In terms of permissions: I'm a bit surprised that folks feel limited by Matrix's freeform hierarchy of permissions. Every user can have a 'power level' from 0 to 100, and you can then customise the threshold required for literally permission (e.g. you need power level 54 or higher to kick users, or whatever). The only difference with Discord is that Discord lets you pick entirely arbitrary combinations of permissions (e.g. have one user able to kick but not ban, but another user able to ban but not kick, or whatever). How useful really is this in real life usage though?
I'm trying to work out whether the problem is if Element's UI for configuring permissions is too basic, or whether folks really do need a full RBAC permission matrix, and if so, for what use case?
The idea of ever increasing and overlapping scopes I don’t think maps well to most people’s mental model of who should be allowed to do what. People mostly want to define an arbitrary role; admin, user, team leader, whatever, and just pick what that role is allowed to do in isolation. It’s marginally more work to setup initially picking all of the permissions again, but it removes all of the overhead of having to monitor what permissions are being adopted from lower scopes on the power level axis.
I also think the power level system makes it much harder to “refactor” permissions for specific roles without affecting permissions for everyone “above and below”
However I'm constantly adding new roles which are really just groups of users. I would say 90% of all the Discord roles I've ever created have no permissions associated with them at all and just exist to ping a group of users (or act as a tag for bots).
Maybe that's served by a different feature in Matrix for user groups. If so, that's still not quite as useful, because sometimes later on you decide the group needs a permission (e.g. a casual gaming group has grown enough to justify having it's own channel).
So the problem here isn't that folks want contradictory access levels (e.g. Admins can kick people but can't set topic, but Mods can kick people but can't set topic) but the ability to set them via group?
I played around with this implementation and it's looking pretty good. Not there yet, obviously, but we're in the ballpark I'd say. Obviously, there's lots more to Discord than just voice rooms and a similar-enough UI. But we're slowly getting there.
and even harder to leave Discord now when a lot of users invested in Nitro fancy emoticons and profile enchantments
I really want to love matrix but at least last time I tried it, the app was very noticeably more clunky and featureless.
But how is this relevant to a discussion of reality?
I do see what people are talking about in reference to the voice channels though, even though I can't stand them.
I think hierarchical permission systems are awkward. Role based is easy to understand and setup, even if more complex technically.
Well, also because Ido is the superior language. But also inertia, yes.