We hear the desire to fully hide the Spaces sidebar loud and clear. It wasn't a blocker for leaving Beta, but we are tracking that request in https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/18898

You’re right that spaces aren’t useful if you’re only in one room(!). Just like a mail client doesn’t need to support mail folders if you only ever have one conversation going on. As others have said, we’ll add the option to hide the spacepanel if you want. Also, you may want to just use a much simpler Matrix client (eg https://hydrogen.element.io - the lightest element!) if you’re only in one room.

In general, Spaces reduce bloat though - they speed up the app by reducing the amount of data the app has to juggle as you filter based on a given space, and they stop your UI and brain being clogged up with irrelevant rooms.

Hello! Hydrogen sorely needs 2 basic things to make it usable as a daily driver - separate DM one-on-one conversations away from Rooms and add a Dark mode toggle. These two things push me back to app.element.io, must-have not nice-to-have things for me. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for your suggestions. We've just had another look at the upcoming priorities for Hydrogen and I can confirm that both of those things are planned for the not-too-far future! Hard to commit to exact time frames, but you've been heard :)

Thanks! I will try hydrogen!

Yes MS Teams is a great example.

It started as a Slack knock-off. Not a great one, the UI is too low density and the multi tenant support sucks unlike Slack's. But it was relatively snappy. And free for O365 users. But lately they've been adding many apps, Wikis, all these fancy meeting modes that make it seem like everyone is in a theatre and many more fluffy things.

Now the app is so slow it takes more than a minute to start up. It often crashes with stupid error messages "Oops! Something went wrong!" that give zero indication of what actually happened.

At the same time MS is heavily pushing companies to adopt it but they're devaluing the product as they go by making it some kind of Swiss army knife with all the trimmings.

They're now realising the performance issue and moving away from Electron towards Edge webview but I think what it really needs is a proper architectural review. They've been too focused on beating the market adding new features and its core functions have suffered.

I don't recall Teams ever being "snappy". It has always felt like a half-broken beta product.

The one thing I liked about it was the balance of "threaded conversation" and "chat" that it promoted with its UI, which was good for the data science team I was on at the time. Of course nowadays I would suggest using Zulip for the same purpose.

I like when they embed views (e.g. PowerBI) in it, but as soon as you click off it to see a message and click back, it has to reload it all. It's like IE6 - a pre-tabs browsing experience.

Embedded browser views are my pet peeve.

On some mobile apps (Gmail, Discord, Telegram, etc. On Android, never used a modern iOS device to know the situation over there) there are embedded browsers enabled by default, but they are not very persistent and have no actual browsing UI.

My mom was buying something from a link she got from a friend, and was unable to complete the transaction because she had to open another Telegram conversation to get the payment details (hey don't judge non-techy people's organization skills!), but of course going back means leaving the browser-view, so once she had the details at hand she couldn't go back to the store to finish the purchase.

That would be "fine" if there were a consistent UX to "no, i really mean to open this on my browser app, not on an embedded view" or if embedded views were opt-in, but as it stands, it is one of the classic attempts at "simplifying" things that actually makes the whole ecosystem more complex and obscure.

This isn't helpful for less technical users but most embedded browsers have an option to open what you're looking at in the real version preserving state. I find this handy to quickly peek at something while conceptually still in the app that opened it, and then go to a real browser if necessary.

> It started as a Slack knock-off.

More like a Webex Teams knock-off, as MS went after the Unified Communications space (group chat + video meetings, though they still lack contact center and hybrid meeting hardware).

Oh I thought it would only do group text chat when it first went live (still in beta).

But it could be that voice/video calls were blocked by our IT because at that time WebEx was our approved tool (not WebEx Teams, just the regular scheduled meeting tool).

I think this feature enables a much more discord-like environment, in which case it totally makes sense why they enabled to for everyone.

Like it or not, discord has taken the market for a lot of younger software projects and geeky communities. If we could get them to use foss matrix instead that’d be a huge win.

I'm a big fan of Matrix becoming more Discord-like. I've been in many small to medium group chats and internet communities over the last decade. About everyone I know from those jumped over to Discord shortly after it came out, and its structure ("servers" that are easy to create by anyone being the main unit which contains not only channels but a member list, roles, and moderators instead of having those each per-channel) is such an upgrade over everything we used before, to the point I was baffled that the design wasn't more copied by others. (Yeah I know that IRC is somewhat similar, but the differences make all the difference. Anyone being able to make a "server", it having a graphical identity, being able to join it through a link, that you don't register in an arcane way on each one all over again with an unconnected identity, that you get channel history, that it's integrated with voice/video chat channels, and that you're a member of all channels in it are all huge factors in how they shape their social spaces and get used.)

I fully agree. The Slack model of having a different login per "server" is good for workplaces, but Discord is incredibly good for "communities", hobby groups, and other casual groups.

As suggested by another commenter here, a hybrid model would probably be ideal for Matrix, where you could log into different spaces with different accounts if you want, but aren't forced to.

I would go one step further and propose that you should be able to have multiple Element windows open, so you can have your "work" space or spaces in one window, and your other spaces in another window.

Use Firefox multi containers for that.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/multi-account-co...

I should clarify that I prefer using desktop applications and would rather not have to chat in a browser window (even if the desktop application is technically a web browser internally).

Ferdi [0] is FOSS and supports multiple accounts for the same service [1].

[0] https://getferdi.com/ [1] https://help.getferdi.com/services/multiple-accounts

Or you could use a client which doesn't support spaces.

I'm fairly sure you can collapse most UI elements though.