[shawnz]

Then instead imagine this: the user really is innocent and just happened to coincidentally send the message right after the start of a long period of poor connectivity (like a flight, or a road trip, etc). If you just allow it to go through after an arbitrary delay, with only a log of the received time for liability purposes, then the user wouldn't have any indication of this scenario occurring.

Wouldn't it be better in that case to show an error so that they can make sure the situation is addressed appropriately?

[Spivak]

You have when the client claims it was sent (so where it goes in the displayed history) and can see when it was received. What else could you possibly do?

[shawnz]

For example, you could reject the message and show the user an error but only if there's a discrepancy of >X minutes. But how much discrepancy should be allowed? I don't know, I only mean to show why I think the solution isn't as simple as it appears

[lmm]

> you could reject the message and show the user an error but only if there's a discrepancy of >X minutes

No you can't, not in a federated and decentralised system like this.

The sender can wait for a read receipt from a given receiver user, if the receiver is willing to make those public. But if the message left client A and didn't arrive at client B, there's no objective fact of the matter about whether the message "was sent" or not.

[immibis]

Seems like a design deficiency of Matrix then. When IRC federation breaks, everyone can see it, except for the rare people who aren't in a shared channel with anyone on the other side of the break.

[lmm]

> When IRC federation breaks, everyone can see it, except for the rare people who aren't in a shared channel with anyone on the other side of the break.

Well sure, you could see that something was going on, if you were paying attention. But how does that solve the problem? Does your IRC client stop you from sending messages if it detects a netsplit?

[kelnos]

I don't think IRC is a good analogy here because there's no "message resync" that happens when the netsplit is resolved. If there are two people on opposite sides of a split, and they both send messages to a channel while things are still split, they will not see the other's messages when the split is over.

In the Matrix case, if a homeserver disappears for a while, it will sync any missed messages when it comes back online.

[lmm]

> Wouldn't it be better in that case to show an error so that they can make sure the situation is addressed appropriately?

If you want a single centralised server then you can set things up that way. Presumably if you're using a setup with multiple servers, and took one of the servers on the flight/road trip, you wanted the people on the flight/road trip to be able to keep talking to each other over that server, even though that server is disconnected from the one in the office.