🎉 Today marks 5 years of etke.cc! 🎉

The etke.cc managed Matrix hosting service was launched on the 12th of February 2021 and has turned 5 years old today!

Below is an overview of improvements that have happened over the last year, plus the usual weekly recap

Component changes¶

New components¶

✨ Addition: (+$3/mo) Draupnir - an antispam and moderation bot. As Matrix grows more popular, keeping the federated network safe becomes more and more important.
✨ Addition: (+$5/mo) Matrix RTC - the experimental Matrix RTC stack for voice/video calling support
✨ Addition: (+$1/mo) FluffyChat Web - a cute and easy-to-use Matrix web client
✨ Addition: (free, part of our bridge pack) Bluesky bridge - bridge your Matrix rooms to Bluesky
🔄 Replacement: Steam bridge - a new Steam bridge replacing the old unmaintained mx-puppet-steam

Deprecated components¶

🗑️ Removal: Hydrogen web client - removed due to being unmaintained
🗑️ Removal: Skype bridge - removed because Skype was shut down by Microsoft in May 2025
🗑️ Removal: LinkedIn bridge (old beeper/linkedin) - removed because it’s unmaintained and archived. We will add support for mautrix/linkedin in the future.

Service & infrastructure improvements¶

🚀 Rolling Release model: We’ve switched from our old weekly fresh/stable dual-release model to a Rolling Release model. The old system required maintaining inventory compatibility with two release channels simultaneously, making hotfixes and feature rollouts unnecessarily difficult. Rolling Release simplifies things for us and gets improvements to you faster. We’ve also integrated automatic testing, so once an update is available, it has already been tested.
🌐 IPv6: Enabled IPv6 for both internal and external communication on all servers.
🔒 Firewall improvements: We’ve unified firewall management for both cloud and on-premises servers, simplifying management of firewall rules. Firewall rules are now component-specific - only rules required for a specific server’s configuration are added and maintained.
🇸🇬 New hosting region - Singapore: We now offer servers in Singapore! This took some time because Hetzner’s Singapore pricing differs from other regions, and our system (price calculator, order page) needed updates to support region-based pricing. We’re happy to now have an Asian presence.
📜 Privacy Policy: We’ve published a clear and comprehensive Privacy Policy.

Synapse Admin enhancements¶

Synapse Admin - the main admin panel for etke.cc customers - received major new features:

🖥️ Server actions: ping, disk usage, price, payments, maintenance, restart, and reboot - all accessible directly from the admin panel
⚙️ Instance config: slight whitelabeling support (app name customization, automatic toggling of federation/tokens pages based on server config) - see details
💳 Billing page: customers can now check payments and download invoices directly from the admin panel
🌍 Translations: etke.cc-specific features are now translated, and starting from the next Synapse Admin release, etke.cc API responses will be translated as well

MatrixRooms.info improvements¶

MatrixRooms.info received several updates:

🔍 Search relevancy configuration (most relevant / members count), search filters (e.g. language:EN), and room view pages
🌟 Community Spotlight on the frontpage - a rotating showcase of small but growing rooms across topics like FOSS, Linux, gaming, food, photography, travel, and more
📊 Server software names on the stats page
🔑 Notary key server - MatrixRooms.info can now act as a trusted key server for your homeserver, helping verify other servers’ cryptographic keys. This improves federation reliability (cached keys are served even when the target server is down) and security (keys can be cross-checked across multiple notary servers to mitigate DNS spoofing).

Community & moderation¶

We’ve teamed up with Muninn Hall to provide guides and resources about moderation - directly from the developers of Draupnir, moderators, and administrators of long-standing big public servers.

We did a lot of things not directly related to Matrix and/or not customer-facing, so we omit them from this post. For those interested, our GitHub is open.

For those interested in previous etke.cc birthday posts:

The Usual Weekly Recap¶

These updates were originally shared in #updates:etke.cc and are collected here in a weekly digest for convenience.

Component Updates¶

Service Updates¶

During the week we introduced a new monitoring check - /.well-known/matrix/client CORS headers verification. This new check helps to avoid common issues when configuring delegation redirects (including the client discovery endpoint), as correct access to that file is mandatory for components like the experimental Matrix RTC stack / Element Call

Apart from that, we optimized the maintenance process and especially improved the restart part to reduce the downtime during the maintenance. Unfortunately, the changes impacted internal networking between components and crashed a few servers - we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience!

Source

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