The Beta Version of The Matrix Space!
As many know, over the years we've experimented with how to let users locate and curate sets of users and rooms in Matrix. Back in Nov 2017 we added 'groups' (aka 'communities') as a custom mechanism for this - introducing identifiers beginning with a + symbol to represent sets of rooms and users, like +matrix:matrix.org.
However, it rapidly became obvious that Communities had some major shortcomings. They ended up being an extensive and entirely new API surface (designed around letting you dynamically bridge the membership of a group through to a single source of truth like LDAP) - while in practice groups have enormous overlap with rooms: managing membership, inviting by email, access control, power levels, names, topics, avatars, etc. Meanwhile the custom groups API re-invented the wheel for things like pushing updates to the client (causing a whole suite of problems). So clients and servers alike ended up reimplementing large chunks of similar functionality for both rooms and groups.
And so almost before Communities were born, we started thinking about whether it would make more sense to model them as a special type of room, rather than being their own custom primitive. MSC1215 had the first thoughts on this in 2017, and then a formal proposal emerged at MSC1772 in Jan 2019. We started working on this in earnest at the end of 2020, and christened the new way of handling groups of rooms and users as... Spaces!
