Admin Contact Users

As admin of our Nextcloud instance, I need to contact one of our users through the Talk app (their email is not working, so I need to use Nextcloud to contact them to let them know).

For privacy, as it’s a shared instance, we have “restrict users to only share with users in their groups”.

So, logged in as my admin user, I don’t see the users who’re not in my group. They don’t appear as the contacts drop-down, nor in the Talk app list of contacts / groups. I tried typing in their username in Talk and I don’t know that it’s working (they’ve got an icon for their user but I don’t see this. It’s not giving any errors, but it’s also not apparently working either).

Basically, I do want the “restrict users to sharing within their groups” to be in operation, but admin users ought to be a special exception to this, as an admin might need to personally contact users through Nextcloud for admin purposes.

(And sending out an announcement as admin is also wrong, because though they’ll see this, so will everyone else and that’s a privacy issue - and disallows me from mentioning anything that ought to remain private.)

To be honest, what would be the best thing is if Nextcloud would accept the Federated ID - “username@domain.tld” - WITHIN an instance. So that those within my group are just “username” but if you need to refer to someone outside your group but on the same instance, it could work exactly like contacting someone outside your instance (send to “username@domain.tld” - because, after all, a user shouldn’t need to know the “implementation details” of where a Nextcloud user is located, treating “local” and “remote” differently, but should just use the same “username@domain.tld” federated ID anywhere and the instance itself will realise “oh, this is on the same instance” and deal with it appropriately. Basically, like the use of the “127.0.0.1” IP loopback address.)