The Matrix.org homeserver suffered from an outage on Monday 22 April, between 08:00 UTC and 10:00 UTC, followed by slowness for the next 2 hours.
The outage occurred during scheduled maintenance with no expected downtime. It included upgrading the base OS of the machines running Matrix.org’s deployment.
Josh Simmons announces
WOW! What a week. Today I am thrilled to introduce not one or two, but eight new organisational members. We are extremely grateful to Futurewei Technologies for joining as our newest Gold Member – more on that soon – and to Verji Tech AS for joining as our newest Silver Member. Their support represents a big step toward financial sustainability for the Matrix.org Foundation.
Further, today we welcome Community Moderation Effort, Matrix Elm SDK, FluffyChat, Matrix Community Events, Polychat, and Rory&::LibMatrix as Ecosystem Members! If you couldn’t tell, there’s a lot going on in the Matrix ecosystem!
Does your community use Matrix? Does your project speak Matrix? Or does your business incorporate Matrix into your work? Show your support and become a member today.
Topping off this week’s excitement, our Governing Board nomination period is just about to start! Learn more about the elections, as well as who can nominate and how in our recent blog post.
Update: the terms of the board have been updated with the follow changes:
Welcome to the first ever Governing Board election season for the Matrix.org Foundation! We start with a one week nomination period that opens on Saturday, April 20th and closes on Friday, April 26th AOE time.
We’ll be doing our best to reach out to every constituent group to let them know they are eligible to nominate candidates for the election. That said, this is our first election and we don’t yet have contact information for everybody who is eligible, so we want your help getting the word out.
If you are interested in nominating someone – or yourself – to be a candidate in this election, read this post in its entirety.
To learn about what the Governing Board is, what it does, and the context it operates in, read this blog post from last December. You are also welcome to read the Governing Board’s current bylaws.
Josh Simmons says
Important deadline: next week, the week of April 15th, is the last week to become a member before the Governing Board nomination period! You must be a member, or have your application in and approved, by the end of day on April 19th (AOE time) in order to be eligible to nominate. Stay tuned for a blog post all about that on Monday ✨
This week we’re proud to welcome GNOME and KDE e.V. as our second and third Associate Members, and there are more applications in the pipeline that we’re reviewing!
Matthew reports
I wrote some thoughts on why governments should explicitly route taxpayer money into funding maintenance of open source infrastructure such as Matrix (rather than only funding feature dev, or not funding at all): https://matrix.org/blog/2024/04/open-source-publicly-funded-service/
Josh Simmons says
This week we're thrilled to welcome the Eclipse Foundation as our first Associate Member! We couldn't be happier with the response to our expanded membership program and are delighted that we will have greater community representation when we elect our first ever Governing Board in the coming months.
Hi folks,
The events of the last week have been utterly terrifying as we’ve seen a highly sophisticated targeted attack on open source infrastructure play out in public, in the form of the liblzma backdoor. Matrix is not impacted by the attack (none of our code or infrastructure is using liblzma or xz 5.6), but it has been a massive wakeup call in terms of understanding the risks posed by overstretched open source maintainership.
No Matrix Live as your usual host Thib has been unavailable most of the week!
Josh Simmons says
Our first ever Governing Board elections are approaching, with the nomination period set to begin in late April. If you want your organization or community to be able to nominate a candidate, or to vote in the election, the time to join as a member is now – same for individuals who want to participate!
This week we’re thrilled to announce three new members: two Ecosystem Members, Trixnity and Nheko-Reborn, and our first Platinum Member, Element!
Half-Shot announces
Great news everyone! As of Matrix 1.10, you can now specify more contact information about your homeserver via the new /.well-known/matrix/support endpoint.
This is useful because it allows other citizens of the federation to know who to contact if there is a problem, and it only requires you to fill in a few details to get going. This change has been on the go since 2019, so on a personal note I am thrilled to see this finally land. You can see an example on the foundation's very own server at https://matrix.org/.well-known/matrix/support
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:
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
We released version 1.10 of the spec today! Read the blog post for the full details. Many thanks to Kévin Comaille for writing many of the spec PRs that landed in today's release!
With the release of Matrix 1.10, we on the Spec Core Team are looking forward to Matrix 1.11 and Matrix 2.0. We are asking the teams working on Matrix 2.0 features to update their MSCs and send them for review in #sct-office:matrix.org soon to help bring them closer to release in the next couple of quarters.
Hey all,
Matrix 1.10 is here! We aim to release the specification once in each calendar quarter, and with Q1 wrapping up in a few days we’re due for this quarter’s release. It has been 5 months since the last release (Matrix 1.9) brought in some protocol maintenance for us though, and the implementation teams have been hard at work building the Matrix 2.0 stack concurrent to the Matrix 1.10 work released today.
A total of 9 MSCs are released in Matrix 1.10, covering a wide range of maintenance, Matrix 2.0 preparation, and features for clients to use. This post focuses a bit on the Matrix 2.0 front and what’s expected in Matrix 1.11’s release cycle, but read on to the changelog at the bottom for full details on the changes which make up Matrix 1.10.
MSC3077 and its related proposal MSC3291 (muting in VoIP calls) lay some foundational groundwork for proper group VoIP to land in Matrix - an objective of Matrix 2.0. Currently this is taking shape at MSC3898 and MSC3401, though Element’s VoIP team is considering a possible third alternative which runs MSC3401 over something like LiveKit’s SFU - stay tuned for updates there. In the meantime, users in native 1:1 calls can enjoy proper screen sharing and mute capabilities ahead of the 1:N call support later this year.
As always, early review is appreciated though please note that MSC3898 and MSC3401 are particularly in flux at the moment.
Over the next 2-3 months, we’ll be focusing on the following MSCs:
Additionally, we’ll be continuing to define the expectations of a Spec Core Team member, particularly as it relates to the upcoming Governing Board for the Foundation. This exercise has been extremely valuable to us so far, and will help identify areas the Foundation and SCT may need support from each other.
Read on for full details of what’s in Matrix 1.10:
Backwards Compatible Changes
/versions to optionally accept authentication, as per MSC4026. (#1728)body field as optional media caption, as per MSC2530. (#1731)Retry-After header may be used to rate-limit a client, as per MSC4041. (#1737)GET /relations endpoints, as per MSC3981. (#1746)Spec Clarifications
data-mx-bg-color and data-mx-color attributes instead. (#1739)PublicRoomsChunk in the GET /hierarchy endpoint. (#1740)sdpMid and sdpMLineIndex are not required in m.call.candidates. (#1742)Content-Type may have distinct behaviour on non-JSON requests/responses. (#1756)m.push_rules account data type cannot be set using the /account_data API, as per MSC4010. (#1763)Spec Clarifications
POST HTTP method, as GET requests don't have request bodies. (#1721)PublicRoomsChunk in the GET /hierarchy endpoint. (#1740)children_state, room_type and allowed_room_ids properties in the items of the children array of the response of the GET /hierarchy endpoint are not required. (#1741)Spec Clarifications
/login and /register endpoints should fail when using the m.login.application_service login type without a valid as_token. (#1744)No significant changes.
No significant changes.
Spec Clarifications
invite->knock is not a legal transition. (#1717)No significant changes.
Spec Clarifications
@matrix-org/spec. (#1713)/relations apis. (#1745)$ref URIs containing fragments in OpenAPI definitions and JSON schemas. (#1751, #1754)Josh Simmons reports
The wait is over! We are now accepting applications from projects and organizations that want to join the Foundation as Ecosystem and Associate Members.
You may recall that in December we announced two new membership tiers to ensure we have healthy community representation as we introduce more open governance for Matrix. Specifically, we created Ecosystem and Associate Member tiers. Ecosystem Members are open source projects that speak Matrix, and Associate Members are FOSS foundations, nonprofits, and academic institutions.
We’re excited to bring more folks into the fold, and thrilled to welcome Thunderbird, Draupnir, and Conduit as our first Ecosystem Members 🎉 Curious who else has joined as a member recently? Check out our Supporters.
We’d also like to recognize Thunderbird for sponsoring the Foundation, which helps us get a little bit closer to making the Foundation’s activities sustainable 🚀
Thib announces
There is a question we often get asked: why do you operate the Matrix.org homeserver, and why do you keep registrations open? We don't want to become the gmail.com of Matrix after all. We covered those in this post.