This Week in Matrix 2026-01-23

🔗Matrix Live S11E20 – Sharing Encrypted History

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Matrix at FOSDEM

HarHarLinks announces

We're excited that by this time next week, a lot of us will have gathered in Brussels for FOSDEM!

Check out our initial blog post for some photos of how this looked in 2025!

🔗Hackathon

We are looking forward to filling Hackerspace Brussels with beyond 100 Matrix hackers who signed up! We start at 9:00 in the morning and will finish the day with a round of lightning presentations at 17:00. Watch the banner on matrix.org and join the chat below for possible live stream announcements! 👀

This hackathon is a friendly place for Matrix newcomers just as well as veterans who will offer their mentorship. If you are interested in sponsoring lunch, dinner, livestream, or prizes, please reach out. Learn more on the blog and join us in #fosdem-2026-hackathon:matrix.org to stay informed!

🔗Booth

Booths all over the campus buildings allow a great diversity of projects to present themselves, and this includes Matrix. Visit us in building AW!

The booth is staffed by volunteers, and few shifts remain available! You can self-register using our shift management platform to join the fun and meet other Matrixers! On top, booth staff will receive one of a kind Matrix-at-FOSDEM-2026 T-shirts!

Whether you join the team or not, we are always looking for projects to put on display! Please reach out to #events-wg:matrix.org or via email with your ideas: your project, demo, stickers, or more!

🔗Devroom

Devrooms at FOSDEM are themed tracks, and we are organising the Decentralised Communications devroom. You can find the schedule on FOSDEM's website.

The devroom is hosted by a stage host introducing the speakers and a video technician ensuring the right camera or slides are shown on stream and recording. If you are interested in joining the team in either position, please reach out to #events-wg:matrix.org or via email.

🔗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:

• MSC4407: Sticky Events (widget-api)
• MSC4406: M_SENDER_IGNORED error code
• MSC4405: Deprecate the emoji method for SAS verification
• MSC4404: Compare emoji by name rather than image

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC4380: Invite blocking (merge)
• MSC4335: M_USER_LIMIT_EXCEEDED error code (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC4381: Remove plaintext sender key
• MSC4313: Require HTML <ol> start Attribute support
• MSC4267: Automatically forgetting rooms on leave

Closed MSCs:

• MSC4347: Emoji verification images
  • See below.
• MSC3915: Owner power level
  • Superseded by MSC4289 and room v12.

🔗Spec Updates

Quite a flurry of activity this week as the Spec Core Team focuses their effort across an array of small MSCs, rather than the usual long-running ones. Many small quality of life improvements were accepted, such as MSC4313, which ensures markdown lists don't get rendered in a confusing manner, and MSC4381 which removes the need for clients to keep sending the deprecated, unencrypted sender_key and device_id fields in encrypted messages.

There was also a lot of discussion around MSC4347: Emoji verification images. The proposal aimed to eliminate the various visual differences between the way clients represent emoji when two users perform emoji verification. Differences in the way the emoji were rendered (i.e. if the clients were using separate emoji fonts) could cause users to think that the emoji did not match - even if the same emoji were being presented.

After much discussion, the proposal was eventually closed. The conclusion was that emoji verification is inherently a bit confusing (and slow). Instead, the verification method is heading towards deprecation/eventual removal while QR code verification (with a fallback to decimal comparison) will be preferred instead.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗continuwuity (website)

Continuwuity is a community-driven Matrix homeserver in Rust.

nex (it/she) 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️ announces

It's been a while since our last TWIM! Sorry, I got distracted watching the sonic fandubs for the Nth time this week. Taking a break to spread the message that continuwuity 0.5.2 and 0.5.3 both got released recently! Both of these are minor releases, but with major impact.

Some of the cool things that have changed since we last wrote:

• 🚪 Invite codes! No longer do you have to have a cronjob rotating your registration token - you can just create limited-use and limited-time tokens right from your admin room!
• 🪪 Hardcoded admins - You now have the option to forcefully define some users as admins regardless of their membership in the admin room, and the ability to disable admin room membership checks altogether!
• 🔨 First-class antispam support - You can now integrate Draupnir or Meowlnir directly with continuwuity to perform functions previously only achievable via synapse-http-antispam. You can now use your Draupnir or Meowlnir for server-wide invite blocking, and (soon™️) more!
• 🔐 Account locking and disabling logins are now supported, alongside our existing suspension support. You can now completely lock users (like a temporary deactivation), or simply prevent them logging in again without disrupting their existing sessions (useful for bots!)
• 🧳 Some admin commands are now restricted to the admin room - potentially dangerous commands can no longer be executed using the global admin command prefix, and must be executed in your admin room directly.

There's plenty more that has happened too - read the changelogs for 0.5.2 and 0.5.3 yourself!

See you soon 🍪

🔗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.

Gaël G. reports

ESS Community 26.1.1 and ESS Pro 26.1.1 have been released.

• Hookshot is now in the list of supported component that you can deploy with the chart !
• Matrix RTC now supports configure Turn/TLS ! This should help your calls go through corporate wifis and firewalls by looking like proper HTTPS traffic.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗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

• Started planning the migration of the project to Swift 6, which will significantly improve the stability of the concurrent code of the app.
• More liquid glass style redesigns, room and spaces toolbar is now rendered in true iOS 26 fashion.
• More space features and improvements (hidden behind a dedicated feature flag):
  • Spaces have made great progress! Is now possible to manage the rooms in your spaces, removing and adding existing ones, or even creating new rooms directly in the space
  • Is also now possible to create a space from the space tab
  • Some more experimentation with the unified room list (spaces + rooms) and how the filtering should work

🔗Element X Android (website)

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

Jorge announces

Hi folks! In the Element X Android team this week has been about - you're not gonna believe this - spaces!

🏠️ Some of the changes we're working on are:

• Use the right power levels when creating new spaces.
• Create a room inside a space.
• Add and remove rooms from spaces.
• Add empty states for your spaces home and empty spaces screens.
• Making sure you have some suggestions when asked to add members to a newly created space or room.

🐛 And other bug fixes like:

• Fix sending media not working when 'select media quality per upload' feature flag is enabled.
• Always try to resolve aliases instead of checking their validity first, to avoid rare cases of room aliases containing weird characters seen in the wild.
• Fix media previews not being displayed for notifications in private rooms if you had that option enabled.

🔗Schildi's Revenge

SpiritCroc announces:

SchildiChat Revenge (working title) is a new desktop Matrix client written in kotlin / compose multiplatform based on the Matrix Rust SDK. In contrast to other SchildiChat clients, this is not an Element fork, while still benefiting from Element X Android and SchildiChat Next, my Element X Android fork.

Primary design goals of Revenge include:

• Multi-account from the beginning, not as an afterthought - e.g. all chats can be both shown combined or separately in inbox
• Multi-window: open as many windows as you want, for multiple conversations at once or even multiple inboxes if you desire
• Fully keyboard-controllable, including command mode and highly configurable key-bindings (I personally like to have some vim-inspired navigation)
• Nested space filtering as seen on SchildiChat Next
• General design inspired by our previous SchildiChat clients

Of course you may wonder if Revenge is a successor to SchildiChat Web/Desktop. To some degree it certainly is, as it has already become my main desktop Matrix client over the last couple of weeks, and the old Web client is effectively unmaintained at this point. On the other hand it is no longer an Element fork, and at the current time it is not a main priority (yet?) to optimize the client be fully functional and intuitive to average users that could be afraid to use the command mode. Right now it may even be a bit biased towards usage on a tiling window manager, i.e. my personal setup, but I plan on improving the UX for regular window managers as well.

While this client is currently still considered to be alpha, I'm already daily-driving it, so feel free to try it out too if you're curious, and let me know your thoughts in #revenge:schildi.chat!

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Rory&::LibMatrix (website)

.NET 10 Matrix bot/client library/SDK.

Emma [it/its] announces

⚠️ Effective immediately, Github mirrors of all Rory&::LibMatrix projects are deprecated.

Hey all, minor updates this time around as I wanted to get the above message out.

New stuff:

• Better room directory search support
• Fixed versioning for NuGet packages
• Various federation bits and bobs - slowly, we're getting there!
• Added schema support for audio/video, and thumbnails in message events
• Fixed room creation hanging due to leftover debug code
• Added ability to restrict joins to pre-upgrade rooms
• Added major chunks of the policy server MSC in preparation

🔗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 Federation Stats

Aine [etke.cc] reports

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

As of today, 13651 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3446 (25.2%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 17137 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 11586 (84.9%)
• conduit: 511 (3.7%)
• continuwuity: 412 (3.0%)
• dendrite: 384 (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.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	codestorm.net	205
2	tuwunel.love	211
3	vibb.me	250.5
4	envs.net	267
5	nerdhouse.io	271
6	uwu.possums.lgbt	296.5
7	vrkknn.net	363
8	fomx.gay	478
9	starstruck.systems	479
10	feralfox.net	487.5

🔗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.