This Week in Matrix 2026-01-05

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗FOSDEM

Thib announces

🔗Hackathon

We're excited that more than 50 people have signed up for our Hackathon before FOSDEM, including some seasoned developers who are willing to mentor newcomers. We're looking forward to meeting everyone there!

If your organisation wants to support the Matrix community for this event and get brand recognition for it, please reach out to [email protected] to sponsor the prizes, lunch, dinner, or drinks!

🕐️ Friday, 30th January, 09:00 - 17:00 CET (local time)
🏢 HSBXL, Rue Osseghem 53, 1080 Molenbeek
🎫 Free registration here
[m] Join us in #fosdem-2026-hackathon:matrix.org to stay informed!

🔗Booth

We'll have a booth for both FOSDEM days, on Sat. 31st Jan. and Sun. 1st Feb. We already have a solid team staffing the booth, but there are a few remaining slots if you want to lend us a hand and leave FOSDEM with a limited edition volunteer T-shirt! (Little birds told me this year the T-shirts would be Spezicolored!)

Find us in building AW!

🔗Devroom

We're coordinating the Decentralised Communications Devroom. We have a pretty cool line-up with focusing on T&S, Matrix, XMPP, ActivityPub, AT and more.

Joins us to get up to speed on what's happening in the decentralised communications world, and why not help cross-pollinate between projects 🐝

🕐️ Sunday, 1st February, 09:00 - 17:00 CET (local time) 🏢 Room AW1.126

dominik says

🔗Call for Demos

As already announced we will (again) have a booth at FOSDEM. If you want to join the Booth-Team you can sign up for shifts in our new shiny volunteering management tool.

To showcase the Matrix ecosystem we are searching for demos for our booth. It can be a pure Matrix project, or it can be about how Matrix helps bridge systems together. If you have ideas, input, or even concrete proposals for what we could show: Send them to us!, either in our Events-WG room or via email.

As the internet availability at the booth might not be the best, local-only or local-first demos would suit our use-case much better than ones relying on Online-Services.

There are no limits:

• You saw something at another place which blew your mind?
• You have a cool project which showcases an aspect of Matrix?
• You developed something which could be useful for running local demos?
• You have stickers for your Matrix project?

We are excited to hear about your ideas!

🔗39C3 - Chaos Communication Congress Matrix Community Assembly

Nico says

As in the previous years, the Matrix community had another assembly at the Chaos Communication Congress! Next to Matrix and Spezifisch stickers, we also provided a help hotline using MTRX on your DECT during the event and had at least 6 successful support calls and helped several users troubleshoot and fix their servers.

We also had several sessions at the assembly, talking about the TI Messenger, exchanging user experiences, communicating with governments as well as discussing how to promote alternative Matrix server instances. The latter might even result in a Working Group around decentralized server sign-ups in the future!

If you didn't attend congress, there are also several talks, that might not be related to Matrix directly, but definitely hit the same spirit:

• Cory Doctorow calling to establish a post-American, enshittification-resistant internet: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet
• Marc-Uwe Kling (and Kangaroo) and Linus Neumann calling for the digital revolution and establishing the digital independence day on the first Sunday every month: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-die-kanguru-rebellion-digital-independence-day

Especially for the latter you may want to contribute. There is currently no recipe for switching to Matrix, but it definitely would be one of the decentralized alternatives: https://di.day/

So far we know of at least one event organized around DIDay in Dresden: https://c3d2.de/news/event-20260104-di-day.html

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Tuwunel (website)

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

jason announces

🔗🚀 Feature Preview

SSO / OIDC Login support is now available in Tuwunel on the main branch and inclusion for the next release. This has been the most sought-after feature second only to Synapse migration support. One of the first features ever requested (#7), the long journey to get here represents something much greater: a litmus test for whether Tuwunel is capable of making forward progress with new non-essential big-budget features; a milestone technically reaching back to conduwuit. Tuwunel's stability has been demonstrated by the inverse relationship of its growing popularity against a shrinking support and bug load. The ground has finally been cleared to build upward and reach for the stars! Speaking of those, Tuwunel hit another milestone recently earning our 1000'th ⭐️ on GitHub after little more than half a year.

Documentation for how to use SSO on your server is still due to land in time for release-bundling. There are still a few caveats at the time of this announcement. The landscape of identity providers is very diverse and more testing is necessary to extend our compatibility before the final release; we cannot guarantee compatibility with providers other than three major ones so far. As a priority, and likely by the time TWIM is published, we will have extended compatibility to MAS which may require further updates.

In the meantime, those who are familiar with authentication systems should have no problem after reading the tuwunel-example. Only the brand, client_id, client_secret and callback_url are really necessary to get up and running. I setup all three providers within 10 minutes for the tuwunel.love homeserver. Speaking of which...

🔗➡️ Demo Tuwunel today with your SSO account: https://try.tuwunel.chat.

You can also find it at tuwunel.love:8448. Please report any abuse immediately to @jason:tuwunel.me and if necessary I will forward it to their IdP.

---

🔗💜 Tuwunel Needs Your Support 💜

We are looking for additional sponsorship so June can work on Tuwunel and implement your features. If you are a company looking for a full-time hire please email [email protected]. If interested in splitting the cost with other companies please email [email protected].

---

💕 GitHub ✦ Releases ✦ Containers ✦ DockerHub ✦ Tuwunel 💕

🔗continuwuity (website)

Continuwuity is a community-driven Matrix homeserver in Rust.

Jade (she/her) announces

It's been a crazy Christmas period for Continuwuity and our community!

Let's start with the important thing: We've released 0.5.0 and 0.5.1. These updates contain critical security fixes, and you should update now. If you use any other Conduit-based homeserver – Conduit, Tuwunel and Grapevine – they will also have security releases for the same vulnerabilities.

It's not all scary warnings though - version 0.5.0 is our biggest release yet! We've completely rewritten our sync code for improved performance and reduced bugs, we've built Debian and Fedora packages and mirrored our container images, and we've fixed more bugs and added more features than we can count here. We also got a new maintainer - say hi to Ginger [she/they] !

I can't thank everyone enough - the 28 code contributors, the people sponsoring Nex and I, and the hundreds of you who have deployed and are using our project. <3

🔗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.

Matthew announces

Reminder: Element released a critical update for ESS Community and ESS Pro in 25.12.2 on Dec 19th - if you have not updated yet, please do so as soon as possible. https://github.com/element-hq/ess-helm/releases/tag/25.12.2

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Extera Next

rustyraven reports

It's been a few weeks of silence, and Extera 26.0.3 is finally out! What did we change since 25.1.0?

• Reworked message selection. Now, when you select a message, a context menu will be displayed instead, because there are too many actions! Multiselection is still available.
• Added timestamp and status icon to message bubbles. One check means sent, two checks means read by someone.
• Added "Slide to answer/reject" on mobiles. That's meant to prevent accidental answers.
• Added two new ringtones: "Homebase" and "Dream of light". Kaniwa-P made that banger.
• Privacy settings per room. Now you can toggle read receipts or typing indicators for specific rooms, without turning them on/off completely!
• Added Twemoji font as an option, if your system font is crap.
• Fixed emoji settings lagging when there are too many custom emojis/stickers.
• Reworked emoji picker, now it supports custom emojis.
• Redesigned most apps of the application, the new design was inspired by Material 3 Expressive.
• Now, you can set custom presence status. Just disable "auto mark as unavailable" in Security settings.
• And the most useful change: image editing. Now you can add markup, text, blur and more to images you send!
• Also added update checking. Download it at our website. Have a question or just wanna talk? Join our Matrix room! Offtopic is allowed.

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [etke.cc] says

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

As of today, 12007 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3236 (27.0%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 17766 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 10266 (85.5%)
• conduit: 470 (3.9%)
• dendrite: 357 (3.0%)
• continuwuity: 339 (2.8%)

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.

🔗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.