It's time for our annual Governing Board elections!
This year we're electing representatives from Individual Members, Associate Members, Gold Members, and Silver Members.
Nominations open at midnight UTC as we move from Friday to Saturday, May 3rd.
Learn more in our election announcement blog post.
Please join me in welcoming Filament and infra.run as the newest Silver Members of the Foundation!
The financial support we receive from members like them helps us steward the Matrix protocol as an unfragmented standard, facilitate open governance, and advance the state of Trust & Safety for the benefit of the entire ecosystem.
We're grateful for the outpouring of support from across the ecosystem. We still need a few larger organisations to step up. Do you rely on Matrix? Join us as a funding member.
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.
While the list above may look empty (no MSC has changed its status in the last week), there has been lot of discussions flying around! Both on MSCs and in the various spec-related rooms.
With Trust & Safety at the forefront of spec discussions these days, MSC4284: Policy Servers, mentioned in TWIM last week, has been seeing both discussion and implementation work. In the same vein, MSC4155: Invite filtering has also had recent activity.
A reminder for folks to take a look at the MSCs which have FCP proposed, as those are currently the furthest through the process.
After some issues with the initial RC of the 1.129 series, we released Synapse 1.129.0rc2 this week.
We apologize for the trouble; we should be back to our regular release schedule from now on.
A new version of Fractal numbered Eleven? Stranger things have happened… Features come running up that hill:
Support for login using the OAuth 2.0 API (as used by matrix.org, which recently made the switch to Matrix Authentication Service)
Overhaul of the page that lists user sessions, with details moved to subpages, for a less cluttered feel, and allowing to rename sessions!
Rearranged account settings, with a new Safety tab that includes a setting to toggle media preview visibility
BlurHashes for images and videos, that are used as placeholders while the media is loading or if the preview is disabled
Contiguous state events are grouped behind a single item
As usual, this release includes other improvements and fixes thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.
We want to address special thanks to the translators who worked on this version. We know this is a huge undertaking and have a deep appreciation for what you’ve done. If you want to help with this effort, head over to Damned Lies.
This version should be available shortly on Flathub.
If you want to join the gang, you can start by fixing one of our newcomers issues. We are always looking for new members!
BlurHashes and disabled image previews in Fractal 11
Hello from the VoIP team—we've just released version 0.10.0 of Element Call!
This release brings some changes to how encryption keys are shared to other participants: in encrypted rooms, Element Call will now use to-device messages rather than room messages by default. For now, Element Call will still automatically fall back to the room messages method for compatibility with older clients. But this already brings some significant performance improvements, and will provide a foundation for further improvements to the security of calls (forward secrecy and post-compromise security related).
We also have some improvements to the docs, primarily around our self-hosting guide and a section featuring some community guides and how-tos.
(Plus a few MatrixAntiDmSpam updates)
A small one this time around
What's new/changed?
You can now report users, events and rooms! These also come with support for adding the user (for event and user reports) to the ignore list automatically :)
Support has been introduced for interacting with the user's ignore list.
You can now synchronise your watched policy lists to your ignore list. This should make the blocking more effective, as it also hides events sent in public rooms.
You can now automatically report blocked rooms and the person who invited you to your homeserver administrator.
This is a WIP: I will be pushing the code in a few hours from when I sent this TWIM post :)
For homeserver administrators: the reason field will contain formatted data, that you should be able to easily parse in whatever tooling you may be using!
If someone writes an MSC for attaching extra data to reports, I would love to implement support for this too!
Theoretically improved the already sub-second response times by making more effective use of multithreading and asynchronous flows
MADS has been split into an "SDK" and the bot itself. This should allow easier embedding into other tooling or platform-specific applications.
Fixed some bugs related to handling older policy events, mainly those using the org.matrix.mjolnir.ban recommendation.
Made API changes to allow for bulk operations, for those hacking ontop of MADS!
🔗Matrix in the “Safeguarded AI” Program Solicitation by ARIA
The UK Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) has been funding a “Safeguarded AI” programme,
one part is a structure-aware version control for the collaboration between AI agents and humans.
I was made aware that Matrix (and a recent paper of us) was mentioned in the
Safeguarding AI - TA1.2 and TA1.3 Solicitation Presentation as part of the
Safeguarding AI - TA1.2 and TA1.3 Call for Proposals.
To quote the programme director and co-founder of IPFS, David "davidad" Dalrymple, “The Matrix open standard for federated instant messaging or chat apps is exemplary, in my opinion, of how to get a chat backend protocol right.”, and he envisions something similar for human-AI teaming with provably safe results.
The technical part of the presentation begins at 05:52, Hash Linking / Matrix begins at 08:12.
As of today, 11155 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3305 (29.6%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation.
The published directories contain 18882 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.
