Accessibility: Notification-restricted spaces

[joepie91]

Your use case

What would you like to do?

Configuring a Space such that while it is the active Space, all other notifications (both audible and visual representations) outside of that Space are suppressed in Element.

This includes (but may not be limited to):

• Notification popups
• Notification sounds
• Unread notification badge in Element Desktop tray icon
• Notification badge on Space icons
• Invites

Why would you like to do it?

With Matrix trying to cover both the IM and public chat usecases, it can become quite overwhelming; sometimes, when I have few 'spoons' left, I just want to talk to some close and undemanding friends privately, and having notifications/mentions constantly pop up visually for (large) public rooms and DM invites gets very stressful at those moments, as I will feel permanently pressured to respond to them.

Right now, my only 'solution' to that is to close Element entirely and not talk to anybody. Because I am no longer using a separate chat app for IM and group chat, I no longer have the possibility of talking to friends without also being bombarded with notifications elsewhere (which I would normally want to follow up on, but not at that moment). This is obviously not good for my mental health.

How would you like to achieve it?

By having a configuration setting for a Space, such as a private one that I have created myself and that only contains non-exhausting people/groups, that makes it "notification-restricted" - whenever it is selected, not only will other rooms and people be hidden, so will any kind of notifications from them. Deactivating it (switching to another Space or Home) would un-suppress notifications again.

I believe this can be implemented entirely client-side, so it shouldn't require any protocol changes, and the only thing that needs to be persisted is whether a Space is notification-restricted or not. The default setting does not need to be changed, this would likely only ever be applied by someone to one or two Spaces.

I suspect this would be a comparatively easy change to make, as it mostly just consists of an additional (client-side) notification filter, and (at most) a single persisted setting per Space.

Have you considered any alternatives?

• Closing Element: This means social isolation, and so is not a good option.
• Leaving other rooms or changing their notification settings: generally, my overwhelmedness is short-lived. It would be excessively impractical to have to change around my rooms or room settings every time I just needed a break from things.
• Multiple accounts for different purposes: Aside from being impractical to have to explain to other people I talk to, Element does not support this anyway.

Additional context

No response

[pingiun]

I think this would be very nice to have, it solves a bunch of notification wants at once

[kittykat]

Moving to discussions as this is cross-platform 👍