One thing that’s wormed its way onto the to do list that haunts the back of my mind, is I’d like to see if I could abuse the matrix or XMPP protocols to get some of the nicer discord-like features lime invite links

I think I've seen invite links being proposed for Matrix, but I don't remember the status of that idea, and can't find a relevant MSC at the moment.

This bot looks like it could be helpful for now:

https://github.com/dfuchss/matrix-joinlink

https://www2.matrix.org/blog/2024/05/24/this-week-in-matrix-2024-05-24/#matrixjoinlink