Next on our radar: FOSDEM 2027! Planning is well underway, and we're happy to share the Call for Participation in the Decentralised Messaging Devroom. If your talk did not make it onto the schedule for The Matrix Conference, why not consider submitting it for FOSDEM? We'll have more information to share about our broader plans for FOSDEM over the next few weeks.
More than 340 attendees, exciting next-generation features ready to ship, Matrix powering more and more government communications, practical updates from the community, and the occasional shark: dispatches from Malmö 2026!
"Matrix has gone from being an interesting experiment to an existential requirement," said Matthew at the opening to the 2026 edition of The Matrix Conference, a sentiment that could be felt throughout this year's edition.
Civil servants from 15 different nations and intergovernmental organizations shared their decisions and experiences migrating to Matrix in response to an urgent need for digital sovereignty; we also heard from regulated industries like healthcare who cannot compromise on privacy or security and are increasingly looking to Matrix as a solution. Matrix is growing in response to this need: representatives from Matrix's rapidly expanding ecosystem came to present the varied projects built on Matrix specification, and members of both the Spec Core Team and the ecosystem came to demonstrate the expanding features that will make up Matrix 2.0.
A demo of Matrix real-time communication (MatrixRTC), was one of the highlights, as Matthew created a group call with himself using three different applications: Visio, Tammy and Element Call.
This year we introduced the community attendance sponsorship package, which allowed us to fund travel for the maintainers of one of the community-created Matrix homeservers called Continuwuity; their talks and workshop were among the most popular of the event. Thanks to Famedly for supporting this initiative via the community attendance sponsorship option.
Of course, we took advantage of being in the home of IKEA to adopt some Blåhajar:
A lot more happened, so read on for more highlights from The Matrix Conference 2026.
The Matrix.org Foundation, together with our friends from the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) and Delta Chat communities, is organising a Decentralised Messaging devroom at FOSDEM 2027, and we are looking for speakers!
Focused on federated and self-hostable chat, this devroom brings our ecosystems together to tackle shared challenges. Although our architectures look pretty different under the hood, we face many of the same hurdles. We want to get together to share operational and implementation experiences, discuss shared technical challenges, and look at practical ways our networks can cooperate.
We hosted over 340 people across two days of talks and workshops, with three rooms of content streamed and available for interaction via our live Matrix rooms during the event.
If you came to the conference, send us your best Blåhaj photos! You'll find us on Matrix and also on Mastodon.
As you can see in Matrix Live this week, we are into the final few days before the Conference!
The event is a team effort, and we're very appreciative of the help of our volunteers (40 of you!). We have a couple of slots (and hoodies!) left if you're willing to help out - just take a look at the volunteer schedule. Maybe there is a free shift during a talk you want to see? How about you help film or record it! If you are willing and able to help out, book a slot!
We are also grateful to our sponsors - their contribution plays a critical role in the Foundation’s ability to run the Conference and progress towards sustainability in general. Thank you!
We're looking forward to seeing many of you in Malmö and Copenhagen!
If you're not able to join us in person, we hope you'll be following along online.
It's finally October, the month of The Matrix Conference 2026! Within only 18 days from publishing this blog, the Matrix community and ecosystem meets in Malmö, Sweden for 3 days of conference, followed by another day of hacking and collaborating in Copenhagen, Denmark!
While the Conference is primarily an in-person event #LocalFirst, it will be accompanied with live streams from all 3 conference stages during the 2 main conference days, powered once more by the amazing c3voc! And of course we could not miss our chat rooms to virtually represent the physical stages on Matrix itself, a "General" chat for the hallway track, hackathon, and more. You can now find all of these grouped in this year's Conference space#conference-2026:matrix.org, and also on the Conference website soon. Naturally, the chats are just as practical if you will be attending in person, as we will be posting news and you can get in touch with other attendees, both remote and present! Note that rooms are read-only for now and will become available for chatting closer to the start of the Conference. Speakers and volunteers will also find that the respective private rooms are inside the same space.
Speaking of volunteers: Here's your chance to join the volunteer chat, get a limited Sweden-colored volunteer hoodie, and most importantly help make MatrixConf happen!
We have made some (hopefully final) adjustments so the shifts in our volunteering system match our schedule more precisely, and also added a couple more shifts! If you're interested in participating in one of our workshops, this should be particularly interesting to you!
Finally, our ticket reserves are starting to dwindle, so if you are planning to attend in person, get your ticket!
The Matrix Conference is happening in just a few weeks! (you may have heard about it? 😉)
Join us in Malmö for talks, workshops, and discussions about the future of Matrix. Go to the website for more details, and to get your tickets.
If you have already bought your ticket, these are now available for download or for adding to your digital wallet. Speakers should check their email to find their voucher for a ticket, and follow the instructions in the email to get invited to the speakers' room on Matrix.
The volunteer system has been updated, with some very last volunteer slots available.
We will have a new range of Matrix stickers available! If you have a Matrix-related project, make sure to bring your own stickers for the sticker exchange.
This week, we are happy to reveal that the pre-event social 🪩 will be held at Babel Malmö, close to the conference venue, on the evening before the main conference content begins.
Hello! This Week in Matrix aka TWIM is our weekly update on what is going on in the Matrix ecosystem (the clue is in the title…!)
You can learn more about how we manage submissions to TWIM in the guide. The basic system is that news updates are posted to the Matrix room #thisweekin:matrix.org, and our friendly bot helps us to categorise the entries to output something that is - mostly - ready to publish. After that, we do some light editing, primarily to format things correctly. TWIM production is a collaborative effort, between myself (Andy, on behalf of The Matrix.org Foundation); the Website & Content Working Group; and of course, everyone that shares their news items every week.
Our goal with This Week in Matrix is for it to showcase the progress of Matrix projects, and the vibrancy of our community. We want it to be interesting and fun to read, as well as being informative to folks that don’t have time to follow everything going on across all the different channels.
We know that it can be a bit of work to post something that’s interesting, but it really helps when the news is authentic, novel, or otherwise impactful. A pattern we’ve noticed is that some projects are summarising changelogs, instead of highlighting updates that might be most interesting for people (meaning, people that use the software, developers, spec authors, and more). In other cases, we’ve seen submissions with far less substance - for example, without any code, or without a pointer to a place for readers to ask questions and learn more. We’re excited to see different new apps emerging, but we also want to have a mixture of news, rather than having the same things featured every week.
You can share images with your news submissions, to make them more visually appealing. One of the editors can help with that, so ask us in the TWIM room. If you're posting something about a client app, it helps us if you can describe what the image is demonstrating and what readers might want to be looking for in it.
All of this is to note that we’re adding some editorial curation to TWIM, in order to keep things on track - and yes, that involves some more proactive choices. If projects show up every week, we might choose to reduce the coverage to keep the content fresh. If there is not enough information in a submission, we may hold it back, or ask for it to be rewritten. That said, we're also keen to keep hearing from everyone. Help us keep This Week in Matrix an exciting and interesting read every week 🫶🏻
The countdown to The Matrix Conference 2026 continues. Watch Matrix Live for a sneak peek, and take a look at the full schedule (and then, get your ticket!)
