I will be upfront with this, and say that I’ve never been a huge fan. But I did reinstall a Matrix server, and some clients to see if it’d gotten better in the year or so since I’ve last used it.
This just… Kind of feels like a more centralized XMPP with group chat folders that sort of function? The spaces feature is neat, but I’ve tried 4-5 clients, and every single one of those throws all of them into the same screen as the DMs by default, and I can’t find a way to change that.
Am I missing something here? Like. I want to at least see what people like here, I just can’t.


I should say that Element looks like it was heavily inspired by the OG Slack UI as it was at a specific point in time probably 7-8 years ago. Slack’s UI started getting tweaked and enshittified quite a bit, especially after Salesforce bought them. So I can totally get not seeing the direct resemblance, but as someone that was forced to be on Slack for a decade, Element felt like “ahh old Slack” in a good way, though obviously not exact.
Ahh, okay, we only started using Slack at work a couple of years ago, so I don’t remember the old UI