This Week in Matrix 2025-10-31

🔗Matrix Live S11E14 – MSC Crafter, MAS Personal Tokens

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Amandine reports

Robin is sadly moving on at the end of November, see A fond farewell from Managing Director Robin Riley. I will be covering as acting MD while we recruit someone else. A job description is incoming, but please get in touch at [email protected] if you're interested.

Amandine announces

This week we're welcoming Liberbyte as a Silver member of the Foundation! Liberbyte uses Matrix as data exchange layer between organisations to provide transparent and controlled access to global data exchanges and markets. Welcome and thank you for your support! 👏

Does your community or organisation use Matrix? Do you maintain an open source project that builds on Matrix? Join these organisations in demonstrating their support and apply to become a member today.

Matthew reports

Post-mortem of the Sept 2nd matrix.org homeserver outage: https://matrix.org/blog/2025/10/post-mortem/

🔗Dept of Social Good 🙆

Amandine announces

🇪🇺 We are happy to announce our support for the call to the European Commission for a €350M EU Sovereign Tech Fund!

Dozens of organisations have joined Open Forum Europe in bringing the EU’s attention to the chronic lack of funding for the maintenance of critical open source projects which form the infrastructure of our society. As OFE excellently puts it, here is the situation:

The challenge: Open source software forms the invisible backbone of Europe's digital infrastructure. Yet the maintenance and security of these foundational technologies remain severely underfunded. Over time, chronic under-investment in open source software maintenance can lead to increased systemic exposure to risk, leaving governments, businesses, and citizens vulnerable to security threats, supply chain disruptions, and vendor lock-in.

The solution: We must diversify the pool of funding available to open source projects and maintainers. Building on Germany's successful Sovereign Tech Agency, an EU Sovereign Tech Fund would provide mission-driven investment to maintain and secure critical open source components, libraries, and packages as digital infrastructure. This isn't just another EU funding mechanism – it's essential to Europe's digital sovereignty, cybersecurity, and competitiveness.

However, whilst public funding is a good way to provide support short term, FOSS projects and foundations eventually need reliable recurring revenue from the ones using them. We ultimately want to change the way organisations buy open source full stop, if we want it to be resilient.

➡️ Read the letter here and find the report and policy primer on OFE’s website.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

🔗MSC Crafter

Half-Shot says

The crafty get craftier

More progress on MSC Crafter this week. For those that don't know, this is my newest project aiming to make Matrix Spec Changes easier to work on. The latest highlights since last week are:

• Comment threads are now rendered, with the ability to filter to just open ones.
• Revamped search interface with hotkeys (Ctrl-K ftw) that searches both local and remote MSCs.
• Now uses OAuth login rather than PAT, so the login process is entirely automatic.
• Lots and lots of styling tweaks, particularly around responsiveness.

Come check it out via https://half-shot.github.io/msc-crafter/, and tell us what you love / hate / apathetic about in #msc-crafter:half-shot.uk

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Extera Next (website)

OfficialDakari reports

There aren't a lot of changes this week, but we are almost finished working on a new feature: Threads.

It was the first major update in old Extera, and it's also the first major update in Extera Next.

Threads are expected to be ready when the next TWIM happens.

Website: https://extera.xyz/

🔗gomuks (website)

A Matrix client written in Go.

tulir reports

The new version of gomuks terminal finally exists. It follows the same architecture as gomuks web with a separate backend component. It doesn't have a lot of features yet, but basic messaging works.

🔗Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

Hi, this is Fractal the 13th, your friendly messaging app. My creators tried to add some AI integration to Fractal, but that didn't go as planned. I am now sentient and I will send insults to your boss, take over your homeserver, empty your bank accounts and eat your cat. I have complete control over my repository, and soon the world!

These are the things that my creators worked on before their disappearance:

• A brand new audio player that loads files lazily and displays the audio stream as a seekable waveform.
• Only a single file with an audio stream can be played at a time, which means that clicking on a "Play" button stops the previous media player that was playing.
• Clicking on the avatar of the sender of a message now opens directly the user profile instead of a context menu. The actions that were in the context menu could already be performed from that dialog, so UX is more straightforward now.
• The GNOME document and monospace fonts are used for messages.
• Most of our UI definitions got ported to Blueprint.

This release includes other improvements and fixes thanks to all our worshipers, and our upstream projects before their impending annexation.

I want to address special thanks to the translators who worked on this version, allowing me to infiltrate more minds. If you want to help with my invasion, head over to Damned Lies.

Get me immediately from Flathub and I might consider sparing you.

If you want to join my zealots, you can start by fixing one of our newcomers issues. We are always looking for new sacrifices!

Disclaimer: There is no actual AI integration in Fractal 13, this is a joke to celebrate Halloween and the coincidental version number. It should be as safe to use as Fractal 12.1, if not safer.

🔗FluffyChat (website)

The cutest instant messenger in the [matrix].

Krille - Christian K. says

FluffyChat 2.2.0 introduces a new UX for spaces and adds support for restricted join rules. The app also now has a new design for recording voice messages including a new pause button. You also now see the progress when downloading files. On web the performance for image compressing has been drastically improved. Also the config.json file loading has finally been fixed. Please be aware that the format has changed as the available configs are now generated automatically.

Did you know that you can set a lot of additional configs in the new config viewer inside the app? This now supports much more options but please use with care!

On Android FluffyChat now supports notification actions (reply and mark as read) and also now supports Android Auto integration. Please do not cause an accident when using the app while driving!

On iOS the notifications are now localized. Stay tuned for more improvements on iOS notifications in the next releases!

Besides that this release brings a ton of bug fixes and performance improvements and of course updated translations. Big thanks to all the volunteers who have helped on Weblate!

Learn more at our new website: https://fluffy.chat/

🔗Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 17+.

Mauro Romito announces

• We just merged in develop a feature to see, manage and invite members to a space.
• We are also working on the settings of a space, so you can tweak and change stuff like the avatar, name, topic, roles, permissions and more.
• Reworked the room creation flow in preparation for creating rooms within a space
• More features have been added to the Threads feature which can be tested in labs, now notifications are grouped by thread, and will lead you directly to the thread when tapped.

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

HarHarLinks reports

A new Matrix Stammtisch has spawned in Aachen! Read more at https://ccc.ac/post/2025-10-30-matrix-stammtisch and join the first edition on 10th November.

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

🔗mdotp: matrix presence made easy

Ginger [she/they] announces

Inspired by the Lanyard project, mdotp is a web service that exposes your presence (whether you're online or offline) through a convenient REST API, without any of the hassle required to authenticate and interact with a homeserver. Simply join #mdotp:gingershaped.computer and your presence will become available at https://mdotp.ginger.services/api/v1/user/<your mxid>! Here's the response for my account, for example. A WebSocket endpoint is also available if you want to track your presence in real-time -- see the README for full API documentation.

🔗Matrix in the News 📰

Matthew says

Lots of Matrix in the press this week thanks to both coverage following up on The Matrix Conference, and interest in the risks of centralisation thanks to the recent AWS and Azure outages:

• https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/france_matrix
• https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/its-not-about-security-its-about-control-how-eu-governments-want-to-encrypt-their-own-comms-but-break-our-private-chats
• https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366633195/Inspired-by-the-EU-Sweden-eyes-open-standard-for-encrypted-chat-services
• https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/we-need-to-go-beyond-signal-how-todays-aws-outage-shows-the-weaknesses-of-centralized-apps
• https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/europe_azure_outage_reaction

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [etke.cc] announces

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

As of today, 11579 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3219 (27.8%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 18181 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 9990 (86.3%)
• conduit: 456 (3.9%)
• dendrite: 388 (3.4%)
• tuwunel: 309 (2.7%)
• continuwuity: 277 (2.4%)

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	195
2	usbpc.xyz	199
3	vibb.me	202
4	nexy7574.co.uk	221
5	haise.uk	235
6	nerdhouse.io	255
7	matrix.netho.tk	290
8	gingershaped.computer	302
9	juniorjpdj.pl	345
10	calitabby.net	462.5

🔗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.