This Week in Matrix

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗FOSDEM

Thib announces

🔗Hackathon

We're excited that more than 50 people have signed up for our Hackathon before FOSDEM, including some seasoned developers who are willing to mentor newcomers. We're looking forward to meeting everyone there!

If your organisation wants to support the Matrix community for this event and get brand recognition for it, please reach out to [email protected] to sponsor the prizes, lunch, dinner, or drinks!

🕐️ Friday, 30th January, 09:00 - 17:00 CET (local time)
🏢 HSBXL, Rue Osseghem 53, 1080 Molenbeek
🎫 Free registration here
[m] Join us in #fosdem-2026-hackathon:matrix.org to stay informed!

🔗Booth

We'll have a booth for both FOSDEM days, on Sat. 31st Jan. and Sun. 1st Feb. We already have a solid team staffing the booth, but there are a few remaining slots if you want to lend us a hand and leave FOSDEM with a limited edition volunteer T-shirt! (Little birds told me this year the T-shirts would be Spezicolored!)

Find us in building AW!

🔗Devroom

We're coordinating the Decentralised Communications Devroom. We have a pretty cool line-up with focusing on T&S, Matrix, XMPP, ActivityPub, AT and more.

Joins us to get up to speed on what's happening in the decentralised communications world, and why not help cross-pollinate between projects 🐝

🕐️ Sunday, 1st February, 09:00 - 17:00 CET (local time) 🏢 Room AW1.126

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🔗Matrix Live S11E18 – Happy Holidays!

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Website & Content WG Report

HarHarLinks says

Only 2 weeks later we are back with a quick wrapup of recent activities on the website before the holidays.

• Jack S. has been supporting us greatly in shipping a million updates to all kinds of ecosystem projects as well as finding and fixing some smaller issues and contributions.
• We cleaned up the blog categories a bit, slowly working towards clearer definition of what goes where.
• salixh5 checked the status of and contributed an update to the LINE bridge during a Matrix Stammtisch.
• anoa updated our footer social media icons to include the Foundation's Bluesky profile.
• We have updated the homepage to fulfil the platinum membership perk.
• andybalaam contributed documentation on how to hide images by default using different Matrix clients via the T&S R&D WG.
• The T&S team announced policyserv, the SCT published Matrix v1.17, and the Events WG shared the latest news about the upcoming FOSDEM 2026.
• We greatly simplified the website contribution workflow by updating the PR template and introducing more automated checks via linters. More about that is on the horizon and looking for contributors!
• The effort to tag issues we are looking for help for continues. You can already find 30 to get involved with using the help wanted tag!

The website office hour is on holidays and will return in its regular slot on 8th January! In the meantime, you can still find us in the #matrix.org-website:matrix.org room and of course keep sending PRs! See you again at TWIM next year.

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🔗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:

• MSC4388: Secure out-of-band channel for sign in with QR
• MSC4387: M_SAFETY error code
• MSC4386: Automatically sharing secrets after device verification

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC4124: Simple Server Authorization
  • Superseded by MSC4345: Server key identity and room membership.
• MSC4099: Participation based authorization for servers in the Matrix DAG
  • Superseded by MSC4345: Server key identity and room membership.
• MSC3953: Server capability DAG
  • Superseded by MSC4345: Server key identity and room membership.
• MSC4294: Ignore and mass ignore invites
  • Superseded by MSC4155: Invite Filtering

🔗Spec Updates

The Spec Core Team expects to release Matrix v1.17 next week with a few MSCs, along with some improvements to the spec website. Stay tuned for those!

Otherwise we're still working away at Matrix 2.0 MSCs - trying to keep them at the forefront while occasionally dipping into other MSCs. MSC4143: MatrixRTC, MSC4354: Sticky Events and MSC4186: Simplified Sliding Sync are the three currently being most actively worked on. The team appreciates your patience while the details are being hammered out.

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🔗Matrix Live S11E17 Element X Android gets a boost

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Website & Content WG Report (website)

It's been a while since the last status update from the Website & Content WG if we disregard the recent upgrade to the TWIM room and bot, so we wanted to share a quick wrap-up of recent developments!

• We continue to explore how to best and most effectively collaborate with the Foundation on publishing news, with the FOSDEM announcement by the Events WG following the newest suggested process with success!
• We have suggested to adopt an AI policy to the Foundation, and it was decided to adopt it on the website for now.
• In collaboration with the Room Directory WG, you can now find the form as well as further information about the room directory of the matrix.org homeserver on a dedicated page
• weeman has added TWIM to the website navbar, so you don't have to remember the shortlink anymore to get your news!
• vedant-vijay fixed an issue with the filters on the SDKs page
• Jack S. has spotted some bugs and opportunities to polish which we were glad to merge!
• We are maintaining the information about the Foundation, including it's members and are working with the Governing Board to keep its documentation up to date, as well as the Working Groups
• We have introduced a bunch of labels to the website issue tracker to help us sort tasks, and especially to point out some tasks that would be easy to implement even by external contributors
• We keep developing guidelines for ourselves to improve the consistency and professionality of the website step by step and of publications in general step by step, while also trying to keep an eye on making it as simple as possible to start contributing
• The #matrix.org-website:matrix.org room was upgraded and as part of that not only receives GitHub webhooks about activities on the matrix.org repo, but also the other repos required for the WG's daily work, including twim-config and the conference website repo
• Of course, we continue to publish TWIM every Friday 😉

As you can see, there is a lot going on! If you're interested in getting involved, you can find us in the #matrix.org-website:matrix.org room, or of course grab an issue and send a PR! We also try to meet in a call regularly on Thursday afternoons, which we announce at #matrix.org-website:matrix.org.

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🔗Matrix Live S11E16 – Connectivity Tester

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Retiring the Slack Bridge hosted on the matrix.org Homeserver

Thib (m.org) says

In an effort to focus its resources where it can best serve the ecosystem, The Matrix.org Foundation is retiring its public Slack Bridge.

Find all the details on the dedicated blog post.

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🔗The Matrix Conference 2025 - The Governing Board Transparency Update

You can find the same video mirrored on media.ccc.de at https://media.ccc.de/v/matrix-conf-2025-75078-governing-board-transparency-update. All Conference content is available via the Conference website.

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Luxchat Hackathon

Amandine reports

We're happy to announce that LU-CIX is joining the Foundation as a Silver Member! LU-CIX is the organisation delivering the Matrix-based Luxchat in collaboration with the Ministry of Digitalisation of Luxembourg and the Chamber of Commerce. Luxchat comes in three (interoperable) flavours:

• Luxchat4Gov for the public sector
• Luxchat4Pro for companies and organisations
• Luxchat, as a free messaging system for the general public and businesses, without advertising and without use of personal data, and respects the privacy of its users.

Earlier this week the three organisations also hosted a successful Matrix meets Luxchat Hackathon in presence of Madame Obertin, Minister of Digitalisation for Luxembourg!

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🔗The Matrix Conference 2025 - The Matrix.org Foundation Updates

You can find the same video mirrored on media.ccc.de at https://media.ccc.de/v/matrix-conf-2025-81434-the-matrix-org-foundation-updates. All Conference content is available via the Conference website.

🔗Dept of Working Groups 💪

Sky reports

Cutting the ribbon on the reopened matrix.org room directory!

Back in early September, the room directory working group started an initial beta test run. For the first time in months, it was possible again to get new rooms into the directory.

Since then, we’ve reworked the multiple forms into one universal one to make things easier for users. We also identified several pain points in the process and validated that our imagined workflow actually works in practice. There are still improvements we’re actively working on, but we’re already happy with the current stage.

There is now a dedicated subpage for the room directory on the matrix.org homepage —you can find it here— where users can easily access all relevant info. Please share it around!

If you’d like to give feedback or get involved, feel free to walk by in our #room-dir-wg-office:neko.dev.

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🔗Matrix Live S11E15 – Figma but based on Matrix?

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Governing Board (website)

The Governing Board is an advisory board to the Matrix.org Foundation and with elected representatives from all across the Matrix ecosystem.

Gwmngilfen announces

Howdy folks, your friendly GB here - I've been a bit quiet recently, but we wanted to let you all know that the latest 6-monthly Board meeting happened this week! Lots to cover, Working Group updates, challenges, plans for upcoming work, and so on - so you can expect a report out in the near future on that! Stay tuned 🙂

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🔗Matrix Live S11E14 – MSC Crafter, MAS Personal Tokens

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Amandine reports

Robin is sadly moving on at the end of November, see A fond farewell from Managing Director Robin Riley. I will be covering as acting MD while we recruit someone else. A job description is incoming, but please get in touch at [email protected] if you're interested.

Amandine announces

This week we're welcoming Liberbyte as a Silver member of the Foundation! Liberbyte uses Matrix as data exchange layer between organisations to provide transparent and controlled access to global data exchanges and markets. Welcome and thank you for your support! 👏

Does your community or organisation use Matrix? Do you maintain an open source project that builds on Matrix? Join these organisations in demonstrating their support and apply to become a member today.

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🔗Matrix Conference 2025 - The Matrix State of the Union

Alternatively you can find it on media.ccc.de at https://media.ccc.de/v/matrix-conf-2025-74977-the-matrix-state-of-the-union.

🔗Matrix Conference Recordings

Beyond the Matrix State of The Union you can also find all of the Matrix Conference recordings at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl5dnxRMP1hUgnYEbpEsEEhIqY_KlO3NG.

They are also available on media.ccc.de at https://media.ccc.de/c/matrix-conf-2025.

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗DINUM joins The Matrix.org Foundation

Amandine says

🇫🇷 Very excited to announce that DINUM, the French Interministerial Digital Directorate, is joining The Matrix.org Foundation as a Silver member and becomes the first government to join the Foundation! 🚀

Matrix is the backbone of Tchap, the secure messaging app for the French government, and it is great to see a State stepping up to concretely support and collaborate with an open source project so critical to their functioning.

💡 We hope this will show the way to all the other public sector organisations using Matrix, especially after we kicked off a Matrix for Public Sector group at the Matrix Conference last week, hopefully soon approved by the Governing Board as an official Working Group 🤞!

➡️ check out the announcement blog!

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