Feat: Channel Groups

[WalrusSoup]

I think that auto-managed channel groups should be added to this SDK.

When an inbound message is received, wrapping the callback with a function to move that channel out of the channel group and subscribe to it would be nice. As of right now, if we want to start having lots of connections we need to frankenstein things together and manage it outside the chat-sdk.

I think this is within scope of the project.

[piotr-suwala]

Hey, @WalrusSoup!

I'll get back to you with this.

[tance77]

@piotr-suwala any updates on this?

[wkal-pubnub]

There are no immediate plans on the roadmap to use channel groups as we're prioritizing some other feature work, but it's possible that we're going to add support in the future if there is a good use case.

That said, I'm not sure I understand the request in this issue.
@WalrusSoup , could you please explain step by step how you're using / proposing to utilize channel groups in Chat SDK?

[WalrusSoup]

To me, it make sense to add it in the long term. In our org, there are going to be individual chats with hundreds of users at certain points in time over the course of normal usage. Channels will go stale, but they still must be connected to in some way or listened to in case a user were to revive an older channel (someone chats in it on either side).

As far as I'm understanding from the docs, channel groups would take care of that. As it stands for us, at some point down the line, we're going to need to implement channel groups ourselves to deal with this problem so that way users can bulk together channel memberships and:

1. wait for themselves to send a message to that channel
2. or to receive a message on that channel,
3. bump that off the channel group and connect to it via the channel sdk normally

Otherwise, it seems likely that at some point we'll be trying to maintain too many connections to channels based on memberships that don't necessarily make sense (stale channels).

If we have a manager or someone in an organization of hundreds of people, it seems likely to us we'll reach that limit.