This Week in Matrix 2026-07-31

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Matrix Community Workation Krems 2026

Yan says

In case you haven't spent the last few years asleep under a rock, you've probably come across the Matrix Workations: get-togethers where people who work with, on and for Matrix meet up to work together and side by side (here's what the past ones looked like). The next one is coming up, back at the Schwarzes Rössl in Krems, Austria, from 22 August to 13 September 2026.

It's a workation, not a vacation. You can happily keep doing your day job. There are desks, meeting rooms, workshops and the usual infrastructure. But of course there are also topics and project groups we dig into together, so we've split Krems into three blocks:

• Week 1 · Håck ma's (22–30 Aug) ("let's hack" in Austrian slang). Prepping for the Austrian hacker gathering, connecting to the local scene, and exploring hacks from, with and through Matrix. Bring your own Matrix open source project and run a hackathon or bug hunt while you're there.
• Week 2 · Public Sector (31 Aug–6 Sep). Matrix in the public sector, including a project retreat for FITKO (in the NEO project a new Matrix-based fabric for citizen-to-authority communication is being laid). Plus the medical sector, education and universities, and public stuff in general. It's getting tight, but ask us anyway, we try to make things possible.
• Week 3 · Matrix and beyond (7–13 Sep). Matrix in use cases a bit further from the chat case: Home Assistant and IoT, widgets, or whatever your project happens to be.

Grab a ticket (community prices, early-bird until 31 July) at tickets.matrix-community.events. Coming as a project or a group of four? There's a group discount, just ask us for the voucher. And we're still looking for sponsors: sponsoring keeps the community prices low and makes the whole thing possible, so if you or your org would like to support the Workation, please reach out.

Brought to you by Matrix Community Events. Come say hi in #workation-nation-general:datanauten.de.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} says

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:

• MSC4522: Username colors
• MSC4521: Adaptive Set Reconciliation via PinSketch
• MSC4519: MatrixRTC Transports Registry

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC4278: Media preview controls (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC4409: Clarify thumbnailing behavior in E2EE
• MSC4319: Room member events for invite and knock rooms in the /sync response

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

The spec is ticking along with new MSCs; some getting into FCP and some being accepted. The introduction of a spec registry concept (see MSC4518: Registries and MSC4519: MatrixRTC Transports Registry) is something I've personally found interesting lately. Primarily an event type registry.

Being able to take all the event types of out the (currently very large) Client-Server spec and into a dedicated page, along with the ability for people and organisations to register their own event types is a noble and long-requested effort! MSC4518: Registries specifically goes into detail about how one can propose a registry and the expected behaviour around adding/modifying entries in it.

There's no such MSC for an event registry yet, and I'm cautious about starting one until MSC4518 has some more time in the oven. But it's only a matter of time!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element.

madlittlemods (Eric Eastwood) reports

Hi everyone. If you're running Synapse, please note that 11 security vulnerabilities were fixed as part of the v1.157.2 security release.

If you haven't yet updated, please consider doing so soon!

We also have a new release candidate this week, Synapse v1.158.0rc1. To highlight from the changelog:

• The default room version is being turned up to 11 🎸🔊1️⃣1️⃣ (#18680 thanks to @ShadowRZ, and @FrenchGithubUser for the underlying test changes necessary)
• New MSC2705 animated thumbnailing support (#18831 thanks to @catfromplan9)

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) announces

Continuwuity v26.7.1 has been released!

This update introduces some new features, such as the ability to change where continuwuity sources the connecting IP from (allowing you to use x-forwarded-for again), an admin command to issue permanent access tokens for bots even when the server is in oauth2-only mode, and device authorization grant support was added for non-web clients. There are also several bugfixes, including a fix for the infamous "room says empty client and must be upgraded from v1 after joining" bug, problems with restricted joins over federation were resolved, new registration admin room alerts were re-introduced after being erroneously dropped, appservice device registration no longer creates orphaned devices, and many fixes related to sync.

You can read the full release notes here: https://forgejo.ellis.link/continuwuation/continuwuity/releases/tag/v26.7.1. We also have deb packages for ARM64 now!

nex (it/she) [starstruck] also says

Continuwuity v26.7.2 has been released!

With new updates come new bugs. New bugs get caught and eventually squashed. In this case, we squashed two regressions introduced around v26.7.1, and fixed a low-severity vulnerability in the sliding sync implementation (particularly relevant to multi-user homeservers). I'd say it's recommended everyone upgrades as soon as possible, but I doubt anyone's hanging around on buggy versions for fun.

You can read the changelog here (it's small, you don't need subway surfers on the side for this one): https://forgejo.ellis.link/continuwuation/continuwuity/releases/tag/v26.7.2

➡️ https://continuwuity.org | #continuwuity:continuwuity.org | #space:continuwuity.org | woof

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Tesseract (website)

Marco announces

Hello again! 0.8.16 and then 0.8.17 went live, with many many goodies. The most important one is calls being enabled by default (they are still considered experimental, but they are now enabled for anyone that wants to give them a shot). Among the highlights now you can (finally) create rooms, send your location (with a chat command and proper OS support), quick-reply from notifications, and full app keyboard navigation. The app visual design got a little refresh, so it should look nicer. Hope you like it!

Feel free to drop by the official room!

🔗Nexus (website)

Matrix client made with Flutter and a Gomuks backend.

QuadRadical (Ping) says

What's new?

• Support for encrypted media
• Initial support for MacOS - No CI yet, you need to build manually
• And some bug fixes, as always :)

Get involved!

If you want to help with development or simply keep up with new features, join our Matrix room at #nexus:federated.nexus or check out the Git repo at https://nexus.federated.nexus!

🔗Element X iOS (website)

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

Mauro reports

This week on Element X iOS, we wrapped up the media gallery timeline item, so you can now send multiple media files grouped into a single timeline entry. User status is nearly there too, though we're currently waiting on homeserver/Synapse support before it can go further. We've also made solid progress on cross-room search. On top of that, we squashed a good number of bugs and crashes this week, including some particularly nasty ones, which should give app stability a noticeable boost.

🔗Matrix Federation Stats 📊

Aine [etke.cc] says

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

As of today, 19935 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 4151 (20.8%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 20258 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 15600 (78.3%)
• continuwuity: 1707 (8.6%)
• conduit: 552 (2.8%)
• dendrite: 319 (1.6%)

Stats timeline is available on 📊 MatrixRooms.info/stats

🧩 Integrations with apps and servers | 💜 Support the project | 👉 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.

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.