Ruma is dead, long live Ruma! › published on 2020-04-10 by Jonas Platte

Today, I have a bit of a sad announcement to make:

Ruma, the homeserver, won't be developed anymore

To those who have actively been following the project, this probably won't be a big surprise, given the homeserver's readme file was already update do note the missing maintenance and people interested in contributing to the homeserver have now gathered around a new homeserver project by the name of Conduit.

The main reason for ending homeserver development is that nobody who has previously worked on its codebase is currently able to guide and review work on it. The codebase has also bit-rotted a lot, with the web framework it uses being almost un-maintained and a number of its other dependencies having seen major new releases since the most recent commit; it also doesn't build on ruma-client-api, for the simple reason that ruma-client-api simply didn't exist yet when most of the homeserver work happened.

However, the end of the homeserver does not at all mean the end of Ruma, the overall project.

The future of Ruma, the project

We will be continuing work on our library crates, making sure they are usable for all kinds of applications, including homeservers. The new homeserver project mentioned at the beginning is based on them and some other folks are currently working on a highlevel client library, also using many of Ruma's library crates.

I am planning to replace the current website with a new one, mostly for technical reasons, but the new one will also reflect our changed focus. This work hasn't started yet, but in the interim I will likely update parts of the current site. Other than that, nothing will really be different compared to last year.

If you are still interested in a Rust homeserver

… then check out Conduit. It is a Matrix homeserver, written in Rust using Ruma's library crates. It is focused on experimenting with new ideas to achieve better performance, for example by using sled as its database. The goal is to make it as easy as possible to set up your own homeserver.