But as far as I can remember, you can’t administer the rooms in a space as one. Like you need to be invited into each separate room.

Nope, again - I don’t understand who told you this. When you’re creating a room in Matrix you can make it either public, invite only, or only joinable via membership in a specific space.

Here’s a screenshot of the room security interface:

Not saying that you couldn’t add that, I’m saying they don’t seem to want to “do what discord did”. Which is a bummer since the success of discord clearly shows what would be needed.

You are correct in that they “don’t want to do what discord this”: recently (and you can see this in their apps like EleX) they’ve transitioned to looking and acting more like modern mobile chat apps like Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram - a decision I’m assuming they’ve made as most of their funding comes from people who want a replacement for those apps and not Discord.

Regardless, just using a Discord-like client (e.g. Commet) is enough to get the experience you want.

I also hadn’t used it in a while - used to be very rough around the edges.

Just installed it on my phone, it’s actually pretty usable now!

If you like Discord’s UI, there is a new Matrix client being developed - called Commet.Chat - that is trying to look and feel like Discord.

Might be worth checking out!

It does have that.

A “server” in Matrix is a space. A chat channel is called a room. A space can hold as many rooms as you want.

Fun fact, unlike Discord, a space can even hold other spaces in it!

SchildiChat Next is a mini-fork of Element X with proper spaces support (and some other nice UI additions).

I say mini-fork as it’s basically just EleX with some UI patches - so it follows EleX actively.

From a chat standpoint, the two are near identical - yes - but Matrix lacks the “voice/video calls as persistent rooms” feature that Discord has. This was planned a while back, but has recently been pushed on the backburner^[1] as they work on Element Call.

Early on Matrix was sort of being built up as an IRC/Discord alternative, but recently they’ve pivoted more towards a WA/Telegram/Slack alternative as most of their financial support comes from European governments and companies looking for strong and secure internal communication solutions they can manage themselves.

So, TL;DR you probably won’t see the exact Discord like features you want land in the spec any time soon as they’re not being funded.

So that means, right now:

• No persistent voice/video rooms (but they are on the roadmap!)
• No push-to-talk or “game friendly” settings like voice auto-detection (also not really on the roadmap)

Having said all that, Matrix is brilliant and I highly encourage people to check it out. I use a Matrix <-> Signal bridge for most of my comms with my friends, and we voice chat on Mumble. Not ideal, but you get to avoid Discord and you get a very similar experience! Bonus points for Mumble as it’s super lightweight.

~[1] It’s not really on the backburner so much as it’s something that will have to be worked on after the new VOIP stack - Element Call - is integrated in the wider Matrix ecosystem. There is an experimental “video rooms” feature, but that really isn’t the same as a native, persistent voice-only room.~