Ben Parsons

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

I spoke to Half-Shot about LOTS of topics in bridging, well worth a watch if you're interested in using Slack, IRC and other platforms with Matrix.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Approved MSCs

No MSCs have cleared FCP this week.

Final Comment Period

No MSCs have entered FCP this week

In Progress MSCs

• MSC2291: Configuration to Control Crawling

The Spec Core Team is going to try and select 3 MSCs to prioritise per week to work on, in order to not stretch resources too thin and to communicate clearly what it is we're actually up to. More details to follow.

Otherwise this week has been continuing to iterate on existing MSCs, as well as updating the MSC template to rename the "Tradeoffs" section to "Alternatives", and to get rid of "Conclusion" which was always just an unnecessary repeat of the introduction.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Construct

Notes from Jason:

Construct did a round of performance work and pursued some of the easier opportunities with the most effective returns. At present, the biggest performance bottleneck Construct experiences is with I/O, specifically latency from accessing disks in a random pattern. This week a few open opportunities for prefetch pipelines were taken, allowing the server to stream data directly from the disk to the client with minimal buffering. This was implemented in several places, mostly for the /media/ system, and also for the /members lists, improving the performance of requesting the members of a room like #whalepool:ericmartindale.com .

There is one area though that requires a special mention for being an order of magnitude more impactful than any other area where a pipelined stream was placed. We have analyzed the way Riot conducts a room change, and by the simple placement of a prefetch operation when the server receives an im.vector.breadcrumb_rooms, which comes early during the room change, Construct is able to populate the room's timeline significantly faster. That has a compounding effect, as the browser initiates several requests based on (and after) the received timeline data- meaning those responses come significantly faster.

Construct is the community driven Matrix server written in C++ for maximum performance. Swing by #test:zemos.net or https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct/ for more.

🔗Synapse

Neil said:

Synapse This week, lots of hacking but not much in the way of news. We’ve been focusing on more privacy improvements as well as polishing up the SAML integration. Next week, expect a wodge of privacy related features to land.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗Matrix Slack bridge 1.0 RC2

Half-Shot said:

The Matrix Slack bridge has had another release candidate this week. 1.0 RC2 is out now. We've rewritten the codebase in Typescript and made many changes, and need your feedback before release so please do not hold back on testing it! The 1.0 release is slated to arrive sometime next week :)

🔗famedly-email-bridge - new email bridge!!

sorunome told us:

Presenting famedly-email-bridge, a new email bridge! It is still early in development but can already send and receive emails.

Features so far:

• Receive emails by a prefix (e.g. [email protected], [email protected])
• Send emails with said prefix
• Receiving emails parses plain body, html body and attachments
• Sending emails collects all messages for a given amount of time. After that it creates an email based on that! Supports edits, redactions and files (image, video, audio, file)!

Things planned for the future:

• Route emails to channels based on threading (reply-chain)
• Send emails by making a new channel and inviting an email ghost and just sending messages!

🔗IRC bridge progress: postgres

Half-Shot told us:

My other news that I forgot to mention is that I have a branch of the IRC bridge that runs off postgres, rather than flat file storage. It's much less memory/cpu intensive and might even offer a bit of a speedup :)

For ref: The current room/user store files for the freenode bridge take up 250MB when stored to disk. The existing storage system works on the principle of loading the whole datastore into memory and periodically saving to disk. Hopefully by not requiring the bridge to load all the state into memory, there are savings to be made.

🔗mautrix-telegram v0.6.1

Tulir told us:

mautrix-telegram v0.6.1 has been released, no changes since the release candidates two weeks ago. mautrix-telegram v0.7.0 is scheduled to be released within 6 weeks.

Also, there's a WhatsApp business API bridge using Twilio in development, though I'm guessing most people won't have any use for that.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Continuum progress

yuforia said:

Continuum desktop client written in pure Kotlin, version 0.9.24:

• Non-square avatar images are scaled up and cropped to fit a square, instead of being scaled down and put into a square.
• Scale avatar images when font size is increased/decreased with Ctrl and +/-. Below is a screenshot of Continuum with UI scaled to be 67% larger.
• After signing-in, open the messaging view each time it's launched instead of showing the login view and requiring one extra click.
• Shutdown background threads and close database so it won't be busy if Continuum is closed and immediately re-launched.

https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/yLOmalevIOxrKATqZVjsmfvr

🔗Riot Web

Ryan offered:

Riot Web worked on the last remaining bits of the current privacy sprint. We are planning to do a release soon that includes this privacy work from the last few months. We are also working on a few improvements for first time users around the create room dialog. We also shipped several patch releases (1.3.5 and 1.3.6) to fix high priority bugs.

🔗Riot-iOS

Manu said:

Riot-iOS has made some progress on the privacy sprint. We fixed some major issues with VoiceOver. Those fixes will be released soon in a hot fix release: 0.9.5.

🔗Riot Android

Benoit:

Riot Android: Still working on privacy

🔗RiotX

Benoit reported:

A release has been done (0.5.0) with login with SSO support. There is also a new "no network" indicator, which is a bit bugged, we will fix that. Stabilization sprint is still ongoing. We already have fixed quite a lot of issues. François is still working on the read marker and is also fixing issues related to the permalinks.

krombel reported:

It might be interesting to some of you that the F-Droid repo for RiotX is finally working again. There was an issue with buildkite which in the end led to the situation that the built apk had a lower versionCode as the apps already in the repo. The repo was then "intelligent enough" to no offer it as update. benoit was able to resolve that so the repos are updating again.

🔗Dept of Ping 🏓

New!! A new section where we will reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

🔗Final thoughts 💭

Slack have invented bridging, very creative of them.

Nico has reappeared, on the tropical island Reunion and is looking again at his Elixir Homeserver project: Plasma.

🔗That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Approved MSCs

• MSC1802: Remove the '200' value from some federation responses

Final Comment Period

No MSCs have entered FCP

In Progress MSCs

• MSC2290: Separate Endpoints for Threepid Binding
• MSC2260: Update the auth rules for m.room.aliases events

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

🔗Mozilla trialling Matrix as an IRC replacement

In fact they're having a standoff between Matrix, Mattermost, Rocket.chat and Slack.

We're eager to see the results of this trial, the feedback will be very valuable for everyone regardless of the final outcome. (Though of course, we are optimistic..!)

Keep up with the discussion in various places.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse

This week sees us complete the last items on the privacy sprint and we expect a release to land early next week. Aside from that OpenTracing is now live, the configuration tool is ready to go (modulo the new Synapse release) and we’ve been trialling out room directory improvements.

Next week expect Synapse 1.4 to land which will contain privacy sprint support as well as a host of bug fixes and perf improvements.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗matrix-appservice-slack 1.0.0-rc1

MAJOR milestone for Half-Shot this week!

Hello Twimians! After many weeks of creativity, pain, and slack, the bridge team are proud to present our first release candidate for the slack bridge. This release brings in a ton of new changes that should massively improve the slack<->matrix experience. The headline features are Postgres support, Puppeting, RTM (websocket) support as well as an entirely refactored codebase written in Typescript.

This release has made heavy changes to the schema of the slack bridge and as such we are not recommending that anyone upgrade their existing slack bridge instances to 1.0.0-rc1. A migration script is currently being worked on, but for the time being existing installs should not be upgraded to 1.0.0 release candidates.

🔗matrix-appservice-irc 0.13.0-rc2

Half-Shot announced:

HELLO IRC FANS. Or possibly not irc fans, if you are running a Matrix bridge.. After a long period of not-being-ready the IRC bridge has a new RC, https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.13.0-rc2. Hopefully the last, but time will tell.

🔗Keybase bridge, mega-pre-alpha

Half-Shot reported:

There is also now a keybase bridge

This is ready for testing, room here: #keybase:half-shot.uk

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Scylla

@daniel:riot.danilafe.com reported:

Hi all! I haven't been around much because our homeserver chugs a little when federation is enabled, but I've got a few updates to share about Scylla, the Elm-based web client for Matrix:

1. There have been a few optimization changes. The naive Elm approach leads to recomputing room names and usernames on every keystroke, which causes huge performance issues in rooms with many users (like #freenode_#haskell!). The new versions of Scylla avoid recomputing room names and message HTML, leading to much better performance in large rooms and rooms where a lot of history is loaded.
2. The recommended fixes in the spec regarding flickering have been implemented, and messages should no longer flicker.
3. "m.notice" and "m.emote" events are now supported
4. There has been a minor visual update to make the interface look a little more consistent and professional.

🔗FluffyChat 11.16

@krille:ubports.chat offered:

We have released FluffyChat 11.16 with minor bug fixes and updated translations. A nice new feature: Messages which contains emojis only are now displayed with a much bigger font. 💕

🔗Continuum 0.9.23

yuforia reported:

Continuum desktop client written in pure Kotlin, version 0.9.23:

• Include Elliptic Curve module to be able to connect to HTTPS servers using ECDSA

• Removed dependency on kotlin-reflect and tornadofx completely and make packaged size about 5 MB smaller, which is a 10% to 20% reduction, depending on the target platform and package format

• In addition to automatic scaling when HiDPI is detected, font size scaling is added. Press Ctrl and + or - to increase or decrease the font size. Font size scaling is not limited to texts, components with their size defined relative to the font size also gets scaled.

• When a image message is clicked, a viewer is opened to provide a closer look. Now the updated viewer is opened in new windows, multiple images can be viewed at once, and interaction with the main window is not blocked. Images also gets scaled when the viewer window is resized.

• Removed borders and backgrounds from 3 buttons and give them a flat appearance.

🔗Fractal

Alexandre Franke told us:

Since last time, Fractal got many translation updates. Current coverage can be seen here. We’re also now disabling the message entry if the user is not allowed to send messages to the room and fixed a crashed when logging out or logging in with the wrong password.

🔗Brawl, new web client from Bruno the Riot dev

Bruno told us:

I've been working occasionally for the past months on a basic matrix web client called Brawl, focusing on performance, offline usage and working on my old phone. I recently got it in still limited, but somewhat useful state. Unsure how much time I'll have to keep working on this regularly, but wanted to share it here anyways. Check it out on https://github.com/bwindels/brawl-chat, there's a GIF of it in action 🙂

🔗Riot Web

From the team:

We’ve made good progress on our first FTUE (First Time User Experience) project: “Improve add & create room”, with only the makeover of the create room dialog remaining. Next week more FTUE projects, and we hope to get some progress on cross-signing, barring any other distractions.

🔗Riot iOS

From the team:

• Finalising privacy
• Release 0.9.4 with support of the new Riot configuration link to quickly customise servers on the authentication screen.

🔗Riot Android

From the team:

• Two minor releases have been made (0.9.5 and 0.9.6), to allow auto configuration of the homeserver in the login screen with a configuration link, and to fix an issue with SSO using Google account.
• Still working on privacy

🔗RiotX (Android)

From the team:

• Working on stabilization. We already have fixed some issues.
• François is still working on ReadMarker
• Benoit is working on saving draft (storing unsent messages)
• Also implementing SSO login and M_CONSENT_NOT_GIVEN error

🔗ALSO: "bashtrix"

Matthew reported:

i wrote a toy client in ~8 lines of bash (thanks to anoa for fixing it up): https://github.com/ara4n/random/blob/master/bashtrix.sh; context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20948530

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗synapse-simple-antispam now available in matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi offered:

due to the large number of invite-spam attacks and increased interest in the synapse-simple-antispam spam checker module, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now has support for installing and configuring it.

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗Release Tracking Bot from Ananace

Ananace reported:

Had some free time and ideas this week, so I've improved my release tracking bot to now correctly handle repos mixing full releases as well as tags (lightweight and/or annotated). GitHub's API really sucks in the tags department, so this required a rework to GraphQL queries instead, and it's looking good on that so far. The bot currently still only handles tracking all starred repos of a given account on GitHub, but I'm working on GitLab support, as well as support for tracking arbitrary repos. And a provisioning API is also somewhere on the roadmap,

🔗That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse

Neil from Synapseland:

This week privacy items have dominated, but we’ve also been edging towards getting our room directory improvements out, shipping a new configuration creator and making further progress on the federation side bus project to improve performance of smaller instances.

We also deployed open tracing on matrix.org, which will help a lot in tracking down all sorts of strange behaviour in the wild and fixing some bugs in the sqlite -> postgres migrator.

Next week we’ll land the room directory improvements, much of the privacy work, and have the configuration creator ready for testing.

🔗Construct

Jason:

Construct added user room listing support so that you can find out what public rooms a user is a member of should they choose to not be invisible. To find out the list of rooms for a user, simply open the room directory in Riot and type a user mxid starting with @...

Construct is implementing the concept of invisibility for users:

The exact mechanism for invisibility is not completely finished but there are obviously some limitations for this feature:

• Only users who are local to the server can set any kind of invisibility. Remote users are always fully listed. One day when the spec has "user's rooms" we would be glad to adhere to an m.user.invisible-etc configuration state event in such a room
• Since there is no federation support for user's rooms list publication, the rooms list for a user is limited to what the server knows (rooms it has seen the user in).

Construct is eager to implement any MSC's regarding user room and group membership listing over the federation.

Construct is written for maximum performance in C++, and is developing rapidly - join #construct:maunium.net for more info.

🔗matrix-media-repo updates for quarantining and purging media

TravisR announced:

matrix-media-repo has received a bunch of updates regarding quarantining and purging media - see the admin docs for more information. There's also an s3 upload bug fix if you're using that.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗GitLab bot to be re-written as a maubot

Tulir announced:

lorico has been rewriting my old GitLab bot to python/maubot: https://github.com/maubot/gitlab/pull/23. Progress on that is looking very good and it'll probably be ready within a week or two.

Check the maubot GH page for more.

🔗mautrix-telegram, small release

Tulir again:

I decided to make a minor mautrix-telegram release with some small fixes, since v0.7.0 will take a while still. v0.6.1-rc2 is out now, the full release will probably happen next week if nobody finds any problems. Main changes:

• Invalid reply fallbacks sent by Riot web in edits are now ignored
• User and portal sync errors are now caught so that the sync command wouldn't fail if one telegram chat disappears.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Riot Web

Tidy update from Bruno this week:

This week we were doing the last bits of the privacy work, and fixing bugs and adding a format bar in the new composer (still behind labs flag).

We’ve also been planning the First Time User Experience work, which will start at full speed next week. This is an effort to address some issues that new users hit in the first days of using Riot. See https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/projects/16#card-25137120 and Matthew talking over the details at https://youtu.be/JYsiHSL0lEA?t=710. Letterboxes in the left panel will likely only be removed as part of the new community project though, as we need parts of the new community UX to keep things usable for power users.

Also, if you're using https://riot.im/develop please enable the new composer in Labs, it works well and deserves testing.

🔗Continuum desktop client, many updates

yuforia reported:

Continuum desktop client written in pure Kotlin, version 0.9.20:

• Updated login page appearance
• Added validation to user ID and server address fields
• The server address gets automatically filled with https:// followed by server name when user ID is being typed
• After signing in, the token and server address are automatically saved
• Added progress indicator when being signed in. It doesn't block user from controlling Continuum, pressing Esc will cancel the signing-in process.
• Speed up application start-up by drawing the window and opening the database in parallel. Now the window typically appears within half a second with its size and position on screen restored to be the same as the last time it was opened. The most recently used accounts get loaded and automatically filled within a second.
• Added drop shadow effect to scroll-to-latest-messages button to increase contrast
• Fix: Always retry synchronization after getting a network error. Previous versions didn't retrieve new messages in a timely manner when the network is unreliable. A delay is added if the error is not a time-out to avoid stressing the homeserver.

koma the Kotlin library behind Continuum:

• Fix suspend/hibernate detection. Synchronization is restarted automatically after the computer resumes from sleeping. The reason is that any previously opened connection is unlikely to be still alive, opening new connections reduces delay.

• Fix incorrect interface declaration that caused login to fail

🔗Pattle 0.13.0 released

Wilko said:

A new version has been made available and should soon be on F-Droid, Google Play and TestFlight!

Expect the new version to be on most platforms in 2 days.

It's not the biggest release, but a release nonetheless.

🔗Changes

• Separate public and personal chats
• Use a bullhorn icon for public chats without an avatar
• Fix sync being started multiple times on startup
• Fix the room.member_count error (might require clearing of data)
• Many SDK changes, for features in future releases

🔗Get Pattle

• Android
  • F-Droid
  • Google Play
• iOS (TestFlight)

Please let me know what you think of the separation of personal and public chats! Currently it's implemented using a bottom navigation bar, but tabs could also be an option (which is closer to what WhatsApp does)

🔗Riot Mobile versions

All teams when I asked responded:

Privacy, privacy and privacy.

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

🔗t2bot.io has 300k MAU

TravisR told us:

t2bot.io has surpassed 300k monthly active users (about 35k daily) 🎉

roughly 250k are (bridged) from Telegram, the rest is from Discord. (there's some very small numbers which include the bots, webhooks, and other tiny bridges, but together they form less than 100 users)

🔗room list viewer tool

joepie91 offered:

Inspired by a question in the Matrix HQ channel, I've built a (rudimentary) room list viewer at https://matrix-rooms.cryto.net/ - you can just enter a homeserver (hostname) and see all the public rooms on it, without needing to log into anything. This might be useful for showing other people what kinds of rooms exist on Matrix!

🔗Dept of Blockchain 🤷‍

🔗OI Chat, Matrix based chat uses blockchain for authentication

@friedger:matrix.org said:

OI Chat has been updated and now connects blockchain users on Blockstack and EOS (and the rest of the matrix universe): https://www.producthunt.com/posts/oi-chat-2 The sever has no passwords or requires permissions by other social account providers, it verifies the authenticity of the user using properties of the blockchain IDs, it names registered on the blockchain.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗Matrixmon

Matrixmon new release 0.4.0, featuring Docker image hosted on Docker Hub and an option to specify custom config file location.

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗matrix-fly-paper: new project for room moderation

@serra:lost-angles.im reported:

matrix-fly-paper is a new bot project intended to help automate server and room moderation. It's currently not ready for any kind of use, as I'm trying out serious TDD and attempting a functional approach to break from my OO training. Feedback is appreciated, stop by #matrix-fly-paper:lost-angles.im to talk shop

If you're interested in such things, there is an existing tutorial on how to use matrix-bot-sdk for exactly this at https://matrix.org/docs/guides/matrix-bot-sdk-room-admin-features.

🔗Dept of Merch 👕

About a month ago we started selling merch at shop.matrix.org, and WOWEE ZOMG we sold a lot of stuff! If you are happy with your purchase I'd love to hear from you - share photos of where you put the stickers or you happily wearing the t-shirt in #twim:matrix.org and I'll make a little collage.

If you are not happy with your purchase then please message me at @benpa:matrix.org and I will try to make it right.

🔗Final thoughts 💭

You should complete this EU-related FOSS survey, and if you wanted to say nice things about Matrix that would be fine by us.

🔗That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Approved MSCs

• MSC1957: Integration manager discovery

Final Comment Period

• MSC2263: Give homeservers the ability to handle their own 3PID registrations/password resets
• MSC2264: Add an unstable feature flag to MSC2140 for clients to detect support

In Progress MSCs

• MSC2246: Asynchronous media uploads
• [WIP] MSC2249: Require users to have visibility on an event when submitting reports
• [WIP] MSC2260: Update the auth rules for m.room.aliases events
• MSC2261: Allow m.room.aliases events to be redacted by room admins
• MSC2244: Mass redactions
• MSC2265: Proposal for mandating lowercasing when processing e-mail address localparts

🔗Notes on the Spec from tulir

I made a few spec proposals: MSC2244: Mass redactions and MSC2246: Asynchronous media uploads. Mass redactions are useful for fighting spam (and bridging telegram deletions) more efficiently. Asynchronous media uploads would make it possible for bridges (like telegram) to handle messages synchronously and thus keep message ordering without blocking all messages behind some media upload.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse

Erik reported:

• Busy landing the remaining items for the privacy project.
• Reviewing and landing the room stats work Oliver has been busy with before he finishes his internship this week (thanks Oliver!).
• Jorik has been doing the finishing touches to the Synapse installer (which looks awesome fyi).
• We’ve also been looking at a basic message retention implementation in Synapse.
• Finally, Hawkowl had a lot of fun at Kiwi Pycon last week (woo keynote!), and is now back and looking at improving performance of outbound requests.

🔗Construct

Jason from Construct:

Construct added support for server notice rooms. As the server administrator I've placed quick access to the server control room for myself in this section.

Construct has also added support for the server-side commands \\read <room-tag>, for example \\read m.low_priority will mark all low-priority tagged rooms as read. The command \\read * also will mark all rooms as read.

Also, we now allow users to configure whether they transmit typing events by setting state events in their home-room. If a user creates an event with the type of ircd.typing.disable.send and the state_key of the room_id, typing events will not be sent to that room for them. Further variations exist, such as ircd.typing.disable.sync to prevent the client from receiving typing events for a particular room or all rooms.

Learn more in #construct:zemos.net

🔗Matrix Visualisations GSOC project 🎓

Eisha announced:

I've finished my GSoC project "Matrix Visualisations", you can view my final report at this address https://gist.github.com/Kagamihime/d0e7ac434b0d80eb201260d213dea0b7

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗mx-puppet-twitter NEW

sorunome reported:

mx-puppet-twitter....do they ever stop?!

Now there is a twitter DM bridge based on mx-puppet-bridge! It uses twitters webhook API to receive direct messages instantly.

So far implemented:

• basic message sending in both directions
• Image, Gif and Video sending (twitter special-cases those) in both directions
• twitter oauth to authenticate

Support room: #mx-puppet-bridge:sorunome.de Donate on liberapay: https://liberapay.com/Sorunome/donate

🔗Jojii email bridge NEW

Jojii announced:

For all those who want a new emailbridge, I have great news for you! The new bridge supports sending and writing emails, using multiple rooms for multiple email-addresses. In addition you can use markup to improve the style of your emailbody, which gets translated to HTML. Here you can find the repository: Matrix-EmailBridge

Go join #jojiiMail:matrix.jojii.de for more.

🔗Big news for the Slack bridges

Half-Shot offered:

The Slack bridge has had a whole week of care applied to it. We've switched the bridge entirely over to Typescript, and overhauled large parts of the codebase to make future work easier (for ex, using the Slack node library rather than request calls). If that's not exciting enough, we've also added support for the RTM API, which means the bridge can use websockets when talking to slack. This gives us nice things like typing updates, and the ability to deploy without needing a webserver to listen for events. Release 1.0 is imminent, but before then we are hoping to land Postgresql support so that the bridge can scale up to meet the high demands placed upon it.

🔗mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir told us:

mautrix-whatsapp got a bunch of small fixes and a dbms migration tool.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Riot Web

Ironed the bugs out of the new composer, which is available on https://riot.im/develop behind a labs flag. Please test!

🔗Riot iOS

Privacy, privacy and privacy.

🔗Riot Android

A security release has been done on thursday. More details here: https://medium.com/@RiotChat/matrix-android-sdk-security-issue-affecting-riot-android-36b4792ea0d6

In parallel we continued working on privacy.

🔗RiotX (Android)

A release has been done today (v0.4.0). The main new feature is Read Receipts!

🔗Neo Renaming

f0x reported:

I'm considering renaming Neo, to help with getting a nice domain, and better findability in general. Any suggestions welcome in #neo:pixie.town.

🔗Pattle 0.12.0

Wilko told us:

A new version has been pushed to F-Droid, Google Play and TestFlight!

⚠️ This update requires a reinstall or clearing of data ⚠️: Because of some database changes which were not that easy to migrate, you'll have to reinstall the app or clear the data.

Expect the new version to be on most platforms in 2 days, and on Google Play in a few hours.

🔗Changes

• Add a dark theme!
• Add basic settings page
• Add ability to change your own display name
• Allow multiple lines while typing a message
• Render line breaks in messages
• Fix issue where homeserver setting was overridden by the user domain
• Mark new messages as read while chat is opened
• Fix chats being sorted by your own display name change
• Fix multiple issues regarding the member count of room being null
• Use Flutter beta, which means that you can paste in textfields again!

🔗Get Pattle

• Android

  • F-Droid
  • Google Play
  • APK

• iOS (TestFlight)

🔗Issues or suggestions

If you stumble upon any issues or would like to suggest features, please do so here! You can login via GitHub and Gitlab.com!

🔗Follow development

Follow development in #app:pattle.im!

🔗Continuum 0.9.19

yuforia reported:

Continuum the pure Kotlin desktop client

• Provide builds of self-contained executables that have no external dependency. The Linux version has been done. AppImage is used, producing a binary of about 50 MB.
• Adjust appearance. Remove alternating row high-lighting in list views. Remove extra padding between messages.

🔗Quaternion has many visual improvements

kitsune reported:

Thanks to Roland Pallai, Quaternion master branch is now able to use customised fonts and sports a faster timeline, better copying and a few other improvements. Settings dialog window is coming.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗igor: a Matrix bot framework for Elixir

uhoreg offered:

for fans of strange programming languages or of monster movie clichés, I've created a Matrix bot framework for Elixir: https://gitlab.com/uhoreg/igor

🔗Dept of Encryption 🔐

poljar:

Initial code dump of Seshat, a Matrix event indexer/database that should enable search for encrypted rooms in riot-desktop. The dump contains a rust library as well as node bindings. The repo can be found here.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗ARM docker images for synapse

Black Hat told us:

Apparently there are no ARM docker images for synapse, so I built a multi-arch synapse docker image. Supported CPU architectures include armv7, aarch64 and amd64.

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

tulir:

There's a useless new maubot plugin that lets you run python and soon shell scripts from Matrix. Not intended as a public bot as it doesn't have any sandboxing, but it does have a "userbot" mode to run it under your own account so that you can use it in any room.

Slightly mean to call your own bot useless :(

🔗Final thoughts 💭

If you've suffered from invite spam lately, you can solve the problem by following these instructions:

There's 3 methods to block the room:

1. Use the synapse admin API for it:

curl -s -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"new_room_user_id":"@abuse:YOUR_SERVER.org"}' 'https://YOUR_SERVER/_matrix/client/unstable/admin/shutdown_room/!BAD_ROOM:example.org'

2. Block the room with an antispam module ( https://github.com/t2bot/synapse-simple-antispam )
3. Ignore the user with /ignore

🔗That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

🔗Installing Matrix @ CCCamp 2019

It's CCCamp 2019 this weekend. Tonight, anoa will be leading an "Install Synapse" workshop in the Librehosters Village- keep decentralisation growing!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse

Neil:

This week we’ve been working on getting our brand new room directory implementation ready, creating a new Synapse installer, and creating a TURN server testing tool. We’ve also been pushing on with the privacy project and fixing up some bugs and perf issues.
Next week it’s all about getting the room directory out of the door, shipping the installer and continuing on with the privacy project. We are in the early stages of a project designed to reduce the load caused by outbound SSL connections, it is looking very promising. We’re also going to give the sqlite->postgres porting script some love as well as working on some message retention ideas, and also ways to reduce the meta data we store.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗mautrix-facebook updated

Tulir announced:

the adding portal rooms to user-specific communities feature that appeared in mautrix-whatsapp and mautrix-hangouts last week is now also available in mautrix-facebook

🔗Gitter bridge is back

Half-Shot offered:

The gitter bridge is back to working order again today! We've made changes so that Gitter side admins can now issue a !matrix kick|ban name command to evict users who are causing issues, rather than relying on reports or matrix side admins.

🔗matrix-appservice-bridge library 1.10.0

Half-Shot reported:

The matrix-appservice-bridge library also saw its 1.10.0 release this week, which has experimental support for bridge errors and also has a bugfix related to room upgrades.

🔗Discord bridge will soon use matrix-bot-sdk

Half-Shot said:

Finally, the discord bridge has very nearly switched to Travis's bot SDK stuff. We are very close to a release, so please stand by :)

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Riot Web

From the team:

• Work on privacy.
• We’ve also been continuing the work on the new message composer implementation. Features are still missing, but this has now landed behind a labs flag on /develop. We’d be especially interested in feedback whether typing with an IME (Chinese, Japanese, …) works better than before.

🔗Riot iOS && Riot Android

From the team:

• Working on privacy:
• Working on identity server v2 API

🔗RiotX (Android)

From the team:

• Read receipt work has been merged to develop. We will release next week, after a small UI iteration
• François is working on Read Markers

🔗Riot with Math support

Tim offered:

I've hosted a version of riot with the changes from https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3251 (for math support) built in so that people can test/use it if they want. It can be found at https://www.pigeon.digital — please do let me know about any bugs you may find!
there is now a room specifically for the LaTeX fork hosted on www.pigeon.digital where you can leave any feedback, report any bugs, or ask for any help: #pigeon.digital:matrix.org

🔗Pattle 0.11.0 released

Wilko reported:

A new version has been pushed to F-Droid, Google Play and TestFlight!

Pattle is now available on Google Play and the official F-Droid repository!

⚠️ F-Droid users ⚠️: The old repository (fdroid.pattle.im) is gone! Please use the official F-Droid repository.

Expect the new version to be on most platforms in 2 days (however, Google Play in a few hours).

🔗Changes

• Fix UI not updating on sync!

• Add ability to send images from your gallery!

• Use Material Design on iOS (although with slight changes to fit iOS)

• Reporting errors to Sentry is now optional, you can choose so at login time

  I do urge everyone to enable it to help me develop Pattle!

• Show a dialog with the option to choose between register and login if the server does not have the ability to check for username availability

• Show notification count in chat overview

  Default notifications will be grey, highlighted notifications will be red.

  Chats with unread notifications will always show on top.

• Send read markers and receipts when a chat is opened for 2 seconds

• Add ability to show password while logging in

• Pattle will now show up as 'Pattle Android' or 'Pattle iOS' in the device list

• Decrease spacing between items

• Fix spacing of messages when sending a new message

• Numerous other fixes

🔗Get Pattle

• Android
  • F-Droid
  • Google Play
  • APK
• iOS (TestFlight)

🔗Issues or suggestions

If you stumble upon any issues or would like to suggest features, please do so here! You can login via GitHub and Gitlab.com!

🔗Follow development

Follow development in #app:pattle.im!

🔗Support me

If you would like to support me, you can do so via Liberapay and Patreon!

🔗'matrixcli', new client enables Matrix as a unix util

Very interesting project: matrixcli is a versatile command line client using the matrix-python-sdk. It's not a conventional IM client, rather it exposes access to Matrix rooms so you can pipe to them as you would other Unix utils.

🔗Continuum progress

yuforia offered:

Continuum

• Handle key mappings and mouse mappings in a more idiomatic way
• Updated appearance, spacing and alignments. https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/glNXYasGpmkWJBNYBtUCqgYO

🔗Fractal Progress

Fractal, the GNOME client, continues to progress:

• fractal-gtk: Migrate to GtkSourceView4
• autocompletion-popover: Fix misplacement on small window widths
• Backend-API: Split request building and parsing from singleton
• directory: Remove duplicate entries for rooms

🔗Neo refactoring progress

f0x told us:

Neo's refactoring is almost done, with the latest changes being css-modulesifying the old stylesheet
We're also looking for nice domain name suggestions, to house the soon to be redesigned project page

🔗Dept of Encryption 🔐

🔗libQuotient E2E Progress (GSOC 🎓)

aa13q reported:

The GSoC is soon coming to the end this year and I'm happy no announce that receiving of the encrypted messages PR is here! https://github.com/quotient-im/libQuotient/pull/346 A significant amount of work still needs to be done (session storage, sending messages, device handling, attachments). And I'm interested to implement it after the summer period since I've already dived into the subject :) Here's the small demo of the receiving messages process: https://youtu.be/gGykLh4mVDg

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Matrix-ClientServer-API-java

Jojii created a new Java-based implementation of the Matrix CS API: Matrix-ClientServer-API-java, they call it "A small and simple java API for the Matrix ClientServer Protocol".

They created Matrix-Grep-Bot using the API.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗flexible ansible role just for synapse

JCG offered:

For people looking for a rather flexible ansible role just for synapse, https://gitlab.com/famedly/ansible/synapse got your back. You can use it to deploy synapse with pip or docker, depending on what you prefer for your host. It's an actively maintained fork of https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ansible-synapse, which has been archived recently and was unmaintained for a while before that. It's just been updated to v1.3.1 too.

🔗New Bridges for matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi offered:

The matrix-docker-ansible-deploy Ansible playbook has gained new bridging capabilities:

• thanks to Eduardo Beltrame (Munfred) and Robbie D (microchipster), support has been added for bridging to Google Hangouts via the mautrix-hangouts bridge. Learn more in: Setting up Mautrix Hangouts bridging.

• thanks to kingoftheconnors and Stuart Mumford (Cadair), support has been added for bridging to Slack via the appservice-slack bridge. Learn more in: Setting up Appservice Slack bridging.

This increases the number of services/protocols that the playbook can setup bridging for to 8: Telegram, Whatsapp, Facebook, Google Hangouts, IRC, Discord, Slack and Email. Learn more in Bridging other networks.

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy gets support for all Synapse config options

Slavi offered:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now harness the full power of Synapse, thanks to our newly-added support for Extensible Synapse configuration.

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗New /health maubot

Ananace announced:

Just built a quick maubot plugin to add a /health endpoint to maubot, so that database failures and other brokenness can be tracked and dealt with appropriately.

🔗That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

In which Matthew talks about:

Synapse

• perf speedup
• installer
• turn tester
• extremities fix by default
• security work
• privacy work

Riot

• privacy; IS and IM permissions and management. Hashed lookup API. Metadata cleanup (GCing redactions; deleting media; history retention); TURN management
• aggregations paused
• FTUE next up
• Cross-signing
• Immutable DMs
• ...then communities

RiotX

• 0.3 came out last week - handles DMs; lots of polishing; reduces the APK down to ~10MB!

Bridges

• moving stuff into proper managed infrastructure
• bifrost should be back soon?
• gitter kept breaking but we're actually working with their team to fix that
• working out how to automate deploying them on modular hosts

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

🔗Approved MSCs

No MSCs have been approved.

🔗Final Comment Period

• MSC2229: Allowing 3PID Owners to Rebind
• MSC2230: Store Identity Server in Account Data
• MSC2010: Add client-side spoilers
• MSC2197: Search Filtering in Federation /publicRooms

🔗In Progress MSCs

• MSC2228: Self destructing events
• MSC2233: Unauthenticated Capabilities API

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Ruma

Jimmy reported:

This Week in Ruma: https://ruma.dev/news/this-week-in-ruma-2019-08-11/

He was also a guest of the Rustacean Station podcast this week:

Ruma and the Matrix Communication Protocol: An Interview with Jimmy Cuadra (Rustacean Station podcast): https://rustacean-station.org/episode/001-ruma/

🔗Construct CS API progress

Jason said:

Construct implemented event relations from the client-server API. Now clients can view edit history of messages.

Learn more in #construct:zemos.net

🔗Dendrite

anoa:

Progress for Dendrite this week has been a bit starved due to ongoing privacy work from the backend team. However it continues to move forwards with the excellent help of cnly reviewing and merging PRs.

We had 3 authors have pushed 5 commits to master and 6 commits to all branches. On master, 14 files have changed and there have been 298 additions and 121 deletions.

Notably we had trion129’s work on providing a fallback webpage for recaptcha authentication finally merged! This was another early PR that was dragged up from the bottom of the list to be modernised and integrated into the current codebase.

Also this week was some work from cnly on refactoring gomatrixserverlib and exposing some more of its internal constants to deduplicate code between itself and Dendrite.

Finally, we had some more work on an unmerged PR from cnly, which adds some internal query APIs for which servers are currently joined to a room, for use by other components later down the line.

No new Sytests are passing this week. We’re still currently at 172 tests passing out of 761 tests in total.

🔗Matrixmon updated

Matrixmon, the perl C2S testing utility has been updated to v0.2.0 with support for SSL connections.

🔗Synapse

Synapse 1.3.0 was released - check out the blog post.

contains performance improvements to reduce disk I/O and reduce RAM usage. We’ve been running it on matrix.org for a week or so and are really pleased with the results.

Ananace's k8s tooling, Slavi's matrix-docker-ansible-deploy and andrewsh's Debian packages were all updated within an hour of release, which is a great community achievement. 👏

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗Major mautrix-* bridges update

tulir said:

mautrix-telegram got some fixes to bugs that appeared during the move to mautrix-python. It also got a manhole similar to the one in synapse, which gives admins access to an interactive Python shell inside the bridge while it's running. The main part of the manhole (server and repl) is in mautrix-python, so you can expect the feature to appear in mautrix-facebook, mautrix-hangouts and possibly maubot in the future.

mautrix-whatsapp and mautrix-hangouts can now automatically add rooms to a user-specific community to help with filtering. mautrix-facebook is also getting that feature in the near future.

mautrix-facebook now has a search command, which means you can now actually initiate conversation with facebook users.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Riot Web

From the team:

• Privacy work continues
• STUN fallback server for assisting with voice & video call negotiation (only used when your homeserver is not configured with it’s own TURN server) changed from Google to Matrix.org server and a prompt has been added to request permission before using the fallback server
• Many small steps towards supporting user choice of identity servers and integration managers, including no identity server at all

🔗Bluepill (Sailfish client) status update

Cy8aer said:

Users can now download artifacts from my gitlab account since I got an SDK container from CoDerus running, cross compiling to Sailfish-RPMs in the Gitlab-Ci. But my programming progress on master looks a bit silent because I swap to matrix-nio.

🔗Fractal

Alexandre Franke told us:

Fractal nightlies are building again.

🔗Continuum

yuforia told us:

Continuum:

• Reimplement ScrollBar for the message list view to make it more consistent with Riot Web. It has a flat appearance now and only appears when the mouse hovers over the list of messages. https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/kVfBsoAsguMmESNThxnUmaTM
• Rewrite the list view partially to handle lists with several types of items more efficiently. The message list has text messages, images, membership updates, etc. Each type needs to be rendered differently, but items of the same type could reuse GUI components when they scroll into and out of view.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗K8s optimized images of Synapse RCs

Ananace offered:

Since the coming 1.3.0 release is bringing along a whole bunch of perf improvements, (and I want to test them out on my IO starved setup) I'm building K8s optimized images of the RCs. Only the debian version of the image though.

They expanded:

It's basically the regular docker image, only with some changes to make it fit nicer in Kubernetes
And there's no Helm chart at the moment, was poking at that for a bit but took a break from building one as I - back then - had trouble with the amount of data that had to be generated
You can only have one Synapse pod at any given time, as it's not scalable. Though you can scale it with workers (as I do myself)
Database-wise, I'm personally running three node HA clusters using Stolon

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

🔗New public instance: Permaweb.io

swedneck said:

We run a public instance on Permaweb.io for everyone to join. We’re a large community of developers focusing on the decentralized web, with lots of channels dedicated to IPFS. In fact, we even host Riot on IPFS! We make full use of Matrix’s bridging capabilities, to Discord, IRC, Slack, Gitter and Telegram too! Come join us at #general:permaweb.io or register at https://riot.permaweb.io/ (or any other compatible client) and say hi!

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗Notification/Remind-Me-Bot using matrix-bot-sdk

Anton (@antonivan:matrix.org) is working at Matrix Towers this summer for work experience. He's been learning about Matrix and matrix-bot-sdk:

This week I made a Notification/Remind-Me-Bot using Travis's bot sdk, it took me 1 and half days, and is able to - set reminder, check reminder, cancel reminder, set interval reminder, cancel interval reminder. It is also able to store multiple reminders and cancel them using the numbers 1 - ∞ . Here is a link to my Github repo - https://github.com/joakimvonanka/Matrix-Remind-me-bot

🔗Dept of Event Videos 📹

🔗Matrix talk @ FrOSCon

Oleg's talk at FrOSCon was apparently really well received:

Video recording from the Matrix talk @ FrOSCon. Video is in German slides in English.

• Video: https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2019-2330-matrix
• Slides: https://programm.froscon.de/2019/system/event_attachments/attachments/000/000/579/original/presentation.pdf
• Channel: #FrOSCon:fiksel.info

He's also thinking of writing a guide to creating presentations:

If someone is interested on an efficient way of creating presentation using only open source tools I'm planing to write an article on that.
Small spoiler: matrix is one of them 😉

🔗Final Thoughts 💭

This week, I have been mostly thinking about... merch. We blew the cache on stickers, so if you are waiting for stickers specifically and have not heard from me, that is probably why. Please contact me with any questions!

🔗That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

Here at Matrix we’re frequently asked for official merch. While those who choose to sponsor Matrix development on Patreon have always been blessed with branded t-shirts, it was otherwise very difficult to obtain official merch.

Today, those dark times have ended, as we announce the Official Matrix Merch Store!

Now available from shop.matrix.org, we’re offering packs of Stickers, T-Shirts, and Hoodies!

Stickers are provided in three types: hexagonal Matrix and Riot stickers, and rectangular transparent Matrix stickers.

T-Shirts are available in all sizes and in Unisex and Women's editions. We’re using Gildan SoftStyle t-shirts, which are popular amongst printed shirts for being both soft and durable.

Matrix-branded hoodies are something very special. Superbly embroidered, they are comfortable and stylish. On a recent trip to San Francisco, a passerby stopped a Matrix guardian in the street and asked where they could buy a Matrix hoodie without knowing what Matrix was.

You really need one of these.

All merchandise proceeds go to the Matrix.org Foundation, which helps fund Matrix development!

The Official Matrix Merch Store is open now: shop.matrix.org!

🔗Matrix Live

Something a little different this week: Erik helped me install Prometheus logging on my own homeserver, and we recorded it for Matrix Live.

Interesting reading: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/docs/metrics-howto.rst

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

🔗The Official Merch Store

<blink>YOU NEED MATRIX MERCH</blink>

Yes, it's true: Official Matrix Merch is available now. There are stickers, t-shirts and hoodies all available now, go and claim yours from https://shop.matrix.org.

<blink>CONSUME</blink>

🔗Free Open Source Conference appearance from Oleg

Oleg:

I will be doing a talk on Matrix this weekend (tomorrow) at the annual Free Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) in Sankt Augustin (Germany). If you are around - come by and get some awesome [matrix] stickers! =)

https://programm.froscon.de/2019/events/2330.html

Visit #FrOSCon2019:froscon2019.fiksel.info to talk about the event.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Approved MSCs

[MSC 2134]: MSC2134: Identity Hash Lookups 🎉

Final Comment Period

No MSCs have entered FCP

In Progress MSCs

[MSC 2213]: Rejoinability of private/invite-only rooms [MSC 2214]: Joining upgraded private rooms

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Dendrite

Huge update from Andrew:

This week’s stats for Dendrite are in! 4 authors have pushed 11 commits to master and 11 commits to all branches. On master, 48 files have changed and there have been 676 additions and 146 deletions.

Of note are the following merged PRs:

• Implement client single event retrieval - #671
  • You can now request a single event from Dendrite’s DB, assuming you have permission to view it.
• Account data events filtering database API and State events filtering database api
  • Very old PRs from CromFR have been updated and finally merged! These lay the groundwork for providing filters across various API endpoints (used in search, /sync, etc)
• Add typingserver service to docker-compose
  • Another fairly old PR by viccuad (their first for Dendrite!) finally reviewed and merged.
• Fix permission and 404 response for alias deletion - #654, Replace membership and visibility values with constants, Implement profile retrieval over federation - fixes #651 (this one is very useful), and Fix transaction IDs in transaction cache have global scope
  • A myriad of changes and fixes by cnly

We also have a number of PRs that were moved forward but not merged. Add auth fallback endpoint (our oldest PR at the moment!) which we mentioned last week is so very close, but not quite there in time for this TWIM.

In terms of passing Sytests, Dendrite now passes 172 tests, up from 167 last week. This is out of 761 tests in total. So just a small bump (0.6%), but note that things that are crucial for Dendrite development at the moment, such as federating, only cover a small subset of tests, so each passing one can bring us much closer to getting Dendrite usable day-to-day.

🔗Synapse

From Neil:

The big news this week we’ve landed some massive DB improvements (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5706) which should make message sending on matrix.org (and any other server) feel noticeably snappier. :) It'll be in the next release.

Outside of perf, we’ve also been continuing with our privacy project, sydent now supports hashing third party identifiers instead of storing the raw form, and in the coming week we’ll look at minimising the meta data we store. You can track our progress across the full project here (https://vector-im.github.io/feature-dashboard/#/plan?label=privacy-sprint&repo=matrix-org/synapse&repo=vector-im/riot-web&repo=vector-im/riot-ios&repo=vector-im/riot-android&repo=vector-im/riotX-android&repo=matrix-org/matrix-doc&repo=matrix-org/sydent)

Work continues on our installer to make it easier to configure Synapse and we’ll be looking for some community feedback rsn. The room directory revamp is now very close and we hope to have something live on matrix.org in about a week.

Finally we’re working on improving the efficiency of smaller instances sending messages into large rooms, we’re still at the design stage, but it will make a huge difference for anyone self hosting.

andrewsh also informs us:

synapse in up-to-date in Debian unstable — and in buster-backports (uploaded last week)

🔗Ruma

This Week in Ruma: https://ruma.dev/news/this-week-in-ruma-2019-08-04/

Also, get live-streamed Ruma development: https://www.jimmycuadra.com/posts/twitch-live-streams-of-ruma-development/

Does the video include time spent waiting for async to land in Rust?

🔗signaller - new "lightweight server"

ChronosX88 announced that he is "developing a lightweight Matrix server" - check on their progress at https://github.com/signaller-matrix/signaller, also join #signaller_dev:netwhood.online.

🔗TravisR announces various unstable interesting things

TravisR:

If you fancy running highly experimental software on your homeserver which might break things, I have two things for you:

1. matrix-key-server ( #matrix-key-server:t2bot.io ) is an implementation of a Matrix key server with notary support. Although it follows the specification, it has not been tested against Synapse. It is however fully featured: check it out on the federation tester ( https://federationtester.matrix.org/#keys.t2host.io ) or by querying it yourself ( https://keys.t2host.io/_matrix/key/v2/query/matrix.org ).

2. matrix-room-directory-server ( #matrix-room-directory:t2bot.io ) is less experimental than the key server but is still very early days. Currently it only offers the ability to manipulate the federated public room directory for your server, but in future it is planned to be its own standalone directory server (room aliases without having to run a whole homeserver). Check it out by searching the t2bot.io room directory from your client.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Continuum progressing!

I love getting updates from yuforia - they've been consistently working on Continuum for some time, and by increments are making a great client.

Reuse the ListView of messages across different rooms to reduce memory usage (Experimental) Remember and refocus the last read message, making it easier to go through all unread messages while switching chat rooms freely.

🔗QMatrixClient is now Quotient

kitsune:

Renaming of QMatrixClient to Quotient has been finally merged to the master branch; Quaternion master uses it from now, too. Packagers are welcome to make test builds and report bugs in #quotient:matrix.org. libQuotient 0.6 beta is coming close now!

🔗Riot iOS

• Test on iOS 13 Beta. Beta 6 fixed most bugs discovered on Beta 5
• Released 0.9.2 (Waiting for Apple review at the time of writing)
• Working on privacy concern.

🔗Riot Android

• Working on privacy concern.

🔗RiotX (Android)

• Release of v0.3.0 on Friday: full changelog can be found here: https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/releases/tag/v0.3.0
• We are working on read receipt management, it’s nearly functional

🔗Dept of Identity 🛂

🔗ma1sd 2.1.1

ma1uta announced ma1sd release 2.1.0:

Changes: reworked unbind (MSC1915).

Now ma1sd is compliant with the MSC1915 (unbind).

and then 2.1.1:

ma1sd release 2.1.1 with the security fix and more strict request validation, allows only requests from ma1sd's matrix domains (mirroring bind). Download links: https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.1.1 (archives and the deb package) and https://hub.docker.com/r/ma1uta/ma1sd for docker image.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗mautrix-facebook, mautrix-telegram and the tulirverse

tulir has been making big updates to two of his bridges:

mautrix-facebook can now bridge formatting, mentions, replies and reactions in both directions.

There is also a logout command now.

mautrix-telegram's switch to mautrix-python is nearly finished (i.e. it didn't cause any errors for the past few days when testing in production). The main reason for the switch is using one Matrix library for all my python bridges. It also means the bridging code like double puppeting and command handling I shared between mautrix-facebook and mautrix-hangouts is now also used in mautrix-telegram.

Visible changes directly caused by using mautrix-python:

• Logs are now colorful.
• Python 3.5 is no longer supported.
• The bridge will refuse to start without access to the base config file.

Other changes that happened during the switch:

• Telegram "Saved Messages" can now be bridged even when using double puppeting.
• Mentions on Telegram are marked as read when using double puppeting (messages were already being marked as read, but mentions weren't).

Also, this actually happened last week and the week before that, but anyway: I've moved the CI and docker registry of my active projects to a self-hosted GitLab at mau.dev. Specifically, the CI/docker registry for all four mautrix bridges and maubot and automatic builds for gomuks have been moved. My maubot plugins also have automatic .mbp builds in the CI. For the docker registry, prepending dock.mau.dev/ to the existing image names will work. The old places (docker hub, dl.maunium.net) won't get new builds anymore. The repos on GitHub are still the "canonical" repos, but they're mirrored more or less instantly with maumirror.

He adds:

mautrix-telegram will probably get some sort of history filling in the near-ish future

Also,

I'm going to add some way to put bridged rooms into personal communities for filtering purposes. Not yet sure if it'll be fully built into the bridges or some kind of an external script

🔗IRC bridge RC

Half-Shot:

Hi folks, we've released a RC of the next irc bridge version. Check it out at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.13.0-rc1

🔗Email2Matrix

Slavi, famed for his ansible playbooks, announced:

I've just released Email2Matrix - an SMTP server that can relay incoming messages over to Matrix based on mappings defined in a configuration file.

While it can also be installed standalone and work with any Matrix homeserver (see its documentation), the simplest way to install it is using matrix-docker-ansible-deploy and its guide for Email2Matrix installation.

The configuration process (users, rooms, mappings) is quite manual, but it's simple and has worked well for me for the past year and a half. I've only just polished it up a bit, released and integrated with the Ansible playbook, so others could benefit from it too.

🔗matrix-xmpp-filter

mijutu appeared, and announced:

I started a "matrix-xmpp-filter" project. It's like matrix-ircd, but with xmpp instead of irc. It can also filter messages by weekday, time and regular expressions. Target audience is Sailfish phone users, but it could be used with other xmpp clients too (no xmpp MUC support required). https://k2c42.dy.fi/matrix-xmpp-filter.git/ #matrix-xmpp-filter:ellipsis.fi.

🔗matrix-github (GH issues bridge)

Half-Shot:

https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-github has had quite a few updates. Notably:

• Support for storing users access tokens securely, using a bot command.
• Multi-process bridging: The webhook portion of the bridge can be run in a separate function if needed for performance.
• Images and mentions now work in both directions
• The readme is now actually helpful, and have also made *.sample.yaml files.
• You can now use it via oauth

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

Ananace:

Currently working on a Puppet module to manage Matrix Synapse installs (both directly and through docker), not quite ready for prime-time yet but watch this spot.

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗Voice to text bot

progserega announced:

I develop matrix Bot, which converting voice messages to text. It use Yandex Speech API and Yandex API cloud (some as aws) for temporary store voice-data before converting. https://github.com/progserega/voice2textMatrix Bot have such logic:

1. user add bot to room (for example room with whatsapp bridge users - now bridge support adding bot to such rooms)
2. bot listen room, and when get voice-message - send it to Yandex-cloud for translate (now support only Russian language).
3. When translating is success - bot get result text and show it in room as notice, such: "Username said: text"
4. Bot also receive some command, which allow disable it in this room, or disable translating for user, which send command..

Seeing this, I wondered, "y tho?", luckily progserega was able to explain with a graphic! They say a picture paints a thousand words, and it's clear from the conversation below why he'd want to have speech-to-text capabilities.

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

The Modular Matrix -> Matrix migration tool now supports migration of power levels to the new user.

🔗That's all I know 🏁

So that's all I have to say to you right now! See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

🔗Matrix Live

I chatted to Rick about the new Small instances available on modular.im.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Approved MSCs

No MSCs have been approved.

Final Comment Period

• [MSC 2134]: Identity Hash Lookups
• [MSC 2174]: Move the redacts key to a sane place

In Progress MSCs

• [MSC 2192]: Inline widgets (including polls and buttons)
• [MSC 2209]: Alter auth rules to check notifications in m.room.power_levels
• [MSC 2211]: Identity Servers Storing Threepid Hashes at Rest
• [MSC 2212]: Third party user power levels
• [MSC 2199]: Immutable DMs
• [MSC 1849]: Proposal for m.relates_to aggregations
• [MSC 2191]: Proposal for using LaTeX for maths display

(kudos to anoa for providing this well-formatted summary section)

🔗KaTeX rendering support

Tim:

there's now a pull request in for full native math rendering support (via KaTeX), which will replace the shoddy bot that I made last week (or whenever)
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3251

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse

This week we’ve been working on implementing identifier hashing in sydent, a brand new installer for Synapse, we’ve trialled some new db perf improvements which look very promising (more on this soon) and finally very close to an all new implementation of room search.

Next week we’ll push out the all new Sygnal, continue with the installer and room search and pick up some tasks under our privacy umbrella to ensure that Synapse is not holding onto any data that it does not strictly need to.

🔗Dendrite

anoa:

Dendrite progress marches forwards. This week we had:

• Room tagging implemented (thanks peekay_46!)
• A PR for redactions opened by our GSoC student cnly
• A PR for authentication fallback (for when clients don’t have a web browser built in and want to use recaptcha from trion129
  • This has been in the works for a while, and just has a couple small changes left to go!
• Two PRs for filtering database functionality from CromFr
• A PR for fixing the scope of transaction IDs in Dendrite’s transaction cache from cnly

Cnly’s GSoC period ends on August 26th. He has been a massive boon to the project’s cadence so far and we hope he will continue even after GSoC ends when he has time :)

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🏗

🔗koma, Kotlin Library

yuforia has this update about koma, the library used to power continuum:

Provide automatic deduplication and rate-limiting when downloading media resources. This improves performance of GUI applications, where avatars of many users may appear on screen at once, and some of them may be identical.

🔗libQuotient

kitsune:

libQuotient's master branch now supports sending and receiving reactions, and receiving message edits. We also have another PR in the works from aa13q that would add support for events decryption, as a part of his GSoC endeavour.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Fractal 4.2 released

Alexandre Franke announced a new edition of Fractal:

Nightlies of Fractal are currently stuck on a 2 weeks old build because of one of our dependencies… but the long awaited 4.2 stable release is out! You can get it out fresh from flathub as usual.

Changelog:

New features:

    Adaptive window, mobile friendly
    Window size and position are remembered
    Redesigned login
    Spellcheck
    Network proxy support
    Typing notifications
    Badges are shown for operators and moderators
    Keyboard shortcuts for easier navigation across rooms

Better uploads:

    Audio and video files are now tagged correctly
    Image files have a thumbnail
    Various tweaks to the file chooser

Bugfixes:

    Logs actually output something now
    A few issues with invites and direct chats have been resolved
    More reliable scrolling
    Some crashes fixed

Under the hood:

    Code refactor continues
    We’re now using Rust 2018
    Many improvements to the build system and CI

🔗Neo huge update!

joepie91:

Lots of news about Neo!

• There's now an additional maintainer (joepie91)!
• A lot of the internals have been refactored, so they should be more maintainable and reliable going forward. Also some future work planned on refactoring the state handling using Redux, which should make it much faster to fix issues and add new features in the future. There are even some ideas already for a future plugin API!
• Display has been improved in a lot of places. Error messages are now more clearly formatted, images in reply-quotes are now shown as thumbnails rather than just a filename, and the reply-to popup now shows the full event that you're replying to properly. The chat window now correctly sticks to the bottom when you're scrolled to the end and receive new messages, even when an image or video loads - though per-room scroll position restoration isn't done yet.
• There's now an experimental compact mode! It uses a more IRC-client-like layout for messages, and generally just fits more content onto the screen. It can be enabled with an experimental flag. A screenshot of the compact mode can be found here.

You can try the compact mode at https://neo.pixie.town/app/?compactMode=true.

🔗Riot Web

Message editing composer now supports undo/redo.

🔗Riot iOS

• Reactions: List of who reacted
• Native Camera. The embedded camera view has been removed. There is now a new action “Take photo and video”
• Privacy: We have been working on implementing terms to display before using integrations

🔗Riot Android

• VOIP / Remove default stun server
• Make Integration Manager optional (disables widgets, calls)

🔗RiotX (Android)

• Feature / Direct Room Creation Flow
• Improvement / Local echo of pending edits
• Improvement / Seamless transition from timeline to fullscreen image preview
• Bug fixes

🔗Pattle

Wilko:

Pattle is now available on Google Play!

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

Half-Shot:

Hey folks, first an update from the bridges integrations side. We've brought back snoonet and oftc on the integrations menu so you can once again connect matrix rooms to these networks. Other networks should work as standard.

🔗matrix-appservice-irc

Half-Shot again:

On the matrix-appservice-irc side we've made a few fixes to the handling of IRC modes (things that handle how users should behave) when bridged to IRC. This should hopefully make opping and voicing users more reliable. There are a few other fixes in the pipeline too, so a release isn't too far off.

🔗GitHub issue bridging !?

Half-Shot AGAIN:

I had an adventure this afternoon into the world of bridging again, and have made a Github to Matrix bridge. At the moment you can join aliases and saturate your homeserver with the entire history of a issue or PR. You can also chat to folks on issues in realtime.

Check it out at: https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-github

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗debian-based K8s-optimized image

Ananace:

Just pushed a debian-based K8s-optimized image as well, it's 150MB larger than the alpine one, but on the other hand it comes with jemalloc support so it's nicer on the RAM instead.

🔗CLI federation tester

kai is someone with no fear of rapid iteration! Versions 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5 of his script were made available this week:

I finished version 1.5 of my small command line based federation tester. The bash script relies heavily on popular Unix tools like awk, curl, jq, sed and so on. Compared to https://federationtester.matrix.org, the outputs are a little more detailed and additional tests are performed, especially on the supported SSL protocols. Currently, it has only been tested under Linux.
The current version improves the handling of port in the .well-known and DNS SRV configuration.
You can download it from #cli_federation-tester_de:matrix.chat-secure.de or directly via https://matrix.chat-secure.de/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.chat-secure.de/MDwYLdrxRdudmcgDzBEALCzN

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

jcgruenhage has been working on a bot in relation to the startup he's working with:

I made a bot for issuing Json Web Tokens to matrix users based on what homeserver they are on. It's implemented as a maubot plugin (best way to write bots right now) and licensed under the AGPLv3. You can find it over at https://gitlab.com/famedly/bots/jwt, and talk about it in #jwt-bot:famedly.de
As for the usecase, we want to give people from customer homeservers access to an API component, but don't want to maintain a separate account database. This way, they can request a token from the bot and then use that to interact with the API component

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

jaywink used an underrated HTML tag tag to inform us:

<Feneas community hat> We've added a public fully featured Telegram bridge to our Matrix stack. More info in our forum. </Feneas community hat>

This is great - we must tip the hat to tulir, creator of this widely-used bridge.

🔗Final thoughts 💭

red_sky: Nheko now has a weblate instance set-up for users to contribute translations: https://weblate.nheko.im/engage/nheko/

Interview about DINSIC's use of Matrix (all in French)

🔗That's all I know 🏁

So that's all I have to say to you right now! See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

🔗Matrix Live - demos!

We had a great demo session this afternoon, unfortunately the recording quality for some of the items was not good enough to share - and it was interesting stuff too! I cut everything from the RiotX and Riot iOS sections - but we'll make it up to you by getting more news from those projects soon.

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

🔗Opportunities available for paid Matrix-related work

Matthew informed the community:

We're getting more and more folks reaching out for paid help setting up smaller self-hosted Matrix deployments. The core team has its hands full currently with helping out with larger deployments; so if anyone reading this wants to offer paid support to those getting up and running on Matrix then please make us aware so we can potentially route inquiries to you.

This is a great step for Matrix, and a great opportunity for you the reader! There are already several people prepared to start work on Matrix-related endeavours, but the fact that there is more work coming in than we can currently route is amazing. If you'd like to be on an informal shortlist, contact support@, or come chat to me directly.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse

So said Neil, who oversees the Synapse-makers:

This week we shipped two new versions, 1.2 (https://matrix.org/blog/2019/07/25/synapse-1-2-0-released) and 1.2.1(https://matrix.org/blog/2019/07/26/critical-security-update-synapse-1-2-1-released). 1.2.1 contains critical security updates, the bugs are long lived and not regressions introduced in 1.2 so all admins are encouraged to upgrade asap.

We’ve also been having some success in improving database performance and hope to ship that rsn so everyone can benefit.

Next week

We’ll continue on db perf, improving logging verbosity (through recategorising some log lines) and generally looking to improve the experience for those admins running on smaller instances.

🔗Ruma

Jimmy released TWIR:

• This Week in Ruma: https://ruma.dev/news/this-week-in-ruma-2019-07-21/
• now with liberapay, to support Ruma: https://liberapay.com/ruma/

🔗GSOC project: Matrix Visualisations 🎓

Eisha:

The GSoc project “Matrix Visualisations” has continued its progression during the second period:

A “multi-view” has been implemented for the frontend application. It means that it is now possible to independently view multiple DAGs at the same time in the same canvas. It can be useful for observing the same DAG but on different HS’s, at the same time. The only current limitation is that you have to use the same backend for every view (with CS API or with the backend talking to a Synapse PostgreSQL database). This change took a long time as it required to make a lot of changes in the code.

The implementation of the support of the Federation API within the backend is in progress. It is slowly progressing as it needed some discussion before starting the work on it and its implementation requires me to become familiar with a lot of new things, regarding the federation process and the authentication of requests between HS’s.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🏗

🔗matrix-shell-suite taking feature requests

darnir:

Hey, I'd like to put out a call to everyone out there. If there's any script people desire for interacting with matrix homeservers, the #matrix-shell-suite:matrix.org project is taking feature requests.

🔗Olm SAS interface for RubyOlm

Willem:

I had the code laying around for quite a while, but I just completed the Olm SAS interface for my fork of RubyOlm. It also includes interfaces for generating the emoji! 😀

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Pattle 0.10.0

I've been playing with Pattle 0.10 and have to say, it feels silky smooth to scroll with. It's really making me look again at Flutter development.

From Wilko, project lead:

A new version has been pushed to F-droid and TestFlight!

Note that for TestFlight the new version will be available in a few days.

• Improve scrolling through chat messages!
  • Messages are now paginated under the hood, before the whole message list was rebuild when loading more messages, causing a jittery scrolling experience.
• Support typing notifications!
  • Typing notifications are shown and send while typing.
• Add chat settings screen
  • Currently you can see the chat name, avatar, description and members. More will be added in the future.
  • You can go to the chat settings screen by clicking on the title of the chat. This'll probably change in the future (at least to be easier).
• Reverse swipe direction of images (thanks Nathan!)
• Fix ripple not showing on send button
• Make UI refreshing more efficient
• The App Store (iOS) name is now 'Pattle' instead of 'Pattle IM'
• When a chat is open, the UI will only be rebuild if that chat has updates.
• Lot's of code clean ups and improvements, mostly in the SDK

What's coming up?

• A release on Google Play!
• A release on the official F-droid repo!
• Remove Cupertino specific styling on iOS
  • Will now use Material Design, but altered for iOS. Having the discrepancy between Cupertino and Material was also the reason why some things didn't show up in iOS or why some things would be blue instead of the Pattle red.
• Notifications!? (F-droid)

Follow development in #app:pattle.im!

🔗Spectral introduces support for reactions

Black Hat:

Reaction support is coming to Spectral!

🔗Riot Web

From the team:

The edit history of a message now shows differences also for formatted (html) messages.

🔗Riot iOS

From the team:

• Reactions: We have now an Emoji picker and the screen that displays who reacted
• Soft logout fully implemented

🔗Riot Android

From the team:

• New release of Riot (0.9.3) to fix crash on Android 4.x
• The package is bigger because we embed both 32bits and 64bits, which is now required by Play Store

🔗RiotX (Android)

From the team:

• Room screen: Manage cancel/resend of unsent messages
• New DM room creation flow
• Room upgrade support

🔗Dept of Encryption 🔐

🔗New Pantalaimon release

poljar told us:

Pantalaimon got a new release. This release brings experimental support for search in E2E encrypted rooms, performance improvements in the database department, better support for true headless mode for all the bot lovers, and of course the usual bug fixes and small improvements.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗matrix-appservice-slack

Half-Shot announced:

0.3.1 of the slack bridge is out with a few bugfixes

Be sure to watch Cadair provide a demo in the Matrix Live video above.

🔗Picard Bot (slack bridging)

Cadair:

SolarDrew and I have been working on re-writing our Picard Bot for a conference next week. Picard helps you bridge between a slack team and a matrix community.

This second version of Picard adds support for reacting to creation of new rooms on slack in real time as well as implementing a set of commands for creating new bridged rooms from either matrix or slack. In addition to this, Picard has matrix commands for inviting you to all the bridged rooms in the community and automatically inviting you to new rooms as they are created. Finally, we have added support for sending welcome messages to all new members of your slack team or matrix community in a DM with the bot, which we are using to explain the chat setup to users and giving them a private place to issue commands.

This is uses matrix-appservice-slack for actually sending events in bridged rooms, and PIcard itself is a skill for the opsdroid bot framework #opsdroid-general:matrix.org and uses the matrix-database plugin for opsdroid which uses matrix room state to back the opsdroid memory.

🔗mx-puppet-bridge, new bridge: mx-puppet-instagram

The work on mx-puppet-bridge things continue! The core library and the implementation received some bugfixes, however, a new bridge is there: mx-puppet-instagram. Currently it supports

• Auth currently only by username+password :(
• basic message sending
• I->M photoes, voice messages, animated image thingies
• M->I images
• M->I files as links only

🔗mautrix-whatsapp

tulir has been putting a lot of time into WhatsApp bridging lately, the bridge is more stable than ever:

There's a mysterious new mautrix-whatsapp branch. Related to that, I made a spec proposal and a synapse PR to allow appservice bots to use /sync.

🔗GSoC Project: Reliable Bridges

Thanks for this update from Kai:

It's all coming together now. While all pieces of the puzzle were roughly there, now they are put into the big picture.

The bridge SDK PR has been merged to develop, now providing bridges the benefit of error reporting. The modifications to the SDK are non-breaking, but activation of the feature requires small changes to the bridge using it. But be warned, everything is still under an unstable prefix and rightly so – the implementation is still subject to change. >

The MSC didn't get much love in public, but the concepts required to evolve it are taking shape. It was contemplated to piggyback on MSC 1410: Rich Bridging and to add a retry mechanism. So heads up for more to come on this front.

The display of bridge errors in Riot Web is now a PR and in the state of getting its last few kinks removed. It will start to be available under a lab flag soon.

With everything getting to play together nicely, there will be the first rooms enabling bridge errors to test the code in the wild. Stabilizing the code for everyday use and getting the MSC into a respectable form are the next goals for the project. Those will help in fostering broader adoption among bridges and clients.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗k8s images

Ananace made sure everything is up to date for Synapse with 1.2.1 images now available.

🔗Dept of Identity 🛂

🔗ma1sd, identity server forked from mxisd released

ma1uta has been working on ma1sd, a fork of the discontinued mxisd:

ma1sd (https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd) is released. ma1sd is a fork of the discontinued mxisd (https://github.com/kamax-matrix/mxisd) is a federated Matrix Identity Service.

Changes:

• rename the application name, configuration options to ma1sd. Internal names, packages still use old name mxisd
• bump some dependencies to the latest versions
• add openjdk-11 dependency for debian package due to debian 10 doesn't include openjdk-8 (yep, ma1sd can work with java 11).

Downloads:

• https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.0.0 - deb package and tar/zip archives
• https://hub.docker.com/r/ma1uta/ma1sd - docker images

Feel free to ask me questions about ma1sd in #ma1sd:ru-matrix.org

🔗Final thoughts 💭

kitsune: "the latest versions of libQMatrixClient (0.5.2 - still under the old name) and Quaternion (0.0.9.4) are now available in Debian unstable, thanks to uhoreg"

🔗That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!