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.
Lots of interesting MSCs came in this week! Note that last week's are also listed as the spec update was skipped.
A swath are looking to improve moderation in Matrix, while others aiming to improve the story around notifications and end-to-end encrypted bridges. There's also been lots of discussion on the hot MSC4133: Extending User Profile API with Key:Value pairs, which can be built upon with spec'd profile fields such as m.timezone (MSC4175).
MSC4208 is the result of splitting out the custom fields portion of that MSC, as it was determined that that portion of MSC4133 needed further discussion before merging.
We had our first Governing Board gathering today at the Matrix Conference in Berlin, with 17 of the 20 members present (4 of which joined remotely)! We got to know each other a little better and discussed many things including Trust & Safety and how we communicate with each other and with the community.
Since this wasn't an official meeting, no votes were taken. The first official meeting of the Governing Board will be taking place soon!
The Matrix Conference 2024 is over, the videos are being cooked and the slides are being uploaded.
We'll be sharing the recordings with you as soon as they're ready.
In the meantime, a big thanks to everyone who attended, spoke, and helped make it happen. We hope you had a great time and learned a lot about Matrix and the community. We hope to see as many or more of you next year!
I’m pleased to report I've been busily onboarding the elected Governing Board members, and we've already started having important conversations about how we continue to move the Foundation forward to support the Matrix ecosystem.
This week Matthew and I published a blog post, significantly informed by community conversations and work with the Governing Board, on a process to define a governance framework for the projects we steward. Of note, in this post we are also drawing a line in the sand and making it clear: some projects, like the spec, test suites, SDKs, and shared cryptographic libraries, are so important that they require ongoing stewardship, under a permissive open source licence, by an organisation that is accountable to the ecosystem. To put a point on it: the Foundation will seek to fund and coordinate maintenance and development of core projects even if faced with a competing fork.
Learn more in our blog post. We’d love to hear from you as we work together to update our project governance, and encourage you to reach out to your representatives on the Governing Board along the way.
Progress on authenticated media continues! As of today, beta.matrix.org has now frozen its media to allow client and server developers, as well as homeserver owners, to test how their stuff responds when a media freeze is in place. This milestone brings us one step closer to matrix.org itself freezing unauthenticated media, described in more detail on the blog: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/26/sunsetting-unauthenticated-media/
The happy path for interacting with beta.matrix.org should be:
Log in or register a new account
Note that media from before today (August 7th) loaded fine
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.
If you are a client or homeserver developer, make sure you read up on the upcoming authenticated media!
Apart from that the spec team has been busy combing through the general spec backlog. Identifying MSCs which appear stuck waiting for SCT input is particularly helpful - drop some links in Office of the Matrix Spec Core Team with a description of how it appears stuck.
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.
Since this MSC was written, it has been shown that having (unstable) prefixes in the unsigned field of events is useful. Hence the general consensus from the SCT has been to close this MSC as it stands.
Needs 1 checkmark from the SCT (started the week needing 2).
we're starting a policy and regulation blog series over on the Foundation's blog. Over the next few months I'll be covering various pieces of legislation that are already in place, as well as incoming regulation, and what it all means for Matrix.
Voting has started for the Governing Board elections and runs till May 31 – but don't delay, vote today! 🗳 Huge thanks to all of the nominees who have thrown their hat in the ring.
All eligible voters should have received an email from the election system. All of the results will be published on the blog on June 3. Read our announcement post or visit our election center for more info.
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.
As an early heads up, Trust & Safety at the Foundation is working on an important update to Matrix, MSC3916 - Authenticated Media. This change will mean that all clients (and servers) will need to present a valid access token in their Authentication header to access media - which is critical to ensure that URLs are only visible to the correct users, and prevents abuse of Matrix for hosting binaries. More details will be published as we work to get everything released - we wanted to get the information out there as early as possible in the meantime. Let us know if you have any questions.
Matrix.org plans to freeze unauthenticated media endpoints within a couple of months after the spec release, which is expected in the next few weeks. "Freezing" means that media uploaded or cached before the freeze will remain accessible via unauthenticated endpoints indefinitely, but any media cached or uploaded after the freeze will require authentication. The unauthenticated endpoints will be deprecated but will still serve old media on matrix.org.
To ensure a smooth transition, we encourage you to start testing against the unstable endpoints and unreleased server builds. The changes for Synapse are being developed here, and for MMR here. Both are expected to release their changes soon. Once MSC3916 passes FCP, stable endpoints will become available. While releasing unstable support to users isn't required, having patches ready will help speed up the rollout.
We know this is a quicker rollout than usual, but with your help, we can improve user safety and security across the ecosystem. Most clients should find this update straightforward, but if issues are encountered, please reach out in #matrix-client-developers:matrix.org or on the MSC discussion. The team is monitoring the room to help clients adopt the change.
Web browser clients might face the most challenges, given the need to specify an Authentication HTTP header on media requests, so reviewing this pull request and its dependencies could provide useful implementation insights.
Thank you for your support. If you have any questions, let us know. We look forward to a smooth transition with minimal user-visible impact 🙂
You can find the names of the nominees on the election page, but who are they, and what are their visions for the future?
The nominees' campaigning has been underway since April 27. Members of the ecosystem are already quite active at #ecosystem.forum:matrix.org. Feel free to join and meet the nominees for the ecosystem members group.
Please, other constituencies, also find a place to meet, greet, and chat with members where people can get to know you better.
Even if we are formally still in testing phase until the end of the Ubuntu 24.04 cycle, the Ubuntu Matrix homeserver reached a state in which we can consider it live.
Although Ubuntu used to be IRC-only, we are now adopting Matrix to cater to a wider, diverse audience, including less technical users and younger generations. Matrix allows us to do so while staying true to the values that brought us Ubuntu, Linux and FOSS. When selecting the tools we use, we are always focused on open-source, privacy and freedom respecting software. We believe that Matrix offers all the modern features we need without compromising our values. Moreover, Matrix will make it easier for us to interact with neighboring communities such as Fedora and KDE.
There is still a lot of work to do, but we want to take a moment to thank the Ubuntu and Matrix communities for their great effort and dedication to this project.
You can read more about it on this Discourse thread and of course, you can now join our Ubuntu community from any Matrix federated server. A good start is the Ubuntu Community Space
