Roomy is a community platform in the atmosphere. Here's how it works (WIP!).
The Index
Each Roomy space situates new visitors on its Index page. This is a complete overview of the entire space, showing latest activity from both channels as well as threads.
Search threads
Quickly sort through threads by title by typing in the contextual search bar.
Channel index
Each channel contains a contextual index constrained to the contents of that channel. Toggling the view-mode from Chat to Threads reveals all threads in that channel.
Future
Filtering controls. Very active spaces might not want channel activity to appear here.
Go to next. The index should follow you around
Spaces
Everything in Roomy begins with a space.
Create new space
..or in the bottom left of the sidebar
Space settings
Access your space settings by clicking the cog underneath the space header.
Here you'll have the following options for further configuration.
General
Space name
Description
Who can join this space? anyone (public) or invite only (private)?
Who can create invite links?
Space handle: set a custom URL for your space (custom domains will be supported).
Permissions
Determine user roles and their respective access levels in your space.
WIP
Members
List of members in your space.
Integrations
How do I delete a space?
Channels, Threads, Rooms
Terminology
For clarity on technical vs user-facing terms in Roomy.
Spaces
Every new community instance in Roomy starts out as a new space, the equivalent of Discord's 'servers' and Slack's 'workspaces'.
Roomy requires each new community to begin with a space containing at minimum one channel.
Categories
A titled container for channels to facilitate thematic bucketing.
Channels
The primary containers of chatrooms are called channels.We opted for the channel term because of its mainstream use in chat platforms like Slack, Discord and Microsoft Teams.
Threads
threads in Roomy are roughly the same as threads in Matrix, Discord or Zulip.
View-modes
View-modes are a novel concept in Roomy compared to conventional group-messaging designs. Every channel in Roomy can be viewed in different view-modes, depending on what’s been enabled (and set as default) for the channel:
Primary modes
Chat-view
Threads-view
Additional modes (pending)
Page-view (wiki)
Links-view
Feed-view
Chat-view works like any other group chat.
Threads-view on the other hand presents a threads-centric view of the channel, in the tabulated style of an "internet forum or message board".
Page-view is essentially a super-pinned thread meant to serve as a living intro & overview document of its respective channel.
Channels can disable views as needed, e.g. if a channel is intended strictly for asynchronous discourse in the form of threads we can opt to disable the chat-view altogether and only allow thread posting, thus creating a 'board' type channel.