This Week in Matrix 2025-09-19

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Robin Riley (m.org) says

This week we're delighted to welcome a new Associate Member to the Foundation: the Moonlight Institute!

Does your community or nonprofit use Matrix, or advocate for free and open source software, interoperability, privacy, or decentralisation? Join us for free as an Associate Member to show your support and participate in the open governance of Matrix.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} reports

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:

• MSC4360 Sliding Sync threads extension
• MSC4359: "Do not Disturb" notification settings
• MSC4358: Out of room server discovery
• MSC4357: Live Messages via Event Replacement
• MSC4356: Recently used emoji
• MSC4354: Sticky Events
• MSC4353: Per-origin linear chain
• MSC4352: Customizable HTTPS permalink base URLs via server discovery
• MSC4351: Odd Context Limits

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

Phew, quite a lot of new MSCs this week, covering some very interesting topics as well!

This week also saw the release of Matrix v1.16, which brings extensible profiles and room version 12, alongside a host of other changes. See the dedicated blog post for more details and the full changelog.

As one can see, the team is really quite excited about it:

Otherwise the SCT is currently focused on the proposals under the umbrella of Matrix 2.0. Keep an eye out over the next few weeks as the SCT works to bring them towards a conclusion, hopefully in time for the Matrix Conference in October.

Kegan says

If you've ever wanted to let any user set temporary, per-user room state in a room, you may be interested in MSC4354: Sticky Events which enables this. From announcing that you're on a call to broadcasting your live location, there are many use cases for such per-user room state. What's more, this state can be encrypted just like normal messages because that's ultimately what sticky events are: normal messages with stronger delivery guarantees.

I'm currently working on getting an implementation working in Synapse, and would appreciate feedback on the proposal from the community.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Tuwunel

jason 🎔 reports

Tuwunel is the enterprise successor to conduwuit 🏳️‍⚧️ funded in part by the Government of Switzerland 🇨🇭

🔗✨ New Features For Version 1.4.2

• Requested by alaviss an alternative DNS resolver can be used to reach local appservices and configured for minimal caching.
• Thanks to a report by DetermineAbsurd the m.federate field can be defaulted or forced to false when creating rooms using a new config option.
• Contributed by tototomate123 a nifty experimental feature can disable push notifications when you're active on one device from being sent to any others. Please thank them when your pocket stops vibrating while chatting on your desktop!
• By request of gr1n verbose logging builds are now bundled with this release. This mode contains additional messages at all levels optimized away in other release modes; this comes at some performance penalty.
• JWT tokens can now be used for authentication on any endpoint which supports UIA. This feature was commissioned and made public by an enterprise sponsor.

🔗📈 Enhancements

• Sliding-sync has been significantly refactored: performance has massively increased with many bugs and compliance issues also fixed.
• Hydra backports are now enabled by default; the change should be completely transparent.

Room deletions now also purge synctokens which can be significant to the overall storage consumed by a room. Room version 1 and 2 support took a step forward, possibly working for some rooms but is not yet considered reliable. Thanks to AreYouLoco for contributing an updated Kubernetes Helm Chart.

🔗🐞 Bug Fixes

• Special thanks to freb1b for investigating a bug which triggers the uploading of unnecessary one-time encryption keys. Running over ten maubot instances it became obvious after observing increased resources and laggy bot response. This update removes any excess keys for a device. Thanks to duckbuster for confirming neochat is affected. Clients confirmed unaffected include: Element, Element X, Nheko. Fractal, Cinny, matrix-rust-sdk and matrix-js-sdk clients and bots are probably unaffected.
• Thanks d4sha_uwu for refactoring alias resolution logic to remain compatible with the upcoming element-web release. This was an incredibly valuable contribution which will spare all of us from impending grief.

Room deletions now preserve a small number of records to properly synchronize with local clients and remote servers after the room vanishes; prior behavior is maintained with a --force flag added to the command. Specification compliance required the /joined_rooms endpoint be restricted to current members rather than including past members. Specification compliance required state events be made visible to prior members of a room where history_visibility=shared. The limit parameter to the /context endpoint is now divided with de facto compatibility matrix-org/matrix-spec#2202. The room avatar in sliding sync is now computed with greater compliance to the specification; this builds off earlier work done by tyler. The canonical alias for a room is considered invalid if the primary alias is missing or removed. Presence is no longer updated by the private read-receipt or read-marker paths, only public receipts.

💕 GitHub ✦ Releases ✦ Containers ✦ DockerHub 💕

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element.

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} says

The release of Synapse v1.139.0rc1 is running behind this week due to fixing a release blocker. Expect it to land early next week, with the full release a few days after that once folks have had a chance to test it.

Otherwise the team continues to work on refactoring the codebase to improve logging in a multi-tenant configuration, as well as begin to advertise support for newer Matrix spec versions (Synapse currently only advertises v12 and below).

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Element X Android (website)

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

Jorge reports

Another week, another TWIM. This week the work on Element X Android has been around:

• Spaces, spaces, spaces. Lots of work related to spaces, the feature is slowly but steadily taking shape.
• Threads: same as with spaces, we're working on finishing the work so the threads features matches the experience on the classic Element apps so we can later iterate on that and improve it.
• Element Call: tested some integrations of the latest changes in Element Call for a better UX.
• F-Droid is back! After fighting some external issues for quite a while reproducible builds are working again so v25.09.1 was released.
• Multi-account work is progressing too!

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗Matrix Connectivity Tester

MTRNord (they/them) reports

We got a new release. It mainly added support for (anonymized) statistics to be gathered.

The statistics are opt-in on a request level. HS level opt-in is deemed out of scope at this time due to the complexity this would have brought. However, opt-out for an HS can be done on request using an issue on either repo.

On a technical level, this stores some request results in a database in its raw format and also the aggregation data. It then provides a /metrics endpoint in Prometheus text format, and uses salted blake3 hashes to anonymize the server_name in the data. It offers currently the client side announced unstable features as well as server types and versions.

Additionally, over at the UI there is now a "Statistics" tab trying to visualize the data.

You are welcome to try it over at https://connectivity-tester.mtrnord.blog/statistics and report issues at https://github.com/MTRNord/rust-federation-tester and https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-connection-tester-ui respectively.

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗maubot (website)

A plugin-based Matrix bot system.

tulir announces

maubot v0.6.0b1 and mautrix-python v0.21.0b4 support verifying their own device by using an existing recovery key or generating a new one, which means they're ready for MSC4153

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗FITKO Neo Hackathon

Marco reports

Greetings from Krems (Danube)! We spent the first week of the workation hacking on an end-to-end encrypted Matrix-powered government-to-citizen communication solution. During the last days, we fought demo-grade keycloak setup, built a Rust-powered Matrix web client for citizen communication and an iOS app for citizens. We also did a lot of brainstorming and planning together with Germany's Federal IT Cooperation and Germany's Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation. Our location provided opportunities for walks in the vineyards, great food and music during the night. We (still unsuccessfully) fought Apple support while trying to register an organization with a German umlaut, enjoyed the community and mixed some new Spezi variations [Editor's note: in turn with Element Korl]. 🍾

The week provides a great starting point for the next iterations of our app and web client that will hopefully skyrocket Germany's next generation user interface to the public administration.

The project is 100% free and open source software and contributes into the existing Matrix ecosystem. Details about that project can be found on the project's dedicated openCode info repository.

🔗Matrix Workation in Krems 2025

Yan announces

From 15 September to 5 October 2025, the Rössl in Krems an der Donau (near Vienna, Austria) is hosting a Matrix Workation - a unique mix of co-working, co-living, hacking, and community fun.

The Workation is open to everyone: developers, contributors, and friends of Matrix. Participants join for daily stand-ups, spontaneous workshops, weekend excursions into the Wachau vineyards, and plenty of opportunities for hacking and late-night discussions.

Even though the Workation has already started, there are still up to 5 spots available between 22 September and 5 October — so you can still join!

🔗Tickets

Tickets are available via the Matrix Community Events ticket shop:

• Day tickets (simple): €70/day
• Day tickets (private room): €90/day
• Special deal: Private room (22 Sept - 5 Oct): €1,000

Venue: Schwarzes Rössl, Langenloiser Straße 7, 3500 Krems an der Donau, Austria

🔗Sponsorship

There are also sponsorship packages available to help make the Workation more accessible:

• Workation 1337 Sponsoring (€1,337)
• Workation 2342 Sponsoring (€2,342)

Why sponsor? Sponsoring a Workation directly strengthens the Matrix ecosystem. By lowering financial barriers, more contributors can join, collaborate, and share ideas. That collective exchange not only benefits the community but also feeds back into every Matrix-based project through new contributions, insights, and connections.

The best way to sponsor is to come by in person bring your projects, your attitude, and your energy, and share them on site. The second best way is to send us some money to cover travel and accommodation for participants who otherwise couldn’t afford to join.

🔗Links

• Event information
• Tickets
• Matrix room: #workation-nation-krems-2025-public:datanauten.de

Come join us in Krems - for hacking, learning, and building Matrix together in a beautiful location by the Danube!

🔗The Matrix Conference

Thib (m.org) announces

The Matrix Conference has published its schedule! Want to hear about how Matrix would fare on the moon (yes)? Are 74 million German citizens using Matrix in the wild? What is this MLS thing and what are the consequences?

Our speakers have the answers to these questions, and more!

• 🗓️ Check the schedule
• 🎟️ Grab your tickets, but be quick!

🔗Matrix in the News 📰

Matthew|away reports

Jon Crowcroft (Matrix.org Foundation Guardian) did a fireside chat with Paul Mockapetris (inventor of DNS) about redecentralisation yesterday - Matrix cameos briefly :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuX04cpsJqg

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [etke.cc] reports

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

As of today, 13063 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 16987 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 9635 (73.8%)
• conduit: 447 (3.4%)
• dendrite: 402 (3.1%)
• continuwuity: 245 (1.9%)
• tuwunel: 218 (1.7%)

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	146
2	tuwunel.love	152
3	codestorm.net	195
4	envs.net	201
5	shork.ch	273
6	usbpc.xyz	292
7	tomfos.tr	311
8	wolfspyre.io	332
9	calitabby.net	407
10	gingershaped.computer	426

🔗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.