element-web: When a Space contains Sub-spaces, the room listing shouldn't show a flat list including all subspace-rooms.

I think this should ultimately be a per space setting. There are two modes at play here.

• Spaces considered as (hierarchical) tags. If a room belongs to a space it is as if it was tagged by that space. Sub-spaces are like sub-tags. Selecting the space acts as a filter of the total collection of rooms to show all rooms tagged by that space.

  This mode is especially useful for context switching, e.g. between Work and Personal.

  Example: if room A is a member of the space Foo and room B is a member of the space Foo/Bar (a sub-space of Foo), both rooms are tagged by Foo, but only one is tagged by Foo/Bar.

• Spaces considered as sets of rooms. A space is just a set of rooms (or other spaces). Selecting a space just shows all of its elements, which may be rooms or other spaces.

  Example: room A is a member of space Foo, but so is space Bar. Space Bar also contains a room B. Selecting Foo only displays its immediate children, which are the room A and the space Bar.

Like @Twi1ightSparkle, I also primarily use my spaces for switching between contexts. When I switch to a context, I expect the space to filter down my total collection of rooms to those particular to that context. But when in that context, I expect for everything that is a descendant of that context to be visible at once and sorted by recency.

I think, though, that these things could coexist? Public spaces could work like I’m suggesting, and then you could create your own private spaces with whatever arrangement you want.

I think I like this suggestion, provided I could get the context-like behaviour I want by creating a private space and adding the public space as a sub-space.

Perhaps we should just differentiate between the two use cases on the UX level since these two use cases seem fundamentally different, even though both would be implemented using spaces. Something like “Contexts” and “Guilds” (to draw a parallel with Discord). There are other use cases I would like to see in the Context case, such as silencing notifications from non-member rooms when it is activated.

It feels to me that this discussion is simply a repeat of the Home discussion (#18093) just one level down. The solution should include the results of the experiment there and allow the user to select “Show all rooms” for the parent space. Or maybe even just inherit that setting globally since it seems to be a conceptual thing, so if someone has indicated they don’t consider Home to be an Other category, then the same should apply to parent spaces.

@MayeulC that would be vector-im/element-meta#306 I think.

For me the Discord model doesn’t work well with very large Guilds, I often find myself having to scroll the list loads to be able to find unreads/notifications as there isn’t a way to sort by recency.

A similar issue would be the case if we split up the room list more than just People/Favs/Rooms because then each list would be recents-sorted but not the whole list. Another issue with this proposal is a room may exist in multiple subspaces and thus now then be shown multiple times in a single room list in multiple places, confusingly.

+1 though I am already addicted to this behavior in Cinny client, but when switching to Element, I get lost in scroll when there are hundreds of rooms in subspaces and then the only option is to left is remembering room name and searching it.

For me the Discord model doesn’t work well with very large Guilds, I often find myself having to scroll the list loads to be able to find unreads/notifications as there isn’t a way to sort by recency.

A similar issue would be the case if we split up the room list more than just People/Favs/Rooms because then each list would be recents-sorted but not the whole list. Another issue with this proposal is a room may exist in multiple subspaces and thus now then be shown multiple times in a single room list in multiple places, confusingly.

High Agree, When I used to use discord and finding huge, active servers It was very fustrating just to find one specific channel under the 5+ or so categories. Just to chime in with my own idea, having some sort of “folders” within the sections that give the freedom to the user of only wanting to be in and see a specific set of rooms within said space.

Just to pitch in: We use Matrix in our solution Verji, and spaces is very important to us. “Room hierarchies” is a highly requested feature from our customers, and we believe that the introduction of Spaces is a game-changer. (So kudos to everyone involved in creating spaces)

However, for our customers, the current implementation where rooms from sub-spaces float up and show up in higher level spaces renders the solution practically useless.

Our preferred solution to this would be:

• Make the behavior configurable per space (a room state event ?). So we could determine if a space only show immediate child-rooms, or the aggregation behavior we have today.
• Keep the space hierarchy in the leftmost column. Or at least make it an option.

I would like to +1 what @mattdm is saying/proposing. Current implementation of spaces doesn’t help with organizing my rooms in a logical manner, since top level (or higher level) spaces also include all the lower level channels. This become more evident if you have rooms in a higher level space that don’t belong in any sub-space and the only view with these rooms gets “polluted” by all the rooms in all the lower level spaces.

As @Twi1ightSparkle said, I would be happy with a setting to choose between the two behaviours and I’m willing to try implementing this if:

1. We think it’s something that’s useful and might be merged
2. The maintainers think it’s “easily” achievable, as my experience with this kind of work is minimal 😃

Here’s a screenshot of the Rust Discord setup:

This is basically “option 3” of my suggested approaches above. It seems superior in a lot of ways:

• “servers” or “spaces” column on the far left can be very narrow and not take up a lot of the screen.
• There’s a clear organization from top to bottom
• Easy to hide the things you’re not interested in right now (click the header to collapse)

This particular approach (as opposed to my “option 2”) also has the advantage that you can still see everything at once and move easily between subspaces /sections.