Re: Privacy Respecting Replacement for facebook groups

[Jean Louis]

* quiliro <quiliro@riseup.net> [2020-10-08 19:07]:
> > And while we are speaking, on emacs-devel mailing list we found
> > Qiantan Hong, who made Emacs Lisp to make real time simultaneous
> > editing, and we are testing it now.
> 
> Nice to know. Please provide some information about your experience,
> when you think it is ready.

It works, there are few bugs, but it works.

I never did that in real time simultaneously, as I do not find it
necessary. We exchange data by email, and send small part of the
transactions for review, then we correct the final version. It goes
over our email line, so that means, it does not touch third party
servers.

In real time I have tried it on local desktop switch with computers in
the same house, it works fine, and it would work fine over VPN,
probably over Tor.

One use case I can think of, is the correction or supervision of text
editing, like in assignments, or translations or similar.

Emacs has the mode to expose the file in real time as web page, that
is impatient mode, it publishes buffers on the web page, such can be
ssh-port-forwarded to remote server, or accessed through Tor,
VPN. With Mumble chat in background that can already serve as public
editing with conversation about that. There would be one editor typing
and many people could make comments by speaking.

> > But I still cannot find good reason to make it "simultaneous"
> > editing. Maybe for correcting students or correcting language,
> > interpunction, inspection, really hard to think. It is not logical and
> > not practical to have two separate minds far apart from each other
> > working on the text in same time. I wish to find more practical use cases.
> 
> I do find it useful to collaboratively edit a document. Nvertheless, I
> have not done it in real life. I suppose that when we have an onsite
> meeting, drafting on a table collaboratively would be the equivalent of
> drafting collaboratively on-line. Otherwise, the experience could loose
> even more of what on-site collaboration has. But again, this is not my
> use-case.

Any simultaneous editing require better channel of communication, such
as chat, which I consider too slow for editing, better voice. So the
voice or chat communication is true collaboration, not simple typing
or editing. Imagine it please. Other person typing, but you do not
know into which direction and what, you can see just one part of the
buffer, you do not see everything, so the page 17 could be edited by
person James, page 25 by person John, page 36 by person Michael, none
of them would really "collaborate" as none of them would see what
other person is doing. Thus there must be chait and voice conversation
in background, that is primary collaboration channel. Not editing.

So if there is such conversation channel, like speech, I do not know
if there should be multiple users. I really don't, as it looks like
mess.

One could setup SFTP or SCP in a loop, as soon as file is edited that
such file is then uploaded to server or sent by email.

https://www.gnu.org.ua/software/direvent/ the software GNU direvent
can be used to detect the files changed, and to upload or send them by
email upon each change, and it could tell in subject which date/time
that file belongs to. The concept with immediate upload, and download
of edited or saved files is similar and could enable almost real time
simultaneous editing with just any editor, without having those
features built-in.

Jean