🔗Matrix Live

Today's Matrix Live: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wuQKtCg-doo

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib (m.org) reports

The Foundation is at a crossroads. We need to raise an additional $610K to break-even, and more immediately to raise $100K to keep our bridges running.

As a neutral custodian for the specification and much more, the Foundation is key to the success of Matrix. It is time to step up for it.

Read the full post on our blog

🔗Dept of Governance ⚖️

Gwmngilfen reports

🔗Announcing the Governing Board Working Groups process

The Governing Board has news! If you have been itching to know how to get involved, we are now ready to get you ... on-Board! 🥁 😀

The Working Groups are the beating heart of the GB - they get the work done. So naturally people have been asking "how do we make one?" and "what is expected of a Working Group?"

🔗Creating a Working Group

The process is fairly simple:

• First, find some people who want to work on the problem - we would suggest at least 3, but the more you have the better, as it shows the level of interest in the issue.
• Second, write down a charter for your Group - this doesn't need to be huge to start with, just a few sentences about what you want to be responsible for and the outcomes you want to achieve.
• Finally, get a Board Member to sponsor you - this means finding a Board Member who agrees with the work you want to do, and will act as your link to the rest of the Board. The #governing-board-office:matrix.org is a great place to start conversations about WGs and look for sponsors. If in doubt, ping me there ( @gwmngilfen:matrix.org ) and I will help if I can.

Once you have that done, the Board Member will discuss it with the rest of the GB, we'll put it to a vote, and if it passes, you're in! (If it doesn't, we'll be sure to pass back what feedback we can about why not).

We would advise making noise about your proposals for Working Groups in the community to rally support and/or new members to get work done. TWIM is a good place for that 😛

🔗Expectations of a Working Group

Working Groups are well named - they work. Some will provide advice & documents on a topic, others may produce code or similar outputs (think, a Docs WG?) but all have work to do. So, obviously you'll want to get on with that.

We also expect that:

• Working Groups will have at least a Matrix room to discuss work in asynchronously

• they will have regular meetings ("regular" is different for different groups, but we would expect not less than monthly). These could be video or chat meetings.

• they take minutes of the meetings - the Board member can help here, but someone should take notes if they are not available.

  • These minutes get passed up to the rest of the Board so we can all be kept up to date at a high level

Clearly there are also some longer term things that we expect, like an expectation to work well with other Working Groups, to build consensus for decisions, etc. The GB can help if things need unblocking, of course.

🔗Documentation

We do need a place to record the Working Groups, what exists already, what they do, how you get involved. This will be added to the Matrix.org website SOON™️

🔗Initial Working Groups

All of this is theoretical until we start creating some groups, so .. let's hear your proposals (and I have a few to post in a moment)! Let's get some work done 💪

HarHarLinks announces

🔗New GB Working Groups - call for members

Working Groups are the core of how the Governing Board orchestrates its work. We have some new ones for you to consider (for the first time 🎉)

🔗Website WG (proposed)

The GB is considering a proposal for a Website WG! @HarHarLinks has written a charter regarding how to get work done for the main Matrix website, and has a good initial member list. While this is de-facto work already being done, we'd like to make it official - it's been proposed by @HarHarLinks so if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, register your interest with them!

🔗Events WG (proposed)

The GB is considering a proposal for a Events WG! This would cover CfPs, staffing booths, merch, event tooling (Pretix box, etc) and so on. While this is de-facto work already being done, we'd like to make it official - its fairly detailed charter been proposed by @HarHarLinks so if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, register your interest with them!

Gwmngilfen reports

🔗Ideas for New GB Working Groups

In addition to the in-flight proposals from HarHarLinks, I have a couple of ideas that need input to get started...

🔗Documentation WG (idea)

I think we could benefit from a Documentation Working Group in Matrix. The Spec pages are excellent, but much of the rest of our docs falls to the general website team, and we see a lot of copies of things like https://doc.matrix.tu-dresden.de/en which suggest to me that people aren't finding our docs sufficient?

So, without wanting to downplay the awesome work that has gone before, I think a dedicated Docs group could try to help specialise the various people working on the website, as well as provide a clear place to report issues with our materials. I'm willing to propose this, if you'd like to discuss it (or think it's an awful idea), please reach out to me ( @gwmngilfen:matrix.org )! in #governing-board-office:matrix.org

🔗New User Experience WG (idea)

Another group I'm thinking about is the New User WG - this would be focussed on how we get more people to Matrix, and improve those first few minutes/hours/days in our ecosystem - and how to gather their feedback effectively.

During the Matrix Unconference in Brussels, I hosted a session on this, and in just 45 mins we made 2 pages of ideas, so I think it's a rich area. Outputs would be advice/suggestions to other parts of the ecosystem for how we can make things better for our newer (and especially non-tech) users. I'm willing to propose this, if you'd like to discuss it (or think it's an awful idea), please reach out to me ( @gwmngilfen:matrix.org ) in #governing-board-office:matrix.org

Got ideas of other WGs? Talk to us in #governing-board-office:matrix.org! Onwards!

🔗Dept of Trust & Safety 🤗

Jim announces

An update on changes to the Matrix.org room directory: https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/curated-room-directories/

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element-iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 16+.

Doug says

• The next release of Element X iOS has an updated Rust SDK and as such, we will no longer support the Sliding Sync proxy - native Simplified Sliding Sync via your homeserver is the only sync option.
• We made huge progress on embedding the Element Call web app into the Element X (rather than loading it from the web) - we are able to participate in calls, and are now just adapting the code to fully support localisation when embedded.
• We have started implementing pills for rooms and events, just as in Element Web. The first step is to replace permalinks rendered in the timeline with these new pills.
• We had a nice little external contribution that fixes @mention suggestions to work from anywhere in your message and not just at the end. Thanks Vickoo 🙌

🔗Element X Android (website)

Android Matrix messenger application using the Matrix Rust SDK and Jetpack Compose.

Benoit reports

Working on several features currently:

• swipe between media: improvement when coming from the pinned Events list. Now merged!
• joining room by alias (can also be called address)
• user interactive verification. It's currently possible to verify your own sessions, it will be possible to verify other users
• fixing bugs! We have fixed a bunch of ANR issue, the first stats from the PlayStore are showing a drop in the ANR occurrences.
• new translations into Norwegian and Turkish. Thanks for all the contributors! As a reminder, anyone can help translating the mobile applications from here: https://localazy.com/p/element/ . Translations are shared between the iOS and Android application.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Next-gen crypto-included SDK for developing Clients, Bots and Appservices; written in Rust with bindings for Node, Swift and WASM

poljar reports

It's been a quieter week, but progress continues! The event cache is receiving its final polish, including performance improvements, as it nears prime time.

The authentication system is also seeing ongoing enhancements, thanks to Kévin Commaille.

Additionally, work has begun on the successor to MSC3061, aiming to allow newly joined users to access the history of encrypted rooms.

🔗Event Cache Updates

• Simplified the flow when resolving a gap (#4691)
• Streamlined back-pagination logic (#4689)
• Implemented lazy-loading for EventCache (#4632)
• Significantly improved reply replacement speed by introducing an index over replies (#4669)

🔗Authentication Improvements

• Removed support for deserializing the old UserSession format that contained the issuer_info field (#4679)
• Adopted the new GET /auth_metadata Matrix API endpoint (#4673)
• Removed the method for authorizing arbitrary scopes (#4664)

🔗Other Notable Changes

• Added a new constructor to InboundGroupSession for easier creation from an m.room_key event (#4688)
• Renamed snapshot files to reduce filename length, allowing Windows users to work on the codebase again (#4625)
• Enabled history visibility overrides when creating a room (#4682)
• Ensured that paginations and syncs don’t add events to the pinned events timeline (#4645)

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗synadm (website)

Command line admin tool for Synapse (Matrix homeserver)

jacksonchen666 (they/it) announces

We have released synadm v0.47! This release packs a few features:

• Connection errors to Synapse should be more reasonably small and easy to understand, thanks to #168.
• synadm user redact is now added, which redacts a user's messages. Supports local and remote users, but intricate details are up to Synapse (see "Redact all events of a user").
• You can filter for empty rooms on the server side in synadm room list with --empty or --not-empty. This is in addition to synadm room purge-empty
• More options were added to synadm user list to match what Synapse supports
• synadm media quarantine and unquarantine now have the -U/--mxc-uri argument to pass MXC URIs to

That's all in code. There are a few changes in documentation, including the theme, listed on the changelogs.

And of course, a changelog is also available on GitHub. Our room is at #synadm:peek-a-boo.at if you have any questions or other stuff.

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi says

thanks to Aine of etke.cc, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports FluffyChat Web as an additional Matrix client you can self-host.

To learn more, see our Setting up FluffyChat Web documentation page.

Slavi announces

Thanks to Zepmann, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports bridging to Bluesky via mautrix-bluesky.

To learn more, see our Setting up mautrix-bluesky documentation page.

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

🔗Matrixbird (website)

ahq announces

Matrixbird is an experimental "mail over matrix" idea I've been working on. It supports both traditional email and secure "matrix email" (local and federated) in a unified client.

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [don't DM] reports

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 10771 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3202 (29.7%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 21078 rooms.

Stats timeline is available on MatrixRooms.info/stats

How to add your server | How to remove your server

🔗Dept of Ping

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

🔗#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	codestorm.net	232.5
2	bi-vibes.com	296
3	shork.ch	338
4	matrix.sp-codes.de	483
5	computerlie.be	538.5
6	mtest.eyer.life	770.5
7	mgamers.com	815
8	ncat.cafe	821.5
9	felixilef.de	916.5
10	craftingcomrades.net	968

🔗That's all I know

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

To learn more about how to prepare an entry for TWIM check out the TWIM guide.

After a successful 2024 with a lot to be proud of, and a Matrix Conference that brought our community together to celebrate 10 years of Matrix, we step into 2025 with a light budget and a mighty team poised to make the most of it!

Our priorities remain to make Matrix a safer network, keep growing the ecosystem, make the most of our Governing Board, and drive a fruitful and friendly collaboration across all actors.

However, whether we will manage to get there is not fully a given.

🔗The Foundation is key to the success of Matrix

The Matrix.org Foundation has gone from depending entirely on Element, the company set up by the creators of Matrix, to having half of its budget covered by its 11 funding members, which is a great success on the road to financial independence! However half of the budget being covered means half of it isn’t. Or in other words: the Foundation is not yet sustainable, despite running on the strictest possible budget, and is burning through its (relatively small) reserves. And we are at the point where the end of the road is in sight.

Why does it matter?

The Foundation has a clear mission:

The Matrix.org Foundation exists to act as a neutral custodian for Matrix and to nurture it as efficiently as possible as a single unfragmented standard, for the greater benefit of the whole ecosystem, not benefiting or privileging any single player or subset of players.

Without the Foundation and its programs, the Matrix protocol itself faces existential threats:

• Without Trust & Safety efforts, bad actors and communities would proliferate on the network and make it unlivable for the rest.
• Without a canonical specification, the shared infrastructure and a Spec Core Team to maintain it, the protocol would become fragmented, losing its effective interoperability – increasing the costs on all downstream users.
• Without a neutral entity as the custodian of the specification, the ecosystem would first shatter and then consolidate around the biggest (likely for-profit) actor.
• Without advocacy, conferences, documentation and tutorials, Matrix would become a niche protocol used by a few enthusiasts for side projects, whilst big proprietary and siloed networks continue to hold the world’s communications.

🔗Implementing the vision

But there is light at the end of the tunnel! Concretely, the Foundation delivers most of its value by fostering a healthy, fair and fertile ecosystem around Matrix. It needs to strike the right balance between:

• Making Matrix accessible & visible.
  • For the general public it means maintaining an easy default onboarding server (Matrix.org).
  • For server administrators it means providing the right tooling to keep their users (and themselves!) safe.
  • For developers it means making it easy to develop products using Matrix, via documentation, tutorials, and in-person events.
• Making Matrix compelling to build on.
  • This means maintaining the Matrix Specification as a canonical, unencumbered, patent free and royalty free specification.
  • Being responsive and vendor-neutral when an organisation or individual contributes.
  • Promoting the good players within the ecosystem.
  • Ensuring the network grows and attracts more users.
• Making Matrix a product that benefits the greater good.
  • This means ensuring that the general public can easily build safe & easy to use communities on Matrix.
  • Ensuring that bad actors are proactively chased and discouraged to use Matrix.

🔗Doing less to do better

Matrix has been here for 10 years, and will hopefully be here for many more! But to continue to grow and thrive, it needs the Foundation to be around and healthy, which means carefully allocating its budget in order to continue to exist and fulfill its mission. This is why it needs to focus on critical programs and shut down some of its activities.

We view the following programs as critical to the Foundation’s mission:

• Maintaining the canonical, backwards compatible, stable Matrix Spec
• Developing protocol enhancements and Trust and Safety tooling, making the tools available to the ecosystem and moderating the servers under its control (typically Matrix.org) - see our recent blog post
• Running the Matrix.org homeserver as an initial home for newcomers
• Promoting the Matrix protocol via online content, conferences and meet-ups and other marketing strategies

We might fine tune our approach, but we can't cease any of those programs without severe consequences for the ecosystem.

Meanwhile, bridges have been at the heart of Matrix for a long time. Public bridges hosted by the Matrix.org Foundation have been a very good resource to show the power of interoperability, connect communities together, and onboard many people into their Matrix journey.

However, these bridges require regular maintenance as the bridged platforms evolve their APIs, and significant engineering and moderation support to run. Luckily, the Matrix ecosystem is now more mature than it was at the time we spun up those public Slack, XMPP and IRC bridge instances. There are now commercial players like Beeper providing a user-friendly offering for people who want to get all their conversations in a single app, or IndieHosters and Fairkom offering hosting for Matrix server and bridge instances (and much more).

So unless the Foundation manages to raise $100,000 of funding by the end of March 2025, we will have to focus our resources on the critical lines of work, and consequently we will have to shut down all the remaining bridges hosted by the Matrix.org Foundation. This includes bridges to Slack, XMPP, OFTC (IRC), and Snoonet (IRC). We will also mark the software behind those bridges as archived, as we don't have the resources to accept new contributions.

In practice, the Foundation needs an additional $610K in revenue to break-even, but this $100K would extend our runway 1 month while we work on landing grants and new members. To put this in context, we nearly doubled our revenue in 2024, reaching $561K, but it was also the first year in which we carried the full cost of our operations: $1.2M. To make ends meet, we liquidated $283K worth of cryptocurrency donations and ended the year with a $356K deficit. We are currently on target for $587K revenue in 2025, with a modest increase in expenses.

🔗Growing the ecosystem and the network

Choosing to shut the bridges down is a difficult decision to make, but will allow us to focus on the critical projects which will keep the ecosystem growing. The success of Matrix depends on how widely it is used by the general public and by organisations – preferably natively rather than via bridges.

The more people and organisations rely on Matrix, the more attractive it becomes for organisations to build products and services on top of it, the more funding the Foundation gets, and the more the Foundation can in turn reinvest into the ecosystem and run initiatives that benefit all stakeholders for the growth of the network.

Once the Foundation is cashflow positive, it will be able to accelerate and eventually get on with the multiple projects the team and Governing Board have in mind to make Matrix fun, exciting, reliable, safe, easy to use, and above all useful. And we hope to get there by the end of the year.

Most importantly, despite the Trust and Safety team being the Foundation’s biggest expense, as explained in our blog post, the team is still underresourced: they are understaffed and under a lot of pressure to deliver protocol improvements, better tooling for server admins, and ensure Matrix.org is a good citizen of the open federation. T&S will be the first area to see increased funding.

Separately, the Foundation wants to continue executing on its mission! Among others, better connect the doers in the ecosystem with the people and organisations who need their energy, share the successes and learnings from the community: the Matrix Conference was an incredible success and we want to see more of that.

We’ve also seen a clear change in how many users and organisations were adopting Matrix in the last few months: the world needs a decentralised end-to-end encrypted network to communicate more than ever, and it shows! We want to uplift the good players which are driving this growth.

The Foundation would also love to support more public policy efforts, which give an opportunity to shape the world by educating regulators, like for the Digital Markets Act; or stronger involvement in standardisation: we had no choice but reduce the effort spent on participating in MIMI, the IETF working group for instant messaging interoperability due to lack of resources.

There is so much more that we could do to make Matrix better and realise its full potential.

🔗So what now?

Right now, the Foundation urgently needs your financial help. For the sake of a safe network, our primary focus today, but also to be able to deliver on the reason we all want Matrix to succeed.

Because we believe that:

• People should have full control over their own communication.
• People should not be locked into centralised communication silos, but instead be free to pick who hosts their communication without limiting who they can reach.
• The ability to converse securely and privately is a basic human right.
• Communication should be available to everyone as a free and open, unencumbered, standard and global network.

In short:

If you are an organisation building on top of Matrix, you can help by becoming a member, which also gives you the opportunity to be eligible to participate in the Governing Board, and other perks.

If you are an organisation buying Matrix services or products, you can help by ensuring that your vendor is financially contributing back to the project or becoming a member yourself.

If you are an individual using Matrix, you can help by making a donation or becoming a member.

If you are a philanthropist or other funder, you can help by getting in touch with us at funding@matrix.org to discuss funding options.

It isn’t the first time we’ve rung the alarm bell, and it is no fun to beg for help. We are at a crossroads, where the vibrancy of the ecosystem and enthusiasm around Matrix is not reflected in the support the Foundation gets, and we are at risk of losing this common resource and all it offers.

But all in all, we are optimists – we wouldn’t have begun this journey if we weren’t – and we believe that there are people out there who realise that sovereign and secure communication is as high on the list of today’s essential technology – if not higher – as ensuring AI is safe, so let’s spread the word and let’s continue working on a safer and more sovereign world!

The Matrix.org Foundation and its growing community were once again present at the biggest OSS conference in Europe, and it's been a tremendous success! It was an opportunity for us to gather, share ideas and debate about ongoing topics, meet the broader FOSS community and present our work.

🔗Fringe Event

With 8000 visitors, FOSDEM is primarily a place to share your work with others and present the latest developments to those interested. But it's not necessarily the best venue for conversations within the community about topics that are still in-flight.

Because so many people are doing the trip to gather in a single city, it remains a good opportunity to gather your own community in a more intimate setting. This is precisely what Fringe Events happening before or after FOSDEM are about.

Workadventure, Nordeck and Famedly generously sponsored the 60 pizzas and €1500 worth of drinks at the event to keep us refreshed and fed! Our deepest gratitude to them and the Brussels Hackerspace HSBXL for giving us a place to gather.

The barcamp / unconference format we adopted allowed participants to mention what they were interested in talking or hearing about, with the help of Yan Minagawa who is a fantastic event facilitator!

Some people were comfortable getting their talk recorded, but some were not. You can find the full list of talk recordings in our Fringe Event YouTube playlist.

🔗Booth

The Matrix booth was located in the realtime communications corner, next to the XMPP and Linphone friends who have been lovely neighbors. Shout out to the XMPP gang in particular for setting up the Realtime Comms Lounge with bean bags that must have been a logistical nightmare to bring to FOSDEM!

The booth was very crowded, we got plenty of enthusiastic visitors telling us what they love about Matrix, with occasional minor support requests. People have been overwhelmingly supportive and curious about the future of Matrix.

We gave away 100 T-shirts in less than a day, asking people for a donation to the Foundation in exchange for the T-shirt. If you didn't already, you can make a donation today!

This year the booth has been opened up to the broader ecosystem and volunteers, and that was a significant success. Many thanks to the whole roster: Dominik, Milton, Sumner, td, Nico, Kim, weeman, Nadine, Timo, Anoa, Greg, Bram, Robin T, stereo, BenP, Will, Neil, Florian and everyone who showed up at the booth to support the crew!

A special thought to MatMaul, Robin and Hans v. Zijst who volunteered but fell sick and took the right decision not to spread germs. You were missed, but you did the right thing.

🔗Main Track Talk

Matthew had a Main Track Talk in Janson "The Road to Mainstream Matrix" in which he covers the history of Matrix, why things are what they are today, how the vendors' strategy support Matrix' mission, and what's coming next.

Today's Matrix Live: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk

Give it a watch if you want to learn more about the new State Resolution algorithm, MLS, Post Quantum Matrix, the future of the matrix-rust-sdk and what this means for the matrix-js-sdk, Trust & Safety.

🔗Matrix Devroom

Right after Matthew's talk we had the Matrix.org Foundation & Community Devroom. The full schedule is available on FOSDEM's website.

The talks covered a variety of topics ranging from technical issues to community ones. If you want to learn more about the state of Synapse, how federation works, using the rust sdk with WASM or even why the Ubuntu community is switching to Matrix, head to the schedule or to our YouTube Playlist with all the talks.

You can find all the videos

• Directly on FOSDEM's website
• Or on our YouTube Channel: Devroom Playlist, FOSDEM 2025 Playlist

Thanks to all speakers and Yan Minagawa again for MCing the devroom!

🔗Community & Ecosystem

If you're an individual and you can afford it, please support the Foundation or become a member so we can keep organizing these events and spread the word about your favorite sovereign, decentralized and E2EE communications protocol.

If you're an organization and you rely on Matrix one way or another, please become an organizational member to ensure the Foundation can keep maintaining an unencumbered specification, protect the Matrix brand and community, and contribute to the efficiency of the protocol.

Finally, if you missed us at FOSDEM, make sure to follow us on our socials to be informed of the next events we will organize or attend! Follow us either on the fediverse, on LinkedIn, on Bluesky or even on the most decentralized of all, by subscribing to our RSS feed.

🔗Matrix Live

Today's Matrix Live: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lkCKhP1jxdk

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Quentin Gliech reports

This week we released Matrix Authentication Service 0.13.0!

This is a big release, as we haven't done one since September.

It is fixing a lot of small issues, but here are a few of the big highlights:

• The email verification has been completely reworked, meaning that accounts don't require a valid email address on them anymore! They are still required for open password registrations, but MAS won't nag you anymore to add an email to your account.
• No more spurious logouts when consuming a refresh token! That was a recurring annoyance for people using Element X in poor network conditions.
• It now reliably provisions users to Synapse! Sometimes, MAS would just stop provisioning new sessions if, for some reason, it lost connections to Postgres. This is a thing of the past, as now MAS has a reliable job queue.
• New translations! MAS is now available in Czech, Dutch, Estonian, English, French, German, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Swedish, and Ukrainian. If you'd like to help MAS get translated to your language, head out to our Localazy project
• Better support for non-OIDC upstream OAuth 2.0 providers. Support for 'social login' options like Google or Sign-in with Apple went from 'good' to 'great', with many UI improvements.

Upgrading should be as easy as grabbing the latest Docker image or the pre-built binaries, restarting the service and voilà!

Feel free to stop by #matrix-auth:matrix.org to join in on the discussion and if you encounter a bug make sure to report it here.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR announces

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC4263: Preventing MXID enumeration via key queries
• MSC4262: Sliding Sync Extension: Profile Updates
• MSC4261: "Do not encrypt for device" flag

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

There's not a ton of updates this week: the team is focusing on reviewing Matrix 2.0 MSCs to move them towards release. The team is also thinking about when to release the spec this calendar quarter, and may aim for late February or early March.

Watch this space for updates :)

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element

~creme reports

envs has put together a small tool for Synapse to block temporary email addresses during user registration and stop invite spam.

You can find the Repo and more details at: https://github.com/envs-net/synapse_blocklist_module

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗matrix-tf-aws

A Fully Automated Terraform Deployment for Matrix on AWS

rsb_tbg reports

Hey everyone, check out my newly public Terraform module on GitHub! It fully automates the deployment of a Synapse homeserver along with 0-4 currently-supported Mautrix bridges (Discord, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp) on AWS—no manual setup required.

🔗🔧 What’s Included?

The module provisions the following resources:

✅ VPC & Networking – Private/public subnets, NAT, security groups
✅ ECS Cluster – Runs Synapse and selected Mautrix bridges
✅ EFS & Access Points – Persistent storage for Synapse
✅ Aurora PostgreSQL – Scalable, managed database
✅ S3 Buckets – Storage for configs and logs
✅ TLS Certificate – Secure HTTPS for your ALB
✅ Dynamic Secrets – No hardcoded tokens/passwords; all are auto-generated
✅ And other resources to connect everything together

🔗🚀 Getting Started

All you need before launching:

🔹 A Route 53 domain for your Matrix homeserver name
🔹 If using the Telegram bridge, a Telegram API ID & hash

Once you initialize the module with Terraform, you’ll have the option to customize configurations and registration files to fit your needs. You can even modify them post-deployment and simply run terraform apply to apply the changes.

🔗 Check it out here: https://github.com/matrix-tf/matrix-tf-aws

It’s super easy to use—whether you’re setting up your first Matrix server or already a pro. Hope it helps! 🚀

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗FOSDEM

Thib (m.org) says

If you want to see what's been happening behind the scenes to organize Matrix' presence at FOSDEM this year, I blogged about my perspective as an attendee, booth organizer, and devroom organizer.

A proper wrap-up post from the Foundation is coming, once we'll have all the recordings published!

🔗Matrix Retreat 2025: Workation in Thailand

HarHarLinks announces

Greetings from Thailand! You may have heard previously about a Matrix-related technology-retreat in Thailand this winter. Well, it’s happening as we speak! Some of us have made our way, directly following FOSDEM, to the beautiful island of Koh Phangan in the gulf of Thailand. We are staying in Tongsala working our day jobs across two coworking spaces. The seven of us will be joined by two more tomorrow, with most of us staying until the 17th of March where we will be attending FOSSASIA, operating a Matrix Stand, giving some talks [1] [2] [3], and handing out stickers which we brought despite limited baggage allowance (priorities!). If you have, or know anyone who has, contacts to Matrix enthusiasts in Asia - or if you want to come join us, please get in touch via #workation-nation-matrix-thailand-2025:datanauten.de! Outside of work, we are exploring Matrix-related tech-projects including a Matrix RTC call recorder, a message search, and the rust-matrix-web. We look forward to updating you on our progress!

🔗Dept of Guides 🧭

Matthew reports

Anil, head of the Energy and Environment Research Group at the University of Cambridge just published a fun guide for how to use hookshot for webhooks in Matrix: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/enter-the-matrix-hookshot

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [don't DM] announces

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 10712 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3177 (29.7%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 22325 rooms.

Stats timeline is available on MatrixRooms.info/stats

How to add your server | How to remove your server

🔗Dept of Ping

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

🔗#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	girlboss.ceo	226
2	codestorm.net	257
3	nexy7574.uk	281.5
4	play.matrix.toys	308
5	maunium.net	325
6	nerdhouse.io	353
7	ncat.cafe	373.5
8	puppygock.gay	386
9	13-48-182-158.cprapid.com	393
10	synapse.rntpts.de	492

🔗That's all I know

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

To learn more about how to prepare an entry for TWIM check out the TWIM guide.

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib (m.org) announces

FOSDEM was a huge success for the Matrix.org Foundation and community this year again!

• 🍕60 pizzas and an uncountable amount of drinks at the Fringe event
• 👕 100 t-shirts sold at the booth on the first day!!
• 🧑‍🏫 A completely packed devroom
• 🤝 Many great conversations at the booth

Shout out to Workadventure, Nordeck and Famedly who sponsored the Fringe Event and kept us refreshed and fed. And a huge thanks to everybody who showed up at the booth either to staff it or to say a kind word, bring constructive criticism, or have a casual conversation.

A more detailed wrap up post will be published this week. In the meantime, I’m leaving FOSDEM with a sense that we are doing the right thing, going in the right direction, and that people notice. I'm looking forward to meeting you all again, as well as those who couldn't make it to FOSDEM!

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR says

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC4260: Reporting users (Client-Server API)
• MSC4259: Bulk Profile Sync API for Federation
• MSC4258: Federated User Directory
• MSC4257: Profiles Arent Auth: Move profile contents to a separate event
• MSC4256: RFC 9420 MLS mode Matrix

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC4239: Room version 11 as the default room version
• MSC4133: Extending User Profile API with Key:Value Pairs

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

Many of the SCT members are at FOSDEM this weekend to talk to folks about Matrix, so won't be doing too much MSC review, but we've still got the next-gen auth MSCs at the highest priority for review once everyone is back!

We're also looking to cut a release of the spec soon, possibly in February, with as many Matrix 2.0 features as possible - if there's an MSC you think should be in this release, let us know in the #sct-office:matrix.org room on Matrix :)

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element

Devon Dmytro says

This week we released Synapse v1.123.0.

This release adds the following new features:

• Implement MSC4133 for custom profile fields. Contributed by @clokep. (#17488)
• Add a query parameter type to the Room State Admin API that filters the state event. (#18035)
• Support the new /auth_metadata endpoint defined in MSC2965 (OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server Metadata discovery). (#18093)

... and a whole lot more!

Thank you to all our contributors for helping to make Synapse the best it can be. As always, feel free to stop by #synapse:matrix.org to join in on the discussion and if you encounter a bug make sure to report it here.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element-iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 16+.

Mauro Romito says

• Knocking, alongside security and privacy settings work is almost completed, recently a testing session was done, where we determined that the features work well, and require only some small polishing before release
• Media gallery also received a lot of improvements and updates and is being closer to get completed
• Today we release our first RC with calendar versioning, which will soon become the new standard for marking releases
• Some small design improvements were made for the DM Details view
• Alongside some improvements for the macOS version

🔗Element X Android (website)

Android Matrix messenger application using the Matrix Rust SDK and Jetpack Compose.

benoit reports

• Knocking, alongside security and privacy settings work is almost completed, recently a testing session was done, where we determined that the features work well, and require only some small polishing before release (yes, I have shamefully copied what Mauro said about EXI 🙈)
• It will be possible to swipe between media when open from the timeline in the next release. Previously it was only possible to scipe when the media was opened from the gallery.
• Next release will be versioned using calendar versioning, so that it will be easier to know the release date and also how old is a particular release just by knowing its version. Also iOS and Android will share the same version!

🔗Tammy (website)

Multiplatform messengers build on top of Trixnity Messenger

Benedict reports

Tammy just got a new release! This update brings speed boosts, fresh features, and tons of fixes to make your messaging experience smoother than ever.

✨ What’s New?

• Typing indicators in the room list – see who’s responding in real time!
• A sleek new image details view for a better media experience.
• Send attachments with Enter for quicker sharing on Desktop.
• Under-the-hood improvements to make Tammy even faster and more reliable.

⚠️ Heads-up! We had to change the database, so you’ll need to log in again. Should we ever have more Tammy users and this happens again, we will do an automatic migration. It's just not worth it at the moment.

Checkout the new Tammy version at https://tammy.connect2x.de and give us feedback in https://matrix.to/#/#tammy:imbitbu.de 🚀

🔗Dept of VoIP 🤙

🔗Element call on Room Kit (Cisco) devices

Emma [it/its] reports

You may or may not have seen my demo at FOSDEM last saturday. In short, I've been working with Robert on integrating Element Call into the closed garden ecosystem of Cisco's meeting devices. This gives businesses and government agencies a migration flow to Matrix, without having to spend a large amount of money on new hardware - by meeting them where they are at.

In the current state of things, we're able to join a call, but dont yet have any interface for interacting with the call once it's running, but it's a great start!

If you're interested, join us in #roomos-matrixrtc:rory.gay, though we do hang out in #webrtc:matrix.org quite regularly aswell!

Today's Matrix Live: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HvdKdjZZLyU

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for developing Clients, Bots, Appservices and Servers

Benedict reports

A new version of Trixnity is out! The release brings massive performance enhancements to Trixnity, significantly improving sync processing efficiency. Processing times have been boosted by up to 5x, while RAM usage has been slashed by the same factor. These improvements were achieved by optimizing how the cache interacts with the local database—bypassing the cache entirely when no listeners are active. On top of this, the cache now supports rollbacks, which helps maintain consistency between the cache and the database, even in edge cases.

A noteworthy change in this release is the removal of support for the Realm database. As Realm-Kotlin is no longer actively maintained or compatible with the latest Kotlin versions, we’ve decided to discontinue its support. However, there’s good news! The Androidx Room database implementation has been fixed and is now a solid alternative for those seeking a reliable, cross-platform database solution.

In addition to these major updates, the release includes several smaller but impactful improvements and bug fixes. For example, refresh token support has been added. Be sure to check out the full changelog for all the details.

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗Draupnir (website)

A moderation bot for open Matrix communities

Gnuxie 💜🐝 announces

We have released Draupnir v2.1.0 with some bug fixes in the wake of the v2.0.2 release:

• Some moderators noticed that on upgrading from v1.87.0 to v2.0.* some rooms would appear unprotected. It later turned out that the functionality for the config option protectAllJoinedRooms was missing from this release. We've now fixed this and also updated the !draupnir rooms command to show which rooms Draupnir is and isn't protecting. Your rooms should be automatically protected again on upgrading to v2.1.0.

• The config option commands.allowNoPrefix has been fixed again. Some commands would interact badly with the setting in the v2.0.* releases, this has now been fixed.

• Functionality has been added in conjunction with protectAllJoinedRooms to automatically unprotect rooms that it has been kicked from and notify the management room.

A couple other issues have been fixed around Draupnir startup time, and manually entering safe mode, so checkout the CHANGELOG if you are interested in those. As always you can find us in #draupnir:matrix.org. Thank you to everyone who has been promptly reporting bugs and making these fixes possible <3

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Matrix User Meetup Berlin

saces says

Next Matrix user meetup 4.2.2025, 8 pm @ c-base

Meet other matrix users, chat about Matrix, the rest, and everything else, discuss your Matrix ideas, sign each other in persona, and maybe spice the evening with a good mate or beer.

Every first Wednesday of the month in the c-base at 8pm ('til the next pandemic).

Matrix room: #mumb:c-base.org

🔗Dept of Guides 🧭

🔗Matrix Spec for Dash & Zeal: Looking for help

Christian Paul (jaller94) announces

Hi everyone, for the past 2.5 years I've submitted new versions of the Matrix Spec to Dash and Zeal. Dash is a documentation browser which works offline. Zeal is an open source browser supporting the same docset format.

The Matrix Spec is built with Hugo and in v1.13 the Hugo config changed enough to break my build script. Currently, I'm unable to release new docsets as these require relative URLs in all HTML files.

Is anyone using this docset? Can someone help to maintain this or figure out the changes needed for v1.13?

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/583#issuecomment-2615430745

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [don't DM] announces

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 10438 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3094 (29.6%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 22196 rooms.

Stats timeline is available on MatrixRooms.info/stats

How to add your server | How to remove your server

🔗Dept of Ping

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

🔗#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	codestorm.net	252.5
2	bi-vibes.com	262.5
3	nerdhouse.io	353
4	littlevortex.net	402
5	tomfos.tr	517.5
6	mtest.eyer.life	521
7	flauschwelle.de	545
8	lewd.social	546
9	rom4nik.pl	598

🔗That's all I know

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

To learn more about how to prepare an entry for TWIM check out the TWIM guide.

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew reports

The 2024 Matrix Holiday Special: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-special-2024/

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗SchildiChat (website)

SchildiChat is a fork of Element for Android and Desktop, that used to focus on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list, but now also provides some additional tweaks and community-driven features that may not be on the roadmap for the upstream clients.

SpiritCroc says

Over the holidays, I added two new (old) features to SchildiChat Next (our Element X Android fork) that I've been missing since switching to the new codebase.

First, inline images and custom emotes are now rendered again, so you don't miss out when users on other clients or certain bridges send these. If you prefer not having images rendered in text message, you can also disable them via a setting, in order to render the fallback text instead - rather than not rendering anything at all as done previously.

Second, I added back the functionality to fetch and render previews for links found in text messages, so you have a better idea what to expect before clicking them. For now, this is an experimental setting, so remember to enable it first if you want to try it out once it lands in the next release.

🔗Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

This week, Kai Uwe has worked on improving the notifications showing the progress of a file upload or download.

James has continued to bring thread support to neochat, this time by making it possible to reply to an existing thread.

Carl has created new UI for various right-click menus that shows up as a drawer when using NeoChat on a mobile device.

🔗Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

🎶 Vive le vent ! Vive le vent ! Vive le vent d’hiver ! 🌲 And vive Fractal 10.beta! While everyone is resting for the holidays, we thought you could use a new release. It focuses on improvements and bug fixes, including:

• Videos were often not playing after loading in the room history, this was fixed, and we also show properly when an error occurred.
• Computing the size of media messages was slightly wrong, which meant that sometimes a grey line would appear below them. We rebooted the code and that problem is gone!
• Our CSS file was a bit too big for our taste, so we decided to make use of SASS and split it.
• We were downloading too many different sizes for avatar images, which would fill the media cache needlessly. We now only download a couple of sizes. This has the extra benefit of fixing blurry or missing thumbnails in notifications.

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!

If you have a little bit of time on your hands, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. Anyone can make Fractal better!

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗libQuotient (website)

A Qt5 library to write cross-platform clients for Matrix

kitsune announces

🔗libQuotient 0.9.2

While working on the next Quaternion beta (sorry to those waiting - the holiday present is not coming this year), the number of improvements in libQuotient reached a point where it's worth making a new maintenance release - so here it is. Aside from, also long awaited, initial threads support in the library (thanks to NeoChat's nvrwhere) it's fixes and cleanup over the place. The notes and the Git tag are at the usual place. Happy New Year everyone!

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Matrix Salon Podcast: Fabian about Alertrix (German episode)

Christian Paul (jaller94) announces

Meet Fabian, who develops Alertrix. This customised chat is going to help firefighters coordinate their emergency responses. It's currently funded by the German Prototype Fund and Fabian gave a presentation at the Matrix Conference where we also recorded this episode. You can find the community room at https://matrix.to/#/#community:alertrix.net.

• RSS feed: https://anchor.fm/s/cdb34188/podcast/rss
• Episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7GI3ek9chZr3VYhMCC0TIs?si=JUoNg1XjRbCB3SFeLdgmdg
• Mastodon post: https://mastodontech.de/@jaller94/113726065155521630

This marks the 20th episode of the podcast and the end of the current backlog. 🥳 Message me your suggestions for which community members you'd like to see featured in 2025.

🔗38C3

HarHarLinks announces

Dear TWIM, I'm writing you from the train back home after having visited 38C3 in Hamburg, the 38th edition of Chaos Communication Congress by the German Chaos Computer Club. Like yesteryear, #community-events:matrix.org organised the matrix community assembly there; you can imagine it as a kind of crossover of the Matrix #fosdem-2025-barcamp:matrix.org booth and a workshop area. We offered some "office hours" for people but many also dropped by around the clock with their questions, to get some of the official Matrix.org hoodies or T-shirts we could offer (thanks Thib for making this possible!), or simply to celebrate and socialise. We had a small assembly project driven by Nico who brought the materials to build an LED cube which once set up visitors could control through Matrix chat commands. As a small game, we hid small plastic rabbits around the whole congress center, which attendees could find and bring back to us to receive our wonderful assembly badge designed by Nadine. We also offered 2 workshops, one being another instance of Tune Your Chat, a project to collect all the neat small tips and tricks to tweak your Matrix experience, and for the other we were joined for a discussion by the creators of the "Standardised Messenger Audit – Frontend" catalog from the office of the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, published earlier this year. And of course we also took another group photo! If you are interested in joining us next time or for one of the many events we visit in the meantime, you can join #chaosevents:matrix.org specifically for appearances at CCC events or #community-events:matrix.org for even more.

Happy new year and see you at #fosdem-2025-barcamp:matrix.org!

🔗Dept of Ping

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

🔗#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	codestorm.net	229.5
2	ncat.cafe	301
3	littlevortex.net	444.5
4	girlboss.ceo	452.5
5	beeper.com	463
6	matrix.org	493
7	melthecat.dev	532
8	transgender.ing	538.5
9	eyer.life	597.5
10	tomfos.tr	637

🔗That's all I know

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

To learn more about how to prepare an entry for TWIM check out the TWIM guide.

🔗Matrix Live

Today's Matrix Live: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GQATaQpuUUQ

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew reports

Last week US Senators Wyden (D) and Schmitt (R) wrote an open letter to the US Department of Defense encouraging them to adopt Matrix more widely, rather than wasting money on unencrypted, centralised or closed systems. The letter also reveals a whole bunch of info at the end about the US Navy's Matrix deployments. This feels like a huge step change forwards - not only is the FBI encouraging citizens to use end-to-end-encryption in the wake of realisations that the public telephone network is insecure, but US Senate is pushing for Matrix adoption (without any lobbying from us, I hasten to add). You can read more about it at the Element blog (Element provides the deployments for the US Navy).

P.S. it really is bleakly amusing that we've been constantly pointing out that legislation like EU's ChatControl and the UK's Online Safety Act are catastrophically flawed because the surveillance backdoors they propose will be exploited and abused by attackers. And here we are, with the lawful intercept backdoors in the US public phone system being compromised by attackers, causing the FBI to recommend non-backdoored E2EE instead. We live in a very strange timeline.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} reports

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC4239: Room version 11 as the default room version
• MSC4238: Pinned events read marker

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC4225: Specification of an order in which one-time-keys should be issued
• MSC4147: Including device keys with Olm-encrypted events

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3006: Bot Interactions!

We haven't had one of these in a while, so I figured, why not!

This MSC talks about "bot interactions", which are additional ways that users can interact with bots other than text - namely client-rendered buttons. Ironically, the rise of LLMs in the years since this MSC was published have brought human-computer text interaction to the forefront, but buttons still have their place!

A bot can define their interactions as a state event and send it into the room. Then clients that see that state event can populate user menus with the actions that bots support! Clicking on a button will send a message into the room that a bot would parse as per usual (so really this is just a shortcut to typing commands out manually). The benefit is users don't need to remember commands (and don't need to !help all the time - cough cough mjolnir), and can quickly issue a potentially lengthy command without typing.

This seems like a cool feature to me. If any bot or client devs feel the same, consider reaching out on the MSC and offering your feedback!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element

Till reports

This week we released Synapse 1.121.0 (and 1.121.1).

1.121.1 is just a patch release to fix an issue building release docker images in our CI. As such, there is only a docker image for 1.121.1, not 1.121.0. 1.121.1 is otherwise functionally identical to 1.121.0.

1.121.0 introduces experimental support for a number of MSCs (MSC4190: Device management for application services, MSC4076: Let E2EE clients calculate app badge counts themselves (disable_badge_count)), as well as stabilises support for locking accounts. It also has bug fixes and limited initial support for returning information about suspended users via the Admin API.

Grab it while it's hot! 🔥

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Extera

OfficialDakari reports

Recently, Extera got saved messages feature. To save a message, open it's menu and click Save. This feature can be changed at any time and is unstable. Also, now, users of extera.xyz can get an email on our domain. DM @mail:extera.xyz and say !m help.

🔗SchildiChat (website)

SchildiChat is a fork of Element for Android and Desktop, that used to focus on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list, but now also provides some additional tweaks and community-driven features that may not be on the roadmap for the upstream clients.

SpiritCroc says

While releases of SchildiChat Next (our fork of Element X for Android) have always been available on my own F-Droid repository, we finally made it into the main F-Droid repository too! These F-Droid releases are reproducible builds checked against my repo, so you know if it lands on the F-Droid repository that it matches what I built before. Compared to reproducible builds from Element X, F-Droid even builds our forks of the Matrix Rust SDK and the Rich Text Editor from source rather than using prebuilts to include as dependencies.

On the feature side, one of the main points that made me switch back to the old SchildiChat app was the ability to manage rooms in spaces. Accordingly, I added a long-press action to the room list that allows you to select a room's parent spaces to add to or remove from. At the time of writing this change is still only included in beta builds behind a feature flag, but will probably arrive in a release build in the next few days.

🔗Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element-iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 16+.

Mauro Romito says

• We are doing great progress with message knocking and media gallery
• We are also experimenting with the event cache, which will make the app even faster
• Some design improvements are being made in the room details screen and the join room screen

🔗Element X Android (website)

Android Matrix messenger application using the Matrix Rust SDK and Jetpack Compose.

benoit reports

• Pretty similar to what's happening on Element X iOS:
• We are doing progress with room knocking
• We are making progress on the media gallery and are integrating an audio player to play voice message and message with audio attachment
• We are also experimenting with the event cache, which will make the app even faster. There is still work to do SDK side to make it usable so it's behind a disabled feature flag for now.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for developing Clients, Bots, Appservices and Servers

Benedict says

The latest release of Trixnity introduces support for decrypted temporary files across all platforms! 🎉 This feature is crucial for handling media like video playback and PDF rendering that require secure but temporary access to decrypted content. Trixnity ensures to providing seamless and secure handling of such files, while maintaining compatibility with the old API.

For more information about this update, or to check out Trixnity, visit the project repository: https://gitlab.com/trixnity/trixnity.

We welcome feedback and discussions in the #trixnity:imbitbu.de room.

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

🔗Synapse Admin Updates

Aine [don't DM] says

A while back, we at etke.cc announced our Synapse-Admin fork. This week, we’re excited to introduce more new features and quality-of-life improvements!

Media Tab for Rooms

Previously, media management was limited to individual users (i.e., media uploaded by a specific user). Now, you can manage media at the room level!

⚠️ While the new media tab offers options to view and remove media per room, it’s worth noting that the Admin API endpoint for room media is more limited compared to the user media endpoint. Despite this, we hope this feature will assist with Matrix server moderation.

Account Suspension (MSC3823)

Account suspension is here! This feature enables you to place users in a "read-only account" state as an alternative to locking accounts.

💡 Note: Not all Admin API endpoints fully support the suspension flag yet, but support is expected to improve in future updates.

E.164-Based Matrix IDs (MSC4009)

Support for E.164-based Matrix IDs is finally here!

Matrix IDs in the format +123456:example.com (with a + sign) have been valid since Matrix v1.8. However, Synapse Admin previously lacked support for these IDs - oops! This has now been addressed.

🔗Spread the Word!

We at etke.cc are incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished with our Synapse Admin fork. Over the last three months, we’ve released an impressive 34 versions, each packed with updates to make Synapse Admin the go-to admin dashboard for Synapse.

While we haven’t yet covered 100% of the API endpoints, and there’s still work to be done, the overall experience has improved dramatically.

If you’ve appreciated the progress we’ve made, we’d love your help in spreading the word about github.com/etkecc/synapse-admin! Share it with homeserver owners and administrators you know, and let them discover the features we’ve worked so hard to deliver.

Explore the source code or try the admin.etke.cc (CDN version). Don’t forget to join the discussion in #synapse-admin:etke.cc

Kim was flabbergasted by Aine's productivity and shared

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗I Don't Have Spotify Maubot

HarHarLinks says

Do people sometimes share links to music with you on Matrix? They do for me. Often, people use Spotify as their music streaming service, but I don't have Spotify.

Therefore about month ago, I shared a maubot plugin on TWIM, which uses the REST API of sjdonado's I don't have Spotify webapp, which itself is also selfhostable open source software.

As it turns out, people sometimes also share links to other streaming services not just with me but also with you!

So after a bit more tinkering, I have released v1.1.0 of my plugin https://github.com/HarHarLinks/maubot-idonthavespotify. It can now also be configured to check for any combination of spotify, apple, deezer, soundcloud, tidal, and youtube, which are all supported by idonthavespotify to different extent. Your mileage may vary depending on what you search, but that's up to the upstream project, since the plugin just connects whatever it does to matrix.

Let me know of any feedback you have at #maubot-idonthavespotify:matrix.org!

Here is what it can look like in action:

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Matrix Stammtisch Dresden

@mcnesium:matrix.org announces

After being founded live during the recording of a recent "Reboot Politics" podcast show, the newly spawned regional community meetup "Matrix Stammtisch Dresden" will have their second get-together next Wednesday the 18th December at 19:00 in the bistro/restaurant "Neue Sachlichkeit" at Kraftwerk Mitte, Dresden, DE – all creatures welcome!

🔗FOSDEM

Thib (m.org) says

The Matrix.org Foundation & Community Devroom @ FOSDEM has a schedule!

The DevRoom will start at 13:00 and end at 17:00 CET, on Sunday, February 2. We received more talks than we could accept, compressed some longer talks into shorter ones to accept as many high quality talks as possible, but we had to make some tough choices!

We will hold a Fringe Event before FOSDEM and invite everyone who didn't make it to the schedule to give it another try there! We already have 2 generous sponsors to keep the community refreshed and fed, and we're open to more sponsorship opportunities. Reach out if you want to talk about how you can help us secure recordings for Fringe event speakers who opt-in, or more.

As for the devroom itself, the schedule is the following:

• 13:00 Matrix State of the Union
• 13:30 Getting the Rust SDK running on WebAssembly
• 14:00 Demystifying Federation in Matrix
• 14:30 State of Synapse
• 15:00 Building the World's First Server-to-Server Matrix Federation Bridge
• 15:30 How Ubuntu Entered the Matrix
• 16:00 Robrix: a pure multi-platform Matrix Client and more
• 16:30 MatrixRTC: Building Real-Time Applications on Matrix

🔗Matrix Salon Podcast: Tom Lant

Christian Paul (jaller94) says

Back in August, I had the honour of interviewing Tom about Matrix, Element, open source work and the community.

Here are links to the episode with Tom, RSS feed of the Matrix Salon Podcast and the Mastodon post about Tom's episode.

You may also look forward to two more German episodes which are planned to be released before the end of the year (aka. on the upcoming two Fridays). 🥁

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Kegan reports

TARDIS has had a facelift! Matthew spent a weekend devising a custom layout algorithm and renderer which has now replaced d3-dag.

This is not only clearer for complex DAGs but also faster than the layout algorithm we previously used. We're currently using TARDIS to experiment with state resolution improvements.

🔗Christian's NeoBoard Advent Calendar

Christian Paul (jaller94) reports

More backgrounds, more games, more templates for your retrospectives. My NeoBoard Advent Calendar offers free whiteboard templates every day.

• NeoBoard Advent Calendar
• NeoBoard Adventskalender (German / Deutsch)

Check out some highlights from the past days:

• Door 7: Pairs game (generator)
• Door 11: Memorise the scene (Christmas)
• Door 13: Ocean background

Do you also wonder what will be behind tomorrow's door? 😏

NeoBoard is a whiteboard widget for Element, allowing you and your team to collaborate during meetings, presentations and group projects. You can export and import whiteboard files to reuse them as templates or migrate between rooms.

🔗Dept of Built on Matrix 🏗️

🔗Acter (website)

Your social organizing app build on matrix: A secure space to gather, engage and grow your community!

ben says

We have been working on deep-linking support in Acter for a while now. As per our usual process, progrress on that happens iteratively over the weekly releases. In the last few releases, we have added support for matrix.to and matrix:-URI-schemes on Mobile as well as started experimenting with our own acter:-scheme to support linking to specific items like Pins and Task-Lists. The current release already featuers support for that via a new QR-code you can scan from within the app to directly jump to specific items. As part of that effort, you can also link calendar-events and pins in boosts and you can easily do that from the newly designed share-screen from the object itself. It's glorious.

On the other side, work on the Chat NG - the total rewrite of the chat UI infrastructure - is also progressing very well with support for bubbles and grouping of messages already in, and further message types being rendered properly now. It is still quite a bit from production ready but the improvement in architecture can already be felt very nicely in terms of UX speed and reactive-ness when you switch it on in your Labs.

Last but not least, we have started with "spring cleaning"-sessions where larger parts of the team get together and walk through the app and discuss minor bugs and annoyances in a synchronised sessions and then try to fix them there and then - so we can speed up the process on these - or write them up as proper bugs if we can't fix them yet. A first sessions of this kind was done recently and fixed a bunch of minor annoyances. As usual the Github release page's Changelog has all the details.

Additionally, we'd like to mention that we are looking for a DevOps Person helping us run our Matrix Infrastructure to extend the Acter Team. If that sounds interesting to you, please apply :) .

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [don't DM] reports

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 10386 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3148 (30.3%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 20778 rooms.

Stats timeline is available on MatrixRooms.info/stats

How to add your server | How to remove your server

🔗Dept of Ping

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

🔗#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	codestorm.net	242
2	nerdhouse.io	303.5
3	wi11.co.uk	307
4	girlboss.ceo	311.5
5	envs.net	407.5
6	catvibers.me	437
7	ncat.cafe	491
8	larsl.net	683
9	melthecat.dev	1161
10	xiny.li	1200

🔗That's all I know

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

To learn more about how to prepare an entry for TWIM check out the TWIM guide.

The Matrix.org Foundation has been made aware that an international investigative operation took down a service called MATRIX which was used by a cybercriminal network, which has no relationship with the Matrix.org Foundation or the Matrix protocol itself.

The takedown site has a Matrix-the-movie branding, which is a probable source of confusion. The app showcased doesn’t look like any of the Matrix clients we’re aware of.

In a statement to the Matrix.org Foundation, Europol confirmed that the MATRIX cybercriminal network and the Matrix protocol are entirely unrelated. Europol states:

The Matrix protocol (matrix.org) is by no means connected to the Matrix secured communication service that was targeted in OTF Continental.

A statement from the Dutch police confirms that this is unrelated: "Matrix is ​​also the name of a company and communications protocol of the same name, which has nothing to do with the crypto communications service Matrix."

The Matrix.org Foundation and community are very happy to announce that this year, they will be in full force at FOSDEM, with a community event right before the conference, a booth to welcome everyone during the conference, and a dev room to explore topics in depth!

🔗Jan 31 - Matrix Community Event

We organize an event before FOSDEM for the community to meet and talk about Matrix without fear of missing out on all the great talks at FOSDEM. The event will take place on January 31 at 1 pm CET at HSBXL and last the whole afternoon. Please note that HSBXL moved since last year.

It's an unconference/barcamp: come and bring your ideas, share them at the beginning of the event, and small groups will form spontaneously.

Please note that the Matrix Community Event has the same Health & Safety Policy as the Matrix Conference. Extremely briefly: You will need to wear a mask while indoors, except while eating and drinking.

As last year, attending the event is free, and we're looking for sponsors to show their commitment to the ecosystem by refreshing our community with drinks and feeding it with pizzas! Of course, you will be credited in our event wrap-up post on matrix.org. We're open to additional ideas to get you the recognition you deserve.

Join the FOSDEM Barcamp room if you're interested in the event, and reach out to events-wg@foundation.matrix.org to sponsor!

• 🕐️ Friday 31, 13:00 - 21:00 CET (local time)
• 🏢 HSBXL

🔗Feb 1&2 - Booth

This year again, we are happy to have a booth for the duration of the event. This is our opportunity to talk with the broader open-source community, share our latest updates, and listen to people's feedback. We can also help the broader community spread the word with cool stickers and T-shirts!

We're looking for volunteers to run the booth with us. This includes talking to the community, sharing project news, and selling merch. Don't worry if it's your first time: We have a booth handbook ready for volunteers and want to limit the time commitment to 2 hours per day.

Reach out to events-wg@foundation.matrix.org if you're interested in staffing the booth with us! We will work out together which slot works best for you. People who sign up before December 15 are entitled to a special edition T-shirt!

• 🕐️ Saturday 1 to Sunday 2, 09:00 - 18:00 CET (local time)
• 🏢 Desk K.2.B4

🔗Feb 2 - Main Track Talk

Matthew's "The Road to Mainstream Matrix" talk got accepted on the main track. It will happen right before the Devroom, fortunately in the same building!

• 🕐️ Sunday 2, 12:00 - 12:50 CET (local time)
• 🏢 Room K.1.105 (La Fontaine)

🔗Feb 2 - DevRoom

Some topics are too complex to be discussed at a booth. Fortunately, we have a DevRoom on Sunday 2 afternoon to talk about topics in greater depth. Be it a technical talk about state resolution or a success story about how Matrix got deployed in your organization, we want to hear about it all!

The Call for Proposals is now closed.

• 🕐️ Sunday 2, 13:00 - 17:00 CET (local time)
• 🏢 Room K.4.201
• 🗒️ The schedule is here

The whole team is looking forward to meeting you at FOSDEM!

🔗Matrix Live

Today's Matrix Live: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HmoVN1x4kO8

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Matrix at FOSDEM 2025

Thib (m.org) says

We're happy to announce that this year again we will have a DevRoom at FOSDEM!

We have half a day to talk about all the great projects we have been working on as a community. Our devroom should be on Sunday afternoon, even if it's not completely set in stone for now.

You can submit a talk following one of the two formats:

• 20 min talk + 10 min Q&A, for topics that can be covered briefly
• 50 min talk + 10 min Q&A, for more complex subjects which need more focus

Be quick, the Call for Proposals ends on December 1st and we can't extend it. FOSDEM organizers will close all DevRooms CfPs, and we can't bypass it!

Find all the dates & details on our Call for Proposals

🔗Governing Board Meeting

Nico says

Next Friday (November 15th) the governing board will have its first official meeting! Topics include the governing structure (how do we decide stuff), forming committees (how do we work on topics and who participates where), selecting a chair and vice chair for the board (to steer meetings) and define how we want to communicate. Some of those topics are still in flux and will be defined further throughout this week. If you are interested, your representatives might be able to tell you more and answer your questions!

We are looking forward to having our first official meeting as the board and hopefully we will have productive results to share with you all soon!

🔗Ecosystem Governing Board Members Office Hours

HarHarLinks reports

Earlier this year, the members of the Matrix Foundation voted for members from their own constituency to represent them at the Governing Board. Nico, Bram and myself were elected to represent the Ecosystem.

While we are usually approachable and responsive in all kinds of ways, there are some topics or situations better to discuss synchronously. We therefore starting today Wednesday 6th November start with weekly office hours every Wednesday at 17:00 German time (CET = UTC+1 during winter). 🐸 We will be responsive to chat in the Ecosystem Public Forum room and will also share a link to a (video) call there.

Please find more detail in the announcement post over here.

Update: Our first office hours went great! We covered quite a lot of topics both between us representatives and the community members who joined - so much so that we overran our time slot by 50% 😅 There is going to be one more office hour next week before the first official governing board meeting, so join the office hour (or write us async) if there is any topic you want us to bring up with the governing board. We would also like to emphasise that we are offering this way of communication for you, the community, so please give us feedback over at the Ecosystem Public Forum in regard of the choice of time slot, etc.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} [back Nov 5] reports

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC4225: Specification of an order in which one-time-keys should be issued
• MSC4224: CBOR Serialization

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC2781: Remove the reply fallbacks from the specification 🎉

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

There was a flurry of PRs to the spec website itself this week. In addition to the myriad of fixes and clarifications, the underlying technology got an update!

https://spec.matrix.org is a static site generated with Hugo, and we use the docsy Hugo theme. Matrix.org has their own fork, with minor changes to self-host all third-party JS/CSS assets instead of downloading them from CDNs.

This fork had gotten a bit outdated however, mostly because updating it and re-downloading the CDN assets was a bit of a pain. This week Kévin Commaille both automated this task and subsequently updated our docsy fork to the latest and greatest. Thank you!

We'd also like to call out @Johennes, @bnjbvr, @AllMightLegend, @uhoreg and @dkasak for their contributions to the spec this week. Thanks all!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element

Devon Dmytro says

There was no new release this week, but we have been working hard on getting a few specific things ready to go for the release. You can expect the v1.119.0rc1 release to be out early next week.

Alongside the usual allotment of new features and bug fixes, we have been working hard on:

• Lifting the minimum supported Python version to 3.9
• Updating Synapse test infrastructure in order to pull in the latest version of Twisted (24.10.0)

Thank you to all our contributors for helping to make Synapse the best it can be. As always, feel free to stop by #synapse:matrix.org to join in on the discussion and if you encounter a bug make sure to report it here.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗Parsee

LDA announces

Oyé, oyé, nouvelle alpha sur le plus petit pont ! I just released the Parsee v0.2 alpha today. I've not being able to work as much on it as before, but I did get quite some bugsquashing features, and plain dumb experiments like getting it to build and start on an (emulated) DEC Alphaserver with some minor changes to Cytoplasm, more commands to make admins' lives easier, and reworked Matrix->XMPP formatting in order to make it more pleasant.

I've also dabbled in some MbedTLS support, but it is still unstable(and slow), done slightly more work with avatars, and fixed some known bugs that would make handling Parsee annoying.

As of next(v0.3 will probably be out by 2025), I am mostly working on optional Janet extension support, to make Parsee even more powerful and extensible.

We're still available over at Matrix and XMPP(xmpp:marsee@conference.monocles.eu) if you want to try it out.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

Benedict says

We released a new version of Tammy including some UI fixes for older Android devices. For those who are hearing about Tammy for the first time: Tammy is a new multiplatform Matrix messenger powered by Trixnity Messenger.

🔗Quaternion (website)

A Qt5-based IM client for Matrix

kitsune says

This is the first 0.0.97 pre-release primarily focused on migration to libQuotient 0.9. Not much to talk about aside from this. The release notes and some prebuit binaries can be found at the usual place.

🔗Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element-iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 16+.

Mauro Romito says

• A new RC for EX iOS will soon be released 1.9.5
• In the new RC EX iOS will be capable of also receiving verifications requests through the SAS protocol (while before was only able to send them)
• We also added a toggle to enable media optimisation that will process media files, to save up data and memory space by compressing them. The option is on by default but can be turned off
• The work for implementing sending, receiving and accepting/declining knocks on rooms is progressing
• Alongside knocking we are also implementing management of room aliases

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

🔗Synapse Admin Updates

Aine [don't DM] reports

A while back, we at etke.cc announced our Synapse-Admin fork, and this week we're excited to share more new features, QoL changes and bug fixes!

We'll begin by discussing technical and under-the-hood updates before moving on to UI features.

SYNAPSE_ADMIN_VERSION env variable

Starting from the least interesting - if you want to build Synapse Admin yourself in an environment where git is unavailable, you can now use SYNAPSE_ADMIN_VERSION env var to set version, instead of relying on git tags.

Logout that actually does the job

Earlier, the logout did send a request to the Matrix logout API endpoint, but didn't clean up things like local storage that is used as a state/session store. Well, now it does 🤷

Proper restrictBaseUrl despite its type

Previously, you could limit Synapse Admin instance to work with specific homeserver(-s) using the restrictBaseUrl config var that accepted both string (like "restrictBaseUrl": "https://example.com") and slice (like "restrictBaseUrl": ["https://example.com", "https://example.net"]). Such an approach has proven to be problematic in multiple cases, but today the last inconvenience with it has been solved - now single-item slices will be treated the same way as the string does (and yes, they are treated differently in the UI), using the only value of the slice.

Configuration in /.well-known/matrix/client

We found out that people tend to use Synapse Admin instances hosted outside their actual servers, and even use a single Synapse Admin instance to manage multiple servers. Unfortunately, such a setup means you can't rely on the config.json file that comes with Synapse Admin instance because it won't contain server-specific configuration… So, here is the solution - just add configuration to your /.well-known/matrix/client file under cc.etke.synapse-admin key, here is an example of how to mark mautrix-telegram puppets as appservice-managed users:

{
  "cc.etke.synapse-admin": {
    "asManagedUsers": ["^@telegram_[a-zA-Z0-9]+:example\\.com$"]
  }
}

works for any config option

Generate random passwords with ease

when creating or updating users. With this change, a new button has been added to the user's create/update form where you can generate a random password in 1 click.

Experimental Features and Rate Limits controls are here!

Now you can enable specific Experimental Features per user, and adjust user's rate limit overrides on the user's page.

Source code, admin.etke.cc (CDN version), say hi in the #synapse-admin:etke.cc

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [don't DM] announces

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 10391 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3184 (30.6%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 22281 rooms.

Stats timeline is available on MatrixRooms.info/stats

How to add your server | How to remove your server

🔗That's all I know

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

To learn more about how to prepare an entry for TWIM check out the TWIM guide.

Hello everyone,

The Matrix.org Foundation is excited to host a Matrix.org Foundation and Community devroom in person next year again at FOSDEM! Half a day of talks, demos and workshops around Matrix itself and projects built on top of Matrix.

We encourage people working on the Matrix protocol or building on it in an open source project to submit a proposal! Note that companies are welcome to talk about the Matrix details of their open source projects, but marketing talks are not welcome.

🔗Key dates

• Conference dates: 1st and 2nd February, 2025
• Devroom date: 2nd February, 2025
• Submission deadline: Sunday, 1st December, 2024
• Announcement of selected talks: Friday, 15th December, 2024

You must be available in person in Brussels to present your talk.

🔗Talk Details

The talks can follow one of the two formats:

• 20 min talk + 10 min Q&A, for topics that can be covered briefly
• 50 min talk + 10 min Q&A, for more complex subjects which need more focus

We strongly encourage you to prepare a demo when it makes sense, so people can actually see what your work looks like in practice.

Of course, the proposal must respect the FOSDEM terms as well:

The conference language is English. All content must relate to Free and Open Source Software. By participating in the event you agree to the publication of your recordings, slides and other content provided under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY).

🔗Code of Conduct

All speakers and attendees agree that all of the presentations and discussions in our devroom are held under the guidelines set in the FOSDEM Code of Conduct. We expect attendees, speakers, and volunteers to follow the CoC at all times.

If you have any questions about the CoC or wish to have one of the devroom organisers review your presentation slides or any other content for CoC compliance, please email us and we will do our best to assist you.

🔗Submitting a Proposal

Proposals must be submitted on FOSDEM's conference management system: https://pretalx.fosdem.org/. Heads up that last year FOSDEM shelved the good old Pentabarf in favour of Pretalx. All submissions must go through Pretalx: https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2025/cfp. When submitting a proposal, make sure to select the Matrix.org Foundation & Community track.

We expect to receive more requests than we have slots available. The devroom organisers will be reviewing the proposals and accepting them based on the potential positive impact the project has on Matrix, as defined in the Mission section of https://matrix.org/foundation.

If a project proposal has been turned down, it doesn't mean we don't believe it has good potential. Maintainers are invited to join the #twim:matrix.org Matrix room to give it some visibility.

🔗Matrix Live

Today's Matrix Live: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5q3njjtlaVU

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} says

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC4220: Local call rejection (m.call.reject_locally)
• MSC4218: Improving performance of profile changes

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2409: Proposal to send EDUs to appservices (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

Steady progress across a range of MSCs this week. I'm particularly excited to see MSC2409 to reach FCP given its widespread use. Perhaps MSC4203: Sending to-device events to appservices is next?

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} says

This week we released Synapse v1.118.0rc1. The major thing to be aware of is that Python 3.8 is now end-of-life. As per our Deprecation Policy for Platform Dependencies, Synapse will be dropping support for Python 3.8 in the next release; Synapse 1.119.0.

Otherwise, Synapse 1.118.0 is the first release to support Python 3.13! PostgreSQL 17 is also supported as of this release.

Other highlights in this release include an experimental implementation of MSC4210: Remove legacy mentions, and the ability to set one's display name upon registering via JWT. In addition, there's the usual round of bugfixes and internal changes. See the release changelog for the full details!

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Extera

OfficialDakari says

Some improvements for Extera are made. Here is what I've changed:

• Reaction styles. I've completely redesigned reactions in messages.
• Perfect browser back button handler. Primarily it's made for mobile. Now you can close modal dialogs with back button, and it works.
• Custom CSS themes! Now you can add Custom CSS Themes to Extera.

Also, here are upcoming things:

• Custom JS plugins. You will be able to inject JavaScript into Extera, like themes.
• Custom AI bots with persona (on extera.xyz homeserver). I will announce in Extera's chat when AI platform for Matrix will be out. Users will be able to create AI bots with GPT-4o + custom system prompt and more.

Best regards, Extera team developer

🔗Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element-iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 16+.

Doug reports

• Element X iOS 1.9.3 is in TestFlight and will be available next week. It adds support for rendering media captions in the timeline, showing verification badges when looking at a room member’s details and fixes a bug with media upload where we sometimes included an incorrect image size.
• Work on support for Knocking continues and we’re currently updating the Reaction Picker to include a Frequently Used section so you don’t have to hunt for your favourite emoji all the time.
• Version 1.9.3 is the last version of Element X iOS that will support iOS 16. The next version we will release will require iOS 17 or 18 as we prepare the way to fix some longstanding bugs that should be addressed by using newer SwiftUI components.

🔗Dept of Widgets 🧩

🔗Matrix Widget Toolkit

Kim Brose (Nordeck) reports

It's been a bit over a month since we updated our Matrix Widget Toolkit to the newest MUI, React, Redux, and Matrix versions just before the Matrix Conference, so we are happy to share the newest update with you today.

While the list isn't long, it is quite significant. We migrated away from Facebook's Create React App (CRA) framework in favour of the new and actively maintained Vite framework (mind the French pronunciation 😉). This allows us to update some dependencies with known issues that were kept back behind CRA. Along with that, we also swapped out our testing framework from Jest to the Vite-native Vitest. If you're consuming the toolkit, you might already be using our @matrix-widget-toolkit/testing package, which conveniently exposes a helper to mock the widget API. These breaking changes caused us to release a new major version of the testing package.

With that, up-to-date package versions of the toolkit components are now:

• @matrix-widget-toolkit/testing@3.0.1, based on vitest
• @matrix-widget-toolkit/api@3.4.2, @matrix-widget-toolkit/mui@2.0.6, @matrix-widget-toolkit/react@2.0.3, all now tested using vitest
• @matrix-widget-toolkit/widget-server@1.0.6, with a slightly newer nginx as its base

All the packages can be found in the releases section of our repo.

You can see a demo of what the toolkit can do using our demo widget.

If you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to us using our public room #nordeck:matrix.org.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for developing Clients, Bots, Appservices and Servers

Benedict says

A new release of Trixnity is out. It supports files larger than 2.1GB now, has some API improvements and there are some new helpers regarding file handling. Additionally a few bugs has been fixed. Matrix 1.12 support is also implemented, but will be part of the next release.

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Next-gen crypto-included SDK for developing Clients, Bots and Appservices; written in Rust with bindings for Node, Swift and WASM

bnjbvr says

Hello everyone! Here's for the first Matrix Rust SDK update for a long time, for updates which happened this week, as generated by our new release process helper! More news about a new Matrix SDK release coming Soon™.

🔗SDK

• Support for preallocated media content URI has been added in Media::create_content_uri(), and uploading the content for such a preallocated URI is possible with Media::upload_preallocated().
• Uploaded medias can now be cached in multiple attachment-related methods like Room::send_attachment.
• When SendAttachment::store_in_cache() is set, the thumbnail is also cached with a sensible default media request (not animated, scaled, same dimensions as the uploaded thumbnail).
• RoomListService::subscribe_to_rooms no longer has a settings argument.
• Room list service: Add m.room.topic and m.room.pinned_events in all_rooms.
• Room list service: Add the m.call.member state event in the required state.
• (internal) Event cache: Dropping a LinkedChunk UpdatesSubscriber release the reader token for the GC.

🔗Crypto

• We now persist the error that caused an event to fail to send. The error QueueWedgeError contains info that client can use to try to resolve the problem when the error is not automatically retry-able. Some breaking changes occurred in the FFI layer for timeline::EventSendState, SendingFailed now directly contains the wedge reason enum; use it in place of the removed variant of EventSendState.
• Add more reason codes to UtdCause.
• matrix_sdk_crypto::type::events::UtdCause::Membership has been renamed to ...::SentBeforeWeJoined.
• Don't warn about verified users when subscribing to identity updates.

🔗Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart.

🔗Matrix Dart SDK (website)

td says

meep quick major version release twim announcement -

🔗v0.34.0

• Powerlevel updates are no longer local echo'd, we wait for the update to come down sync.
• Fix a ton of edgecases parsing message bodies
• We also added v1.12 endpoints support.
• Auto-generated objects now also have proper equality and hashcode overrides so you can just compare 2 objects now.

That's it for now, see you soon bye byee

🔗libQuotient (website)

A Qt5 library to write cross-platform clients for Matrix

kitsune announces

🔗libQuotient 0.9.0

After a few release candidates, the new stable branch and the new version of libQuotient are officially released! Matrix 1.12 under the hood, cross-signing support (finally in stable), lots of refactoring and cleanup after transition to Qt6-only code and a flurry of smaller features and fixes. The release notes are where you would expect them.

🔗Elm SDK (website)

A more consistent alternative to the matrix-js-sdk, written in Elm.

Bram says

🔗Elm SDK beta 3.6.0

Despite being a minor update, the number of new features is major! The beta 3.6.0 Elm SDK update adds the following features:

• Added Matrix.Room.getState to explore a room's state
• Added Matrix.leave to leave rooms
• Added Matrix.Invite module
• Added Matrix.Event.redact and Matrix.Room.redact to redact events
• Added Matrix.Room.name, Matrix.Room.topic & Matrix.Room.pinned_events to quickly access the most commonly used state events

Additionally, using backwards compatibility, the Elm SDK now supports ALL official spec versions! (Including historical ones.) This means that you can safely update the Elm SDK without needing to wait for your homeserver to update. You can now view the supported versions document for an in-depth table.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi reports

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports installing and configuring Matrix Authentication Service (MAS).

Huge thanks to Quentin Gliech from the Element / Matrix Authentication Service team for answering our numerous questions about MAS.

Our Setting up Matrix Authentication Service documentation page has more details about this new service, what you might expect from the switch and how you can migrate your existing (Synapse) homeserver setup to it.

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

🔗Synapse-Admin

Aine [don't DM] reports

A while back, we at etke.cc announced our Synapse-Admin fork, and we're excited to share more QoL changes and a new feature

• Separate login button for access token auth - that doesn't depend on the login mechanisms advertised by homeservers
• Better footer implementation - no more content overlapping, no more unnecessary scrollbar
• Fixed room state events display, including displaying of external users - the content (and sender) are visible now
• User profile in the top menu - now you will see your avatar and displayname instead of a placeholder in the top menu
• Enable visual customization - adjust the display of various tables to your liking, e.g. hide unnecessary columns in the user list
• Custom menu items - evolution of the previously implemented Contact support button, now you can set your own custom menu items using menu key in config.json

Apart from that, the #synapse-admin:etke.cc room has been created - do not hesitate to say hi!

Source code, admin.etke.cc (CDN version)

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗Draupnir (website)

Gnuxie 💜🐝 reports

Draupnir, a moderation bot, has released v2.0.0-beta.8. This release includes improvements to safe mode, we now show which persistent configuration properties have caused Draupnir to enter safe mode. We also have made a few changes to Draupnir's logging to give system admins feedback on how Draupnir is configured. For all the details, check the release notes.

I've also written a blog update about what I have been working on over the last month or so and I also talk through an update to the Draupnir roadmap.

https://marewolf.me/posts/draupnir/2406.html

Please note that in this release the minimum node.js version required to run Draupnir has been updated from Node 18 to Node 20. If you are using Debian, please follow our documentation for using Debian and node source here, which was kindly contributed by Sky.

If you have any questions or need help with anything related to Draupnir, please find us in our support room at #draupnir:matrix.org.

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [don't DM] reports

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 10274 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3145 (30.6%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 22149 rooms.

Stats timeline is available on MatrixRooms.info/stats

How to add your server | How to remove your server

🔗Dept of Ping

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

🔗#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	conduwu.it	151
2	transgender.ing	185
3	envs.net	192.5
4	tomfos.tr	197
5	awawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawaw.gay	203
6	pissing.dev	208
7	constellatory.net	233.5
8	girlboss.ceo	251.5
9	nerdhouse.io	256
10	synapse.rntpts.de	292.5

🔗That's all I know

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element

Devon Dmytro announces

This week we released v1.116.0rc2. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Guests can now use the new media endpoints to download media, as described by MSC4189
• Add initial implementation of delayed events as proposed by MSC4140
• Add implementation of restricting who can overwrite a state event as proposed by MSC3757
• Add an asynchronous Admin API endpoint to redact all of a user's events, and an endpoint to check on the status of that redaction task

...and a whole lot more. Check out the release notes for the full set of changes! Thank you to all our contributors for helping to make Synapse the best it can be. As always, feel free to stop by #synapse:matrix.org to join in on the discussion and if you encounter a bug make sure to report it here.

Dept of Clients 📱

Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille says

Back to school, and Fractal is back too! The leaves are starting to cover the floor in our part of the globe, but you don’t have to shake a tree to get our goodness packed into Fractal 9.beta:

• We switched to the glycin library (the same one used by GNOME Image Viewer) to load images, allowing us to fix several issues, like supporting more animated formats and SVGs and respecting EXIF orientation.
• The annoying bug where some rooms would stay as unread even after opening them is now a distant memory.
• The media cache uses its own database that you can delete if you want to free some space on your system. It will also soon be able to clean up unused media files to prevent it from growing indefinitely.
• Sometimes the day separators would show up with the wrong date, not anymore!
• We migrated to the new GTK 4.16 and libadwaita 1.6 APIs, including CSS variables, AdwButtonRow and AdwSpinner.

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!

If you have a little bit of time on your hands, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. Anyone can make Fractal better!

Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element-iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 16+.

Doug reports

• This week brings the Release Candidate for v1.8.4 to TestFlight which amongst other things enables Message Pinning - long press on a message and tap Pin to try it out yourself!
• v1.8.4 is also our first build to use Xcode 16 which should fix some iOS 18-related bugs and we’ve been fixing any smaller bugs that we’ve encountered as the week has progressed.
• Lots of time has been spent on our tests (some of which fell apart a little after the Xcode 16 upgrade), and hopefully we’ll soon be back to enjoying a stable suite of tests.
• Finally we’re tackling the big AGPL migration and are updating Element iOS Classic, Compound iOS and the Rich Text Editor to be inline with all of our Element licenses.

Element X Android (website)

Android Matrix messenger application using the Matrix Rust SDK and Jetpack Compose.

ganfra reports

• This week we've released version 0.6.4 to Google Play Open Testing. Message Pinning is now stable - long press on a message and tap Pin to try it out yourself!
• We have spend most of our time fixing bugs and improving code, including tests.
• Finally we’re tackling the AGPL migration on various projects to be inline with all of our Element licenses.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

vodozemac-bindings for c++

tusooa🏔️ reports

vodozemac-bindings for c++ now works for builds without exceptions. We have also written a doc: https://iron.lily-is.land/w/from-libolm-to-vodozemac/ . Again, any help is welcome.

It now supports building on Windows. See Merge Request 10 for more details.

Dept of Services 🚀

etke.cc (website)

Your matrix server on your conditions

Aine [don't DM] says

A while back, we at etke.cc announced our Synapse-Admin fork, and this week we're excited to share two major updates:

• Upgrade to React Admin v5
• Restrictions on modifying specific users

The React Admin upgrade enhances the Synapse-Admin UI experience, especially if you found the previous dark theme too high-contrast.

The second update is a quality-of-life improvement you've always wanted but may not have known you needed. 🙂

Previously, we introduced a feature to prevent users from accidentally deleting their sole homeserver administrator account.

Now, we're addressing another common issue: inadvertently altering system user accounts managed by appservices (such as bridges and bots). Editing, deleting, locking, or changing the passwords of these appservice-managed accounts can cause serious problems. To prevent this, we've added a new feature that blocks these types of modifications to such accounts, while still allowing other risk-free changes (changing display names and avatars). By defining a list of MXID regex patterns in the new asManagedUsers configuration setting, you can protect these accounts from accidental changes.

If you're using matrix-docker-ansible-deploy, the playbook automatically handles this configuration setting to ensure appservice-managed user accounts remain safe.

Source code

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix User Meetup Berlin

saces announces

As we have all not seen each other for a long time, I can proudly announce:

Next Matrix user meetup 2.10.2024, 8 pm @ c-base

Meet other matrix users, chat about Matrix, the rest, and everything else, discuss your Matrix ideas, sign each other in persona, and maybe spice the evening with a good mate or beer.

Every first Wednesday of the month in the c-base at 8pm ('til the next pandemic).

Matrix room: #mumb:c-base.org

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

AlexGames: simple Lua/Rust WebAssembly powered board games running in a Matrix widget

axby announces

I put together a collection of simple board games written in Lua and Rust, built them to WebAssembly, and focused on a standalone web application that relies on a websocket server for multiplayer. I tried swapping out the websocket server for the Matrix widget API, and it works! This means that all you need is the static HTML/JS/WASM hosted on a server, and you can add a widget to a small Matrix room like this:

/addwidget https://alexbarry.net/dev/games/matrix-widget/?matrix_widget_id=$matrix_widget_id&matrix_user_id=$matrix_user_id

And you can play games with a friend, using Element web or desktop. No other server side handling required!

Here's a demo video, two Element web sessions playing chess together, using the Matrix room for game state changes: https://youtu.be/a_uR0tPeR18?t=15

Source code is available in a branch on GitHub here, and feel free to join #alexgames:matrix.org if you're interested in more, or want to find someone to try a game with. To try the standalone web version, you can visit https://alexbarry.github.io/AlexGames/ . I'd be happy to update and polish the Matrix widget version if there's interest. I also set up my project so that you could write your own games in Lua and upload them to the existing web/matrix version, without having to build the project. See my very simple API (e.g. draw_rectangle, handle_user_clicked) and the API demo example game.

Matrix in the News 📰

HarHarLinks reports

While the team is still working hard on the video recordings from The Matrix Conference (watch this space!), we got some news coverage:

• 🇬🇧 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/24/meet-the-scrappy-tech-company-taking-on-slack
• 🇬🇧 https://www.heise.de/en/news/Matrix-conference-On-current-developments-the-state-of-open-source-and-more-9951334.html / 🇩🇪 https://www.heise.de/news/Matrix-Konferenz-Zu-aktuellen-Entwicklungen-dem-Stand-von-Open-Source-und-mehr-9939673.html
• 🇬🇧 https://www.fastcompany.com/91194828/nato-is-testing-out-this-decentralized-messenger-for-communications-between-member-nations

Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [don't DM] announces

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 9994 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3079 (30.8%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 21297 rooms.

Stats timeline is available on MatrixRooms.info/stats

How to add your server | How to remove your server

Dept of Ping

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	conduwu.it	211
2	tomfos.tr	213
3	fost.re	224
4	awawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawaw.gay	228.5
5	puppygock.gay	250
6	girlboss.ceo	275.5
7	itzzen.net	277
8	bark.arf.wf	315.5
9	ipv6.girlcock.systems	352
10	speakup.nl	375.5

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	tomfos.tr	66.5
2	fost.re	81.5
3	conduwu.it	83
4	transgender.ing	98.5
5	girlboss.ceo	131
6	nerdhouse.io	175.5
7	bark.arf.wf	176.5
8	constellatory.net	182.5
9	littlevortex.net	195.5
10	ipv6.girlcock.systems	208.5

That's all I know

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!