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Ben Parsons

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This Week in Matrix 2019-02-08

08.02.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

Huge week! Let's go!

🔗Matrix Live: Riot Redesign Chat (2019-02-08 - Season 3, Episode 13)

Riot-web new version coming out so soon. So soon! It looks and runs great, you can use it today at https://riot.im/develop. Includes a labs flag for displaying custom tags, which I love. Watch the vid.

🔗FOSDEM 2019

FOSDEM happened.

  • two Matrix-themed packed-room talks
  • lots of people coming to chat at the stall to say things like "hi" or "I like Matrix" or "what is Matrix? … wow that sounds amazing, how can I get involved?"
  • 1000s of stickers decentralised out of my bag onto people's laptops
If you didn't yet, take a look at the summary blogpost, which also contains videos of both talks.

🔗Synapse 0.99.0

With the release of Server to Server Spec r0.1, Synapse 0.99.0 is shipping now.

Synapse 1.0.0 will be compliant with r0.1 and the goal of Synapse 0.99.0 is to act as a stepping stone to Synapse 1.0. Synapse 0.99.0 supports the r0.1 release of the server to server specification, but is compatible with both the legacy Matrix federation behaviour (pre-r0.1) as well as post-r0.1 behaviour, in order to allow for a smooth upgrade across the federation.
It is critical that all admins upgrade to 0.99.0 and configure a valid TLS certificate. Admins will have 1 month to do so, after which 1.0.0 will be released and those servers without a valid certificate will no longer be able to federate with >= 1.0.0 servers.

Please read the announcement post and be sure to come and chat in #synapse:matrix.org if you need help!

🔗GSOC 2019

Cadair has been helping admin this year's GSOC application:

Matrix.org has applied to be a GSOC (Google Summer of Code) mentoring organisation. If your matrix project has a feature a summer student could tackle and you have the time to mentor them over the summer, why not add a project idea to our website by submitting a PR to this repo. Feel free to ask questions in #gsoc:matrix.org as well.

🔗Latest MSCs

🔗Approved MSCs

🔗In Progress MSCs

🔗matrix-puppet-hangouts 0.1.0 released, with bidirectional image support

tom reports that:

matrix-puppet-hangouts version 0.1.0 has been released!
This release adds bidirectional (Hangouts -> Matrix and Matrix -> Hangouts) image support!
It also bumps the version of matrix-puppet-bridge (the common core of matrix-puppet-bridge bridges, which handles most of the stuff that's the same between different third-party service bridges, and makes implementing new matrix-puppet-bridge bridges easier) required to 1.16.2, the current latest, for recent bugfixes that improve all matrix-puppet-bridge bridges.
0.1.0 also requires Python 3.5+, for async. Older versions of python3 won't work. PRs getting python3 < 3.5 working again are welcome.

tom also gives credit to d3m3vilurr:

These changes are also brought to us by d3m3vilurr, Honored Hero of Matrix Puppet Bridge

Praise indeed!

🔗matrix-media-repo from TravisR now supports .well-known server delegation

TravisR reports that:

matrix-media-repo now supports .well-known server delegation (compatible with Synapse 0.99 and r0.1 of the server-server specification), among many other bug fixes and improvements. Actually validating the certificates presented by servers will be implemented alongside Synapse 1.0's requirement for it.

🔗Dimension from TravisR now supports .well-known server delegation

Similar to matrix-media-repo above, TravisR has been implementing .well-known server delegation in Dimension:

Dimension now supports .well-known server delegation (compatible with Synapse 0.99 and r0.1 of the server-server specification). Actually validating the certificates presented by servers will be implemented alongside Synapse 1.0's requirement for it.

🔗mxisd v1.3.0-rc.3

Max:

mxisd v1.3.0-rc.3 is out. This is hopefully the last RC before release, but we would like as much testing as possible! the v1.3 branch is a big enhancement on the previous release with big performance and privacy improvements. It's smaller, faster, stronger and protects you privacy even better than before! You know you want it!

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports Synapse v0.99

Slavi reports that:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports Synapse v0.99 and should be ready for Synapse v1.0.
If you're using the playbook to manage your Matrix server you should upgrade soon.
Depending on how you've customized your setup, you may not even have to do anything for the big Synapse v0.99/v1.0 transition, besides upgrading and re-running the playbook. A good place to start is the changelog entry: Synapse v0.99 support and preparation for Synapse v1.0

I have been using these playbooks to test my own homeserver deployment and am happy.

🔗Tchap Android client

Willem reports that:

After seeing a demo at FOSDEM of Tchap, the app the French government uses to access their Matrix network, I decided to try to get it to work as a general-purpose Matrix client. The app uses email and password to log in, and infers the homeserver address from the homeserver name. So to get it to work, I had to patch the app and write a little proxy so it gets the proper homeserver (and optionally identity server) from an email address.
A patched version of Tchap can be found at https://github.com/14mRh4X0r/tchap-android, code for the proxy at https://git.snt.utwente.nl/14mRh4X0r/tchap-proxy. At the moment it's very crude, and images/files don't work since the virus scan API is unimplemented, but at least it can be used outside the French government. ?

🔗Riot iOS

From the team:

  • Still iterating on key backup UX
  • Fix various share extension bugs (image sending failure, links share as text, etc…)

🔗Riot Android

  • Still iterating on the key backup UX, changes concern Riot and the Matrix SDK
  • Valere has worked on Riot Android Notifications, we intend to merge this work on develop at the beginning of the next Sprint.
  • RiotX: no update this week due to François being out of the office

🔗.NET SDK

Half-Shot, working on "not bridging":

I opened up the .NET SDK project for the first time in two years and revived it to just about work with a r0.4.0 home server. Its now based on .NET core 2.0.

Related .NET lovin'.

🔗Spectral, soon for KDE Plasma Mobile

Black Hat is clearing:

I'm porting Spectral to KDE Plasma Mobile with Kirigami framework. This provides full convergence and mobile support.

Some progress pictures below, desktop and mobile version.

🔗Preparing for Synapse on OpenBSD

Linda has been making progress on a project to get Synapse running on OpenBSD, and to that end has been preparing and improving the dependencies that we take for granted on Linux. To summarise the current status:

This week I've been porting Synapse's dependencies to OpenBSD -current distribution. There is no port yet for Synapse in OpenBSD. Ports missing from OpenBSD 6.4 for Synapse's dependencies were:

  • py-frozendict: ok'd, waiting…
  • py-unpaddedbase64: TBD
  • py-canonicaljson: TBD
  • py-signedjson: TBD
  • py-treq: WIP (this will take a while, lots of dependencies)
  • py-daemonize: ok'd, waiting…
  • py-pymacaroons: TBD
  • py-phonenumbers: 8.10.4 done, waiting to be imported…
  • py-prometheus_client done, needs to be tested/imported…
  • coturn: TBD, maybe?
waiting = usually waiting for an OpenBSD developer to "ok" and import

Of those, py-phonenumbers was added to OpenBSD
-snapshots (-current) distribution. py-phonenumbers (?) and py-service_identity received updates to ports. py-prometheus_client, py-daemonize and py-frozendict are ported ready and waiting to be given "ok" at OpenBSD's ports@ mailing list.
There is an unofficial up-to-date Synapse port exists at GitHub maintained by someone else, which I've not yet tested. (At glance, I can take a guess the devel/tz port may not be required.)
(coturn doesn't have a port yet, may have to look at it later.)

🔗c u l8r

Phew! That was a lot! See you next week, and if you have a project you'd like to see featured in This Week in Matrix, come chat to us in #twim:matrix.org!

This Week in Matrix 2019-02-01

01.02.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

🔗MSC (spec) updates

r0, the first stable release of the Server-Server (Federation) Specification is extremely close! We of course will make a big splash and let you know when this comes!

Even apart from that, let's take a look at the MSCs (Matrix Spec Changes) that are currently in progress.

🔗Approved MSCs

🔗Final Comment Period

🔗In Progress MSCs

🔗Synapse

Neil and the team have been working frantically on getting a new Synapse release out this week:

This week has been all about gearing up for v0.99.0 and if you would like to help us test it, our latest release candidate lives here
We've taken the decision to bump up to v0.99.0 because it is very much a precursor to v1.0. When v1.0 lands it will contain a breaking change that means all homeservers will need a valid certificate for their server to server endpoint, self signing will no longer be possible.
v0.99.0 contains support to help you do this, but once it lands all admins will need to upgrade, failure to do so will mean losing the ability to federate with > v1.0 servers.
We'll have detailed docs ready to go alongside the full v0.99.0 release, and we plan to leave at least 1 month between v0.99.0 and v1.0, but for now please be aware that the change is coming.
Huge thanks to Rich, Erik, Hawkowl and Anoa for all their work in getting us to rc stage.

🔗nheko_reborn

If you haven't already heard, then I envy that you get to learn about it now: there is a credible new project which forks nheko and seeks to maintain and continue the project.

Nheko-Reborn is a new project headed by red_sky, who told me:

I think I'm getting pretty close to having another release ready. Need to clean up some things here and there and get the CI packages uploading correctly
It'd be good to have more community engagement

Come chat about the project in #nheko-reborn:matrix.org.

🔗Riot iOS

  • New app icons
  • Most of e2ee keys backup screens are done. We are only missing the sign out warning which invited the user to back up their keys before logging out
  • A Beta release is on its way to TestFlight

🔗Riot Android

  • Finishing e2ee keys backup screen
  • Integrate new app icons, and splash
  • Release in Beta
  • Riotx: improvement in room list, read marker management

🔗journal

lukebarnard has continued work on journal, a matrix-backed blog engine:

I've posted another blog on journal about the next steps for the project, including my thoughts on verifying blog content.

https://journal.lukebarnard.co.uk/journal/26-jan-2019

I'm planning to start work on the component that will scrape blog content from a matrix room. This will most likely involve a dedicated bot that syncs new journal blog events, verifies the blog signature and then writes the blog content to a file on the blog server.

I'll probably ramble about the details of that at some point.

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi had two big updates for matrix-docker-ansible-deploy this week, improved security and IRC bridging:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now has much-improved security. All services now run in containers with a non-root user from the very beginning, without capabilities and with a read-only filesystem. To learn more, see the relevant changelog entry.
Thanks to a contribution by Devon Maloney (@Plailect), matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now has IRC bridging support via matrix-appservice-irc. To learn more, see the Setting up Appservice IRC documentation page.

🔗neo

f0x again, now with an update on neo:

Not too much work on Neo this week, but there's some smooth animations for the roomlist now video, with music, which is surprisingly complicated in css
https://git.lain.haus/f0x/iris

🔗libaqueous - Matrix SDK in Dart

Black Hat is working on a Matrix SDK in Dart:

libaqueous (the Matrix SDK in Dart) is progressing nicely. A reference implementation is also planned.
The repo is at https://gitlab.com/b0/libaqueous, and I also set up a room at #libaqueous:encom.eu.org

🔗ma1uta's Matrix projects: Jeon, JMSDK, matrix-jabber-java-bridge

ma1uta has been working on his ecosystem of Matrix tooling:

Not much changes in jeon, jmsdk and matrix-jabber-java-bridge (mjjb).

  • Jeon: improved mxid with a new validation, support of the 11 java. And preparing the new release.
  • Jmsdk: fixed few bugs.

🔗matrix-jabber-java-bridge

The bridge is being re-written. I excluded the jabber server (still need to setup SRV records) and implementing the xmpp s2s api in the bridge. Done:

  • rfc6120 in s2s part;
  • almost server dialback (XEP-0220);
Remaining:
  • MUC (XEP-0045);
  • stabilize.
New version will allow:
  • 1:1 conversations between matrix and jabber users;
  • group chats by double-puppet mapping rooms to conferences;
  • additionally xmpp users can join directly to rooms via double-puppet bots.
Also I started breaking the bridge to modules. And the next module will be ActivityPub S2S module which allows communicate matrix servers with other fedivers.

🔗mxisd

Max reports that:

mxisd v1.3.0-alpha.3 is out! This one works further towards protecting your privacy and we strongly recommend it if you already are using an alpha release. We have written our stance on privacy with how it affects mxisd here.

We also consider this release to be as stable as v1.2.2. Feel free to upgrade following the Upgrade notes and benefits from all the v1.3.0 work so far, especially the massive improvements on resources usage.

🔗Purism working on Fractal integration

update on @gnome @matrixdotorg client for #PureOS: "I am pleased to announce that over the next week I will be working to make Fractal's UI adaptive for the Librem 5's launch. This contract began last week, and I already have some results to show off." https://t.co/iX47u1Bdb1 pic.twitter.com/Hnr7ZVpYd1


— Purism (@Puri_sm) January 30, 2019

Definitely take a look at the linked blog post for more.

🔗What else is there?

What there mainly is is FOSDEM. A lot of Matrix-folk are currently near me as I write this, sat in a hotel bar in sunny Brussels. Matrix live is not available today, but will incorporate some of the event, which kicks of tomorrow.

If you will be attending, come /join us at the Matrix table, where there will be stickers and t-shirts and merriment, and definitely come and attend the talks:

This Week in Matrix 2019-01-25

25.01.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

🔗Matrix Live S03E12 - Modular.im

This week I chatted to Rick about the release of Modular, Hosted Homeservers and more. We're pleased to be able to announce the availability of a HipChat migration tool to get people into Matrix.

🔗Latest MSC updates (from anoa's MSC bot)

🔗Approved MSCs

🔗Final Comment Period

🔗In Progress MSCs

🔗Synapse

  • Working furiously towards an r0 spec release. Event ids as hashes (MSC 1659) and S2S API certificates (MSC 1659 ) are very close now - see https://github.com/orgs/matrix-org/projects/8 to track our progress.
  • Since MSC1711 is a breaking change, we will initially ship our next release (v0.35.0) with ACME support to make it easy to provision and renew certificates. The give everyone a month to upgrade and install a cert before we ship Synapse v1.0 which will require that servers have certificates in order to federate. Don't worry, there will be plenty of details on the steps necessary for admins when v0.35.0 lands - watch this space.
  • Finally a raft of db performance improvements, room version upgrade bug fixes, as well taking a look at room directory and user directory efficiency.

🔗matrix-puppet-slack

tom reports that:

matrix-puppet-slack version 1.10.1 has been released, thanks again to @twouters

  • The bridge could not create new Matrix rooms on versions of Synapse after a certain change, because it did not reserve the room alias prefix it used. That's been fixed, but anyone currently running matrix-puppet-slack will need to edit their slack_registration.yaml and restart Synapse. See the Release for instructions on doing so.
  • The bridge will no longer send "Edit: " events when Slack sends it a "message_changed" message, if the message text has not actually changed (Slack sends these events for URL previews, for example, but this just causes duplicate bridged messages). This fix has been a long time coming.

🔗matrix-corporal

Slavi reports that:

matrix-corporal 1.3.0 was released.
It uses a new Matrix API for fetching account data (Synapse >0.34.1 is required), so it performs reconciliation quicker than before.

From the notes:

Reconciliation is now much faster, due to the way we retrieve account data from the Matrix server (no longer doing /sync).
From now on, the minimum requirement for running matrix-corporal is Synapse v0.34.1, as it's the first Synapse release which contains the new API we require (GET /user/{'{'}user_id{'}'}/account_data/{'{'}account_dataType{'}'}).

🔗journal

lukebarnard disappeared from our screens some time ago, but he's back with this news on journal:

I have an update on journal (finally). I've pushed the redesign branch that I've been working on. It contains the web view component of the new architecture and can be used as a generic blog-hosting site (I'll be doing this personally). Feel free to check it out here: https://journal.lukebarnard.co.uk/journal/1-jan-2019

🔗Riot-web

  • Redesign
  • Typing notifications don't make timeline jump anymore
  • Jump to bottom button is overlay now, so we can finally hide the room status bar again most of the time
  • Working on room sublist resizing
  • Work on authentication flow
  • Work on settings

🔗Riot Android and iOS

  • Reskin of Riot is nearly finished. Last known issues have been fixed.
  • Keys backup screen development well underway! We're working to fit everything nicely on mobile platforms - there are some UX/UI specificities to consider.
  • Riotx (new version of riot for Android, built using the upcoming kotlin SDK): more and more event types supported in timeline.

🔗Quaternion

kitsune reports that:

the macOS build for Quaternion 0.0.9.3 turned out to be not complete and fails if the user doesn't have Qt installed. Thanks to Aaron Raimist the build has been now includes a snapshot of Qt 5.11 - if you tried and failed to run the .dmg from https://github.com/QMatrixClient/Quaternion/releases, you can try to use it again.

Thanks also to Aaron for helping populate homebrew with Matrix goodness. Mac users may be interested to know that Seaglass and Spectral are both available in homebrew now.

🔗Neo client

f0x reports that:

Neo is still in the GUI component design stage (the best stage to get involved with feedback!). I have implemented the jdenticon library for avatars, autoscrolling when there are new events, and I've added the Rust code of conduct. https://git.lain.haus/f0x/iris
General vision for this project is to first get as much gui done as possible, before diving in the backend. This will be split into a separate module, with the gui component being as protocol-agnostic as possible, to allow different backend modules for XMPP or IRC as well.

🔗Fractal client

Backend refactoring by Julian Sparber and Alejandro Domínguez. They also got progressed with tag handling, spell checking and lazy loading.

🔗matrix-bot-sdk

TravisR reports that:

the matrix-bot-sdk has received a bunch of updates currently residing on the develop branch. Changes include unit tests covering most of the library, appservice support improvements, handling of room version upgrades, and a bunch of bug fixes.

matrix-bot-sdk was recently updated to have support for Application Services, and is a lighter alternative to the matrix-js-sdk.

🔗cl-matrix

Gnuxie reports that:

I've been working on cl-matrix and I think now it might be in a good condition to talk about it. cl-matrix is a WIP client library written in common lisp, most of the API endpoints have been covered using macros that allow you to copy straight from the spec, here is an example using the send event endpoint:

(define-matrix-endpoint room-send-event (:put)
  ("rooms" room-id "send" event-type txn-id))

this will expand into a function with the signature:

(PUT-ROOM-SEND-EVENT AUTHENTICATION ROOM-ID EVENT-TYPE TXN-ID CONTENT &KEY PARAMETERS)

it also has some basic events defined using deeds that can be issued using the sync endpoint.

🔗Informo

The unknown individual from Informo, vabd told us:

Not much news this week in Informo land, though we have a few specs proposals that are still open for public review, including SCS #19 (rendered version here) which rewrites the specs website's introduction to make it more newcomer-friendly and feature a brief introduction on what Informo is about.
People who either never had a look at the project, or got fed up trying to because of the difficulty to easily understand what we're building, we'd love to read your opinion on this! ?

This is much, much appreciated. For those interested but confused, please take a look.

🔗matrix-autoinvite

CromFr (Thibaut CHARLES) reports that:

matrix-autoinvite is a very basic service that synchronizes joined rooms between users from different servers, by inviting missing users to the room.
I'm using it to invite @CromFr:matrix.org to each Facebook Messenger rooms on my personal homeserver (that has very limited resources) hosting the matrix-puppet-facebook bridge. This way I can chat with people on facebook from a matrix.org account :)

Some relevant news from today: Zuckerberg Plans to Integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger

🔗matrix-register-bot

krombel reports that:

A long time ago I started writing matrix-register-bot. Now as there is a new requestor of it I finally implemented the planned features and released 0.1-rc1
Feel free to test it and ask questions or provide feedback in #matrix-register-bot:msg-net.de

🔗Other thoughts

Did you know about status.matrix.org? This handy site lets you know about the status of the matrix.org homeserver. That URL again: status.matrix.org.

linux.conf.au is happening right now in Christchurch, New Zealand (editor's note: is this right? .au or .nz?), and they've been partly using Matrix for their comms.

FOSDEM is in a week! Come chat in #matrix-fosdem:matrix.org. Be there and be square. I'll be there with Matrix swag so ping me if you'll be attending.

🔗When will I see you… again?

I might adjust the schedule a little next week since it's FOSDEM (see above), but as always, stay tuned into #twim:matrix.org for all the biggest news!

This Week in Matrix 2019-01-18

18.01.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

🔗Matrix Live S3E11

This week I chatted with Jason Robinson about all things decentralisation, especially his projects socialhome, the-federation.info, and feneas.org. Jason has been interested in decentralisation for many years, and had a lot to say about how we can look forward to a more decentralised Internet.

🔗Latest MSC updates (from anoa's MSC bot)

Approved MSCs

[MSC 1229]: Mitigating abuse of the event depth parameter over federation [MSC 1497]: MSC1497: Advertising support of experimental features in the CS API [MSC 1501]: Room version upgrades [MSC 1354]: Widget API extension: Always-on-screen [MSC 1339]: Proposal to add a GET method to read account data

Final Comment Period

MSC 1794: Federation v2 Invite API

In Progress MSCs

[MSC 1796]: improved e2e notifications [MSC 1797]: Proposal for more granular profile error codes [MSC 1607]: Proposal for room alias grammar [MSC 1544]: Key verification using QR codes [MSC 1802]: Standardised federation response formats [MSC 1804]: Advertising capable room versions to clients [MSC 1538]: storing megolm keys serverside [MSC 1681]: cross-signing [MSC 1659]: Proposal: Change Event IDs to Hashes [MSC 1767]: Extensible event types & fallback in Matrix (v2) [MSC 1768]: Proposal to authenticate with public keys [MSC 1769]: Extensible profiles as rooms [MSC 1772]: Groups as rooms (v2) [MSC 1776]: Implementing peeking via /sync [MSC 1640]: MSC: Replace event IDs with hashes [MSC 1777]: peeking over federation

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi reports that:

It's a New Year and there have been a lot of improvements to the matrix-docker-ansible-deploy playbook:

Lots of thanks go to Maximus, jcgruenhage and Cadair for helping out!

🔗libQMatrixClient and Quaternion

kitsune reports that:

libQMatrixClient 0.4.2 has been released, fixing a security issue (the library could be tricked into altering the local room state by fake state events - those without state_key). The master branch of the library is updated as well - it is strongly recommended to update to either 0.4.2 or master, depending on which branch you live on.

For those who want to help testing Quaternion or just can't wait to the next release, we now have CI builds collected at bintray: https://bintray.com/qmatrixclient/ci/Quaternion. Linux and macOS are already there, and Windows binaries will also be available any day soon.

🔗matrix-client.el

alphapapa reports that:

matrix-client.el can now send typing notifications.

🔗matrix-puppet-slack

tom reports that:

matrix-puppet-slack v1.10.0 has been released, thanks to Cadair and (once again!) d3m3vilurr!

v1.10.0 fixes Matrix-to-Slack image upload, and no longer sends markdown-formatted @-mention links in the plaintext body of Matrix events; instead, it uses plaintext username the way text-only clients traditionally have it.

The version bump is also the project's 100th commit, and I've updated the supported feature checklist in the README to paint a more comprehensive picture of what is and isn't supported, and link out to the GitHub Issues for some of the unsupported features, in hopes of making life easier for users and encouraging contributions.

🔗opsdroid

SolarDrew reports that:

opsdroid's Matrix connector is now a core part of the library rather than an external addition. This should open up a lot of cool possibilities for doing fancy stuff with bots on matrix. Many thanks to Cadair for helping with this.

🔗mxisd

Maximus reports that:

mxisd has a new alpha release: v1.3.0-alpha.2 - Fixes a set of issues from alpha.1 and is now close to v1.2.2 stability. If you are already on alpha.1, update is highly recommended.

🔗continuum (previously, "koma")

uforia reports that:

made some minor changes to continuum to make the GUI more intuitive. Now when there are no joined rooms, buttons for joining or creating rooms are shown instead of an empty list. And when there are issues with syncing or syncing takes longer than usual, a status bar with options is shown.

🔗mauview

tulir reports that:

I've been working on a new Go TUI library for gomuks: https://github.com/tulir/mauview

Still not quite sure if it's a good idea, but at least the input area component is very nice. It should also make it easier to add more fancy stuff like html tables and selecting messages (for replying/redacting)

🔗Riot iOS

We are still working on the key backup screens. The last bit on the SDK side, the passphrase support, has been implemented this week.

Reskin is almost done. It just needs some small adjustments. We will release a beta soon so that we can gather users feedback.

This week, we have also fixed small but boring UX issues in Riot and we will continue to do so up to the end of the month and FOSDEM!

🔗Riot Android

Reskin is almost done too and available on develop builds.

Benoit has started to implement the key backup passphrase management in the SDK. Valere is still improving push notifications at the code level but also at the display level.

We are working hard to polish the app for FOSDEM.

🔗Modular

Rick reports:

We now have a HipChat migration tool - https://www.modular.im/tools/hipchat-migration. This tool helps migrate a HipChat workspace to your very own Modular Hosted Homeserver. Migration is performed by uploading an exported copy of an existing HipChat workspace so that the tool can automatically re-create all of the users and rooms (including messages and attachments) on your new Matrix homeserver. Once the migration is complete all of the migrated users will be emailed with login instructions, so that they can seamlessly continue chatting where they left off in HipChat. If your organisation (or if you know of an organisation that) has not yet decided what to do when Stride & HipChat is discontinued next month, come and try Modular!

🔗Synapse

The Synapse gang are working flat out towards r0 and a v1.0 release - you can track our progress here (https://github.com/orgs/matrix-org/projects/8). Aside from that if you haven't already done please please upgrade to v0.34.1.1 (https://matrix.org/blog/2019/01/15/further-details-on-critical-security-update-in-synapse-affecting-all-versions-prior-to-0-34-1-cve-2019-5885/)

🔗Dendrite

Brendan reports:

People have been generally happy about the flood of new issues following the completion of the internal audit last week, and a few folks have been opening PRs addressing some of the “good-first-issues” labeled ones, which has been amazing to see, including fixing room joins and a couple of default variables. Thanks a lot to Cnly and Behouba for these!

On my end, this week mainly consisted in reviewing most of these PRs (and merging them when that was possible), while anoa worked on making Dendrite's CI more complete and reliable, especially by configuring it to run sytest against Dendrite which will allow us to better track its compliance to the Matrix specification.

If you're interested in contributing on Dendrite, there's still some “good first issues” open, and we'll be happy to chat and help in #dendrite-dev:matrix.org ?

🔗Synapse in Debian

andrewsh reports that:

the most recent synapse, using Python 3, is available in both stretch-backports and Debian testing

🔗Discord Bridge

Half-Shot reports that:

Discord bridge v0.4.0 is out now, nothing new since rc1 because it was that good. There have been no changes since rc1 because either Sorunome did a stellar job of keeping things stable, or nobody spoke up out of fear :p. Thanks one and all for continuing to run the bridge.

🔗New Dart/Flutter Matrix SDK

Black Hat reports that:

I am prototyping a Matrix client SDK in Dart. It will target Flutter (Android, Fuchsia and iOS), web (AngularDart or other) and Dart VM.

🔗f0x returns to Neo

f0x reports that:

Neo v4: Iris is coming up, focusing on design first. It will be based on React, and the matrix js sdk
I didn't plan ahead enough with old Neo (v3), so it became a bit of a clobbered togeather mess, which I'm trying to prevent this time around
https://git.lain.haus/f0x/iris

🔗That's all for now

Come chat in #twim:matrix.org to discuss what's happening, and especially come and share what YOU'VE been working on!

Ben's favourite projects 2018

17.01.2019 00:00 — Thoughts — Ben Parsons

Hi all, Ben here.

Since joining the core team as Developer Advocate last year it's been quite a ride. One of the best things about the job is getting the chance to talk to so many people about their projects and what they would like to see happen in the matrix ecosystem. With so much going on, I just want to say thanks to everyone who has been so welcoming to me and share some of my personal highlights, as I recall them, from 2018!

🔗Clients

Fractal was featured in the very first TWIM, announcing v1.26. Since then, the team have hosted two IRL hackfest events (Strasbourg and Seville - where to next, Stockholm? Salisbury?), engaged two GSOC students and continued to push out releases. At this point, Fractal is a full-featured Matrix client for GNOME.

Matrique became Spectral, and is generally awesome. Apparently the name "Matrique" was chosen because it sounds French, but those who speak the language well revealed that this name was not ideal! The project was re-named "Spectral", and is going strong. I really appreciate the multi-user facility! It's a great looking client, and runs great on macOS too (protip: get more attention from /me by providing a macOS build…)

On which subject, Seaglass is a native macOS client. First announced in June, this client supports E2EE rooms (via matrix-ios-sdk), and is also available on homebrew.

Ubuntu Touch has the most Matrix clients per-user of any platform. UT epitomises the resilience and collaborative spirit of Open Source. It's a true community maintenance effort, and is as friendly a community as you might meet. uMatriks came first, but it's FluffyChat that prompted me to install it on my battered old OnePlus One. FluffyChat is now extremely full-featured, with E2EE support being actively discussed.

In the command line, gomuks appeared and quickly became a competent client, but in terms of sheer enthusiasm and momentum, I must give commendation to matrix-client.el, a newly revived mode for Emacs which turns your editor/OS into a great Matrix Client. I enjoyed using it enough that it began to change my mind about using emacs. Laptops have more than 8mb memory these days anyway.

🔗A culture of bots

There is a tendency in the community to build a bot for everything and anything. This has reached the point where there are multiple flairs available depending on what bots you like to make (silly vs serious.)

TravisR was perhaps the first person I saw to get the obsession, creating

and more…

Cadair even made twimbot, designed to make it easier to consume and produce This Week in Matrix itself.

In June tulir started maubot, a plugin-based bot system built in Python, which now also has a management UI.

🔗All bridges lead to Matrix

Or from Matrix, depending on which way you want to send the message.

Around May, I started to notice another obsession brewing in the community. Bridging is a core part of the Matrix mission, but it was around this time I started seeing it in the wild.

Summer 2018 Half-Shot began working in the Matrix core team, and was hugely productive in maintaining and developing the bridge infrastructure for matrix.org. IRC bridging is far more stable and reliable now than it was a year ago. And yet there are still more bridges - too many to list, so I'm picking the ones I've used and enjoyed.

Discord is bridged by matrix-appservice-discord, handled by Half-Shot, aided and abetted by anoa but with a new maintainer this year, Sorunome. This bridge is now feature-rich and sits at v0.3.1.

tulir's suite of bridges including mautrix-telegram and mautrix-whatsapp are extremely stable and useful - big thank you to TravisR for maintaining t2bot.io and hosting the Telegram bridge too.

SMSMatrix, a phone-hosted bridge is simple and works great for SMS bridging.

🔗Libraries, SDKs, Frameworks

I enjoyed using matrix-bot-sdk for building elizabot (more coverage needed for that!), and the SDK recently received support for application services.

In April, kitsune announced v0.2 of libqmatrixclient describing it as “the first one more or less functional and stable" - confidence! This library now powers both Quaternion and Spectral. QMatrixClient has continued to get updates, plus features including lazy loading and VoIP signalling.

There are a few libs I want to pay more attention to this year, starting with tulir's maubot now that it has been rewritten in Python. I'm also excited to see jmsdk, part of ma1uta's broader ecosystem of Matrix tooling - a Java-based SDK.

🔗Ruma Resurrection

Until around June, Ruma was receiving regular updates. There was a pause as the team waited for Rust async/await to land, and also to get some stability in the Matrix Spec. Still waiting on Rust, but now that the Matrix Spec is stabilising, Ruma is showing signs of life too. I have also been watching other homeserver projects begin to restart, which makes for a great start to 2019.

🔗DSN Traveller by Florian

Matrix was featured as part of a Master's thesis by Florian Jacob.

DSN Traveller tries to get a rough overview of how the Matrix network is structured today. It records how many rooms it finds, how many users and servers take part in those rooms, and how they relate to each other, meaning how many users a server has and of how many rooms it is part of.

Florian's thesis was handed in last August. Source code is available.

All details at https://dsn-traveller.dsn.scc.kit.edu/, room at #dsn-traveller:dsn-traveller.dsn.scc.kit.edu.

🔗Still more

Synapse dominates the homeserver space right now, so if you want to host your own homeserver today it's the obvious choice. Too great a variety of installation guides was doing more harm than good, so Stefan took the initiative to create a definitive community-driven Synapse installation guide, including a room to discuss and improve the text. Find the guide linked from here, and chat about the guide in #synapseguide:matrix.org.

I want to use Matrix, and I want to host my own homeserver. As such, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy is a project I absolutely love. It uses Synapse docker images from the Matrix core team, and combines them with Ansible playbooks written and organised by Slavi. It lets you quickly deploy everything needed for a Synapse homeserver, and it's simple enough that even I can use it.

Construct, a homeserver implementation in C++ began successfully federating with Matrix, work progressed from around April/May.

Having a Matrix-native mode for shields.io (those counter/indicator images you often see at the top of repos) seems like something petty at first, but it's actually a great indicator of the importance of Matrix from the outside. Plus, I love seeing the images at the top of different repos. Thanks Brendan for helping this along.

Two students worked on Matrix-related projects during GSOC 2018.

Something which came in super-helpful for me when testing homeserver installations was f0x's fed-tester. Source code available (obv.)

🔗Thanks for all the projects

Thanks for a great 2018. There was so much to learn about, so much to write about, and so many great community members to meet and chat to! If I didn't mention your project, I'm sorry to have been either forgetful or to not be able to include everything.

If you think I've missed something, or if there's a project I should have included rather than another, or even if you just disagree with my choices, let's discuss it in #twim:matrix.org. See you there, and let's all parade ahead to a productive, open, interoperable 2019!

This Week in Matrix 2019-01-04

04.01.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

🔗Welcome to 2019

It's been 2019 for several days now, plenty of time to get used to it! Let's get started with the first TWIM of the year!

🔗Matrix Live S3E09 from 35C3

Several Matrix-ers attended 35C3 in Leipzig last month, you can check out Matrix Live recorded from the conference below (also includes some screenshots and other clips of the event), and also watch a talk given by this author titled Matrix, the current status and year to date.

🔗Welcoming Jason Robinson to New Vector

Decentralisation lover and Python fan Jason Robinson joins New Vector!

one of my dreams of working for a company that is a driver and leader in open source and open standards is coming true

🔗matrix-appservice-purple

Hey Half-Shot, what bridges have you worked on this week?

matrix-appservice-purple got soft launched on matrix.org and is happily bridging XMPP and matrix communities together. I am on full bug and feature fixing duty for it and the consensus from both sides is that it's looking pretty awesome.
The matrix-appservice-purple bridge is coming along leaps and bounds, with formatting fixes, presence handling and speedier message delivery both ways. Also a shoutout to the XMPP community for guidling me through the XEP landscape and giving the bridge a thorough testing. :)

🔗Riot Web Experimental

Riot Web Experimental was announced in a blog post last month, and is ready to get some more testing! Note that the name is still "experimental", but to get an image of where things are going, please give it a try!

http://riot.im/experimental

🔗Riot iOS

Photo sharing via the app share extension has been fixed this week.
At the time of writing, a new Riot iOS is baking with all bug fixes made the last month.

🔗Riot Android

Riot 0.8.21 has been released on 01/02 on the PlayStore and on F-Droid.

This version contains:

  • A new notification troubleshoot screen with the possibility to run a diagnostic and to submit bug report. Feedbacks are already coming and we improve this screen incrementally to help users.
  • A new invitations counter on the group icon in the home screen
  • Other bug fixes
We are still working on push/notification reliability. Riot Play Store resources have been translated into 8 languages so far: Basque, Bulgarian, Chinese (Traditional), French, German, Hungarian, Italian and Portuguese (Brazil).

🔗matrix-client.el's many updates

alphapapa provided many updates for matrix-client.el this week, I recommend chatting in #matrix-client.el:matrix.org where the cultists Emacs users and client devs hang out.

matrix-client.el gained more room sorting options and a /priority command to set room priority. It also includes a workaround for a Google Chrome drag-and-drop bug on Linux, so now Chrome users can drag-and-drop URLs, files, and images directly into room buffers to upload them.

matrix-client.el gained a new notifications-buffer feature that shows notifications from multiple rooms in a single list, allowing you to easily monitor multiple rooms at once and jump to events in them.
e.g. I can see messages from #matrix and #twim in the same window, and reply to messages in both rooms from the same prompt

🔗koma project: now continuum-desktop (client) and koma library

uforia from koma announced that the client formerly known as koma is now continuum-desktop:

in the koma project, the desktop client now has continuous integration and prebuilt packages for Mac and Linux; and you can click on image messages to zoom in. A simple weather bot is created reusing the same implementation of matrix client api. Send it the name of a city, and it will fetch the current weather using openweathermap

🔗mxisd

Max, creator of mxisd, announced:

All versions of mxisd dropped support for Riot v0.17.8, introducing a bug affecting many of its features. Any new release integrating this PR will also be dropped of support. mxisd users are strongly encouraged to roll back to v0.17.7

This design concern is noted by the riot-web team and is under investigation.

🔗Dendrite audit progress

Brendan on the progress of the Dendrite audit:

Dendrite's audit is finally coming to an end! I'm happy to say I just finished the “data collection” phase, in which I looked at everything that needs to be either fixed or implemented in Dendrite. This represents 90% of the work and around 3 weeks of full-time work. All that's left to do now is some triaging in the data (which is available here, by the way), into order to have a clear view on what's left to do in the audit. Expect a lot of new issues and a shiny project board appearing on the Dendrite repository next week ?

🔗Informo news

Informo is a project intended to enable information sharing, especially for vulnerable activists. It is enabled by Matrix. vabd, the mystery individual behind the project announced:

Our specs bot, which shouts in Matrix rooms when the state of a proposal to a specs project changes, got an upgrade: it now handles concurrency better, and can now send multiple messages if multiple matching labels are added to the proposal in the same action (before, it just wouldn't know what to do in such an event and would fail silently).

🔗msc-chatbot

The MSC process is the formal process by which changes are submitted to become part of the Matrix specification. anoa has been working on a bot to help with the process:

msc-chatbot now exists. It has commands that let you view the status of current MSCs, as well as a daily summary of MSCs to keep people up to date.

🔗Matrix-Minecraft bridge

TravisR, as if he has time to be working on such things, has announced the revival of his Matrix-Minecraft bridge:

I've brought my Matrix<-->Minecraft bridge back to life in the form of a Bukkit plugin. It's still in the very early stages of development and requires you to compile it yourself to get it, but it is a thing. Check it out on GitHub: https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-minecraft
It'll be designed to work as a public hosted bridge, so someone could use t2bot.io to bridge their minecraft server (for example)

🔗stickerpack dimension migration tool

Dandellion has created a tool for stickerpack creators:

I've finished https://dali99.github.io/stickerpack-dimension-migration-tool/ for a niceish way to make migrations files for custom stickerpacks in dimension

🔗XMPP (as Jabber) turns 20

As noted in The XMPP Newsletter:

Today is Jabber's 20th anniversary! Jabber would later be standardized and renamed to XMPP.

On this subject, it's always worth thinking about the importance of openness and interoperability in messaging. This recent article in Linux Journal is a reminder of the need to avoid proprietary vendor lock in, and mentions both XMPP and Matrix.

🔗We'll meet again…

Come chat in #twim:matrix.org with your Matrix news to be featured in this post. Next Friday there will be another weekly edition, but before then expect to see an edition to the effect "benpa's best-of-the-community 2018".

This Week in Matrix 2018-12-28

28.12.2018 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

🔗Welcome to the last TWIM of the year

It's the 28th of December as I write this, and I hope you had a good year. Long as it is, I recommend reading Matthew's write-up of the year, as it covers a lot of ground!

Many of the core team have been out of the office this week, but there are still plenty of updates to share from the Matrix ecosystem!

🔗mxisd v1.2.2

Max released mxisd v1.2.2:

mxisd had a Holiday-special release: v1.2.2 before v1.3.0.

This release introduces two new big features:

  • Username login rewriting via 3PID to allow advanced flows, like bypassing the synapse restriction of having numerical usernames for non-guest users
  • Support for multiple Base DNs for LDAP backends
Work has started on v1.3.0 so this is definitely the last release before a non-backward compatible release.

🔗Scylla

VaNilLa has started a new client, a web app build in Elm:

Hi all! I am working on a Matrix client in Elm, and I was recommended to share it here: Scylla

🔗koma-desktop

druig:

koma-desktop is updated to JavaFx 11 and installation is simplified. Dependencies, including native modules can be packaged into one single file, which only needs to be downloaded and run. Java Runtime 11 is the only runtime dependency. Now it's just cross-compilation that needs to be set up before packaged releases can be provided for Mac, Windows, and Linux users.

🔗Prometheus Alertmanager bot for Matrix

Jason Robinson:

I started work on a Prometheus Alertmanager bot for Matrix. The basic idea is that Alertmanager can send webhook alert events to the bot which will then send the formatted events to configured rooms based on the alert receiver. It works, but is still early work in progress. See code and info here: https://git.feneas.org/jaywink/matrix-alertmanager.

Also mirrored on GitHub: https://github.com/jaywink/matrix-alertmanager

🔗Fractal 4.0

Alexandre Franke:

As expected the Fractal team released 4.0 and is already hard at work on the next micro version. We recommend getting it from Flathub like we usually do.

From the release notes:

New features:

  • Enhanced history view with adaptive layout, day divider
  • Reorganised headerbar, app menu merged with user menu
  • Larger display of emoji-only messages
  • Some performance improvements
  • Opening a room jumps to first unread message
Bugfixes:
  • More reliable notifications
  • Fixed display bug for avatars
Under the hood:
  • Large code refactor
  • Logging infrastructure
  • Continuous integration
  • More informative build output

🔗maubot

tulir working on maubot:

The new command handling system in maubot is ready. The new system should be much nicer to use when developing plugins.

Previously maubot had a system that was designed after the improved bot support spec proposal, but it wasn't very nice or pythonic. If/when the proposal or something similar goes through, I'll probably add support for it in the new command handling system.

Next I'll make some developer docs so that other people could actually make their own plugins.

The code is at https://github.com/maubot/maubot and you can ask about maubot in #maubot:maunium.net.

🔗matrix-client.el new features

alphapapa:

Emacs makes it so easy to integrate things. Now you can send org-mode syntax messages with the /org command in matrix-client.el.

Tab-completion of usernames and IDs was added to matrix-client.el.

🔗matrix-to GitHub app

t3chguy has come out of hiding to announce:

https://github.com/apps/matrix-to is a Github App which makes use of their shiny and new Content Attachments API/Webhook. When a matrix.to or view.matrix.org URL is used this app is activated. It adds a little snippet with the Room Title and Topic (if the room is peekable from matrix.org). In future it'll work for event permalinks, but currently there is no support for peeking context/event in Matrix API.

Example can be seen at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.to/issues/52#issuecomment-449878490. Idea courtesy of TravisR.

🔗See you next year

So there you have it.

I'm at 35c3 with some known characters from the Matrix world (as well as 15,000 others.) If you're here too, come visit us in our assembly, and also make sure to come to Dijkstra tomorrow to watch me present a look back at on the last year: https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2018/Fahrplan/events/9400.html. We have recorded a message for Matrix Live from 35c3, but will post tomorrow with some more footage from the event.

Otherwise, see you next year Matrix fan!

This Week in Matrix 2018-12-21

21.12.2018 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

🔗Matrix Live: Half-Shot talks bridges, and working on libpurple bridging to Matrix

You may have seen that Half-Shot been working fearlessly and tirelessly on bridges for many, many months. In this episode of Matrix Live Half-Shot chats with Matthew about his work, progress and achievements, with a focus on recent matrix-appservice-purple and XMPP work. Audio is not amazing, but worth listening to get acquainted with recent work.

As a note from Half-Shot:

The matrix-appservice-purple bridge gained a XMPP specific backend for better performance when you want to do just xmpp bridging. It's rather quick right now, and needs dogfooding.

Chat in #purple-bridge:half-shot.uk!

🔗Matrix badges on shields.io

TWIM

Brendan:

A couple of weeks ago, fr1kin PR'd a nice Matrix badge to the Shields project that tells you how many users are in a public room. There were a few issues with it so I PR'd some changes to make the badge more usable, and it's now merged and live (as of yesterday evening), with examples available here! ?
For instance, here's a badge for TWIM: https://img.shields.io/matrix/twim:matrix.org.svg ?

🔗Spec update

New MSC for cross-signing, which has different (hopefully better) semantics from the previous cross-signing MSC.

🔗matrix-bot-sdk support for application services

TravisR, author of matrix-bot-sdk:

matrix-bot-sdk has received early support for application services. Similar to the official matrix-js-sdk, the bot-sdk uses an Intent-based model for making bridges easier to write. Check out the simple example here for more information on how it works.

🔗koma-library

druig continues work on their JavaFX/kotlin client project:

The matrix client API implementation in koma is being extracted into a new repo, which is going to be a lightweight library for Kotlin.

🔗Seaglass now available on homebrew

Aaron Raimist reports that Seaglass is available on homebrew for macOS:

Installing Seaglass is now easier than ever. If you already use Homebrew to manage other packages, you can now install Seaglass with a simple brew cask install seaglass.

If you don't use Homebrew, you can still download Seaglass from GitHub.

🔗matrix-client.el is reborn!

alphapapa reports from a team who have forked and are maintaining a Matrix client for Emacs:

Many additions and improvements to matrix-client.el (https://github.com/jgkamat/matrix-client-el) recently, including a "standalone client" mode that launches Emacs to look like this.

Chat in #matrix-client-el:matrix.org.

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi:

the matrix-docker-ansible-deploy playbook has received some bugfixes and improvements lately. Most importantly, it's now running the freshly-released Synapse 0.34.0 under Python 3, so memory usage should be much better.

🔗libQMatrixClient/Quaternion

kitsune:

I started work on matrix: scheme support in libQMatrixClient/Quaternion. Expect more news on this around New Year.

🔗Fractal road to 4.0

Fresh from their hackfest in Seville last week, Alexandre Franke reports:

The Fractal crew spent the week chasing last minutes bugs and made two beta releases (3.99.0 and 3.99.1) in preparation for the big new stable release, 4.0, which is right around the corner.

🔗New Rooms for Space Launches and Aviation

Aaron Raimist has been creating some new rooms:

#space:im.kabi.tk for anyone interested in space, rocket launches, satellites, etc.
Are you wondering what NASA's new Mars Rover is doing? Maybe you live on the west coast of the United States, and you saw that meteor on Wednesday night that came within minutes of a scheduled rocket launch and just after three astronauts left the space station. If any of that sounds interesting to you, feel free to join the room.
A Matrix bot is being tested to send updates about upcoming rocket launches to the room.

#aviation:matrix.org for anyone interested in aviation. Whether you are a pilot, someone who visits an airshow once in a while, or if https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk piqued your interest, come join.

🔗t2bot.io upgrade

TravisR:

Just a head's up that I've increased the storage capacity of the database. With current projections, the server should be good for another year or two.

The database is also 1ms closer to Synapse and has a faster CPU in it. It probably won't make a dent in speed on federation, but it is a step forward.

I'll be rolling out python 3 to the homeserver this week too, which should help a little bit.

https://riot.im/experimental/#/room/#help:t2bot.io/$154511414912clELm:t2l.io

🔗FluffyChat 8.0 RC announced

Krille and his Ubuntu Touch fans are looking forward to FluffyChat 8.0:

Hey guys, in order to release the FluffyChat 8.0 Christmas Edition, the FluffyChat 8.0 release candidate is ready for you! :-)
Also the weblate translations are ready: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/fluffychat/

🔗Riot iOS

From the Riot iOS team:

  • We have fixed and improved some e2e stuff.
  • Back to reskin. We start to implement e2e backup screens.

🔗Riot Android

From the Riot Android team:

  • New screen to troubleshoot notification issue has been merged on /develop.
  • Splitting current Android SDK to separate crypto part is on it's way. We're doing this in order to be able to integrate crypto faster in the Riot reboot.

🔗Synapse

Neil from Synapse reports:

We released 0.34.0! This release recommends Python 3 for production and brings with it huge performance improvements. If you've been putting upgrading off upgrading your Synapse, now is the time to do so. For more details here is a post that explains what you should expect and a recent Matrix Live interviews Amber (hawkowl) on the subject.

Aside from that we are working furiously towards federation R0 and have a bunch of MSCs to get us ever closer. You can track our progress here.

andrewsh notes that 0.34.0 is also available in the Debian repos:

Synapse 0.34.0~rc2 in Debian since Tuesday, 0.34.0 uploaded today; both use Python 3 only

🔗Dendrite

Brendan reports:

Dendrite's internal audit is progressing very well and is getting very close to its end.
What's left to do for me is check the implementation status of a few Matrix features, and translate those into tagged GitHub issues so that everyone can have as clear of a view as possible on what's left to work on.
I'm on holiday all of next week, but hopefully will have some good news about that the following week.

🔗That really is it for now

Did you get to the end? What was your favourite section? Come tell us in #twim:matrix.org! Do you have your own update you'd like to add? Same place, come chat in #twim:matrix.org.

Next week is various things. It's Christmas, which means there will be more hacking and coding happening than usual I expect! It's also 35c3, which I will be attending, and might affect scheduling next week. Stay tuned in #twim:matrix.org for news, and come join us in #matrix-35c3:matrix.org if you'll be there and want to meet up!

Merry Christmas!

This Week in Matrix 2018-12-14

14.12.2018 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

🔗Fractal Hackfest

Developers and creators of Fractal, the GNOME Matrix client, have been holding a Hackfest this week in Seville. Matthew and I caught up with them on video for Matrix Live this week, and discussed the product improvements they've been making and their plans for the next release (due next week!)

🔗Matrix Spec

🔗This Week in Ruma

We don't often get to feature news from Ruma, but this week there is an updated This Week in Ruma.

Ruma is not dead, however, and small improvements have continued over the last year. The Matrix spec has advanced quite a bit and many of the blocking issues for Ruma have been resolved. Rust's maturity is another story. async/await is still under development and this is the most significant blocking issue to progress on Ruma.

🔗maubot new tooling

tulir has been working on tooling for maubot:

maubot got a command-line tool for building plugins and managing maubot instances. I also added some server-side stuff for easy registration of accounts in the management interface using synapse shared secrets, but the UI for that isn't ready. Also, I'm planning on adding some kind of small Matrix client in the management interface for manually managing the added bot clients. That might lead to a separate library that could be used in other projects or embedded in websites.

Max with a new release of mxisd:

mxisd hits v1.2.1 with a new maintenance release, fixing bugs and regressions from v1.2.0. Updating to v1.2.1 is strongly encouraged as v1.3.x will contain breaking changes and will not be a straight-forward update like v1.x has been until now.

🔗Clients

🔗Lazy-loading lands in QMatrixClient

kitsune has reported that lazy-loading, a Matrix feature that entails only loading room member details as needed, is now in libQMatrixClient master.

reference implementation in Quaternion will follow up

Black Hat has been testing the feature in Spectral, which uses the library, and says there is a 30%-50% reduction in RAM usage at startup.

🔗Riot Web progress on /experimental and v0.17.8 released

Bruno has been working on /experimental, and I recommend taking a look at the progress there! The next version of Riot Web is closer than ever.

Improved read markers now available on /experimental, needs further tweaking though. Brought back community UX on redesign, other small improvements.

v0.17.8 was released with several bugfixes and improvements.

🔗Riot iOS

Release made with these notes:

This new version supports the consent of matrix servers terms of service (including GDPR) in the registration flow. It also contains fixes for the "Empty room" bug, the registration issue on iOS 10, etc.

Get more information:

🔗Riot Android

Release made:

This new version supports the consent of matrix servers terms of service (including GDPR) in the registration flow. Many bugfixes SDK contains KeyBackup

Get more information:

🔗Servers

🔗Synapse

A lot of focus on getting debian packages ready for python 3 - this is a blocker for our official python 3 release 0.34.0. Aside from that, finalising some outstanding state resolution behaviour (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1693) and dusting off event ids as hashes (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/1127.)

🔗Dendrite

Brendan:

My internal audit of Dendrite is continuing, drawing a more and more precise picture of what's left to fix and implement. I aim to have it over by the end of the year, or the very early days of 2019 at the latest. Folks can track its progress through https://cloud.abolivier.bzh/index.php/s/qXi2KFjCQk2c6eG

🔗modular.im now has Extra-Large instances available

Due to demand, modular.im Hosted Homeservers now has Extra-Large instances available. If you need to service 1,000+ users on a Matrix homeserver, this is the product for you!

🔗linuxgaming.life homeserver is the number one Matrix homeserver focused on Linux gaming

swedneck has continues his work on linuxgaming.life:

I've added some bots, health monitoring, and dimension integration manager to linuxgaming.life, and made the website dark.

The homeserver is open for new registrations.

🔗That's all I know!

If you'd like see your Matrix-related project featured in this blog post, come chat to us in #twim:matrix.org, and we'll see you next week!

This Week in Matrix 2018-12-07

07.12.2018 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

🔗Matrix Live S03E06

In which Matthew & Amandine discuss The Matrix.org Foundation, go-live for the French Government deployment for Matrix, and some exciting random diversions into post-1.0 Matrix features which should land once once 1.0 is out the door!

🔗Purism sponsoring Fractal development

We are proudly sponsoring the work of Julian Sparber on Fractal, the @matrixdotorg client for GNOME. Read his latest update - https://t.co/q4ubjzETxC #LibreDesktop #DemandFreedom #gnome

— Purism (@Puri_sm) December 5, 2018

Purism announced they are sponsoring Fractal development, starting with Julian Sparber working last month to improve the message view. You can read about his progress here. Highlights:

Before, there was a jarring cut when new messages were loaded, but now you can just scroll upward and older messages are loaded continuously.
The part I'm most excited about is the new "new message divider". When the user opens a room they can directly start reading the conversation from the last seen message and they don't need to search for the new message divider. Not only has the UX gotten a lot better, but also the underlying code is much cleaner now.
I also spent some time on making message rendering faster. I replaced the RegExp with more efficient code, this made the rendering much faster (from ~10ms to ~ 1ms) for every single message.
In summary, all of these things improve Fractal's UX a lot and make it feel more like a modern messaging app.

🔗Synapse 0.34.0rc1

0.34.0rc1 is out - please test it! 0.34.0 will be the first to officially support python 3. We're still working on the debian packaging but 0.34.0 proper should be out next week.

🔗Dendrite

Brendan has been getting on with Dendrite development:

Started auditing Dendrite's codebase to identify what is left to implement, along with what hasn't been implemented correctly. Still a lot of work left to do on this, but it's looking promising so far.

🔗Modular

Modular is a Hosted Homeservers product, check out modular.im. This week:

Matrix -> Matrix account migration tool available at https://www.modular.im/tools/matrix-migration. It's still beta, so please test it and let us know if you experience issues.

🔗New Homeserver: linuxgaming.life

swedneck has set up a new public homeserver at linuxgaming.life! There is also a Riot installation at https://riot.linuxgaming.life, served via IPFS.

Currently working on the website (based on t2bot.io, thank you travis for making that available on github!) and making things nicer in general.
I will be adding more bots shortly. Please let me know of any issues with the HS or anything surrounding it.

🔗Informo

Informo is a project to create a specification and implementation for distributing information and news. This week they have been working on merging changes to the specification:

Work on the Informo specifications has slowed down a bit in the last couple of weeks, though since the last update we did manage to get some relatively big SCSs merged into the specs, including SCS #9 (rendered here) which specifies how information sources must publish their information through the federation, and SCS #11 (rendered here) which describes how sources must register themselves in order to be picked up by clients, and handle localisation. ?
There's still a couple of big items to take care of before we can cut a 1.0 release of the Informo specs but this is definitely a huge step towards this goal.

🔗Minecraft Bridge

Dandellion:

I started working on a Minecraft bridge pretty heavily based on Travis's old project, but using Minecraft-protocol instead of mineflayer.
You need a bot Minecraft account that can join and idle in the server, it then uses /tellraw to post messages.

🔗libQMatrixClient 0.4.1 released

libQMatrixClient, which powers Spectral and Quaternion was released by kitsune, Lazy Loading coming soon:

libQMatrixClient 0.4.1 has been released today, with small fixes in the stable branch. Meanwhile, active work is ongoing on lazy-loading support in the library, with ETA for the feature landing in master being in about a week or so.

🔗Riot Web

🔗Riot iOS

  • Reskin still ongoing
  • A new release is coming
  • Less activity because of POSS

🔗Riot Android

  • A new developer joined us to help maintaining Riot: Valere Fedronic
  • Keys backup PR in review
  • Privacy Terms acceptance in login flow in review
  • FCM issue investigation/troubleshooting by Valere
  • François Off (sick :()
  • New theme is coming soon

🔗Koma

druig has been working on Koma, a JavaFX Matrix client:

This week in koma: implementation of json library switched from runtime reflection to compile-time code generation
The matrix api is implemented manually in the project, retrofit and moshi are used to interact with the rest api.

🔗SimpleMatrix

As we mentioned in TWIM last week, MTRNord has been working on designs for SimpleMatrix, a Matrix client for Android in development. This week he has made a video showcasing the new design.

🔗Redecentralize meetup in London

Last night Half-Shot & Neil & Brendan went to see the Redecentralize folk at their meetup:

Beer! And pizza! And also Redecentralize
We chatted to a nice bunch of folks both demoing their decentralized projects and talked to the likes of scuttlebutt, BBC, IPFS and more. Was a interesting experience having around 8 minutes to quickly explain to newcomers what Matrix is and why they should use it in a speed dating format. We chatted (and demoed) bridges, new-riot and generally how it all fits together. There were a lot of very interesting people with different profiles and backgrounds, and diversified questions which lead to a lot of interesting discussions.

Note for the confused: the format of the meetup was comparable to speed dating. There is no suggestion that Matrix should be used at regular speed dating. If you do find such a use for Matrix, come tell us in #twim:matrix.org.

🔗matrix-wug, X-SAMPA to IPA bot

Last month Dandellion introduced a bot designed to convert between formats for pronunciation notation, this week he released the source code: https://github.com/dali99/matrix-wug

🔗The end of the post, and nearly the end of 2018

This week it has been winter-in-Europe kind of weather, but that's ok, it happens every year. TWIM on the other hand happens every week, so if you have something to share, and would like to share what you've been working on, come chat to us in #twim:matrix.org.