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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Maybe that would help because I have a really hard time understanding how matrix works.
Like lemmy more or less
Ive been using it for many years now and i understand it can be confusing at times. Do you have any specific questions that i might be able to answer? I have onboarded dozens of people at this point and somehow we always figured it out.
So I guess my problem is that I'm used to Discord's paradigm. You have servers and in the servers you have chat rooms, video conference rooms, and DMs. it pretty much reflects what's on IRC.
When it comes to Matrix, I have trouble making the parallel. Maybe because of the terminology?
I was wondering if you could help me out in that regard. Knowing that I'm familiar with IRC and Discord, can you explain to me the different terminology in Matrix and how it works?
FYI: Commet really is easier to navigate than Element.
Ok so terminology wise:
If you just want to create something resembling a discord server, you first create a Space.
You can decide if it should be public or private (public = anyone with the address can join / private = invite only)
Then you add rooms to it, normal rooms for text channels and video rooms for voice/video channels. During the creation of each of these rooms (or after) you decide if they should be visible to all space members, or be invite only (think mod channels).
Afterwards just invite people to the Space and they will be able to join the rooms you set up.
There are 3 predefined permission levels: Default, Moderator, Admin but you can also define numeric power levels for more fine grained control over what people can do. You can set permissions for users on the Space level and on the room level separately. So you can give someone mod powers for the entire Space or only for a single room. You can also set the default power level very low (think Guest/Applicant) so that people can only join the space itself and nothing else (or only a guest room) until an admin or mod changes their power level to something higher (think member) that allows them to join other rooms.
Some more details:
All of the different types of rooms can exist completely separate from Servers/Spaces or be part of them. The only purpose of Spaces is to create a sort of umbrella that these can all be grouped under. New people can then join the Space and automatically get access to all the rooms that the Space/Server admin wants them to have access to.So in practice you will have a bunch of personal DMs or group chats that exist on their own, basically like any other instant messenger like Signal or WhatsApp. And then if you have a larger community that requires some more structure you can create a Space, to which you then add whatever rooms you need.
There is a lot of flexibility to this however. Unlike with discord, all rooms exist completely on their own, they arent actually fundamentally tied to a space. So you can detach a room from a space and attach it to another. You can also add preexisting rooms to a new Space. So if you have a group chat with your gaming buddies, but at some point decide you want to expand your group and want to create a Space with multiple rooms, you can just add your original group chat to the newly created space.
So in a way you should think of Spaces not in the same way as Discord servers, but just as an arbitrary grouping of chats and voice channels that also allows you to set access restrictions for all of those chats in a single place.
Sometimes things get confusing. This is the permissions settings page of Space i just created. So why does it say
Thats because Spaces are actually rooms too, just fancy ones that can have sub rooms. This is bad UI design and should say "space" instead of "room" but thats just where matrix is at right now. Clients like commet will be what solves this for people by giving them a UI with a more familiar terminology.
Omg! THANK YOU!
This really clears it up! I'm saving this.
I hope people share this post if anyone else is confused.
Big thanks again!
It's almost identical on Matrix, although many clients make it hard to distinguish things. For example, Fluffy Chat (and the "official" Element too, I think?) show both Servers AND their Rooms on your "all chats list", making finding things confusing.
Check out Commet, it structures things exactly like Discord, so you'll clearly see what's a server, what's a room on that server, etc.
Yeah i just installed it and it makes more sense
I appreciate your help. I might reach out to you soon.
Maybe I should also look up some YouTube videos about it. That always helps as well.
honest question, what is there to understand? it sounds you already got through registration so you are through the hardest part which is choosing a provider.
What is there to understand? It's just a decentralized protocol - in fact, you don't need to understand to use it. Just connect to chat server like you'd connect to one in discord.
Gee, thanks. That's so helpful. 🙄