This topic is brought up occasionally on the RPI core. Either in writing a drop in replacement for the server that existing clients could connect to (which would require duplicating the current server protocols (including SLCP)), or in switching to a different (hopefully more adopted) chat protocol (e.g.: XMPP (Jabber), SIP, IRC) that could be added to to support features critical to adoption as a lily replacment.

Old Features that must be preserved

# -> (11:23) From masto, to cmc:                                                
# - Posit: the first requirement of any potintial lily replacement is that it   
# - be lily.                                                                    

For the purposes of this thought experiment, however, perhaps we can develop a feature list that would be "close enough."

• Must provide an upgrade path for old users. This includes those people that still use telnet only. One suggestion: provide a proxy server in front of whatever server is doing the actual CMC (--Aurelis)
• Authentication
  • Accounts are not tied to anything else except having an email address
  • Accounts are anonymous (the email address is private, and name can be)
• Unique naming within the entire domain (/reserve, /rename)
• Message sending
  • To a single other user
  • To a single other discussion
  • To multiple users and/or discussions, so each recipieint knows who/what the other recipients are
• Discussions
  • Persistent (Maintains membership, even if member not online at time)
  • Multiple moderators
  • Authorization (/permit)
  • Reviews only available to members
  • [optional] notification when people enter/leave discussions
  • List of members available to non-members
  • Existance not available to people not authorized
• Personal and discussion review
  • Available only to members of a discussion
  • Personal review can collect messages even when not logged on
  • Flexible (parameters to narrow review)
• User attributes
  • blurbs
  • here/away?
  • idle time
• Notifications
  • Discussion creation/destruction
  • User login/logout
• Ignore (both per-discussion and private)
• Server managed groups

New Features that we should shoot for because otherwise why bother.

• Rich text
• Unicode support.
• end to end encryption.
• Multiple connections by single user (screen -x)
• threads
• groups as first-class objects
• improved timezone support

Possible replacments

• Complete rewrite in non MOO engine. Aiming for a dropin replacment with extra features.
• Jabber/XMPP
• SIP
• IRC

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