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.
The Matrix.org Foundation and community are very happy to announce that this year, they will be in full force at FOSDEM, with a community event right before the conference, a booth to welcome everyone during the conference, and a dev room to explore topics in depth!
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
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!
We will be decommissioning the sliding sync proxy next week (21/11/2024) and Element are removing client support in mid-January (17/01/2025).
Sliding Sync is designed to provide a significantly faster and more scalable sync experience in our clients. The initial implementation was first prototyped in Element Web backed by an entirely experimental server proxy. The implementation had half an eye on low bandwidth use cases, and the prototype led to MSC3575. We then realised that a simpler approach would be beneficial, and reused the same (experimental) proxy concept to facilitate beta testing with Element X, this time making it available on matrix.org. In doing so, we learned valuable lessons, leading to a refined and simplified API design in MSC4186. The proxy itself was only ever considered as a temporary arrangement to aid speed of development, rather than being a long term solution.
Simplified Sliding Sync MSC4186 (also known as native sliding sync), has since been implemented in Synapse, with encouraging results. Now that we don’t expect the API shape to change significantly, we recommend homeserver developers to implement MSC4186 natively.
The Matrix.org Foundation does not have the resources to keep up maintenance of the proxy service or its codebase, and plans to decommission the proxy from Mid-November and archive the sliding-sync repo.
Recognising that the community needs time to adopt sliding sync natively, Element will keep client support for the old API (MSC3575) until the 17th of January, 2025.
We're happy to announce that this year again we will have a DevRoom at FOSDEM!
We have half a day to talk about all the great projects we have been working on as a community. Our devroom should be on Sunday afternoon, even if it's not completely set in stone for now.
You can submit a talk following one of the two formats:
20 min talk + 10 min Q&A, for topics that can be covered briefly
50 min talk + 10 min Q&A, for more complex subjects which need more focus
Be quick, the Call for Proposals ends on December 1st and we can't extend it. FOSDEM organizers will close all DevRooms CfPs, and we can't bypass it!
The Matrix.org Foundation is excited to host a Matrix.org Foundation and Community devroom in person next year again at FOSDEM! Half a day of talks, demos and workshops around Matrix itself and projects built on top of Matrix.
We encourage people working on the Matrix protocol or building on it in an open source project to submit a proposal! Note that companies are welcome to talk about the Matrix details of their open source projects, but marketing talks are not welcome.
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
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.
PHEW! One month later and I’m still buzzing from the inaugural Matrix Conference in Berlin. This was the first time we’ve gathered such a broad cross-section of the ecosystem both upstream and downstream, bringing together contributors, vendors, and end-users in the same place at the same time.
The result was a fantastic demonstration of how much we can learn from each other, how much progress we’ve made, and how valuable it is to have The Matrix.org Foundation as an ecosystem steward that can bring us all together.
When we were planning the conference, we weren’t sure how big the demand would be. Having hit capacity and sold out of tickets weeks before the event, we know to aim higher next time! We’ll get a larger venue next year, but it was very gratifying to have sessions where the room was literally full!
You could really feel the energy: all told, we had 236 participants from 12 countries across 3 continents, representing 79 different organisations, join us across 4 days of events featuring 52 speakers.
Since the outset of Matrix, our aim has always been to provide a protocol that lets you build open, decentralised,
secure communication apps which outperform the mainstream centralised alternatives. It’s been a twisty journey - first
focusing on making Matrix work at all (back in 2014), and then getting it out of beta with Matrix 1.0 in 2019, and now
focusing on making Matrix fast, usable and mainstream-ready with Matrix 2.0.
Meanwhile, the pendulum of decentralisation continues to accelerate in our direction. Our friends at Bluesky have shown
that it’s possible to build decentralised social apps which are mainstream friendly enough for
Presidents to
recommend them; Elon continues to destroy Twitter and showcase
the importance of decentralisation to everyone, and even Meta is dabbling in decentralised social media (and
decentralised communication!)
So, where does Matrix sit in all this? Well, in order to make the transition to mainstream, we’ve been beavering away to
implement four main pillars in Matrix 2.0:
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.
