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.
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. :)
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
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.
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).
uhoreg 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:
Accepted MSCs:
- No MSCs were accepted this week.
Closed MSCs:
🔗Spec Updates
Matrix 1.9 is due out next week. Keep your eyes peeled for an update.
Andrew Morgan (anoa) 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:
- MSC4080: Cryptographic Identities (Client-Owned Identities)
- MSC4079: Server-Defined User Home Pages
- MSC4078: Transparent pusher creation
- MSC4077: Improved process for handling deprecated HTML features
- MSC4076: Let E2EE clients calculate app & E2EE-room badge counts themselves
MSCs in Final Comment Period:
- No MSCs are in FCP.
Accepted MSCs:
- No MSCs were accepted this week.
Closed MSCs:
🔗Spec Updates
Cross-posting from TravisR's announcement in the Office of the Spec Core Team room...
🔗Matrix 1.9
The next release, Matrix 1.9, is scheduled for release on Wednesday, November 29, 2023. This will largely be a maintenance release, but if there's anything you think we might have missed, please let us know.
🔗Matrix 1.10
The Spec Core Team is now accepting MSC and feature suggestions towards the Matrix 1.10 release, due sometime around FOSDEM in February (unsure if it'll be before or after). So far we've got the following features up for consideration:
- Extensible Events (at least proposing FCP on the majority of the core system; plan to merge for Matrix 1.11)
- Encrypted appservices (like MSC2409)
- Custom emoji/stickers (merge)
If there's specific MSCs, or even vague ideas you'd like the SCT to focus on, let us know in the Office of the Spec Core Team room. The SCT will generally find it harder to actually write the MSCs ourselves, but if you're planning on implementing a feature that will need spec review, let us know so we can ensure bandwidth is made available for that review to happen.
🔗Random MSC of the Week
The random MSC of the week is... MSC3394: New auth rule that only allows someone to post a message in relation to another message!
This MSC is paving the way towards the use case of a room where, for instance, announcements can be made by admins, while general users can start or participate in a thread branched off from an announcement. But they otherwise would not be able to make "top-level" posts.
This feature is common in services such as Telegram, for announcement or support rooms. And it would be nice to be able to support the same kind of use case in Matrix.
It looks like I dropped the ball on keeping up with the discussion on this one. So excuse me while I go do that!
Josh Simmons announces
The Matrix.org Foundation is proud to join with Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and over 400 security experts, researchers, and NGOs in sounding the alarm about the EU's proposed eIDAS reform.
As written, the proposal radically expands the ability of governments to surveil their citizens and residents across the EU.
We encourage citizens and residents of the EU to pay close attention and look for ways to get involved – urgently.
Josh Simmons says
A couple months in, it’s a joy and a privilege to introduce myself as the first Managing Director of The Matrix.org Foundation! Read my intro post to learn more about me, the work ahead, what you can do to help, and how the leaders of other open source foundations are reacting to my appointment.
I’m thrilled to take this opportunity to also announce the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation, a new room that offers a direct line to me and the rest of the small but mighty team behind the Foundation. Come say hi! 👋🏻