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Public Rooms

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When you want to join larger public conversations, you have three major options at hand:

  1. Joining a specific room from its address/alias or from a matrix.to link
  2. Browsing a public directory to find rooms of interest
  3. Joining a room that was listed in a Space

Some clients also allow applying specific settings to public rooms, such as hiding images by default.

Joining a specific room

Someone might have shared a link that starts with matrix.to with you, or you might have stumbled upon it on a website. Those links will bring you to the public conversation you tried to join after asking you what client you want to use.

Clicking a matrix.to link you will open a new tab in your browser, showing you a UI that looks like the following.

matrix.to asks to confirm the choice of homeserver instance which it will use to preview the room.

Click on accept, and you will be redirected to a preview of the room you're trying to join, containing its name, address (on the format #room-name:example.com), and number of people currently in the room. Below this preview is a list of clients you can use to join the room.

Preview of the "RPG General" room on matrix.to. Room alias, amount of members, and topic are shown. The top of the list of clients is visible below, including Element and Weechat.

Since this documentation started with Element, let's carry on with it. You will be able to seamlessly change to another client when you're more used to Matrix.

Click on "Continue" below Element. If you have installed Element Desktop, your browser may ask you if you want to allow this page to open Element. Click on Allow. If you haven't installed Element Desktop, you can either click on "Download" to get it, or "Continue in your browser" to carry on with the web app.

Depending on the privacy settings set by the administrators of the room, you may or may not be able to see a preview of the conversation.

Preview of the "RPG General" room using Element Web. A few example chat and status messages can be seen. The room is not yet in the room list. At the bottom is a button to join the room.

Click on "Join the discussion": you can now participate in the room!

The room now appears in the room list as selected. The same messages as before can be seen, but there is now an additional join status message and a greeting from the "thibiscus" tutorial user.

Browsing the public directory

Joining a specific room is handy when you know exactly what you want to discuss or where, but sometimes you just want to find a casual place to talk of things of interest with people on the Internet.

Matrix has a built-in directory where people can publish their public rooms for others to find them. The directory only shows rooms published on a single provider at once. If you have created an account on matrix.org, it's going to show you only rooms published on matrix.org's directory.

To access the directory in Element Web, click on the + in the left bar, and on "Join public room".

After clicking on the plus symbol in the room list, there is a menu with the options to start a new chat, create a new room, or join a public room.

It will open a list of all the public rooms published in the directory of your provider.

A window titled "Explore rooms" has opened in front. It has a search box near the top, a selection box with "matrix.org" selected, and a list of rooms below. Each room has an avatar, name, topic, member count, and join button. Some also have a preview button.

The directory can be very large sometimes, and the rooms displayed at the top of the list may not be of interest to you. You can type a center of interest to see if someone has created a room for it already.

The search box now contains "cycling" and rooms which contain this word in their name or topic make up the list of results, ordered by member count.

You can click "Join" to join the room, and voilà, you're in!

A view of the "Cycling" room's couple last messages. The "thibiscus" test user has just joined.

Spaces

A Space is a way to group several rooms together. If you are familiar with other platforms, Matrix Spaces are similar to Slack Workspaces or Discord Servers. It looks like the following.

The space home of the "Warm Drinks Community". It has a cup of coffee as avatar and the name and description are shown prominently next to further details: the space is public and has two members, there is a summary of the member avatars next to an invite and a settings button. In the middle is a search box to filter the list of rooms and subspaces below. Some of the rooms are indicated as suggested. At the top of the list are buttons to add, remove, or mark rooms as suggested.

To join a Space, you need to either know its address, or click on a matrix.to link to that space someone would have shared with you. For example, to join the Space of the Matrix Community, you can click on https://matrix.to/#/#community:matrix.org

The process to join a Space is the same as for Joining a specific room.

Once you have joined a Space, clicking on its icon on the leftmost bar will bring you to the index view of the space: you will see all the rooms contained in this space, and you will be able to join them by clicking on "Join".

Note that when you join a Space, you are not automatically joining all the rooms inside it.

Here are a few Spaces you might be interested in:

Hiding images by default

In public rooms, sometimes people post inappropriate content, including images you don't want to see. Hopefully a room's moderators will tidy things up quite quickly, but many people prefer to make images in public rooms hidden, allowing them to show individual images when they are ready.

In Fractal

In Fractal, images in public rooms are hidden by default. You can check and adjust this in Account Settings.

Fractal, after clicking the avatar to show a pop-up menu. The gear icon is highlighted, saying Account Settings.

Choose Safety, and find "Media Previews". Make sure "Show only in private rooms" is selected.

Fractal's settings screen, on the Safety tab. Show only in private rooms is highlighted, under Media previews.

Now images will be hidden by default. You can make them visible by clicking on "Click to show preview".

Fractal's main timeline, with some hidden images. Click to show preview is highlighted on one of them.

You can re-hide them by choosing the "eye" icon in the corner of the image.

Fractal's main timeline, with some images. The eye symbol in the top right of one is highlighted. The tooltip says Hide media preview.

In Element X

In Element X, you can hide images in public rooms in Settings, by tapping on your avatar.

Element X, with the avatar highlighted.

Choose Advanced Settings.

Element X's Settings screen, with Advanced settings highlighted.

Under "Show media in timeline" choose "In private rooms".

Element X's Advanced settings screen, showing Show media in timeline, with the In private rooms option highlighted.

Now images will be hidden by default. You can make them visible by clicking on "Show".

Element X's timeline, with a hidden image which has a Show button that is highlighted.

To hide an image after it has been shown, go back to the room list and re-enter the room.

In Element Web

In Element Web, you can hide images in public rooms in Settings.

Element Web with the avatar highlighted, and the avatar menu visible, with All settings highlighted.

Choose Preferences, and scroll down to Moderation and safety. Click "In private rooms" under "Show media in timeline".

Element Web's settings menu, on the Preferences page, showing the Moderation and safety section. Under Show media in timeline, In private rooms is highlighted.

Now images will be hidden by default. You can make them visible by clicking on "Show image".

Element Web's timeline with a hidden image. The Show image button is highlighted.

You can re-hide them by choosing the "eye" icon when you hover over the image.

Element Web, hovering over an image to show the pop-up menu. On this menu is an eye image that is highlighted. The tooltip says Hide.