Display subspaces in minimized space panel

[robintown]

There's definitely room for improvement to make the layout more readable, but I hope this should be a good enough start for design to be able to provide feedback on.

Closes element-hq/element-web#17472.

Preview: https://611a88fe1baa5c009fa5d77b--matrix-react-sdk.netlify.app
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[turt2live]

The code looks fine, though personally I'm not sure I'd be using this functionality. Subspaces are useful for organizing massive collections of rooms, but in practice I (personally) rarely ever actually jump into a subspace.

For metrics: Element's company space is ~40-50 subspaces with up to 4 levels deep of subspaces. I only really go digging through the tree if I'm looking for a particular room, but otherwise I'm just looking to filter by coarse area as a sort of account switching.

[nadonomy]

Hey @robintown thanks for the contribution. We'll need to review/think on this somewhat internally before accepting this.

One of the goals we set ourselves with Spaces was that we want to meet peoples expectations from other platforms and abstract away more complex capabilities. This resolves into ensuring the non-expanded state of the space panel being no more complex than peoples expectations from incumbents today.

I can absolutely see the value in this for committed users. It might be that we'd consider this behind a settings flag instead, but we'll discuss more internally and follow up!

[robintown]

@nadonomy Good to know, and of course if this ultimately isn't desired functionality for mainline Element I'll definitely understand.

To add my two cents, the main reason for me suggesting this functionality is this: A number of my spaces are organized under personal spaces by their general topic, as is visible in the screenshot above. However, I rarely find myself wanting to view things from the perspective of the topic spaces, as they end up mixing together many separate, though related, subjects. So instead, I end up having to keep the space panel expanded all the time in order to be able to actually visit subspaces and see subspace-level notification states (as activity in one subspace might be a lot more important to me than activity in another).

Given @turt2live's comments this does sound like the sort of thing that might work best under a settings flag, though I'll wait to see what comes out of the internal discussion. 👍

[robintown]

I'm retracting this PR since it seems from the recent IA things that the design team has other plans for subspaces anyways, which I'd rather not get in the way of :)

[niquewoodhouse]

Hey @robintown

I'm retracting this PR since it seems from the recent IA things that the design team has other plans for subspaces anyways, which I'd rather not get in the way of :)

Just to say the team is not necessarily following through on any other plans at the moment. I think there's value in what you're proposing, and the issue it closes has a lot of useful ideas/feedback too. Lots of promise here.

We just need to find time later to focus on this specific interaction so we'll keep this in mind when we get to it. This will be of use then, so leaving it assigned to myself for then.