# Signal Group User Activity

"How active is each user in the signal groups I'm in?"

This project reads the configuration directory from the Signal for Desktop app
and generates a spreadsheet that looks like this:

|                  | Alice | Bob | ... |
|------------------|-------|-----| ----|
| Neighborhod Chat | 1     | 5   | ... |
| Roomate Chat     | 12    | 0   | ... |
| ...              | ...   | ... | ... |

Each cell is the total message count for a user in a chat.

The goal is to afford distributed collection of group participation metadata
from a community that uses disparate signal groups. No one member of the
community is a member of every signal group, so we need to make use of multiple
users' signal data.

I personally would not at all feel comfortable sending someone my decrypted
signal database, so I implemented this as a dockerized python command line tool
that runs locally. It generates a simple csv file that's easily inspectable
before sharing.

## Usage

First build the docker container for the tool

    $ ./build.sh
    Sending build context to Docker daemon  716.3kB
    Step 1/12 : FROM archlinux:base-20241110.0.278197
    ---> 8f94599caa7b
    [...]
    Successfully built 1c3e3a1b45f5
    Successfully tagged sigint:latest

The following command will run the analysis against the signal config directory
you point it to, and dump the output to ./output/table.csv

## Linux

    $ ./run.sh -c ~/.config/Signal

    INFO:main:writing message count table to /output/table.csv

## Macos

    $ ./run.sh -c ~/Library/Application\ Support/Signal

    INFO:main:writing message count table to /output/table.csv

## Group Filtering

Adding -f will filter the groups under consideration to only those listed in
config/chat_list.txt

    $ ./run.sh -c ~/.config/Signal -f

You might want to run the command once without filtering, then paste the chat
name column from the spreadsheet into config/chat_list.txt and narrow down to
only the ones you care about and run it again with -f.