This Week in Matrix 2025-12-05

🔗Matrix Live S11E17 Element X Android gets a boost

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Website & Content WG Report (website)

It's been a while since the last status update from the Website & Content WG if we disregard the recent upgrade to the TWIM room and bot, so we wanted to share a quick wrap-up of recent developments!

• We continue to explore how to best and most effectively collaborate with the Foundation on publishing news, with the FOSDEM announcement by the Events WG following the newest suggested process with success!
• We have suggested to adopt an AI policy to the Foundation, and it was decided to adopt it on the website for now.
• In collaboration with the Room Directory WG, you can now find the form as well as further information about the room directory of the matrix.org homeserver on a dedicated page
• weeman has added TWIM to the website navbar, so you don't have to remember the shortlink anymore to get your news!
• vedant-vijay fixed an issue with the filters on the SDKs page
• Jack S. has spotted some bugs and opportunities to polish which we were glad to merge!
• We are maintaining the information about the Foundation, including it's members and are working with the Governing Board to keep its documentation up to date, as well as the Working Groups
• We have introduced a bunch of labels to the website issue tracker to help us sort tasks, and especially to point out some tasks that would be easy to implement even by external contributors
• We keep developing guidelines for ourselves to improve the consistency and professionality of the website step by step and of publications in general step by step, while also trying to keep an eye on making it as simple as possible to start contributing
• The #matrix.org-website:matrix.org room was upgraded and as part of that not only receives GitHub webhooks about activities on the matrix.org repo, but also the other repos required for the WG's daily work, including twim-config and the conference website repo
• Of course, we continue to publish TWIM every Friday 😉

As you can see, there is a lot going on! If you're interested in getting involved, you can find us in the #matrix.org-website:matrix.org room, or of course grab an issue and send a PR! We also try to meet in a call regularly on Thursday afternoons, which we announce at #matrix.org-website:matrix.org.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Tuwunel (website)

Enterprise successor to conduwuit, the high-performance and feature-rich fork of Conduit.

jason 🎔 reports

Tuwunel is now deployed at scale serving the citizens of Switzerland in production. Some optimizations were requested to reduce operating costs from projected growth over product lifespan: this release delivers with markedly reduced CPU usage and improves responsiveness.

🔗✨ New Features For Version 1.4.7

• Upgrade Support for Room Version 12 is now available. Though this room version has been supported for the entire 1.4 series, all Tuwunel servers have been protected by Hydra Backports on all room versions. As such, other work was able to be prioritized for the preceding releases.

🔗📈 Enhancements

• Recursive relations have been enabled. This is an optimization which allows the server to gather more data using fewer client requests, for example, of a thread with many reactions and replies. The implementation is now optimal and utilizes the full capabilities of Tuwunel's asynchronous database.
• Several miscellaneous but significant optimizations took place at the direction of memory profiling. This reduced load on the allocator for database queries and JSON serialization of complex objects. Heroes calculations and the joined room hot-path on sync v3 were further optimized to reduce the database query load itself.
• Jemalloc has been repackaged with platform-specific optimizations enhancing the build. The upgrade to the dev branch of libjemalloc itself was considered as too much variability for the same release, it is planned for an upcoming release.
• Thanks to element-hq/synapse#18970 by dasha-uwu, we have very slightly turned down the amount of randomness when selecting join-servers, More retries also occur within a single request if necessary. Thanks to gogo199432 and lifeofguenter for reporting problems in (#128) and (#205) respectively. More opportunities are still available to make large room joins robust.

🔗🐞 Bug Fixes

• Special thanks to yefimg for fixing LDAP logout in (#231) from a report kindly made by orhtej2 in (#97); thank you for your patience waiting for domain expertise to assist here.
• Thanks to Radiant-Xyz the example configurations have been updated to remove allow_check_for_updates. This fixes any warnings for the item no longer existing. (#221)
• Thanks again to Radiant-Xyz reporting in (#219) the /whoami endpoint now returns spec-compliant errors for Mautrix bridges (fe12daead9). Thanks also to @bobobo1618 for confirming the fix is working.
• Relations responses were sometimes incorrect in the forwards direction. This was fixed by (5147b541) bringing those responses into full compliance. Note the prior release had also fixed compliance issues but in the backwards direction.
• Server selection for backfill struggled sometimes for version 12 rooms. These rooms might fail to load history after join. Additional servers are now found using creators and additional_creators instead.
• Room leave compliance has been fixed for an edge-case where a room becomes empty except for a locally invited user which does not have its leave event sent down /sync.
• Thanks to grinapo for a report which lead to the discovery of events acquired over backfill not being checked for whether they already exist.

🔗⏩ Upcoming

Several planned items could not be cut into this release: SSO/OIDC support (#7), Element Call setup assistance and documentation (#217)(#215), User-level Admin Room and Media deletion (#192), and any other assigned issue. These items are on the short-list for the next cycle and mean a lot to us. To all participants: your issues are not being ignored and we hear you.

🔗💜 Tuwunel Needs Your Support 💜

We are looking for additional sponsorship so June can work on Tuwunel again full-time. If you are a company looking to accelerate development with features you need please email [email protected] right away.

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💕 GitHub ✦ Releases ✦ Containers ✦ DockerHub ✦ Tuwunel 💕

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🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element.

Devon Dmytro says

Upcoming packaging changes:

In an upcoming release of Synapse (possibly 1.145.0) we will be changing the build backend from poetry-core to maturin. This change should maintain wide support across distributions while allowing Synapse to take advantage of first-class support for interfacing between Python and Rust modules. This is only relevant to anyone packaging Synapse from source. Users installing Synapse from containers, PyPI or any other upstream package are not affected.

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 25.12.0 and ESS Pro 25.12.0 have been released!

Both bring in upgrades of Synapse to v1.143.0, Matrix Authentication Service to v1.7.0 & Element Web v1.12.6. Support for IPv6 only clusters is improved but not yet completed. A number of deprecated configuration options are removed, so please consult the release notes carefully to see if you're impacted.

ESS Pro now supports Adminbot to help companies manage their rooms centrally. There are also improvements to the default auto-scaling configuration.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Nexus (website)

QuadRadical (Ping) announces

Hi, around two weeks ago I started making Nexus, a Matrix client made with Flutter and the Matrix Dart SDK.

In these two weeks, I've made great progress, as you can see in the progress list.

However, I'd love some help implementing some features, or help with UI design, as it probably takes me longer to design a UI than to implement most features,

If you're interested, please let me know in our Matrix room!

🔗Element X Android (website)

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

Jorge says

In the Element X Android team, this week we've been focused on:

• Spaces! I know, I know, every week we work on spaces, but it's a huge task because we really want to have the best UX possible.
• Improve the UX for opening a room: instead of loading the joined room data while we're navigating, which can result in some flickering, we now preload the room and then navigate with the result.
• Added room list indicators about messages that are being sent or failed to send. There is also some ongoing work for displaying edits and reactions properly.
• Enabled the Sentry Rust SDK inside our SDK so we can get info about panics and other issues coming directly from the Matrix Rust SDK.
• Worked on doing some periodic cleanup step in the SDK databases to ensure they remain performant.
• Fixed some issues related to voice recoding, ignored users, the rich text editor sizing and the text inside notifications for spaces.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Rory&::LibMatrix (website)

.NET 10 Matrix bot/client library/SDK.

Emma [it/its] says

Your friendly .NET 10 Matrix SDK

Hi all! I wanted to give an update on Rory&::LibMatrix that I thought was exciting enough to publish!

🔗What's new:

• Rory&::LibMatrix is now available on NuGet! You'll find packages under the RoryLibMatrix namespace, though you may need to enable "prerelease" versions in your NuGet client, as all releases (at least for the near future) will be released as such, as I don't have a good versioning scheme.
• Repositories are now also mirrored to Codeberg! Come find us at https://codeberg.org/Rory-LibMatrix!
• We now target the release version of .NET 10, rather than RC's. Dependencies have been updated to reflect this.
• Touched up some federation code and added part of the redaction algorithm (targeting only room version 12 for now).

🔗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 🦀 says

Hello everyone! This week, we've released the version 0.16.0 of the SDK!

You may be wondering what happened to the 0.15.0 release, and you’re right to ask. Unfortunately, it had to be yanked after a problematic Git dependency slipped through during publishing.

This created a situation where some SDK crates were successfully released as 0.15.0, while others failed to publish. To avoid confusion and maintain consistency, the entire 0.15.0 release was yanked.

See more on the release page.

🔗Latest Event

• #5913 Edits are now supported as part of the Latest Event! Finally, one might say, and to which we can only agree.
• #5624 The old Latest Event API has been removed. -3001 lines of code, yepee.

🔗Timeline

• #5900 The Timeline can now be configured to hide read receipts on state events. Not all clients expect this behaviour, so this is a configuration, see the new TimelineReadReceiptTracking type.

🔗Send Queue

• #5920 The Send Queue now inserts newly sent events in the Event Cache directly! It avoids the situation where a sent event could disappear: it is no longer a local event but not yet a remote event if the server lags to give it back via the /sync. Now we no longer wait on the server, the event is already here, period.

🔗Client

• #5916 Support refreshing the access token when fetching the server versions. A deadlock has also been removed. One stone, two problems.
• #5911 We are improving performance of the stores relying on SQLite. We've noticed that fragmentation is a non-negligible performance bottleneck. This patch introduces Client::optimize_stores to optimise… well… the stores. This is an exploration to see how to defragment the database without disturbing your apps too much. The impact is particularly noticeable on Android devices.
• #5917 Support for the stable m.oauth UIAA type has been added, as it has recently landed in the Matrix specification.

🔗Room List

• #5927 The Room List now receives less updates, which reduces the number of redraws app-side.

🔗Bindings

• #5919 A network request was sent only for log purposes. It was breaking the offline mode detection, and was slowing down the startup on slow network conditions. This request has been removed as it was considered useless!

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗Matrix Connectivity Tester v2

MTRNord (they/them) reports

Last week I mentioned a rework of the UI. This week, I can announce that its source code is available at https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-connection-tester-ui/.

Additionally, we now have a Weblate instance and would like to get translations for the new v2 design. You can find the instance over at https://weblate.mtrnord.blog/projects/matrix-connectivity-tester/.

Finally, there is now a general outline of the Documentation pages at https://beta.connectivity-tester.mtrnord.blog/docs available and a new Statistics UI over at https://beta.connectivity-tester.mtrnord.blog/statistics.

As a result, the next goals are now to get the translations improved and extended and also the documentation has to be written before we can publish this to the stable URL.

As usual, you can find the stable deployment at https://connectivity-tester.mtrnord.blog/ for your convenience as well as the source code at https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-connection-tester-ui and our mailing list at https://lists.midnightthoughts.space/mailman3/lists/matrix-connectivity-tester.lists.midnightthoughts.space/

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Matrix at FOSDEM 2026

Thib (m.org) reports

The Matrix.org Foundation and its community will once again be at FOSDEM in 2026, and we need YOU 🫵

• Jan 30: Big Silo is trying to control the Federation! Join us for a collaborative hackathon where we join forces to fight back!
• Jan 31 & Feb 1: We have a booth for the whole duration of FOSDEM!
• Feb 1: We coordinate the Decentralised Communication Devroom

Find all the information about it on our blog.

🔗Dept of Stammtische 🍻

🔗Matrix Stammtisch Aachen

HarHarLinks says

Next Monday, 2025-12-08, Matrix Stammtisch Aachen takes off for its second edition! This is an informal local meetup for everyone interested in Matrix to any degree! We might do anything from figuring out what server to sign up with to configuring notifications which have no UI setting. Learn more at https://ccc.ac/post/2025-10-30-matrix-stammtisch and join the room at #matrix-stammtisch:ccc.ac to get in touch!

Interested in joining or starting your own local meetup? You can find many organisers of other local events at #events-wg:matrix.org and #community-events:matrix.org.

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [etke.cc] says

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

As of today, 11725 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3218 (27.4%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 16784 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 10058 (85.8%)
• conduit: 472 (4.0%)
• dendrite: 368 (3.1%)
• continuwuity: 306 (2.6%)

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	tuwunel.love	146
2	pingtest.dedyn.io	166
3	continuwuity.codestorm.net	191
4	codestorm.net	214
5	vibb.me	245
6	prisma.moe	273
7	unredacted.org	278
8	shork.ch	292
9	gingershaped.computer	295
10	nerdhouse.io	311

🔗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.