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Spaces launch in Element

element.io

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Re: Spaces launch in Element

#21

Post by callahad »

dmitriid wrote: 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…

This may be heretical but... I just use Element in my browser. If I need another tab, I open another tab. Did the same thing when I worked at a company that used Slack.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#22

Post by liotier »

callahad wrote: post #16
iruoy wrote: 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 specifie…

Can an existing room be moved to a space ?

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#23

Post by ninchuka »

liotier wrote: post #22
callahad wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 specifie…

Can an existing room be moved to a space ?

yes, you can add any room your in to a space you've made

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#24

Post by callahad »

liotier wrote: post #22
callahad wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 specifie…

Can an existing room be moved to a space ?

Yep! Fastest way is to right click the Space in the sidebar and choose "Add Existing Room"

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#25

Post by progval »

callahad wrote: post #16
iruoy wrote: 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 specifie…

Where can I find the Space specifications? I don't see it in the main documentation (https://matrix.org/docs/spec/), and "matrix spaces specification" in a search engine does not return anything relevant.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#26

Post by AgentME »

rablackburn wrote: post #13
bajsejohannes wrote: post #8

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.

I'm a big fan of Matrix becoming more Discord-like. I've been in many small to medium group chats and internet communities over the last decade. About everyone I know from those jumped over to Discord shortly after it came out, and its structure ("servers" that are easy to create by anyone being the main unit which contains not only channels but a member list, roles, and moderators instead of having those each per-channel) is such an upgrade over everything we used before, to the point I was baffled that the design wasn't more copied by others. (Yeah I know that IRC is somewhat similar, but the differences make all the difference. Anyone being able to make a "server", it having a graphical identity, being able to join it through a link, that you don't register in an arcane way on each one all over again with an unconnected identity, that you get channel history, that it's integrated with voice/video chat channels, and that you're a member of all channels in it are all huge factors in how they shape their social spaces and get used.)

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#27

Post by callahad »

progval wrote: post #25
callahad wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 specifie…

Where can I find the Space specifications? I don't see it in the main documentation ( https://matrix.org/docs/spec/ ), and "matrix spaces specification" in a search engine does not return anything relevant.

In this case, the parent spec change for Spaces was MSC1772: Matrix spaces (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1772).

You may also want to look into MSC2946: Spaces Summary (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/2946) and MSC3083: Restricting room membership based on membership in other rooms (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3083).

These will manifest in a published version of the spec when we next cut one of those (soon!). We're also working on a new design / platform for the spec docs at https://spec.matrix.org/ which is where it should appear.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#28

Post by ivank »

dmitriid wrote: 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…

https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ is a client with tabs for Slack and Discord. Unfortunately it does not provide all the functionality of the web interfaces, though.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#29

Post by Arathorn »

bajsejohannes wrote: post #8

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…

You’re right that spaces aren’t useful if you’re only in one room(!). Just like a mail client doesn’t need to support mail folders if you only ever have one conversation going on. As others have said, we’ll add the option to hide the spacepanel if you want. Also, you may want to just use a much simpler Matrix client (eg https://hydrogen.element.io - the lightest element!) if you’re only in one room.

In general, Spaces reduce bloat though - they speed up the app by reducing the amount of data the app has to juggle as you filter based on a given space, and they stop your UI and brain being clogged up with irrelevant rooms.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#30

Post by _abox »

bajsejohannes wrote: post #8

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…

Yes MS Teams is a great example.

It started as a Slack knock-off. Not a great one, the UI is too low density and the multi tenant support sucks unlike Slack's. But it was relatively snappy. And free for O365 users. But lately they've been adding many apps, Wikis, all these fancy meeting modes that make it seem like everyone is in a theatre and many more fluffy things.

Now the app is so slow it takes more than a minute to start up. It often crashes with stupid error messages "Oops! Something went wrong!" that give zero indication of what actually happened.

At the same time MS is heavily pushing companies to adopt it but they're devaluing the product as they go by making it some kind of Swiss army knife with all the trimmings.

They're now realising the performance issue and moving away from Electron towards Edge webview but I think what it really needs is a proper architectural review. They've been too focused on beating the market adding new features and its core functions have suffered.

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