matrix-org / matrix-org/matrix-spec

Federated Invites: It appears that there is no way to retract an invite such that the invitee is made aware of it

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improvement
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Description

If you invite a user over federation and then change your mind (retract the invite, by setting their `m.room.member` membership to `leave`), there doesn't seem to be any mechanism to notify the invitee's server of that.

The result is that the invitee is left with a stale invite and when they try to redeem it, they get some generic error like 'Failed to make_join via any server' (Synapse example).

This is probably limited to the case where there aren't other users in the room on the same server as the invitee, otherwise the `m.room.member` event would be sent to the invitee's homeserver (*by coincidence*) and that probably leads to the right thing happening.

It seems there should be:

* a Federation endpoint to notify about a retracted invite, but since that can't be guaranteed to be reliable, we also need...
* an error code on `make_join` and `send_join` somehow informing the invitee that their invite has since been retracted, so clients can show an appropriate error message

Very similar in spirit to #146

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the federation invite flow described in the issue, especially retracting an invite by setting m.room.member membership to leave. Review the make_join and send_join entry points and the related discussion in #146. Done means the specification defines how retracted invites are communicated and how invitees receive an appropriate error.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
api, networking
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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