This Week in Matrix 2026-08-21

🔗Matrix Live S13E05 - Matrix @ FrOSCon 2026

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

HarHarLinks announces

🔗FrOSCon (website)

We had an awesome time representing Matrix at the Free and Open Source Software Conference! The new (as of FOSDEM) Matrix Foundation Events WG™️ Booth Kit was a great help in making our booth look much nicer and more engaging than ever, with 2 Linux laptops, a MacBook, one Android and a postmarketOS phone, various stickers, a standup about the Foundation, etc etc. For more detail, keep an eye out for Matrix Live! Here is a teaser:

HarHarLinks reports

🔗Matrix Community Workation Krems (website)

The workation starts tomorrow! Join the Matrix Community in Krems on the Danube in Austria for up to 3 weeks of hacking and networking in the Matrix community, go on an excursion to the Hack-ma's hacker camp in the next village over, or help the German government in digitising its infrastructure with proper Matrix, proper open source, and proper security and privacy.

Come chat with us #community-events:matrix.org or follow our fedi https://mastodon.matrix.org/@community_events.

PS: anyone going to MRMCD?

andypiper reports

🔗The Matrix Conference Community Hackathon (website)

We're excited to announce that this year's Community Hackathon at The Matrix Conference is in collaboration with Dr. Carla Griggio and the mInt Research Lab on User-centered Messaging Interoperability at the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University.

On Friday 23rd October, we'll cross the Øresund Bridge to København and spend the afternoon hacking together on a range of Matrix-related projects. We're very grateful to Carla and Aalborg University for their support of this year's Matrix Conference.

We'll be adding more information about the hackathon and logistics (including the straightforward 🇸🇪 🛤️ 🇩🇰 transport options) on the website very soon. Don't worry: we already confirmed that Club Mate is readily available in supermarkets in Copenhagen! 😉

🔗The Matrix Conference schedule (website)

We're starting to send out the first email acceptances to speakers for the Conference! This should happen over the next few days, so prospective speakers, please check the email associated with your talk submission - we need you to click a link to confirm your acceptance. We have a process to get these sent out, so please stand by! We plan to confirm the initial set of content next week, as speakers are able to accept.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Harmony (website)

catcraft reports

Hello again everyone! It's been a bit over a month since our first TWIM entry, and since then, Harmony has had quite a few new features and fixes. If you missed the previous entry, Harmony is a JavaScript-based, modular, extensible Matrix client with an open plugin system.

Harmony v0.4.0 has just been released, with support for pinned messages, spoiler and mathematical messages, partial power level management, and a few other things. There has also been a new plugin adding support for MSC4440 biographies.

Since v0.2.0 (the last release posted here), we've also added OAuth/SSO login support, 'jump-to-message' support, and significant performance improvements (particularly for rooms with many members). You can find the full changelog here. In my own opinion, since v0.2.0, the experience has gone from 'okay' to 'quite pleasant'!

You can find the latest release on the releases page on Codeberg, and you can also join the Harmony rooms to get announcements and chat about the client:

• Space
• General room
• Plugin developer room
• Announcements

Finally, now that the AUR situation has been mostly resolved, packages have been published for Harmony (harmony-im and harmony-im-git).

Happy hacking!

🔗FluffyChat (website)

The cutest instant messenger in the [matrix].

Krille - Christian K. announces

FluffyChat 2.9.0 has been released

After the long waiting for 2.8.0 getting reviewed in the Play Store, we now have already FluffyChat 2.9.0, featuring better notifications on iOS, http3, verification check icon for users, double tap to react and a lot of bug fixes and other improvements.

🔗iOS Notifications

We are still not completely there that we can always display the message content of encrypted messages on iOS. It is still not working when the app is not in foreground duo to the end to end encryption but the app will now display the sender and (if cached) the avatar of the sender so you will know who sent you a message.

In the next release we will aim for displaying the message content for unencrypted rooms and then for encrypted ones. Also other features like message actions will also eventually come to iOS.

🔗http3

By using the flutter packages cronet_http and cupertino_http we now support http3 on iOS and Android. This means FluffyChat will now use the system’s proxy by default and network communication speed should improve.

🔗Double Tap to React

Thanks to AndusDEV we now have double tap to react. This is enabled by default on mobile (can be disabled in the settings if you prefer message selection instead). The default emoji to be sent is of course ❤️ while this can also be configured.

🔗Verification icon

Users you have verified are now marked with a ✅ icon. If you have verified all users in a room, then the whole room is marked as verified. This should give you a better indication, which conversation is extra secure.

🔗Better Android Notifications

On Android notification processing now start a foreground service. This should make push notifications much more reliable when the app has been terminated.

🔗Others

This release does not bring translation updates as there are currently some technical problems on weblate. We are on it. All changeslogs can be found here: https://github.com/krille-chan/fluffychat/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md#v290

🔗Element X iOS (website)

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

Doug reports

This week we released 26.08.2 to the App Store (with all the changes reported last week) and made an interim RC for 26.08.3 which is a TestFlight-only build to validate some changes to our release workflows.

We continued iterating on User Status, fixing cases where changes weren’t reflected in room member profiles and where your own profile would stop updating if you removed your avatar. The surrounding UI also received tweaks, including a fix for cropped emojis and some refinements to the copy. As part of this the Chats, Search and Spaces screens received a visual tidy-up too. Navigation titles are now more compact, toolbar buttons behave better on iOS 26, and typography is a little more consistent across the app.

Under the hood, Element X should do less unnecessary work during startup, while updates to the Matrix Rust SDK improve profile handling in more homeserver configurations.

We also spent some time optimising our testing setup: flaky tests have been de-flaked, integration tests fail faster, and CI should make better use of cached compilation artefacts.

🔗Dept of VoIP 🤙

Johannes Marbach announces

We've released version 0.6.0 of lk-jwt-service (the LiveKit JWT service).

This release adds support for delegating delayed leave events to the service via the new /delegate_delayed_leave endpoint. This spares clients having to maintain their dead man's switch themselves and improves the mechanism's accuracy. Delegated events can be persisted across service restarts using a new optional storage backend based on Redis.

In a related change, the previously introduced delay_cs_api_url parameter was deprecated on all endpoints. For increased security, the service now ignores this parameter entirely and instead resolves the C-S API location using .well-known discovery. Homeserver admins should make sure to configure .well-known discovery appropriately.

Further noteworthy changes include a new health check endpoint /healthz and improved test coverage.

⚠️ Important: As we continue progressing on MSC4195, the service will undergo further breaking changes. Specifically, the endpoints the service currently provides will be integrated into the Client-Server API to be served by the home server in future. For Synapse, we're planning to run the service as a sidecar application service to which Synapse will proxy incoming requests via MSC4512. Other homeservers can choose to follow this approach if they want to reuse the service implementation.

On a related note, we also have a Rust rewrite in flight (https://github.com/element-hq/lk-jwt-service/pull/197). This won't impact the service's external interface but will change the way the service is built.

🔗Element Call (website)

Native Decentralised End-to-end Encrypted Group Calls in Matrix.

Robin announces

🔗Deprecating .well-known transport discovery

Hi from Element's VoIP team! We just released Element Call 0.24.0, which deprecates the method of discovering MatrixRTC transports that used the homeserver's /.well-known/matrix/client file. This is a PSA for admins and developers that you may need to take some actions to ensure Element Call can still find your LiveKit SFU.

For client developers using Element Call as a widget, make sure that your client supports the new get_rtc_transports action from MSC4515. If desired, you can implement this action in a way that still falls back to .well-known discovery to give your users more time to migrate to the MSC4519 endpoint.

For admins hosting a standalone Element Call instance, make sure that your homeserver supports the GET /_matrix/client/unstable/org.matrix.msc4143/rtc/transports endpoint from MSC4519. (If it doesn't, you could try "implementing" it manually with an unauthenticated reverse proxy entry.) See the updated self-hosting guide. If your server's /.well-known/matrix/client file contained an org.matrix.msc4143.rtc_foci key, you may remove it.

For other homeserver admins, no changes are required at this time because Element Web/Desktop and Element X Android/iOS are all being adapted to keep the .well-known discovery method as a fallback. We still recommend enabling the GET /_matrix/client/unstable/org.matrix.msc4143/rtc/transports endpoint from MSC4519 however to prepare for future changes. See the updated self-hosting guide.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗Matrix Connectivity Tester (website)

A web interface to debug and troubleshoot Matrix connectivity issues.

MTRNord (they/them) says

Since the last update, a bunch of federation-check improvements landed to improve edge cases, bugs and also extending the statistics.

🔗What's Changed

• Outgoing federation checks can now also probe over a dedicated IPv4-only and IPv6-only address, so you can see whether a server's outgoing federation actually works over each address family individually, not just whichever one its resolver happens to prefer.
• The public opt-in Statistics page now also breaks down announced address family (IPv4-only / IPv6-only / dual-stack) and, for dual-stack servers, which family actually connects.
• Optional MSC4524 (Federation Bidirectional Ping) support for the outgoing-federation check, as an alternative to the client-API room-alias trick.
• Fixed a couple of real, reported false-negatives: a server whose /.well-known/matrix/client redirects elsewhere (client-server side) wasn't followed at all and got silently probed at the wrong base URL, and a well-known response missing CORS headers (including on the redirect itself) was silently treated as "absent" instead of being flagged as its own problem.
• Optional (for the operator/hoster) OpenTelemetry tracing support added to allow for better optimizing and debugging of edge cases encountered as bugs.
• Cleaned up the OpenAPI spec (interactive docs at /api-docs).
• Reworked the way we do alerts instead of having a fixed number of fails before an alert. This reduces flapping spam.

Code lives on self-hosted Phorge: https://phorge.mtrnord.blog/source/mcte/repository/main/.

Find the deployed version at https://connectivity-tester.mtrnord.blog or, if you're daring, https://stage.connectivity-tester.mtrnord.blog for the staging deployment, which gets changes earlier but at less stability.

If you find issues or want to request features, please direct them at the Phorge repository or at the forum at https://forum.mtrnord.blog/c/matrix-connectivity-tester/support/6 :) Note that I am doing this in my freetime alone so it might take a few days or weeks at times for me to respond. :) I do however try to respond as early as I am able to.

🔗Dept of Videos 📹

andypiper announces

🔗Matrix Live (website)

Matrix Live is our weekly video update that spotlights different aspects of the Matrix ecosystem, from the Foundation's Working Groups, through events, the evolution of the specification, to the many different projects that build on top of the Matrix protocol.

If you'd like to join me (Andy) in a future edition of Matrix Live, get in touch! We're scheduling a number of weeks ahead, and we'd be happy to find time for an upcoming conversation.

🔗Matrix Federation Stats 📊

Aine [etke.cc] says

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

As of today, 20083 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 4114 (20.5%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 20558 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 15647 (77.9%)
• continuwuity: 1760 (8.8%)
• conduit: 548 (2.7%)
• dendrite: 305 (1.5%)

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.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	continuwuity.org	161.5
2	vrkknn.net	209.5
3	raccoon.cafe	234
4	vibb.me	255
5	nerdhouse.io	256.5
6	dykes.ca	302
7	worldethicaldataforum.org	339
8	w33b.cloud	390.5
9	unredacted.org	421
10	victorewik.es	422

🔗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.