This Week in Matrix 2026-11-06

🔗Matrix Live - Foundation & Governing Board Update

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Governing Board (website)

The Governing Board is an advisory board to The Matrix.org Foundation, with elected representatives from all across the Matrix ecosystem.

🔗Governing Board meeting, Nov 2026

HarHarLinks says

Hi all, it's been half a year since the Governing Board's last report which means this week it was time for us to gather for the second Board meeting of the year!

We're busy getting a proper report ready to share with all of you, so this is just a teaser, but I hope we will be able to include it properly in the next TWIM!

As a tiny teaser, we thank Max who joined the Board as a representative for the Individual Members of the Foundation only during the last election cycle, but unfortunately had to leave the Board again long before the end of his term due to life happening. 🙏 Instead we're excited to announce that we're joined by Reid Anderson, the runner-up Individual Member candidate from the elections earlier this year! 🎉

You can find the info about the Board, its Committees and all members at https://matrix.org/foundation/governing-board/.

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗The Matrix Conference

Andy P announces

We're happy to wrap up The Matrix Conference 2026 by sharing the official event photos with you! Please note the information provided in the README.txt file.

All talks from the Conference were recorded and are available for streaming on demand through our archive page including downloadable slides. If you're a speaker of a recorded talk and your slides are missing, please send them to us at [email protected] so we may make them available.

We are currently looking at some great options for venues in The Netherlands for The Matrix Conference 2027. If you know of a venue we should definitely check out, please share it with us via email to [email protected].

🔗FOSDEM

Andy P reports

The next major event on The Matrix.org Foundation radar is FOSDEM 2027 which will be happening on January 30-31 in Brussels, Belgium 🇧🇪

The Call for Proposals for the Decentralised Messaging Devroom is open now, and runs until Friday November 20th. We'd love to see your submissions for Matrix-related talks.

Watch this space for news about other Matrix-related content and happenings around FOSDEM!

🔗Stammtische (website)

HarHarLinks says

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!

• 9 November (2nd Monday of every month) 20:00 CET: #matrix-stammtisch:ccc.ac at CCCAC. This month we're excited to celebrate its first anniversary! 🎉
• 11 November (2nd Wednesday of every Month) 19:00 CET: #matrix-stammtisch:koeln.ccc.de at C4

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

🔗Dept of Working Groups 💪

🔗Widgets Working Group

Timo K. says

The Working Group has formed, and the first meetings have been held.

Outcomes so far:

• Organisational foundations: Sponsor, Chair, Website, Rooms.
• There is a bi-weekly Widget Clinic (a meeting in which technical topics are discussed: the spec, SDKs, bouncing ideas off each other about widget solutions). The goal is to get the ecosystem, and specific solutions, into a healthy state.
• We are making progress on an overview of how Matrix can be extended. Several conversations ended up on what we truly need in the ecosystem. The conclusions will be are presented soon here. This is fundamental to justifying the current MSCs, because it answers the question: Why the proposed solution should end up in the spec.

Join our room if you want to help out: #widgets-working-group:matrix.org

🔗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:

• MSC4578: Cross-client Shared Search Indexes of encrypted messages
• MSC4577: Soundboards for MatrixRTC calls
• MSC4576: Only allow data publishing when also allowing audio/video publishing on LiveKit transports
• MSC4575: MatrixRTC m.full_mesh transport
• MSC4574: linked state events
• MSC4573: Atomically increasing versioned account data

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

Lots of new and fun MSCs have been put up this week! Feel free to have a look through the above.

After the dust from The Matrix Conference has settled, the Spec Core Team have been trying to wrangle the remaining two, err three, Matrix 2.0 MSCs.

This week MSC4576 sprung up under the Matrix 2.0 label. It's a tiny follow-up to MSC4195: LiveKit transport for MatrixRTC to enable applications other than VoIP to use MatrixRTC channels (such as Neoboard). It's non-controversial, so expect it to be accepted by the SCT fairly rapidly.

Otherwise, the SCT is focusing on wrapping up the Matrix 2.0 saga, getting it out, and then moving on to the backlog of other MSCs waiting in the queue. Thank you for your patience, and feel free to review and comment on and refine the landscape of MSCs in the meantime!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Arminius (website)

Arminius is a new enterprise homeserver in development.

Nico says

Heya, Nico here, with my corporate hat on!

For the last almost 2 years my team at Famedly have been secretly working with the BWI on a new homeserver for them. Now we finally published the repository for it and will continue working in the open from now on.

However, the homeserver is not done yet. So please do not actually use it yet. We want to first make sure it behaves as a proper citizen of the federation and we still have a few complement tests to pass as well as do a proper audit and fixup some of the corners we have cut at the start of development.

You might be wondering why one would want to write a new homeserver. We gave one explanation at The Matrix Conference and thanks to the amazing video and conference team as well as all the volunteers, you can actually watch the recording here: https://conference.matrix.org/watch/#why-is-there-rust-in-our-matrix

If you are not much of a video fan, the brief gist of it is:

• We want a scalable homeserver, that we can run in a high-availability setup without any single process of failure. (That's what SPOF stands for, right?)
• We want the server to be reliable, because surprises are for people, not computers!
• And we want it to have all the enterprise-y fun bits like easy to deploy on k8s and integrate with all the enterprise tools the BWI likes or rather gets to deal with.

Long term this will also be our base for our MLS work.

So far it has been pretty fun developing a homeserver while trying to follow the spec and please do expect a few spec clarification PRs as well as contributions from complement from us. You don't often get to see the spec from that lens and I hope we can leave the spec in a better place for the next 20 homeservers!

If anything here sounded interesting, do check out our repo, but don't look too closely, it is always a bit embarrassing to present something you have built!

As an aside, we also built our own test suite and have been trying it out on Continuwuity, which has been quite interesting. It is a lot of fun to work with others in the ecosystem!

We also plan to make an MSC out of our homeserver migration format once we gathered some experience with it, which will surely make development of other homeservers more interesting to people, who already have a homeserver deployed.

That is all I have for you this time. You likely will have to wait for the next update for a while, but we do intend to share when Arminius becomes usable and you can try it out. In the meantime you can always find us on Matrix!

🔗Zendrite (website)

pat-s announces

Zendrite, the Dendrite fork written in Go, released v3.7.0. This release catches up with Matrix spec v1.16 to v1.19, adds two moderation features and repairs rooms whose stored state went wrong.

Spec support

• /versions now advertises Matrix v1.16 through v1.19.
• MSC4108 QR code login, which lets a new device sign in by scanning a code from a device that is already logged in, using the rendezvous from MSC4388.
• MSC4306 thread subscriptions, so users can follow individual threads.
• MSC4262, which delivers profile updates over sliding sync.
• The Matrix v1.17 changes MSC4190, MSC4210 and MSC4326.

Moderation

• MSC4284 policy servers, which a room can use to screen events before they are accepted.
• MSC4380 invite blocking, which lets users block unwanted invites.

Room state repair

• The roomserver repairs state events that were stored under the wrong state key, and skips rejected outliers while doing so.
• Events that were rejected are rechecked against the repaired state, redactions together with the events they redact, and events together with the rejoin that follows their cited join.
• Messages that were rejected along with their sender's membership are accepted.
• Memberships the local repair cannot settle are taken from other servers, and outlier memberships that follow the current state are added.
• Forked memberships are passed on even when a room has nothing else to add, and the memberships other servers hold for users the repair leaves alone are logged.

Release notes: https://codefloe.com/pat-s/zendrite/releases/tag/v3.7.0
Chat: #dendrite:matrix.org

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗slack2matrix

Adam reports

slack2matrix is a one-shot Slack workspace importer that fills in several gaps from prior solutions, including by providing full migration of media/attachments. It imports your Slack export into Matrix as an end-to-end encrypted space. Each Slack channel becomes an encrypted room inside the space. Every Slack user can be mapped to a Matrix user and optionally cross-signed with that Matrix user’s recovery key. Every message, thread, reaction, and file is imported with its original author and timestamp, and all media is encrypted on the client before upload, so the homeserver never stores a plaintext copy of the history. Hyperlinks between messages in different Slack channels are translated to Matrix room hyperlinks.

Try it out: https://github.com/matrix-axon/slack2matrix

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Sable Chat (website)

F0rest says

Hi TWIM! We haven't talked since we released v2.0.0, and as we're now on [checks notes] v2.3.5(!) there's quite a bit to catch up on. Firstly: we're on the Apple App Store! Yes, it's taken this long to get on the App Store. It happens. We're also on Google Play Store now, so users don't have to download APKs anymore. Here's three weeks of new features:

In calls, we now have push-to-talk and other global call shortcuts on Desktop. We now have screensharing with audio everywhere, thanks to our Electron migration, which has also allowed us to support Wayland. You can also now configure if you want to use hardware encoding and/or decoding.

In accessibility, we have more comprehensive keyboard navigation, screen readers announce new messages, and better screen reader support during setup and sign-in. (We're always striving for better accessibility -- if you have access needs, or experience doing accessibility audits, please reach out!)

In user experience, so much! We have amazing hand-crafted UI sounds & ringtone (thanks Mae), a nice inline audio player, color-scheme sync on Linux desktop, tons of new customisation like overriding fonts. We now have a lovely notification tray instead of an annoying banner when the app tries to self-update. We have a nice landing page for when you first open the app, instead of just dumping you on a blank screen. We're always iterating on UX, and with 4510 new commits there's a lot we can't quite outline.

Some other stuff: in notifications, we have more granular notification rules, and we now prevent notifications reaching other devices if you're currently using Sable. We now have tray support everywhere, you can edit captions on messages, sensitive data is stored on the system keyring, DeArrow support for YouTube embeds, and a Nix flake for building your own desktop builds. We now ship a hosted option, similar in architecture to Gomuks, and Sable can now register as a handler for matrix: URIs.

Phew! That's about three weeks of changes. It's been a very very busy time for us at Sable, as we grow from a solo fork of Cinny to a fully fledged, independent and hopefully-maturing codebase. I'd like to thank Erwan for tirelessly working on Sable every day, handling scary business things like DUNS and App Store Connect, going above and beyond in delivering the best for not only us but upstreaming changes to Matrix Rust SDK and quickly familiarising with Continuwuity to push our ecosystem forward. We've started getting contributor cross-over with Continuwuity (thanks Ginger!) and it makes me excited to see what we could do if we start reaching out to other projects.

If you're part of the ecosystem, whether it's a bridge bot, homeserver, or other integration, please reach out! We have a simple mission of creating the best Matrix client out there -- not just a Discord clone, not just a JSON debugger, but something truly Matrix we can give to users: with great UI, UX, accessibility, leading feature support, and no vibecoding!

Sable is a Matrix client, available on iOS, Android, Web, and Desktop Platforms. You can view our Git repo, and join our Matrix space at #sable:sable.moe. 🏳️‍⚧️

🔗Extera (website)

rustyraven[extera] says

Hi! Extera now supports more languages than ever before. New languages include Finnish, Polish, Ukrainian, and Turkish. Minor improvements: the new group page is now used for creating chats in spaces (meaning you can manually toggle E2EE and visibility options), and a fix for forwarding gallery messages.

That's all what was changed in Extera, have a nice day!

---

Website ・ Try Extera ・ Releases ・ Source code ・ Matrix space

🔗ytalk-ng (website)

dirk says

Hi everyone! I’d like to introduce ytalk-ng, a native Matrix client for iPhone, iPad and Mac, inspired by irssi and the classic Unix chat tool ytalk. It’s currently available in beta through TestFlight, and I’m looking for people to try it out and share their feedback.

If numbered chat windows, slash commands and an activity indicator like [Act: 2,3,5!] feel like home, this might be for you. ytalk-ng brings that style to Matrix with a green-on-dark terminal look, monospace text and keyboard shortcuts. There’s also a ytalk-inspired split-screen view for conversations.

Underneath the retro interface, it supports encrypted rooms and direct messages, device verification and key backup. You can use an existing account on a homeserver that supports Simplified Sliding Sync, signing in with OAuth or a password.

This is still a beta, so please expect bugs and rough edges. I’d especially appreciate feedback on everyday usability, homeserver compatibility and how the interface feels on different devices. Bug reports and ideas are very welcome!

Join the beta on TestFlight

Website and screenshots · Support and feedback

🔗Element X iOS (website)

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

Doug announces

The 26.11.0 release candidate is out and should reach the App Store on Monday. Its headline changes are:

• Reply with a voice message. You can now reply to any message with a voice recording.
• Custom image reactions. Reactions that use an image now render in the timeline, animated GIFs included!
• Right-to-left text. Mixed LTR and RTL text is now properly aligned within the message bubble.

Also in this release: members of an allowed space can join knock_restricted rooms directly, we fixed a bug when opening notifications that belong to a thread and the message search tab explains its three-month history limit. Element Call moves to its final 0.28.2 release.

Outside of the release, our work on Multi-Account support continues, with each signed-in account getting its own service for Notifications, Calls & Location Sharing and we’re getting everything ready to allow presentation of the add-account flow.

🔗Dept of Guides 🧭

🔗How to setup Synapse

Andy P announces

ADMIN magazine has a lengthy article this week about running your own Matrix Server (specifically using Synapse). https://www.admin-it.io/running-your-own-matrix-server-with-synapse/

🔗Matrix Federation Stats 📊

Aine [etke.cc] announces

TWIM

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

As of today, 20461 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 4044 (19.8%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 20513 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 15634 (76.4%)
• continuwuity: 1970 (9.6%)
• conduit: 519 (2.5%)
• dendrite: 264 (1.3%)

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	158.5
2	codestorm.net	179
3	vibb.me	259
4	sspaeth.de	266
5	awesomesheep48.ca	291.5
6	koshchki123.com	322
7	victorewik.es	417
8	jvyden.xyz	585
9	zirco.dev	660.5
10	blahaj.club	856

🔗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.