Terminology

[erlend-sh]

For clarity on technical vs user-facing terms in Commune.

Spaces

Every new community instance in Commune starts out as a new space, exactly equivalent to Matrix Spaces. Unlike Matrix/Element however which allows for rooms (channels) to be created without a space container, Commune requires each new community to begin with a spacecontaining at minimum one channel. We believe this is more in line with conventional group-messaging UX, such as Discord's 'servers' and Slack's 'workspaces'.

Channels

channels in Commune are the technical equivalent of [rooms](https://spec.matrix.org/v1.8/rooms/) in Matrix.

We opted for the channel term because of its mainstream use in chat platforms like Slack, Discord and Microsoft Teams.

Similar concepts:

• Fediverse: Groups
  Partial compatibility is planned, e.g. by enabling an Announcements category to be federated.

• Discourse: Categories
  Effectively the same as channels, except Discourse treats topics-board channels and chat-room channels as two separate containers, whereas in Commune each channel contains and is capable of both.

Boards and view-modes

boards are a novel concept in Commune compared to conventional group-messaging designs. Every channel in Commune can be viewed in two different modes:

• Chat-view
• Board-view

Chat-view works like any other group chat. Board-view on the other hand presents a threads-centric view of the channel, in the tabulated style of an "internet forum or message board".

Channels intended strictly for asynchronous discourse in the form of threads can opt to disable the chat-view altogether and only allow thread posting.

Threads

threads in Commune are the same as threads in Matrix. However, Commune makes threads web-readable and thus SEO-friendly.