This Week in Matrix 2025-08-01

🔗Matrix Live S11E07 - Reflections on Matrix criticism over the last week

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew reports

Travis wrote a great update on recent T&S work over at https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/2486#issuecomment-3142023818.

🔗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.

🔗Trust and Safety Working Groups (website)

Nico reports

By the time you read this, you should be able to find documentation about the Trust and Safety working groups doing Research and Documentation as well as planning to support maintaining the matrix.org room directory on the working groups page.

If those interest you and you want to help out, feel free to join their public offices and introduce yourself! Sorry it took so long to set up and it will take a while longer until you see some output from those groups, but we are slowly organizing ourselves!

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} says

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:

• MSC4317: Signed profile data
• MSC4316: External cross-signing signatures with X.509 certificates and (semi-)automated verification

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

The Spec Core Team continues to work on room version 12 with a release expected in the second half of August. Once that's out, we'll be back to our normal programming.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Telodendria (website)

An open source Matrix homeserver implementation written from scratch in ANSI C and designed to be lightweight and simple, yet functional

Jordan Bancino reports

Telodendria has migrated all of its online infrastructure from the telodendria.io domain to telodendria.org. The new canonical address of our official Matrix room is #general:synapse.telodendria.org. Please update all links and bookmarks to ensure that they don't break when the old domain expires.

After a long break, development on Telodendria will be resuming shortly. You can read more in the July 2025 Status Update blog post.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

Last week, we landed many small improvements and fixes. Most notably, we fixed a common crash when logging into an account, prepared for room version 12 and made NeoChat generate a thumbnail when sending videos.

🔗Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille says

Want to get a head start and try out Fractal 12 before its release? That’s what this Release Candidate is for! New since 12.beta:

• The upcoming room version 12 is supported, with the special power level of room creators
• Requesting invites to rooms (aka knocking) is now possible
• Clicking on the name of the sender of a message adds a mention to them in the composer

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, it should be mostly stable and we expect to only include minor improvements until the release of Fractal 12.

If you want to join the fun, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. We are always looking for new contributors!

🔗Element X iOS (website)

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

Mauro Romito reports

• Submitted RC 25.08.0
• Started working on supporting v12 rooms on EL-X
• Spaces work is going smoothly, and we are working on supporting the tab bar to switch between all rooms, and spaces
• Same for threads, which can now be tested experimentally by using developer options
• When sending videos the app will take in account the max upload size defined by the server when compressing it
• If any file is bigger than the max upload size, we won't even try to send it and inform the user of the HS limitation

🔗Element X Android (website)

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

ganfra says

• Submitted RC 25.08.0
• Started working on supporting v12 rooms
• Some improvements and bug fixes regarding media
• Support for 16KB page size

🔗Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

🔗Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

jaller94 announces

Since yesterday, I've started updating Matrix Wrench – the webapp to inspect and tweak Matrix rooms and their state events.

You can expect a few updates coming this weekend to support room version "12" and offer fine-grained, client-side room upgrades.

Greetings from the Matrix Community Summit 2025 in Berlin. 👋

🔗Dept of VoIP 🤙

🔗Element Call (website)

Native Decentralised End-to-end Encrypted Group Calls in Matrix.

Robin reports

🚀 We’ve just released v0.14.0 with a mix of new features, improvements, and fixes! Notification stability is soon to be improved by moving the call notification handling into the EC app (instead of relying on EX and Element Web clients). Calls should now feel smoother with fewer cases of participants disappearing and reappearing, thanks to adjusted timeouts and sending multiple restarts for delayed events simultaneously. We’ve also polished the earpiece overlay with clearer text and better visibility, touched up error screens, and fixed an iOS Bluetooth issue where audio could unexpectedly switch from Bluetooth to speaker. 🔗 Full changelog

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Rory&::LibMatrix (website)

.NET 9 matrix bot/client library/SDK

Emma [it/its] says

Hi! It's been about a month since the last news update!

What's new/changed?

• Client
  • Added support for room version 12, and it's various changes
  • In addition to that, various utility methods have been added to help replace common patterns, such as offering a function to get relevant servers from "Room creators" in the room creation event rather than relying on parsing the room ID...
  • Fixed fetching events with MSC2815 (including redacted content) so it works on not my patched version of synapse (oops)
  • Properly support reading server capabilities
  • Expose server ACL events as regexes to allow more consistent matching across tooling
  • Added explicit support for sending events in bulk, though the behavior side of this is not yet finalized. This also supports my synapse patch to add server-sided support for this.
  • Fixed error and ratelimit handling somewhat
    • Rate limits no longer depend on retry_after_ms in the response body
    • Bad gateway errors will be automatically retried every 1-2 seconds until successful.
  • Added a lot more dials to the room builder, as well as some work on supporting room upgrades by extension.
• Federation
  • Cleaned up some of the federation related code with more abstractions
  • Proper federation authentication support has been added
• Developer/user experience
  • Added more debugger displays to summarize simple objects (such as event lists)
  • Added support for streaming and fixed some handling of JSON data - this should reduce CPU spikes where possible

And, as always:

• The code is available at cgit.rory.gay (or Github - read only, may be outdated)!
  • All contributions are more than welcome, be it documentation, code, anything! Perhaps, example usecases, bots, ...?
• Discussion, suggestions and ideas are welcome in #libmatrix:rory.gay (Space: #mru-space:rory.gay)
• Got a cool project that you're working on and want to share, using LibMatrix? Be sure to let us know, we'd love to hear all about it!

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Your all-in-one toolkit for creating Matrix clients with Rust, from simple bots to full-featured apps, with bindings to Swift, Kotlin, WebAssembly, Go and more

poljar says

The summer holidays continue and things are relatively calm. Still, progress hasn’t stopped. Here’s a summary of notable developments in the Matrix Rust SDK over the past week:

• The send queue can now report the current progress for media being uploaded, thanks to Johannes Marbach (#5453, #5469). Integration in the timeline should come Soon™.
• Experiments with MSC4306 (threads subscriptions) are moving forward, with the SDK now able to (un)subscribe to individual threads, locally remember thread subscriptions, and experimental PRs are up for automatically subscribing to threads. Exciting!
• Timeline items that were previously marked as UTD (Unable To Decrypt) but resolve into unsupported event types are now properly removed (#5463).
• Benchmarking is now enabled in continuous integration to help track performance trends over time (#5443).
• A draft pull request introduces early experimental support for encrypted state events (#5456).

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Matrix Community Summit 2025 (website)

Yan announces

Patchlevel: Real-Time Hacktogetherness in Berlin

Broadcasting live from the legendary c-base in Berlin, the Matrix Community Summit is in full swing: Four days of hacking, debugging, and spontaneous brainclustering—powered by over two dozen developers, bridge wranglers, and federation fanatics from across the Matrixverse.

The first two days were all about unstructured breakfast-hackflowing: all-day Brezn™, low-latency topic switching, and end-to-end discussions stretching deep into the night. All the while, chilled Liquid Drum’n’Bass gently massages the packets through the air—because nothing complements federation like a good sub-bass handshake.

As of now, the collective co-presence has shapeshifted into a semi-structured ad-hocracy: thanks to OpenKi, sessions are collaboratively summoned into existence via dynamic interest-expression-clicky-buttons (™ pending). Time, space, and participation auto-adjust, like a well-federated room on low power mode.

Whether it’s Federation Bottleneck Debugging, Bridge UX Flowchartathons, or Clickpath Optimisation Roundtables—if it fits into the Matrix mental model, it finds a home here.

And yes, in true cyberpunk fashion, this announcement was semi-synthetically co-authored with ChatGPT. Curious how it came about? Explore the full conversation here.

If you're in Berlin and believe communication freedom shouldn't be throttled by platform borders—come by, plug in, and federate your mind.

🔗Matrix Community @ WHY2025

HarHarLinks reports

WHY2025 is a nonprofit outdoors hacker camp taking place in Geestmerambacht, the Netherlands (approx 42km North of Amsterdam), on 8-12 August 2025. It is the latest edition of the quadrannial series of hacker camps in the Netherlands. Some people from the Matrix community will be attending, so if you are, too, keep a look out for the [matrix] flag! If things go well we might even be reachable via DECT MTRX etc. You can also reach us in the #community-events:matrix.org and #chaosevents:matrix.org rooms.

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

🔗Maptrix

hagen says

Maptrix is a proof of concept to map academic matrix servers based on matrixrooms.info and WikiData information. Inspired by TU Dresden’s map.

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine reports

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

As of today, 12782 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3678 (28.8%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 18065 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	continuwuity.codestorm.net	139
2	tuwunel.love	140.5
3	codestorm.net	207
4	continuwuity.rocks	207
5	envs.net	211
6	tchncs.de	222
7	ncat.cafe	223.5
8	unredacted.org	311
9	tomfos.tr	316
10	emzee.me	359

🔗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.