Nested chatroom hierarchies with Matrix Spaces | Hacker News Reader

Nested chatroom hierarchies with Matrix Spaces

matrix.org

18 pointsArathorn5 comments

> Spaces effectively gives us a way of creating a global decentralised filesystem hierarchy on top of Matrix - grouping the existing rooms of all flavours into an epic multiplayer tree of realtime data. It's like USENET had a baby with the Web!

For anyone only casually following Matrix, it's important to remember that it's not just a chat system. It's a distributed, eventually-consistent store of ordered data. That store just happens to primarily be used for chat at the moment.

I'm personally very excited about where this technology could go. The federation, consensus, and organizational technologies underlying Matrix the chat app are very general and have tons of potential.

Thanks to the whole team! Spaces is definitely a welcome feature. I have plans to experiment with it to see if we can use room hierarchies as a way to enable posting and discussing software patches.

I feel this article is targeted at Matrix developers, for those that want a take from a user perspective, I think https://element.io/blog/spaces-the-next-frontier/ (linked in the article) is easier to digest.

Fair point. On one hand Spaces are super cool from a dev perspective, as they provide arbitrary hierarchies with decentralised access controls for any kind of realtime data - like a read/write realtime version of the hierarchical web.

But on the other hand, from a UI perspective on a chat client like Element they end up essentially being a new dimension with which to filter your room list. Hard to know which appeals more to folk :)

What are the plans for Public Spaces discovery?

I've created a space, added a few rooms and unless I invite the users they can't know it exists. There should be something better than spamming rooms.

You could create a parent space and advertise that? Or participate in an existing parent one? The idea of directories is to associate them with spaces going forwards rather than have the unmaintainble nightmare of flat global ones or per-server ones.

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