This is an announcement for people using our Matrix chat rooms through apps supporting Spaces such as Element.

Our GrapheneOS Community Space grouping our chat rooms was broken by Matrix protocol bugs. You should join https://matrix.to/#/#community:grapheneos.org and leave the one without our logo.

Matrix bugs have broken our main General room 4 times and our Off Topic room 3 times. Our Discord server (https://discord.com/invite/grapheneos) was created after the last time our General room was bricked. We also set limits on which Matrix features we use and how we use them to avoid this.

Our current General and Off Topic rooms were created and managed within these limits and haven’t broken yet. Our Matrix Space significantly predates the limits we set to avoid bricked rooms and had over 25k users. We expect each room predating our limits will eventually break.

To avoid bricked rooms, we now create all public rooms with @admin:grapheneos.org, never add another admin account, restrict settings/permissions changes to the admin account, only have mods on grapheneos.org / matrix.org and NEVER set invite-only.

Ideally, we’d only have mods on grapheneos.org since matrix.org is the source of many state issues. However, spammed messages often cause lag result in messages not being federated to our server, especially from there. We may limit using it to clean up spam.