Spaces and Rooms — Redundant Joining and Role-Based Joining

[cipherswami]

Problem 1: Redundant Joining
Spaces are essentially collections of rooms. However, after joining a space, users must still manually join each room. This feels unnecessary — if someone wanted to join a specific room, they could have searched for it directly.

Suggestion:
When a user joins a space, they should automatically join all public rooms within it. Private or restricted rooms can remain optional and require explicit joining. This reduces friction and makes onboarding smoother without compromising privacy.

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Problem 2: Role-Based Room Access
Some rooms should only be accessible to users with certain roles, such as Moderators, Premium Members, or Males-only.

Suggestion:
Enable role-based room access within spaces. Roles can be assigned during or after joining based on:

• Responses to onboarding questions
• Verified account attributes or linked permissions
• Admin or moderator assignment

This allows for controlled access and personalized participation while maintaining community integrity.

[cipherswami]

Removing this option or disabling this option default would be great. DM's in the Matrix space is kind of confusing. Lets keep it simple, DM's are DM's they don't need to be appeared in Spaces.

[awtj8o81ryywg793]

Quoted from the parent comment:

DM's are DM's they don't need to be appeared in Spaces.

I disagree. Spaces can be used in many different ways, including as a personal means to organise rooms. A user may want to further organise their direct messages beyond what is possible with the current filters.

[awtj8o81ryywg793]

Quoted from the initial post:

When a user joins a space, they should automatically join all public rooms within it. Private or restricted rooms can remain optional and require explicit joining. This reduces friction and makes onboarding smoother without compromising privacy.

There is a fairly significant issue with this suggestion: since spaces can have sub-spaces, and those can contain further sub-spaces, do you expect all public rooms to be joined automatically, including those in these sub-spaces? That could potentially mean a user joins hundreds, if not more, rooms all at once.

With Synapse, you can set rooms, including spaces, to be automatically joined by default. I’m not aware of support for this in other homeserver implementations. I'm also uncertain if Element supports similar functionality; if not, I’d welcome such an addition. I would argue that this functionality should be opt-in and that public rooms shouldn't be joined automatically just because they're public.

A space can contain any number of rooms, many of which will be for different topics. Just because a user joins a space doesn’t mean they have an interest in joining all public rooms contained within. If a user were automatically joined to all public rooms and didn’t want to be in most of them, they would have to manually leave a significant number of rooms, which would be a real hassle and rather unnecessary.

[awtj8o81ryywg793]

Quoted from the initial post:

Some rooms should only be accessible to users with certain roles, such as Moderators, Premium Members, or Males-only.

Since there is no concept of global roles per se, how would this work? Would it be based on the role a user is given in a specific room?