Gnuxie & Draupnir: The start of 2025 and reviewing 2024

If you didn't already hear, Draupnir v2.0 has been out for awhile now, and we just released Draupnir v2.2.0. This marks the end of the bug hunt started at the end of last year and we'll be focussing more energy into the rest of the roadmap from this point onwards.

As we stated in This week in Matrix a couple of months ago in January, Draupnir v2.0 really is a milestone for Matrix generally. Hopefully this will become a turning point for Matrix's open communities. We have a long way to go yet, but if we look behind us it should be clear that we've never been in a better position.

We were given a few shoutouts at FOSDEM this year, including very briefly in the main talk The Road to Mainstream Matrix. However, the real show of support came from Ubuntu Matrix Council in their How Ubuntu Entered the Matrix talk. Where they demonstrated how they build and run their community on Matrix. In particular how they organise with the community Community Moderation Effort. Which operates the main policy room for combating spam on Matrix. They also went into some detail about the challanges open communities face on Matrix and the need for community organised tools and orgnisations such as Draupnir and CME¹. So watch or listen to their talk if you didn't already.

We made an entry into Matrix Community Year in Review 2024 (right at the bottom) where we shared a lot of insight into development throughout 2024 and parts of 2023². You should at least read the opening 4 paragraphs since I probably haven't spoke that confidently about Draupnir before and I do now feel proud of Draupnir.

I also wrote some thoughts about Draupnir development here and what the term mainstream adoption means for Matrix. It's clear that the Matrix foundation and Element are really struggling and neither of them are going to stay in their current form for much longer unless there is a miracle. As a community we need to prepare for the worst, especially the changing of agendas. If you didn't read the foundation's blog post about their funding issues already then here's the link: We're at the crossroads. The one thing I want you to be critical about in any eventuality is the idea of mainstream adoption. Because this will be used as a bulldozer to justify changes that will not be in the community's interest³. Already in the aforementioned FOSDEM talk Matthew expressed that he wished Matrix was more like Bluesky in the early days. Focussing on a killer app that would launch Matrix into the mainstream rather than putting so much time and effort into an open spec process. That's not to say that approach would not have worked for giving that idea of Matrix success. But it's not the Matrix or community we have and it's quite clear that Matrix's founders never embraced its own ragtag developer community. Or a grassroots approach to software development for that matter. And that's really what I want to see.

In the last update I gave on this blog, I said that I'd be taking a step back from governance issues. But I completely broke that promise because I've been helping to organise the Matrix ecosystem forum and we now meet weekly on Wednesdays. The discussions have been really positive and we've already got different parts of the Matrix community talking, including developers from Element. I put together a proper meeting agenda structure for us and since then things have felt really good. I think it is only a matter of time before we start to see some positive developments for Matrix as a direct result of the ecosystem forum.

Well they say no plan survives contact with the enemy. 2.0 took longer than we thought it would. Because of the number of issues that we have encountered (mostly just me being bad) we are not going to be able to cover all of our NLnet grant goals. So for a simple overview of the priorities (in no particular order):

• Baseline documentation for the matrix-protection-suite
• Preview effects of policy list subscription
• Agree / disagree ratings for policies
• Explicit agreement watch mode for policy lists
• Simple participation metric

There will be room for more but anything else will be a bonus. We've been making progress towards these goals while hunting bugs for v2.0

We have stated a number of times that the participation metric protection for draupnir will be ariving soon. But this will be pushed back while we investigate the stability of the room state backing store. If you do notice any errors in relation to sqlite in your logs and you are on Draupnir v2.2.0, please report them. We have made changes in v2.2.0 to improve the situation but I'm not confident we have covered the cause of the problems yet.

That's all I have for this update. Thanks once again to my sponsors on GitHub and Ko-fi. I'll see you in the next update.