Last week, the Matrix team put out a call to arms for the community to support Matrix financially, and the community response has been great. Response in online forums such as reddit and Hacker News has been extremely positive, and in the first 24 hours, the community pledged well over $1000/month through Patreon and Liberapay. Although it has slowed down since then, it is now over $1700/month, getting close to the first goal of supporting one developer working half time on Matrix.
While last week was the first time that the Matrix community was able to contribute hard dollars towards the development of Matrix, the community has been supporting Matrix in other ways for quite a while. Since I started following Matrix a little less than a year ago, I've seen that the Matrix community has been quite active testing, filing and triaging bugs, contributing code to core projects, writing bots and bridges, providing support in the Matrix rooms, and more.
Here's a quick roundup of some of the new things that the community has come up with since the Matrix Holiday Special. I have undoubtedly missed some projects, so apologies in advance for all those that I've missed.
Voyager
TravisR has been experimenting a lot with Matrix, and one of the unique things he has come up with is a bot that maps out how Matrix rooms are related to each other by noting when one room is mentioned in another room. The results are then mapped in a massive graph.
Linux distributions
Gentoo: PureTryOut has created an overlay for Gentoo for installing some Matrix-related software.
Debian: Synapse and the Matrix plugin for Pidgin have been packaged for Debian and are included in Debian unstable, and other Matrix-related software has been packaged and submitted for inclusion. Myself and others have also been working on forming a Matrix packaging team.
Integrations
One of Matrix's main features is the ability to bridge with different networks, and while the core Matrix team has had their hands full maintaining the IRC, Gitter, and Slack bridges, the community has been writing bridges to other networks.
Puppeting bridges: The Matrix Hacks group has added quite a few new bridges this year so far. Looking at their GitHub account, they have bridges for Hangouts, Slack, Skype, Signal, and GroupMe, in addition to the previously-announced iMessage bridge. Discussion and support for these bridges take place in #matrix-puppet-bridge:matrix.org.
email: Two email integrations have been written, which work in different ways. Max's bridge allows email users to participate in Matrix rooms while TravisR's bot sends messages to rooms when it receives an email.
Discord: Half-Shot has also written a Discord bridge.
Clients
Riot: While the core Riot team was busy working on creating an improved experience for new users, the community implemented some of Riot Web/Desktop's most requested features, resulting in the release of Riot Web/Desktop 0.10 in which all of the major new features were initiated by the community. I think that's an achievement that the community can be very proud of, as well as the core Riot team, for being able to foster such an active community.
Nheko: As good as Riot is, it isn't for everyone. Development on other clients such as Quaternion has continued, but a new one, Nheko, has been started recently which already seems quite promising.
Matrix Recorder: Although Matrix keeps all history on the server, some people want to keep their own copy of history. Alex created Matrix Recorder, which saves history to a local SQLite database. Matrix Recorder even supports saving history from end-to-end encrypted rooms.
e2e crypto: While end-to-end cryptography is still in beta in Riot, some brave souls have been experimenting with it in other clients. In addition to Matrix Recorder's support of e2e rooms as mentioned above, penguin42 has done work on adding e2e to the Matrix Pidgin plugin and davidar has added e2e support to his Hubot adapter.
SHA2017 badge: One of the most intriguing projects is the badge for the SHA2017 camp, which reportedly contains a Matrix client. I don't know what they're using Matrix for, so I hope they do a write up at some point.
Documentation/Talks
The Matrix community has been busy writing documentation and blog posts, and doing talks about Matrix. Coffee has been collecting helpful information about Matrix into a machine-readable knowledge base. Some guides for Riot have been written, including usage basics by muppeth, maxigaz's guide, and an introduction from an IRC perspective. CryptoAUSTRALIA recently had a workshop for setting up Synapse and Riot, and published a tutorial online. And PureTryOut did a Matrix talk at the Dutch Linux User's Group a few months ago. There have certainly been other people from the community doing talks about Matrix that I am not aware of.
Server list
A federated communications protocol is less valuable if users can't find servers to join. Since there is no official list yet, Alex set up a list of Matrix servers. Though to call it just a list of servers is an understatement. It includes statistics on each server such as uptime, response times from various locations, and SSL test scores, so that users can make a more informed choice of servers. If you are running a Matrix server, whether public or private, please consider submitting your server to the list to improve visibility for your server and to strengthen the federation.
GSoC
Matrix was again accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code and has three students. Two of them are working on iOS-related projects, and since I don't have an iOS device, I haven't been following their progress. However, Michael (a.k.a t3chguy), in addition to improving Riot, has been working on creating a search engine-friendly view of public rooms, which will be helpful for Matrix rooms that are used as support forums.
Matrix would not be what it is today without the support of the community, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the community will develop in the future. Last week, the community was invited to contribute financially towards Matrix's development. But for those who are unable to contribute in this way but still want to support Matrix, or for those who have pledged money but still want to do more, hopefully this list gives some ideas for how you can help out, either by supporting an existing project or starting your own.
Addendum (July 19, 2017)
Some projects that I missed:
Max has written an alternative Identity Server implementation called mxisd. Identity Servers haven't been getting as much attention as homeservers, application services, or clients, so it's great that someone has been working on an alternative implementation.
TravisR has also been working on an Dimension, alternative implementation of Riot's integration manager.