For what it’s worth, the thing I find most exciting about Spaces is that they provide a decentralised hierarchical namespace with decentralised access controls for every room (ie pubsub topic) in Matrix. So it’s like we’ve sprouted an openly federated global hierarchical filing system for freeform realtime data streams of all flavours - where people can go crazy defining their own trees, applying their own curation ideals; perhaps we’ll even see a single global tree emerge (although the implementation may need some more optimisation first).<p>It’s like a multiplayer hybrid of DMOZ and USENET and the read/write Web all rolled together. Once we start storing more interesting data streams than instant messages in it (eg forums, email, bulletin boards, DOMs, scene graphs, ticker data, IOT sensor data...) it <i>really</i> gets interesting :)<p>Plus you can use it to organise your own rooms and have Discord style communities or Slack style workspaces, but that’s the boring obvious bit ;)<p>Edit: for a user-facing rather than developer-facing overview, <a href="https://element.io/blog/spaces-the-next-frontier/" rel="nofollow">https://element.io/blog/spaces-the-next-frontier/</a> has more details.
Wohoo! Thanks to Spaces, I feel comfortable using Cactus comments for blog posts (e.g: <a href="https://viccuad.me/blog/enabling-cactus-comments" rel="nofollow">https://viccuad.me/blog/enabling-cactus-comments</a>), as I could create a private space containing all the rooms for each blog post comment chain.<p>To me it shows the snowballing effect of features.<p>Also, Matrix's Spaces (even in Beta) seem more flexible and thought out than the second best implementation I know, in Slack.
What is the E2EE story for spaces? Besides space names and member lists which I assume are visible to the server like normal rooms, what other information is also visible to the home server? Are rooms/subspaces inside spaces also visible?
Pretty exciting stuff, still trying to wrap my head around some of the technical possibilities outside of chat. Just to be clear, a room can be contained in multiple spaces, right? Or even, if I'm understanding it correctly, in multiple places in a hierarchy in the same space?<p>The Element blog post talks about setting up admin spaces and community spaces. So if rooms aren't exclusive to a single space I could build custom, private spaces that pull rooms from multiple different communities I'm a part of.<p>That's a really cool feature that Discord doesn't have right now.
Once this becomes widespread, I can actually start using Matrix as a real Discord / Slack alternative (communities just weren't cutting it, unfortunately).
So I understand why the spaces api is similar to rooms from a developers perspective, but why do they share the same # sigil as rooms and not take the old + community sigil?<p>Spaces seem conceptually different from rooms.
This is really cool tech. I'm using it in my "Discord meets Minecraft" app (jel.app), it's basically exactly the primitive missing to really have a multi-tenant story for these kinds of chat systems.
I looked at this post and the user facing blog post, but I’m not sure if I’ve understood this. Is it just a way to organize different rooms together for easy access (like Telegram’s folders, which is just for each person, but here these can also be shared with others)? If yes, then can someone please point to similar implementations (preferably with screenshots) on other platforms for comparison and where the similarities and differences lie?
also <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27185737" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27185737</a> :)
A good and robust bot api and useful smart widgets based on url are a must. I've had chats go from discord to matrix and then simply die after a few days.
> As many know, over the years we've experimented with how to let users locate and curate sets of users and rooms in Matrix. Back in Nov 2017 we added 'groups' (aka 'communities') as a custom mechanism for this - introducing identifiers beginning with a + symbol to represent sets of rooms and users, like +matrix:matrix.org.<p>We already have a universal notation for identifying resources on the Web. Why not use that?
Do the Matrix clients still phone-home to some centralized server (Vector, I think it's called) as well as to matrix.org on every launch?<p>That's what kept me from switching last time; to me a federation client that's going to phone home to a central server is no better from a privacy standpoint than using Signal (which isn't federated but is also end to end encrypted and phones home to its centralized server), and Signal's UX is better thus far.<p>If that can get solved (and it seems like it can), Matrix looks like it's going to be super awesome.