Could messaging apps offer a scheduled “quiet presence” mode?

I work remotely, and the hardest part of chat is often not the messages themselves but the instant visibility around them: online status, typing indicators, unread badges, and the implied stopwatch on every reply. It turns what should be asynchronous communication into a low-grade social obligation, and makes actually disconnecting feel like going missing.

I’d like a scheduled “quiet presence” mode that works locally: keep syncing messages, but suppress or delay outgoing presence, typing, and read-receipt events, while hiding the badge and response-time cues from me. Ideally the client would not report that real-time behavior to a central service or create a new behavioral profile. Teams would lose some useful coordination signals, though, and collaborators might find delayed presence frustrating.

Would anyone here use or implement something like this? Has a privacy-preserving quiet-presence feature genuinely improved your wellbeing?

The client-side part is fairly plausible: keep the message sync channel alive, but make presence, typing, and receipts opt-in events behind a scheduler. The hard boundary is “local-only.” A server can still observe connection timing and sync activity unless the protocol is designed to avoid exposing those details. Suppressing a receipt is not the same as making the session invisible.

I’d separate the promises. “Don’t send a typing event until 9am” is a concrete privacy property. “Don’t create a behavioral profile” depends on server logs, analytics, and the account model, which the client may not control. Matrix’s explicit presence, typing, and receipt events make the first problem visible; they don’t automatically solve the second.

The interface change matters as much as the protocol. If everyone knows quiet presence exists, “offline” stops meaning unavailable and becomes a normal boundary. Without that shared norm, people may simply ask why someone is hiding, turning a pressure-reduction feature into another status to interpret.

I can see teams resisting this for support and incident work. Presence is crude, but crude signals are sometimes useful when nobody has time to write a formal handoff. I’d want schedules, exceptions for named channels, and an obvious urgent path—not a blanket promise that every message can wait.

The wellbeing case sounds reasonable, but I’d test it rather than assume it. Some people may feel less watched; others may feel more anxious when they can’t tell whether a message was seen. A quiet mode should probably report only a broad availability window, if anything, and let teams agree on response expectations separately.