This Week in Matrix

🔗Matrix Live S10E22 — LiveKit, Matrix Conf, Elections, and Kubernetes on a Raspi

🔗Dept of elections 🗳️

The Governing Board of the Matrix Foundation is an advisory board that is made up of elected representatives from all across the Matrix ecosystem.

Robin Riley (m.org) reports

It's time for our annual Governing Board elections! This year we're electing representatives from Individual Members, Associate Members, Gold Members, and Silver Members. Nominations open at midnight UTC as we move from Friday to Saturday, May 3rd. Learn more in our election announcement blog post.

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Robin Riley (m.org) says

Please join me in welcoming Filament and infra.run as the newest Silver Members of the Foundation! The financial support we receive from members like them helps us steward the Matrix protocol as an unfragmented standard, facilitate open governance, and advance the state of Trust & Safety for the benefit of the entire ecosystem.

We're grateful for the outpouring of support from across the ecosystem. We still need a few larger organisations to step up. Do you rely on Matrix? Join us as a funding member.

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🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Robin Riley (m.org) reports

We are delighted announce that LiveKit is the newest Silver Member of the Foundation! The LiveKit Project is an open source project that does everything Matrix needs for native group calls, and the company behind the project is donating their LiveKit Cloud services to help us provide that functionality to users on the Matrix.org homeserver. We're grateful for their support and look forward to announcing 2-3 more new Silver Members in the coming weeks 🚀

🔗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:

• [WIP] MSC4284: Policy Servers

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC3861: Next-generation auth for Matrix, based on OAuth 2.0/OIDC
• MSC2967: API scopes
• MSC2966: Usage of OAuth 2.0 Dynamic Client Registration in Matrix
• MSC2964: Usage of OAuth 2.0 authorization code grant and refresh token grant

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3391: API to delete account data

🔗Spec Updates

The update above is actually from the last 21 days to make up for the lack of spec updates recently (I've been travelling!).

In my opinion, the most interesting part to talk about above is MSC4284: Policy Servers. If you haven't already, read the matrix.org blog post on Introducing Policy Servers. In short, they're servers on the internet where you can send events to and have them be checked for spam/illegal imagery/etc. before allowing the event to be sent down to your users. You can think of them like a SpamChecker Synapse module, but homeserver implementation agnostic.

This is a pretty interesting idea, and one can host their own policy server to keep the network decentralised. If you're interested in weighing in on the topic, please do so on the MSC!

Note: the idea of a "policy server" is not new. This MSC attempts to bring the concept in to the Matrix ecosystem specifically for Trust & Safety purposes. But the APIs could be used to enforce any policy (security, enterprise use cases, etc.).

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🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew reports

We've recently seen serious spam attacks against Matrix, so we're introducing Policy Servers to recommend whether servers should accept or discard events before they get synced to clients. If your server participates in public rooms, see https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers to keep it safe.

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🔗Matrix Live

Migrating millions of matrixers to MAS

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Quentin Gliech says

🔗Matrix.org now uses MAS!

On Monday this week, the backend team at Element successfully migrated Matrix.org to use matrix-authentication-service (MAS).
This happened right after the core MSCs for next-generation auth got merged into the Matrix spec!

After a full week of running MAS on Matrix.org, we're happy to call the migration a great success! 🕺

This means Matrix.org users now have a new home to manage their accounts: account.matrix.org

You can read more about the migration on the Matrix.org blog:
👉 Matrix.org is now running MAS!
...and what it means for Element users on the Element blog:
👉 MAS migration unleashes Element X on Matrix.org

We're still ironing out a few bugs, so if you’ve experienced any issues related to the migration, let us know in #matrix-auth:matrix.org!

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

🔗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 announces

• We are working on implementing a feature to report a room or an invite the contains offensive content
• Also improved our Notification Service Extension to consume less memory
• Updated our app icon
• Some small accessibility improvements were added
• Fixed a crash that might happen when backgrounding the app

🔗🧭: Dept of Guides 🧭

Wi11 wrote:

With MAS (Matrix Authentication Service) becoming a prominent part of the Matrix ecosystem, and the removal of the fallback Element provided MatrixRTC backend (Element Call), I wrote a couple of blog articles to document how I installed both with Docker Compose and configured them with Synapse.

Whilst the official docs are very good, perhaps this may be useful as a happy path guide for those who want to use docker compose, MAS, and the Element Call backend, together with Synapse.

➡️ Deploying an Element Call backend (MatrixRTC) with Docker Compose, and configured with Synapse

➡️ Deploying MAS with Docker Compose, migrating users, and configured with Synapse

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Robin Riley (m.org) reports

The Matrix.org Foundation is proud to join likeminded organisations in endorsing the United Nations Open Source Principles, a set of guidelines to promote collaboration and adoption of open source around the globe.

Robin Riley (m.org) says

Please join me in welcoming the newest Silver Member of the Matrix.org Foundation: SSH Communications Security! We're grateful to SSH for stepping up to support the Foundation's mission and stewardship of the Matrix protocol.

Does your organization rely on Matrix? We're working hard to close our budget gap, and we need your help. Join the Foundation to ensure Matrix has robust stewardship well into the future.

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Trust and Safety Research and Documentation Working Group

Nico announces

As part of my work for the Trust and Safety Committee I am trying to establish a working group to help with researching and documenting the state of T&S across the ecosystem. If that sounds interesting to you, please poke your head into #governing-board-office:matrix.org and tell us!

To summarize what the group is about, the current proposal looks like this:

To make appropriate decisions, the T&S committee needs to know about the state of T&S in the wider ecosystem. It needs to have insights into current challenges, solutions and initiatives. On the other hand the community can also benefit from having some of that information documented. The T&S R&D WG is a tool to help with that. It includes a wider set of individuals and reports their research results to the T&S committee. In some cases the WG is also encouraged to enhance the documentation on matrix.org to help communities and users on Matrix moderate their rooms. The T&S committee might sometimes ask the WG for help in researching specific topics in more detail to guide their decisions.

🔗Pledge of Confidentiality

The WG will sometimes have to deal or come in contact with confidential data, possibly because of legal reasons, possibly because of active abuse concerns. While the WG is encouraged to be open, there will be times where the WG should keep certain information confidential and only share it with specific individuals. As the WG we pledge to keep information confidential when necessary while still being transparent and open where possible. The T&S committee may decide to remove members from the WG if it sees a member abusing their access to information or not acting in a trustworthy manner by sharing information the group agreed to keep confidential. This should be a last resort, needs a majority in the T&S committee and should be preceded by appropriate communication and warnings.

🔗Typical Tasks

• Gather information about current moderation challenges on Matrix and keep structured notes about them
• Maintain an overview of available moderation tools and their capabilities
• Create and maintain moderation guides on matrix.org in collaboration with the Website or Documentation WGs
• Reach out to moderators to gather feedback or offer advice
• Reports insights and opinions to the T&S committee and possibly other T&S working groups
• Potentially collaborate on proposals with the T&S committee or other WGs
• Turn some of their research into MSCs and collaboratively push them to completion as well as advise on other MSCs from a T&S perspective

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Governing Board (website)

The Governing Board is an advisory board that is made up of elected representatives from all across the Matrix ecosystem.

Gwmngilfen reports

A few weeks ago the Governing Board brought you news of a Working Group process, and the first ones had been proposed using it. I'm happy to report that we now have our first two active Working Groups!

🔗New Groups

Firstly, we have the Website Working Group, which (from their charter) has "responsibility for editorial and technical oversight of the main Matrix websites and social media channels. This includes the main matrix.org website, conference website, and the various social media channels". They've already had their first meetings, and you can find them in #matrix.org-website:matrix.org

Secondly, we have the Events Working Group, which (again from the charter) is "the main organising team of the official events hosted by the Foundation, such as the Matrix Conference or co-hosting FOSDEM Fringe". They are just spinning up their processes, and you can find them in #events-wg:matrix.org

🔗More Groups Wanted

We want to see many more groups! We have a couple of new groups under consideration by the Board which I hope to bring you news of soon, but in the meantime, discussion and/or volunteering for potential new groups is very welcome in #governing-board-office:matrix.org ! (And yes, I still want to get the Docs and UX groups running, speak to me in that room if you wish to volunteer 😛)

Thanks for your efforts & work, on behalf of your Governing Board!

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew says

The Matrix.org Foundation is now registered with Benevity in order to receive corporate donations as part of Corporate Social Responsibility programmes. If your employer supports donations via Benevity please encourage them to route some of their donations to supporting Matrix!

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Very interesting news reported today

You find there the document "Cyber Blueprint - Proposal Council Recommendation" for download that contains on page 17 a recommendation to use the matrix call for inter-gov communication on cyber topics.

In the next step, The European Council must discuss and then possibly adopt this proposal.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/cyber-blueprint-draft-council-recommendation

Continue reading…