alt Hacker NewsIn my experience with running Discord servers you setup a couple of hierarchical roles (admin, moderator, user etc) when you first setup the server and never again.
However I'm constantly adding new roles which are really just groups of users. I would say 90% of all the Discord roles I've ever created have no permissions associated with them at all and just exist to ping a group of users (or act as a tag for bots).
Maybe that's served by a different feature in Matrix for user groups. If so, that's still not quite as useful, because sometimes later on you decide the group needs a permission (e.g. a casual gaming group has grown enough to justify having it's own channel).
Right - this matches my hunch; that folks want to define groups of users (which you can already in Matrix in 'spaces', but the UX in most clients is awful) - and what they really want is group-based permissions (which isn't part of the protocol, and instead gets layered on at the application layer today.
So the problem here isn't that folks want contradictory access levels (e.g. Admins can kick people but can't set topic, but Mods can kick people but can't set topic) but the ability to set them via group?