Community "Changelog"

A brief glimpse at our history.

The Python community on Matrix evolved quite a lot over the years. From just a handful to hundreds and thousands of users who are members of our rooms. The following timeline shows the milestones we reached so far.

  • The Python Room Was Created 🗓️ Dec 31, 2020

    Like every good story, at least on Matrix, ours starts with an m.room.create event, when the Python room was created on Thu, Dec 31 2020 00:00:23 (UTC) by Michael .
    The room identifier was Python3:matrix.org, since #python:matrix.org was still used by the “old Python” room, which was abandoned by the administrator and bombarded with spam messages.

    A few hours later the spammers joined from the old room started their attack on our new room. To support our project ilex joined the moderation team.

  • Code of Conduct & BrenBarn Joined the Moderation Team 🗓️ Jan 4, 2021

    Our Code of Conduct was created. Just a few days later BrenBarn joined the moderation team.

  • James Joined the Moderation Team 🗓️ Jan 28, 2021

    James Belchamber wrote an email to the matrix team, to urge them, to clean up the old room from spam. Instead they “tombstoned” the old room into ours and assigned us the room identifier #python:matrix.org. On the same day James joined the moderation team.

  • The Abuse Management Bot Joined the Moderation Team 🗓️ Apr 30, 2021

    The Abuse Management bot (now known as “Administrator” or “Mjölnir”) was deployed to the server. After a few days of intense testing, the bot joined the Python room and started protecting the users from spam. Since then the bot watches our rooms room 24/7.

  • Change Room Address 🗓️ Sep 29, 2021

    We changed the main address of the Python room to #python:matrix.org

  • Spaces Announcement 🗓️ Oct 8, 2021

    We announced our community Space and two new rooms:

    There is a blog post available with more information on this topic:

    Spaces Announcement 🎉

    Our community has grown to over 3500 members, and we are grateful for everyone who is bearing with us. Thanks Pythoneers!
    As we grow, we want to provide space for more conversations. Keeping discussion on-topic in this room is the right thing to do, but off-topic conversation is fun -- and it builds a stronger community.

    Michael Sasser, ilex, BrenBarn and James Belchamber
    October 8, 2021  ·  1 min  ·  Matrix and Community

  • Python Space Announcement 🗓️ Oct 15, 2021

    Upon request of our community we created and announced the new Python Space . This new Space includes Python rooms recommend by the community.

    There is a blog post available with more information on this topic:

    Python Space Announcement 🎉

    In response to the community's request, we have created another Matrix Space. One, that is not bound to our Code of Conduct. The new Space includes recommendations from the community -- for the community.

    Michael Sasser
    October 15, 2021  ·  1 min  ·  Matrix and Community

  • The Abuse Management Bot was renamed to Administrator 🗓️ Mar 14, 2022

    The Abuse Management bot (Mjölnir) was renamed to Administrator like in the official matrix rooms before. This should make it easier to understand it’s purpose for new users.

  • Move Website Development to GitLab 🗓️ Apr 12, 2022

    Originally, we decided to use Git LFS for images and static content in binary form, which doesn’t fit in the typical versionable category. With some experience of not using Git LFS in scenarios like this, one might conclude, that this is a reasonable use case for using this extension.

    While developing the website, we ran into issues with GitHub’s LFS policy. The advertised 1 GB of storage and bandwidth per account/company does not mean, monthly. The quota does not reset by itself. Only by throwing credits at it, we were able to continue development. But that wasn’t the worst thing at all. Every use of that quota is metered. Even pulling the LFS content in GitHub Actions. A fully integrated service of GitHub. This was not acceptable for us. So - we decided to try out alternatives.

    In the end, we decided to go with GitLab. It doesn’t meter Git LFS bandwidth usage at all. Even the storage use doesn’t have a quota by itself. It counts as user space together with artifacts and anything else stored on GitLab by that project.

  • defnull Joined the Moderation Team 🗓️ Nov 10, 2022

    After helping countless users, defnull finally joined the moderation team.

  • Heimdall, the Next-Generation Moderation Bot 🗓️ Feb 4, 2023

    We have just created the initial commit, writing our own moderation bot for Matrix using the Rust Matrix Appservice SDK .

    It will be a feature rich, multi-tenant bot, that intends to fix numerous issues we are facing with the current bot situation. It will use machine learning, statistical analysis and heuristics to fight spam more accurately. Most of the bot actions you presently might see happening is us manually giving the bot commands. We want our bot to handle more incidents themselves and empower our users to support its decision making progress without efforts. Also, the flooding protection will not ban anymore for just typing fast without violating the default federation rate limit for users. Overall the bot will not be as aggressive against users as our current solution is. Even bans might not be permanent anymore.
    So, stay tuned!

  • Domain, Email and CDN 🗓️ Mar 19, 2023

    It was quite tiresome to use placeholders, code names and personal email addresses for our projects especially when laying out APIs. So we scored matrixpython.org as our domain. With that out of the way, we can make the code names permanent and settle on matrixpython.org and www.matrixpython.org are for our new website. is now our general purpose email address and shall be for reporting things. The website is now hosted using the Cloudflare Pages and the Cloudflare CDN. It is now incredible fast and allows us to protect our internal pages using our own OpenID Connect provider.