When we talked about the digital independence day in the Tanelorn community, last year’s Matrix test run came up. Back then, we tested Matrix with a few volunteers for a possible move from Discord. Our verdict was that there were a few hiccups too many to recommend a complete move. Personally, I’ve been using Matrix for quite some time now and I’m relatively fine with it, although I prefer XMPP.
I had my doubts setting up a complete space beyond testing rooms for that community, but Eris2Cats just said “build it and they will come“. Since Tealk already did the hard part of “build it“ with rollenspiel.chat and some members missed the test run, I just thought to myself “why not?” and set up a Matrix space there (with sub-spaces and rooms) that we could just go and use.
The set-up was rather easy. I especially like that the structure is not hierarchical, so one room can be a part of multiple spaces at the same time. You can always make up your mind about the sorting later. The drawback here is that without a hierarchical structure, user privileges can’t be inherited. So if I create a sub-space “Community“ with the rooms “Chit-Chat“, “Food“, “Pets“ and “Memes“, I can’t just appoint a moderator for that sub-space once, but have to give them moderator privileges for every single channel contained in that sub-space separately.
When a new user joins a space (or a sub-space), they get recommendations for rooms instead of joining all the possible channels automatically. That makes it a bit less overwhelming to join – a good idea, I’d say.
In contrast to our test run, I didn’t actively try to find as many problems as possible. This is why I recommended everyone who didn’t already have a Matrix account to register directly at rollenspiel.chat and use the web version of the Element client. I also didn’t encrypt any of the rooms. We still found a problem: The single-sign-on service „Pinoverse“ which is connected to rollenspiel.chat accepted usernames with symbols that weren’t allowed on Matrix. Tealk quickly came to our rescue, fixed the problem and edited all the account names so everyone could log in. I like to stress here that this is not an issue with Matrix itself.
All in all, I would conclude that apart from the little registration problem everything ran pretty fine. Matrix offers a free and open-source way to provide a chat space for communities here and is rather clever with the structure. However, these little problems are exactly the sort of thing that make Matrix look half-baked and complicated, alienating possible new users. I hope the protocol continues to be improved here. Thanks again to Tealk for not only providing the infrastructure, but also the top-notch tech support.
I’m curious how this Matrix space develops!