2025-10-18 –, Ada Byron
Policy servers (MSC4284) are a new way of providing communities with an additional layer of protection against spam and other unwelcome content. In this talk we'll cover what policy servers are, how they work, and how to set one up for your community on Matrix.
This talk is aimed at community moderators and developers of moderation tooling. We'll cover the history of policy servers, how best to use them in a layered protection suite, and what their capabilities are. We'll then cover the technical details of the first implementation, policyserv, and the adjacent work required to improve the overall efficiency and user experience of policy servers in Matrix. Finally, we'll demonstrate how communities can set up a policy server for their community and explore the possible futures for policy servers.
Travis is the Foundation's Trust & Safety (T&S) technical lead alongside his other roles as Director of Standards Development, Spec Core Team (SCT) member, SCT Governing Board representative, and Senior Software Developer at Element. He spends most of his time building and designing layered T&S tooling for Matrix users, communities, and server owners to operate, with a particular focus on ensuring the spec meets the needs of that tooling.