This Week in Matrix 2025-06-20

🔗Dept of elections 🗳️

🔗Governing Board (website)

The Governing Board is an advisory board to the Matrix.org Foundation and with elected representatives from all across the Matrix ecosystem.

Robin Riley says

Our second annual Governing Board election has come to a close! Huge thanks to all the candidates and voters. We're extremely grateful to everyone who served in the precedent-setting first cohort that we elected last year.

Special thanks to outgoing representatives Cleo Menezes Jr., Kevin Boos, Sumner Evans, and Thor Arne Johansen, congratulations to the incumbents who were re-elected, and welcome to our new incoming representatives, Christian Kußowski and Gnuxie! Find more info on our blog.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} announces

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.

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC4301: Event capability negotiation between clients
• MSC4300: Processing status requests & responses

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC4113: Image hashes in Policy Lists
• MSC4015: Voluntary Bot indicators
• MSC3006: Bot Interactions

You can find the list of MSCs with proposed final comment period here.

🔗Spec Updates

Matrix 2.0 is still coming together. A huge part of it is Next-Generation Authentication (aka. OAuth 2.0/OIDC). While the relevant MSCs have been accepted for a little while now, writing up the actual changes to the spec have yet to happen.

That is, until, Kévin Commaille took it upon themselves to do so! Ever the avid contributor of the Matrix spec, Kévin has created a number of PRs that translates the five separate next-gen auth MSCs into actual updates to the spec. This is a daunting task, and we commend Kévin for taking it on and keeping on top of it!

🔗Dept of Trust & Safety ⚖️

andybalaam says

Announcing Olicy, a prototype Matrix Policy Server

You may have heard of MSC4284, which describes "policy servers" as a new tool for combatting spam in Matrix rooms.

Olicy is an early prototype of a policy server, written in Rust, with good test coverage. It doesn't work yet, but the outline of the code is there.

You can join in with the code at codeberg.org/andybalaam/olicy and discuss Olicy in the Matrix room at #olicy:matrix.org.

🔗Dept of Science 🎓️

🔗Element usability study – call for participants

Pedro M. Ribeiro says

Hi everyone! I’m Pedro Ribeiro, an MSc student at the NOVA School of Science & Technology.
For my thesis I’m researching the usability of the Element messaging app and I’m looking for volunteers for a questionnaire followed up by a scheduled single ~50 min remote session (screen-share tasks + short interview).

If you are interested in secure messengers or use Element and would like to help improve its UX, you can sign up via this form .

The study follows an ethics protocol currently pending approval by my university, and all data is handled confidentially.
Questions? Feel free to DM me at @lonely_actuator4029:matrix.org, or contact me through email at [email protected]

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Matrix Authentication Service (website)

Matrix Authentication Service (MAS) is an OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Provider server developed by Element.

Quentin Gliech reports

This week, we've released MAS 0.17, which, along with a few additions to its admin API and some small bug fixes, brings registration tokens to MAS as a way for you to onboard new users onto your homeserver in a controlled manner.

See the full release notes for 0.17.0 here and for 0.17.1, which was released shortly afterward to fix a minor regression.

With the next generation auth APIs landing in the spec recently, we're now working on support for the stable spec, getting MAS to 1.0, as well as making the MAS integration in Synapse non-experimental.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille says

We released Fractal 11.2 which updates the matrix-sdk-crypto dependency to include a fix for a high severity security issue. It is available right now on Flathub.

🔗FluffyChat (website)

The cutest instant messenger in the [matrix].

Krille - Christian K. announces

FluffyChat 2.0.0 is released — now powered by Vodozemac!Together with the brand-new Matrix Dart SDK 1.0.0, which also uses Vodozemac — the modern encryption library for Matrix written in Rust.

This is something many of you have been waiting for.

But that’s not all: lots of small bug fixes and performance improvements have also landed. The reaction picker and the message context menu have been improved as well.

Additionally, there’s a new option to display the navigation rail in mobile mode — especially useful for those who use Spaces a lot.

Under the hood, FluffyChat now runs on Flutter 3.32.4 with updated dependencies, bringing even more bug fixes and performance enhancements.

See all changes at: https://ko-fi.com/Post/FluffyChat-2-0-0-has-been-released-with-Vodozem-L3L01GRELK

🔗Element X Android (website)

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

Jorge announces

This week we've released an RC version for v25.06.3, which is still marked as pre-release. We plan to add new release candidate versions as pre-releases in Github and then upgrade them to full releases once they're available in the stores after some testing - which we're deeply grateful for 🙏.

Other than that, we've made some good progress on:

• Supporting room upgrades.
• Improving accessibility in several parts of the app.
• Adding experimental support for room history sharing.
• Improving the reliability of push notifications.

🔗Dept of Widgets 🧩

🔗Matrix Widget Toolkit (website)

Reusable framework for creating Matrix widgets.

Milton Moura (n.io) says

🔗New releases with support for sending delayed events

We at Nordeck have been busy bringing MatrixRTC with LiveKit Backend to the NeoBoard Widget, and part of that endeavour is using delayed events, as proposed in MSC4140, to clean up the realtime session membership state when you become inactive or leave a realtime collaborative whiteboarding session.

So, last week, we have updated the Matrix Widget Toolkit, the foundation for our widget applications, to support sending delayed room state and room timeline events, as well as updating them, so you can restart the delay, and let them linger for bit longer, or just cancel them before they are effectively merged into the room DAG.

To show delayed events in usage, we updated the Throw Dice example widget to include the option to send a custom event with a few seconds delay. To test this, be aware that you should enable delayed events support in your Synapse homeserver configuration.

This means we have new minor version releases of the matrix-widget-toolkit/api (v4.2.0) and matrix-widget-toolkit/testing (v3.1.0) packages with delayed events support, and new patch releases of the matrix-widget-toolkit/react (v2.0.6) and matrix-widget-tookkit/mui (v2.1.3) that also bring updates to vite and react related dependencies.

Thats all the news for now, if you have any questions or feedback, reach us at #nordeck:nordeck.io !

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗communitybot (website)

wreck [m.org backup account, do not ping] reports

minor usability improvements to the communitybot plugin for maubot have been added! repo

what is this? communitybot is a plugin for maubot that aims to make managing your community rooms on matrix as friendly and simple as on other platforms. it provides capabilities for you to easily create and add new rooms, replace or archive old ones, manage permissions of your community moderators, and track user activity for pruning inactive users! it also supports basic spam mitigation mechanisms such as message redaction based on word lists or file upload, subscribing to public banlists such as CME, and a human-verification-before posting based on power-level.

new in the latest version is an initialize command to get you up and running a community based on opinionated defaults. if you're using the unedited base config, the command will:

1. create a new space and update your plugin config to use it
2. automatically add you to the list of users to invite to all new rooms, and set your power to administrator
3. create a private, dedicated room for moderators to use for bot commands away from the rest of the community
4. create a public "waiting room" where matrix users from anywhere can join and ask to be invited to your space
5. enable initial wordlist- and file-based message redaction in your waiting room (update your wordlist as appropriate instead of the current effword and essword placeholders)
6. ensure that all future rooms require moderator permissions to invite additional users, to prevent unexpected "guests" in your community

using the bot for all room and space creation will ensure that the bot always has higher permission than even administrators to avoid permission issues on other bot commands in the future.

check out the README for more information, come ask questions in #dev:mssj.me , and happy community-building!

nota bene: this bot is intended for creating and managing "gated" communities, akin to a slack workspace or discord server. this helps to reduce moderation overhead. fighting spam across multiple public rooms is no fun, but if you want to try to do that you will continue to be better suited with a tool like Draupnir/Meowlnir/Mjolnir. if you really like AI for some reason, you may be interested in my separate LLM-powered moderation bot

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Thib announces

The Matrix Conference's Call for Proposals is open until the end of June. We already have very strong proposals, but don't miss your chance to let the world know about your project!

We're also happy to open the ticket store! The key points are:

🎟️ Tickets can be bought here 🥰 Foundation members get a free ticket (see details in the store to get your voucher) 👔 Businesses are expected to purchase a Business Ticket 🙌 Sponsors get free business tickets in their package, and we only have one Championship sponsorship package left!

HarHarLinks says

🔗Matrix Community Events @ GPN23

Hello again! In case you didn't know, Matrix Community Events is a collective of Matrix enthusiasts from across the universe who like to represent Matrix at events in real space and also sometimes organises their own events sometimes.

It is summer in Germany, and hackers are gathering in Karlsruhe for tinkering and eating goulash at GPN23. So are we!

The conference started on Thursday June 19th and continues until Sunday June 22nd. Yesterday, we hosted an introductory workshop about how to choose a Matrix client, that was well attended. We have put the Matrix curtainbanner up among the hacker space and pride flags. If you are attending and interested in discussion Matrix, there is a good chance you can meet us in the vicinity! You can also always join our Matrix room #community-events:matrix.org, and #chaosevents:matrix.org for events related to CCC specifically.

For more info about Matrix Community Events, visit https://matrix-community.events.

Don't forget our next self-organised event is coming up end of July: Matrix Community Summit is back in 2025, baby! Find out more in the announcement TWIM post.

Happy hacking!

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

spaetz announces

Two weeks ago, testmatrix, a matrix server sanity checker was born and announced here. Since then, it has grown to version v0.0.8 and proven useful for supporting new users and their setups. It is available at pypi.org, so you can easily install testmatrix via pip or uvenv (or simply check out the code and run without installation).

Notable additions since that initial announcement:

Specific for MatrixRTC (aka Element Call):

• Test for unstable support of MSC3266 (Room summaries)
• Test whether delayed events (MSC 4140) are enabled when MatrixRTC configured (Fun fact: Testing my tool, I discovered that matrix.org has them still turned off :-)).

General improvements:

• Test for guest access and/or presumable open registration being enabled
• Add --anonymize switch (to censor domains from your logs for submission; still check the submitted content though!)
• Added a CI action, that runs the source checker mypy automatically on all commits, which is a bit of a pain, but has found real bugs...

If you have problems or ideas, hop into #testmatrix:sspaeth.de and let me know.

🔗Matrix in the News 📰

spaetz announces

An article at heise.de (in German) reports that the German federal government and states will decide on June 26 whether to use Matrix as a common basis for their communication. Apparently, the plan was created by the states of Hamburg, Sachsen-Anhalt and the German digitalization agency "Fitko". According to the article, if decided upon, the plan is to conclude phase "transition planning and validation" until the 2nd quarter 2026, followed by phase "transition & migration", with regular operations starting in 2028.

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [don't DM] announces

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

As of today, 13069 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3759 (28.8%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 18487 rooms.

Stats timeline is available on MatrixRooms.info/stats

How to add your server | How to remove your server

🔗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.