This Week in Matrix 2025-08-08

🔗Matrix Live S11E08 – Stitched History

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Upcoming coordinated security release reminder

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} says

A reminder that patches for the coordinated security release of Matrix server implementations will go out this Monday, August 11th 2025 at 17:00 UTC. If you run your own homeserver, please be ready to update around that time to receive security patches!

Further details are available in the original pre-disclosure blog post.

🔗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.

HarHarLinks reports

🔗Working Group update from the Governing Board

Last week we were excited to announce two new Working Groups! Huge thanks to Nico who is acting as the Governing Board sponsor for both the Trust & Safety Research & Development Working Group and the Room Directory Working Group. You can learn more about both as well as the existing Events Working Group and Website & Content Working Group on the website at https://matrix.org/foundation/working-groups/!

Feedback form getting these new Working Groups set up helped us at the Governing Board identify some parts in our bylaws and processes documents that were a bit more difficult to grasp. The Governance Committee of the Governing Board is responsible for improving both the Governing Board's own as well as the Foundations processes and has been working in parallel to fill the gaps: You can read the new description about what the tasks of Working Group Chairs are at https://matrix.org/foundation/governing-board/bylaws/02-bylaws/#working-group-chairs-and-vice-chairs-expectations. Tl;dr: if you really care about something getting done, then being the chair is your role for ensuring progress keeps getting made.

🔗Dept of Trust & Safety ⚖️

Cat reports

Cat has been writing about Trust and Safety in a matrix context and some stuff about community management on Cats new ish blog. So if you see Cat using words like Custodial Moderation and wonder what Cat is talking about you can check out https://neko.support/blog/2025-07-11/cats-views-on-moderation-terminology and https://neko.support/blog/2025-08-06/communities-do-moderation-wrong

Because it turns out a lot of people get confused by projects like CME and what role they play. Hopefully this writing is helpful in easing that confusion.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗continuwuity (website)

Continuwuity is a community-driven Matrix homeserver in Rust

Jade reports

I recently wrote an explainer for Policy Servers, one of the moderation features that's recently made its way into Continuwuity: https://jade.ellis.link/blog/2025/07/27/let's-talk-about-policy-servers

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

This week, Joshua has added a cool new feature: NeoChat will now show you a small warning when you're trying to reply to a message sent by a user who has meanwhile left the room.

🔗Element X iOS (website)

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

Mauro Romito says

• A RC with support for V12 rooms has been sent for verification to the store
• Also a new version with a bugfix for missing EC notifications has been released
• We are making great progresses with spaces, the implementation of a scalable tab based navigation system has been implemented.
• We also made a tiny cli tool here to show people how to get started with the rust sdk in swift

🔗Element X Android (website)

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

Jorge announces

It's been a long while since we had a proper update. In these last weeks we've been focused on:

• Improving the Element Call experience.
• Setting the foundations for the work on threads.
• Continue working on spaces.
• Kept working on improving accessibility in the app.
• Adapt Element X to the changes required for new room version v12.
• Improve how media upload is handled.

And of course doing the mandatory 'bug fixes and improvements'.

🔗Tammy (website)

Multiplatform messengers build on top of Trixnity Messenger

Benedict announces

Over the past weeks, Tammy got a shiny upgrade with version 1.1.22 (or in dev-speak, from Trixnity Messenger 3.6.11 to 3.7.0). Here’s what’s new and exciting:

• 📝 Beautiful Rich Text Rendering
  Rich text messages now render reliably and look great — bold, italics, code blocks and more, just as you’d expect!

• 👤 New Presence Icons
  Presence indicators got a fresh look. We think they’re much nicer — what do you think?

• 🏠 Room Version 12 Support
  Tammy now supports room version 12, treating the room creator as having infinite power level (as per the MSCs).

• 🚫 Refresh Tokens Disabled
  Due to random logout issues with MAS and our plans to upgrade to Matrix next gen authentication, refresh tokens are currently turned off.

• 🔧 Countless Bugfixes
  Too many to list — trust us, Tammy’s now faster, smoother, and more stable than ever.

• 📱 iOS is Coming!
  Huge progress on the iOS version — yes, even PDF rendering works already! Tammy on iOS is nearly ready to launch.

Stay tuned — the best of Tammy is yet to come!

🔗Dept of VoIP 🤙

🔗Element Call (website)

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

Timo K. says

Here is your VoIP team at Element with a short update: Element Call got a minor release this week v0.14.1. It fixes an audio issue with Safari a logging issue, that prohibited the team from properly debugging audio playeback issues in Element Call. Besides that progress is made to improve the LiveKit Token Management Service. Stay tuned to find out how to manage access to your MatrixRTC Livekit SFU more granular in the near future.

In the last couple of days we made some time to work on the MatrixRTC spec. Particularly the section explaining how multiple session in a single room will work.

🔗Dept of Encryption 🔐

🔗Element Crypto Team update

andybalaam announces

The Crypto team is hard at work on a project we call Invisible Crypto.

🔗What is Invisible Crypto?

The idea of Invisible Crypto is that you don't notice your messages are encrypted, because everything is so smooth and easy.

In practice, at the moment, we are working on "Exclude Insecure Devices": making sure that if devices are unverified, they are essentially ignored. When we turn this on widely, it will mean we no longer have to warn you about unverified devices because they essentially don't exist. It will also make everyone more secure because unverified devices can't be trusted.

🔗What have we been doing?

At some point in the future we will turn on Exclude Insecure Devices in Element clients, and recommend to other client developers to do the same thing. Before we're ready to do that, we have been doing 2 things:

• Fixing problems with verification: if we're going to tell all our users they need to verify their devices, we need to be sure they are able to do that! We've found and fixed lots of problems in Element clients (especially Element Web) where device verification can go wrong, or you can get stuck in a bad state with no clear way to escape. There's more to come on this work too!
• Implementing the feature: we've just merged code to exclude to-device messages from insecure devices, and we already have prototype code merged to exclude normal room messages. You can turn it on in the Element clients via a labs flag called "Exclude insecure devices when sending/receiving messages" which is accessible when the developer tools are turned on.

🔗What is coming next?

As soon as we're happy with the ability to verify devices (and fix broken setups) in the Element clients, we will announce a deadline: the day when Element clients turn on Exclude Insecure Devices by default. This will give users enough time to make sure their devices are verified, and developers of other clients notice that if they don't verify devices, users will be excluded from conversations.

This is obviously a disruptive change, but it's needed for security, and it will remove some of the most confusing error messages from Matrix users' experience, so we think it is vital.

Meanwhile, along with our other work (including finding and fixing unable-to-decrypt problems!), we will continue working through problems people have with the verification process, making it smoother, less error-prone and less confusing.

If you'd like to talk to us, you can find us hanging out in the Matrix support rooms for the Element clients and servers - see you there!

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Rory&::LibMatrix (website)

.NET 9 matrix bot/client library/SDK

Emma [it/its] says

News, news, news, but what's actually new?

Changes:

• Merged everything back into the master branch, which was way overdue anyways
• All Rory&::LibMatrix family repositories should now automatically get mirrored to GitHub 🎉
  • Remember to poke me on Matrix if you send a PR, as I most likely won't be monitoring these repos, they're provided for your own convenience.
• Overhauled the room creation tool
  • Added support for (manual) room upgrades - once again putting users in full, complete control over their data 🔒 (yes, it supports room version 12!) - Note: WIP
    • Early beta version, add ?previousRoomId=!internal:room.id to the URL to initiate an upgrade
    • [Rory&::LibMatrix] - Add RoomUpgradeBuilder containing all of the underlying logic
    • [matrix.org users]: Do not use this tool to upgrade your public rooms, as this will fail when paid accounts get rolled out
    • Added support for MSC4321 (annotated policy list upgrades)
    • Added support for migrating members and room state
    • Added support for migrating old unstable keys to their spec counterparts (ie. org.matrix.mjolnir.ban -> m.ban)
    • Preserve access rules and powerlevels, while taking some extra precautions to have state resets hopefully fall back to completely locked down
  • Expose a lot more settings, while reworking the UI
    • We now have some help links for more "advanced" options like guest access!
    • Managing room ACLs works now
    • Allow setting room type (useful when upgrading old policy lists that weren't yet using MSC3784!)
    • Added the ability to preload and manage state events that will be part of the room upon creation
  • Hint: you probably will run into rate limits - exempt yourself if you're running your own homeserver! There's no UI feedback for this, but you can keep an eye on the network tab in browser devtools to keep up to date!
• Lots of policy list editor changes, such as the ability to scan for redundant policies and major performance improvements

And, as always:

• You can find the first party hosted version of RMU here!
• The code is available at cgit.rory.gay!
  • All contributions are more than welcome, be it documentation, code, anything! Perhaps, example usecases, bots, ...?
• Discussion, suggestions and ideas are welcome in #mru: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!

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗matrix-alertmanager

jaywink announces

New v0.9.0 release of a simple NodeJS bot called `matrix-alertmanager', to receive Prometheus Alertmanager webhook events and forward them to chosen rooms.

Latest release brings possibility to customize links in the room messages, based on event labels, for example to provide links for easy alert silencing.

See https://github.com/jaywink/matrix-alertmanager for more.

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Matrix Community Summit 2025 Berlin

jaller94 says

Once again, many community members met up in-person to chat and learn from each other. We talked about topics like MLS, moderation, room upgrades, dealing with FLOSS free riders and the inner workings of the Matrix Foundation.

In contrast to the past summits, we focused on coworking and roundtable discussions. This way more people were able to join all four days from Thursday to Sunday and bring in their interests.

With the help of sponsors, we were able to once again offer drinks, food and an iconic location at the c-base in Berlin.

Missed it? Keep your eyes peeled! We plan to continue the summit on an annual basis.

https://matrix-community.events/

🔗TWIM Process

HarHarLinks says

This Week in Meta! The efforts of the Foundation to maximise transparency about its inner workings continue as contributors in all areas continue to chip away at it. Today, the Website & Content Working Group is excited to share the newest in TWIM process!

The TWIM process has never been secret per se, but like many things it was "simply done" ad hoc and thus not really documented so far. This started to change a bit over a year ago, when the awesome MTRNord (they/them), volunteering TWIM-editor, wrote up the TWIM Guide. From this point on the call for TWIM, sent each TWIMday morning, included a link to this document to ensure everyone knows the best practices for TWIM-ing. While the motivation for the guide was primarily a combination of trying to push the quality of submissions further and lighten the workload for the TWIM editors, this implicitly also documented some insight behind the scenes.

As of this week, we have both polished the guide itself, filling some of the gaps left, but most significantly also added an appendix that goes into even more detail of how TWIM works, how to edit it, and we try to explain why we do it in that way. For example, the regular submission deadline is 17:00 CE(S)T "Paris time", because the current team responsible for TWIM is based in Europe and in case of doubt needs to be able to edit and publish TWIM during business hours.

I'm very happy about having this written down properly, as it also allows us as TWIM editors to follow a well-structured to do list we can check off step by step as one of the many pieces of the possible that minimize human error and let us curate the best TWIM possible!

Please check the updated guide and if your're curious also the process at https://matrix.org/twim-guide. If you have feedback or suggestions, please contact us, the Website & Content Working Group, via our public room #matrix.org-website:matrix.org.

Thanks, and keep on TWIMing! Your editors

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine reports

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

As of today, 12718 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3661 (28.8%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 17989 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	141
2	continuwuity.codestorm.net	167
3	continuwuity.rocks	184
4	codestorm.net	191.5
5	ncat.cafe	205.5
6	envs.net	232
7	nerdhouse.io	255
8	tomfos.tr	274
9	wolfspyre.io	310.5
10	calitabby.net	396.5

🔗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.