This Week in Matrix 2025-03-28

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Robin Riley (m.org) reports

The Matrix.org Foundation is proud to join likeminded organisations in endorsing the United Nations Open Source Principles, a set of guidelines to promote collaboration and adoption of open source around the globe.

Robin Riley (m.org) says

Please join me in welcoming the newest Silver Member of the Matrix.org Foundation: SSH Communications Security! We're grateful to SSH for stepping up to support the Foundation's mission and stewardship of the Matrix protocol.

Does your organization rely on Matrix? We're working hard to close our budget gap, and we need your help. Join the Foundation to ensure Matrix has robust stewardship well into the future.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} 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:

• MSC4279: Server notice rooms
• MSC4278: Media preview controls

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC4254: Usage of RFC7009 Token Revocation for Matrix client logout (merge)
• MSC2965: OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server Metadata discovery (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC3266: Room summary API

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

Matrix v1.14 was released today! Read more about it on the blog post.

Otherwise work has been steadily progressing on next-generation auth MSCs. There's now only three remaining (MSC2964, MSC2967, MSC2966) that need ticks. They're likely to land very soon, so watch this space!

Finally, MSC2545: Image Packs (Emoticons & Stickers) (aka custom emoji) received some much-needed love yesterday. Thanks to Skye for poking me with a large stick to resolve the majority of the remaining open threads. The MSC is now close to being proposed for FCP merge!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} reports

Hello all. Synapse v1.127.1 was released this week with a fix for a high severity vulnerability affecting federation. The vulnerability is CVE-2025-30355 / GHSA-v56r-hwv5-mxg6.

If your homeserver is federating, please update as soon as you are able.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Quaternion (website)

A Qt5-based IM client for Matrix

kitsune reports

Here comes Quaternion 0.0.97.1, a relatively small upgrade over 0.0.97 from the last month - except that you can initiate verification from it (yes, after all those years), and if you're lucky, you will even verify it! Aside from that, the shuttle scroller has been redesigned a bit, with number of loaded events and events to the sync edge being shown inside the scrolling area now. Full release notes are where you would expect them to be, together with builds for Windows and macOS; and flatpaks are available from Flathub any hour soon now.

🔗Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

It's the beginning of bee season! 🌸🌺🌼 🐝 B like beta! Here's Fractal 11.beta:

• New shortcuts Ctrl + Page Up and Ctrl + Page Down go to the previous/next room in the list
• The media cache will now be periodically cleaned up
• The page that lists user sessions has been overhauled, with details moved to subpages, for a less cluttered feel, and paving the way to a new feature!
• A couple of small cosmetic changes have landed as well

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!

If you have a little bit of time on your hands, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. Anyone can make Fractal better!

🔗Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element-iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 16+.

Mauro Romito announces

• EC code is now embedded directly in EX, allowing it to be faster and safer
• Some accessibility improvements were made, like better voice over for voice messages, avatars, toggles, and video call actions
• Varioius bugfixes like, rendering DM avatars in invites now works properly, and the rendering of pills in reply preview now being fixed

🔗Element X Android (website)

Android Matrix messenger application using the Matrix Rust SDK and Jetpack Compose.

Jorge reports

🔗What's new this week?

• We published Element X Android v25.03.2 in the stores and uploaded v25.03.3 and v25.03.4 to both Github releases and the Google Play Store open testing lane.
• We improved user mention and room pills both in the composer and the timeline items.
• Integrated a bundled version of Element Call into the app so you don't need to use an external service for in-app calls inside Matrix rooms.
• Added some checks to avoid malicious redirections of links where the displayed text would point to a URL and the actual URL would take you to some different one.
• We're working on improving UX and aligning some Android and iOS detail implementations (video autoplay, timeline item sender info touch areas and feedback, etc.).
• And of course, the mandatory 'bugfixes and improvements' changelog entry.

🔗Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

David Langley announces

🔗🌍 Hello from the Element Web Team

It’s been while since we have posted but we're back with some juicy updates!

🔗👬 A New Left Panel and Room List in Labs

We're bringing a new UX to the left panel on the web and desktop apps with an improved layout, functionality and changes to bring it more in line with the Element X Mobile apps.

You can enabled the new experience in labs now to get the following changes:

• New filters and room lists for easy access to your rooms
• Updated Notification indicators that are more in line with Element X Mobile
• Improved menus for Spaces for Rooms
• Improvements to style and spacing

Coming soon...

• More filters! (Mentions Only, Invites Only, Low Priority)
• A menu to quickly change notifications for a room.
• Accessibility improvements.

🔗🔄 Sliding Sync in Labs

For a faster and more scalable sync experience, Sliding Sync has now been implemented natively on Synapse and with a recent update to Element Web/Desktop this can now be used within labs. This replaces the old implementation that was dependant on the sliding sync proxy. To enable the the flag your server should support MSC4186.

🎥 Check out Matrix Live next week for a demo of each of these new additions.

👋 That's all for this week but stay tuned for some more Element X Web -style updates in the future!!

🔗Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Will L announces

Element has had a constant stream of requests for official Helm charts for Synapse and, with Matrix 2.0 materialising, there's even more interest in Helm charts to coordinate the various moving parts.

Today we're very excited to provide an initial release of Element Server Suite, Community Edition (ESS Community), providing long-awaited open source Helm charts from Element, built as an official non-commercial open source Matrix distribution for the wider Matrix community. The initial release orchestrates Synapse, Matrix Authentication Service (MAS), Element Web and supporting infrastructure; Element Call will be coming soon (for now, it’s configured to use a MatrixRTC backend provided by Element). ESS Community is designed to easily and quickly set up a Matrix deployment, even if you don’t have any Kubernetes knowledge. Give it a shot and let us know what you think in the ESS Community Matrix room.

As the name implies, ESS Community is tailored to small-/mid-scale, community use cases. Those that want to use Matrix in a formal workplace - requiring the likes of SBOMs, Support, LTS, Advance Security Advisory, scalability, multi-tenancy and enterprise features or need compliance with regulations such as EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) or Gematik TI-M - should use ESS Pro.

🔗Dept of VoIP 🤙

🔗Element Call (website)

Native Decentralised End-to-end Encrypted Group Calls in Matrix, as a standalone web app

Timo K. reports

🔗Element Call 0.9.0 Release 🤙🏼

We’re excited to announce the release of Element Call 0.9.0! 🎉 This is a major update that introduces packages/artifacts to bundle the Element Call widget directly into messenger apps.

This means:

• No need to download the web app to start a call in Element X (EX) or Element Web (EW).
• Reduced network usage and faster loading times (dependent on network speed).
• Improved security by embedding the widget.

🔗Availability

• Element X: Waiting for App/Play Store publication.
• Element Web: Close to being merged.

🔗Use the EC bundle in your own client

If you want to setup bundled EC in your own client see the docs in the element-call repository.

🔗Other Highlights

This release also includes:

• Playwright integration tests 🧪
• Improved error handling ⚙️
• And more!

Check out the full release notes here for all the details.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗dendritecli v1.2.0

nex (she/it)🦈🐈️ reports

dendritecli v1.2.0 has been released!

v1.2.0 patches some bugs related to outdated HTTP libraries, and some timeouts on API requests that took too long (namely room purging). However, since I've never posted about this project before, here's an overview of what dendritecli is:

dendritecli is a friendly command line tool designed for making standard Dendrite administration tasks (such as creating/deactivating users, evacuating rooms and users, purging rooms, and resetting passwords) simple and easy to remember. Once you've set an account token, and optionally pointed the command in the direction of your database, you won't need to remember those curl commands again.

This release is now on PyPi! You can install it with pipx install dendritecli (or pip install dendritecli if you don't have pipx)

Contact: #ontopic:nexy7574.co.uk | GitHub: https://github.com/nexy7574/dendritecli | PyPi: https://pypi.org/p/dendritecli/

🔗synadm (website)

Command line admin tool for Synapse (Matrix homeserver)

jacksonchen666 (they/it) announces

synadm is (almost finished) migrating to Codeberg!

Our Codeberg repository is at https://codeberg.org/synadm/synadm. We migrated from GitHub (from https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm) and also moved things into an organization, so now the bus factor should be 2 (me and JOJ0) for the entire project, including code, PyPI, and docs. The current progress of things and checklist can be viewed at https://codeberg.org/synadm/synadm/issues/174.

This shouldn't mean much if you installed synadm via PyPI (with pip or pipx), but it does mean you'll have to change git remote URLs if you've cloned synadm (for development or run code from the master branch), or if you're a linux distro package maintainer using tarballs from GitHub.

If you have any questions, comments, or issues you wish to report, please head to #synadm:peek-a-boo.at for now.

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗maubot (website)

A plugin-based Matrix bot system.

wreck announces

maubot plugin for expiring messages

i am regularly bombarded by people who ask: "does matrix have exploding/expiring messages like signal does?" to which i constantly have had to reply no, and then devolve into a long winded diatribe about threat modeling and distributed communication systems... well, now i've put all that into the readme of a maubot plugin that does exactly that!

introducing a new expiring messages maubot plugin. this is my first attempt at such behavior, so i'm really not sure how it will perform at scale... please test it out and share your experience!

this bot can be invited to any matrix room, and if given enough power to redact messages in that room, will keep track of messages sent, and expire them based on the time you set.

please read the README of the project for a lengthy explanation about why this plugin does not magically make you secure... but may fit into your personal threat model in certain situations!

feel free to chat with me about it in my general development room: #dev:mssj.me

🔗Draupnir (website)

A moderation bot for open Matrix communities

Gnuxie 💜🐝 says

Draupnir is looking for feedback on new homeserver administrative features for server admins (particularly those with open registration) in the newly released Draupnir v2.3.0-beta.0.

This release brings policy list support for blocking and purging rooms on your homeserver via a new Room Takedown Protection. Which includes support for MSC4204: Takedown moderation policy recommendation & MSC4205: Hashed moderation policy entities. We also provide a configurable utility as part of the protection to discover the details of the rooms your homeserver is participaiting in.

We are also providing a new way to block invitations to users on your homeserver via the new Block invitations on server protection. This is compatible with synapse workers and replaces the functionality from the legacy synapse module. This work is thanks to tulir's synapse-http-antispam module.

There are a few other changes in this release, so you should check the CHANGELOG. See you in #draupnir:matrix.org.

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Matrix User Meetup Berlin

saces says

Next Matrix user meetup 2.4.2025, 8 pm @ c-base

Meet other matrix users, chat about Matrix, the rest, and everything else, discuss your Matrix ideas, sign each other in persona, and maybe spice the evening with a good mate or beer.

Every first Wednesday of the month in the c-base at 8pm ('til the next pandemic).

Matrix room: #mumb:c-base.org

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

🔗Matrixbird (website)

ahq reports

Matrixbird has some dev instances for those interested in early testing. Matrixbird supports incoming regular email, local and federated matrix emails. There are instances on matrixbird.dev and matrixbird.net. More general discussion in the #matrixbird:matrix.org room.

🔗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.

🔗#ping:maunium.net

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	awawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawaw.gay	174
2	nexy7574.uk	199
3	codestorm.net	200
4	conduwu.it	210.5
5	cummiesin.me	212
6	tomfos.tr	225.5
7	envs.net	237
8	usbpc.xyz	260.5
9	pc.nexy7574.co.uk	275
10	gingershaped.computer	363

🔗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.