This Week in Matrix 2026-10-02

🔗Matrix Live S13E11 - All Things Matrix

🔗Dept of The Matrix Conference 🏛️

🔗The Matrix Conference (website)

HarHarLinks says

It's finally October, the month of The Matrix Conference 2026! Within only 18 days from publishing this blog, the Matrix community and ecosystem meets in Malmö, Sweden for 3 days of conference, followed by another day of hacking and collaborating in Copenhagen, Denmark!

While the Conference is primarily an in-person event #LocalFirst, it will be accompanied with live streams from all 3 conference stages during the 2 main conference days, powered once more by the amazing c3voc! And of course we could not miss our chat rooms to virtually represent the physical stages on Matrix itself, a "General" chat for the hallway track, hackathon, and more. You can now find all of these grouped in this year's Conference space #conference-2026:matrix.org, and also on the Conference website soon. Naturally, the chats are just as practical if you will be attending in person, as we will be posting news and you can get in touch with other attendees, both remote and present! Note that rooms are read-only for now and will become available for chatting closer to the start of the Conference. Speakers and volunteers will also find that the respective private rooms are inside the same space.

Speaking of volunteers: Here's your chance to join the volunteer chat, get a limited Sweden-colored volunteer hoodie, and most importantly help make MatrixConf happen! We have made some (hopefully final) adjustments so the shifts in our volunteering system match our schedule more precisely, and also added a couple more shifts! If you're interested in participating in one of our workshops, this should be particularly interesting to you!

Finally, our ticket reserves are starting to dwindle, so if you are planning to attend in person, get your ticket!

Until next week with more news, Your Events WG

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} announces

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:

• MSC4553: Forwarded messages
• MSC4551: Sliding Sync Extensions: Receipts
• MSC4550: Explicit links

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC4452: Preview URL capabilities API
• MSC4095: Bundled URL previews

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3960: Sliding Sync Extension: Receipts
  • Superseded by MSC4551: Sliding Sync Extensions: Receipts

🔗Spec Updates

The SCT is continuing to focus on Matrix 2.0 MSCs in the hope that they may be ready for the Matrix conference this month. Critically, shortcuts are not being taken to get these MSCs over the line. The team is simply focusing their efforts on these MSCs instead of others for the time being.

🔗Matrix 2.0 Checklist

The following is the current state of the various MSCs:

• 🟢 MSC4140: Cancellable delayed events - Merged (unchanged).
• 🟢 Clarifications for MSC4140: Cancellable delayed events - Merged on 29 September.
• 🟡 MSC4354: Sticky Events - 2 / 8 required approvals (unchanged). Two recorded concerns remain: MSC link formatting and an outstanding rate-limiting comment.
• 🔴 MSC4480 Sliding Sync Extension: Sticky Events - Still pre-FCP; no formal FCP proposal or approval checklist yet. Implementation links have been supplied.
• ⚪ MSC3960: Sliding Sync Extension: Receipts - Closed without merging on 30 September, superseded by MSC4551.
• 🟡 MSC4551: Sliding Sync Extensions: Receipts - Proposed for FCP; 2 / 8 required approvals** (+2). A couple clarifications are needed, but no recorded concerns.
• 🟡 MSC4538: Sliding Sync Extensions: To-Device messages - Proposed for FCP; 3 / 8 required approvals, with no concerns recorded on the FCP checklist.
• 🟡 MSC4543: Sliding Sync Extensions: End-to-end encryption - Proposed for FCP; 2 / 8 required approvals, with no concerns recorded on the FCP checklist.
• 🟡 MSC4143: MatrixRTC – Real-time communication over Matrix - 6 / 8 required approvals (unchanged). Outstanding concerns cover the Sticky Events dependency and an implementation/proposal mismatch.
• 🟡 MSC4195: LiveKit transport for MatrixRTC - 4 / 8 required approvals (+1). The MatrixRTC dependency remains the only recorded concern; concurrent FCP is permitted.
• 🟡 MSC4196: Voice and video calling application for MatrixRTC - 2 / 8 required approvals (+1). Dependent on MSC4143.

The team and authors certainly have their work cut out for them, but things are looking cautiously positive!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Zendrite (website)

pat-s announces

Zendrite is a Matrix homeserver written in Go, forked from Dendrite earlier this year. v3.4.0 is out, and its headline feature is active-passive high availability.

High availability (opt-in). Run several Zendrite candidates against shared PostgreSQL, NATS JetStream and S3-compatible media storage; a Kubernetes Lease elects one to serve while the others wait as standbys. A durable ownership generation fences every boundary (database, broker, media, outbound federation and request admission), so a paused or partitioned old leader cannot write after its successor takes over. Rolling upgrades between compatible builds hand over without failed client requests (search briefly answers 503 while the new leader rebuilds its index), and an upgrade contract refuses builds that would need an offline migration.

HA changes are qualified in CI by a fault-injection harness that runs against real PostgreSQL, a three-node JetStream cluster, a kube-apiserver and a federating peer. It kills, freezes and partitions leaders, fails over PostgreSQL, loses brokers, and checks that no acknowledged write, to-device message or receipt goes missing.

Federation and sync.

• MSC4311 and knocking over federation.
• Bundled aggregations for threads, edits and references on every endpoint that should carry them.
• Per-thread unread counts (MSC3773).
• Large rooms no longer stall sync: a state update in a room of 50,000 members now takes seconds instead of minutes.

Reliability. Dozens of fixes found while qualifying HA also benefit single-server setups:

• Federation transactions are retried instead of silently dropping receipts or to-device messages when the broker cannot take them.
• A silent NATS broker is detected in about 30 seconds.
• Consumers retry transient failures instead of losing work.
• New metrics make a stalled consumer or a struggling broker visible.

Upgrade notes, the full changelog and the HA guide are in the docs and the release. Chat with us in #dendrite:matrix.org.

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element.

madlittlemods (Eric Eastwood) reports

This week we have a new release, Synapse 1.162.0. To highlight:

• The default room version is now room version 12 (#20130, thanks to @jason-famedly from Famedly).
• As a reminder, we've been driving forward Matrix spec compliance by filling in a bunch of tiny gaps in behavior between Synapse and the Matrix spec. This release includes even more fixes (#20115, #20154, #20181, #20200). And we're at the point that we will be advertising support for more Matrix spec versions in the next release ✨.
• Also as part of the Matrix spec compliance march, we fixed the flawed MSC4311 implementation originally introduced in Synapse v1.136.0 (#19723). This is a fix around stripped state for invites/knocks: client-side APIs like /sync use stripped state events and we now send full PDUs on the federation-side. This also fixes the incompatibility that Continuwuity v26.6.1+ folks have been experiencing since the stripped state format is strictly validated there. To give the ecosystem time to adapt, Synapse will only apply strict validation to incoming invites and knocks after 2027-06-01.
• /sync no longer drops state events in MSC4222's state_after when the since token falls inside a persisted batch of events (#20171).
• /relations got a speed boost in large rooms (10-100x purportedly) which means opening the thread panel should be much quicker (#20182).
• We got some help with one of the pesky Complement test flakes to ensure the /room_summary endpoint returns fresh and accurate join_rules (#20205, thanks to @jason-famedly from Famedly)

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.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Cinny (website)

Lozenge reports

Cinny 4.12.7 is now available with a small but important set of fixes and maintenance updates. This release updates the sanitize-html and react-router-dom dependency (security fix), fixes "%" sign wraps below the input issue, and correct emoji autocompletion overwriting preceding element.

• Try Cinny at https://app.cinny.in
• Join us at #cinny-space2:matrix.org

🔗Element X Android (website)

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

Benoit announces

Last week

• Settings are being reorganised: account settings and application settings are now split, the user status moved, and the multi-account section was updated. Still behind a feature flag.
• Removing a message now asks for confirmation, and you can give an optional reason.
• Fixed a blank screen at launch when the homeserver expires the sliding sync session, and fixed a leak of threaded timelines.

This week we shipped versions 26.09.3 and 26.09.4, with updated SDK bindings and a fix for rustls failing certificate revocation checks on app start. Native Element Call integration is moving forward: calls can now be drawn directly in the app, follow you into picture-in-picture, and be answered through a dedicated call entry point. Multi-account support keeps improving, with incoming verification requests now shown for all signed-in accounts, along with which account is being verified. Each account's avatar thumbnail is now stored in its session database and used as a fallback when showing your other accounts. The sign out and signed-out screens have been redesigned, now displaying account info and scrolling properly on small screens. Automatic back pagination and unread indicators are now enabled by default, and you can choose to display only unread notifications. Search history got buttons to remove a single item or clear the whole history. As usual, plenty of bug fixes and dependency upgrades landed too, including a crash fix in voice message playback.

🔗Element Classic Android

Benoit says

• Element Classic Android 1.6.66 is out, with an updated banner about excluding insecure devices, following the banner encouraging migration to Element X in 1.6.64.

🔗Rabble (website)

rig announces

I've been building Rabble, a new desktop Matrix client aimed particularly at voice-heavy communities.

It combines Matrix messaging with push-to-talk and voice channels, with the goal of covering some of the use cases that keep communities on Discord while remaining a Matrix client.

Rabble is built as a native desktop application rather than on web technologies, which keeps it lightweight and gives it direct access to platform APIs for things like global shortcuts and other OS integration.

The first public builds are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It's still early, and feedback is very welcome.

• #Rabble community

🔗Nexus (website)

Matrix client made with Flutter and a Gomuks backend.

QuadRadical (Ping) announces

Hello TWIM! Nexus was on TWIM last week, but a lot has changed since then, so here's the rundown:

• Notable speed improvements: By rewriting our timeline widget and state merge code, performance has been greatly improved. Expect faster room loads, and less hitching.
• Support for jumping to out-of-timeline events: This has been an annoyance for a long time, but it's finally fixed! The timeline rewrite made this easier, and the whole feature landed in a diff of only a few hundred lines.
• Flatpak repo: Nexus is now available through a Flatpak repo, so updates can happen through flatpak update or your software center of choice. More information can be found at https://nexus.federated.nexus/#flatpak.
• Room summaries: Before joining a room, you now see a summary of information about that room:

• Clickable room links: With the change above, it was easy to implement clickable room links. Clicking a room link focuses that room if you are joined, or opens a join dialog if you are not.
• Event links: Event links work the same way, but also scroll to the linked event.
• And, as always, a whole lot of bug fixes 🙂

🔗Initial release progress:

Last TWIM, I told you we were getting close to being ready to release 1.0.0. Well, I have more news: there are only three issues left for the 1.0.0 milestone!

When these are done, I'll release an alpha for 1.0.0 to find any bugs, then hopefully we can have 1.0.0 stable released very soon after. You can take a look at the remaining issues for 1.0.0 here: https://nexus.federated.nexus/milestone/1

🔗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.

🔗FluffyChat (website)

The cutest instant messenger in the [matrix].

Krille - Christian K. reports

FluffyChat 2.10.0 will be released this weekend, including finally support for MatrixRTC calls via LiveKit (compatible with Element calls) and a lot of bugfixes and improvements. You can see all changes here: https://github.com/krille-chan/fluffychat/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md#v2100

With this release comes the first official build for Windows: https://github.com/krille-chan/fluffychat/releases Please be aware that these builds are mostly untested and very experimental. We are happy for any feedback. Native macOS builds are also coming soon.

🔗Matrix Federation Stats 📊

Aine [etke.cc] reports

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

As of today, 20397 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 4129 (20.2%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 19712 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 15772 (77.3%)
• continuwuity: 1866 (9.1%)
• conduit: 545 (2.7%)
• dendrite: 285 (1.4%)

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	172
2	kanp.ai	197
3	sspaeth.de	198
4	raccoon.cafe	215
5	vibb.me	272
6	szp.lol	338.5
7	awesomesheep48.ca	346
8	4d2.org	376.5
9	victorewik.es	435.5
10	m.starshard.space	624

🔗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.