Josh Simmons announces
Have you seen the Stack Overflow Developer Survey results for 2023?!
Of the 83,830 folks surveyed, Matrix was the #1 chat tool in terms of current users' satisfaction. It was also rated as the most desirable among the open source tools with open governance, but there is a lot of room for improvement in awareness. We’re excited to build on this 2024! 🚀
No Matrix Live this week, but a YouTube playlist of the Matrix talks given at FrOSCon!
Andrew Morgan (anoa) 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:
- There were no new MSCs this week.
MSCs in Final Comment Period:
- MSC3981:
/relationsrecursion (merge)Accepted MSCs:
- No MSCs were accepted this week.
Closed MSCs:
- No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.
Spec Update
For those familiar with Travis' weekly task lists of MSCs for the Spec Core Team to review in the Office of the Matrix Spec Core Team room, a new weekly list is now being posted in the Matrix Spec & Docs Authoring room. This list is aimed at technical writers who can help by converting MSC authors' words into PRs against the spec text itself.
This is the final step for getting an MSC integrated into a new release of the Matrix spec, and anyone can try their hand at it! It would also very much help the Spec Core Team by freeing up more bandwidth for review of the MSC backlog, as well as push forward the protocol itself. Thank you!
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the relevant Matrix rooms.
Random MSC of the Week
The random MSC of the week is... MSC4003: Semantic table attributes!
This MSC proposes expanding the set of suggested, interpreted HTML tags in Matrix clients to include additional tags related to tables. With them, more control over table rendering is possible. The proposal itself includes one such (albeit fairly arbitrary) example
The proposal is well-written and straight-forward, so do feel free to have a look if the subject interests you!
This year again the Matrix Foundation and Community will have plenty of opportunities to meet at FOSDEM! Together with our awesome community, we’re organising a FOSDEM Fringe Event before FOSDEM itself, we will have a booth to meet everyone and spread the word about Matrix, and a devroom to go more in depth on Matrix topics.
Josh Simmons reports
We’re excited to announce the timeline for our first ever elections as we take the next big step in open governance for Matrix. We’re also introducing two new membership tiers to increase community representation by including open source projects and foundations on the Governing Board.
Read about this and more in our latest blog post.
Nico announces
(Please ignore, that I never know, what year number to attach to such a "Year In")
You may remember I organized a small blog post last year to collect stories from the different community projects and what they did in the year and maybe some sneak peaks at the next year. If not, you can find it here or on the Matrix.org blog.
Anyway, enough about 2022, I now encourage you to talk about 2023 and beyond! If you have interesting stuff to report about your projects or projects you have been involved in in 2023, feel free to join #year-in-2023:neko.dev and talk about it! The usual TWIM rules apply there, just that we talk about a whole year and it may involve lots of manual editing on my side, so don't try to break it. Also please be positive in your news and lets try to end 2023 with a bang!
And please share this with projects you want to hear about. :)
Thib says
I'll start with a heads-up that the Foundation is going to clean-up all the
libera.chataliases on Matrix. You might want to check the rooms under your control to update the alias and the matrix.to links to it.You can find all the details on our blog
The Matrix.org Foundation has taken down the bridge with the Libera Chat network. This only prevented messages from making it across the bridges, for Matrix users to appear on the IRC side, and for new IRC users to appear on the Matrix side.
As part of our work to remove the bridge leftovers, we have removed the ghosts in Matrix rooms and demoted the Libera Chat appservice user. We will now remove the aliases from the rooms, and strongly encourage you to make sure you update the links to your Matrix room if they relied on a matrix.to link that contains :libera.chat
Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team
dmr reports
This Tuesday we released Synapse 1.98.0rc1. Its promotion to the 1.98.0 release proper is planned for the coming Tuesday (12th Dec). We expect v1.98.0 to be the final release of 2023, as the team takes a break over the holiday period.
Of note in this release candidate:
- Synapse now fully supports Matrix v1.7, v1.8 and v1.9.
- Server notice rooms received a few quality-of-life improvements to. Thank you Mathieu Velten for submitting these changes.
- Synapse's upgrade notes now describe how far Synapse can be safely downgraded.
As ever, thank you to our users, contributors, and community of server operators.
Several potential speakers asked us to extend the deadline of our CfP for the Matrix Devroom at FOSDEM. We are extending the deadline to Friday 8th December. You will find below the Call for Participations amended. Please submit your talks to https://pretalx.fosdem.org/: we're looking forward to reading them!
Unfortunately no Matrix Live this week, your host and editor apologises for the inconvenience!
Josh Simmons says
This week we were sorry to announce that we are not able to bring the Libera.Chat bridge back online. We have already begun working through clean up tasks, such as clearing ghosts, and expect to be done by December 22. If you see any bridge artifacts left past that point, please let us know.
We know that many communities and individuals were relying on the bridge, and we regret the impact this situation has on them.
If you are one of those who have relied on the bridge in the past, you may be asking: what now? You do have options.
People who need a bridge for their community can run their own: the matrix-appservice-irc software is still maintained. Only its Libera.Chat instance, which was configured to persist connections across restarts, is being shut down. Please be mindful of the network, and read Libera.Chat’s recommendations and their Matrix FAQ when doing so.
For more information, read our full announcement and Libera.Chat’s announcement.
Christian Paul (jaller94) reports
Wikidata is an open knowledge base, containing structured information to be read by humans and machines. I love it and I contribute to it a lot.
This week, I added a few more items from the Matrix ecosystem which I want to highlight:
You may have heard of this event series called Matrix Community Summit (Q123583505). In the past, we've had the Matrix Community Summit 2022 (Q123583515) and the Matrix Community Summit 2023 (Q123583556).
One output of these community summits is the Matrix Salon Podcast (Q123583531), which is a podcast featuring community members. Check it out! After all, you already seem to be interested in Matrix (Q22906785) given you're currently reading This Week In Matrix (Q123583570).
