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Digital sovereignty is built on an open standard that enables federation

Steve Loynes — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 06:51:24 GMT

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Digital sovereignty is built on an open standard that enables federation

April 22, 2026

Across Europe, sovereign communications systems are already being deployed, and crucially, they don’t have to exist in isolation. An overlooked part of achieving genuine digital sovereignty is ensuring that an organisation has the ability to switch easily between vendors to guard against vendor lock-in.

It’s a sentiment that was perhaps best expressed by Karsten Wildberger, Germany’s Federal Minister for Digital, at the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty in November 2025: “Digital sovereignty means having choices, so no single technology and provider becomes a dependency that can be used against our interests. It is always good to have choices in order to avoid dependencies.”

Without the ability to easily switch between vendors, an end-user organisation remains beholden to a specific vendor. It gives a vendor too much power over the end user organisation. For example, it’s preferable to swallow a doubling in price than to ‘rip and replace’ an incumbent solution.

At the more alarming end of the spectrum, it creates major vulnerabilities. A recent example is Ukraine suffering the loss of satellite imagery supplied by Maxar Technologies, as the US vendor implemented a decision made by the US government. In a similar incident, email services to Karim Khan, chief prosecutor at International Criminal Court (ICC), were suspended as a result of a US government sanction. The ICC has since gone through the rip and replace pain of moving from Microsoft Office to openDesk, a sovereign alternative.

Interoperability delivers digital sovereignty

Governments’ adoption of digitally sovereign solutions, to avoid a dependency on a single vendor, is the right strategy to take in an increasingly sharp geopolitical climate. Even a vendor that is currently trusted cannot be trusted into an unseeable future. A vendor can be acquired, possibly by a company that’s headquartered in a non-trusted country. A vendor could be completely compromised as a result of a cyber attack, or nation-state sponsored malicious insider. A vendor could grow into a monopolistic position - especially if a government standardises on that vendor - and then abuse its dominant market position.

While a solution could be from a European vendor, enable self-hosting, and might even be open source, it’s still not offering sovereignty if it’s proprietary style ‘vendor-locked’ software. This is especially true for chat-based solutions.

Chat should never be a proprietary-style vendor-locked solution

Chat apps have developed during a quite centralised era of computing. That those using WhatsApp can only communicate with others using WhatsApp has, somehow, never been seriously questioned. Likewise, it’s only Signal to Signal, Slack to Slack, Teams to Teams, Threema to Threema, WebEx to WebEx, Wire to Wire, Zoom to Zoom. They are all walled gardens - siloed systems - that don’t interoperate.

Chat has never suited a proprietary model, because it often involves people who use different technology. The original open internet is a huge success because it enables communication through common standards. People can upload information stored and managed on their own system, and make it available to others via the Web.

Email is similar; it doesn’t matter what email system you use, you can send an email to anyone because it’s based on a standard on which all vendors operate. No one ever asks if you use Microsoft Outlook, Gmail or Apple Mail as - thanks to interoperability - it doesn't matter.

As a result (despite email being arcane and insecure) there’s still a healthy competitive ecosystem of email providers and switching between them isn’t a massive headache. Decades of emails can be seamlessly managed during an email migration, unlike years of chat history moving from Slack or Teams to some other proprietary system. As for WhatsApp or Signal, well, as consumer messaging apps they shouldn’t even be used within the workplace.

The role of Matrix for sovereign communications

Matrix is an open standard for decentralised communications. The protocol enables self-hosting, resilient communications, interoperability and end-to-end encryption.

There’s well in excess of 200M people already using Matrix, and more than 150K Matrix deployments. More than 25 governments around the world have already deployed Matrix-based systems. There are more than 40 software vendors in the Matrix ecosystem, and at least 30 major primes, systems integrators, services firms and hosters offering Matrix-based solutions.

The German healthcare system has developed its own standard, TI-Messenger, built on top of Matrix, that’s already implemented by public healthcare insurers. It’s currently being rolled out to local healthcare providers and will eventually support the vast majority of Germany’s 83M citizens.

The Matrix ecosystem provides the ‘digital commons’ that ensures genuine digital sovereignty. Governments and public sector organisations have complete ownership and control of their communications solutions, with the ability to easily choose and switch between vendors, and federate with each other through their own sovereign systems.

Sovereignty without isolation - Matrix-based federation

Choosing a communications solution based on an open standard to ensure digital sovereignty brings another significant benefit. The Matrix open standard not only ensures a competitive ecosystem - it enables each independent Matrix stack to connect with any other (assuming both parties want to connect, of course).

It’s the very opposite of a standard proprietary-approach, where all parties have to use the same vendor. The Matrix open standard enables solutions from different vendors, and those developed in-house, to federate. This means sovereignty does not come at the cost of interoperability, which is a balance that ‘walled garden’ proprietary systems cannot deliver.

In other words, all 27 EU members, and the EU itself, could all have their own sovereign Matrix-based solution for communications. And they could all remain in their specific solution (which is perhaps tailored to meet their own country-level requirements), while all being able to federate with each other.

We’re already seeing this play out. Germany’s public sector has multiple Matrix-based systems including the openDesk office suite, BundesMessenger and BwMessenger. Meanwhile, The City of Cologne runs Rocket.Chat enabling it to benefit from Matrix-based federation if it wishes. The French government is standardised on Tchap, which also sits within LaSuite; France’s sovereign office suite.

Sweden has SAFOS Chatt, its own Matrix-based chat. Elsäkerhetsverke, the Swedish Electrical Safety Authority, uses Rocket.Chat and could therefore use Matrix-based federation to connect with other organisations. The European Commission and the UNICC use Element, NATO ACT uses its Matrix-based NI2CE Messenger. EU-Lisa and NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) both operate on Rocket.Chat so, again, can also federate using the Matrix open standard.

If they so desire, all of these country-specific communications platforms can federate - ensuring digital sovereignty and enabling cross-border federation. All without a dominant vendor, and all completely without any level of vendor lock-in.

Taken together, these deployments form a growing, federated network of sovereign communications across Europe - not a patchwork of silos, but an interconnected ‘network of networks’ ecosystem. Digital sovereignty, when built on open standards, enables communications without vendor dependency.

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Introducing the ESS Community migration tool

Patrick Maier — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:27:49 GMT

Since we launched the Element Server Suite (ESS) Community edition, we’ve been thrilled by the momentum. We are seeing a whole wave of new deployments and steadily growing engagement within the community. It’s clear that more people than ever want a robust, manageable way to host their own Matrix stack.

However, we’ve also heard a consistent question from those of you running older, "pre-ESS era" deployments: “How do I get my existing data into ESS without starting from scratch?”

Today, we are excited to answer that question. Available starting today, we are officially releasing an initial version of the ESS Migration Tool.

Why migrate to ESS?

For many long-time Matrix admins using Synapse, maintenance can be a manual burden including handling complex configuration, managing dependencies and keeping up with security updates.

By migrating to ESS, you leave that heavy lifting to Element’s ESS distribution. ESS is designed to make your life easier; once migrated, you can keep your system up-to-date, secure and packed with the latest Element features just by running a simple command. Furthermore you get all the components needed for a basic Element/Matrix stack out-of-the-box, curated and coordinated between each other, easy to deploy and maintain.

Introducing the ESS migration tool

The ESS migration tool is a dedicated tool designed to bridge the gap between your current Matrix environment and a modern ESS deployment. The tool automates the most tedious parts of moving to a Kubernetes-based ESS architecture:

Configuration parsing: It takes your existing Synapse and Matrix Authentication Service (MAS) configuration files and parses them to discover secrets and linked files.
Transformation: It converts those configurations into values files compatible with the ESS Helm chart.
Kubernetes integration: It automatically generates the necessary Kubernetes Secrets and ConfigMaps.

The goal is minimal disruption. You can set up your new ESS environment and continue providing service to your users while immediately gaining access to powerful integrated features like Element Admin and Element Call.

A "breeze" for MAS migrations, too

Matrix Authentication Service (MAS) is the next generation of authentication and user management in Matrix. If you haven't moved your deployment to the MAS yet, ESS is your secret weapon. By migrating your environment to ESS Community first, you can utilise our built-in MAS migration tooling which automates the majority of the transition - check out the MAS migration guide. If you already have a MAS-enabled environment, no problem, you can still use the migration to get into ESS!

Getting started

The migration tool is available as a Python package and is licensed under AGPLv3. You can find basic instructions in the ESS Community repository. To help you through the process, we’ve prepared a comprehensive step-by-step migration guide as part of the tooling itself.

The roadmap: What’s next?

This first release is just the beginning. Our priority was to get this tooling into your hands as early as possible to gather feedback from the community. Over the coming months, we will be adding more functionality, including:

Automated imports: Direct database and media file imports.
Environment discovery: Automatic imports from existing Docker or Kubernetes contexts.
System health: Integrated prerequisite checks to ensure a smooth transition.
Expanded stack support: Migration support for Element Web, Matrix RTC/Livekit, and reverse-proxy configurations.

A note for commercial customers

While today’s announcement is a major milestone for our Community version, we haven't forgotten our Enterprise and Sovereign users. A top priority for our engineering team is facilitating a seamless "lift" from the ESS Classic stack to the modern ESS Pro environment.

The development to support customer migration paths is just around the corner and we are currently in the final stages of internal validation and will have more detailed news to share very soon. If you are an ESS Classic customer, you will be notified as soon as the Pro migration path is ready - and if you'd like to discuss your specific needs - please reach out to our support team.

Join the conversation

We want to hear about your migration experience. Your feedback directly shapes the future of this tool. If you run into any issues, let us know.

Talk to us: Join the ESS Community Room.
Report issues: Create a ticket in the ESS Community repository.

Start your migration today and experience the next generation of Matrix hosting!

Spaces has landed on Element X!

Andreas Sisask — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:09:21 GMT

First previewed during the Matrix Conference and detailed in the Glimpse into the Future blog post, the vision for a faster, more intuitive way to organise conversations is now a reality as Spaces are now officially available on Element X!

This update brings a sophisticated digital architecture to the experience, replacing long room lists with structured, context-driven communication.

What are Spaces?

Think of Spaces as the digital architecture of your communication. Instead of an overwhelming list of individual rooms, Element uses Spaces to group related conversations into navigable, virtual containers. This structure delivers two primary benefits for organisational scaling:

Effortless room discovery: Spaces provide an immediate overview of a specific team or project. Users can instantly see all relevant channels - for example, every room belonging to "Team X" or "Project Y" - ensuring that the right people always find the right conversations.
Simplified access management: Element allows rooms to be configured so any member of a Space can join them without needing an invitation. This streamlines onboarding while still offering the flexibility to keep specific rooms within that Space "invite-only" for sensitive topics.

By organising by department, project, or interest, Spaces allow for seamless context switching. Users can move from a focused "Product Team" environment to a "Company News" world with a single tap - ensuring mission-critical focus and general updates stay perfectly separated.

Automated organisation for admins

Spaces isn’t just about better organisation for users; it’s a powerful tool for administrators. If you are using Element Server Suite Pro (ESS Pro), you can now mirror your organisation’s actual structure directly within the app.

With automated memberships and permissions, admins can automatically assign users to the correct Spaces and rooms. For example, all members of your “IT Department” can be automatically added to the “IT” Space with the appropriate access rights the moment they join. This gives admins granular control over who can access, read and participate in conversations, ensuring your workspace remains secure and organised.

What’s new?

Spaces on Element X isn't just a port of the old system; it’s a complete redesign built for speed, reliability and clarity. As we modernise Element across Web, Desktop and Mobile, we are ensuring that Spaces feel like a native, seamless part of your workflow.

1. A smarter, cleaner chat list

To keep the chat list clean and actionable, Element X utilises a high-level filtering system. Instead of clunky folders, a quick filter at the top of the chat list allows users to instantly narrow their view to a specific Space. This ensures that only the rooms relevant to a chosen context are visible, removing the noise of unrelated conversations.

The main chat list featuring the top-level Space filter row

2. Discovery at your fingertips

The dedicated Spaces tab serves as a central hub for joined and created Spaces, enabling users to actively manage their environment and expand their reach. This interface allows for the immediate discovery of rooms within existing Spaces that a user has not yet joined, while providing admins with direct controls to manage memberships, adjust settings, or link new rooms to the structure. It also facilitates the creation of entirely new Spaces, offering a unified location to build and govern organisational architecture from a single, intuitive interface.

The new Spaces Tab with the 'Discovery' view

3. Flexible room creation

Organisation starts the moment you create a room. You can now choose exactly where a room belongs during the setup process. Attach it to a specific Space so your teammates can find it instantly, or keep it "spaceless" for your own private or general chats.

Attach a room to a specific Space

4. Context before you join

No more guessing what’s inside an invite. With Space previews, you can see a description, the member count, and who invited you before you hit accept. This transparency ensures users understand the scope of a community before entering.

A Space invitation preview showing the description

Ready to dive in?

The wait is over. Spaces is one of the final pieces of the puzzle in making Element X the ultimate replacement for the "Element Classic legacy apps." It’s faster, it’s prettier, and it’s ready for you to use.

To get started, simply update your app to the latest version and look for the new Spaces icon!

Meedio partners with Element to deliver sovereign communications across Europe

Steve Loynes — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:16:19 GMT

Meedio will use Element Server Suite Pro (ESS Pro) as the server-side solution for its new communications platform. Launching in Q2, the Meedio solution will include its own front-end client including a Matrix-based video conferencing solution. Meedio will be available both on-premise and as a hosted service.

The Danish headquartered company will offer sovereign communications across Europe, with a particular focus on the Healthcare, Education and Public Sector. Meedio recently won a framework tender to supply Germany’s 1,100 universities with communications solutions, and holds TÜV and KBV certification for the German healthcare industry. Its hosted solution will initially be based out of Germany, with hosting available from other European countries as the service expands.

Meedio’s communications solution brings another competitor into the Matrix-based communications ecosystem, giving public sector organisations and businesses yet more options when it comes to choosing between Matrix vendors. Meedio joined the Matrix.org Foundation as a Silver member in January 2026, and participated in The Matrix Conference 2025.

Infrastructure to enable customer focus

Using ESS Pro as the server-side solution for its Matrix-based service gives Meedio the ability to focus on its customer propositions. Rather than creating and maintaining backend functionality - such as scalable performance, identity and access management and record keeping - Meedio is free to dedicate all its development resources to its front-end products and services.

“So much of our success comes from listening to our customers, and giving them solutions to match their exact requirements,” says Runi Hammer, the founder and CEO of Meedio. “We’ll compete in the Matrix ecosystem by differentiating on the frontend client, such as our video conferencing and medical case boards. By using ESS Pro we have the best server-side solution available, so we can just focus on what we do best; delivering solutions to our customers.”

Runi Hammer

CEO Meedio

ESS Pro also provides a highly cost-efficient way of delivering a powerful hosted solution to small and medium size businesses across Europe. By using ESS Pro, Meedio can provide dedicated hosting to large customers, and multi-tenant hosting for smaller customers.

Matrix co-opetition

Meedio already has a strong installed customer base as a result of its enterprise-grade Matrix-based video conferencing solutions in healthcare, education and contact centres. Meedio will be expanding its Matrix-based frontend clients with domain-specific messaging, collaboration and integrations. It will both compete with, and complement, Element and other Matrix-based vendors.

"We're really excited to partner with Meedio - enabling them to provide excellent domain-specific Matrix clients by leveraging the best possible Matrix distribution from the team who created Matrix - Element Server Suite Pro.

“By joining the Matrix.org Foundation C.I.C. they show their commitment to the underlying Matrix project and we look forward to collaborating with them further."

Matthew Hodgson

Co-founder, CEO/CTO Element

Meedio delivers on-premise and hosted solutions for organisations with as few as five end-users, through to large public sector organisations and enterprises.

Governments need to adopt Matrix responsibly

Steve Loynes — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 09:43:06 GMT

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Governments need to adopt Matrix responsibly

March 25, 2026

It’s great to see another European government, this time Belgium, using the Matrix open standard as the foundation for digitally sovereign communications. Matrix enables digital sovereignty through decentralisation, self-hosting and interoperability. As a result, it gives governments full control over their data and operations.

By choosing Matrix, Belgium ensures it can work with any Matrix-based provider, switch vendors if needed, and avoid the long-term lock-in that plagues traditional communication platforms. Even European communications vendors, such as Wire or Threema, are built around vendor dependency. And yet vendor lock-in is the very opposite of digital sovereignty.

Whereas with Matrix, a government can create its Matrix-based communications solution solely in-house by building on FOSS components. Belgium is doing exactly that, which is testimony to just how much independence a government has over its Matrix-based communications.

With great sovereignty comes great responsibility

When a government standardises on Matrix, it is building critical communications infrastructure on open source software. It’s therefore imperative that the same government does its part to ensure the open source project on which it relies is healthy and sustainable. The open source project doesn’t sustain itself automatically. It relies on funding, active participation and collaboration.

A government that spends millions on in-house development forking an open source project is far from an open source champion. Nor is it favourable for tax-payers or the local industry, as much of that development is reinventing what already exists in the commercialised product. Three or four years down the line, a government is left with a bespoke stack that’s hugely expensive to maintain and several steps removed from the ‘digital commons’ that was so appealing in the first place.

Working with the commercial upstream vendor is far more cost effective than building from FOSS components, particularly over the medium and long term.

Mindful procurement

With European governments scrambling to free themselves from vendor-locked systems, the exuberant embrace of open source software can see some parts of government struggle to maintain pace. Senior officials from a non-technical background, and public sector procurement processes, are often fairly unfamiliar with open source software. Fuelled by the strategic imperative of technological independence, procurement teams and others can adopt a seemingly independent ‘vendorless’ approach without fully understanding the implications - that they are sawing off the very branch they are sitting on by not ensuring the health of the underlying open source project, and thus the code they rely on.

It’s quite an irony that some governments who want to free themselves from proprietary platforms are simultaneously starving the upstream vendors that develop and maintain the open source alternative on which they intend to rely - incentivising it to become more and more closed source to survive - and preventing it from keeping up with the proprietary competition.

Organisations like the Open Source Business Alliance have already published guidance to help governments appreciate the complexity of responsibly procuring open source software - ensuring that upstream vendors who maintain the overall project are suitably financed to ensure the underlying software is developed and maintained.

Learning from others

In Germany ZenDiS - which is building the digitally sovereign openDesk office productivity suite - ensures that upstream projects are directly involved and properly funded via subscriptions to the vendors’ commercial offerings; paying for what they use, to keep the overall open source healthy. Projects like BwMessenger and BundesMessenger, both developed by BWI GmbH, also demonstrate strong collaboration with the Matrix ecosystem.

Sweden’s SAFOS initiative, the European Commission’s Element deployment, the Dutch Ministry of Defence and many others all show a similar pattern; governments embracing open source while actively supporting the vendors and communities behind it.

Working with upstream vendors doesn’t just support the overall open source project. Vendors provide more experience of the technology, enterprise-grade scalability and high availability, Long Term Support distributions, well-maintained integrations, and crucial features such as identity management, group-synchronised access control and audit capability. There is a significant difference between free-of-charge software for community use and software that’s designed for a nationwide government deployment. That’s precisely where an upstream vendor adds demonstrable value, and lower total cost of ownership. And it’s that revenue that helps, in turn, fund the overall open source project.

The hybrid ideal

As one of our European government customers said to us recently: “It’s not about FOSS vs paying for subscriptions. It’s not buy vs build. It should be a hybrid approach that works for all parties.”

Sovereignty is about choice, and by adopting open standards like Matrix governments will preserve sovereignty and interoperability. Open standards give governments an ecosystem of vendors to choose from. And that is far more sovereign than locking an organisation into a multi-million a year team to maintain an in-house fork. Besides, working with commercial vendors provides the support, stability and assurance that the upstream project needs to improve and compete with proprietary incumbents.

Through ready-to-use products, operational expertise and accountability, a vendor relieves a government of considerable complexity, cost and risk. With the combination of open source and professional software, a government ensures complete digital sovereignty, and can yet still customise its solution to suit its exact requirements; a level of bespoke customisation that a software vendor typically wouldn't deliver.

Solutions like Element’s enterprise offerings provide exactly that balance; cost-effective, secure and professionally maintained - and yet ensuring the openness and flexibility that guards against vendor lock-in.

The strategic importance of digital sovereignty and the interoperability provided by an open standard revolves around a government having complete control of its data and visibility on the technology stack used. Requirements of that magnitude deserve investment, for both the solution itself and the wider open source project that is there to benefit everyone.

By the same author

Element is the fast, simple and private way to communicate with family, friends, teams, colleagues, organisations and the wider world.

Thanks for reading our blog— if you got this far, you should head toelement.ioto learn more!

Get started

For Web, Android, iOS, macOS, Windows & Linux

Element Blog

Digital sovereignty is built on an open standard that enables federation

Digital sovereignty is built on an open standard that enables federation

Interoperability delivers digital sovereignty

Chat should never be a proprietary-style vendor-locked solution

The role of Matrix for sovereign communications

Sovereignty without isolation - Matrix-based federation

Related Posts

By the same author

Element is the fast, simple and private way to communicate with family, friends, teams, colleagues, organisations and the wider world.

Introducing the ESS Community migration tool

Why migrate to ESS?

Introducing the ESS migration tool

A "breeze" for MAS migrations, too

Getting started

The roadmap: What’s next?

A note for commercial customers

Join the conversation

Spaces has landed on Element X!

What are Spaces?

Automated organisation for admins

What’s new?

1. A smarter, cleaner chat list

2. Discovery at your fingertips

3. Flexible room creation

4. Context before you join

Ready to dive in?

Meedio partners with Element to deliver sovereign communications across Europe

Infrastructure to enable customer focus

Matrix co-opetition

Governments need to adopt Matrix responsibly

Governments need to adopt Matrix responsibly

Related Posts

By the same author

Element is the fast, simple and private way to communicate with family, friends, teams, colleagues, organisations and the wider world.