This Week in Matrix 2025-07-18

🔗Matrix Live S11E05 - Project Hydra

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew reports

On Wednesday we pre-disclosed a major security update on the horizon (codename Hydra) to improve state resets and related federation issues in Matrix. This requires a coordinated security release across all Matrix servers, so that servers running in untrusted federations (e.g. the public Matrix network) can speak the upcoming new room version (v12).

We have just pushed back the date for the coordinated security release to Aug 11th 2025, as we've heard a lot of feedback that 6 days wasn't enough for clients/bots/bridge/tooling developers to test the changes introduced by room v12, and that it also doesn't give enough time for community admins to prepare for the necessary room upgrades. Underestimating the time needed here for client/community testing is entirely our fault, due to being overfocused on coordinating the significant serverside work needed. Pushing back the release date by 3 weeks gives everyone more time to test and prepare. We've also opened up registration on the beta.matrix.org homeserver, which is already running v12 rooms by default, to make it easier for client developers to test their clients. We've also made one clarification below for client developers, explaining the new permissions needed to send m.room.tombstone events.

See https://matrix.org/blog/2025/07/security-predisclosure/ and this week's Matrix Live for all the details.

HarHarLinks announces

The Matrix Foundation and Website & Content Working Group are excited to announce the introduction of the "Homeserver" section to the matrix.org website! 🎉 You can find it at https://matrix.org/homeserver/ and in the navbar a the top of the page or hamburger menu on mobile.

This is the central place to learn all about the homeserver instance provided to the public by the Matrix Foundation. From here, it is now easy to browse all the relevant info, including system status, news, system notices, legal documents, and even preliminary info about the premium accounts currently still being finalised. We already have some more info in the pipe we want to add, but if you find some missing info, let us know in the website's GitHub issues!

If you're interested in contributing to the matrix.org website, you would be more than welcome. You can reach the Website & Content Working Group at #matrix.org-website:matrix.org, and we offer an office hour via that room on most Thursdays to discuss in sync. You can also find a lot of good first issues on the repo. :)

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Element X iOS (website)

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

Doug announces

Having had a focus on improving the app’s accessibility for the past few weeks, this week we decided to take a look at automatically running Xcode’s Accessibility Audits for all of our views. This has helped us identify issues such as missing VoiceOver elements, small tap target sizes and views that might not scale well with changes to the Dynamic Type size.

Amongst other things its just really cool to watch these tests run:

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

OdoItal announces

vodozemac-python 0.9.0 has been (finally) published, with python bindings to the rust library at the same version.

It also comes with new exposed attributes, cleaner unit tests, and most importantly, prebuilt wheels for python3.14!

During the course of creating this release, it also revealed bugs with vodozemac's exposure of the dehydrated accounts functionality, which could not be supported in the python bindings for this release, unfortunately.

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [away] reports

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

As of today, 12871 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3704 (28.8%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 18218 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.