This Week in Matrix 2025-10-03

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗The Matrix Conference

Thib (m.org) announces

The Matrix Conference is almost here, and we couldn't be more excited! It's the final sprint to get all ducks in a row, but everything is aligning well.

We're looking forward to having a relaxed Barcamp and and welcome party at Le Météor, with drinks and Flammeküeche courtesy of Rocket.Chat and Element, followed by three full days of talks and workshops.

Don't miss out on the conference, grab your tickets (and if you're an individual member, you can shoot us an email at [email protected] to get a voucher for a free ticket 🤫)

🗓️ October 15 to 18
🗺️ Kaleidoscoop, Strasbourg, France
🤩 Look at that impressive line-up
🎟️ Grab your tickets before we run out!

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Extera Next (website)

OfficialDakari reports

Extera Next finally got some updates!

For some time, Extera Next was only for Android, but recently we added AppImage for Linux, which you can download on extera.xyz website. Also, we've updated the website.

Some changes include:

• Pulled some updates from upstream (fluffychat)
• Added background downloads, so you can continue reading your chats while downloading a file (not works for E2EE yet)
• Image picker seems to be working, when you already have a default gallery app selected. So, you can again upload stickers and set wallpaper.
• QOL update for people, who mostly speak in another language than English: you can now mention users with non-ASCII displayname.

There are still a lot of problems we're aware of, but we're going to fix them as soon as possible.

Website: https://extera.xyz Our Matrix room: #extera:extera.xyz

🔗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

• Spaces work has made great progress, and we finally have a first stable iteration of this new great feature, this first iteration will allow our users to browse, check and see their spaces and the rooms in them, but most importantly it will be included in the next version!
• Threads work is also going forward, we recently also implemented a way to open matrix permalinks from and to threads across the same or different rooms.
• And since Threads work has reached a decent amount of progress, we decided that Threads will be the first feature of our new Labs section of EXI. No need to enable developers settings anymore, we are in fact introducing a dedicated settings section that allows our users to test our "stabler" experimental features, a bit like EW does.
• Also the next version of the app will support Liquid Glass for iOS 26, and more liquid glass improvements and redesigns are going to come in future versions.

🔗Dept of Encryption 🔐

🔗Element Crypto Team update

andybalaam says

This summer we had awesome intern Skye working with us, and they took on a cool project experimenting with encrypting state events. This has potential to give much better privacy in Matrix rooms by hiding room names and other room-level information from server admins and other prying eyes.

They wrote up their project and their experience at Element in a recent blog post: https://element.io/blog/hiding-room-metadata-from-servers/

Spoiler alert: they got their prototype working, and it's about to appear in Element Web behind an experimental labs flag! This should help us learn what it's really like to work with rooms most of whose metadata is encrypted.

We need to think carefully about how this feature works, and we need to acknowledge that this work is only a partial solution, because it leaves room-management events visible to the server. The conversation continues in Skye's MSC at: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/4362

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗Element Admin

Quentin Gliech announces

We're thrilled to release a first version of Element Admin, a user-friendly web interface to manage your ESS deployment! This is the first open-source UI capable of managing users in Matrix Authentication Service, leveraging the new OAuth 2.0 capabilities of the Matrix API

This ships in both ESS Community and ESS Pro starting 25.9.2, so just choose a hostname for it and update your ESS deployment to enjoy this new component! In case you're not (yet!) running ESS but still want to enjoy Element Admin for your MAS and Synapse deployment, you can head over to https://admin-beta.element.dev/ for a live instance.

It's available in multiple languages (head over to Localazy to help translate it!). It works great on both desktop and mobile. It's a fast, modern React app. It has both a light and a dark theme thanks to Compound.

But this is only the beginning. We've got basic users and room management for you to start with, but more importantly: this sets a solid base for the future 💃

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

🔗Matrix Connectivity Tester

MTRNord announces

Today we bring some improvements to the email alerts. Firstly, we now have some UK-Gov style email HTML added. The text content, of course, is still available for text-only readers of emails.

Next, we now changed the email intervals. The checks now happen in 5m interval instead of 1h. Additionally, to that, the system will now initially send a failure email, then do reminders every 12h. As soon as you then resolve the issue, it will email you telling you the issue was resolved.

Lastly, on the code side, the servers now get distributed evenly in a window between the 5m interval. The aim here is to reduce the load on my server if there are more servers subscribing to alerts, and instead aim for a more even load.

You can as usual check out the code at https://github.com/MTRNord/rust-federation-tester/ and https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-connection-tester-ui/

Or use it at https://connectivity-tester.mtrnord.blog/

If you want to opt in into the development versions you can use https://stage.connectivity-tester.mtrnord.blog/ instead which features the main branch.

🔗Dept of Hackathons 🍕

🔗Matrix -> Receipt

Nico announces

We randomly bridged our Matrix rooms to a receipt printer. Only works for text, images and audio though, videos don't work.

Greetings from Krems

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [etke.cc] reports

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

As of today, 10722 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3064 (28.6%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 17958 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 9292 (86.7%)
• conduit: 423 (3.9%)
• dendrite: 377 (3.5%)
• continuwuity: 246 (2.3%)
• tuwunel: 219 (2.0%)

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 room

tulir announces

The ping room has been upgraded to v12. The new room ID is !ping12Z19lU3TzHS4slLsUNPx-I7MZKyneYRUlO7voU

(this is mostly a notice for the TWIM editors to update the ping table generation script)

🔗#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

🔗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.