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Spaces launch in Element

element.io

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Re: Spaces launch in Element

#31

Post by Arathorn »

For what it’s worth, the thing I find really exciting about Spaces is that they provide a way to create a decentralised global hierarchical directory structure for realtime data. It’s like a free-for-all global USENET hierarchy that anyone can curate or contribute to, complete with decentralised ACLs. Or like DMOZ but for chatrooms. We haven’t published a “root” space as Matrix.org yet (as the “subspace” hierarchy feature is still in beta), but I cannot wait to kill off the public room directory for Matrix.org (which is a total tirefire atm) and replace it with decentralised hierarchies of rooms that the community can moderate and curate like any other content.

Add in voice/video rooms, async comms (messageboards, forums, mailing lists, newsgroups), decentralised metaverse worlds like thirdroom (https://youtu.be/e26UJRCGfGk?t=2263) and then you end up with a skeleton for a whole open universe of interoperable communication.

Next up: decentralised search for discovery as well as decentralised hierarchies…

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#32

Post by bajsejohannes »

Arathorn wrote: post #29
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, Space…

Thanks! I will try hydrogen!

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#35

Post by brainsmith »

That's awesome for teams to focus on just work conversations but unfortunately not enough.

We've completely switched our work communication to a self-hosted matrix+element with SSO, so we can be sure our matrix auth is secured the same way our other internal services are.

However, some of us also have personal matrix accounts which are offline during work hours and corporate accounts are offline outside of work hours which forbids using matrix as an emergency contact method. It would be great to either ability to sign into multiple accounts or an ability to sign into a single space using account other than the default one.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#36

Post by nerdponx »

AgentME wrote: post #26
rablackburn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-ch…

I fully agree. The Slack model of having a different login per "server" is good for workplaces, but Discord is incredibly good for "communities", hobby groups, and other casual groups.

As suggested by another commenter here, a hybrid model would probably be ideal for Matrix, where you could log into different spaces with different accounts if you want, but aren't forced to.

I would go one step further and propose that you should be able to have multiple Element windows open, so you can have your "work" space or spaces in one window, and your other spaces in another window.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#37

Post by nerdponx »

_abox wrote: post #30
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 minut…

I don't recall Teams ever being "snappy". It has always felt like a half-broken beta product.

The one thing I liked about it was the balance of "threaded conversation" and "chat" that it promoted with its UI, which was good for the data science team I was on at the time. Of course nowadays I would suggest using Zulip for the same purpose.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#38

Post by nerdponx »

normaler wrote: post #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

I do this with spaces too. But it occurred to me that I'm essentially abusing spaces to act like client-side folders/groupings of rooms.

Can you create a space that's only for "personal" use, if you are not an admin of your home server?

Spaces are a great feature, but I think clients will start needing to add grouping/tagging somehow, in addition.

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#39

Post by Arathorn »

brainsmith wrote: post #35

That's awesome for teams to focus on just work conversations but unfortunately not enough. We've completely switched our work communication to a self-hosted matrix+element with SSO, so we can be sure our matrix auth is secured the same way our other internal services are. However, some of us also have personal matrix accounts which are offline during work hours and corporate accounts are offline outside of work hours…

Yup. Multiaccount is desperately needed in Element. Other Matrix clients (FluffyChat, Quaternion, possibly Nheko?) have it already though)... plus you can always cheat and just open Element in multiple browser tabs :)

Re: Spaces launch in Element

#40

Post by nerdponx »

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…

It's not just tabs. I am in so many damn Discord servers and Matrix rooms that I want to be able to view, filter, sort, and modify them in a table. I want to be able to do bulk operations. I want to be able to tag them and group them into hierarchies, with a UI that promotes doing such things, rather than obstructs.
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