How do privacy settings work in Rooms in Spaces?
How do privacy settings work in Rooms in Spaces?
I'm trying to migrate over one of my smaller Discord groups to Matrix. There are obvious UX shortcomings, but most of them are no big deal and worth it for getting away from an enshittifying platform.
I created a Space, and inside of it created several Rooms. The Rooms are all encrypted, and set "Access: Space members", and were initially set "Who can read history? Members only (since the point in time of selecting this option)".
I thought this should mean that if I create a new Room (with that setting) in my Space, send some messages, and the others later join the Room, they would be able to see the messages. Unfortunately, this did not appear to be the case. Does anyone know what these options actually do?
Unfortunately, the official documentation on the Element website is particularly unhelpful:
From here the options are self-explanatory, simply change as desired to meet your requirements.
The other options, Members only (since they were invited) and Members only (since they joined) are also a bit unclear, in the context of a Space. Is someone "invited" from the moment they receive an invitation to a Space that automatically grants entry to a Room? Had they "joined" from when they joined the Space, or only upon joining the specific Room? (I would assume the latter, but considering my assumption about the first option was evidently wrong, I'm considering anything to be possible.)
This is sadly just completely broken and impossible at the moment. It used to work like this but the implementation was found to have security and performance flaws. So at the moment the only way to get a functional history for new members is to not use encrypted rooms.
There is ongoing work to re implement this feature but idk when it will drop. There is a whole technical talk about this from the recent Matrix conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E4ArQopptM
And a looong github issue https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/2829
I would expect this to be implemented some time early next year.
Oh damn, that sucks. Thanks for the quick and concise answer!
Kinda wish Element would at least push out a minor UI update explaining the problem. Or at least put it in their docs, instead of claiming it's "self-explanatory". I guess that's what jtree is saying in the Github.
Yeah this has been an issue for years at this point i believe, so its odd that it was never removed/clarified.
This could mean anything but in the talk i sent from a month ago, there was already a functional tech demo so its probably not super far from becoming a developer option. Usually after they add something as a dev option and there arent any major issues it gets moved to stable a few months later.