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!
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
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!
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!
There weren't any updates for a long time, but today Extera is in TWIM, because I've got enough (3) changes to describe!
There always was memory leak which caused Extera to use 100% CPU. It was fixed in latest commit, and it was there whole time! Now you won't be billed 1000$/mo for electricity if you use Extera.
Now settings category list and settings list don't scroll like one window. Minor change tho.
And, because of libolm deprecation (which happened a long time ago), Extera finally manages to start using Rust crypto.
Fixed ghost mode bug: Now, marking as read while you use ghost mode will use private read receipts.
This RC will also have enabled by default the event cache, to make the app even faster
We also added pills rendering to the composer, and is now possible to mention a room by using the "#" character, it will work just as EW, where you can filter based on the follow up text, and select the room you want to mention (which creates a permalink to it) by tapping on it
We added a badge in the composer for unencrypted rooms
We updated and improved our UI tests and our CI systems
The NeoBoard Widget just keeps chugging along with awesomeness! We just released v2.1.0 this week, which adds some new features and several improvements!
Previously, we only supported text shapes with the Inter font. You now have a selection of 6 additional fonts that you can use to express yourself with: Abel, Actor, Adamina, Chewy, Gwendolyn and Pirata One. Mix style with creativity and make your boards truly stand out! 🎨✨
We’ve taken our arrow and line tools to the next level! Before, you couldn’t attach them to shapes, but now, lines and arrows seamlessly connect shapes—and stay connected even as you move them around.
This update is a game-changer, especially for creating diagrams and visually mapping out information flows with ease and precision. 🚀
Pasting images from the clipboard is now possible! No more downloading and uploading, just copy pasting! Also, use CTRL+D / CMD+D to duplicate a shape or selection of shapes for faster content creation!
...And a lot more!
Check out the changelog for a full list of other improvements and bug fixes.
If you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to us using our public room #nordeck:nordeck.io.
This week we released Draupnir v2.2.0 which includes a rework of the unban command. The unban command now shows a preview of all the policies that will be removed in order to unban a user, and any rooms that they will be unbanned from. The preview prompt can be skipped by using the --no-confirm option. Please note that the unban command no longer accepts an argument for a policy list.
We've also made some progress in this release towards simulated protection capabilities which will allow us to include previews in more commands in the next releases (both watch and ban).
These improvements were added alongside a few other fixes in the follow up from the release of Draupnir 2.0. So checkout the release notes for the full picture. As always, we'll see you in #draupnir:matrix.org
A while ago I wrote a little tool using the matrix-rust-sdk to manually download and decrypt media: https://git.nwex.de/networkException/matrix-media-event-decrypt
It supports a few options that can be helpful when debugging (like fetching from a different server) as well as the ability to download and decrypt all media from a JSON room export created by Element Web
Jon Stewart talking about "the Matrix Protocol"? Yes, it's true, deep into his "Weekly Show" podcast this week, Maria Ressa brings up Matrix as the cornerstone of a tech stack for independent journalists and democracy advocates.
As of today, 10798 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3202 (29.7%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation.
The published directories contain 20434 rooms.
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.
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.
🔗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?"
First, find some people who want to work on the problem - we would suggest at least 3, but the more you have the better, as it shows the level of interest in the issue.
Second, write down a charter for your Group - this doesn't need to be huge to start with, just a few sentences about what you want to be responsible for and the outcomes you want to achieve.
Finally, get a Board Member to sponsor you - this means finding a Board Member who agrees with the work you want to do, and will act as your link to the rest of the Board. The #governing-board-office:matrix.org is a great place to start conversations about WGs and look for sponsors. If in doubt, ping me there ( @gwmngilfen:matrix.org ) and I will help if I can.
Once you have that done, the Board Member will discuss it with the rest of the GB, we'll put it to a vote, and if it passes, you're in! (If it doesn't, we'll be sure to pass back what feedback we can about why not).
We would advise making noise about your proposals for Working Groups in the community to rally support and/or new members to get work done. TWIM is a good place for that 😛
Working Groups are well named - they work. Some will provide advice & documents on a topic, others may produce code or similar outputs (think, a Docs WG?) but all have work to do. So, obviously you'll want to get on with that.
We also expect that:
Working Groups will have at least a Matrix room to discuss work in asynchronously
they will have regular meetings ("regular" is different for different groups, but we would expect not less than monthly). These could be video or chat meetings.
they take minutes of the meetings - the Board member can help here, but someone should take notes if they are not available.
These minutes get passed up to the rest of the Board so we can all be kept up to date at a high level
Clearly there are also some longer term things that we expect, like an expectation to work well with other Working Groups, to build consensus for decisions, etc. The GB can help if things need unblocking, of course.
We do need a place to record the Working Groups, what exists already, what they do, how you get involved. This will be added to the Matrix.org website SOON™️
All of this is theoretical until we start creating some groups, so .. let's hear your proposals (and I have a few to post in a moment)! Let's get some work done 💪
The GB is considering a proposal for a Website WG! @HarHarLinks has written a charter regarding how to get work done for the main Matrix website, and has a good initial member list. While this is de-facto work already being done, we'd like to make it official - it's been proposed by @HarHarLinks so if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, register your interest with them!
The GB is considering a proposal for a Events WG! This would cover CfPs, staffing booths, merch, event tooling (Pretix box, etc) and so on. While this is de-facto work already being done, we'd like to make it official - its fairly detailed charter been proposed by @HarHarLinks so if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, register your interest with them!
I think we could benefit from a Documentation Working Group in Matrix. The Spec pages are excellent, but much of the rest of our docs falls to the general website team, and we see a lot of copies of things like https://doc.matrix.tu-dresden.de/en which suggest to me that people aren't finding our docs sufficient?
So, without wanting to downplay the awesome work that has gone before, I think a dedicated Docs group could try to help specialise the various people working on the website, as well as provide a clear place to report issues with our materials. I'm willing to propose this, if you'd like to discuss it (or think it's an awful idea), please reach out to me ( @gwmngilfen:matrix.org )! in #governing-board-office:matrix.org
Another group I'm thinking about is the New User WG - this would be focussed on how we get more people to Matrix, and improve those first few minutes/hours/days in our ecosystem - and how to gather their feedback effectively.
During the Matrix Unconference in Brussels, I hosted a session on this, and in just 45 mins we made 2 pages of ideas, so I think it's a rich area. Outputs would be advice/suggestions to other parts of the ecosystem for how we can make things better for our newer (and especially non-tech) users. I'm willing to propose this, if you'd like to discuss it (or think it's an awful idea), please reach out to me ( @gwmngilfen:matrix.org ) in #governing-board-office:matrix.org
The next release of Element X iOS has an updated Rust SDK and as such, we will no longer support the Sliding Sync proxy - native Simplified Sliding Sync via your homeserver is the only sync option.
We made huge progress on embedding the Element Call web app into the Element X (rather than loading it from the web) - we are able to participate in calls, and are now just adapting the code to fully support localisation when embedded.
We have started implementing pills for rooms and events, just as in Element Web. The first step is to replace permalinks rendered in the timeline with these new pills.
We had a nice little external contribution that fixes @mention suggestions to work from anywhere in your message and not just at the end. Thanks Vickoo 🙌
swipe between media: improvement when coming from the pinned Events list. Now merged!
joining room by alias (can also be called address)
user interactive verification. It's currently possible to verify your own sessions, it will be possible to verify other users
fixing bugs! We have fixed a bunch of ANR issue, the first stats from the PlayStore are showing a drop in the ANR occurrences.
new translations into Norwegian and Turkish. Thanks for all the contributors! As a reminder, anyone can help translating the mobile applications from here: https://localazy.com/p/element/ . Translations are shared between the iOS and Android application.
It's been a quieter week, but progress continues! The event cache is receiving
its final polish, including performance improvements, as it nears prime time.
The authentication system is also seeing ongoing enhancements, thanks to Kévin Commaille.
Additionally, work has begun on the successor to MSC3061, aiming
to allow newly joined users to access the history of encrypted rooms.
We have released synadm v0.47! This release packs a few features:
Connection errors to Synapse should be more reasonably small and easy to understand, thanks to #168.
synadm user redact is now added, which redacts a user's messages. Supports local and remote users, but intricate details are up to Synapse (see "Redact all events of a user").
You can filter for empty rooms on the server side in synadm room list with --empty or --not-empty. This is in addition to synadm room purge-empty
More options were added to synadm user list to match what Synapse supports
synadm media quarantine and unquarantine now have the -U/--mxc-uri argument to pass MXC URIs to
That's all in code. There are a few changes in documentation, including the theme, listed on the changelogs.
And of course, a changelog is also available on GitHub. Our room is at #synadm:peek-a-boo.at if you have any questions or other stuff.
Matrixbird is an experimental "mail over matrix" idea I've been working on. It supports both traditional email and secure "matrix email" (local and federated) in a unified client.
As of today, 10771 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3202 (29.7%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation.
The published directories contain 21078 rooms.
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.
As of yesterday, Matrix.org is using a curated room directory. We’re paring down the rooms that are visible to a collection of moderated spaces and rooms. This is an intervention against abuse on the network, and a continuation of work that we started in May 2024.
In early 2024 we noticed an uptick in users creating rooms to share harmful content. After a few iterations to identify these rooms and shut them down, we realised we needed to change tack. We landed on first reducing the discoverability and reach of these rooms - after all, no other encrypted messaging platform provides a room directory service, and unfortunately it can clearly serve as a mechanism to amplify abuse. So, in May 2024 we froze the room directory. Matrix.org users were no longer permitted to publish their rooms to the room directory. We also did some manual intervention to reduce the size of the directory as a whole, and remove harmful rooms ahead of blocking them.
This intervention aimed at three targets:
Lowering the risk of users discovering harmful rooms
Stopping the amplification of abuse via an under-moderated room directory
Reducing the risk for Matrix client developers for app store reviews
In truth, the way room discovery works needs some care and attention. Room directories pre-date Spaces, and some of the assumptions don't hold up to real world use. From the freeze, and the months since, we've learned a few things. First, the criteria for appearing in a server's room directory in the first place is way too broad. Also, abuse doesn't happen in a vacuum. Some rooms that were fine at the time of the freeze, are not now. There are a few different causes for that, including room moderators losing interest. We looked for criteria to give us the confidence in removing the freeze, and we hit all the edge cases that make safety work so challenging.
Those lessons led to a realization. One of the values of the Foundation is pragmatism, rather than perfection. We weren't living up to that value, so we decided to change. The plan became simpler: move to a curated list of rooms, with a rough first pass of criteria for inclusion. In parallel, we asked the Governing Board to come up with a process for adding rooms in the future, and to refine the criteria. We've completed the first part of the plan today.
There's plenty of scope for refinement here, and we've identified a few places where we can get started:
The Governing Board will publish criteria for inclusion in the Matrix.org room directory. They'll also tell you how you can suggest rooms and spaces for the directory.
We're going to recommend safer defaults. Servers should not let users publish rooms unless there are appropriate filtering and moderation tools in place, and people to wield them. For instance, Element have made this change to Synapse in PR18175
We're exploring discovery as a topic, including removing the room directory API. One promising idea is to use Spaces: servers could publish a default space, with rooms curated by the server admin. Our recent post includes some other projects we have in this area: https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/
What criteria did you use for this first pass?
We used a rough rubric: Is the room already in the room directory, and does the Foundation already protect the room with the Matrix.org Mjolnir? From there, we extended to well-moderated rooms and spaces that fit one of the following:
Matrix client and server implementations (e.g. FluffyChat, Dendrite)
Matrix community projects (e.g. t2bot.io)
Matrix homeserver spaces with a solid safety record (e.g. tchncs.de, envs.net)
Why isn't the Office of the Foundation in the directory?
It didn't exist before May 2024, so the Office has never been in the directory. We're going to add it in the next few days, with a couple of other examples that fit our rough rubric.
How do I add my room/space to the list?
At the moment, you can't. The Governing Board will publish the criteria and the flow for getting on the list.
What do I do if I find a harmful room in the current directory?
You shouldn't, but if a room does have harmful content, check out How you can help
If you are wondering what the Foundation Safety team get up to, and what we have planned, we have an update for you. Check out the post: Building a Safer Matrix
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 MSC implementation and iteration is happening behind the scenes at the moment, leading to not very exciting Spec Core Team (SCT) updates :) As this implementation work progresses, the Matrix 2.0 MSCs in particular will continue to push forwards towards acceptance.
In the meantime, early versions of Extensible Profiles is up for review and today's blog post "Building a Safer Matrix" hints at some T&S spec changes expected soon.
The next spec release is expected in early March 2025 - if there's MSCs you think should be included there, let the team know in the SCT Office!
Right now, the world needs secure communication more than ever. Waves of security breaches such as the “Salt Typhoon” compromise of the telephone network’s wiretap system have led the FBI to advise US citizens to switch to end-to-end-encrypted communication. Geopolitical shifts painfully highlight the importance of privacy-preserving communication for vulnerable minorities, in fear of being profiled or targeted. Meanwhile the International Rules-Based Order is at risk like never before.
We built Matrix to provide secure communication for everyone - to be the missing communication layer of the Open Web. This is not hyperbole: Matrix is literally layered on top of the Web - letting organisations run their own servers while communicating in a wider network. As a result, Matrix is “decentralised”: the people who built Matrix do not control those servers; they are controlled by the admins who run them - and just as the Web will outlive Tim Berners-Lee, Matrix will outlive us.
Matrix itself is a protocol (like email), defined as an open standard maintained by The Matrix.org Foundation C.I.C - a UK non-profit incorporated in 2018 to act as the steward of the protocol; to coordinate the protocol’s evolution and to work on keeping the public Matrix network safe. The Foundation is funded by donations from its members (both individuals and organisations), and also organises the Matrix.org homeserver instance used by many as their initial home on the network.
Much like the Web, Matrix is a powerful technology available to the general public, which can be used both for good and evil.
The vast majority of Matrix’s use is constructive: enabling collaboration for open source software communities such as Mozilla, KDE, GNOME, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and thousands of smaller projects; providing a secure space for vulnerable user groups; secure collaboration throughout academia (particularly in DACH); protecting healthcare communication in Germany; protecting national communication in France, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland; and providing secure communication for NATO, the US DoD and Ukraine. You can see the scope and caliber of the Matrix ecosystem from the talks at The Matrix Conference in September.
However, precisely the same capabilities which benefit privacy-sensitive organisations mean that a small proportion of members of the public will try to abuse the system.
We have been painfully aware of the risk of abuse since the outset of the project, and rather than abdicating responsibility in the way that many encrypted messengers do, we’ve worked steadily at addressing it. In the early days, even before we saw significant abuse, this meant speculating on approaches to combat it (e.g. our FOSDEM 2017 talk and subsequent 2020 blog post proposing decentralised reputation; now recognisable in Bluesky’s successful Ozone anti-abuse system and composable moderation). However, these posts were future-facing at the time - and these days we have different, concrete anti-abuse efforts in place.
In this post, we’d like to explain where things are at, and how they will continue to improve in future.
The largest use of our funding as a Foundation is spent on our full-time Safety team, and we expanded that commitment at the end of 2024. On a daily basis, the team triage, investigate, identify and remove harmful content from the Matrix.org server, and remove users who share that material. They also build tooling to prevent, detect and remove harmful content, and to protect the people who work on user reports and investigations.
The humans who make up the Foundation Trust & Safety team are dedicated professionals who put their own mental health and happiness in jeopardy every day, reviewing harmful content added by people abusing the service we provide. Their work exposes them to harms including child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA), terrorist content, non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), harassment, hate, deepfakes, fraud, misinformation, illegal pornography, drugs, firearms, spam, suicide, human trafficking and more. It’s a laundry list of the worst that humanity has to offer. The grim reality is that all online services have to deal with these problems, and to balance the work to detect and remove that content with the rights of their users. We’re committed to that work, and to supporting the Trust & Safety team to the best of our ability — we are very grateful for their sacrifice.
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.
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.
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.
