Thib

🔗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!

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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.

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🔗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 🌡️

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

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗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?"

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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.

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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.

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🔗Matrix Live

🔗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.

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🔗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!

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