This Week in Matrix 2026-08-28

🔗Matrix Live S13E06 - The need for privacy-preserving decentralised reputation

🔗Dept of The Matrix Conference 🏛️

andypiper announces

🔗The Matrix Conference (website)

We've been bowled over by the volume of submissions for this year's conference in Malmö 🇸🇪! We're not quite ready to reveal the complete schedule, but the team has been busy sending out confirmations to speakers. If you submitted to our call for papers, check your email and (most importantly) if your session was accepted please click the required link to confirm your attendance.

You can have a look at an initial set of confirmed talks here. Note that this is not yet the full set of talks, as we're still working with speakers on their proposals. You can expect to hear more over the next couple of weeks.

Look out for talks such as

• The Matrix State of the Union
• A Vision for a Next-Generation Timeline
• Making Custom Profiles in Matrix More Useful
• Customize your Matrix Messenger
• How Encryption Works in Matrix
• Matrix Wrench - a admin tool for operators and community managers
• ... and many more!

In case you missed it, last week we also announced that the hackathon will be taking place at the neighbouring Aalborg University across the water in Copenhagen 🇩🇰

We're excited about The Matrix Conference 2026, and we think you will be, too! 😎

andypiper says

🔗The Matrix Conference Sticker Swap (website)

Advance notice that we'll have a sticker swap table at The Matrix Conference this year. We want to celebrate, share and spread knowledge of the different community projects that build on Matrix, and what better way to do that than via the medium of stickers 💫 Bring your stickers to share with others, and find out about other projects at the same time.

If you have a project logo to share with the rest of the ecosystem, we'd love to see it on the sticker swap table 🙇🏻 there's also a "booth kit" for The Matrix.org Foundation that pops up at other events throughout the year, and we'll be happy to spread awareness of ecosystem projects via the booth (if there are any stickers left over, that is...). Need help with how to create stickers for your project, or want to send us some to share in case you can't make it to the event? Talk to the Events Working Group #events-wg:matrix.org.

This is also a good time for a reminder to get your ticket for The Matrix Conference 🎟️ (if you haven't done so already). It is shaping up to be an excellent few days of talks, hacking, networking, and celebration.

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

HarHarLinks says

🔗Stammtische (website)

A Stammtisch ("regular's table") is a German meetup format where those with a shared interest meet regularly for discussion, exchange, and socialising.

Find more community organised events at matrix-community.events!

• 2 September (1st Wednesday of every month) 20:00 CEST: Matrix User Meetup Berlin #mumb:c-base.org at c-base
• 4 September 19:00 CEST: #workation-nation-general:datanauten.de at Schwarzes Rössl - as part of the Matrix Workation

Are you running a Matrix meetup? Add it to the list!

🔗Dept of Built on Matrix 🏗️

Lukas Weller says

🔗Neo Nominated for Open Source Competition

Hello everyone!

We'd like to share an update and some great news that Neo, the pilot project bringing Matrix to German public administration, has been nominated for the Open Source Competition!

Developed by FITKO (Föderale IT-Kooperation) and the team behind it, Neo uses Matrix’s open protocol to enable secure, end-to-end encrypted communication between citizens and authorities. It includes a Matrix-based web client and smartphone app, supports structured workflows like document requests, and integrates with other Matrix solutions.

We feel this is an important step for Matrix adoption in the public sector. If you’re equally excited about Matrix adoption in government IT, it would help us out massively to push Neo to the top. The winner will be announced at SCCON 2026 in October this year.

Vote for Neo at https://open-source-wettbewerb.de/voting/neo/ or spread it on your favorite social network. You can also find some more info on Neo in the project description or on https://gitlab.opencode.de/fitko/matrix-g2x/.

Thanks for your support!

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

LogN announces

🔗Is presence fixed yet?

No, but we're making progress.

Today, presence is one of Matrix’s least-deployed core features. Even with efforts to improve implementations, almost every major public Matrix deployment disables federated presence, citing privacy and performance concerns.

A group of independent community members, including maintainers of Continuwuity, have been working on a group of proposals to improve the semantics of Matrix presence.

This week we published MSC4532: Revised Social Presence, a proposal to remodel presence information to better support social use cases. This includes proper presence overrides ("appear offline"), and a busy status, alongside potential major performance improvements.

Our first proposal, MSC4495: Selective Presence, is moving along well: we have an unmerged experimental implementation in Continuwuity, now with 3 servers running it!

If you're interested in the work we're doing, take a look at ispresencefixedyet.com or join us at #presence-v2:zirco.dev!

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Element X Android (website)

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

Benoit announces

Hey TWIM! Another busy week on Element X Android — 50+ pull requests merged, an internal v26.08.2 release cut, and a remarkable amount of it coming from the community. 🎉

• New language: Arabic: Element X Android now ships Arabic translations, synced from Localazy. Many thanks to the translators! (#7461)
• Sign-in gets simpler: Choosing where your account lives is now much less fiddly. @jennaharris7 reworked account provider selection so it autocompletes from providers you've used before, accepts a server without typing https://, is case-insensitive, and respects the enterprise allow-list. The text field is also correctly disabled while a sign-in is in flight. (#7394, #7492). Login polish continued around it: the focused field now stays visible above the keyboard (#7455), and stray carriage returns pasted into the login and password fields are stripped out (#7439).
• Know why a message failed. Tapping a message that failed to send now opens a dialog explaining the actual reason instead of leaving you guessing. (#7490)
• Focused timelines stay focused until the target event has actually been rendered, fixing permalinks that used to drift away mid-pagination. (#7463)
• Better looking photos. Image compression has been relaxed so photos and screenshots keep noticeably more detail. (#7451)
• Opening an image that hasn't finished uploading now shows the right picture (#7359), and images shared in with a vague mime type keep their transparency (#7452).
• Editing a caption now converts markdown to HTML like the composer does (#7441), the send button no longer vanishes when you clear the composer while editing (#7456), and starting a mention refreshes the room member list so recent joiners show up (#7438).
• Voice messages keep playing when another app makes a short sound (notification blips no longer kill your playback). (#7454)
• Verification unstuck: outgoing session verification no longer hangs when recovery setup is incomplete — thanks @hardcore-sushi! (#7433)
• Deep links on cold start: an account provisioning deep link that launches the app from scratch is no longer swallowed. (#7488)
• Resuming the app from the recents list no longer re-opens the room you had left (#7436), the app stops waiting forever on a room alias the remote server never resolves (#7446), declining an invite closes the invite screen (#7440), and leaving a room that can't be found shows an error instead of failing silently (#7437).
• User IDs containing a slash now open the right profile (#7445).
• Switching back to "system" theme after forcing light or dark actually applies the system theme again (#7453).
• The sync service no longer restarts while the client is shutting down (#7472), and the applicationName in the User-Agent is normalised — HTTP headers don't allow UTF-8 (#7477).
• Call: Picture-in-Picture now reacts to camera orientation changes on the other participant's device, so a remote rotation no longer leaves you with a sideways video (#6951). Element Call embedded also moved to 0.24.0 (#7474).
• The notification troubleshooter now explicitly explains a rate-limiting push gateway, instead of reporting a generic failure. (#7448)

A huge shout-out to @hayaksi1, who landed 20 PRs this week alone — timeline, composer, media, notifications, login and release tooling. Thanks also to @jennaharris7, @hardcore-sushi and @bxdxnn for their contributions.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for developing Clients, Bots, Appservices and Servers.

Benedict announces

Just a quick update on Trixnity: The recent 5.8.0 release focuses on refactoring the E2EE and database transaction management to make things a bit cleaner, safer, and easier to test. We also added some media service improvements in 5.7.0, specifically around download size limits and automatic media cleanup.

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

blue @privacyte.ch says

🔗RemoteRails: Matrix & LiveKit Appliance with WG VPN & SSO (website)

The Matrix protocol's versatility for use cases from internal chats to globally federated OTT messaging inspired us to integrate Tuwunel, LiveKit, and Coturn into our self-hosted, zero-knowledge appliance for E2EE chats & calls.

As with the other services (Drive, Office, Mail) in the appliance, the auth and signaling endpoints of Matrix reside on a private VPN subnet managed by Defguard. The Matrix server is accessible only after a user has authenticated with their OIDC SSO credentials and 2FA (TOTP or WebAuthn) to the WireGuard tunnel. By default, the Matrix federation endpoint is also isolated from the web, but this can be relaxed to interoperate with other external homeservers, if desired.

The appliance is engineered for portability, security, and data minimization. We built a set of standardized deployment scripts that install a minimal Debian OS (with no provider telemetry), instantiate the RAID/LVM, and provision the appliance using Debootstrap and Docker Compose. Even when the appliance is hosted in a commercial datacenter, we wanted to achieve an on-premises grade of discretion using LUKS, hardware-based memory encryption (SME/TME), DMA protection, and Secure Boot with UKI. To strip out the dependency on Google Play Services, we also baked in the Ntfy.sh container for self-hosted UnifiedPush notifications on Android.

For a closer look at our defense-in-depth philosophy and threat modelling, check out our Confidential Computing & Security Model writeup.

venumonelement says

🔗Decentralizing social media using ATProto and Matrix (venoom)

Over the past two weeks, I made it possible to use ATProto and Matrix together in one cross-platform app. The goal is to combine an ATProto account and a Matrix account under one identity: ATProto provides profiles and public posts, while Matrix provides encrypted messages and calls.

The accounts are linked by storing the Matrix ID in the ATProto DID document and the ATProto DID in the Matrix extended profile. Venoom checks that both values match and can then show information from both profiles together.

I also connected MAS to an ATProto OAuth broker, so users can access a Matrix account through their ATProto identity or connect a Matrix account they already have.

Next up is refining the app and fixing bugs. I hope to release a test version soon. If you’re interested, you can join the room where I post updates:

https://matrix.to/#/!gxmZLQDhVacrWxzPiM:matrix.org

🔗Matrix Federation Stats 📊

Aine [etke.cc] announces

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

As of today, 20162 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 4140 (20.5%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 20658 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 15705 (77.9%)
• continuwuity: 1775 (8.8%)
• conduit: 533 (2.6%)
• dendrite: 307 (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	vrkknn.net	190
2	nerdhouse.io	236
3	victorewik.es	321
4	zirco.dev	365
5	ed25519.uk	1067.5
6	poweron.dk	1239
7	blahaj.club	1268
8	matrix.org	1711
9	matrix.sharks.id.au	2177
10	tinier.town	2599

🔗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.