The public room list is generally considered a bad idea, and we're seriously considering deprecating it in favour of space hierarchies - i.e. curated hierarchie

The public room list is generally considered a bad idea, and we're seriously considering deprecating it in favour of space hierarchies - i.e. curated hierarchies of groups of rooms, so that folks who like curating lists of interesting rooms can go and do so - rather than them all being dumped in a huge mess in a linear list. There'd then be social pressure to curate the best space index, rather than it being a tragedy of the commons of random lost forgotten rooms. In terms of where to hang out and where to use it, here are some handy spaces picked from my personal space bar... * https://matrix.to/#/#community:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#community:matrix.org <-- rooms about Matrix itself * https://matrix.to/#/#space:ansible.com https://matrix.to/#/#space:ansible.com <-- rooms about Ansible * https://matrix.to/#/#activitypub-community:codelutin.com https://matrix.to/#/#activitypub-community:codelutin.com <-- rooms about Activity Pub * https://matrix.to/#/#wikimedia-space:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#wikimedia-space:matrix.org <-- rooms about the Wikimedia community * https://matrix.to/#/#solarpunks:solarpunk.cloud https://matrix.to/#/#solarpunks:solarpunk.cloud <-- a random solarpunk community i lurk in... * https://matrix.to/#/#rlang:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#rlang:matrix.org <-- rooms about the R language * https://matrix.to/#/#buddies-of-budgie:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#buddies-of-budgie:matrix.org <-- rooms about the Budgie desktop environment etc etc. This ends up being way higher signal-to-noise than the room list (although there's always the risk that a space will get forgotten and neglected). Obviously this selection is biased a bit towards open source software, given that's what I'm into, but there are loads of other communities too. Nobody's yet started a big global space tree to help find them (probably because subspace performance needs some work), so the best bet for discovering them otherwise is probably simply through DDG or Google or whatever, looking for folks advertising them on their websites. Alternatively, you can head off into IRC or some other Matrix server (e.g. mozilla.org) from the room directory selector in your matrix client of choice. Many of my rooms are actually bridged into IRC, XMPP, Slack, Discord etc rather than entirely native Matrix.