Spaces - Soliciting UX and usage expectations

[subpop]

Hello Relay users,

I'm considering how to shape the Spaces UX in Relay. I am not a heavy spaces user in any client, so I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on how you use Spaces. What do you use them for? How do you interact with them? What value do they bring you? Any feedback you can provide would be of immense help, and would enable me to bring support for Spaces to Relay sooner!

[kkremitzki]

Not a Relay user but I saw your request for feedback on Mastodon, hope this is of some help. As a Debian Developer, I participate in many communities. A plain "chat" view listing of my rooms and DMs is like 50+ items long and unwieldy. My "spaces" view has 6 items, and they are my preferred jumping-in points for activity in the communities which make use of that feature. For each of those (example: Codeberg, KDE) there are usually several rooms I care about, so darting back and forth in an ungrouped listing to catch up on news and developments isn't ideal.

Cheers!

[subpop]

Thanks for your response! Assuming you've looked at the screenshot of Relay, you can see it's a typical "list in a sidebar with room timeline in the main view" UI. The current/normal view is to load all the users rooms into the sidebar, and they can navigate among them like a classic chat app. If you had a UI to view and select your spaces, would you want the sidebar to almost filter down its content to the rooms you have joined within that space? Would you expect to be able to navigate rooms and view their timelines, almost as if it were a high-level filter on your room list?

[beef331]

I see spaces exist for two main reasons. Allowing one to manage a collection of rooms that are otherwise disjointed(think rooms that have nothing in relation, but you want them together), this also allows you to easily share rooms that you author with others. They also are there for communities to run a collection of related rooms, people can make their own rooms and put them in the spaces so people can join a space and join the community. I use them in both of these ways, I don't need to be in the space of every community I'm in, but I do want to not clutter my room lists so I make a space of slightly related rooms(Like I have a space for a bunch of matrix clients and my for homeserver's support room) and put those rooms in there. Something that might be nice is to allow a user to mark a space as 'hidden' so they don't have to leave/rejoin the space to find rooms from it.

[subpop]

Interesting. So users can create their own private spaces and add rooms they don't own to those spaces? And it sounds like spaces add value for listing rooms that the user is both joined and not joined. 🤔

[beef331]

That's the magic of Matrix spaces, you can use them like a Discord server, you can use them like a private collection of rooms, or anywhere in between. Imagine a community built around a game or software, if that game or software had an announcement channel in their matrix space, users could have that room directly in their own space without having to resort to webhooks or other methods of forwarding messages to their own room. People that joined their space would just see the room there and could join it if they care.

[Rustacian]

1. Group rooms together for context (e.g. work
2. Join Online communities who organize various rooms in a space (hierarchy)