This Week in Matrix 2026-02-13

🔗Matrix Live S11E21 – Commet

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew announces

We're delighted to welcome the massive influx of users looking for decentralised alternatives to Discord!

We published a post about what to expect, and some clarity on the growing challenges posed by age verification.

Welcoming Discord users amidst the challenge of Age Verification

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Yan 't' Minagawa says

🔗Matrix Workation, Thailand Edition 🇹🇭

There’s something a little wild going on in Thailand right now.

A group of Matrix enthusiasts traveled straight from FOSDEM to Koh Phangan, a beautiful island in the Gulf of Thailand, to kick off another Matrix workation. After running a similar setup in 2025 (and having a great time), we decided to do it again. This time, we rented a separate house right on the beach - just next door to La Casa, a local remote & digital coworking space in Ban Tai. Mornings are spent together, then everyone dives into their own projects. Once a day, preferably at sunset we sync up, and in the evenings we hack, explore, or head out on small excursions together.

🔗Matrix Pop Up MeetUp Koh Phangan

We’re also connecting with the local community and advocating for Matrix. As part of that, we’re hosting a Matrix Meetup Koh Phangan at our beach house on the next two Wednesdays, starting at 6pm.

If you’re interested in future Matrix workations or want to stay in the loop, feel free to join our Matrix communication rooms we’re always happy to welcome fellow travellers, hackers, and community builders.

🔗Matrix Stammtisch Freiburg

stereo reports

19th February @ 19:00 - 23:00 CET

We will chat about Matrix in public inside a pub, current developments and questions (maybe answers). We can also discuss our approach to the https://di.day and how a change receipt from WhatsApp or Signal to Matrix can look like. This time again in "Blauer Fuchs", Freiburg downtown.

https://blog.freiburg.social/event/matrix-stammtisch-freiburg-2/

🔗Dept of Working Groups 💪

🔗Come and join the Matrix Governing Board Governance Committee Working Group!

Neil reports

Some of you may know that the Matrix Governing Board is made up of committees made up of GB members, each committee then has various working groups to actually get things done formed from members of the wider community alongside a GB member who sponsors the committee.

I want to call out the formation of a new working group for the Governance Committee. The committee’s charter lives here, but in short the role of the committee is to figure out how the Foundation should be structured and operate. So this might include topics such as improving transparency, improving communications internally, making it clear who is responsible for the various Foundation code repositories etc.

If you have thoughts on topics that the committee should be sponsoring and want to get involved, you can join the working group room #governance-wg:matrix.org.

🔗Events WG Wrap-Up

HarHarLinks says

Hi all! This is a very irregular report of what we have been up to over in the Events Working Group.

Maybe you've heard of it, but we recently organised the presentation of Matrix at FOSDEM. Part of that was a hackathon at the local hacker space, which superseded the previous concept of a BarCamp. Further innovation involved the creation of a booth setup, which allows us to just grab a backpack, unload it at a conference, and have a working and offline-capable live demo setup with multiple clients.

We rely heavily on volunteers form the community offering their time to run conferences. With the experience from The Matrix Conference 2025, we used FOSDEM as testing grounds for our new shift management system. The feedback and experience was very valuable, and we think it worked really well, an overwhelming amount of shifts was taken already weeks before the event!

We look forward to making some tweaks and deploying it again soon for The Matrix Conference 2026!

You can read the full FOSDEM Wrap Up over in the blog. If you have any feedback, comments, or suggestions, please share them with us in our room or by email to [email protected].

In terms of (internal) tooling, we also finally have switched to a proper issue tracker, which is a lot comfortabler to use. Thanks, Foundation! ❤️

Speaking of The Matrix Conference, we also took the FOSDEM hackathon as an opportunity to publish the Call for Proposals for 2026! The Conference will take place in Malmö, Sweden, in October 2026. We are now working on finalising the venue and exact date, and you bet are we eager to tell you more very soon! We are full stream ahead and a lot of new exciting ideas are cooking...

Meanwhile, Stammtische (local meetups) are popping up all over Germany the World (see above)! The community is maintaining a list over on their website, go find your local one - or Pull Request your own to add it!

🔗Website & Content WG Wrap-Up

HarHarLinks announces

Hi all! Our last update we shared before Christmas, here is what's new in the Website & Content Working Group!

• We are working with the Foundation's legal team on the long awaited brand assets page!
• We are excited about frequent contributor Jack S. joining the Working Group!
• We took the opportunity of the FOSDEM hackathon to teach more people about how to contribute to the website and are glad to have merged some PRs resulting from it (see below)!
• We now have an issue tracker for TODOs unfit for the website issue tracker instead of a messy markdown file!
• We figured out some issues in configuring branch protections shakes fist at GitHub and are working to improve them!
• We have discussed some ideas on how to improve the maintenance of the feature sets on the /ecosystem pages!
• We shipped lots of updates to ecosystem projects manually! Thanks to Jack, nexy, Neil, Emma, Ben, Airyzz, Danny!
• We updated our social media links in the footer! Thanks, Danny!
• We now have a lot of linters running automatically in CI ensuring our markdown is tidy!
• We shipped updates to the Governing Board and Working Group pages!
• We improved the accessibility of the website! Thanks, Jack!
• We updated the download buttons for the ecosystem clients on Windows and Mac! Thanks anoa!
• We moved the page listing the members of the Foundation to /foundation/members!
• We advertised the FOSDEM online experience of the Events WG!
• We fixed some cosmetic detail of the guides on /docs!

See you again soon with the latest news, in the meantime you can find us over in our room. We are also always looking for people who want to get involved! You can grab a help wanted issue, submit a PR, and if you like, join the weekly office hour via our room.

🔗Dept of Trust & Safety ⚖️

🔗policyserv

TravisR says

v1.2.0 of policyserv, the Foundation's MSC4284 policy server implementation, is here! Newly added features include a link filter, initial support for "server-centric" communities, and other filter improvements.

We're working on actually using the new text-checking APIs we added for server-centric communities, but the feature does exist to start running text like search queries, newly registered usernames, etc through policyserv. Watch this space for updates on how we progress with Search Redirection and other planned uses of the API.

Let us know if there's any bugs in the release at #policyserv:matrix.org 🙂

✨️ If you'd like to give policyserv a try before deploying your own, apply to use our instance! Policy servers are proactive tooling that aim to prevent spammy messages from ever reaching your community members, and work well alongside your existing moderation bot setup.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗continuwuity (website)

Continuwuity is a community-driven Matrix homeserver in Rust.

nex (it/she) 🏳️‍⚧️ says

Continuwuity 0.5.4

It feels like just last week I had the envs.net hedgedoc page open, writing another TWIM post for a continuwuity release. Yet here we are again. Time flies when you're fixing bugs, or however the saying goes.

This week we've got a smaller bugfix release that also has some security fixes and new features in it. Quite all rounded! Here's a couple things that changed since 0.5.3:

• 🔐 Fixed a vulnerability that could allow evil remote servers to trick yours into sending unexpected events while joining or knocking on a remote room.
• 🔎 Fixed a bug that caused the server to incorrectly fall back to unauthenticated media when fetching remote authenticated media failed.
• 📤 Reduced the likelihood of being state reset back into a room you previously left by refusing to process events belonging to said disconnected rooms.
• 🔇 Logs will no longer be spammed by "type not supported" when a client is trying to register and is asking about out-of-band completion.
• 📥 The documentation for installing on Fedora no longer lies to you.

As always, the full changelog is available on our forgejo, along with release binaries, and all the information you could ever need about a release. See 0.5.4's release here: https://forgejo.ellis.link/continuwuation/continuwuity/releases/tag/v0.5.4. If you enjoy the work we're doing for the Matrix ecosystem, please consider giving us a star on GitHub - it massively helps us with visibility!

0.6.0 is already in the oven, so don't forget to stay tuned for that one. You can get more active updates from us by joining #continuwuity:continuwuity.org, or by joining our active offtopic room at #offtopic:continuwuity.org. We've also got a host of other rooms (including new ones) in our space: #space:continuwuity.org. Come say hi!

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Element X iOS (website)

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

Mauro reports

🔗In a world… where rooms longed for order…

Spaces iteration two has arrived in the Release Candidate and is rolling out to the App Stores this coming week.

🔗What’s now available

• Filter your room list inside Spaces.
• Add, remove, and create rooms in Spaces you manage.
• Create new Spaces on demand.
• Edit Space settings — name, topic, avatar, permissions, security, and privacy.

This is finished, in RC now, and shipping soon.

🔗And oh! We also did the following:

• Swift 6 strict concurrency support — just started
  We already use async/await. Now we’re beginning work to support strict concurrency, with proper actor usage and Sendable conformance enforcement.
  (Status: in progress — early stages)

• CI tools — experimental transition
  We’re exploring moving from Fastlane to custom Swift build scripts.
  (Status: experimental / prototype — Fastlane still active)

🔗TL;DR

• 🎉 Spaces v2 — shipping soon
• 🔄 Swift strict concurrency — work kicked off
• 🧪 CI transition — experimental

Stay tuned. The Matrix evolves… again. 🚀

🔗Element X Android (website)

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

Jorge reports

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm happy to announce the work on spaces is done! The feature is available in the latest v26.02.0 release candidate which is now on the open beta channel, and will be officially released next week if everything goes well. We hope you all enjoy it!

That's all for the exciting news, I'm afraid. The rest of the week we've been focused on fixing some annoying bugs, trying to measure sync performance to check how we can improve it, improving how fallback notifications work (those 'You have new messages' ones you see from time to time) and other minor adjustments to the UX of the app.

🔗Dept of Widgets 🧩

Timo K. reports

🔗Expenses Widget

When you travel with a group, you end up sharing a lot of things: grocery shopping, dinners, scooters, taxis and occasionally lending each other money. Keeping track of who paid what for whom can get messy surprisingly fast.

Back in 2025, we started experimenting with a Matrix-based solution to make this easier.

The idea is simple: we create a shared room where every participant posts their expenses. Each message follows a lightweight, human-readable syntax. For example:

1000 nice dinner $ @me / @me @myfriend:example.com @myotherfriend:example.com

This reads as:

The event sender paid 1000 (whatever the currency) for a nice dinner. The cost is split equally between the event sender and the listed participants.

The whole user experience is about having a Splitwise-like feature set without having a separate app. All clients that can send room messages should be able to send expenses.

From these messages, we can:

• keep a running balance for everyone in the group
• calculate settlements at the end of the trip
• stay transparent without spreadsheets or external apps

To get an overview, we have developed a widget that can visualize, summarize, and interpret the data.

Widgets currently don’t have access to the full room history by default. For short trips with few expenses, there’s a simple workaround: scroll to the beginning of the room before opening the widget, and everything will work as expected.

For longer trips with extensive room history, we went a step further and created a pull request for Element Web: https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/pull/32430

This change allows Element Web to fetch additional events when a widget requests them, giving widgets access to the complete set of messages in a room.

There are certainly better long-term solutions, but as a stopgap, this approach works well. Alternatively, room history exports can also be imported.

The widget itself is fully reactive - try it out and watch how it updates instantly when someone posts a new expense to the room (copy this into your element web message composer):

/addwidget https://matrix-expenses-widget-nightly.netlify.app/#/?widgetId=$matrix_widget_id&userId=$matrix_user_id&roomId=$matrix_room_id&baseUrl=$org.matrix.msc4039.matrix_base_url&deviceId=$org.matrix.msc3819.matrix_device_id

Source code: https://codeberg.org/matrix-community/expenses-matrix-widget

And of course, the room isn’t just about numbers: it also includes screenshots, settlement summaries, and the occasional funny GIF or photo - because trips should stay fun, even when tracking expenses.

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Miklós Zsitva announces

Hi everyone! I've just released the initial version (v1) of Matrix Status Monitor, a lightweight GNOME Shell extension (45-49) for tracking unread notifications and favorite rooms directly from the top bar.

• Built with GJS/ESM and Soup 3.0, it features a minimalist 'Status Pill' design and LIFO sorting for active rooms.
• What's coming next week: > I'm already working on a v2 update that will bring even tighter system integration (Libadwaita-inspired UI) and improved status feedback, including better handling of encrypted room states and real-time sync optimizations.
• Check out the code and stay tuned for the update: https://github.com/nurefexc/matrix-status

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [etke.cc] reports

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

As of today, 14191 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3543 (25.0%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 17134 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 11894 (83.8%)
• continuwuity: 546 (3.8%)
• conduit: 525 (3.7%)
• dendrite: 365 (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	codestorm.net	197
2	vibb.cc	205.5
3	usbpc.xyz	225
4	vibb.me	255.5
5	nerdhouse.io	281.5
6	matrix.alejand.org	332
7	coneja.tel	348
8	mustelid.chat	380
9	uwu.possums.lgbt	382
10	muoi.me	391.5

🔗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.