Space home vs all feedback

[t3chguy]

Use the emoji reactions on this issue to vote for your preference

🚀 Home = Invites, Favourites, DMs, Orphans (High SNR)
❤️ Home = All rooms
👀 Home = User preference of 🚀 / ❤️
🎉 Home = Like 👀 but a user could choose both at the same time, thus having a separate meta-space for "All Rooms" and a separate one for "High SNR"

[thibaultamartin]

My current personal usage is:

• join many rooms
• figure some can be grouped
• add those in spaces
• switch to home for the “impossible to sort”

Home with everything kinda defeats the point of Spaces for my personal usage. One of the appeals of Spaces for me is the ability to bring order to a large number of rooms.

[WolvenMoonstone]

Having introduced many people from discord to matrix I've found that the current functionality (High SNR) is much easier and intuitive for them then with the "all" home which is closer to how communities v1 originally functioned. i think the main reason for all the confusion is from people using the original communities feature and not having it explained to them clearly enough how the new home functioned.

I reccomend that we keep the High SNR functionality for people at least as a default as it is easier for newcomers to matrix and if people insist on the "all rooms" dynamic that we leave it as an option..

[frandavid100]

I have to disagree. I have introduced a few friends and family members to Element (and also to spaces) and the current behaviour creates a layer of complexity that they don't want, because they can no longer find some rooms just by clicking the Rooms tab; instead they must click the Hamburger menu, find the proper space, click it and then click the Rooms tab.

Most of them come from apps like Whatsapp or Telegram, and are used to a single list showing all their conversations. And they have repeatedly told me how much they dislike having to go through all these steps just to find a room.

[t3chguy]

The "all" things with the communities was confusing, frustrating, unintuative and upsetting upon moving to Matrix.
Group chats and categorized spaces in a similar way to discord, like a collection of interconnected message boards/forums, is much more intuative and fosters communication and cohesive community building. Something more similar to a high SNR structure is a more intuative extension of the way we compartmentalize our interests than anything I've experienced so far in the setup of V1 communities. There's no sense of unity or flow or connection. I don't feel like a member or participant, it's very lonely and people and other parts of the supposed grouped and connected community feel distant and chilled. Why would I want my community to feel like... not a community? Why would I use an aplication or a platform for social networking if it makes me feel disconnected? It's not a community, it's a filter. It's a collection. not a group or a community.
What I miss from discord that I really enjoy is the VERY heavy slant the app has toward a building of interpersonal relationships. Unlike something like facebook or twitter where it's a passive experience it is active. It's a massive scrolling shared group message similar to what we have here. However if I want to change from, say, a channel discussing photography to a channel discussing the philosophical concept of maths I can just scroll up on discord and I haven't gone anywhere, it feels like the exact same place. However here I have to leave and go to a new place. It's not connected. Additionally, I miss the structure of voice channels.
More than that, the friends feature on discord promotes the formations of individual rapport and close interpersonal bonds, whereas the design here is less... close. An individual you talk with is treated similarly to your engagement or participation in a group making the interaction seem more formal and distant. You don't have friends, here everyone is a stranger.
I like the way servers, channels, and chats are kind of nested into one another on discord like a russian doll. The language used is maybe not what tech people here are used to, "server" on discord means something else, and that's another point. I'm not a developer, I don't program apps. The most I do is use python to sort through large data sets. But element and matrix seem to be designed to exclude people who aren't as technically inclined, which is unfortunate considering that it is the most outsider friendly security focussed platform. As I understand it, a main goal of the team is to make all of this more accessible and user-friendly, and in that light moving away from from High SNR is moving in the wrong direction.
I think that's most of it.

- Pandoras_Box in the feedback room

[robintown]

I think the core of the issue here is that spaces get used in two different ways: spaces that just group together existing rooms, and spaces whose rooms canonically belong to them / only make sense in the context of the space (pretty sure this has been articulated before).

To reflect this dichotomy of usage I would suggest as an alternative: If a room has a canonical parent space of which you are a member, hide it from home. Otherwise, include it in home. This ensures that Slack/Discord-style spaces work as expected for people coming from those platforms, while a filter-style view is retained for those rooms that don't ask to be hierarchically organized.

[t3chguy]

If a room has a canonical parent space of which you are a member, hide it from home. Otherwise, include it in home.

I think this would feel even more inconsistent than either of the current proposed options. It'd be even harder to know what to expect in Home without giving serious thought to each of your spaces and their rooms.

[frandavid100]

My current personal usage is:

* join many rooms

* figure some can be grouped

* add those in spaces

* switch to home for the “impossible to sort”

Home with everything kinda defeats the point of Spaces for my personal usage. One of the appeals of Spaces for me is the ability to bring order to a large number of rooms.

Can't you create a private 'Miscellaneous' space to group those impossible to sort rooms?

[WolvenMoonstone]

I have to disagree. I have introduced a few friends and family members to Element (and also to spaces) and the current behaviour creates a layer of complexity that they don't want, because they can no longer find some rooms just by clicking the Rooms tab; instead they must click the Hamburger menu, find the proper space, click it and then click the Rooms tab.

Most of them come from apps like Whatsapp or Telegram, and are used to a single list showing all their conversations. And they have repeatedly told me how much they dislike having to go through all these steps just to find a room.

It seems to me there is a rift here between two paradigms that are at odds here

The Soft Grouping paradigm (Eg: WhatsApp):
Every room is separate self-contained and displayed in a flat list structure. It's all there, everything is just in the "all" home. the user doesn't need to know where the chats are but communities are mostly limited to single rooms. a High SNR home could be seen as unnessasary In this use case. the spaces act as filters similar to a category search. Future features (such as flairs) would go mostly unused.

The Hard Grouping paradigm (Eg: Discord):
Rooms are inherently "inside" a space. Communities are groups of rooms involving related things or have common people. High SNR or similar is used to create community cohesion across a large set of topic-based rooms. Spaces would then be used to visually group the inter-room community into a connected whole. using an "all" home would break this cohesion and result in an overwhelming unwieldy set of rooms. Future space features add quality of life for admins and users.

edits: clarity, spelling, terminology

[AlexiWolf]

Here's what I said in the room. Figured it might be a bit more useful here:

As someone with dyslexia, a hard grouping structure is a HUGE deal for usability. As channels are currently laid out on Element, and on platforms like Telegram, the app quickly becomes unusable because parsing lists to find what I want is near impossible without huge effort.

For example, if there's 5 spaces, with 10 channels each. Presenting all those channels in a list will make the whole thing a blur. It's impossible to find what I'm looking for that way. A hard grouping structure mitigates this problem by condensing lots of related channels into a much smaller list that's easier to look through. Now there are only 5 entries to look through, and if I look in one of the spaces, there's only 10 items. This layout allows me to join many more channels before things become completely unusable. A tree structure is much more intuitive to many more people. That is why so many popular chat / community platforms are starting to follow these same design motifs. This is the same reason file systems switched from being stored as flat lists to trees.

The soft relationship structure in Telegram was the single biggest factor in choosing to leave it, and I'm having the same issue with Element and Matrix. Spaces seems like a promising solution to that problem, and it may be the only reason I was willing to continue using Matrix.

Personally, I feel the best option would be allow the user to chose. Perhaps as a first-start prompt? That way everyone can get what they want. Either way Spaces is capable of doing both, and with Element being the reference implementation for a Matrix chat app, it should also be able to do both.

[frandavid100]

Hi, Alexi.

For example, if there's 5 spaces, with 10 channels each. Presenting all those channels in a list will make the whole thing a blur. It's impossible to find what I'm looking for that way. A hard grouping structure mitigates this problem by condensing lots of related channels into a much smaller list that's easier to look through. Now there are only 5 entries to look through, and if I look in one of the spaces, there's only 10 items.

The thing is, with "all rooms home" you still have those 5 entries; and if you look in any of them, you still have those 10 rooms. It's not like spaces will be removed and you will be forced to find your rooms in a huge list.

You can still use those spaces to organize and find your rooms exactly like you would with "unsorted rooms home". So what's the loss?

[WolvenMoonstone]

Hi, Alexi.

For example, if there's 5 spaces, with 10 channels each. Presenting all those channels in a list will make the whole thing a blur. It's impossible to find what I'm looking for that way. A hard grouping structure mitigates this problem by condensing lots of related channels into a much smaller list that's easier to look through. Now there are only 5 entries to look through, and if I look in one of the spaces, there's only 10 items.

yes but there is a more visual separation of space and home is the default room which can still be overwhelming for some users

The thing is, with "all rooms home" you still have those 5 entries; and if you look in any of them, you still have those 10 rooms. It's not like spaces will be removed and you will be forced to find your rooms in a huge list.

You can still use those spaces to organize and find your rooms exactly like you would with "unsorted rooms home". So what's the loss?

The loss is of the separation of concerns and mental separation of spaces the High SNR home provides

If you really want an unsorted rooms home what's stopping you from making it a private space rather then it being the home?

[th0mcat]

🚀 is my preference and how I will use my Home Space, but 👀 is how it should be implemented in all Element clients.

In addition, I have a suggestion for the Unread tab on the Android app (but could apply to the other Element clients). The Unread tab should contain all unread DMs/rooms for all Spaces. As an end user, it's much easier to

open the app, hit the Unread tab, then select the chat

than to

open the app, hit the hamburger menu, select the space, then select the unread tab, then select the chat

especially for people with large phones or smaller hands. I know this kind of cuts into the whole purpose of Spaces, but it makes the UX a bit easier/friendlier.

[SimonBrandner]

In addition, I have a suggestion for the Unread tab on the Android app (but could apply to the other Element clients). The Unread tab should contain all unread DMs/rooms for all Spaces. As an end user, it's much easier to

I've already filed an issue for that here