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

Your use case

Our Space has a lot of rooms – there are probably going to be hundreds. In order to make that not overwhelming, I want to organize these via sub-spaces. However, the UI considers all rooms in sub-spaces to be rooms in the top-level space too. Observe:

(Please ignore visual styling … this is a new server in progress!)

We don’t even have all of our rooms configured yet, and the list is already basically useless. It’s even worse on mobile.

I would really like one of:

1. Spaces and Rooms displayed as multi-level hierarchy replacing the > Rooms list.
2. Room list shows just rooms, but there’s a second section > Spaces after > People and > Rooms which lists nested spaces.
3. Long flat list of rooms under > Rooms, but broken up into sections with Spaces serving as a section headers

The could also get sub-spaces out of the leftmost bar, allowing that to take up less space.

Have you considered any alternatives?

We could create multiple top-level spaces and not use nested spaces. This probably would be fine on our own server, but is less convenient for anyone coming in from a federated server since we’d have to send them a bunch of different space invites.

Additional context

This is really important to us; one of the chief reasons for moving to Matrix is for ease of use for new users, and this feels like an impediment to that.

[dkasak]

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.

[emorrp1]

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.