This Week in Matrix

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew says

Very happy to announce that the Spec Core Team has been reviewing how to make more progress on MSCs and get more organisational diversity into the SCT, and we've decided to expand the team - unanimously voting to add both tulir and clokep to the team effective today. Huge thanks to both tulir and clokep for being up for joining and donating their time... and looking forwards to their contributions in helping get MSCs to and through their Final Comment Period and merged into the spec!

Josh Simmons says

We’re excited to be forging stronger ties with other open source foundations, so that we can work together and lean on one another’s areas of expertise. Last week we announced that the Matrix.org Foundation joined OpenForum Europe as a supporter alongside Mozilla and many others.

Adding to that, we’re pleased to share that we have become an affiliate of the Open Source Initiative and joined their Open Policy Alliance, and we’ve also joined the Eclipse Foundation as an associate member.

We look forward to going further, faster, together! 🚀

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

No Matrix Live this week, but there will be plenty of Matrix talks (live!) on Sunday at FOSDEM in the Matrix devroom, and at Matthew's main track talk. The talks are livestreamed, so you can follow even if you aren't at FOSDEM (or if you are in FOSDEM but the room is full). If you are at FOSDEM, you can also find live Matrix people at the matrix.org stand in Building K, level 2.

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons announces

Announced today during the EU Open Source Policy Summit in Brussels, the Matrix.org Foundation and Mozilla have joined OpenForum Europe as supporters. OpenForum Europe has proven an effective convener and advocate for open source and open standards in Europe, and we’re glad to help further that work.

Josh Simmons announces

This week the Matrix.org Foundation launched a new fundraiser, shared some high level budget figures, and kicked off a series diving into our emerging roadmap!

We’ve made huge strides over the last year, with the Foundation more robust and independent than ever before, and there’s a lot to be excited about in the future. Critically, we still need more organizations to step up to fund our work before January 2025.

Huge thanks to Beeper, Gematik, Fractal Networks, Fairkom, Thunderbird, and the hundreds of individuals who have already stepped up! Learn more in our blog post and become a member today 🚀

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) 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:

• There were no new MSCs this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3981: /relations recursion (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Update

For those familiar with Travis' weekly task lists of MSCs for the Spec Core Team to review in the Office of the Matrix Spec Core Team room, a new weekly list is now being posted in the Matrix Spec & Docs Authoring room. This list is aimed at technical writers who can help by converting MSC authors' words into PRs against the spec text itself.

This is the final step for getting an MSC integrated into a new release of the Matrix spec, and anyone can try their hand at it! It would also very much help the Spec Core Team by freeing up more bandwidth for review of the MSC backlog, as well as push forward the protocol itself. Thank you!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the relevant Matrix rooms.

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC4003: Semantic table attributes!

This MSC proposes expanding the set of suggested, interpreted HTML tags in Matrix clients to include additional tags related to tables. With them, more control over table rendering is possible. The proposal itself includes one such (albeit fairly arbitrary) example

The proposal is well-written and straight-forward, so do feel free to have a look if the subject interests you!

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons announces

Have you seen the Stack Overflow Developer Survey results for 2023?!

Of the 83,830 folks surveyed, Matrix was the #1 chat tool in terms of current users' satisfaction. It was also rated as the most desirable among the open source tools with open governance, but there is a lot of room for improvement in awareness. We’re excited to build on this 2024! 🚀

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

No Matrix Live this week, but a YouTube playlist of the Matrix talks given at FrOSCon!

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) 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:

• There were no new MSCs this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3981: /relations recursion (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Update

For those familiar with Travis' weekly task lists of MSCs for the Spec Core Team to review in the Office of the Matrix Spec Core Team room, a new weekly list is now being posted in the Matrix Spec & Docs Authoring room. This list is aimed at technical writers who can help by converting MSC authors' words into PRs against the spec text itself.

This is the final step for getting an MSC integrated into a new release of the Matrix spec, and anyone can try their hand at it! It would also very much help the Spec Core Team by freeing up more bandwidth for review of the MSC backlog, as well as push forward the protocol itself. Thank you!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the relevant Matrix rooms.

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC4003: Semantic table attributes!

This MSC proposes expanding the set of suggested, interpreted HTML tags in Matrix clients to include additional tags related to tables. With them, more control over table rendering is possible. The proposal itself includes one such (albeit fairly arbitrary) example

The proposal is well-written and straight-forward, so do feel free to have a look if the subject interests you!

Continue reading…

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons reports

We’re excited to announce the timeline for our first ever elections as we take the next big step in open governance for Matrix. We’re also introducing two new membership tiers to increase community representation by including open source projects and foundations on the Governing Board.

Read about this and more in our latest blog post.

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Matrix Community Year In Review 2023

Nico announces

(Please ignore, that I never know, what year number to attach to such a "Year In")

You may remember I organized a small blog post last year to collect stories from the different community projects and what they did in the year and maybe some sneak peaks at the next year. If not, you can find it here or on the Matrix.org blog.

Anyway, enough about 2022, I now encourage you to talk about 2023 and beyond! If you have interesting stuff to report about your projects or projects you have been involved in in 2023, feel free to join #year-in-2023:neko.dev and talk about it! The usual TWIM rules apply there, just that we talk about a whole year and it may involve lots of manual editing on my side, so don't try to break it. Also please be positive in your news and lets try to end 2023 with a bang!

And please share this with projects you want to hear about. :)

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib says

I'll start with a heads-up that the Foundation is going to clean-up all the libera.chat aliases on Matrix. You might want to check the rooms under your control to update the alias and the matrix.to links to it.

You can find all the details on our blog

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

dmr reports

This Tuesday we released Synapse 1.98.0rc1. Its promotion to the 1.98.0 release proper is planned for the coming Tuesday (12th Dec). We expect v1.98.0 to be the final release of 2023, as the team takes a break over the holiday period.

Of note in this release candidate:

• Synapse now fully supports Matrix v1.7, v1.8 and v1.9.
• Server notice rooms received a few quality-of-life improvements to. Thank you Mathieu Velten for submitting these changes.
• Synapse's upgrade notes now describe how far Synapse can be safely downgraded.

As ever, thank you to our users, contributors, and community of server operators.

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

Unfortunately no Matrix Live this week, your host and editor apologises for the inconvenience!

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

🔗Libera Chat bridge sunsetting

Josh Simmons says

This week we were sorry to announce that we are not able to bring the Libera.Chat bridge back online. We have already begun working through clean up tasks, such as clearing ghosts, and expect to be done by December 22. If you see any bridge artifacts left past that point, please let us know.

We know that many communities and individuals were relying on the bridge, and we regret the impact this situation has on them.

If you are one of those who have relied on the bridge in the past, you may be asking: what now? You do have options.

People who need a bridge for their community can run their own: the matrix-appservice-irc software is still maintained. Only its Libera.Chat instance, which was configured to persist connections across restarts, is being shut down. Please be mindful of the network, and read Libera.Chat’s recommendations and their Matrix FAQ when doing so.

For more information, read our full announcement and Libera.Chat’s announcement.

🔗Matrix on Wikidata

Christian Paul (jaller94) reports

Wikidata is an open knowledge base, containing structured information to be read by humans and machines. I love it and I contribute to it a lot.

This week, I added a few more items from the Matrix ecosystem which I want to highlight:

You may have heard of this event series called Matrix Community Summit (Q123583505). In the past, we've had the Matrix Community Summit 2022 (Q123583515) and the Matrix Community Summit 2023 (Q123583556).

One output of these community summits is the Matrix Salon Podcast (Q123583531), which is a podcast featuring community members. Check it out! After all, you already seem to be interested in Matrix (Q22906785) given you're currently reading This Week In Matrix (Q123583570).

Continue reading…