Robin Riley (m.org) says
Meet the nominees for the Governing Board and swing by the election rooms to ask questions and get to know them better. Huge thanks to all of the nominees for stepping up to serve the community! Voting begins on May 31st.
The Matrix.org Foundation is happy to announce that the Matrix Conference 2025 will be held at Kaleidoscoop in Strasbourg, France, from October 15 to 18!
Last year the Conference was completely sold out, with more than 200 decision makers, experts and enthusiasts joining us for this very first edition! The rooms were so full, and we had such a long waiting list that we've decided to extend our capacity this year to 300 attendees, with flexibility for more.
We would like to thank our Anchor Sponsor Element for their dedication to the Matrix ecosystem and to the success of the Conference! Thank you, Element, for enabling us to make the Conference happen!
Hi all!
Another six months has passed since our last report, and elections are just around the corner. So that means it’s time for another Board report. We’ll be asking you to select some new board members, and it’s only right that you get some insight into the work that’s been going on with the ones we have!
Thib (m.org) reports
We are excited to announce that The Matrix Conference will happen in Strasbourg from October 15 to 18! Following last year's success, we bumped our capacity to accept more than 300 attendees this year.
- 🗣️ The Call for Proposals is now open until June 6
- 🤝 We have sponsorship packages ready for organizations interested in getting the right eyes on their products
- 🎟️ We expect to open registrations in the coming weeks
- 🌐 You can find all the information about the conference on https://2025.matrix.org
The Events Working Group and the Foundation at large are looking forward to meeting you in the flesh this year again!
HarHarLinks announces
The nomination period for this years's governing board elections ends tonight (UTC)! If you're an Individual, Silver, Gold, or Associate member, submit your nomination here!
Tomorrow (UTC), the 2 week campaigning period begins officially, but you are already allowed to campaign, for example in the official Governing Board campaigning rooms.
Robin Riley (m.org) reports
It's Governing Board election season and nominations opened last weekend! This year we're electing representatives for Gold, Silver, Individual, and Associate Members. Learn more on the 2025 election page and consider nominating yourself! You can also drop by the Office of the Governing Board to talk to current representatives and community members.
Matrix Authentication Service (MAS) is an OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Provider server developed by Element.
Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} says
MAS v0.16.0 was released this week with a new migration tool! It's still called
syn2mas, but it's faster, more accurate and... written in Rust. 🦀 Running it against matrix.org showed users being migrated at a rate of 60k/s!More details around the new tool, and migrating your homeserver to next-generation auth, is available in the MAS documentation. Please give it a try and send feedback!
The Governing Board of the Matrix Foundation is an advisory board that is made up of elected representatives from all across the Matrix ecosystem.
Robin Riley (m.org) reports
It's time for our annual Governing Board elections! This year we're electing representatives from Individual Members, Associate Members, Gold Members, and Silver Members. Nominations open at midnight UTC as we move from Friday to Saturday, May 3rd. Learn more in our election announcement blog post.
Robin Riley (m.org) says
Please join me in welcoming Filament and infra.run as the newest Silver Members of the Foundation! The financial support we receive from members like them helps us steward the Matrix protocol as an unfragmented standard, facilitate open governance, and advance the state of Trust & Safety for the benefit of the entire ecosystem.
We're grateful for the outpouring of support from across the ecosystem. We still need a few larger organisations to step up. Do you rely on Matrix? Join us as a funding member.
Today we kick off the second Governing Board election season for the Matrix.org Foundation! We start with a two week nomination period that opens on Saturday, May 3rd and closes on Friday, May 16th. This year’s deadlines are anchored to the UTC timezone, rather than the AOE approach that we used with mixed results last year.
We’ll be doing our best to reach out to everyone in the Gold, Silver, Individual, and Associate Member constituent groups to let them know they are eligible to nominate candidates for the election.
If you are interested in nominating someone – or yourself – to be a candidate in this election, read this post in its entirety.
Robin Riley (m.org) reports
We are delighted announce that LiveKit is the newest Silver Member of the Foundation! The LiveKit Project is an open source project that does everything Matrix needs for native group calls, and the company behind the project is donating their LiveKit Cloud services to help us provide that functionality to users on the Matrix.org homeserver. We're grateful for their support and look forward to announcing 2-3 more new Silver Members in the coming weeks 🚀
Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} reports
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:
MSCs in Final Comment Period:
- No MSCs are in FCP.
Accepted MSCs:
- MSC3861: Next-generation auth for Matrix, based on OAuth 2.0/OIDC
- MSC2967: API scopes
- MSC2966: Usage of OAuth 2.0 Dynamic Client Registration in Matrix
- MSC2964: Usage of OAuth 2.0 authorization code grant and refresh token grant
Closed MSCs:
🔗Spec Updates
The update above is actually from the last 21 days to make up for the lack of spec updates recently (I've been travelling!).
In my opinion, the most interesting part to talk about above is MSC4284: Policy Servers. If you haven't already, read the matrix.org blog post on Introducing Policy Servers. In short, they're servers on the internet where you can send events to and have them be checked for spam/illegal imagery/etc. before allowing the event to be sent down to your users. You can think of them like a SpamChecker Synapse module, but homeserver implementation agnostic.
This is a pretty interesting idea, and one can host their own policy server to keep the network decentralised. If you're interested in weighing in on the topic, please do so on the MSC!
Note: the idea of a "policy server" is not new. This MSC attempts to bring the concept in to the Matrix ecosystem specifically for Trust & Safety purposes. But the APIs could be used to enforce any policy (security, enterprise use cases, etc.).
Matthew reports
We've recently seen serious spam attacks against Matrix, so we're introducing Policy Servers to recommend whether servers should accept or discard events before they get synced to clients. If your server participates in public rooms, see https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers to keep it safe.
Last week, we shared details about ongoing attacks on Matrix. Over the past week or so, we’ve tested some new tooling to help combat abuse on matrix.org.
If you run your own Synapse server and your users are present in the Foundation’s community rooms, you can benefit from this tooling by installing an experimental Synapse module. You can find the code and installation instructions here. We’re deliberately taking the bold step of announcing a tool and also announcing its deprecation in the same post. This is experimental work, and we are iterating quickly. We expect to have an implementation in Synapse shortly, so the module will be discontinued around May 21.
Policy servers are an overlapping layer of protection with existing community moderation tools such as Draupnir, Mjolnir and Meowlnir. Rooms can opt-in to this new layer of protection, recommending that servers participating in the room check events with a given policy server before they are sent to their clients. The policy server will pass an opinion on each event, recommending servers in the room to accept the event, or to reject it. For people in the room, this should be effectively invisible. Events which pass the check will be shown as normal, while ones which don’t will never make it through to their clients.
The Foundation intends to offer a policy server to room admins, but we hope that in time other providers will offer alternative policy servers. The Foundation is already running an experimental implementation for some of its public rooms, which we will release once we have confidence in the approach. We also expect that for many rooms, a policy server isn’t necessary, or spends most of the time in a low-power or disabled state. Element and the Foundation are exploring these ideas over the coming weeks.
MSC4284 is now open to support this work. Please get involved in the MSC, and help us to improve this addition to safety tooling for the network. We’d especially like to see implementations for non-Synapse servers.
Folks who run communities on Matrix who would like to test our policy server, reach out to us at [email protected], using the subject policy-server-alpha.