This Week in Matrix 2025-04-11

🔗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!

🔗Dept of Academia 🎓️

🔗PhD position in Human-Computer Interaction Principles for Messaging Interoperability available in Copenhagen, Denmark!

carla says

A unique opportunity for a fully funded 3-year position to design user-friendly interfaces for managing privacy in interoperable chats.

The PhD position is in the area of Human-Computer Interaction, supervised by me (Carla Griggio) and Prof. Niels van Berkel at the Department of Computer Science in Aalborg University (Copenhagen Campus!).

Development experience related to Matrix is a plus but not a requirement. The ideal candidate has solid software engineering skills and cares deeply about interoperability and/or the user experience of managing privacy in text messaging.

🎓 You can find more info about the position and apply here.

🎦 This project is directly related to "the walled garden dilemma" I presented at the MatrixConf, and you can watch the video here.

🔗Research Paper "ReP2P Matrix"

Florian Jacob announces

Our research paper “ReP2P Matrix: Decentralized Relays to Improve Reliability and Performance of Peer-to-Peer Matrix”, is now available under CC-BY, code and data based on the existing peer-to-peer Matrix prototypes is available as well. We thought of a concept for “disposable decentralized relays” - like simple, user-independent homeservers with minimal privileges and without users being bound to only one - and evaluated it as an additional way of message dissemination that complements the current P2P Matrix prototypes. The work was a cooperation between the Telematics and Decentralized Systems research groups, and was presented at the Decentralization of the Internet Workshop at ACM CoNext.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element-iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 16+.

Doug reports

This week we released Element X 25.04.3 with a collection of improvements such as

• The option to only hide timeline media in public rooms.
• The ability to kick/ban someone directly from the timeline (and add a reason when you do it).
• Improvements to hopefully reduce the amount of space use by both the SDK and the app.

On top of this we’ve continued to work on support for Threads, added the ability to enter your PIN with a keyboard and improved the smoothness of the authentication flow when using OIDC.

🔗Element X Android (website)

Android Matrix messenger application using the Matrix Rust SDK and Jetpack Compose.

Benoit says

We are releasing a new RC 25.04.1 to fix a crash introduced recently that did not get its way to production. Thanks for all people who have sent rageshakes and to YamatoRyou for having created the issue!

Besides that, we're working on improving accessibility when using a screen reader. Also there have been some changes on the settings to prevent images from invitations to be visible for safety reason.

You'll also notice that the app got a new icon!

🔗Cinny (website)

Cinny is a Matrix client focused on simplicity, elegance and security

Lozenge announces

Cinny v4.5.0 & v4.6.0: Enhanced room management and Privacy

The Cinny team is pleased to announce our latest updates, delivering powerful new tools for room management and user privacy.

With v4.6.0, we’ve introduced customizable power levels (based on MSC3949), allowing room admins to create distinct roles with colored badges. Administrators can now bulk-import custom emojis, and upgrade room versions seamlessly. We have also improved media handling including audio/video downloads.

Our v4.5.0 release focused on privacy controls, giving users the ability to disable read receipts and typing indicators, along with automatic hiding of messages from ignored users. We’ve also implemented image upload previews and streamlined deleted message handling.

These features are now easily accessible through our redesigned room/space settings interface.

Experience these updates today: 🌐 app.cinny.in 💬 Join our community: #cinny-space:matrix.org 🗞️ Follow us on Bluesky 📝 Release notes: GitHub

🔗Tammy (website)

Multiplatform messengers build on top of Trixnity Messenger

Benedict announces

Over the past few weeks, Tammy has grown in leaps and bounds with tons of improvements aimed at making Matrix more accessible, reliable, and delightful across platforms — especially on the web! Here’s a quick roundup of the journey from 1.1.3 to 1.1.11 (or, in dev-speak, from Trixnity Messenger 3.2.0 to 3.5.3 under the hood).

🔗✨ Major New Features

• Custom Themes & Material 3 Styling

  Say hello to dynamic theming! Tammy now uses a brand-new Material 3 styling system, paving the way for creative themes — yes, even nostalgic ones like Windows 9x. This is just an idea, but maybe you’ll be able to apply themes just by joining a Matrix room in the future.

• Archived Rooms Support

  Left a room but still want to check what happened? No problem — rooms stick around until you manually delete them.

• Knocking Support

  We now support knocking into public rooms and accepting knocks in the member list.

• Accessibility Upgrades

  You can now adjust font and display sizes to suit your visual preferences.

🔗🔧 Improvements & UI Enhancements

• Revamped Styling

  Tammy’s UI has been polished with unified styling for buttons, surfaces, tooltips, floating action buttons, and input areas. No more flickers or mismatched elements.

• User Profile Screen

  You can now view member profiles and do some room actions on them.

• Performance Boosts

  Web experience is much smoother, because we fixed many bugs.

🔗🐛 Fixes You’ll Appreciate

• Decryption & Verification Fixes

  Several bugs around device verification and message decryption are gone. Note: You may need to re-login to ensure all keys sync correctly!

• Web: One Instance at a Time

  We added a check to ensure only one running instance of Tammy in your browser to avoid database corruption.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for developing Clients, Bots, Appservices and Servers

Benedict reports

Trixnity got some polish over the past few weeks. The sync loop has been completely reworked to behave more predictably, especially when switching filters or timeouts - great news for notification reliability. On top of that, client-side support for the Matrix 1.11 federation media API has landed. As usual, a bunch of bugs were squashed and minor API improvements made to keep things smooth and stable.

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Next-gen crypto-included SDK for developing Clients, Bots and Appservices; written in Rust with bindings for Node, Swift and WASM

Ivan 🦀 reports

Time flies! Did you miss us? Because we missed you. Our latest update report was 3 weeks ago. We were pretty busy!

First off, we are happy to announce the immediate availability of the Matrix Rust SDK 0.11 release \o/. Feel free to check the CHANGELOG.md files of all the crates you're interested by.

🔗Threads & Timeline

Gimme a T! Gimme a H! Gimme a R! Gimme a E! Gimme a A! Gimme a D! Yes. We are actively working on threads. If you want to track the progress on that front, feel free to read the meta-issue Thread.

Right now, works as started to send messages in threads, or to refactor the Timeline to aggregate items together.

A notable change in the Timeline, unrelated to thread, has been introduced: a new virtual timeline item to represent the start of the Timeline. This is pretty useful if you want to render a special header at the start of the Timeline. The consumer of the Timeline no longer needs to do a computation dance to detect its start.

🔗Media gallery

A new MSC has been added: MSC4274, Inline media galleries via msgtypes:

Matrix allows sharing individual media files such as images or videos via dedicated m.room.message msgtypes. This is, however, not practical for sharing larger collections of files. For one thing, there is no mechanism to set a joint caption for several media files. For another, there is no way to inform other clients that a set of pictures belongs together and should be grouped accordingly in the timeline. These shortcomings call for a built-in media gallery feature as it is widely known from other messaging apps.

As with all MSCs, an implementation on a client and a homeserver is required. And here comes a set of patches to implement this MSC inside the Matrix SDK.

🔗Memory usage

When a Client is instantiated, the BaseStateStore is created. And if a session exists, it is restored. And when it is restored, all rooms are loaded. This is perfectly fine because it means the Client has a full knowledge of all the user's rooms, which is expected. However, if a user has a lot of rooms, it can be problematic in one situation: push notification.

When a push notification is received on a device, on some OS, a new special process is started, which requires to start a new Client. This is the case of iOS for example, but not on Android where the main app process is used for notifications. This special process may have memory limitations. On iOS, this is usually 20Mib. And here comes the problem. For some users with very large accounts, creating a Client can take more than 20Mib of memory. The consequence is that the push notification process will crash, and the user will miss its notification. How annoying!

We have resolve this problem with two approaches:

• matrix-sdk-sqlite gains two new types, SqliteStoreConfig and RuntimeConfig, to configure how SQLite will manage its pooling, its cache size, its journal size etc. (#4826, #4828, #4870, #4894)
• matrix-sdk-base gains a new RoomLoadSettings type to configure how a session will restore its room. Please read the documentation carefully because there are important details. (#4847, #4851, #4850, #4867, #4868).

It was quite a ride, but it was fruitful! For these kind of users, memory dropped from more than 20Mib to 6.5Mib for the full notification process. And now these users can receive notifications again!

🔗Event cache

The EventCache has received some love too. We have reworked the SQL schema. This was required for Threads, but also as an internal clean up of Permalinks.

A memory leak has been detected when a RoomEventCache is dropped, and it has been fixed! A new API in matrix-sdk-ffi has been proposed to safely clear all room event caches.

🔗Encryption

On encryption side, we have fixed the reset of the cryptographic identity if the user ever input the wrong password.

🔗SDK clean ups

We have also been pretty busy to clean up the internal of the sync flow inside matrix-sdk-base. This flow has evolved organically since too long, and it's time for a solid clean up (#4889, #4901, #4914). This will hopefully allow to fix a couple of small bugs here and there.

Other clean ups are happening inside the SDK. It's clearly a lot of PR, so please check the CHANGELOG.md.

🔗Authentication

Did you see the super cool announcement of this week: Matrix.org is now running MAS (Matrix Authentication System)? That's for the homeserver side. On the client side, work has started since a long time and continues even today.

Client::logout logs the user out regardless of the auth API. The OAuth API keeps being cleaned up, simplified, or made more robust (#4879, #4831, #4882).

🔗multiverse

multiverse is one of our devtools. It's a debug-oriented Matrix client, built on top of the Matrix Rust SDK.

A full rewrite of multiverse happened. It gets a lot more features, as it is used by more teams and more people trying to develop new features (#4861, #4912, #4913).

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗maubot (website)

A plugin-based Matrix bot system.

HarHarLinks says

This week I published a patch for my maubot plugin that resolves Spotify and other streaming services links to those of other platforms. This resolved a compatibility issue with the upstream API used. https://github.com/HarHarLinks/maubot-idonthavespotify/releases/tag/v1.1.1

wreck reports

more updates to my maubot communitybot plugin, which aims to make it easy for community leaders to manage their rooms and members on matrix.

1. big update to permission management: cascading power-level management! the bot will now pay attention to power-level changes made in your parent room or space, and replicate those changes to all rooms in the space that it can. yes, that means you can make someone a moderator of your space, and they will gain moderator permissions in all rooms in it! hooray! there's even a not-horribly-painful upgrade path to move your statically defined admins/mods in your config to be admins/mods of the space as long as your bot is a space admin.
2. archive and replace rooms: have a room with members you can't kick out because of power level disfunction? enabled encryption on accident? suffering from whatever the latest state-resolution bug is? created a temporary room for a convention, gathering or date-specific happening, and don't remember how to send a custom tombstone event? easily archive rooms or create updated ones without ruining everyone's day!
3. interactive verification workflow for new joiners: a new hip way to combat spam in your community rooms. you can now configure some or all of your rooms to require that new members verify they know how to accept a DM invite, and are capable of following simple instructions! migration command !community verify-migrate will fix your existing room's permissions safely (hopefully) so anyone already in your room doesn't need to verify.
4. bulk message redaction: redact up to the last 100 messages from a user in a room on demand, or enable automatic bulk redaction in all your community rooms when a user is banned with the redact_on_ban setting. finally.

feel free to join my development channel and see first-hand how the interactive verification workflow works, ask questions (after you verify 😉), get help, or suggest features! #dev:mssj.me

🔗Dept of Trust & Safety 🙆

Jim announces

🔗Trust & Safety update

Hi folks. You may have noticed a rash of attacks on public Matrix rooms, where attackers send floods of illegal imagery, designed to shock and appall. We haven’t been commenting publicly as it’s an ongoing incident, but we want to give you a brief update:

• The attackers are overloading homeservers with malicious federation traffic to slow down our ability to redact messages (giving the impression that we’re not responding to the raids: we are). We’re working on solutions to this.
• We’re also working on ways for servers to filter abusive content before it ever gets sent to clients; we’ll publish details as soon as we can..
• Whilst this is ongoing, we strongly recommend hiding image previews in your client.
  • In Element X, it’s in Settings >> Advanced settings >> Moderation and safety.
  • In Element Web, it’s: Settings >> Preferences >> Images, GIFs and Videos >> Show previews/thumbnails for images.
  • If your client doesn’t provide this, we recommend encouraging your client dev to add it.
• To clear abusive media from your server and clients:
  • If you are using Synapse, you can delete abusive media from other servers by clearing the remote media cache, using https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/admin_api/media_admin_api.html#purge-remote-media-api
  • If your server was used to send this type of abuse, you will need to find and quarantine the media, redact the events and remove the user. Depending on your jurisdiction, you may also need to report the imagery.
  • In Element Web, you can clear your cache in Settings >> All Settings >> Help & About >> Clear cache and reload
  • In Element X, clearing the cache is hidden in developer settings currently: to enable them, tap the Version number at the bottom of the settings screen 7 times to reveal the Developer Options menu, then select Clear Cache.

We’d like to apologise to those impacted by this abuse; we don’t accept this, and we’re using it to drive some step changes to how moderation works in Matrix. See also https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/ for other work ongoing in this space.

Finally: You can help. T&S depends on Foundation funding, which is currently lacking. If you want the Foundation to be able to accelerate T&S work, please consider becoming a member or donating.

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [don't DM] announces

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 11227 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3318 (29.6%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 19572 rooms.

Stats timeline is available on MatrixRooms.info/stats

How to add your server | How to remove your server

🔗Dept of Ping

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

🔗#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	pc.nexy7574.co.uk	162
2	nexy7574.uk	167
3	awawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawaw.gay	171.5
4	f.dog	208.5
5	conduwu.it	212
6	nerdhouse.io	218
7	usbpc.xyz	240
8	girlboss.ceo	269
9	matrix.hildebrind.space	277

🔗That's all I know

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.