This Week in Matrix 2025-11-14

🔗The Matrix Conference 2025 - The Matrix.org Foundation Updates

You can find the same video mirrored on media.ccc.de at https://media.ccc.de/v/matrix-conf-2025-81434-the-matrix-org-foundation-updates. All Conference content is available via the Conference website.

🔗Dept of Working Groups 💪

Sky reports

Cutting the ribbon on the reopened matrix.org room directory!

Back in early September, the room directory working group started an initial beta test run. For the first time in months, it was possible again to get new rooms into the directory.

Since then, we’ve reworked the multiple forms into one universal one to make things easier for users. We also identified several pain points in the process and validated that our imagined workflow actually works in practice. There are still improvements we’re actively working on, but we’re already happy with the current stage.

There is now a dedicated subpage for the room directory on the matrix.org homepage —you can find it here— where users can easily access all relevant info. Please share it around!

If you’d like to give feedback or get involved, feel free to walk by in our #room-dir-wg-office:neko.dev.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element.

Devon Dmytro announces

This week we released Synapse v1.142.0.

This release has a few notable changes for server admins to be aware of:

• Support for Python 3.9 has been dropped as it is now end of life
• The minimum supported version of SQLite has been increased to 3.40.0
• The MacOS Python Wheels are being deprecated and will stop being published as of Synapse 1.144.0. We would love to hear from you if you make use of these.

⚠️ We have just been made aware of a regression in Synapse's MAS integration affecting support for MAS instances hosted under a subpath. See this issue for further details. We are working on a fix and hope to have a patch out shortly.

Thank you to all our contributors for helping to make Synapse the best it can be. As always, feel free to stop by #synapse:matrix.org to join in on the discussion and if you encounter a bug make sure to report it here.

🔗Homeserver Deployment 📥️

🔗Element Server Suite (website)

Element Server Suite (ESS) is a backend hosting solution for Matrix-based communications that supports self-hosted and fully managed deployments.

Ben BZ announces

ESS Community 25.11.1 and ESS Pro 25.11.1 have been released this week.

• Both bring in upgrades of Synapse to v1.142.0 and Matrix Authentication Service to v1.6.0.
• Component images are now checked that both AMD64 and ARM64 are supported.

ESS Pro also brings in a fix for Element Call widgets in Element Web Pro (which is also in ESS Pro LTS 25.10.2) and some improvements to the default high-availability configuration.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

David Langley says

🌍 Hello from the Element Web Team

🔗👬 Future Room List Updates

Thanks to all who provided feedback on the first version of the new left panel and room list we released in September 2025. We have gathered and considered the feedback and used it to shape the future iterations.

For a visual of where we are headed and further details of what changes we will be making next please check out this issue.

TL;DR, we are going to:

• Reintroduce the "People" meta space
• Add a quick setting for message previews
• Add Room List "Sections" and/or "Personal Groups" (v1)
• Update the sorting mechanisms to prioritise/stick unreads at the top

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Rory&::LibMatrix (website)

.NET 10 Matrix bot/client library/SDK.

Emma [it/its] reports

Your friendly .NET 10 Matrix SDK

Good $DATE $TIME everyone! I wanted to give an update on the state of the Rory&::LibMatrix family of projects!

🔗What's new:

• We've been working on proper publishing on NuGet, while unfinished, you should start seeing build artifacts there fairly soon! These are powered by Nix, in order to ensure that builds are, in fact, reproducible!
• We've bumped the minimum required .NET version to .NET 10! This brings a whole swath of performance improvements.
• Made the HTTP/network error handling behavior more configurable
• Removed deprecated synchronous methods for resolving unauthenticated media download URLs
• Reworked how the synapse admin room list filtering works to be more generic and based on OOP rather than bespoke objects.
• BREAKING: StateEvent/StateEventResponse have been renamed to MatrixEvent/MatrixEventResponse! This was long overdue, but clarifies that these are for any matrix events, not just state events! Similarly, EventContent has been renamed to MatrixEventContent, as well as any related methods.

🔗And, as always:

• The code is available at cgit.rory.gay or GitHub!
  • All contributions are more than welcome, be it documentation, code, anything! Perhaps, example usecases, bots, ...?
• Discussion, suggestions and ideas are welcome in #libmatrix:rory.gay (Space: #libmatrix-space:rory.gay)
• Got a cool project that you're working on and want to share, using LibMatrix? Be sure to let us know, we'd love to hear all about it!

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Your all-in-one toolkit for creating Matrix clients with Rust, from simple bots to full-featured apps, with bindings to Swift, Kotlin, WebAssembly, Go and more, sponsored by Element.

Ivan 🦀 reports

It's been a long time… Time flies! Too much happened, so it's going to be a highlight this time!

🔗Latest Event, Event Cache, and Timeline

The new Latest Event API was blocked by another project: redecryption. So far, when an event is received but cannot be decrypted, the Timeline was running a task listening to various sources of information and was trying to re-decrypt the event. It was working nicely! The problem is that events were re-decrypted inside the Timeline, which is an in-memory structure. Events were stored as UTD (Unable To Decrypt) events inside the Event Cache (the database holding all events). So the project consisted at implementing the redecryption inside the Event Cache directly! The main part of this project can be found in #5746, which unblocks many features —including the Latest Event— and fixes a couple of bugs!

🔗Badge Counter

We all know how irritating it is when the app displays a new notification, you open the app, and you see nothing. Yeah. Sadly, we know. We have a path to fix this. But the journey starts with the cross-process lock. This is a novel API we've implemented ensuring only one process can have an access to a particular resource, like a database. This is really important on iOS for example, when the notification process can be fired concurrently to the main app process. We have recently improved this API by adding the notion of “dirty”: a process can obtain a lock, but the process is informed that the obtained resource is dirty, which means it has been obtained by another process meanwhile, and the current process should reload its in-memory state. The meta issue is #4874, and the foundation for this has been implemented and has landed in a couple of Matrix clients already. We are using this API to invalidate/reload the Media store, the Event Cache store, and the Crypto store for example. This is absolutely required to solve the Badge Counter issue.

🔗Space

Space is an active project! We are implementing more features (like having live ordering!), more MSC, and we are experimenting several UI. Nothing has landed, but so you know, we are actively working on it.

🔗Improved performance with SQLite

The sun was bright, the birds were singing, like any other days, except that Element X Android was too slow. And that morning, we wanted to solve this problem. It led us to visit numerous parts of the stack, but the summary of this journey is: we went from 600ms to 25ms to open a room on Android. On some old devices, it was sometimes taking 2-3s, and now it's constantly 25ms! The most notable patches are #5841 for the SQLite part, #5854 for the compilation part (enabling SIMD), and #5833 or #5827 for the SDK part. Note that the impact on iOS was also great but barely noticeable, from 20ms to 10ms to open a room.

🔗QR code login

QR code login is an exciting project: grab one device, generate a QR code, scan it with another device, boom, you're connected, all keys setup etc. There are 4 sides to QR code login: new device scans, new device generates the QR code, old device scans, and old device generates the QR code. We initially implemented only one side: new device scans. Now all of them are implemented: #5711, #5801, and #5818. All flows are being implemented in the Element X clients, but maybe other clients are working on it too.

🔗Don't panic

We've fixed numerous bugs about Sliding Sync, auth, Matrix versions, UniFFI, cryptography and so on! The list would be too long… but it drains too much time to track and to fix.

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Stammtische

stereo reports

Matrix Stammtisch Freiburg

Monday, November 17th 2025, 19:15 CET
Upstairs in "Blauer Fuchs"
Metzgerau 4, 79098 Freiburg

It's our very first edition - expect the two matrix admins of matrix.freiburg.social to be there: fx and stereo, and as special guest Michael Muench 👋
matrix room over here >#matrix-stammtisch:freiburg.social<
please tell us, if you want to take part, so the pub will not be overcrowded like the delirium in brussels ;)

🔗Matrix in the News 📰

mcnesium announces

Matrix in the News! German public broadcasting radio has presented the Matrix messenger protocol as becoming increasingly popular in their weekly computer and communications show (in German).

Erik announces

Since I didn't found any transcript nor English version, I created a transcribed and translated version here: https://pad.michelson.eu/s/qZHJwDM0F

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [etke.cc] announces

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

As of today, 11633 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3222 (27.7%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 19233 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 10012 (86.1%)
• conduit: 463 (4.0%)
• dendrite: 380 (3.3%)
• continuwuity: 295 (2.5%)

Stats timeline is available on 📊 MatrixRooms.info/stats

🧩 Integrations with apps and servers | 👉 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	186.5
2	vibb.me	204
3	ncat.cafe	212
4	envs.net	232.5
5	synapse.rntpts.de	247
6	uwu.possums.lgbt	255
7	tomfos.tr	262
8	nerdhouse.io	280
9	beeper.com	297.5
10	gingershaped.computer	366

🔗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.