This Week in Matrix 2025-10-24

🔗Matrix Conference 2025 - The Matrix State of the Union

Alternatively you can find it on media.ccc.de at https://media.ccc.de/v/matrix-conf-2025-74977-the-matrix-state-of-the-union.

🔗Matrix Conference Recordings

Beyond the Matrix State of The Union you can also find all of the Matrix Conference recordings at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl5dnxRMP1hUgnYEbpEsEEhIqY_KlO3NG.

They are also available on media.ccc.de at https://media.ccc.de/c/matrix-conf-2025.

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗DINUM joins The Matrix.org Foundation

Amandine says

🇫🇷 Very excited to announce that DINUM, the French Interministerial Digital Directorate, is joining The Matrix.org Foundation as a Silver member and becomes the first government to join the Foundation! 🚀

Matrix is the backbone of Tchap, the secure messaging app for the French government, and it is great to see a State stepping up to concretely support and collaborate with an open source project so critical to their functioning.

💡 We hope this will show the way to all the other public sector organisations using Matrix, especially after we kicked off a Matrix for Public Sector group at the Matrix Conference last week, hopefully soon approved by the Governing Board as an official Working Group 🤞!

➡️ check out the announcement blog!

🔗Matrix.org Foundation to receive funding from FLOSS/fund

HarHarLinks announces

We are excited this week that The Matrix.org Foundation is to receive $25000 in funding from FLOSS/fund!

Quoting from their website,

Started in 2024 at Zerodha, FLOSS/fund is dedicated to supporting critical, impactful, and valuable Free/Libre and Open Source projects globally.

Earlier this year, some Matrix nerds from #community-events:matrix.org visited the FOSSASIA summit in Bangkok, Thailand, (watch this space for 2026! 👀) where we met the super enthusiastic folks from FLOSS/fund who urged us to join as they are very excited about Matrix and see it as important FLOSS infrastructure; both directly by itself, and also due to being supporting infrastructure used to make significant amounts of FLOSS projects happen.

As we returned home and after getting approval from the Foundation, the Website & Content Working Group got to work and published the funding.json and related files to the website as well as some important projects of the Foundation, such that they would become indexed and available to easily browse at https://dir.floss.fund/view/projects/@matrix.org. This is a very interesting project in itself! It is really well implemented and in our eyes the setup matches the open source spirit perfectly.

And just last weekend, as we are wrapping up The Matrix Conference in Strasbourg, we receive word that Matrix has been selected in the second tranche of 2025 to receive $25000!

We congratulate all of the other awesome projects who were selected! 🎉
A million thanks to FLOSS/fund for selecting us, as well as everyone else involved for making this happen. 🤩
We are excited to see where the road for FLOSS/fund leads next year! 🚀
If you are able and looking to fund FLOSS projects you are building on, find worth supporting, or even just to discover new ones, we absolutely encourage you to browse the awesome directory at https://dir.floss.fund/!

Find out how else you can support The Matrix.org Foundation at https://matrix.org/support/. Does your organisation rely on Matrix? Join us as a funding member.

🔗Updated Support and Membership Pages

HarHarLinks reports

Just in time for The Matrix Conference, the Website & Content WG have revamped the /support and /membership pages of matrix.org for clearer structure, making it easier to find the methods to support the Foundation, and collecting all info about membership on one page instead of spreading it across multiple.

Check it out on https://matrix.org/support/, from where you can also navigate to learn more about https://matrix.org/membership/.

Please let us know your thoughts, and if there is anything else to add, at #matrix.org-website:matrix.org!

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

🔗MSC Crafter

Half-Shot announces

Working on a new small project to render MSCs in a faster, learner format than GitHub currently allows with intelligent rendering of things like:

• Comment theads
• Ticky boxes for FCP
• MSC state based on labels
• Linking together mentioned MSCs and spec items to easily lay out how a spec maps to Matrix

As well as that, primarily I want to add offline support to all of this so I can use it as a quick reference too when working on Matrix.

It's already slightly functional: https://github.com/Half-Shot/msc-crafter

🔗Weekly Spec Update

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:

• MSC4373: Server opt-out of specific EDU types
• MSC4371: On the elimination of federation transactions.
• MSC4370: Federation endpoint for retrieving current extremities

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3782: Matrix public key login spec (close)
• MSC3779: "Owned" State Events (close)
• MSC3757: Restricting who can overwrite a state event (close)
• MSC2839: Dynamic User-Interactive Authentication (close)
• MSC2835: Add UIA to the /login endpoint (close)
• MSC2416: Add m.login.jwt authentication type (close)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

The barrage of MSCs marked as FCP close above are the result of the next-gen auth being merged to the spec, and the Spec Core Team going through and closing all the MSCs that it obsoletes.

Otherwise, with the Matrix conference last weekend behind us, the SCT are continuing to focus on Matrix 2.0 MSCs with a more relaxed cadence.

🔗Dept of Trust & Safety ⚖️

🔗Draupnir (website)

A moderation bot for open Matrix communities.

Gnuxie 💜🐝 announces

Draupnir call for participation: reviewing the last development cycle and affirming the project direction

Hi everyone, if you value the work that we do on the Draupnir project and think that it is important then we need to hear from you. We are trying something new where we provide a short update and reflection about the project and an interactive vote where you can affirm contributors about the project direction.

• Cycle review: https://the-draupnir-project.github.io/draupnir-documentation/governance/reports/2510A-cycle-review
• Next cycle selection: https://the-draupnir-project.github.io/draupnir-documentation/governance/reports/2510A-selection
• Vote: https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/ewtgdO-YIwCjLhfJpwsj87m7RU7v6hJKHbu3BWqa1kg/
• Discussion: https://matrix.to/#/!UMROhYUQcvtGuoIIka:matrix.org/$7C2Sv-B-6HJ7fVMlCRd3R9jlZqe2rUxlPliEaB-M4yE

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element.

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} reports

Deprecation of MacOS Python wheels

The team has decided to deprecate and eventually stop publishing python wheels of Synapse for MacOS. This is a burden on the team, and we're not aware of any parties that use them. Synapse docker images will continue to work on MacOS, as will building Synapse from source (though note this requires a Rust compiler).

Publishing MacOS Python wheels will continue for the next few releases. If you do make use of these wheels downstream, please reach out to us in #synapse-dev:matrix.org. We'd love to hear from you!

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Extera Next

OfficialDakari reports

• Finally implemented polls. Extera Next now supports creating, viewing and participating in polls.
• A privacy update: EXIF cleaning. Extera Next now removes EXIF metadata from pictures by default. You can change it in Settings → Security.
• Added notification actions from FluffyChat.

Website: https://extera.xyz/

🔗Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

Ah, Autumn… The trees are wearing their warmest colors, the wine harvest is ending, developers are preparing to hibernate… and Fractal 13.rc is here!

Our repository has been relatively quiet since the beta release, with mostly work on bug fixes for our new audio player, and a bit of code refactoring.

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 13.

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 17+.

Mauro Romito reports

• More features are coming to Spaces, like a way to check their members and invite new ones
• Various fixes for iOS 26, one in particular fixes the scrolling behaviour not working properly sometime in the timeline.
• Notifications are also getting improved so that they may bring you directly to a Thread if the lab feature is enabled

Mauro Romito reports

• New RC has been sent for verification, it includes mostly fixes and stability improvements for iOS 26.
• We are also working on having push notifications focus directly the events they are representing once you tap them.
• Spaces work is progressing, we are implementing a way to view members of a space and manage their settings, while also taking the time to refactor and improve our codebase so that the flows that are common between rooms and spaces can be reused.

🔗Element X Android (website)

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

Jorge announces

The team has been working hard on improving spaces and threads:

• 📳 We want you to be able to have separate notification groups for threads in rooms, and these should take you to the thread when opened.
• 🏠 We're improving the architecture of the app to improve how spaces integrate with it, and also improving the design.
• 🔄 There is a new feature flag enabled by default in nightly builds to use WorkManager to fetch the notification content for push notifications. We had to implement this since there are some restrictions on Android 15 and higher that won't allow the app to make network requests when it's on background, even after receiving a push notification. This should now be fixed, but since it's a new implementation there might be some regressions. Please try it out and let us know!
• 🏎️ There is some planned work for improving the overall performance of the Element X Android application, focused on the bottleneck caused by fetching data from the Rust SDK and other rough edges. If all goes well, expect to see performance improvements soon!

🔗Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client.

Matthew reports

Element finally got around to renaming its legal entity from New Vector Ltd to Element Creations Ltd, as fun as it was having the company misnamed under the 2015 vintage brandname of Vector. This is purely cosmetic and has no impact on anything other the name used on appstore accounts (once updated), copyright statements and legal docs.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗synadm (website)

Command line admin tool for Synapse (Matrix homeserver).

jacksonchen666 (they/it) says

Here's the summarized release notes for v0.49:

• Unix socket support!
• synadm now sends a user-agent of its own now, including the version in the user-agent
• synadm media purge --before-days 0 now works (deletes all remote media before now). This also applies to local media deletion which has the same arguments.
• Speaking of local media deletion, local media deletion now prompts for confirmation.
• synadm correctly honors the "Verify certificates" setting (self-signed TLS/SSL certs should work now)
• Forgot to include this in release notes, but there's also now a detailed Getting Started guide on the documentation. It will eventually replace the instructions in the README, but I am just getting started on the documentation (heh).

The additional 2 hotfix patch releases (v0.49.1 and v0.49.2) really are just bug fixes for new things in v0.49. The latest is now v0.49.2.

Oh, and #synadm:peek-a-boo.at is our matrix room, and the Code is on the berg (uh, Codeberg). That's all!

🔗Matrix in the News 📰

MTRNord (they/them) announces

The Matrix Conference 2025 has been in the News at Heise:

In German: https://www.heise.de/news/Matrix-Konferenz-2025-Grosse-Plaene-und-sogar-das-Geld-dafuer-10773794.html

Or in english at: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Matrix-Conference-2025-Big-Plans-and-Even-the-Money-for-Them-10773975.html

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

🔗Synapse Admin Updates

Aine [etke.cc] announces

The last TWIM entry about etke.cc's Synapse Admin fork was very long ago - we stopped publishing them because the big / major changes were already implemented, and while each new release increased QoL and UX, there were not so much TWIM-worthy things.

But today we have a big thing to announce:

OIDC Auth support has been implemented by @beastafk:etke.cc

It was requested in the upstream project in 2023, and finally implemented in etke.cc's Synapse Admin fork, making it more convenient for servers deployed with MAS.

Apart from that, there were a lot of smaller-yet-convenient changes:

• New localizations: Japanese (thanks to @shirahara:etke.cc) and Ukrainian (thanks to khvalera)
• External Auth Provider-compatible mode (less painful for OIDC, LDAP, etc.)
• Ongoing mobile UI improvements
• Support 3pids in bulk registration (csv import)
• Improved user account status toggles
• And many more small improvements here and there

And for etke.cc customers specifically, more exclusive features have been added

Source code, admin.etke.cc (CDN version), and don't forget to say hi in the #synapse-admin:etke.cc room!

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [etke.cc] announces

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

As of today, 10603 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3018 (28.5%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 18062 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 9187 (86.6%)
• conduit: 419 (4.0%)
• dendrite: 366 (3.5%)
• continuwuity: 263 (2.5%)
• tuwunel: 217 (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: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	codestorm.net	181
2	nexy7574.co.uk	185
3	vibb.me	211
4	beeper.com	240
5	gingershaped.computer	312.5
6	calitabby.net	374.5
7	tomfos.tr	390
8	yipping.zone	551
9	skhron.org	623
10	mailstation.de	645

🔗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.