This Week in Matrix 2025-11-07

🔗Matrix Live S11E15 – Figma but based on Matrix?

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗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.

Gwmngilfen announces

Howdy folks, your friendly GB here - I've been a bit quiet recently, but we wanted to let you all know that the latest 6-monthly Board meeting happened this week! Lots to cover, Working Group updates, challenges, plans for upcoming work, and so on - so you can expect a report out in the near future on that! Stay tuned 🙂

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

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:

• MSC4377: Clarify Image Pack Ordering

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

The Olm and Megolm specs were moved into the spec website itself, rather than existing on a separate GitLab repository. This makes them easier for readers to find. Otherwise, the spec text itself has not changed. You can find them here: https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/olm-megolm/

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Tuwunel

jason 🎔 announces

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

🔗✨ New Features For Version 1.4.6

• Element Call discovery support (MSC4143) was implemented by tototomate123. Adding a [[global.well_known.rtc_transports]] section in your config file enables discovery. More information on setting up Element Call can be found at Spaetzblog, skipping step one, and performing step three in your Tuwunel config.
• Dehydrated Device support (MSC3814) is now available. This feature allows users to receive encrypted messages without being logged in. Supporting clients will setup the dehydrated device automatically and it will "just work" behind the scenes. This feature was commissioned and made public by an enterprise sponsor.
• Notification panel (the 🔔 button) has been implemented. Even though Element-web now requires enabling it in the Labs menu, the underlying support (GET /_matrix/client/v3/notifications) enhances the push-notification handling of other clients.
• Live room previews are now available. This support (GET /_matrix/client/v3/events) allows users, including guests, to sync updates for a public room without joining.
• Thanks to a suggestion by cyberdoors, the configuration option encryption_enabled_by_default_for_room_type is now available. This feature can enable encryption for a room even when the client does not.

🔗📈 Enhancements

• Thank you tototomate123 for improving the reverse-proxy docs, adding dedicated pages for both Caddy and Nginx. Thanks to tycode for pointing out the docs were missing for alternative proxies.
• Thanks to an observation by iwalkalone69, the last-seen time for a device in the session list is now updated acceptably. This function piggybacks on the presence system to prevent writing too frequently.
• Thanks to an inquiry by EntityinArray, guest-accounts can now be enabled while registration tokens are also enabled and continue to prevent open account registration.
• Courtesy of dasha-uwu the list of servers attempted when joining a room is now properly shuffled to increase the odds of finding a viable server, especially if an additional join attempt is made.

🔗🐞 Bug Fixes

• Special thanks to BVollmerhaus for finding the TURN secret file configured by turn_secret_file was broken, forcing users to configure turn_secret directly. Thank you for fixing this with a PR.
• Thank you scvalex for updating the nix build for Tuwunel's integration tests and re-enabling all checks with an amazing last-minute PR.
• Thanks to a report by Anagastes, Nheko and NeoChat users can now enjoy properly verified devices. Special thanks for the assistance of deepbluev7 with diagnosing the cross-signing signature issue.
• Database columns intended for deletion, notably roomsynctoken_shortstatehash, never had the deletion command actually invoked on them 😭 explaining the lack of enthusiasm after the 1.4.3 release introduced stateless sync. Users will now see the free disk space they were promised. This was uncovered during an unrelated issue investigation courtesy of frebib.

Thanks to investigation by dasha-uwu the pagination tokens in the /relations endpoint were buggy and now operate correctly. Thanks you Polve for identifying the DynamicUser=yes directive in the systemd files was invalid and advising a replacement. Thanks you daudix for reporting an edge-case where the server will refuse to start rather than recreating a missing media directory. Push rule evaluation was never implemented for invites arriving over federation; notifications are now properly sent in this case. Sliding-sync handlers were susceptible to errors under rare circumstances escaping to cause an HTTP 500, which wreaked havoc on the rust-sdk. Federating with Conduit over several non-essential endpoints was broken. It is unclear whether this affected an actual Conduit release version, but thanks to kladki a fix is scheduled and we have included a workaround now on this end.

🔗💜 One More Thing

I would like to make a special note of the extraordinary kindness and positivity from everyone in and around the Tuwunel community. Thank you again to grin for being a fantastic host of #tuwunel:matrix.org. I have also had the privilege of meeting and assisting countless users over DM who have been so incredibly polite and fill me with joy after we solve issues. You represent the best of Matrix and motivate me to continue giving this project my all.

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💕 GitHub ✦ Releases ✦ Containers ✦ DockerHub ✦ Tuwunel 💕

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🔗Homeserver Deployment 📥️

🔗ESS 25.10 releases are now available

Patrick Maier announces

Good news! 25.10 releases of Element Server Suite (ESS) have been published. ESS is the Matrix backend distribution from Element in their capacity as the creators of Matrix, which comes in different editions:

• ESS Community - Official helm charts and open source components from Element intended for non-commercial use
• ESS Pro - the new official helm charts from Element and Pro components intended for commercial use
• ESS TI-M - a special version of ESS Pro tailored to the requirements of the German healthcare system based on Gematik's TI-Messenger
• ESS Classic - the legacy operator-based Matrix distribution from Element

After the great success showing off ESS at this year's Matrix Conference we’re seeing a lot of interest in the new Helm-based ESS stack: ESS Community and ESS Pro and we are proud of the new stack maturing rapidly.

You can re-watch the respective talks from the Matrix Conference 2025 here:

• The Element update: Shininess, scalability and sustainability (Element's keynote including a live demo of setting up ESS Community and upgrading it to ESS Pro)
• ESS - Element's distribution for Matrix deployments

The new releases include new LTS versions, a full migration path to the Matrix Authentication Service and Element X for ESS Classic users as well as the new Element Admin tooling in ESS Community/Pro. Read more on our blog post.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗NeoBoard Standalone (website)

Private and secure whiteboard for everyone.

Milton Moura (n.io) says

Hello from Nordeck - Today we have great news to share!

🔗NeoBoard Standalone is now an open source software project!

After a little over a year of development, during which we presented our first technical advances on building a standalone Matrix Widget API Client application at The Matrix Conference 2024, and the more recent announcement that NeoBoard Standalone will join the openDesk suite as the default Whiteboard application, at the 2025 Matrix Conference, one crucial point was missing: publishing it as an open-source project.

So today we are proud to announce that NeoBoard Standalone is now available on GitHub as an open-source project licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL-3.0).

🔗What is NeoBoard Standalone?

If you are not familiar with NeoBoard Standalone, or the NeoBoard Widget, it’s a private, secure, real-time collaborative whiteboard built on the Matrix protocol. It’s a standalone web app that acts as a lightweight, whiteboard-centric and simplified Matrix client, where the focus is on content creation, brainstorming and visual collaboration.

Under the hood, it’s using Matrix to provide a replicated data store for CRDT-based events exchanged between all users collaborating in a whiteboard session. These custom events encapsulate shape and drawing data and are shared via the room timeline for persistence and non-persistent realtime data is exchanged via WebRTC using MatrixRTC and LiveKit as a transport backend.

🔗What’s Next?

We’re hard at work migrating from a fixed-size, slide-based user interface to an infinite canvas model with frames, and are planning a first major release once that is complete.

Stay tuned for updates and we always welcome feedback from businesses, individuals and the community!

You can reach out to us by visiting our public room at #nordeck:nordeck.io

🔗We're also on Matrix Live this week!

🎤 📣 📺 We just had the opportunity to talk about NeoBoard on this week's Matrix Live, so if you're reading this on the matrix.org blog, check out the top of this TWIM article to watch the interview video!

🔗Extera Next

OfficialDakari says

New development version of Extera Next has got some new features this week:

• Threads. Keep your chats organised by moving discussions into threads. This was not copied from FluffyChat, so expect some bugs.
• New space UX. UI for spaces was updated to give it a better look.

That's all for this week! Join our Matrix space → #space:extera.xyz

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Polyjuice (website)

Elixir libraries related to the Matrix communications protocol.

uhoreg reports

After a too-long hiatus, I've started working on the Polyjuice Project again, a set of libraries and tools for Matrix written in Elixir.

I've updated the room version support in Polyjuice Utils (a library for functions common to clients and servers) to room version 11 with the help of Ben W. Room version support in Polyjuice Utils includes identifier parsing, redaction rules, and authorization checks. Room version 12 should be coming soon.

I've also started adding API definitions (such as endpoint paths and schema definitions) to Polyjuice Utils, and updating Polyjuice Client and Polyjuice Server to use those API definitions. This should reduce code duplication between Polyjuice Client and Polyjuice Server, and make things more consistent. The current goal is to implement API definitions for at least all the endpoints and types that Polyjuice Client and Polyjuice Server currently use. This will probably take a while, and means that I won't be implementing much new stuff while I work on this, but I think it will be worth the effort.

Aside from those changes, I will be dropping support for older versions of Elixir. The goal is try to support the version of Elixir that is in Debian oldstable, and as such, Elixir versions older than 1.14 will no longer be supported.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

spaetz says

testmatrix (a synapse sanity checker) has a new release (v0.2). Minor improvements are:

• Test for MSC 4108 (QR code login)
• Check if public room directory is enabled
• Warn if client well-known baseurl does not start with https://
• a few other minor bugfixes and improvements

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗FOSDEM 2026 Decentralised Communications Devrooom

Matthew says

Excited to announce that we proposed a Decentralised Devroom for FOSDEM 2026 as a change from the usual Matrix devroom, to reflect FOSDEM's emphasis this year on cross-project collaboration rather than per-project devrooms. The devroom has been accepted, and we've now issued a Call For Participation here: https://matrix.org/blog/2025/11/fosdem-cfp/ - so you have 3 weeks to submit talks on the latest and great projects you'd like to present. So please get thinking and submitting (especially if you want Matrix to be represented in the devroom! :D)

🔗The Matrix Conference 2025 Photos

HarHarLinks says

The Foundation and Events Working Group are excited to share the photos from The Matrix Conference 2025! As with most non-code assets, they are available under CC BY-SA, allowing you to share and edit them, as long as you give us credit and use the same license. You can view and download them here; the README contains more detail about how you may use the photos. When sharing them online, please tag with the Conference hashtag #MatrixConf2025 and feel free to mention the Foundation's account on the respective platform, if one exists!

🔗Stammtische

Michael Muench announces

New Matrix Stammtisch Freiburg. Initial meet-up on 17.11.2025.

Find more details here #matrix-stammtisch:freiburg.social and/or get in touch with stereo

HarHarLinks reports

Reminder that the first Matrix Stammtisch Aachen is taking place Monday evening! It's an informal gathering for people who are interested in exchanging their experiences with Matrix on all levels. Read more at https://ccc.ac/post/2025-10-30-matrix-stammtisch and if interested join the chatroom at #matrix-stammtisch:ccc.ac!

🔗Dept of Blogs

MTRNord (they/them) says

I wrote a blogpost about my thoughts on Matrix where I go a bit over my history with matrix, what I like, what I don't like and what I want to improve in the future. Have a look over at https://mtrnord.blog/2025/11/07/my-thoughts-on-matrix-in-2025/ :)

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [etke.cc] announces

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

As of today, 11596 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3227 (27.8%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 18107 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 10011 (86.3%)
• conduit: 456 (3.9%)
• dendrite: 381 (3.3%)
• tuwunel: 309 (2.7%)
• continuwuity: 286 (2.5%)

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	156
2	codestorm.net	162
3	usbpc.xyz	169.5
4	vibb.me	194
5	nexy7574.co.uk	199.5
6	sharkee.top	251
7	unredacted.org	252
8	tomfos.tr	267
9	envs.net	291
10	shork.ch	340

🔗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.