This Week in Matrix 2026-03-06

🔗Matrix Live S11E24 – URL Previews, and Pushing Secrets

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Pangea Chat as a new Silver member!

Amandine announces

Join us in welcoming Pangea Chat as the latest Silver member of the Foundation! Pangea uses Matrix as the basis for their language learning via instant messaging app 🌍️ We love being part of an initiative spreading knowledge and build links between people 👏

🔗Room Directory - Working Group Updates

Nico reports

Good morning everyone, it has been quite a while since you got any update from us! The room directory working group has been quietly processing the requests you sent to it via the form, but now we also have some more exciting updates for you all!

We listened to (some of) your feedback and added a few more topics to the room directory form. This means you can now also request listing the following topics:

• Hobbies, which is quite a big category. Obviously some limitations still apply, we generally want to keep the directory friendly to all kinds of beings and ages, so while a lot of things fall under the term "hobby", we might reject applications still for other reasons. However, this should make the directory more interesting to all kind of less technical users and ensure that you can find people to share your passion with, even if it is not strictly about Matrix!
• Homeserver lobbies. This is a quite narrow topic, but just finding a homeserver is often not enough. You might have questions about the server or want to know what kinds of people hang out there. As such we chose to allow listing the lobby rooms of homeservers in the directory as well, which can serve as a low stakes way to advertise or investigate homeservers as long as you already have a Matrix account. Hopefully this will help some people find a homeserver, that suits their taste.

Now obviously this isn't all the topics you have requested. If anything is still missing, you can always chat with us in #room-dir-wg-office:neko.dev! We are also looking for some new members, if you want to volunteer, because we expect how many rooms we will have to process to only grow.

Apart from that a word of caution, we also recently rejected some rooms, that had no existing history or moderation tooling. When we evaluate rooms, it helps us a lot if we can see some history in the room to validate which conduct is enforced in those rooms. As such if you request your room to be added to the directory, that might be something to keep in mind.

And for anyone who is now entirely confused, you can learn more about how to list your rooms or what that even means in the documentation.

🔗Dept of Jobs 💰️

🔗Search for a new Thib!

Thib (m.org) announces

The Matrix.org Foundation is looking for its next Thib: we have a Senior DevRel position open.

It's a tall order, but we have fantastic volunteers and a solid handbook to help you settle into the role. If you tick most of the boxes but not all of them, please reach out nonetheless.

🔗Dept of Working Groups 💪

🔗Matrix Foundation Maintained or Sponsored Projects Policy Working Group

Nico announces

It can often be quite unclear, what is necessary for a project to become part of the https://github.com/matrix-org organization and what this means for the long term maintenance of that project. The Governing Board has been trying to establish a working group to figure that out for quite a while. Without any promises, if you are interested in taking part of that, please contact me! :)

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

🔗Hydra update

Kegan says

Hydra is a project to improve the reliability and security of the federation side of Matrix. Phase 1 changes landed into room version 12. All MSCs for Phase 2 have now been published, and they consist of:

• MSC4242: State DAGs
• MSC4428: Stable identifiers for room members
• MSC4430: Member Keys

There's 3 phases planned for this project, with phase 3 currently consisting of research papers.

Please take a look and provide feedback!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Continuwuity (website)

Continuwuity is a community-driven Matrix homeserver in Rust.

nex (it/she) 🏳️‍⚧️ announces

You've got mail! Well, actually, you've got a homeserver update to install. And if you don't have an update to install because you aren't already using continuwuity, then you've still got a homeserver update to install, because you should be using continuwuity anyway.

What's changed since 0.5.5? idk, I just deliver the mail. You should read the changelog for the v0.5.6 release to see what's new. I guess I also help write the server, so I can tell you some of the things that changed, but it's important that you know this wasn't in the job description when I signed up.

• 🔐 Support for "MSC3814 Dehydrated Devices" has been added, meaning you can now receive encrypted messages without being logged in (supporting client is not included).
• 🕷️ URL previews have had their reliability boosted with new configurable user agents, and a dedicated purge command to remove old ones.
• 🌪️ Massive improvements to performance for inbound federation (from other servers), which has also increased reliability.
• 🕴️ Added partial support for appservice device masquerading, which should decrease issues encountered with mautrix bridges.

There were also some (low severity) security fixes in this release:

• Fixed a data amplification vulnerability (CWE-409) that could be exploited when some compression algorithms were enabled.
• Removed the theoretical ability for escaped admin commands (\!admin in rooms other than the admin room) to be executed over federation. This is a followup enhancement to further improve the resilliance to attacks similar to CVE-2026-24471 and CVE-2025-68667.

Another important change in this release: federated presence is now disabled by default. Typing indicators and read receipts are still enabled by default, although their documentation has been updated to reflect the cost of using them. Local presence is still enabled by default, so users on the same homeserver can still see each others' online/unavailable/offline status, but it will no longer federate to other servers unless explicitly enabled. Also, there is a bug in 0.5.5 and below with our policy server implementation - if you do not update to 0.5.6, and join a room with both the stable event type, and the unstable event type, you will encounter "duplicate state" errors when trying to process others' events. This cannot be resolved without upgrading.

Questions? Concerns? Write me via carrier pigeon. Or join #continuwuity:continuwuity.org, that works too.

Also, we once again have even more rooms. If you look in our space: #space:continuwuity.org, you can explore some of the more topical-but-not-continuwuity rooms, such as our now popular #techtopic:continuwuity.org room, which is basically our offtopic room, but for the more technical discussions not everyone there will care about. As always, everyone is welcome in our general rooms, you don't have to be running continuwuity or even care about the project to join in!

Anyway. Woof.

➡️ https://continuwuity.org

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Element X Android (website)

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

Jorge says

Hello again this week! There's nothing too exciting to tell, to be honest: we've worked mainly in bug fixing and continued the ongoing work on new features.

• Live location sharing is been actively worked on, we're integrating the SDK code and it seems to be working nicely.
• Push notification handling has been simplified internally, which should mean receiving push notifications should work more reliably now.
• @timurgilfanov (external contributor) fixed a tricky issue that made the text inside the message composer's scroll to act weirdly when it grew to its max size. Thanks!
• Push notifications for redacted encrypted events should now be properly handled: this previously caused a fallback 'you have new messages' notification to appear.

And other several minor bug fixes, which have reduced our crash and ANR rates to almost a third of what it was a few weeks ago, so the app is more stable in general. That said, we noticed some issues in our latest release v26.03.0 that causes the room sync to sometimes fail consistently, preventing it from loading new data. We've released a new v26.03.2 version that should fix this and include some of the latest changes mentioned above, it should be available soon in the different stores.

🔗Commet (website)

Commet is a client for mobile and desktop with a modern UI and fun features!

airyz reports

This week we released another update for Commet! This update aims to fix many of the most common issues found since the previous release, and implements a bunch of quality of life improvements as well! Thank you to everyone who has given their support since the last update! Commet has grown so quickly over the last month, and its an exciting time for the project!

🔗New Features

• Encryption support for Calendar Rooms
• Search and Quick Switcher
• Remove tracking parameters from links
• Traditional account switching mode
• Improved default screenshare quality
• Added private read receipts and typing indicators

Theres a whole lot more to it, so be sure to check out the release on our Github for the full changelog!

🔗Dept of VoIP 🤙

🔗Element Call (website)

Native Decentralised End-to-end Encrypted Group Calls in Matrix.

Timo K. announces

🔗Element Calls transition to Matrix 2.0

This week we have released version v0.17.0.

This is a really big release which we put in a lot of effort.

The big changes it includes are:

• Support for multi-SFU, allowing MatrixRTC to fit into the distributed nature of Matrix
• Support for sticky events. This makes MatrixRTC entirely state-event independent and will result in really big performance improvements in the long run. (No state event spam/spraying)
• Support for delegation of delayed events. This allows us to have fast disconnects managed by the LiveKit SFU. Additionally, this is a solution to replace the heartbeat-based approach that can, in unfortunate cases, lead to undesired disconnects.
• Support for pseudonymous identities on the livekit SFU. This decreases the metadata leaked to the LiveKit SFU to a minimum. This is not an issue for deployments that control both the SFU and the homeserver. But for deployments that use an external SFU or the LiveKit Cloud offering, this is an improvement. The Livekit Cloud will only see UUIDs that change with each call and they cannot extract any matrix user info out of it.

All those changes are NOT active by default. The magic behind this release is that it is a "transition"-release. As incompatibilities make the matrix UX really bad, we try to make the transition as painless as possible. This release is our tool for this transition. It will behave exactly like version v0.16.0 (minus the bug fixes and performance improvements), but as soon as someone (a future v0.18.0 or v0.20.0 user) joins with the Matrix 2.0 concepts, v0.17.0 will also be able to work in combination with them.

There is even a devtool option in v0.17.0 which allows you to manually set one of the future modes. So if your Matrix deployment supports everything needed for Matrix 2.0, you can already play around with it today!

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗Matrix Helm Charts

cyclikal announces

Over the course of 3 weeks whilst working from the Thailand island of Koh Phangan 🇹🇭 as part of the Matrix Workation - and 1 week back in reality - I've been working on creating a number of helm charts which can be used to deploy Matrix-related components into a Kubernetes cluster.

That's now available at cyclikal94/matrix-helm-charts!

The idea is to create charts with example defaults that "Just Work" to deploy components with near-most all configuration deferring to the components' standard config file format

So far a few charts have been created for:

• ntfy a HTTP-based pub-sub notification service which can be used to provide Matrix push notifications on Android without Google via UnifiedPush. See binwiederhier/ntfy.
  • Includes useful Matrix config defaults in an example values.yaml, so you don't have to "know" ntfy.
• matrix-appservice-irc an IRC bridge for Matrix. See matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc
• mautrix-telegram A Matrix-Telegram hybrid puppeting/relaybot bridge. See mautrix/telegram

The work spent on mautrix-telegram, getting setup following the Kubernetes guidiance, should mean I can get the remaining mautrix bridges as charts. The charts exist but are pending testing ... 🤖

🔗Installing

Deploying should be as easy as:

1. Adding the Helm Repo:

helm repo add matrix-helm-charts https://cyclikal94.github.io/matrix-helm-charts
helm repo update

2. Setting up your values.yaml (just use the values.matrix.example.yaml) and plug in your homeserver details.
3. Deploy with:

helm upgrade --install matrix-appservice-irc matrix-helm-charts/matrix-appservice-irc -n matrix-appservice-irc --create-namespace --values matrix-appservice-irc-values.yaml

4. For App Service bridges (basically everything except ntfy) give Synapse the App Service Registration file - if you're using ESS Community it's just:

synapse:
    appservices:
        - configMap: matrix-appservice-irc-registration
          configMapKey: appservice-registration-irc.yaml

Deploying helm charts / upgrades isn't exactly ... exciting, but here's a GIF anyway:

🔗Credits

All credits should go to the services these charts deploy, these charts just get them deployed into Kubernetes via helm. Please check out the linked repositories!

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Matrix Stammtisch Aachen

HarHarLinks reports

Next Monday, 2026-03-09, Matrix Stammtisch Aachen goes into the next round and I am excited to have @robin:robin.town lead it while I'm away at FOSSASIA Summit! This is an informal local meetup for everyone interested in Matrix to any degree! I believe this time there is going to be a talk about the spec prepared by the lovely @famfo:ccc.ac! Learn more at https://ccc.ac/post/2025-10-30-matrix-stammtisch and join the room at #matrix-stammtisch:ccc.ac to get in touch!

And if Aachen is too far for you, check out the Stammtisch index at https://matrix-community.events/more.html or add your own meetup to the list! You can find us in chat at #community-events:matrix.org!

🔗Matrix Stammtisch Frankfurt am Main @ CCC-FFM

weeman announces

Monday, 16th of March starting from 19:00 (CET)

I am happy to announce that the next regular Matrix Stammtisch will be held at the Chaos Computer Club Frankfurt on the third Monday of each month. We hold an F.A.Q. session to answer your questions about Matrix. This time the focus will be on sharing experiences of running your own Matrix infrastructure. However, there will also be time to discuss other topics.

Looking forward to see you there!

You can find more info on the website. Feel free to contact us in our Matrix Room #public:ccc-ffm.de.

🔗Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [etke.cc] reports

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

As of today, 17151 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 4113 (24.0%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 17699 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 13828 (80.6%)
• continuwuity: 1107 (6.5%)
• conduit: 598 (3.5%)
• dendrite: 376 (2.2%)

Stats timeline is available on 📊 MatrixRooms.info/stats

🧩 Integrations with apps and servers | 💜 Support the project | 👉 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	envs.net	224
2	vengeful.eu	256
3	continuwuity.org	266
4	shork.ch	281
5	melthecat.dev	287
6	vibb.me	319
7	usbpc.xyz	353
8	31a05b.net	358
9	foxwitch.net	377
10	matrix.its-tps.fr	405.5

🔗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.