The Matrix.org homeserver suffered from an outage on Monday 22 April, between 08:00 UTC and 10:00 UTC, followed by slowness for the next 2 hours.
The outage occurred during scheduled maintenance with no expected downtime. It included upgrading the base OS of the machines running Matrix.org’s deployment.
Josh Simmons announces
WOW! What a week. Today I am thrilled to introduce not one or two, but eight new organisational members. We are extremely grateful to Futurewei Technologies for joining as our newest Gold Member – more on that soon – and to Verji Tech AS for joining as our newest Silver Member. Their support represents a big step toward financial sustainability for the Matrix.org Foundation.
Further, today we welcome Community Moderation Effort, Matrix Elm SDK, FluffyChat, Matrix Community Events, Polychat, and Rory&::LibMatrix as Ecosystem Members! If you couldn’t tell, there’s a lot going on in the Matrix ecosystem!
Does your community use Matrix? Does your project speak Matrix? Or does your business incorporate Matrix into your work? Show your support and become a member today.
Topping off this week’s excitement, our Governing Board nomination period is just about to start! Learn more about the elections, as well as who can nominate and how in our recent blog post.
Josh Simmons says
Important deadline: next week, the week of April 15th, is the last week to become a member before the Governing Board nomination period! You must be a member, or have your application in and approved, by the end of day on April 19th (AOE time) in order to be eligible to nominate. Stay tuned for a blog post all about that on Monday ✨
This week we’re proud to welcome GNOME and KDE e.V. as our second and third Associate Members, and there are more applications in the pipeline that we’re reviewing!
Matthew reports
I wrote some thoughts on why governments should explicitly route taxpayer money into funding maintenance of open source infrastructure such as Matrix (rather than only funding feature dev, or not funding at all): https://matrix.org/blog/2024/04/open-source-publicly-funded-service/
Josh Simmons says
This week we're thrilled to welcome the Eclipse Foundation as our first Associate Member! We couldn't be happier with the response to our expanded membership program and are delighted that we will have greater community representation when we elect our first ever Governing Board in the coming months.
No Matrix Live as your usual host Thib has been unavailable most of the week!
Josh Simmons says
Our first ever Governing Board elections are approaching, with the nomination period set to begin in late April. If you want your organization or community to be able to nominate a candidate, or to vote in the election, the time to join as a member is now – same for individuals who want to participate!
This week we’re thrilled to announce three new members: two Ecosystem Members, Trixnity and Nheko-Reborn, and our first Platinum Member, Element!
Half-Shot announces
Great news everyone! As of Matrix 1.10, you can now specify more contact information about your homeserver via the new /.well-known/matrix/support endpoint.
This is useful because it allows other citizens of the federation to know who to contact if there is a problem, and it only requires you to fill in a few details to get going. This change has been on the go since 2019, so on a personal note I am thrilled to see this finally land. You can see an example on the foundation's very own server at https://matrix.org/.well-known/matrix/support
TravisR 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:
MSCs in Final Comment Period:
- No MSCs are in FCP.
Accepted MSCs:
- No MSCs were accepted this week.
Closed MSCs:
- No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.
🔗Spec Updates
We released version 1.10 of the spec today! Read the blog post for the full details. Many thanks to Kévin Comaille for writing many of the spec PRs that landed in today's release!
With the release of Matrix 1.10, we on the Spec Core Team are looking forward to Matrix 1.11 and Matrix 2.0. We are asking the teams working on Matrix 2.0 features to update their MSCs and send them for review in #sct-office:matrix.org soon to help bring them closer to release in the next couple of quarters.
Josh Simmons reports
The wait is over! We are now accepting applications from projects and organizations that want to join the Foundation as Ecosystem and Associate Members.
You may recall that in December we announced two new membership tiers to ensure we have healthy community representation as we introduce more open governance for Matrix. Specifically, we created Ecosystem and Associate Member tiers. Ecosystem Members are open source projects that speak Matrix, and Associate Members are FOSS foundations, nonprofits, and academic institutions.
We’re excited to bring more folks into the fold, and thrilled to welcome Thunderbird, Draupnir, and Conduit as our first Ecosystem Members 🎉 Curious who else has joined as a member recently? Check out our Supporters.
We’d also like to recognize Thunderbird for sponsoring the Foundation, which helps us get a little bit closer to making the Foundation’s activities sustainable 🚀
Thib announces
There is a question we often get asked: why do you operate the Matrix.org homeserver, and why do you keep registrations open? We don't want to become the gmail.com of Matrix after all. We covered those in this post.
Matrix self-defines as the go-to protocol for "open, secure, decentralised communications". The Matrix.org Foundation defines "maximising […] the number of online servers in the open federation" as a key objective in its mission. So why is the Matrix.org homeserver, probably the largest homeserver in the whole federation, still in open registration mode?
Let's dive into the technical, and user experience choices behind it.
Josh Simmons announces
This week Thib published the second installment in our roadmap blog post series: Opening up the Foundation. This post dives into the work we’re doing this year to increase community participation and open governance, looking even beyond the Governing Board to things like office hours, working groups, and fiscal sponsorship.
If you missed the first post in the series, check it out: A roadmap and appeal for help from The Matrix.org Foundation.
We’re grateful for the level of support we’ve received as we share more about the Foundation’s financial needs and the work we are doing in service of the ecosystem. Many dozens of individuals have donated and joined as Individual Members, and we’ve more than doubled the number of organizational members! Huge thanks to Beeper, Fairkom, Famedly, Fractal Networks, Gematik, IndieHosters, and XWiki.
We still have a long way to go, and critically we need larger organizations to step up to the plate, but the early results are encouraging. Onwards and upwards! 🚀
Matthew reports
There's a huge number of Matrix projects active in the German public sector, and the team at Element has had a go at mapping them out and providing a guide to what's going on, how they relate to each other, and to generally try to explain why Germany is the leading country for digital sovereignty - including self-sovereign secure communication with Matrix: https://element.io/matrix-in-germany
Since the Foundation got itself a Managing Director at the end of last summer, it has been working on its independence. With lines more clearly defined between its major supporter Element and itself, the Foundation has been able to clarify its role. The Foundation's major goal, alongside stewarding the specification, is to fill in the gaps where there is no direct organisational interest, to make the Matrix ecosystem grow.
There are two levels where the Foundation can have an impact: at the governance level, in the form of the Governing Board; and at the hands-on level, with working groups and projects.
See below what the coming year holds for us.