I'm excited to share some quick news from the governing board today!
Over the holidays around the new year, we finished the committee chair elections and congratulate:
Bram and Sumner, chair and vice chair of the Governance committee,
Sumner and Nico, chair and vice chair of the Community committee,
Robin and Kevin, chair and vice chair of the Finance committee,
J.B. and Nico, chair and vice chair of the Trust & Safety committee!
This paves the way for the committees to start taking up work while at the same time the governing board as a whole also finalises the processes around working groups so we can onboard all of you!
We look forward to sharing another update soon, and Matrix @ FOSDEM is also on the horizon, where attendees will be able to meet a good handful of governing board members face to face! For any questions, feedback, or discussion with/about the governing board, join our #governing-board-office:matrix.org!
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.
It may seem quiet from the stats above, but there's actually been a healthy amount of activity across various MSCs this week!
MSC3266: Room summary API had FCP proposed, which moves this long-awaited MSC significantly closer to being accepted. This MSC allows clients to get a quick preview of a room before joining it, which is useful in all sorts of scenarios (see the MSC for a list!). There's still a fair amount of feedback to get through, but much of it is small clarifying comments. Exciting to see this one move forward!
MSC4133: Extending User Profile API with Key:Value Pairs has also been moving forward, with the Synapse implementation in active review by the maintainers, and all concerns on the MSC (currently) having been resolved this week.
There's plenty of activity on other MSCs as authors work to update them. Also a huge thanks again to those working on the spec text itself. Multiple PRs against the matrix-spec repo have been opened following the holidays, all making the spec better for everyone. Thank you!
Happy new year, crab enthusiasts!! Here's your first yearly update for the Matrix Rust SDK.
Lots of refactorings around the event cache's storage, which is nicely moving along, including one critical bugfix.
The FFI layer (notably used by the ElementX apps) keeps on getting better. The logs configuration will now take place in the SDK, instead of leaving this responsibility to apps. A fix has also been introduced so that panics would be correctly logged in the FFI layer.
Some refactorings have been made to help compiling the SDK to WebAssembly. Thanks @jplatte!
Starting a quest to get rid of most unwrap()/expect() in the code base, @poljar added some synchronous locks wrappers that panic when poisining, getting rid of many unwrap()s.
The experimental-sliding-sync feature flag has been removed by @Hywan. That's right folks, we declare support in the SDK is not experimental anymore 🥳
Ruma has been upgraded, unlocking the development of crypto features and delivering some nice bugfixes. Thanks @zecakeh!
Room::display_name has been reintroduced, as it showed useful in downstream projects.
Unrecoverable errors (e.g. 401) will now stop the sending queues, instead of letting future events send; this should lead to less confusion for end users.
The Timeline component can now upload byte attachments directly, instead of having to use a local file path that will be loaded by the SDK. Thanks @zecakeh!
Drapunirv2.0.0-beta.10 has been released. This will be our final beta release before releasing v2.0.0 next week.
In this release we have resolved a number of issues painful issues, from problems with serverACL changed notice spam, slow user policy application on larger deployments, to issues with unwatching policy rooms. We also got a big boost from a first time contributor nex (she/it) 🐟 who fixed a number of bugs, and most prominently changed the unban command so that the behaviour from the --true option became the default. Please do read the changelog for the details. And once again you can find us in #draupnir:matrix.org.
Grid is a new mobile app for private and live sharing location between friends, family etc. utilizing Matrix end-to-end encryption. Grid is cross-platform and provides a solution to traditional location sharing apps that either sell or expose your data.
Grid enables secure location sharing through both 1:1 and group conversations, with thoughtful privacy features like sharing expiration times and incognito mode. The app utilizes Protomaps hosted on Cloudflare, eliminating any dependency on Google Maps or Apple Maps while maintaining full functionality.
Whether you prefer using our default server or self-hosting with Synapse, Grid gives you complete control over your data. The custom mapping solution can also be self-hosted, giving complete autonomy.
We're finalizing our feature roadmap which will include exciting capabilities like geofencing, customizable sharing windows, SOS features, and active live sharing (for biking, hard enduro, etc.) Stay tuned for these upcoming enhancements!
We - Federal IT-Cooperation (FITKO), together with the German Federal Ministry of the Interior - are going to showcase Matrix-based communication between citizens and public authorities. We want to demonstrate feasibility of end-to-end encryption with great usability in this scenario, enhanced with machine-readable parts. You can read more about our project over here (in German, unfortunately!): https://gitlab.opencode.de/fitko/g2x-matrix-pilot
Since our talk at the Matrix Conference (slides) we published our call for tenders for "Piloting a matrix-based communication channel for G2C communication"! You can read more on our vision, some technical details and our approach to support public money - public code over here (in German too, sorry!)
As of today, 10526 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3135 (29.8%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation.
The published directories contain 21228 rooms.
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
To learn more about how to prepare an entry for TWIM check out the TWIM guide.
The Foundation needs you
The Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit and only relies
on donations to operate. Its core mission is to maintain
the Matrix Specification, but it does much more than that.
It maintains the matrix.org homeserver and hosts several
bridges for free. It fights for our collective rights to
digital privacy and dignity.
