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Spaces launch in Element

element.io

11–20 of 129 posts

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#11
post #7

Neither Slack nor any of the Slack clones can figure the most simple of things: tabs. Instead they all insist on having just one window with a 10-kilometer long list of rooms/chats/channels on the left that you have to switch between in a single window. This becomes especially frustrating when you have several active chats going on at the same time, or when you want to retain some info on the screen while answering i…

In Element (on desktop at least) spaces act like tabs to order the massive vertical list of chats. On mobile these spaces are hidden in the slide-in menu.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#12
post #2

> [Spaces] come in three main flavours: This is what I still find confusing about spaces. How do I create each of these 3 different flavours? Is there a default flavour? Do I have to upgrade a personal space into a private/public space?

I dislike that distinction a bit. Spaces are just like rooms. You can just create one (that's a personal space), invite some people in (private space), and make it public with a public link (public space).

The distinction is artificial. I mostly want public or private spaces to regroup existing rooms, so the "private" space that wants to force me to create new rooms (in element) is a bad fit.

I also think it's a bit early to come out of beta without peeking: you have to be joined to subspaces as well so that sub-rooms are sorted.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#13

This seems to built for people with a lot of rooms/people. I think it's a classic mistake to enable it for all users, and I see it in all kinds of products. Everyone starts out by building something simple, but eventually it's bloated with features that I don't need (I'm sure someone does). Personally, I use matrix every day. However, it's only for a single room. With this new feature, I lost 70 "pixels" (or 140 actu…

I think this feature enables a much more discord-like environment, in which case it totally makes sense why they enabled to for everyone.

Like it or not, discord has taken the market for a lot of younger software projects and geeky communities. If we could get them to use foss matrix instead that’d be a huge win.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#14
I use spaces to organize different bridged services, Whatsapp, Instagram, Telegram, Signal and Matrix itself.

As a subset of rooms to organize a team, I think it would make more sense to host a separate matrix instance.

But it can be nice to give access to a set of rooms in a public community akin to:

- General - Dev Product A - Dev Product B - Watercooler - Sysad

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#15

This seems to built for people with a lot of rooms/people. I think it's a classic mistake to enable it for all users, and I see it in all kinds of products. Everyone starts out by building something simple, but eventually it's bloated with features that I don't need (I'm sure someone does). Personally, I use matrix every day. However, it's only for a single room. With this new feature, I lost 70 "pixels" (or 140 actu…

I'm fairly sure you can collapse most UI elements though.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#16
post #6

A graphic that shows the hierarchy/differences of all the possible spaces/groups/rooms would be nice. Because as I understand it these are 3 different things and there are different variants of each.

Groups ("Communities") are a legacy, underspecified extension to the Matrix protocol; it's best to ignore them as they will go away soon. Spaces are the properly specced replacement for Groups.

From a user perspective, Spaces are containers which can hold an arbitrary number of Rooms or other Spaces. Like Rooms, Spaces can be public, private (invite only), or "restricted" (only joinable by members of another specified Room or Space).

At a technical level, Spaces are actually implemented as Rooms.

In Matrix, Rooms maintain state. Spaces are just rooms whose state indicates that they should be treated as a space ("type": "m.space" on the m.room.create event), and which have pointers to other rooms/spaces which it considers as children (m.space.child events). This means that a single Room can exist in many Spaces, as membership points from the space to its children, rather than in the opposite direction.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#17

This seems to built for people with a lot of rooms/people. I think it's a classic mistake to enable it for all users, and I see it in all kinds of products. Everyone starts out by building something simple, but eventually it's bloated with features that I don't need (I'm sure someone does). Personally, I use matrix every day. However, it's only for a single room. With this new feature, I lost 70 "pixels" (or 140 actu…

We hear the desire to fully hide the Spaces sidebar loud and clear. It wasn't a blocker for leaving Beta, but we are tracking that request in https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/18898

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#18
post #7

Neither Slack nor any of the Slack clones can figure the most simple of things: tabs. Instead they all insist on having just one window with a 10-kilometer long list of rooms/chats/channels on the left that you have to switch between in a single window. This becomes especially frustrating when you have several active chats going on at the same time, or when you want to retain some info on the screen while answering i…

I think MS Teams is worst about this, because they have so much functionality crammed in the app.

I constantly find myself switching between the Calendar view / channel view when planning a meeting, or between channels when referencing a PDF shared in the "Files" section of a different channel. Super annoying.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#19

This seems to built for people with a lot of rooms/people. I think it's a classic mistake to enable it for all users, and I see it in all kinds of products. Everyone starts out by building something simple, but eventually it's bloated with features that I don't need (I'm sure someone does). Personally, I use matrix every day. However, it's only for a single room. With this new feature, I lost 70 "pixels" (or 140 actu…

Or you could use a client which doesn't support spaces.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#20
post #7

Neither Slack nor any of the Slack clones can figure the most simple of things: tabs. Instead they all insist on having just one window with a 10-kilometer long list of rooms/chats/channels on the left that you have to switch between in a single window. This becomes especially frustrating when you have several active chats going on at the same time, or when you want to retain some info on the screen while answering i…

In Element (on desktop at least) spaces act like tabs to order the massive vertical list of chats. On mobile these spaces are hidden in the slide-in menu.

You still need to go through the whole process of creating a Space even if it's just some place in a chat that you want open while you're having a conversation in another chat.

You still have to use the same window to switch between them.

These are not tabs.

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