Matrix has always been built to support large virtual communities - after all, Matrix itself and all its dependent projects are developed via Matrix. Over the last year this has expanded further, with Mozilla joining Matrix in March 2020, Gitter joining in October - and meanwhile a huge influx of large virtual events and educational and public-sector deployments driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, lots of our work in 2020 has been focused on improving features for navigating and managing large virtual communities, whether that's improving the user experience in Element, or adding entirely new features to the protocol. We'll give a tour of what we've been doing, and how we deployed it for FOSDEM. We'll also show off our brand new Spaces implementation (the ability to group rooms into a hierarchy).

Spaces are particularly interesting because they open up the possibility of Matrix being more than just a big flat namespace of conversations: instead they provide a global fully decentralised hierarchical filesystem, complete with decentralised ACLs, allowing users to publish and curate an arbitrary taxonomy of whatever data they choose (be it real-time conversations, history, data streams, files, objects, etc). This has potential to flip Matrix entirely on its head: Spaces could become the main backbone of the protocol, with chatrooms being mere leaf nodes in a giant tree of collaboration. Imagine if NNTP, AFS, IRC and the Web had a baby :D We'll dig into these ideas and more, and their implications for large-scale decentralised open source collaboration in years to come!