This Week in Matrix 2025-04-18

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

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.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille says

Here comes Fractal 11.rc. New since 11.beta:

• Rearranged account settings, with a new Safety tab
• New setting to toggle media preview visibility
• Sessions can be renamed
• Support for login using the OAuth 2.0 API (as used by matrix.org, which recently made the switch to Matrix Authentication Service)
• Contiguous state events are grouped behind a single item

But what does RC stand for? Really Cool? Reasonably Complete? Rose Colored¹? Release Candidate, of course! That means it should be mostly stable and we expect to only include minor improvements until the release of Fractal 11.

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.

If you want to join the fun, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. We are always looking for new contributors!

¹ That was actually once true, with Fractal 9.rc.

🔗Element X Android (website)

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

Benoit says

• We've made a security release 25.04.2 this week. Make sure to install the latest version of the application from the PlayStore (F-Droid build is in progress)
• We are working on improving accessibility of the application specifically on the timeline. Also fixing bugs regarding the screen reader. Some UI elements were not focusable.
• In the mean time, we're helping the moderation team by adding ability to block and report room and invitation.

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

🔗MatrixRooms.info Updates

Aine [don't DM] says

MatrixRooms.info is a demo MRS instance by etke.cc that provides you the weekly Federation Stats, and today I'd like to tell about the website updates made by beastafk

Communities spotlight

On the main page of the website, a new section has been added - communities spotlight. It randomly picks one of the example search terms and shows the most relevant (small) communities that need you. We hope that section will help smaller Matrix rooms to be discovered and grow!

this section has strict filters (members: 5-500, language: English, avatar: must be set), but sometimes there are no rooms eligible for the filter criteria, in that case, just the first 10 most relevant rooms are shown as a workaround

Search relevancy modes

Previously, the website scored search results by members (highest priority), and relevancy (lower priority). Now you choose what relevancy mode you prefer - most relevant (but usually small) rooms, or highest members count (less relevant)

Option to not share report with homeserver and room admins

When you report a room, there is a new option that prevents sharing the report with homeserver and room admins of the reported room, useful when the admins themselves are bad actions, details

And much more smaller changes!

Apart from the new features described above, the website got plenty of smaller updates and visual fixes

Check it out on MatrixRooms.info

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [don't DM] reports

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 11293 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3334 (29.5%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 18702 rooms.

Stats timeline is available on MatrixRooms.info/stats

How to add your server | How to remove your server

🔗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.

🔗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.