This Week in Matrix 2023-04-28
28.04.2023 20:14 — This Week in Matrix — ThibMatrix Live
Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️
Matrix.org Foundation
Michael Downey announces
Don't miss this week's Matrix Live, where Amandine & Matthew talk about the growth of the Foundation and how it will help all of us working in the Matrix ecosystem be more successful. And in case you missed it, a job description for the Foundation's first Managing Director has now been posted. If you think you have what it takes, or if you want to share it with others who might, don't delay!
Matrix.org Website Bug Hunt
Thib says
Some of you might have heard of it, but we're about to launch a (long overdue) update of the matrix.org website! The current one has served us well, but it grew organically as exciting projects and features were added to it. It became a little impractical to navigate and sometimes confusing.
The new matrix.org website, nicknamed "Zola" after the static site generator it uses, is not just a fresh coat of paint on the website: it's a complete rewrite to address three kind of people who would browse the website. Sorted by time they're willing to spend on a web page:
- The general public, who is not tech savvy and doesn't want to understand how things work, but who wants to get an easy onboarding
- Community managers, who are not too tech savvy but are willing to spend a bit of time to understand more advanced use cases
- Developers who want to understand how matrix works, and who want to build & break things!
We're in the final stages of developing the website, and we need you to help us making it ready! Head to the preview of the website, use the website, and give is feedback by opening an issue on the website tracker. Please make sure the issue doesn't already exist before opening it.
Reporting the following is particularly helpful:
- Something looks off, misplaced, is not aligned well or behaves oddly
- Something is missing (the doc is incomplete? Some informationg is missing somewhere?)
- There's an accessibility issue
- Something doesn't work on your browser
- It's not clear how to get to a particular information (you're looking for a client or a SDK, and after visiting the website you still don't know which one to use or how to get it?)
We still need to:
- Finish up the Bots page (which will likely be replaced by an Integrations page)
- Flesh out the support page to highlight more of the work of the Matrix.org Foundation
- Import the historical projects that are no longer maintained (clients, servers, bots, bridges, sdks)
If you want to follow along, you can join the #matrix.org-website:matrix.org room.
Help us make the website look as neat as possible for launch!
Matthew reports
The UK's online safety bill is a catastrophe in the making, and as currently written empowers the UK telecoms industry regulator (OFCOM) to obligate end-to-end encrypted messaging apps to embed proprietary 3rd party scanning software which attempts to identify and flag abusive content and report it to the authorities. If you are in the UK, please sign this petition https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/634725 to try to force the government to reconsider. Element, for instance, would rather be blocked by the UK govt from the app stores than embed third party scanning technology. For more info: https://element.io/blog/the-uks-online-safety-bill-undermines-everyones-safety/ and https://element.io/blog/the-online-safety-bill-an-attack-on-encryption/