This Week in Matrix 2025-11-28

🔗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.

🔗Dept of Trust & Safety ⚖️

🔗Draupnir (website)

A moderation bot for open Matrix communities.

Gnuxie 💜🐝 announces

TWIM Draupnir has released v2.8.0 which includes a much anticipated feature: policy room subscription previews 🎉

We will be following up this release with a re-work to the UX surrounding server ACL changes within the next few days, as part of a larger move to keep the management room focussed on important notifications and prompts.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element.

Devon Dmytro says

This week we released Synapse v1.143.0.

Of note for this release:

• support for PostgreSQL 13 has been removed as per our deprecation policy. Synapse will fail to start when run with PostgreSQL 13.
• this will be the last release to support macOS wheels. We haven't heard any feedback from anyone still using these so we will go ahead with the plan and discontinue their generation.

Thank you to all our contributors for helping to make Synapse the best it can be. As always, feel free to stop by #synapse:matrix.org to join in on the discussion and if you encounter a bug make sure to report it here.

🔗continuwuity (website)

Continuwuity is a community-driven Matrix homeserver in Rust.

Jade says

Continuwuity has a new website! It should generally be much easier on the eyes, and easier to navigate! Go check it out at https://continuwuity.org/

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Element X Android (website)

Android Matrix messenger application using the Matrix Rust SDK and Jetpack Compose.

ganfra announces

• We've dedicated efforts to improving the app's performance and have implemented new monitoring to track it effectively.
• The room list is now more reliable, thanks to the adoption of the newLatestEvent API.
• We also continued to make progress on Spaces.
• And as usual, a number of bug fixes have been included to enhance stability.

🔗Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 17+.

Mauro Romito reports

• We are currently implementing the space members access join rule, which allows a room to have people join without an invite if they are a member of a space included in the rule.
• Usage of the new latest event API which allows to see the sent state of your own message (if last) in the room list.
• We redesigned the room members list.
• We are dropping support for iOS 17, this is a thing we do every year so that we only support the latest 2 OS versions, which allows us to keep removing deprecated code and use and experiment with new APIs

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Your all-in-one toolkit for creating Matrix clients with Rust, from simple bots to full-featured apps, with bindings to Swift, Kotlin, WebAssembly, Go and more, sponsored by Element.

Ivan 🦀 reports

What nice improvements have been made these past 2 weeks! Can't wait to share them with you!

🔗Redecryptor

A new API, a new pun. Let's welcome R2D2, the new Redecryptor API that has recently land in the Event Cache. With this new API, the Event Cache is responsible to redecrypt events that failed to be decrypted at the first try (because keys may be lagging or insert non-sense reasons inherent to decentralized end-to-end encryption).

• #5746 The Redecryptor has fully landed!
• #5868 To remove the old redecryption logic from the Timeline.
• #5881 To fix a race condition in the redecryptor leading to missed decryption attempts (known bug, see #5474).
• #3872 is finally closed!

Not only it's cleaner, it's also more efficient and it handles more complex situations. Kudos!

🔗Latest Event

The new Latest Event API is finally used more widely. The Element X clients are using it, and it rocks. The clients feel more reactive and snappy. It is even possible to see a little 🕙 in the room list for messages being sent. It means that your local messages are now displayed in the Room List!

With this new feature comes news bugs. Of course. People can't just use something without breaking it. Otherwise, where would be the fun, I'm asking you!

• #5908 When a message cannot be sent (because your subway is upset with the mobile network), it's marked as “cannot be sent”, and so any other new messages should be marked as “cannot be sent” too automatically.
• #5885 The user profile details are now attached to the LatestEventValue automatically, so that the client can do richer rendering in the Room List.
• #5913 —not merged yet— The LatestEventValue reflects edits too. These aggregated events are a bit complex to handle, but we gently start to have a nice toolset to handle these cases now, yepee.

🔗Sliding Sync

We constantly improve sliding sync, both client and server side, with performance improvements in mind.

• #5878 We've changed how SlidingSync client enters the long-polling mode. Now, SlidingSyncListBuilder provides a new requires_timeout method, which takes a user-defined function, used to decide whether a request should do a long-polling or not. With this new feature, we have more controls to recover from complex scenarios (network is always complex), and thus improving the user experience. The previous behaviour is kept by default for the sake of consistency.

We are about to revisit the matrix_sdk::room_list_service::SyncIndicator behaviour too. Expect news on that front soon.

🔗Event Cache store is cross-process lock aware

We said last time we've improved the CrossProcessLock so that a process knows when another process obtained a lock while the former got suspended. This information is required so that a process can decide to refresh its in-memory state when this happens. The Media store was already cross-process lock aware. Now there is a new name in the list.

• #5856 The Event Cache store is now also cross-process lock aware. Every time an API is called in EventCache or RoomEventCache, a new read- or write-lock is obtained, and the in-memory state is automatically refreshed if required. Kudos to the reviewers, that wasn't a small set of patches!

This contribution frees the road for the Badge Counter project, but also for the Events from notification are stored in the main app project. It's exciting!

This work was also required to continue working on Threads, where we want to persist thread events. This work has started.

🔗Misc

• #5856 It adds support for *aarch64-apple-watchos target triples, i.e. we can build the Matrix Rust SDK for watchOS!
• #5879 We have an AI policy now!
• #5898 We expose session expiration errors during QR login.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗Matrix Connectivity Tester

MTRNord (they/them) announces

It's been a while since my last update, but a few things happened.

First of all there is an ongoing rewrite happening for the frontend. The key points with that are that it switches to the rebranded ukgov theme (which will at some point also get a custom colour scheme to avoid confusion), it uses SSR instead of full client-side rendering, and it has a revamped structure around its results. One major change in that being the arrival of finally showing suggestions on how to actually resolve your issues. You can find that deployed at https://beta.connectivity-tester.mtrnord.blog/

Note however that this is still relatively early in the process, so only the start page and the results page are available at this time. Additionally, I am far from handling all the various ways federation can fail and writing suggestions on how to fix those. This is going to take some more time to figure out and improve, and most important, to make it technically correct in all cases. Additionally, the source code is not yet available since it is very fast moving still, however expect it to be published under the same license as the existing UI (AGPL-3.0). I am hoping to make this happen within the next weeks.

Beyond the rewrite of the UI, there is also some change to ways to access the source code and how to reach out. The source code is now also available at https://git.midnightthoughts.space/rust-federation-tester/ and https://git.midnightthoughts.space/matrix-connection-tester-ui/ instead of just GitHub. With that, I also provide a mailing list (yes, those still exist) at https://lists.midnightthoughts.space/mailman3/lists/matrix-connectivity-tester.lists.midnightthoughts.space/ for people who prefer not to use GitHub to contribute or for people to ask questions. If providing patches using the mailing list, please use the format you would get using git send-mail or git format-patch. GitHub Contributions of course are also still accepted.

As usual, you can find the production deployment at https://federationtester.mtrnord.blog/ for use at your convenience :)

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗📢 FOSDEM Decentralised Communication Devroom!

bboett reports

• Call for Proposals (CFP) closing soon! The Decentralised Communication Devroom at FOSDEM 2026 is happening, and the Call for Proposals ends this Sunday night. Submit your proposals ASAP at fosdem.org/submit!
• We will also have a booth —Come talk with the team or grab stickers!
• Travel Tip: When booking your FOSDEM travel, please plan to arrive a day early (ideally by Thursday evening at the latest). We are organising a full-day Fringe event on Friday, January 30th!

🔗Matrix FOSDEM Hackathon

Thib (m.org) announces

The Events Working Group is thrilled to announce that the day before FOSDEM 2026, on Friday 30 January, we will have a Hackathon!

We're thinking it as a collaboration first hackathon where teams lift each other. We will all work toward a common goal, and we will only succeed together.

The hackathon will start at 9am CET, last the whole day, and people will be able to present their successes, failures, learnings, achievements, improvements, or even frustrations at the end of the Hackathon. More details in a full blog post next week!

Registration will open next week and be free of charge, but we need to know how many people are coming to organize the logistics. We count on you, people of the Federation!

🤝🧢

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [etke.cc] reports

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 11721 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3223 (27.5%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 16790 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 10067 (85.9%)
• conduit: 468 (4.0%)
• dendrite: 370 (3.2%)
• continuwuity: 304 (2.6%)

Stats timeline is available on 📊 MatrixRooms.info/stats

🧩 Integrations with apps and servers | 👉 How to add your server | 🙅 How to remove your server

🔗Dept of Ping

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

🔗#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	tuwunel.love	148
2	codestorm.net	179.5
3	continuwuity.rocks	192.5
4	vibb.me	208.5
5	nexy7574.co.uk	237
6	nerdhouse.io	264
7	synapse.nexy7574.co.uk	270.5
8	uwu.possums.lgbt	279.5
9	tomfos.tr	324
10	wolfn.eu	341

🔗That's all I know

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

To learn more about how to prepare an entry for TWIM check out the TWIM guide.