MTRNord

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Trust & Safety

Jim announces

If you are wondering what the Foundation Safety team get up to, and what we have planned, we have an update for you. Check out the post: Building a Safer Matrix

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR 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:

• MSC4264: Tokens for Contacting Accounts
• MSC4265: Data Protection Officer contact in /.well-known/matrix/support
• MSC4266: Policies in /.well-known/matrix/support

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Update

Lots of MSC implementation and iteration is happening behind the scenes at the moment, leading to not very exciting Spec Core Team (SCT) updates :) As this implementation work progresses, the Matrix 2.0 MSCs in particular will continue to push forwards towards acceptance.

In the meantime, early versions of Extensible Profiles is up for review and today's blog post "Building a Safer Matrix" hints at some T&S spec changes expected soon.

The next spec release is expected in early March 2025 - if there's MSCs you think should be included there, let the team know in the SCT Office!

🔗Informal TI-Messenger Spec Discussion

Johannes reports

@this-week-in:matrix.org for people interested in informally discussing the Matrix-based TI-Messenger (TI-M) spec, as of today we have a public room: https://matrix.to/#/#tim-spec:matrix.org

If you haven't heard of TI-M before, in a nutshell it's a chat standard for the German healthcare system.

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Matrix@FOSDEM 2025

As a reminder Matrix will again be present at FOSDEM this year!

As always, FOSDEM is free to attend and will happen at the 1. and 2. of February. Additionally we will have a fringe event on the 31st of January. You can find more information in the "Matrix in full force at FOSDEM" blog post.

Additionally please be aware that the Health and Safety Policy for the fringe event will be the same as the one of the Matrix Conference. Extremely briefly: You need to wear a mask while indoors, except while eating and drinking.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} reports

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:

• MSC4253: Modifying or rejecting accepted MSCs
• MSC4252: Extensible Events modification: State event handling
• MSC4250: Authenticated media v2 (Cookie authentication for Client-Server API)

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC4213: Remove server_name parameter from join and knock endpoints (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

MSCs in Proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC4133: Extending User Profile API with Key:Value Pairs
• MSC3765: Rich text in room topics
• MSC3266: Room summary API
• MSC4239: Room version 11 as the default room version
• MSC3757: Restricting who can overwrite a state event
• MSC4183: Additional Error Codes for submitToken endpoint

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3575: Sliding Sync (aka Sync v3)
  • Superseded by MSC4186: Simplified Sliding Sync
• [WIP] MSC4097: Interactions between media redirection and authentication
  • Replaced by spec-independent approaches.

🔗Spec Updates

As suggested from folks in the TWIM room, the above status now contains MSCs that are currently in proposed Final Comment Period. The hope is that this directs attention to MSCs that are close to being either merged/closed.

Let me know what you think!

Continue reading…

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Governing Board (website)

The Governing Board is an advisory board that is made up of elected representatives from all across the Matrix ecosystem.

HarHarLinks says

I'm excited to share some quick news from the governing board today! Over the holidays around the new year, we finished the committee chair elections and congratulate:

• Bram and Sumner, chair and vice chair of the Governance committee,
• Sumner and Nico, chair and vice chair of the Community committee,
• Robin and Kevin, chair and vice chair of the Finance committee,
• J.B. and Nico, chair and vice chair of the Trust & Safety committee!

This paves the way for the committees to start taking up work while at the same time the governing board as a whole also finalises the processes around working groups so we can onboard all of you!

We look forward to sharing another update soon, and Matrix @ FOSDEM is also on the horizon, where attendees will be able to meet a good handful of governing board members face to face! For any questions, feedback, or discussion with/about the governing board, join our #governing-board-office:matrix.org!

Until next time!

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} says

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:

• There were no new MSCs this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

It may seem quiet from the stats above, but there's actually been a healthy amount of activity across various MSCs this week!

MSC3266: Room summary API had FCP proposed, which moves this long-awaited MSC significantly closer to being accepted. This MSC allows clients to get a quick preview of a room before joining it, which is useful in all sorts of scenarios (see the MSC for a list!). There's still a fair amount of feedback to get through, but much of it is small clarifying comments. Exciting to see this one move forward!

MSC4133: Extending User Profile API with Key:Value Pairs has also been moving forward, with the Synapse implementation in active review by the maintainers, and all concerns on the MSC (currently) having been resolved this week.

There's plenty of activity on other MSCs as authors work to update them. Also a huge thanks again to those working on the spec text itself. Multiple PRs against the matrix-spec repo have been opened following the holidays, all making the spec better for everyone. Thank you!

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live - Social Login with MAS

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Welcoming Ercom as a Silver Member

Josh Simmons (m.org) says

We'd like to welcome Ercom as the newest Silver Member of the Matrix.org Foundation and are excited to announce a couple other new members before the end of the year 🚀

The Matrix.org Foundation stewards the Matrix protocol specification, facilitates open governance, and convenes the ecosystem. While Matrix continues growing in adoption, the Foundation's funding is not keeping pace. If your organization builds on Matrix and is invested in its future, the time to become a funding member is now.

🔗Matrix.org protocol is not MATRIX

Josh Simmons (m.org) announces

From the department of no-the-other-Matrix: This week saw news of Europol shutting down an encrypted messaging service called MATRIX. All indications are that this has nothing to do with the Matrix protocol, and we are grateful to the agencies and publications that have made an effort to disambiguate. We are, of course, monitoring the situation as more information becomes available.

Continue reading…

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Sunsetting the Sliding Sync Proxy: Moving to Native Support

Will L announces

Work on Sliding Sync – which provides a significantly faster and more scalable sync experience in Matrix clients – has moved to focus on native support, and away from the proxy.

The Sliding Sync Proxy on the Matrix.org homeserver will be decommissioned on November 21st, and client support in Element X will be removed on January 17th.

More details for users as well as server and client developers in Matrix.org's latest blog post

🔗First Official Governing Board Meeting

HarHarLinks says

It is Friday TWIMday the 15th of November, and the Governing Board just came out of their first official meeting after the informal one at the Matrix Conference back in September. The focus of this meeting was to define the structure of the Governing Board, so we expect the results will not have an immediate tangible effect outside the Governing Board, but it gives the Governing Board the basic process to enable taking more perceptible decisions.

This includes discussion about how we want to communicate with each other, but we also defined how we vote on actual decisions and some other basic rules for the Governing Board. As a part of that we elected a chair and vice chair for the Governing Board, who are going to help the Governing Board with facilitation tasks. Greg "Gwmngilfen" (chair) and Kim "HarHarLinks" (vice) were elected and are happy to share this post as one of our first actions in this role today. 😁 We also started some subcommittees of the Governing Board, to enable us to work efficiently in smaller groups focussed on specific topics. The rough topics for the initial four committees are Governance, Trust & Safety, Community, and Finances. What their exact scopes are going to be is left as a first task to the respective committees to define along with other bootstrapping, such as electing committee chairs and vice chairs. The set of initial committees is intentionally kept small to remain flexible and open the door for refining them later when we have more experience with how our day to day operations look like. We also discussed defining initial working groups, which would be structured as groups below the committees to fulfil more specific roles and would be the primary way for the Governing Board to include the community. However, we decided to defer that to the committees for now. We got through all the big parts on our agenda but ran out of time before having a formal vote on what communication tools we want to use. We have a great proposal which we are going to vote on asynchronously.

In general we had quite a productive meeting and reached agreements on many topics with clear next steps in other areas. The Governing Board might not have tackled yet the topics you would have prioritised, but it now has an asynchronous voting process and should be able to progress in other areas using the committees.

See you soon with more news from the Governing Board!

Continue reading…

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Matrix 2.0

Matthew reports

We've also announced Matrix 2.0 as now being usable by mainstream users, to complement the keynote from The Matrix Conference - giving an update on all the APIs that will form Matrix 2.0! https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/

🔗The wait is over, videos from The Matrix Conference 2024 are here

Matthew reports

The Matrix Conference talk videos have been published - check them out at https://2024.matrix.org/watch/ and see Josh's round-up of the conference at https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrixconf/

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

uhoreg says

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:

• MSC4223: Error code for disallowing threepid unbinding
• MSC4222: Adding state_after to sync v2
• MSC4221: Room Banners

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2781: Remove the reply fallbacks from the specification (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC2409: Proposal to send EDUs to appservices

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

🔗The weekly spec update

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:

• MSC4210: Remove legacy mentions
• MSC4209: Updating endpoints in-place
• MSC4208: Adding User-Defined Custom Fields to User Global Profiles
• MSC4207: Media identifier moderation policy
• MSC4206: Moderation policy auditing and context
• MSC4205: Hashed moderation policy entities
• MSC4204: m.takedown moderation policy recommendation
• MSC4203: Sending to-device events to appservices
• MSC4202: Reporting User Profiles
• MSC4201: Profiles as Rooms v2
• MSC4198: Usage of OIDC login_hint
• MSC4197: Copy Paste Hints

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC4170: 403 error responses for profile APIs (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC4189: Allowing guests to access uploaded media

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Update

Lots of interesting MSCs came in this week! Note that last week's are also listed as the spec update was skipped.

A swath are looking to improve moderation in Matrix, while others aiming to improve the story around notifications and end-to-end encrypted bridges. There's also been lots of discussion on the hot MSC4133: Extending User Profile API with Key:Value pairs, which can be built upon with spec'd profile fields such as m.timezone (MSC4175).

MSC4208 is the result of splitting out the custom fields portion of that MSC, as it was determined that that portion of MSC4133 needed further discussion before merging.

Finally, MSC4189: Allowing guests to access uploaded media being merged closes one of the final gaps with the authenticated media epic.

Continue reading…

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons (m.org) announces

We had our first Governing Board gathering today at the Matrix Conference in Berlin, with 17 of the 20 members present (4 of which joined remotely)! We got to know each other a little better and discussed many things including Trust & Safety and how we communicate with each other and with the community.

Since this wasn't an official meeting, no votes were taken. The first official meeting of the Governing Board will be taking place soon!

🔗Matrix Conference 2024

The Matrix Conference 2024 is over, the videos are being cooked and the slides are being uploaded. We'll be sharing the recordings with you as soon as they're ready.

In the meantime, a big thanks to everyone who attended, spoke, and helped make it happen. We hope you had a great time and learned a lot about Matrix and the community. We hope to see as many or more of you next year!

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons (he/they) reports

I’m pleased to report I've been busily onboarding the elected Governing Board members, and we've already started having important conversations about how we continue to move the Foundation forward to support the Matrix ecosystem.

This week Matthew and I published a blog post, significantly informed by community conversations and work with the Governing Board, on a process to define a governance framework for the projects we steward. Of note, in this post we are also drawing a line in the sand and making it clear: some projects, like the spec, test suites, SDKs, and shared cryptographic libraries, are so important that they require ongoing stewardship, under a permissive open source licence, by an organisation that is accountable to the ecosystem. To put a point on it: the Foundation will seek to fund and coordinate maintenance and development of core projects even if faced with a competing fork.

Learn more in our blog post. We’d love to hear from you as we work together to update our project governance, and encourage you to reach out to your representatives on the Governing Board along the way.

Continue reading…