Desktop content polish (tracking)

[delkc]

Tracking PR for the desktop content polish work. The original single diff reached 71 files spanning five unrelated changes, so it's being split into reviewable slices.

This branch is the holding pen for whatever hasn't been split yet. Each child PR is cut off main; as one merges, this branch gets rebased and those commits drop out of the diff automatically. So the diff below is always exactly "what's left." When it's empty, this closes.

Slices

• 1. Chat timeline system messages — fix(desktop): channel topic and membership metadata cleanup #3642
  SystemMessageRow.tsx. Cleared topic/purpose rendering as empty quotes (a real bug), and "was added by" → "added by". Extracted the copy to lib/systemEventCopy.ts for unit coverage.

• 2. "relay" / "space" → "community"
  identity-archive/hooks.ts, community-members/ui/ConfirmRemoveDialog.tsx, profile/ui/ArchiveConfirmDialog.tsx, agents/ui/PersonaDeleteDialog.tsx.
  A product-vocabulary decision, not a copy tweak — wants a reviewer who can approve the word itself. Incomplete in this branch: 7 files still show "relay" to users, including onboarding/ui/ProfileStep.tsx ("reconnect to the relay") and communities/ui/CommunityEditForm.tsx ("Can't reach this relay"). Finish or scope explicitly.

• 3. Destructive confirmation pattern — ~15 files
  Title becomes a question ("Delete template?"), description states the consequence in future tense ("X will be removed"), confirm button names the object ("Delete team", not "Delete"), and cannot → can't. One pattern applied consistently.

• 4. Toast voice sweep — ~40 files
  "Failed to X" → "Couldn't X", trailing periods dropped from toast fragments. Purely mechanical.
  Incomplete in this branch: 96 files still contain "Failed to" (180 instances), and the projects/ feature was left behind entirely — it kept "Failed to merge pull request", "Failed to post comment", "Failed to approve" while everything else moved to "Couldn't". Either finish it or state the boundary in the PR, because as-is it reads as an oversight.

• 5. Toasts that needed new data — 8 files
  Not copy — this group changes code. MembersSidebarMemberCard.tsx + useMembersSidebarModeration.ts thread a new durationLabel through two layers so the toast can say "timed out for 10 minutes"; channel-templates/useApplyTemplate.ts adds a new formatFailedAgentNames helper. Neither has a test. Most likely of the six to draw a real review comment, and currently buried under 60 files of string edits.

• 6. Date and time formatting — feat(desktop): one relative date ladder across chat and the Inbox #3769
  Three divergent implementations against one standard:

  • messages/lib/dateFormatters.ts formatDayHeading (chat day divider) — has Today/Yesterday, but every older date renders as "Monday, March 31st" with an ordinal, instead of the standard's weekday → "June 20" → "Aug 2022" progression.
  • home/ui/InboxDetailPane.tsx:239 and HomeView.tsx:842 — the visible header timestamp is formatInboxFullTimestamp, which is always absolute and always carries the year ("Jul 8, 2026, 2:34 PM"), even for a message from this morning. Never relative, at any distance. (An earlier version of this item said clock-time-only; that was wrong — formatTime feeds only the continuation-row hover gutter.) The pane has no day divider, so whatever it shows has to carry its own date.
  • home/lib/inbox.ts — a third implementation; shows "Yesterday" but never "Today".

  Standard is shared-foundations-numbers → Relative Dates and Timestamps. One open question: the standard's oldest band drops the day ("Aug 2022"), which is ambiguous for a day divider that must uniquely identify a day.

Sequencing

• 2 and 3 overlap on PersonaDeleteDialog, ConfirmRemoveDialog, and ArchiveConfirmDialog — send them sequentially or as a small stack.
• 1, 5, and 6 are disjoint and can go in parallel.
• 4 last — it's the slice that rots against main.

Also noted, not scheduled

• Membership rows are the only passive-voice status lines. 10 of the 12 system-event captions are active ("created this channel", "left the channel"). The 2 exceptions are members_added and member_joined where actor ≠ target, which read "added by Alice Chen" — because those rows are titled with the person who arrived, not the person who added them. That's also why they get the dual avatar leading with the new member's face.

  fix(desktop): channel topic and membership metadata cleanup #3642 dropped "was" rather than making it agree with the subject ("You was added by" is broken). Agreement would key on user-controlled display names, fail visibly when it guesses wrong, and need re-deriving for every future passive line. The durable fix is to remove the passive voice instead: re-title those rows with the actor and go active — "Alice added Marcia to the channel, along with Peter, Jordan, and 2 others" — which matches member_removed exactly and makes the title slot always mean "the actor". Cost: it changes whose avatar and name lead the row, so it's a design call, and it touches isMembershipArrival plus the mentions.spec.ts membership assertions.

• "Added by You" in the persona catalog. agents/ui/PersonaAddedBy.tsx has the same mid-sentence capitalization mismatch fix(desktop): channel topic and membership metadata cleanup #3642 fixed for channel system rows (toInlineName in messages/lib/systemEventCopy.ts). One-word change plus two assertions in agents.spec.ts, but it's the agents feature rather than the chat timeline.

• "the channel" vs "this channel" — joined/left/removed say one, created/archived/unarchived say the other.

• This branch's 7fb85c878 carries an unrelated .gitignore addition (.pnpm-store/) that should ride with something else or go on its own.