This Week in Matrix 2025-05-23

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Governing Board (website)

The Governing Board is an advisory board that is made up of elected representatives from all across the Matrix ecosystem.

Robin Riley (m.org) says

@this-week-in:matrix.org Meet the nominees for the Governing Board and swing by the election rooms to ask questions and get to know them better. Huge thanks to all of the nominees for stepping up to serve the community! Voting begins on May 31st.

Robin Riley (m.org) announces

We'd like to welcome Federated Computer and Discourse as the newest Silver Members of the Foundation! Federated Computer is stepping up with financial support, and Discourse is donating use of their services, which our Governing Board and Working Groups have been using extensively.

This brings us up to 33 organisational members of the Foundation! We're thrilled to see the ecosystem coming together in this way.

We're still seeking new funding members, as we work to raise revenues and reduce costs to get to a balanced budget. We particularly need larger orgs to step up. Do you rely on Matrix? Protect your investment by funding the Foundation.

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Matrix Conference 2025

Thib (m.org) announces

We're happy to announce Element as the Anchor Sponsor for the Matrix Conference 2025!

We're scrambling to organize the conference in a superb venue in the gorgeous city of Strasbourg. In the meantime, if you want to be part of the adventure you can

🎙️ Submit a Proposal until June 8 🤝 Sponsor the conference and get the right eyes on your products 💪 Volunteer to help us organize the conference

🔗Dept of Academia 🎓️

🔗Foundational Research Paper on Garbage-Collection in Matrix using Cryptographic Proofs

Florian Jacob announces

Wouldn't it be nice if your homeserver could garbage-collect all this ancient room history and just keep a small cryptographic proof that everything was alright? On that topic, we have published our “Proof-Carrying CRDTs allow Succinct Non-Interactive Byzantine Update Validation”. Byzantine-fault tolerant CRDTs ("Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types") are the scientific basis for Matrix, and in this work, CRDTs are combined first-time with non-interactive cryptographic proofs, as they are known from the zero-knowledge field. At the example of Matrix, we evaluate whether that combination is futile. There is still a lot of research to be done to make this a reality in Matrix, but the results were better than we expected: While making every event carry a proof of authorization is not practical yet, one could add a proof to more seldom things like room upgrades. The article is freely available as Open Access under CC-BY, and our implementation is licensed MIT. This work was enabled by the Decentralized Systems research group at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and presented at this year's Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element

Devon Dmytro announces

This week we released Synapse v1.130.0.

This release adds the following new features:

• Add an Admin API endpoint GET /_synapse/admin/v1/scheduled_tasks to fetch scheduled tasks. #18214
• Fix a longstanding bug where Synapse would immediately retry a failing push endpoint when a new event is received, ignoring any backoff timers. #18363
• Pass leave from remote invite rejection down Sliding Sync. #18375

... and a whole lot more!

Thank you to all our contributors for helping to make Synapse the best it can be. As always, feel free to stop by #synapse:matrix.org to join in on the discussion and if you encounter a bug make sure to report it here.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Extera

OfficialDakari announces

Hello, everyone! It was a long time we didn't tell anything about Extera. At this moment, we mostly develop Extera Next, a fork of FluffyChat. It contains some fixes and improvements, such as:

• Use formatting in captions
• Render HTML in media captions
• Pure Black theme for AMOLED devices
• Option to hide avatars in invites
• Removed accepting by clicking an invite (not in notification tho, also you need to hold the invite to do anything)

There are not a lot of differences, but the list will grow as time passes.

You can download Android version of Extera Next from here.

🔗Element X iOS (website)

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

Mauro Romito announces

• We are improving the media timeline visibility setting, alongside the hide invite avatars by moving them in the account data, so that they might sync across all your devices (MSC4278)
• We have made RC 25.05.2 which includes:
  • Tapping on the username in the timeline, will show a bottom sheet to allow admins to swiftly take actions on that user (like kicking or banning).
  • Timeline events won't be grouped if they happened more than 5 minutes apart.
  • Fixed a bug that made accepted DMs sometimes appear as group rooms.
  • Homeserver admins can streamline the onboarding flow with the use of account provisioning deeplinks.

🔗Tammy (website)

Multiplatform messengers build on top of Trixnity Messenger

Benedict announces

Over the past few weeks, Tammy got some updates with a lot of improvements. Here’s a quick roundup of the journey from 1.1.12 to 1.1.14 (or, in dev-speak, from Trixnity Messenger 3.5.4 to 3.5.8 under the hood).

• 📄 Native PDF Viewer: Tammy now supports (again) viewing PDF files directly within the app across Desktop, Android, and Web.
• ⚡ Immediate Message Feedback: Tammy provides instant feedback when a message is sent, even before synchronization, ensuring users know their message is on its way.
• ☝️ Scroll to replied event: Tammy scroll to the replied message when clicking on it.
• 🎨 Expanded Theming Capabilities: The app now allows for greater customization, including sliders, avatars, chips, banners, switches, and emoji reactions, enabling a more personalized look and feel when using Trixnity Messenger for a whitelabled messenger.
• 🐞 Bug Fixes: Addressed issues related to message replies, user verification, power level adjustments, user search functionality, and export on the web.

Stay tuned for more enhancements as we continue to improve your experience with Tammy!

🔗Dept of VoIP 🤙

🔗Element Call (website)

Native Decentralised End-to-end Encrypted Group Calls in Matrix, as a standalone web app

Florian Heese reports

Hello from the VoIP team 👋,

We are excited to announce Element Call v0.11.0! 🎉

Element Call now supports background blurring for video feeds! 🌟 This highly requested feature finally made it to Element Call. As one of the most secure video conferencing solutions, this is a must-have because it enhances privacy during calls.

Additionally, we've fixed a nasty race-condition that occurred when unmounting a call. 🐛 The next release candidate is already on the horizon and will include Earpiece Speaker mode for mobile use cases. 📱 Stay tuned, and happy calling!

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗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

Oi, mush, rooms everywhere 🍄. Nothing's better than a world-class, UK slang and Matrix based, joke to start a good TWIM. Having immensely enjoyed this dad-ish joke, let's move on what has been done this week in the Matrix Rust SDK!

🔗Timeline

Refactoring continues to simplify and to refactor the code in order to provide a better support for Threads, mostly around aggregations. Amongst many things:

• #5060 Handle aggregations on non-live timelines: it means that Timelines with a PinnedEvents focus (to get the pinned events), or with an Event focus (to focus on a permalink), will receive live edits, redactions, or reactions. This was a known limitations, and we are glad to see it being solved. This was necessary for Threads; a happy collateral damage don't you think?
• #5059 The pinned events were unnecessarily reset sometimes, this is now solved so that users get a more stable UI.

🔗Room

• #5055 When sending unthreaded receipts, the unread flag are also unset. It follows a recommendation from the specification and is expected by most client.
• #5070 Room gains two new methods: successor_room and predecessor_room. When a room A is tombstoned (i.e. archived), it is replaced by a room B. Then room A is the predecessor of B, and B is the successor of A. This is a nice abstraction to better deal with room versions.

🔗Sliding Sync

• #5047 Another excuse to celebrate: the SlidingSyncRoom type has finally been removed! It was an awful hack, mostly to store a “timeline buffer”. Now that we have the Event Cache (a novel API to organise and to store events received by a client), and that the Event Cache has a persistent storage, and that the storage is enabled by default (see our last week celebration!), it is now possible to remove this SlidingSyncRoom type. What a long path to reach this point, isn't it? Farewell mush.

🔗Cryptography

• #4998 Client gains a new superpower: encrypt_and_send_custom_to_device to… you guessed it… encrypt and send custom to-device events. It is behind the experimental-send-custom-to-device feature flag, so use it at your own risk, it might break at anytime.

🔗General

The spring clean up continues at a good pace!

• #5076 All our Cargo.toml files have been formatted with cargo-sort.
• #5056 and #5067 The matrix_sdk_base::rooms::normal module was almost 4000 LOC. Honestly, not something to brag about. It's now split into smaller modules for the sake of clarity.

🔗Bindings

Eh, matrix-sdk-ffi gains new additions:

• #5065 new superpower unlocked: being able to send the logs in Sentry, which is a nice to have at this level directly, it saves efforts from the apps.
• #5058 it provides a new API to construct a Timeline, which helps further improvements. It can break your code though, so please review it.
• #5040 and #5062 matrix-sdk-ffi receives a couple of new API to get the media preview configuration directly from the store.

🔗Widget

• #4963 One more step towards better encryption support in MatrixRTC with the Matrix Rust SDK: WidgetDriver now support to-device events!

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

🔗MRS (website)

Aine [don't DM] says

We’re excited to share a significant update to the MRS project and its demo instance -MatrixRooms.info - shoutout to beastafk for making that possible! Here’s what’s new:

🔍 MSC1929 UI Check Tool

We've added a dedicated MSC1929 testing page to help homeserver admins verify their MSC1929 support files. This includes automatic reporting to server admins. 👉 Docs on MSC1929 validation in MRS

🏠 Enhanced Room View Pages

• OpenGraph tags: Beautiful previews when you share a room link.
• Improved avatars: Faster loading, better caching, and stylish fallbacks when missing.
• MSC2312 Join button: Direct matrix: links let users join rooms easily.

👉 MRS room view implementation

🔗 Shareable Search Results

Now you can link directly to filtered search queries! Example: matrixrooms.info/search/coffee

🎯 Advanced Search Filters

Powerful query support to refine your results, e.g. language:EN server:etke.cc

👉 MRS search logic

🖼️ Avatar Improvements

We’ve refined how avatars are processed, cached, and displayed—even when missing.

👉 MRS media service

---

🎯 Explore the new features and give them a try at MatrixRooms.info. MRS source code, and don’t forget to say hi in the #mrs:etke.cc room!

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [don't DM] reports

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

As of today, 11141 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3296 (29.6%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 17736 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	tuwunel.love	147.5
2	continuwuity.org	176
3	codestorm.net	201
4	usbpc.xyz	234
5	nerdhouse.io	267.5
6	pissing.dev	271
7	c.aosn.de	280.5
8	tomfos.tr	309
9	wolfspyre.io	348
10	nplusc.de	362

🔗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.