Josh Simmons reports
We’re excited to announce the timeline for our first ever elections as we take the next big step in open governance for Matrix. We’re also introducing two new membership tiers to increase community representation by including open source projects and foundations on the Governing Board.
Read about this and more in our latest blog post.
I confess I'm awfully chuffed with myself as we return from the holiday break. I just completed a successful migration of my main Matrix account from managed hosting to a homeserver that I run for myself on a virtual private server (VPS).
The whole experience has been illuminating, and there are some specific details that are timely for people like me who needed to migrate off of Element Matrix Services (EMS) as they pivot to focus on enterprise.
Thus, this blog post. I'm going to share my experience in hopes that it'll help some folks with that migration!
Hi all,
2023 has been a pivotal year for Matrix, with huge changes landing both organisationally and technically to prepare the protocol for future generations. The ecosystem has once again gone from strength to strength, with active users (based on Synapse opt-in phone-home reporting) doubling across the public network, and more projects building on Matrix than we can count (look out for the “This Year in Matrix” community wrap-up blog post) - and more organisations than we can track joining Matrix for all their secure decentralised communication needs.
On the governance side, we are in an incredibly exciting new era with Josh joining the Matrix.org Foundation as its first ever Managing Director (and employee!), with a mandate to cement sustainable funding for Matrix as an independent foundation, governed by the forthcoming elected open Governance Board. Now, Matrix needs funding more than ever - but rather than turning the entirety of this post into a plea for donations, I’m going to let Josh fly the flag in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, if you want Matrix to keep existing (especially if you’re an organisation who builds on Matrix) please join the Foundation and donate.
On the technical side: the theme of the year has been one of focus: extreme, overdue, focus.
Nico announces
(Please ignore, that I never know, what year number to attach to such a "Year In")
You may remember I organized a small blog post last year to collect stories from the different community projects and what they did in the year and maybe some sneak peaks at the next year. If not, you can find it here or on the Matrix.org blog.
Anyway, enough about 2022, I now encourage you to talk about 2023 and beyond! If you have interesting stuff to report about your projects or projects you have been involved in in 2023, feel free to join #year-in-2023:neko.dev and talk about it! The usual TWIM rules apply there, just that we talk about a whole year and it may involve lots of manual editing on my side, so don't try to break it. Also please be positive in your news and lets try to end 2023 with a bang!
And please share this with projects you want to hear about. :)
As 2023 winds down and I find myself in the thick of planning for 2024, I’d like to start preparing all of us in the Matrix ecosystem for what is to come.
Next year will mark a number of important milestones in the history and evolution of Matrix: the protocol will mark its 10th birthday, we’ll see key initiatives in the spec cross the finish line, and we’ll seat the first ever community-elected Governing Board.
The election of our first Governing Board is what I’d like to focus on today, because it is a huge milestone on the path to an independent, self-sustaining, and self-governing ecosystem. When we celebrate Matrix’s 20th birthday, we’ll look back and our history will be divided much the same way it is in other ecosystems: before and after incorporating a foundation, and before and after introducing community governance.
Let’s talk about what the Governing Board is, why it matters, and how to get involved!
Thib says
I'll start with a heads-up that the Foundation is going to clean-up all the
libera.chataliases on Matrix. You might want to check the rooms under your control to update the alias and the matrix.to links to it.You can find all the details on our blog
The Matrix.org Foundation has taken down the bridge with the Libera Chat network. This only prevented messages from making it across the bridges, for Matrix users to appear on the IRC side, and for new IRC users to appear on the Matrix side.
As part of our work to remove the bridge leftovers, we have removed the ghosts in Matrix rooms and demoted the Libera Chat appservice user. We will now remove the aliases from the rooms, and strongly encourage you to make sure you update the links to your Matrix room if they relied on a matrix.to link that contains :libera.chat
Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team
dmr reports
This Tuesday we released Synapse 1.98.0rc1. Its promotion to the 1.98.0 release proper is planned for the coming Tuesday (12th Dec). We expect v1.98.0 to be the final release of 2023, as the team takes a break over the holiday period.
Of note in this release candidate:
- Synapse now fully supports Matrix v1.7, v1.8 and v1.9.
- Server notice rooms received a few quality-of-life improvements to. Thank you Mathieu Velten for submitting these changes.
- Synapse's upgrade notes now describe how far Synapse can be safely downgraded.
As ever, thank you to our users, contributors, and community of server operators.
Several potential speakers asked us to extend the deadline of our CfP for the Matrix Devroom at FOSDEM. We are extending the deadline to Friday 8th December. You will find below the Call for Participations amended. Please submit your talks to https://pretalx.fosdem.org/: we're looking forward to reading them!
Unfortunately no Matrix Live this week, your host and editor apologises for the inconvenience!
Josh Simmons says
This week we were sorry to announce that we are not able to bring the Libera.Chat bridge back online. We have already begun working through clean up tasks, such as clearing ghosts, and expect to be done by December 22. If you see any bridge artifacts left past that point, please let us know.
We know that many communities and individuals were relying on the bridge, and we regret the impact this situation has on them.
If you are one of those who have relied on the bridge in the past, you may be asking: what now? You do have options.
People who need a bridge for their community can run their own: the matrix-appservice-irc software is still maintained. Only its Libera.Chat instance, which was configured to persist connections across restarts, is being shut down. Please be mindful of the network, and read Libera.Chat’s recommendations and their Matrix FAQ when doing so.
For more information, read our full announcement and Libera.Chat’s announcement.
Christian Paul (jaller94) reports
Wikidata is an open knowledge base, containing structured information to be read by humans and machines. I love it and I contribute to it a lot.
This week, I added a few more items from the Matrix ecosystem which I want to highlight:
You may have heard of this event series called Matrix Community Summit (Q123583505). In the past, we've had the Matrix Community Summit 2022 (Q123583515) and the Matrix Community Summit 2023 (Q123583556).
One output of these community summits is the Matrix Salon Podcast (Q123583531), which is a podcast featuring community members. Check it out! After all, you already seem to be interested in Matrix (Q22906785) given you're currently reading This Week In Matrix (Q123583570).