Allow newcomers to see some history, but not all

[DuendeInexistente]

Is your suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.

In more social/less security-related contexts, hiding history before joining makes a lot of sense, it deters people entering the chat to find dirt on people, which is a common occurrence in art servers.

However, it also makes it harder for newcomers to jump into the conversation. If they're not properly aware of the feature the place may look like a ghost town to them, and giving them context can be awkward, and need to redirect the conversation and risk derailing it, and need to be done for each individual person who joins. Basically feels like entering a room where people's talking and they suddenly go quiet.

Describe the solution you'd like.

Let them see the last few minutes/messages before they joined. Should be a configurable setting, maybe including "whichever shows more/less" in some way, though that might be too technical or hard to easily convey.

A nice default should be last ten messages or minutes, whichever shows the most messages.

[t3chguy]

By default users will be able to see history from the point they were invited, which should give them sufficient context.
This includes e2ee rooms. For e2ee rooms from the next release (Monday) even rooms set to all history will work

[DuendeInexistente]

That doesn't much work for open servers that don't need invites, though. It assumes the context that rooms are invite only, which make sense for projects but not for communities.

[t3chguy]

If a room is open without invites then why not open history access too?

[DuendeInexistente]

it deters people entering the chat to find dirt on people, which is a common occurrence in art servers.

Basically this. You wouldn't believe how common it is, in artist communities, for people to do it: there's drama and suddenly people trying to throw more fuel to the fire start joining discord servers to download their message history, the software is easy to find.

They could still enter to snoop, but they wouldn't have the entire server history available.

[t3chguy]

But a bot/service could join the room and expose the entire history anyway, like view.matrix.org or similar

[DuendeInexistente]

Then "since they joined" is already useless.

And if bots are enough to deterr most people, being able to see some context to the conversation to join in more easily but not having the entire history still works.

[robintown]

If they're not properly aware of the feature the place may look like a ghost town to them, and giving them context can be awkward, and need to redirect the conversation and risk derailing it, and need to be done for each individual person who joins.

FTR this will hopefully be made less awkward by matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#5887.