This Week in Matrix 2026-01-09

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Amandine says

🚀 We’re happy to start the year by announcing Meedio joining the Foundation as a new Silver member! Meedio builds and sells Matrix-based video conferencing systems, hosted in EU or on-premise. Welcome! 🤗

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix Stammtisch Aachen

HarHarLinks says

Next Monday, 2026-01-12, is the first edition of Matrix Stammtisch Aachen in 2026! This is an informal local meetup for everyone interested in Matrix to any degree! We might do anything from figuring out what server to sign up with, to configuring notifications which have no UI setting. 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!

Interested in joining or starting your own local meetup? You can find many organisers of other local events at #events-wg:matrix.org and #community-events:matrix.org.

Dept of Working Groups 💪

Fundraising Working Group

Gnuxie 💜🐝 reports

Hello TWIM, I am trying to organise a Fundraising Working Group. The Fundraising Working Group will assist the Foundation in the organisation and the execution of fundraising the Foundation’s work. This means that as well as organising Fundraising the working group will also help the Foundation be aware of fundraising opportunities. Critically the group will help communicate the benefit that the Foundation’s activities provide to its members, and also provide feedback back to the Foundation.

The group is currently provisional and I would like to gauge interest from the community before proceeding, the charter can be viewed here: https://gist.github.com/Gnuxie/54d364b3c0d4ce76e05a06d1d24632e6

If this sounds interesting to you, please join the lobby room to discuss or indicate whether you would like to take an active or passive role: #provisional-fundraising-working-group:matrix.org

Dept of Servers 🏢

continuwuity (website)

Continuwuity is a community-driven Matrix homeserver in Rust.

Jade (she/her) reports

It’s icy and cold out there, but what’s knocking at the door? It’s a new Continuwuity release!

Continuwuity 0.5.2 is out now with some handy new features! I think it’s some real hits this time. We now integrate with Meowlnir and Draupnir to perform server-wide invite anti-spam, so you don’t have to lift a finger to deal with those unwanted invites. We’ve also added limited use registration tokens that you can create from the admin room, so you can let your friend create an account - or build a more complicated pipeline.

We’ve added more features to help secure your server - you can configure admins in your configuration file now, and disable all users in your admin room being administrators. You can also lock user accounts as well as logging out all sessions for an account using an admin command.

Go check out the full changelog, and don’t forget to give us a star on GitHub!

Dept of Clients 📱

Extera Next

rustyraven announces

Hello everyone! Our project has finally moved to GitHub: https://github.com/ExteraApp/Extera

Anyway, here is a regular changelog (26.0.3 → 26.0.4), but I will cover only pretty major changes:

• First hotkeys. Alt+↑ and Alt+↓ to switch chats on desktop.
• Fixed “Auto mark as AFK” setting not having effect.
• Add avatar border radius customisation.
• Support HTTP ranges for videos (aka streaming videos). That’s for unencrypted rooms only tho.
• Fixed whitespace and trailing newlines handling in HTML messages. That’s actually somehow linked to project’s migration to GitHub.
• Allow cleartext HTTP traffic on Android… for 127.0.0.1 and localhost. I made that for use with yggstack. Maybe I will implement built-in Yggdrasil support…
• And renamed chat backups to key backups, bc that’s what the function does.

And you can download the latest release at our website.

Have questions or just wanna talk? You’re welcome at #extera:extera.xyz, offtopic is mostly allowed.

Element X iOS (website)

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

Doug says

Hello and happy new year TWIM! We’re back to work on Element X and have started the year off making the following improvements:

• We merged a community contribution that adds a Translate action for text-based messages.
• The initial implementation of linking devices by showing a QR code has landed on develop. There’s still more SDK work to be done before we’re ready to release this, but linking a new Element X client from an existing one works!
• On the Spaces front, we’re just starting the next chunk of work so that you can create new spaces and add/remove rooms from existing spaces.

Dept of Widgets 🧩

Matrix Widget Toolkit (website)

Reusable framework for creating Matrix widgets.

Milton Moura (n.io) says

Hello, amazing Matrix people from all over the world! We at Nordeck have a small update to share with you!

There is a new Matrix Widget Toolkit release to announce!

If you’re not in the loop, the Matrix Widget Toolkit is a reusable framework for developing Matrix widgets and it powers widgets such as NeoBoard, a collaborative realtime whiteboard application.

The only new feature of the latest 1.2.0 release of the @matrix-widget-toolkit/widget-server is the ability to also allow custom CSP options for overriding frame-src sources, which can be useful if your app is loading content from other sources within frames.

As for the other toolkit packages, they have had many of their dependencies updated, so they’re essentially maintenance patch releases.

As usual, if you have any questions or feedback, you can reach us at #nordeck:matrix.org.

Dept of VoIP 🤙

Element Call (website)

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

Timo K. announces

MVP matrixRTC-SDK

In the context of the upcoming Matrix hackathon at FOSDEM, the VoIP team wants to share some VoIP unrelated news to potentially inspire hackathon projects.

Element Call is undergoing a significant refactor (we will share more details soon). As a consequence, the codebase now has a clearer “SDK” part and “call UI” part. Since Element Call is already built as a widget, it was very easy to create a build target that can be thought of as a “MatrixRTC container widget”. We call it the Element Call SDK target.

It exposes a very-high-level API to get an RTC app running.

It is easier than ever to build an encrypted real time experience in a matrix room with all the obvious features:

• user verification
• group management
• persistent encrypted storage
• end to end encrypted real time and persistent media exchange

Here is an example of how this can be done: Example.html

try {
    window.matrixRTCSdk = await createMatrixRTCSdk(
        "com.github.toger5.rtc-application-type", // RTC application type
    );
} catch (e) {
    console.error("createMatrixRTCSdk", e);
}
const connectionState = window.matrixRTCSdk.join();

window.matrixRTCSdk.data$.subscribe((data) => {
    // do something with the data received from other members
});
The SDK takes care of all the MatrixRTC requirements:

To get more help on how to use it: SDK-README

This will do the following for you:

• Connect to the host client’s widget API (an app like this needs to be added via /addwidget; see the SDK-README
• Send the state (or, if configured, sticky events) into the room
• Read the room state to learn about the current members
• Connect to SFUs (it also supports the multi-SFU MatrixRTC approach), including:
  • Getting the OpenID token from the Matrix homeserver
  • Obtaining the JWT token for the SFU
• Send and update delayed leave events
• Provide a simple API to interact with other participants:
  • A function for sending data over LiveKit: sendData
  • Observables (RxJS) for tracking the current RTC session state: data$, connected$, members$

We would be very happy if someone has fun playing around with it. It would be possible to also expose a very simple audio api: publishAudio(boolean) playAudio(boolean) muteAudio(boolean) audioState$: Observable<{playing, publishing, muted}> to also allow a VoIP channel in the RTC app. (but its also possible to just run EC besides the custom RTC widget so it has not been added for now.)

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma (website)

A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.

Kévin Commaille announces

A happy new year means a happy new batch of Ruma releases! That’s right, we just released Ruma 0.14.1, with the following improvements:

• Support for Matrix 1.17, including appservice device masquerading and the m.oauth UIA type.
• Fix a long standing bug with the Clone implementation of our Owned* types (generated with the IdDst macro). Instead of using the Clone implementation of the internal type, it was always creating a new instance of the borrowed type and converting it to the owned type, which meant that using Arc<str> as the internal type didn’t actually provide any benefit.
• Behind the scenes we refactored the proc macros code to make it consistent among all the macros, and hopefully to make it easier to understand and contribute to.
• The implementations of a few MSCs where updated, like adding support for the new GET /_matrix/client/v1/rtc/transports endpoint from MSC4143 or fixing the format of to-device events for the PUT /_matrix/app/v1/transactions/{txnId} endpoint extension from MSC4203.

This release is accompanied by ruma-client 0.18.0 which also adds support for appservice device masquerading, and synapse-admin-api 0.9.0.

And maybe our next PR will be yours! If you are looking for inspiration, we have a few “help-wanted” issues to get you started.

Matrix Federation Stats

Aine [etke.cc] reports

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

As of today, 12073 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3231 (26.8%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 18750 rooms.

The most popular server software among the online servers is:

• synapse: 10295 (85.3%)
• conduit: 474 (3.9%)
• dendrite: 357 (3.0%)
• continuwuity: 346 (2.9%)

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	bi-vibes.com	210
2	tuwunel.nexy7574.co.uk	214.5
3	cisnt.uk	219
4	codestorm.net	227
5	continuwuity.codestorm.net	228
6	melthecat.dev	229
7	vibb.me	229
8	tuwunel.love	229
9	transgender.ing	268.5
10	nexy7574.co.uk	275

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.