This is really great XMTP team. Many user-friendly experiences can be built on top of this, and clients can leverage onchain data to help users identify “good/known” users whom they would likely want to “allow” vs. “bad/unknown” actors whom they would likely want to block.
Looking forward to working with everyone on this.
We implemented Contact permission preferences at Converse very easily. Working with the XMTP React Native SDK, every status is synced smoothly between the protocol and the application.
Thanks to Contact permission preferences, our users don’t have to worry about keeping their choices if they use different XMTP apps: consent is portable and follows the user.
On the other end, it allows us to protect their inbox in a more efficient manner: thanks to existing allow & block actions, we can learn from the user preferences and filter allow and block suggestions for future conversations (while preserving the user’s privacy).
We’re excited for this upgrade and the opportunities the portable consent layer brings. We built an off-chain, centralized version of subscription/unsubscription preferences in Holder last year and are excited to see the decentralized evolution to manage consent at the protocol level. This is HUGE for empowering permission-based marketing and messaging, which is core to our ethos and beliefs at Holder.
To pull on the permission-based marketing thread — one of our core values back at ExactTarget was actually “Stay True to Permission”. Their “acceptable use policy” is still called the “Permission-Based Marketing Policy” at Salesforce. For the first time, though, that consent can be portable and interoperable across platforms and inboxes, unlike email and SMS.
The capability to support a portable contact preference while preserving privacy and self sovereignty is very powerful. While the protocol enables a seamless UX as a user travels between XMTP clients, the user is in exclusive control of their preference data. For example, if I block a spam or unwanted conversation, my action does not reveal to the sender they have been blocked. The network does not even know I have blocked the sender. This information is private to me, and travels with me wherever I go in XMTP supported apps.
At Unstoppable Domains, we added portable consent across all 3 of our XMTP apps - iOS native, Android native and Web. We felt it is was a critical step in protecting users from spam and other unwanted messages.
Our users appreciate that they can open other apps like Converse and maintain the state of their conversation list.
Glad to hear this is a focus and going live 
Remember this was an anticipated point of discussion I raised with @mg and @pol at Permissionless 2023.
Online safety is a requirement, not a nice to have. Would be really awesome to have old twitter’s “are you sure you want to send this?” message read and tone identified by local-run ai; would improve the quality of messaging on the network.
Would love to see blocklist leveraged as attestations of bad behavior for global shielding and spam prevention; if enough accounts block someone they could have a global “block preference” applied so their messages are not received. Anyone who thereafter allows receipt from that account is likely a conspirator, so you can let the spam network identify itself for you!