdkKW4

[aaronraimist]

Related: matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals#3840