You find there the document "Cyber Blueprint - Proposal Council Recommendation" for download that contains on page 17 a recommendation to use the matrix call for inter-gov communication on cyber topics.
In the next step, The European Council must discuss and then possibly adopt this proposal.
The Foundation is at a crossroads. We need to raise an additional $610K to break-even, and more immediately to raise $100K to keep our bridges running.
As a neutral custodian for the specification and much more, the Foundation is key to the success of Matrix. It is time to step up for it.
🔗Announcing the Governing Board Working Groups process
The Governing Board has news! If you have been itching to know how to get involved, we are now ready to get you ... on-Board! 🥁 😀
The Working Groups are the beating heart of the GB - they get the work done. So naturally people have been asking "how do we make one?" and "what is expected of a Working Group?"
First, find some people who want to work on the problem - we would suggest at least 3, but the more you have the better, as it shows the level of interest in the issue.
Second, write down a charter for your Group - this doesn't need to be huge to start with, just a few sentences about what you want to be responsible for and the outcomes you want to achieve.
Finally, get a Board Member to sponsor you - this means finding a Board Member who agrees with the work you want to do, and will act as your link to the rest of the Board. The #governing-board-office:matrix.org is a great place to start conversations about WGs and look for sponsors. If in doubt, ping me there ( @gwmngilfen:matrix.org ) and I will help if I can.
Once you have that done, the Board Member will discuss it with the rest of the GB, we'll put it to a vote, and if it passes, you're in! (If it doesn't, we'll be sure to pass back what feedback we can about why not).
We would advise making noise about your proposals for Working Groups in the community to rally support and/or new members to get work done. TWIM is a good place for that 😛
Working Groups are well named - they work. Some will provide advice & documents on a topic, others may produce code or similar outputs (think, a Docs WG?) but all have work to do. So, obviously you'll want to get on with that.
We also expect that:
Working Groups will have at least a Matrix room to discuss work in asynchronously
they will have regular meetings ("regular" is different for different groups, but we would expect not less than monthly). These could be video or chat meetings.
they take minutes of the meetings - the Board member can help here, but someone should take notes if they are not available.
These minutes get passed up to the rest of the Board so we can all be kept up to date at a high level
Clearly there are also some longer term things that we expect, like an expectation to work well with other Working Groups, to build consensus for decisions, etc. The GB can help if things need unblocking, of course.
We do need a place to record the Working Groups, what exists already, what they do, how you get involved. This will be added to the Matrix.org website SOON™️
All of this is theoretical until we start creating some groups, so .. let's hear your proposals (and I have a few to post in a moment)! Let's get some work done 💪
The GB is considering a proposal for a Website WG! @HarHarLinks has written a charter regarding how to get work done for the main Matrix website, and has a good initial member list. While this is de-facto work already being done, we'd like to make it official - it's been proposed by @HarHarLinks so if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, register your interest with them!
The GB is considering a proposal for a Events WG! This would cover CfPs, staffing booths, merch, event tooling (Pretix box, etc) and so on. While this is de-facto work already being done, we'd like to make it official - its fairly detailed charter been proposed by @HarHarLinks so if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, register your interest with them!
I think we could benefit from a Documentation Working Group in Matrix. The Spec pages are excellent, but much of the rest of our docs falls to the general website team, and we see a lot of copies of things like https://doc.matrix.tu-dresden.de/en which suggest to me that people aren't finding our docs sufficient?
So, without wanting to downplay the awesome work that has gone before, I think a dedicated Docs group could try to help specialise the various people working on the website, as well as provide a clear place to report issues with our materials. I'm willing to propose this, if you'd like to discuss it (or think it's an awful idea), please reach out to me ( @gwmngilfen:matrix.org )! in #governing-board-office:matrix.org
Another group I'm thinking about is the New User WG - this would be focussed on how we get more people to Matrix, and improve those first few minutes/hours/days in our ecosystem - and how to gather their feedback effectively.
During the Matrix Unconference in Brussels, I hosted a session on this, and in just 45 mins we made 2 pages of ideas, so I think it's a rich area. Outputs would be advice/suggestions to other parts of the ecosystem for how we can make things better for our newer (and especially non-tech) users. I'm willing to propose this, if you'd like to discuss it (or think it's an awful idea), please reach out to me ( @gwmngilfen:matrix.org ) in #governing-board-office:matrix.org
The next release of Element X iOS has an updated Rust SDK and as such, we will no longer support the Sliding Sync proxy - native Simplified Sliding Sync via your homeserver is the only sync option.
We made huge progress on embedding the Element Call web app into the Element X (rather than loading it from the web) - we are able to participate in calls, and are now just adapting the code to fully support localisation when embedded.
We have started implementing pills for rooms and events, just as in Element Web. The first step is to replace permalinks rendered in the timeline with these new pills.
We had a nice little external contribution that fixes @mention suggestions to work from anywhere in your message and not just at the end. Thanks Vickoo 🙌
swipe between media: improvement when coming from the pinned Events list. Now merged!
joining room by alias (can also be called address)
user interactive verification. It's currently possible to verify your own sessions, it will be possible to verify other users
fixing bugs! We have fixed a bunch of ANR issue, the first stats from the PlayStore are showing a drop in the ANR occurrences.
new translations into Norwegian and Turkish. Thanks for all the contributors! As a reminder, anyone can help translating the mobile applications from here: https://localazy.com/p/element/ . Translations are shared between the iOS and Android application.
It's been a quieter week, but progress continues! The event cache is receiving
its final polish, including performance improvements, as it nears prime time.
The authentication system is also seeing ongoing enhancements, thanks to Kévin Commaille.
Additionally, work has begun on the successor to MSC3061, aiming
to allow newly joined users to access the history of encrypted rooms.
We have released synadm v0.47! This release packs a few features:
Connection errors to Synapse should be more reasonably small and easy to understand, thanks to #168.
synadm user redact is now added, which redacts a user's messages. Supports local and remote users, but intricate details are up to Synapse (see "Redact all events of a user").
You can filter for empty rooms on the server side in synadm room list with --empty or --not-empty. This is in addition to synadm room purge-empty
More options were added to synadm user list to match what Synapse supports
synadm media quarantine and unquarantine now have the -U/--mxc-uri argument to pass MXC URIs to
That's all in code. There are a few changes in documentation, including the theme, listed on the changelogs.
And of course, a changelog is also available on GitHub. Our room is at #synadm:peek-a-boo.at if you have any questions or other stuff.
Matrixbird is an experimental "mail over matrix" idea I've been working on. It supports both traditional email and secure "matrix email" (local and federated) in a unified client.
As of today, 10771 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3202 (29.7%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation.
The published directories contain 21078 rooms.
After a successful 2024 with a lot to be proud of, and a Matrix Conference that brought our community together to celebrate 10 years of Matrix, we step into 2025 with a light budget and a mighty team poised to make the most of it!
Our priorities remain to make Matrix a safer network, keep growing the ecosystem, make the most of our Governing Board, and drive a fruitful and friendly collaboration across all actors.
However, whether we will manage to get there is not fully a given.
The Matrix.org Foundation and its growing community were once again present at the biggest OSS conference in Europe, and it's been a tremendous success! It was an opportunity for us to gather, share ideas and debate about ongoing topics, meet the broader FOSS community and present our work.
With 8000 visitors, FOSDEM is primarily a place to share your work with others and present the latest developments to those interested. But it's not necessarily the best venue for conversations within the community about topics that are still in-flight.
Because so many people are doing the trip to gather in a single city, it remains a good opportunity to gather your own community in a more intimate setting. This is precisely what Fringe Events happening before or after FOSDEM are about.
Shout out to Workadventure, Nordeck and Famedly who sponsored the Fringe Event and kept us refreshed and fed. And a huge thanks to everybody who showed up at the booth either to staff it or to say a kind word, bring constructive criticism, or have a casual conversation.
A more detailed wrap up post will be published this week. In the meantime, I’m leaving FOSDEM with a sense that we are doing the right thing, going in the right direction, and that people notice. I'm looking forward to meeting you all again, as well as those who couldn't make it to FOSDEM!
This week we tried publishing TWIM on a Monday, but people seem to enjoy reading their Matrix news during the weekend. We will get back to publishing TWIM on Fridays!
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.
Quite a flurry of activity in spec-land this week, as you can see from the above! MSC4133: Extending User Profile API with Key:Value Pairs moved into final comment period. While it still has one outstanding concern as of today, hopefully that can be worked out in the near future.
SchildiChat is a fork of Element for Android and Desktop, that used to focus on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list, but now also provides some additional tweaks and community-driven features that may not be on the roadmap for the upstream clients.
Over the holidays, I added two new (old) features to SchildiChat Next (our Element X Android fork) that I've been missing since switching to the new codebase.
First, inline images and custom emotes are now rendered again, so you don't miss out when users on other clients or certain bridges send these. If you prefer not having images rendered in text message, you can also disable them via a setting, in order to render the fallback text instead - rather than not rendering anything at all as done previously.
Second, I added back the functionality to fetch and render previews for links found in text messages, so you have a better idea what to expect before clicking them. For now, this is an experimental setting, so remember to enable it first if you want to try it out once it lands in the next release.
So, how was your year? NO! DON'T TELL ME NOW! But read on!
Some might remember the year in review for 2023 or 2022, well, this year is still 2024 and I decided to do another one!
If you don't remember, here is the gist of it: It is a room, where you can post about what you did, experienced or otherwise found interesting in 2024. You can also give some predictions for 2025, if you are so bold! Then, on the 31st, I will compose those into a blog post and you can read what others had to say! Now, the exact dates are a bit muddy, last time I was late and there is no guarantee I won't be late this time, but you have until the 30st to compose something you want to share.
There are no exact restrictions on what projects can participate or that what you share has to be a project, but we try to ring out the year with positive vibes from the community in general. Please also try to look at the overall year, if you just want to report on the week, well, there is something called "This Week in Matrix" for that!
Now, you probably are asking the important question, where is that room? Well, you can guess it from last years alias, but for everyone else:
The takedown site has a Matrix-the-movie branding, which is a probable source of confusion. The app showcased doesn’t look like any of the Matrix clients we’re aware of.
In a statement to the Matrix.org Foundation, Europol confirmed that the MATRIX cybercriminal network and the Matrix protocol are entirely unrelated. Europol states:
The Matrix protocol (matrix.org) is by no means connected to the Matrix secured communication service that was targeted in OTF Continental.
A statement from the Dutch police confirms that this is unrelated: "Matrix is also the name of a company and communications protocol of the same name, which has nothing to do with the crypto communications service Matrix."
We want to know everything about the bugs you squashed, the features you developed, and the docs you wrote. And even better, not only do we want to know about it, we want you to tell the Matrix community about it during our FOSDEM Fringe event, or even to tell the world about it in our FOSDEM Devroom!
But we're not limiting our presence to a DevRoom, we will also organize a fringe event before FOSDEM and have a booth during the wole event. Want to grab a limited edition T-shirt? Now's your chance to sign-up and help us staff the booth. All details are in our blog post.
