This Week in Matrix 2025-11-21

🔗The Matrix Conference 2025 - The Governing Board Transparency Update

You can find the same video mirrored on media.ccc.de at https://media.ccc.de/v/matrix-conf-2025-75078-governing-board-transparency-update. All Conference content is available via the Conference website.

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Luxchat Hackathon

Amandine reports

We're happy to announce that LU-CIX is joining the Foundation as a Silver Member! LU-CIX is the organisation delivering the Matrix-based Luxchat in collaboration with the Ministry of Digitalisation of Luxembourg and the Chamber of Commerce. Luxchat comes in three (interoperable) flavours:

• Luxchat4Gov for the public sector
• Luxchat4Pro for companies and organisations
• Luxchat, as a free messaging system for the general public and businesses, without advertising and without use of personal data, and respects the privacy of its users.

Earlier this week the three organisations also hosted a successful Matrix meets Luxchat Hackathon in presence of Madame Obertin, Minister of Digitalisation for Luxembourg!

🔗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

Time flies - it's another report from the Governing Board! We met about 2 weeks ago to go over the current status for the various Committees and Working Groups, to get an update from the Foundation, and to hear from the GB members about current challenges, concerns and opportunities. You can read the report on the blog and you can always ask questions in #governing-board-office:matrix.org!

One of the points raised was about the process for creating Working Groups - we've tried to make it easy, but we've not really made it publicly discoverable. We're working on that now, but to repeat earlier calls - if you have some work you want to form a group around, come chat with us in #governing-board-office:matrix.org and we'll help you out if we can!

🔗Dept of Working Groups 💪

🔗Website & Content WG

MTRNord (they/them) announces

The Website and Content WG has a Meta update for TWIM this week.

First of all we finally have been given a Room Version 12 update by the T&S team which allowed updated permissions and a clean slate to submit your posts too. Thanks to the T&S team for facilitating and executing this 🎉

As a result of that, we were forced to update hebbot (the tooling that's behind the TWIM bot) from a roughly 2-year-old version to the current main branch. As a result of that, we got many new features for TWIM and Room Version 12 support. 🎉

For you, this means 2 things when submitting:

• We now got intentional mentions support. If your client supports intentional mentions, you can now use it to ping @this-week-in:matrix.org when submitting news. If you have no support for intentional mentions, make sure your message starts with TWIM:.
• We finally got the double TWIM user cleaned up. This should fix confusion we had for a while about which user to ping.

You can find the new room at the same location as before #twim:matrix.org

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} reports

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:

• MSC4382: Peppered hash verification for E2EE content moderation
• MSC4381: Remove plaintext sender key
• MSC4380: Invite blocking

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC4191: Account management for OAuth 2.0 API (merge)
• MSC3824: OAuth 2.0 API aware clients (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC4323: User suspension & locking endpoints

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

The spec marches steadily forwards. There's still a fair bit of focus on Matrix 2.0 MSCs, but as the SCT waits for authors to update their proposals, we're focusing on other MSCs in the meantime.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element.

Devon Dmytro announces

This week we released Synapse v1.142.1.

This patch release fixes the regression from v1.142.0 where Synapse's MAS integration support for MAS instances hosted under a subpath was broken.

Also noteworthy:

• the next release of Synapse (v1.143) removes support for PostgreSQL 13 as per our deprecation policy. Synapse will fail to start when run with PostgreSQL 13.
• v1.143 will be the last release to support macOS wheels

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.

🔗continuwuity (website)

Continuwuity is a community-driven Matrix homeserver in Rust.

nex (it/she) [Continuwuity] says

I saw some weird things crawling around in our codebase, so I went ahead and called an exterminator. It's safe to say, some things definitely changed. In fact, so many things changed, that today we're cutting a new release for continuwuity!

You may have heard of such releases being cut before. Believe your eyes, reader, for the legend is true! Continuwuity does actually get releases! Sometimes.

This release is a bugfix release, with the express intent of healing some of the wounds revealed by v0.5.0-rc.8. There are no new features in this release (aside from advertised support for MSC4155, so you can now disable invites in Element without needing to manually edit your account data), as all of these changes were backported from the main branch. If you want shiny new toys, join #main:continuwuity.org and track the main branch! Plenty of cool pebbles and shiny gems there.

🔗Bug fixes

(full git changelog)

• Resolved several issues with state resolution v2.1 (room version 12)
• Fixed issues with the restricted and knock_restricted join rules that would sometimes incorrectly disallow a valid join
• Fixed the automatic support contact listing being a no-op
• Fixed upgrading pre-v12 rooms to v12 rooms
• Fixed policy servers sending the incorrect JSON objects (resulted in false positives)
• Fixed debug build panic during MSC4133 migration

🔗When is the full release already!

I know, I know, we're probably the only software ever to release 10 release candidates with no actual release. I promise, 0.5.0 will be happening soon! We've only got 10 things left to look at (at the time of writing), and only two of those are actually even blocking the release. Last time we gave out planned release dates, we ended up being months late, so we aren't going to do that again, however I promise it's a top priority and we're aiming for the near future. But hey, I'd like to see YOU bake a homeserver-shaped cake without the recipe book telling you how long it'll take!

Also, we're accepting any and all contributions! They don't even have to be code! We've got plenty of issues related to documentation, and other issues and pull requests that simply just need some community testing. If you've got a server (even just a raspberry pi sat under your bed), you can help out! If you're interested, feel free to talk to us in #dev:continuwuity.org (you'll need to join #main:continuwuity.org or at least #space:continuwuity.org first), we're more than happy to help out!

Anyway, until next time, which will hopefully be soon. Also please give us a star on github if you haven't already, it greatly helps with boosting our visibility ❤️

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Ement.el (website)

Matrix client for Emacs.

alphapapa announces

Ement.el, a Matrix client for the GNU Emacs text editor and Lisp environment, has been released at version 0.17. Changes since the last release include:

Additions

• Command ement-room-download-file, which downloads the file in the event at point (for image, audio, video, and file messages). (#323. Thanks to Arto Jantunen.)
• Customization groups for faces. (Thanks to Phil Sainty.)
• Option ement-room-hide-redacted-message-content, which hides the content of redacted messages by default. It may be disabled to keep redacted content visible with a strikethrough face, which may be useful for room moderators, but users should keep in mind that doing so will leave unpleasant content visible in the current session, even after being redacted by moderators.
• Option ement-room-list-avatar-generation: if disabled, SVG-based room avatars are not generated. This option automatically tests whether SVG support is available in Emacs, and should allow use with builds of Emacs that lack librsvg support.

Changes

• Disable underline for faces ement-room-list-direct and ement-room-list-name (in case a face they inherit from enables it, e.g. when themed).

Fixes

• Call eww-browse-url instead of browse-url in ement-room-browse-mxc (because the latter is not useful for authenticated media if the user has configured it to use a different browser). (#323. Thanks to Arto Jantunen.)
• Workaround change in magit-section that broke fontification in room-list and directory buffers. (See #331.)
• Handle non-symbol commands in command-history. (#330. Thanks to Alex Bennée for reporting.)

Feel free to join us in the chat room: #ement.el:matrix.org!

🔗Element X iOS (website)

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

Mauro Romito says

• The notification sound has been updated after some feedbacks to be more audible
• We implemented a way to test our notification service extension, which will allow us to identify any potential bug or regression more easily
• We are continuing improving our Threads labs feature, threaded events now support pinning and the banner shortcut will open the thread directly
• Spaces work is also going forward, we are currently implementing a way to handle the space members join rule in your rooms, so that you can have specific space members automatically join them. We are also experimenting with a room list that supports rendering and displaying spaces alongside normal rooms.
• A new RC has been sent for verification 25.11.3

🔗Element X Android (website)

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

ganfra reports

This week we've been focused on:

• Performance improvements and monitoring: after improving the database and decryption performance by almost 10x, we're now adding new metrics to make sure it doesn't unexpectedly drop in the future and find performance bottlenecks as soon as possible.
• Spaces: the work around spaces keeps taking most of our time, but we progress little by little.
• Fixes for notifications with UnifiedPush: we received some contributions that should improve the stability of the notifications when UnifiedPush is in use. We also fixed a bug that could cause notifications to be lost if there was a large amount of them pending to be resolved.
• The notification sound has been updated after some feedbacks to be more audible.
• New RC 25.11.3 has been sent for verification.
• And of course, lots and lots of bug fixes.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Ruma (website)

A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.

Kévin Commaille says

We are already here with a new breaking release, Ruma 0.14.0. We try to avoid making breaking releases too often, but we realized that a cargo feature available in Ruma 0.13.0 was not additive, and to fix it we needed a breaking change, so here we are! There are also other things to look forward to:

• Support for Matrix 1.16, including room version 12 and extended profiles.
• The traits and macros for API endpoints now have better support for the different kinds of endpoints in the Matrix APIs:
  • Adapt the endpoint path resolution for an outgoing request, depending on whether it is possible to decide the path to use depending on the response of GET /versions,
  • Adapt the type of authentication to add for an outgoing request, with added support for server signatures,
  • Add a method to extract authentication data from an incoming HTTP request.
• The minimal supported Rust version was bumped to 1.88, allowing us to port our crates to the Rust 2024 edition, and to begin using let chains.
• We also gained support for up and coming MSCs like "Do not Disturb" notification settings (MSC4359) and invite blocking (MSC4380).

We still have a bunch of issues opened and always welcome implementations for ongoing MSCs, so don't hesitate to contribute.

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [etke.cc] says

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

As of today, 11806 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3255 (27.6%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 18199 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 10155 (86.0%)
• conduit: 475 (4.0%)
• dendrite: 380 (3.2%)
• continuwuity: 300 (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	Std Dev
1	codestorm.net	169	183.12
2	envs.net	200	435.31
3	shork.ch	201	299.89
4	nexy7574.co.uk	206	282.66
5	vibb.me	212	550.35
6	arcticfoxes.net	222	244.5
7	uwu.possums.lgbt	275	615.53
8	starstruck.systems	308	635.19
9	gingershaped.computer	327	482.48
10	muoi.me	353	320.34

🔗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.