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Comment by trumpablehump | Hacker News Reader

Can I use separate identities in the same Element instance yet? Especially with Spaces I feel like this is an obvious feature where it should be easy for people to protect their privacy by using different accounts for different hobbies or peer groups.

I would love to finally be able to use my employer's chatrooms with my real name, the animal rights group with my one pseudonym and the techie chat with the other one.

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Fluffychat allows multi-account logins on the same device, if that's what you're looking for. I haven't tested it myself, but it seems similar to the way the Gmail app operates with multiple accounts (you switch over to a new account and get content specifically for that account, rather than mixed rooms from different accounts all in one list).

In practice, though, I'd be impressed if you could even find three different circles that are all on Matrix. I haven't found many people who are willing to switch yet over, anyway.

> In practice, though, I'd be impressed if you could even find three different circles that are all on Matrix. I haven't found many people who are willing to switch yet over, anyway

Kind of funny, but my experience over the last year as been the opposite. Probably because the kinds of communities I am interested in are focused around various FLOSS projects, but it seems like everywhere I look the "Contact Us"/"Get Involved" page for a project linked to their Matrix room(s). Anecdotally, the momentum that Matrix has in the FLOSS space is reaching a critical mass where it will almost be the de-facto communication tool (I am starting to be surprised when I see an IRC link instead...)

Outside of the tech world, I agree with you. Adoption of Matrix is tricky, but honestly it does not seem much worse than trying to get your friends to move the MMS group chat onto any other platform (WhatsApp, GroupMe, etc). Only extra challenge is helping them understand what "homeserver" they should use.

It sounds like you're asking for a Slack style configuration, e.g. where each workspace (in Slack terminology) needs to be authed into and can use different accounts within one app instance?

Slack is a bad example here because you can't really use different accounts at a time (at least on web). It just provides a relatively easy link to switch between them. Maybe app/mobile are better?

But yes, I think OP is asking to be logged into two accounts and see the rooms/contacts/notification from both in the same application. This is not currently supported in Element and I don't think it is on the near roadmap. But some other clients do have multi-account support.

I'd actually prefer the focus to be having a better UI to change your display name for every space/room. What remains public then is very limited and that should be a much better experience than changing accounts every time (I use this heavily with Telegram Plus - 4 users and it's super annoying). I'm ok with my username being public...

This would be MSC 3189 [1]. It is just a draft for now. So expect it to be shipped to clients in 3-6 months(?)

[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3189

Not yet. Hopefully one for 2022!

Is there any Matrix to Matrix bridge? Such a bridge should be able to solve the problem short term.

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