Update: As of August 2023, the server Gossip Land has been deleted. This means any links to gossip.land referenced below will no longer work. Check out this new and more up-to-date list of servers: https://servers.joinmatrix.org/
I run a Matrix chat server for my friends, family, and friends-of-friends. I called it Gossip Land and whilst there are a few different apps you can use to join a Matrix server, Element is a good starting point.
You can grab an account on the main Matrix server, meaning your username will be @username:matrix.org or, if you are a friend of mine, drop me a message and I’ll tell you how to get @username:gossip.land
There are many servers out there and you can talk to people on nearly all of them! Only, it can be quite hard to find new servers and chat rooms. So, this post will be a quick guide on how to do that.
Join rooms on gossip.land
Whether you are signed up to gossip.land or not, there are a few public chat rooms you can join.
Members of gossip.land can open the Element app and use the “Explore rooms” button which will list all the local rooms.
Or, for convenience, anyone on any server can use these links:
🎨 Art & Design · #design:gossip.land
🏀 Basketball · #basketball:gossip.land
📚 Books · #books:gossip.land
🐱 Cats · #cats:gossip.land
🐶 Dogs · #dogs:gossip.land
📺 Film & TV · #film:gossip.land
⚽️ Football · #football:gossip.land
🇳🇴 Oslo · #oslo:gossip.land
🎶 Music · #music:gossip.land
📰 News · #news:gossip.land
🧬 Science · #science:gossip.land
🏑 Sports · #sports:gossip.land
🧑💻 Technology · #technology:gossip.land
Joining chat rooms on other servers
Maybe you want something a little more niche? Well, there is probably a chat room for that somewhere online. As a user of gossip.land, the Element app will probably show you all the available rooms from gossip.land and matrix.org.
In this video below, we’re going to do two things;
- Search for a ‘pokemon’ room on matrix.org
- Join a Firefox browser room on mozilla.org
So, as you can see – to join a room you don’t need to know the actual room address if you know the server. You can just add the server and then search, browse, and join all the available rooms.
Or, to quickly join a room, just type
/join [room address]in any chat. You can run this command from any server, not just gossip.land!
A list of servers and rooms
So, as we have explained, there is gossip.land and matrix.org. We have also discovered mozilla.org. Now I’m going to do my best to maintain a list below of servers and some example rooms on those servers.
If you know of anything I should add, please get in touch. And because I haven’t manually been to each and all the rooms below, if you see anything that’s bad or offensive, then let me know. Otherwise, happy chatting!
There are so many rooms on matrix.org, here is a full list of rooms maintained by someone else.
Other servers
There’s more. Here are a list of servers you can add and see what rooms are there. I will expand these server lists to include room links when I have time. 😥
- fosdem.org
- cyberia.club
- eggy.cc
- perthchat.org 🇦🇺
- tomesh.net 🇨🇦
- aria-net.org
- gnome.org
- nltrix.net 🇳🇱
- feneas.org
- pettybickering.ca
- asra.gr
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