Ben Parsons

🔗DSN Traveller

If you've spent any time using Matrix public rooms, you've probably seen the bot DSN Traveller. This is a post-grad project from Florian Jacob, an informatics student at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology. This week, Florian handed in his thesis on Matrix!

In summary, I could show that Matrix has few large but many small servers. Large servers reduce the overall network load, but a significant fraction of the load is concentrated in them. Introducing more small servers would further increase the load concentration. The Matrix event graph as a Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type showed to be well-suited for reliable messaging and history synchronization, and is applicable beyond Matrix.
I'm now working on a scientific paper on the results, which will boil down the more than 80 pages of the thesis to something much more digestible. ? You'll hear it in TWIM when that is finished!

Room for discussions: #dsn-traveller:matrix.org
Website with more information on the DSN Traveller: https://dsn-traveller.dsn.scc.kit.edu/

This really is exciting stuff! The thesis will be made available online in the future (we'll post it here.) Florian is also hoping to continue his work into Matrix research:

I'm currently in the process of trying to secure funding for a doctorate with Matrix as the topic, as that's where I can proof experience.

🔗#open-science:matrix.vgorcum.com

All this talk of academia led Mathijs and Cadair to create #open-science:matrix.vgorcum.com, room for discussion of Open Science topics.

🔗Half-Shot IRC Connection Tracker

As you may know, although he's now back studying for the final year of his Computer Science degree, Half-Shot will continue to dedicate some time to bridge maintenance. He's been working on IRC Connection Tracker, the next gen bridge for Matrix-IRC:

The IRC connection tracker has had yet more code and love applied to it. The headline changes are:

• We now have a fully working IRC client that can connect to an IRCd, join channels and chat. These client's persist over > the lifetime of the service.
• There is a tool included with the service ircctl which allows you to spawn and use connections en masse. It also lets > you list the state of the currently connected clients.
• Work has just begun on a client library for connecting this up to the bridge, but should be swiftly completed thanks to…
• A brand new spec website in the works for describing the protocol (thanks Brendan for pointing me in the right direction)

Spec docs: https://half-shot.github.io/irc-conntrack/ Repo: https://github.com/Half-Shot/irc-conntrack/ Room: #irc-conntrack:half-shot.uk

🔗Fractal

Alexandre Franke has the handle on Fractal, the Matrix client for GNOME:

This week in Fractal, more refactoring and small bugfixes. About 50 commits by 5 people, one of which made their first contributions this week (congrats Rasmus!).

Julian Sparber, who was part of GSOC 2018 on the Fractal team, has been working on Room History:

The room history refactor I was working on for fractal is upstream, now we can start to improve how messages are displayed and make the loading of older messages better.

Julian is also pleased to still be heavily involved with Fractal outside GSOC.

🔗Synapse

Synapse 0.33.5.1 was released with Py3 beta support:

0.33.5.1 is an interesting release. On the one hand it contains the usual bug fixes and performance improvements of a point release, but it also our first versioned release where monolith installs can be run under Python 3.5 and 3.6! Python 3 support is very much in beta, so please be cautious but if you would like to try running under a py3 environment we'd love to get your feedback.

Check out https://hub.docker.com/r/avhost/docker-matrix/tags/ for Python 3 docker images of Synapse, look for the v0.33.5.1.dev.py3 tag.
Says Mathijs:

it is functional, but much like python3 support it is still a work in progress, hence the larger size

🔗Matrix on Hyperboria

jcg has set up hypertrix.ovh:

I spent last night setting up hypertrix.ovh, a matrix server only listening on Hyperboria, a cjdns based end-to-end encrypted IPv6 overlay mesh network. I'd be glad if someone could be found to peer and federate with me there! Registration is open, but your client needs to be connected to Hyperboria to be able to talk to the server.

If you are currently using Hyperboria, go join hypertrix.ovh, or start your matrix server listening on it, and go chat to JC!

🔗Seaglass

Lots of discussion about this project, specifically the question of how to efficiently render Rich Text. macOS does not make this easy, so a solution being considered is to use a WebKit for room rendering:

WebKit has the advantage of being super super fast on macOS, and also very low overheads
The current approach uses Cocoa NSTableViews and it's horrible because Apple clearly couldn't decide how they wanted them to work and therefore it's not very optimised
Moving to WebKit only adds about 16mb to the RAM usage and redraws far faster than the NSTableViews can when resizing etc, and we'll save a lot on the text formatting too which currently is a bit of a mess

🔗Cadair and Half-Shot on the Slack Bridge

Cadair has been helping Half-Shot with bridge maintenance, specifically by contributing to matrix-appservice-slack.

matrix-appservice-slack is a Node project, built on matrix-appservice-bridge, which is designed to bridge messages and metadata between Slack and Matrix. These updates:

• Improves pills substitutions to use the new slack mentions
• Add Gitter style edit bridging
• Adds a config option to specify the directory the user-store.db and room-store.db files go in
• Converts slack snippets to inline code dumps in matrix

🔗ma1uta tests for client

ma1uta has been adding tests to jmsdk.

🔗Spectral

Black Hat has been working on the client formerly-known-as-Matrique: Spectral:

I added elevation shadows for some components, such as message bubble, panels, etc.

🔗Native Tor onion service enabled for matrix.org and riot.im

Cloudflare now provide Onion routing, this service has been enabled for matrix.org and riot.im. Cloudflare have a thorough explanation which is worth reading: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-onion-service/.

We just turned on the new native Tor onion service support for https://t.co/vidAnPoIo2 & https://t.co/UIjS6gDkvf in cloudflare; feedback welcome! https://t.co/keXC4bjo5F pic.twitter.com/nTRmGHCt8P

— Matrix (@matrixdotorg) September 28, 2018

🔗Spec

September was mainly spent cleaning up loose ends on the Spec after all the releases at the end of August, and catching up on the never-ending maintenance burden of improving Synapse.  However, in October the plan is to to go back again to working full out on the S2S r0 release. Wish us luck...

🔗Riot

• Lazy loading members is now on by default on riot.im/develop - reducing Riot's RAM by 3-5x.  Please give it a go and test it before we ship it in Riot 0.17 (probably next week) so we can iron out any last bugs (which will probably look like user profiles going missing)
• Lazy loading also ships by default in Riot/iOS in Testflight 0.7.4 - if you want in on Testflight let us know in #riot-ios:matrix.org and we'll share an invite link!
• Lazy loading in Riot/Android coming real soon now; it's behind a labs flag on the develop branch if you want to experiment.
• Travis has started attacking the Riot/Web 'First Impressions' project (starting with unbreaking onboarding in Riot/Web when GDPR consent is enabled)
• Lots and lots of UX work from Nad on E2E, Communities, Onboarding and the overall redesign, complete with a redesign workshop with Jouni.
• Aiming for end of Oct for first cut of redesign to be live as an experimental branch on riot.im.
• Lots and lots of E2E implementation work in general; backups, cross-signing, and verification.

🔗The end is nigh!

But only for this blog post! Check out Matrix Live below, and we'll see you back here next week. :D

https://youtu.be/zo4IH4nUQ9w

🔗Nheko 0.6.0 released!

Get latest stable releases from GitHub.

🔗Features

• Support for sending & receiving markdown formatted messages.
• Import/Export of megolm session keys. (Incompatible with Riot)
• macOS: The native emoji picker can be used.
• Context menu option to show the raw text message of an event.
• Rooms with unread messages are marked in the room list.
• Clicking on a user pill link will open the user profile.

🔗Spec Proposals: E2E Cross-signing and bi-directional key verification

uhoreg has written up a new work-in-progress proposal for E2E cross-signing.

Also, although it wasn't this week, I don't think that we have previously announced the proposal for bi-directional key verification using QR codes: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1544

🔗Jeon

Massive update from ma1uta about his Jeon project! This update brings Jeon into line with the most recent updates to the Client-Server, Application Service, Push and Identity APIs.

In ma1uta's words:

Jeon is a set of the java interfaces and classes which describes the Matrix API.

• client-api: r0.4.0-1 corresponds to the r0.4.0 C2S API.
• application-api: r0.1.0-1 corresponse to the r0.1.0 AS API,
• push-api: r0.1.0-1 corresponds to the r0.1.0 PUSH API,
• identity-api: r0.1.0-1 corresponds to the r0.1.0 IS API.
• All artefacts available from the Maven Central Repository.

Major changes:

• Full support for the corresponding Matrix api.
• Changed version for displaying the Matrix api version.
• Added support to the asynchronous responses.

Also updated the swagger schemas generated from the code:

• https://ma1uta.github.io/swagger/c2s.json - C2S API
• https://ma1uta.github.io/swagger/as.json - AS API
• https://ma1uta.github.io/swagger/push.json - PUSH API
• https://ma1uta.github.io/swagger/id.json - IS API

And the first hotfix: application-api r0.1.0-2 with fixed url (/transactions has been changes to the _matrix/app/v1/transactions). And this release will break all AS because synapse sends transactions to the old url.

Join #jeon:matrix.org to discuss the progress of this product more.

🔗VoIP signalling support has landed in libQMatrixClient

Exciting times for libQMatrixClient!! Thanks kitsune, developer of libQMatrixClient and Quaternion:

After some pretty long time of being in a PR/fork, VoIP signalling support has landed in libQMatrixClient! Many thanks to mariogrip (the founder of UBports) for the initial code and to delijati (a developer behind uMatriks) for getting it to work with the most recent library.
The actual VoIP stack does not come included, client developers have to take whatever WebRTC implementation is available for their platform and glue the pieces together. However, as the example of uMatriks shows, this now becomes relatively easy if your platform is on good terms with WebRTC (like UBports). I look forward to further work with UBports community on keeping this platform a first-class Matrix citizen.

Go chat in #quaternion:matrix.org to see the ways libQMatrixClient is developing.

🔗Matrique is now Spectral

After intense discussion, there is a new name for Matrique: Spectral. The repo now sites at https://gitlab.com/spectral-im/spectral, there is a new room at #spectral:encom.eu.org, and a new logo:

🔗FluffyChat featured in OpenStore

FluffyChat is getting some love from OpenStore, the official Ubuntu Touch app store: this week it was the featured app.

🔗Matrix Corporal

@slavi:devture.com, creator of Matrix Corporal (a Matrix server configuration tool - "Kubernetes for Matrix"):

Matrix Corporal has received some updates over the past few weeks since its initial release: a couple of additional HTTP APIs for retrieving/destroying user access tokens; more consistency with the Matrix Client-Server specification when it comes to error responses; faster reconciliation for user accounts that are joined to many/large rooms.

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Another project from @slavi:devture.com, for those who prefer their DevOps ansible-flavoured:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now also helps you set up service discovery as per the .well-known Matrix specification.

🔗jcg ansible PR for matrix notifications

jcg has an upstream PR to have matrix notifications in ansible. Combined with Slavi's matrix-docker-ansible-deploy above, you can get Matrix notifications about issues with your Matrix deployment…

🔗Seaglass E2E + self-update

neilalexander:

Seaglass end-to-end encryption support is now complete, including device verification and blacklisting, key sharing requests, key import and export (which should be compatible with Riot) and re-requesting keys

This is really exciting news for macOS matrix users!

I'm also working on auto-updating Seaglass with Aaron Raimist's help in addition to finishing E2E support :-)

:-) is right!

🔗ma1uta jmsdk

ma1uta must have been in a work-on-Matrix mode this week, because he has also updated jmsdk:

I have released a new version of the java client (https://github.com/ma1uta/jmsdk/tree/master/client-sdk). The new client works is asynchronous mode, each method doesn't block the thread and return the CompletableFuture (promise in java). Then you can block thread to get the response or build a asynchronous promises chain.

Finally:
ma1uta is also looking forward to the release of Java 11:

with the Curve25519 key agreement (http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/324) and will try make a pure java implementation of the olm/megolm. Just for fun. :)

🔗synapse-purge

Maze, seeing that his synapse database was already at several gigabytes, decided to produce a tool to shrink it:

The synapse-purge tool allows homeserver admins to free disk space by purging old room events from the synapse database. It is an alternative for synpurge which currently does not work correctly.

Configuration is minimalistic at the moment. Meaning it purges all remote rooms on the server with a globally configured preservation period.

🔗synapse

andrewsh: 0.33.4 uploaded to Debian's stretch-backports, pending approval.

0.33.5rc1 is now available, with the big news being the inclusion of support for Python 3.5 and 3.6! Hawkowl's Py3 has merged for monoliths and is working pretty well, looking like 2-3x RAM improvement. Please help us test!

Erik's state compressor tool is pretty much finished, we've been starting to run it on things and it reduces disk usage for the state group table by at least 10x.

The only catch is that it's quite DB heavy whilst it runs, so we haven't run it on Matrix.org yet.

🔗Fractal

Alexandre Franke and the Fractal team:

refactoring of the history and other parts is going on in the master branch of Fractal. We also cleaned up build and dependency related bits.

🔗maubot and sedbot

tulir:

I made some updates to maubot and fixed most of the sedbot (S. Edbot) issues people had reported.

tulir used maubot to create a factorial bot: >

I might also make some useful bots soon

And so it was - late breaking news that maubot has been used to develop a Dictionary-definition-bot! Not available for public use yet but it proves that the project is useful!

🔗Riot Web

Lazy Loading remains the focus, we're getting closer with more bugs solved this week! To enable Lazy Loading room members and get speed and memory benefits in Riot, use the develop branch and enable "Lazy Loading" under "Labs" in the settings.

Lots of final bug hunting for lazy loading - this is taking longer than you might expect because we're doing end-to-end CI everywhere.

Lots of work on E2E, Dave has been working on:

UI for e2e key backup that's waiting for some lower level bits
and hopefully our e2e core code is moving from asm.js to webassembly making it, by current estimations, significantly faster.

Redesign work continuing as well - Bruno has been working on it this week, Jouni the designer will visit next week to continue the process.

Nad has joined us to help with design bandwidth and is working on the onboarding flows for the redesign as well as fixing all the UX issues in Communities!

🔗Riot Mobile + Mobile SDKs

Lots of work on Lazy Loading - to be released along with Riot Web.

🔗Bridges

Half-Shot is joining us to work part-time on bridges going forwards - this is great news, especially for his connection-based IRC bridging antics as well as catching up on the PR and maintenance backlog for the IRC bridge and Slack bridge.

🔗Modular

Modular (Hosted Homeservers) has first customers; if you want to give it a go please let us know!

🔗Finally

Thanks for reading, take a look at Matrix Live below!

🔗Dimension

Update (this got lost in the original post; sorry Travis!): Dimension received a security update - if you run your own Dimension instance it is strongly recommended you update right away. Telegram bridge support in Dimension is underway, with more updates expected for next week in Matrix.

🔗Clients

🔗Fluffychat

It's been some months since we checked in with FluffyChat. If you're a Ubuntu Touch user, or have a device running it, you should see the progress that has been made recently on this Matrix client. Collected changelog 0.5.0 to latest (0.5.4):

• Search chats
• Chat avatars
• Search users in chats
• Security & Privacy settings:

1. Disable typing notifications
2. Auto-accept invitations

• New message status:

1. Sending: Activity indicator
2. Sent: Little cloud
3. Received: Tick
4. Seen by someone: Usericon

• Display stickers
• Minor UI improvements
• FluffyChat now automatically opens the link to the matrix.org consens
• Updated translations

🔗Seaglass

Neil has been keeping up the pace with Seaglass development:

Seaglass has had a substantial rewrite to the room cache to help improve reliability and reduce crashes, better thumbnail behaviour on inline images, various tiny visual tweaks, in-window blending, support for encryption key sharing requests for E2E rooms.

Rendering performance has been massively increased (if you ignore the occasional bug). Resizing the window shouldn't be so slow anymore and a lot of avatar image operations are no longer repeated unnecessarily

Other than that this week has mostly featured lots and lots of bug fixes, hopefully lots of crashes fixed.

Screenshot below shows the new E2E UI:

🔗Quaternion

When not escaping typhoons, kitsune has found some time to continue work on Quaternion:

Quaternion's master branch is alive again - it's been prone to crashes in the last two weeks, now it shouldn't. Feel free to try the new room list organised by tag!

🔗SimpleMatrix

MTRNord has been working on SimpleMatrix:

SimpleMatrix now supports Basic messages sending (with Commonmark) and basic receiving of messages.

🔗miniVector

Marcus has re-packaged miniVector for F-Droid:

There's now a second matrix client available in F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.lavadip.miniVector/

This is a fork of Riot Android done by hrjet, f-droid release done by me. It's removing mostly jitsi group call functionality and some other smaller stuff. In doing so it manages to require far less permissions and is also only 12 MB in size instead of riots 20 MB.

🔗Matrique

Black Hat:

Matrique gained alpha support for multiple accounts

This is thanks to leaning on libqmatrixclient's native multiple account support!

🔗Riot Web 0.16.4 released

This is pretty much a maintenance release - fixing the DM avatar regression that crept in with 0.16.3, adding better support for warning users when their client hasn't yet synced with the server, and the final bits of work needed before we can turn on membership Lazy Loading in the upcoming Riot 0.17.

Full changelogs as always are split over the three projects which make up Riot/Web:

• https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#changes-in-0164-2018-09-10
• https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#changes-in-0134-2018-09-10
• https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#changes-in-0110-rc1-2018-09-07

🔗SDKs and Libraries

🔗libQMatrixClient ecosystem

As you may know, Matrique, led by Black Hat, and Quaternion, led by kitsune, are both projects build using libQMatrixClient, a Qt5 library from kitsune designed for writing Matrix clients. While kitsune has been working on the library for some time, Black Hat has also now started making contributions:

libQMatrixClient now has a pkg-config file to further ease clients building on Linux systems, as well as more convenient API to track read markers if all users, not just of the local one.

🔗matrix-js-sdk v0.11.0 released

This release contains support for lazy loading room members, and also some breaking changes relating to startClient().

• Support for lazy loading members. This should improve performance for users who joined big rooms a lot. Pass to lazyLoadMembers = true option when calling startClient.
• MatrixClient::startClient now returns a Promise. No method should be called on the client before that promise resolves. Before this method didn't return anything.
• A new CATCHUP sync state, emitted by MatrixClient#"sync" and returned by MatrixClient::getSyncState(), when doing initial sync after the ERROR state. See MatrixClient documentation for details.
• RoomState::maySendEvent('m.room.message', userId) & RoomState::maySendMessage(userId) do not check the membership of the user anymore, only the power level. To check if the syncing user is allowed to write in a room, use Room::maySendMessage() as RoomState is not always aware of the syncing user's membership anymore, in case lazy loading of members is enabled.

🔗Synapse

Synapse 0.33.4 was released, with a whole host of bug fixes, some enhancements to resource usage management and a bunch of internal changes in readiness for room member state lazy loading and our ongoing port to Python 3.

Meanwhile, Python 3 support for monolithic (non-worker) Synapses has finally landed on the develop branch, thanks to massive work from hawkowl and notafile - if you want to help us test and flush out any remaining byte/utf8 style errors, please create a virtualenv for python 3.6 or 3.5 (twisted doesn't support 3.7 yet) and point the develop branch of Synapse at it, tail the logs for ERRORs and report them via Github if/when you see them.  In practice it seems pretty stable though, and noticeably reduces RAM and speeds things up thanks to improved GC and general performance work in Python.

We've also discovered that jemalloc works very well at improving RAM usage on Python 2 under Linux (we haven't tried it on Python 3 yet) by providing a more fragmentation-resistant malloc implementation; if you are having problems with your Synapse RAM spiking up we recommend giving it a go.  All of the Matrix.org server is using it now.

Also, lots of ops work this week; Erik has prototyped a new storage strategy for state groups which shrinks storage requirements by 10x, we'll be applying this shortly to Matrix.org otherwise we're going to run out of disk space.  There was also a regression on Synapse develop on federation, where outbound requests would get stuck and never retry - this impacted the matrix.org server badly over the course of the week, but as of Friday night we have a workaround in place.  We're not aware of it affecting anyone other than the matrix.org deployment (and we haven't got to the root cause yet).

🔗Construct homeserver progress

This week:

Added notification counts which show up in Riot now, and expanded support for g++-7 and 8 instead of just g++-6. Construct repository is found at: https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct.

🔗IRC Connection Tracker

Half-Shot is continuing to work on the project to split out IRC connection management from the IRC bridge, letting the bridge be restarted without interrupting IRC connections!

The project is going quite well, and is going to be used on matrix.org once production ready which will really speed up upgrades and give us near zero downtime indifferent to the size of the bridge.

At the moment the project has the ability to spin up and maintain connections, however the connections are not supporting IRC fully yet as there are bits to do on the parsing and maintaining state side. There is also work on a top-like tool to visualise and control the service outside of the bridge so we can quickly handle any oddities if they come up. Finally, it allows you to hot reload the configuration without dropping existing connections!

On the work done to support this on matrix-appservice-bridge, there is basic support for stating connections on the bridge but it's in early stages at the moment.

🔗Spec

Travis has been tidying up loose bits on the Matrix spec this week:

• experimenting with splitting out the "Room" specific bits of the spec into a dedicated section rather than being split between the CS and SS APIs;
• trying to pin down a formal grammar for room aliases
• ...and identifiers in general.

In practice, finalising the S2S API is now blocked on proving the implementation on Synapse; work on this will resume next week and then we'll document the end result and ship the r0 at last.  Timings are going to be completely determined by available manpower and what level of ops distractions we face (c.f. the Synapse section above...).  Whilst we're waiting for the final S2S details to get hashed out, Travis is going to be helping on Riot dev, to try to stop stuff like this, as there's no point in having the platonic ideal of a perfect spec if actual users are unable to benefit from it.

🔗#matrix-dev

#matrix-dev:matrix.org was reborn as a new room a couple of weeks ago to flush out old corrupted events, but maybe not everyone knows. Come join #matrix-dev:matrix.org, it's a starting point for all developers looking to build on the platform.  We're also rebuilding #test:matrix.org and #riot:matrix.org, although once we ship the new state resolution

🔗A sneak peek at Modular...

Finally, there's been a massive amount of work on the New Vector side of things to soft-launch Modular - a paid hosting platform for Matrix servers (and, in future, paid integrations).  At this point we're looking for early adopters who want a dedicated Riot+Synapse for communities or companies of 50 or more users - but don't want to have to run it themselves.  Modular takes the homeserver hosting we've already been providing for Status, TADHack and others, and turns it into a mass-market product.  The pricing for early adopters is over 5x cheaper than Slack, so if you've been dying to have a reliable, fast and expertly maintained homeserver without any of the headaches of admining one yourself, please head over to https://modular.im and give it a whirl and let us know how it goes!  This is also a great way to support Matrix development in general, as money from Modular will directly keep the core Matrix team funded to work on Matrix.  Once we're happy with the soft-launch and have incorporated any feedback we'll start yelling about it as loud as we can :)

🔗Matrix Live

We've had a bit of an accidental hiatus on Matrix Live thanks to getting submerged all the different project endgames happening atm (spec releases, lazy loading, Modular, Riot redesign etc), and for the last few Fridays we've got to midnight and beyond with too much still on the todo list to justify recording a video.  But to avoid completely falling behind, here's a slightly exhausted Saturday morning update instead (warning: Matthew is not a morning person).

Recently I've been working to improve some of the content on the matrix.org website.

Firstly the FAQ now has updated content and a more presentable menu.

We have a Guides Index, which includes a clarified guide list, plus links to off-site contributions from the community. It's possible to click "recommend" on these items if you've had a good experience with them. If you have documentation or guides you'd like to see added to the list, contact me on Matrix or make a pull request on the site repo.

Finally, as part of a programme to improve visibility on projects in the Matrix ecosystem, we are introducing the "Matrix Clients Matrix". This is a list of some of the most popular current Matrix clients in the ecosystem today, and should shed some light on current feature statuses! The list is not exhaustive, and if you would like to see your client project included, please contact me at the same address, or come chat in the Matrix Client Developers community room. Pretty green Features grid:

🔗The Spec

As many know, we've been aiming for the end of August to cut the first ever stable releases of the remaining APIs in the spec which have up to now been marked unstable - i.e. providing a snapshot of the spec which correctly matches the reference implementations (other than implementation bugs) and which can be used in isolation to develop production grade implementations of clients, servers, etc without need to reference any other implementations. There's been a massive sprint to pull this together, and as of the time of writing there are still PRs and commits landing every few minutes.  We'll post a full update on our progress on Monday; meanwhile you can see a sneak peek over at the August 2018 r0 project board.

Spec work has completely precluded any other backend dev this week.

🔗Half-Shot, gone but not really gone

This week we say farewell to Half-Shot, who has been working fulltime on bridges over the summer. He has managed the matrix.org bridges largely single-handedly, with a big focus on the often-volatile IRC bridge(s).

🔗Bridges

🔗matrix-appservice-irc 0.11.0

It's a big deal, and it's rolling out to IRC networks this week. Half-Shot released matrix-appservice-irc 0.11.0, with the following included:

New features & improvements:

• Cache modes internally
• Replace nicks with user pill mentions
• Kick users if we fail to create an IRC client for them on join (aka ILINE kicks)
• SASL support
• Add err_nononreg so we can announce PMs that failed
• Formatting of replies

Bug Fixes:

• Fix invalidchar nick
• Don't answer any msgtypes other than text in an admin room.
• Fix provisoner leaving users on unlink
• Fixed a bug where content of events the bridge hadn't cached were not being used in replies.
• We were calling authedRequest but the request was not mocked out.
• There was a bug involving intents in m-a-b so it was bumped

Metrics:

• Metrics for MatrixHandler - Iline Kicks
• Idle connection metrics
• QueuePool.waitingItems should use it's internal queue size

Misc:

• Section out tests, linting and coverage into separate stages for Travis

🔗WhatsApp

tulir has been working on mautrix-whatsapp bridge.

now bridges a lot more stuff, such as formatting, media and replies. I'm also almost done with desegregating users so that Matrix users join the same group chat portals rather than everyone having their own portal to the same chat

🔗Zulip chat, bridged by Zulip

Matthew discovered there is a Matrix-Zulip bridge on the Zulip side. So if you're running a Zulip server (for some reason), and want to bridge with Matrix check out the integration docs here.

🔗IRC Connection Tracker

Half-Shot created a new component to enhance the reliability of IRC-Matrix bridging:

IRC Connection Tracker is a thing now. It's a project to separate out the IRC connections from the appservice so the two can be run independently, so that restarting the appservice doesn't affect the IRC connections. It's hopefully going to allow bridge stuff to run faster when it's done.

This project is still really early stage. You can take a look at the Proposal document here.

🔗Clients

🔗Nheko 0.5.4

Not technically this week, but Nheko 0.5.4 was recently released

• The settings page now includes the device id & device fingerprint (thanks @valkum )
• The Polish translation has been updated (thanks @m4sk1n )

Get the latest builds of Nheko from bintray.

🔗Fractal

Alexandre Franke and the GNOME crew have been working on Fractal, gearing up for their upcoming 3.30 release.

Fractal 3.29.92 got released and we are freezing strings to give GNOME translators a bit of time to complete translations for 3.30 next week. Latest developments include tweaks for the title bar, misc bug fixes, a new presentation for uploaded files (that are not images, those are still displayed inline) with buttons to download or open them. Development builds are now parallel installable for easier testing and CI has been improved.

🔗Seaglass

neilalexander:

Seaglass now has some early support for inline images and attachments, and supports Quick Look. Also handles emotes and notices better. It also has version numbers now, various other little fixes and Aaron Raimist has been working on auto-update support.

Version numbers! Now when you go to download the tarball from bintray, you can see what's going on!

There's also been some work on supporting dark mode on Mojave (which looks particularly sexy) and even Touch Bar support!

🔗Riot Android v0.8.15

Riot Android v0.8.15 is on it's way to the Play Store.

🔗Changes in Riot Android 0.8.15 (2018-08-30)

MatrixSdk:

• Upgrade to version 0.9.9.

Improvements:

• Improve intent to open document (#2544)
• Avoid useless dialog for permission (#2331)
• Improve wording when exporting keys (#2289)

Other changes:

• Upgrade lib libphonenumber from v8.0.1 to 8.9.12
• Upgrade Google firebase libs

Bugfix:

• Handle \\/ at the beginning of a message to send a message starting with / (#658)
• Escape nicknames starting with a forward slash / in mentions (#2146)
• Improve management of Push feature
• MatrixError mResourceLimitExceededError is now managed in MxDataHandler (vector-im/riot-android#2547 point 2)

🔗Changes in Riot Android 0.8.14 (2018-08-27)

MatrixSdk:

• Upgrade to version 0.9.8.

Features:

• Manage server quota notices (#2440)

Improvements:

• Do not ask permission to write external storage at startup (#2483)
• Update settings icon and transparent logo for notifications and navigation drawer (#2492)
• URL previews are no longer requested from the server when displaying URL previews is disabled (PR #2514)
• Fix some plural and puzzle strings, and remove other unused ones (#2444)
• Manage System Alerts in a dedicated section

Other changes:

• Upgrade olm-sdk.aar from version 2.2.2 to version 2.3.0
• move PieFractionView from the SDK to the client (#2525)

Bugfix:

• Fix media sharing (#2530)
• Fix notification sound issue in settings (#2524)
• Disable app icon badge for "listen for event" notification (#2104)

🔗Riot iOS 0.7.3

🔗Changes in 0.7.3 (2018-08-27)

Improvements:

• Upgrade MatrixKit version (v0.8.3).

Bug fix:

• Fix input toolbar reset in RoomViewController on MXSession state change (#2006 and #2008).
• Fix user interaction disabled in master view of UISplitViewController when selecting a room (#2005).

🔗Changes in 0.7.2 (2018-08-24)

Improvements:

• Upgrade MatrixKit version (v0.8.2).
• Server Quota Notices in Riot (#1937).

Bug fix:

• User defaults: the preset application language (if any) is ignored.
• Recents: Avoid to open a room twice (it crashed on room creation on quick HSes).
• Riot-bot: Do not try to create a room with it if the user homeserver is not federated.

🔗Riot Web

There's been lots of work debugging and optimising Lazy Loading, which is edging closer to being turned on by default.  We've also been working away at improving E2E UX - starting with finishing key backup, and then improved verification, and then finally cross-signing (at last!)

🔗SDKs

🔗Ruby Matrix SDK

ananace is working on the Ruby Matrix SDK "fixing issues and documenting as I go".

🔗Matrix Android SDK

🔗Changes to Matrix Android SDK in 0.9.9 (2018-08-30)

Improvements:

• Clear unreachable Url when clearing media cache (vector-im/riot-android#2479)
• "In reply to" is not clickable on Riot Android yet. Make it a plain text (vector-im/riot-android#2469)

Bugfix:

• Removing room from 'low priority' or 'favorite' does not work (vector-im/riot-android#2526)
• MatrixError mResourceLimitExceededError is now managed in MxDataHandler (vector-im/riot-android#2547)

API Change:

• MxSession constructor is now private. Please use MxSession.Builder() to create a MxSession

🔗Changes to Matrix Android SDK in 0.9.8 (2018-08-27)

Features:

• Manage server_notices tag and server quota notices (vector-im/riot-android#2440)

Bugfix:

• Room aliases including the '@' and '=' characters are now recognized as valid (vector-im/riot-android#2079, vector-im/riot-android#2542)
• Room name and topic can be now set back to empty (vector-im/riot-android#2345)

API Change:

• Remove PieFractionView class from the Matrix SDK. This class is now in Riot sources (#336)
• MXMediasCache.createTmpMediaFile() methods are renamed to createTmpDecryptedMediaFile()
• MXMediasCache.clearTmpCache() method is renamed to clearTmpDecryptedMediaCache()
• Add MXMediasCache.moveToShareFolder() to move a tmp decrypted file to another folder to prevent deletion during sharing. New API MXMediasCache.clearShareDecryptedMediaCache() can be called when the application is resumed. (vector-im/riot-android#2530)

🔗Matrix iOS SDK

🔗Changes in Matrix iOS SDK in 0.11.3 (2018-08-27)

Bug fix:

• MXJSONModel: Manage m.server_notice empty tag sent due to a bug server side (PR #556).

🔗Changes in Matrix iOS SDK in 0.11.2 (2018-08-24)

Improvements:

• MXSession: Add the supportedMatrixVersions method getting versions of the specification supported by the homeserver.
• MXRestClient: Add testUserRegistration to check earlier if a username can be registered.
• MXSession: Add MXSessionStateSyncError state and MXSession.syncError to manage homeserver resource quota on /sync requests (vector-im/riot-ios/issues/1937).
• MXError: Add kMXErrCodeStringResourceLimitExceeded to manage homeserver resource quota (vector-im/riot-ios/issues/1937).
• MXError: Define constant strings for keys and values that can be found in a Matrix JSON dictionary error.
• Tests: MXHTTPClient_Private.h: Add method to set fake delay in HTTP requests.

Bug fix:

• People tab is empty in the share extension (vector-im/riot-ios/issues/1988).
• MXError: MXError lost NSError.userInfo information.

🔗Tools

🔗matrix-to-riot

Half-Shot shared a handy Firefox extension: matrix-to-riot

This is a tiny webextension to forward matrix.to links to an open Riot tab.

Really useful if you often click matrix.to links and find yourself needing to URL-hack to get to where you need to be.

🔗That's all for now

We're going to shift this week's Matrix Live to Monday, alongside the upcoming blog post on the spec release progress. Have a good weekend!

Thank you to Half-Shot for all your work on Bridges over the last months and beyond. Today is your last day, but I'm sure we'll see you again before long. Text below is from Half-Shot.

---

Today marks my last day of my 3 month internship at New Vector (the startup which hires many of the core Matrix team). For those of you who haven't been reading Ben's fabulous blog posts, I've been working exclusively on bridges; in particular the IRC bridge.

Tasked with the goal of making it crash less and run faster, I hope that the evidence is visible and people are generally having a better experience on it!

Some stats pulled from the matrix-appservice-irc repo:

• 39 PRs closed (4 remain open)
• 27 issues closed, 27 issues opened.
• 334 commits, averaging 7.6 commits a PR.

Commits this year:

---

But aside from showing off some stats, I wanted to mention all the new features:

• Replies on Matrix translate well to IRC, or as well as IRC allows.
• People mentioning your IRC nick now ping your matrix user, finally!
• So. Many. Metrics. Everything you wanted to know about the internals of the bridge, but were too afraid to --inspect.
• Not spamming homeservers with join requests on startup (it makes for a happy ops team).
• No longer are IRC users shackled to a "(IRC)" extension on their displayname, you can be who you want with group flairs!
• Support for node 4 has been dropped, and support for 6,8 and 10 has been assured.

On the matrix-appservice-bridge side, I optimised some calls to cache locally and avoid hitting the homeserver too often, and disabling presence for homeservers that don't support it.

There are future plans to make bridging more visible to Matrix Clients as a first class citizen. Ideas like speccing a state event (MSC1410) so that bridges can interact with each other properly and clients can create full bridge management views which are still decentralised from an integration manager.

I'd like to give a shoutout to Travis who has reviewed nearly all my changes that have made their way into the bridge, on top of all the other tasks he has on his plate. And of course a thank you to all of the Matrix team who have been very supportive during my time here.

🔗Synapse 0.33.3

Big week for Synapse: v0.33.3 was released this week. You'll find preparation for support for Lazy Loading and Room Versioning, lots of bugfixes, and a great contribution from vojeroen: support for sending SNI over federation for vhosted servers. More complete change log here, features below:

• Add support for the SNI extension to federation TLS connections. Thanks to @vojeroen! (#3439)
• Add /_media/r0/config (#3184)
• speed up /members API and add at and membership params as per MSC1227 (#3568)
• implement summary block in /sync response as per MSC688 (#3574)
• Add lazy-loading support to /messages as per MSC1227 (#3589)
• Add ability to limit number of monthly active users on the server (#3633)
• Support more federation endpoints on workers (#3653)
• Basic support for room versioning (#3654)
• Ability to disable client/server Synapse via conf toggle (#3655)
• Ability to whitelist specific threepids against monthly active user limiting (#3662)
• Add some metrics for the appservice and federation event sending loops (#3664)
• Where server is disabled, block ability for locked out users to read new messages (#3670)
• set admin uri via config, to be used in error messages where the user should contact the administrator (#3687)
• Synapse's presence functionality can now be disabled with the "use_presence" configuration option. (#3694)
• For resource limit blocked users, prevent writing into rooms (#3708)

Ananace has upgraded his K8s-optimized Synapse image to 0.33.3

🔗Spec

• A large chunk of e2e has landed in the spec, largely thanks to Zil0's work. There are still some things left, but the main bits related to sending encrypted messages is in there. Attachments and key sharing are being reviewed today
• TravisR progressed on Push, Application Services, and Client-Server APIs.
• To follow along with progress, the best place to look is the August 2018 r0 tracker.

🔗E2E

Key backups are being worked on, and we've had some new thoughts on key verification.

🔗ru-matrix.org

Well are you?

Alexey and ma1uta have a new Russian-language community wiki available at https://ru-matrix.org. This:

accumulates Russian translates of Matrix FAQ and manuals, and other info about Matrix in Russian. Also we starts a public Matrix Synapse server for Russian users with free open registration

Russian Matrix users: feel free to add and complement articles in our wiki to make Matrix more friendly for Russian users.

🔗Client News

🔗Seaglass

neilalexander has been on a roll the last few weeks working on Seaglass, the macOS-native client:

Seaglass now has support for creating, joining and leaving rooms, and accepting/rejecting room invites, redacting messages, improvements to the room settings pages, timestamps, some visual tweaks, lots of bug fixes, early support for detecting failed message sends, scrolling improvements

🔗Matrique

Black Hat continues work on Matrique, a glossy Qt client:

Typing notification and desktop notification of Matrique are working, plus other improvements

See the latest commits here.

🔗Riot Web

Lazy Loading (LL) is available on develop behind the LABS flag, and is being polished. It will probably not make it to next release, but it's progressing!

🔗Riot Mobile

New releases are imminent for both Android and iOS:

• iOS: bug fixes and Lazy Loading in settings
• Android: bug fixes, better management of permission requests at startup

🔗Shared Secret Auth and Matrix Corporal

Slavi has been working on several operations tools for Synapse. Firstly Shared Secret Auth password provider module for Matrix Synapse.

It allows external systems (which know the shared secret) to easily obtain access tokens for any user hosted on the homeserver. This is incredibly useful for all sorts of automation (no more pre-generated access tokens or plain-text passwords).

With this tool, you can pass a mxid, and get back an access_token for that user. With this, you can do whatever actions would normally be done with a token. For example, you for a new starter at a company, you could join a set of rooms known to be needed by new starters.

Support room for Shared Secret Auth: #matrix-synapse-shared-secret-auth:devture.com

Next, he has released Matrix Corporal, reconciliator and gateway for a managed Matrix server:

It's a way to take control of Matrix (Synapse) in a corporate (or other such) environment.
Based on a configuration policy (generated by an external system, like your intranet), it can auto-create and auto-disable users, keep their profile and authentication details to date, auto-join/leave users to communities and rooms, etc.
It's also meant to sit in front of the Matrix Synapse Client API, inspecting and allowing/denying requests, in accordance with the configuration policy (preventing people from leaving certain rooms/communities, preventing them from messing around with their profile details, etc.)

Support room for Matrix Corporal: #matrix-corporal:devture.com

Note that Slavi also maintains matrix-docker-ansible-deploy, which can deploy these projects along with Synapse itself.

🔗Bots

🔗twimbot

I was extremely young when I first read and understood Larry Wall's explanation about the virtue of laziness, but I did not expect it to lead here. Cadair has created (I think inspired by an idea from TravisR), a "twimbot". This bot works in conjunction with opsdroid and the opsdroid connector-matrix - it works by storing selected messages from #twim:matrix.org in room state. In this way, it either assists the author by making it easier to produce the blog post you're reading, or it coldly replaces the author, leading to his sacking and penury. To view updates currently held by the bot, join #twim_updates:cadair.com.

🔗Hashtag bot

When he's not working away on the Matrix Spec, TravisR continues to work on less [essential|sane] Matrix projects. This week we have @hashtag:t2bot.io, a bot that converts #hashtags to Matrix groups.

Why? Because why not. Source available on github: https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-hashtag-bot

🔗Bridges

🔗matrix-appservice-bridge and matrix-appservice-irc

Half-Shot will only be working full time with the Matrix Core team for another week (!!!), but until then he's going full-speed with bridge work. First matrix-appservice-irc:

Just pushed out matrix-appservice-irc 0.11.0-rc3 which contains a lot of nice things. The full changelog is there, hoping to get some of this tested and running on the matrix.org servers soon, but initial testing looks good :)

Having worked so much on IRC bridging the last few months, Half-Shot has this week managed to make improvements to matrix-appservice-bridge:

Released matrix-appservice-bridge 1.6.0 which contains mostly things I was writing for the irc bridge and factored out instead. There's a couple of goodies like automatic caching of profiles/events, and getEvent as a way to fetch events from the homeserver without fiddling with context.

Full changelog: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/blob/1.6.0/CHANGES.md

Some Intent operations now cache requests that would otherwise fall through to the homeserver which can be expensive. This is configurable for Intents via the opts.caching.ttl and size options. AgeCounters now allow you to set your own time period buckets. Added a new function Intent.getEvent which will fetch events from the homeserver without any context information, which should be quick. MembershipCache is now exposed to let folks read and write to the cache while also letting the bridge access it.

a release: Fix issue where roomState would fail. b release: Fix issue where we were calling this.intent inside intent like fools! c release: Fix issue where some stole js-sdk code was not checked thoroughly.

🔗WhatsApp

tulir announces that mautrix-whatsapp "is now somewhat usable for basic chatting".

It uses the go-whatsapp library to talk with the WhatsApp Web API. Using the web API means that you'll still need WhatsApp on your phone connected to the internet, but it also means you won't get banned for using the bridge.
The bridge is still very alpha, but basic message bridging and some advanced features already work. There's a features & roadmap document about that.

To come chat about the WhatsApp bridge: #whatsapp:maunium.net.

🔗mxtoot

mxtoot is a Matrix-Mastodon bot from ma1uta, creator of Jeon and the ecosystem around it.

There were two releases last week:

0.4.6 with additional commands (follow, unfollow, mute, unmute, block, unblock users, show followers and followings of the specified user) and a little bugfix.

0.4.7 is out now, which increases the length of messages to 4000 characters.

🔗GSOC is finished!

GSOC 2018 has been valuable for everyone involved!

• Thank you zil0 for all your work on the Matrix Python SDK, E2E and and spec work.
• Thank you APWhiteHat: lots of work on dendrite, including a bunch of stuff on federation, as well as typing notifications!
• and thank you to Cadair for helping to organising it!

🔗The Construct using asynchronous disk IO

Jason writes:

the Construct has advanced to fully asynchronous disk IO in a single-threaded environment.
RocksDB is a highly configurable and customizable database with a very large callback surface to support many different environments, which is good to connect it with something like AIO.
Normally RocksDB gets its performance from concurrent standard POSIX system calls (blocking IO) with multiple threads. The callback surface and its internals are not specifically suited for deviating from the pthread model. However I hacked RocksDB and tricked it into believing that my userspace contexts, which mimic the std::thread/pthread interface, are threads.
This is an example of a RocksDB callback to read from a file, it expects this callback to return immediately (i.e as soon as the kernel returns from a blocking read(2).) Except, where I call fs::read() that is actually a stack-suspension which makes a request to linux AIO where the stack resumes after AIO has called back with the data (see: https://github.com/jevolk/charybdis/blob/master/ircd/aio.cc)
No modifications to the internals of RocksDB were necessary. The Construct is being developed here: https://github.com/jevolk/charybdis.

🔗Community Guides Index

Some weeks ago I asked for suggestions for content to add to a "Community Guides Index". There was not a wave of feedback, but we have enough collected content to be able to share a first pass of this Index. Check out the content there, and please please contact me if you have articles, videos or anything else you'd like to see included. Of course, if you'd like to produce some content and have it included, that would be great too! Ideas for missing articles:

• any content in a language other than English
• DevOps, how to use k8s or ansible to install Synapse
• how to use the Application Services API to make a bot

🔗OggCamp 2018

OggCamp last weekend was great - massive thank you to Jon for organising and running the show - we love your work!

Presentations from Ben and Half-Shot seemed to go down well, we all chatted with Open Source fans and generally flew the flag for Matrix.

🔗New Rooms

• tulir has enough projects that he has created #:maunium.net, for any project of his that doesn't have it's own room
• Support room for Shared Secret Auth: #matrix-synapse-shared-secret-auth:devture.com
• Support room for Matrix Corporal: #matrix-corporal:devture.com
• If you prefer the cold output of a machine, #twim_updates:cadair.com shows you the updates as they're posted in #twim:matrix.org.
• WhatsApp bridge: #whatsapp:maunium.net

🔗So long…

Hope you had a good week, hope you enjoyed reading this post! Amandine is back after some needed vacation time, and has this week's Matrix Live below.

All the threes, Synapse 0.33.3!

This release brings together a lot of bugfixes, and also some preparation for support for Lazy Loading and Room Versioning.

We also have, as a great contribution from @vojeroen, SNI extension support! With v0.33.3, Synapse now supports sending SNI over federation for vhosted servers, which resolves this long-standing request.

As always, you can get the new update from https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases/tag/v0.33.3 or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse.

🔗Features

• Add support for the SNI extension to federation TLS connections. Thanks to @vojeroen! (#3439)
• Add /_media/r0/config (#3184)
• speed up /members API and add at and membership params as per MSC1227 (#3568)
• implement summary block in /sync response as per MSC688 (#3574)
• Add lazy-loading support to /messages as per MSC1227 (#3589)
• Add ability to limit number of monthly active users on the server (#3633)
• Support more federation endpoints on workers (#3653)
• Basic support for room versioning (#3654)
• Ability to disable client/server Synapse via conf toggle (#3655)
• Ability to whitelist specific threepids against monthly active user limiting (#3662)
• Add some metrics for the appservice and federation event sending loops (#3664)
• Where server is disabled, block ability for locked out users to read new messages (#3670)
• set admin uri via config, to be used in error messages where the user should contact the administrator (#3687)
• Synapse's presence functionality can now be disabled with the "use_presence" configuration option. (#3694)
• For resource limit blocked users, prevent writing into rooms (#3708)

🔗Bugfixes

• Fix occasional glitches in the synapse_event_persisted_position metric (#3658)
• Fix bug on deleting 3pid when using identity servers that don't support unbind API (#3661)
• Make the tests pass on Twisted < 18.7.0 (#3676)
• Don't ship recaptcha_ajax.js, use it directly from Google (#3677)
• Fixes test_reap_monthly_active_users so it passes under postgres (#3681)
• Fix mau blocking calculation bug on login (#3689)
• Fix missing yield in synapse.storage.monthly_active_users.initialise_reserved_users (#3692)
• Improve HTTP request logging to include all requests (#3700, #3723)
• Avoid timing out requests while we are streaming back the response (#3701)
• Support more federation endpoints on workers (#3705, #3713)
• Fix "Starting db txn 'get_all_updated_receipts' from sentinel context" warning (#3710)
• Fix bug where state_cache cache factor ignored environment variables (#3719)

🔗Deprecations and Removals

• The Shared-Secret registration method of the legacy v1/register REST endpoint has been removed. For a replacement, please see the admin/register API documentation. (#3703)

🔗Internal Changes

• The test suite now can run under PostgreSQL. (#3423)
• Refactor HTTP replication endpoints to reduce code duplication (#3632)
• Tests now correctly execute on Python 3. (#3647)
• Sytests can now be run inside a Docker container. (#3660)
• Port over enough to Python 3 to allow the sytests to start. (#3668, #3732)
• Update docker base image from alpine 3.7 to 3.8. (#3669)
• Rename synapse.util.async to synapse.util.async_helpers to mitigate async becoming a keyword on Python 3.7. (#3678)
• Synapse's tests are now formatted with the black autoformatter. (#3679)
• Implemented a new testing base class to reduce test boilerplate. (#3684)
• Rename MAU prometheus metrics (#3690)
• add new error type ResourceLimit (#3707)
• Logcontexts for replication command handlers (#3709)
• Update admin register API documentation to reference a real user ID. (#3712)

This feels like a bumper (extra big) post, so let's get straight into it!

🔗Spec

TravisR continues to plow through work in documenting, clarifying and confirming the spec. You can check out his project on Github: August 2018 r0, which should give an idea of both the scale of the project and the amount of work which has been done. Rather than list out individual items as I have been, please take a look at that project, and come chat in #matrix-spec:matrix.org if you'd like to contribute.

🔗Clients

🔗Riot web

Some exciting things on Riot Web this week!

Bruno has merged his work on lazy loading room members lists, which should mean we see some big performance improvements, especially in larger rooms. You can expect to see that released on /develop soon.

He has also just started to work on the riot redesign, and has begun on some of the more visible changes like resizeable panels:

More news on the redesign to come soon!

🔗nheko 0.5.3 released

nheko 0.5.3 was released this week. From the changelog:

Features

• Add option to disable desktop notifications
• Allow user to configure join rules for a room
• Add tab-completion for usernames

Improvements

• Remove the space gap taken by the typing notifications
• Remove hover event from emoji picker
• Add tooltips for the message indicators
• Fix compilation on FreeBSD
• Update Polish translation
• Small modal improvements

🔗Seaglass builds being generated

Seaglass, the MacOS-native client, now has automatically generated builds available on bintray.

Seaglass is now a very usable and stable client on macOS. neilalexander has been very active this week:

Seaglass has had various updates, including the groundwork for joining and leaving channels, LOADS of crashes fixed, some more work done on avatars and E2E encryption has been fairly well road-tested now Still need to complete UI for device verification and setting E2E but it works fine in existing channels

🔗Quaternion

kitsune has been working on Quaternion:

Quaternion has gained a new way to highlight mentions - with tinted background instead of colored text. Also, the majority of work on rooms grouping is done, and the current master branch features the roomlist grouped by tag (but rooms under each tag are pretty much out of order so it's not really ready for daily use yet).

Quaternion is looking for a macOS packager - if someone has the chance to help out in this area, speak to kitsune in #QMatrixClient.

🔗Palaver

Arne came at us with the v0.2.1 release of Palaver:

A few days back Palaver has been moved to Gitlab. And I have since released v0.2.0 and v0.2.1. A runnable jar-file of the latest release can be downloaded at https://gitlab.com/MrCustomizer/palaver/tags/v0.2.1. The biggest changes in v0.2.x are the replacement of all the web views with native JavaFX components (as I don't feel comfortable embedding a whole browser stack in a desktop application) and support for read markers. There is a short YouTube video demonstrating the read marker implementation:

🔗Riot mobile

This week, work continued on Lazy Loading room members for Riot Android, and progress toward a release for 0.7.0 on iOS.

🔗neo client

f0x has begun rewriting Neo using matrix-js-sdk.

🔗Matrique

Black Hat has been working on Matrique:

Matrique now has a (basic) room management panel, a working emoji picker, an unread marker and supports playing "m.audio". It should be available at Flathub any time.

🔗SDKs and such

🔗Jeon, Jmsdk, Gene, Matrix-Jabber-Bridge: ma1uta-world

ma1uta is continuing to make progress on his Java-focused collection of APIs and SDKs, he's eagerly awaiting the r0 release of the spec (aren't we all!)

Jeon (https://github.com/ma1uta/jeon) (client2server and application api) has released on the Maven Central Repository with version 0.4.1. The next goal: the stable release of all apis 1.0.0 after the Matrix spec will be released (I hope it will be soon :)) Jmsdk (https://github.com/ma1uta/jmsdk) the client and bot SDK have released on the Maven Central Repository. Gene (https://github.com/ma1uta/gene) the lightweight api for android has released on Maven Central Repository with 0.2.1 version. So, everyone can use this libraries without additional settings and additional repositories. Matrix-Jabber-Bridge (https://github.com/ma1uta/matrix-jabber-java-bridge) the double-pupped bridge between the Matrix and Jabber. I am still working on it and I think it will be released in a few weeks.

🔗Ruby SDK v0.0.3

Ananace has tagged and released the next development version of the Ruby Matrix SDK - 0.0.3. He has plans to "finish up documentation and unit testing", with the aim of making a v1.0.0 release.

🔗mautrix-appservice-go

tulir has a new, yet-to-be-revealed project, and in support of this he's been working again on mautrix-appservice-go:

mautrix-appservice-go is a bit more active again: it now has an initial intent API similar to the one in mautrix-appservice-python (which in turn is based on the intent API from matrix-appservice-bridge).

🔗Synapse

No release this week, but Synapse has been progressing:

• Python 3 port continues at pace, we expect to have a beta to test in monolith mode rsn (Hawkowl leads this)
• Erik has been working on some federation API refactoring to make matrix.org snappier and hopes to have the new state resolution algo ready to go if not deployed late next week
• Richvdh has been looking at performance, as well as spec PRs/ Next week will be r0 work

Many Synapse maintainers are also doing huge lifts on development of the spec.

🔗Matrix support now in ntfy

Half-Shot took a rare 30-minute window away from bridge maintenance to add Matrix support to ntfy. ntfy describes itself as

A utility for sending notifications, on demand and when commands finish

but in fact, you also send notifications whenever you like by calling ntfy send from anywhere you'd normally execute shell commands. This will make it really easy to integrate Matrix notifications into any other application!

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi brought updates to matrix-docker-ansible-deploy:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy got a lot of improvements lately:

• email-sending support, so that Matrix Synapse can send email notifications (enabled by default)
• mxisd Identity Server support (enabled by default)
• more detailed docs split into various sections (used to be a single README, but with more and more features it was turning into a wall of text)
• started keeping a changelog, especially for backward-incompatible things

the playbook can now also set up and configure Maximus's matrix-synapse-rest-auth

🔗Riot Translations

@csybr:dodsorf.as and @dandellion:dodsorf.as appeared and announced that there is now a Norwegian Nynorsk translation available for Riot Web, matrix-react-sdk and riot-android. Non-Matrix-related aside: as a lazy Brit, I was vaguely aware of the cultural weight language carries in the history of Scandinavia, but didn't realise that Norway still has some fundamental differences ongoing.

🔗Giveth

The Giveth project have produced a bot built on matrix: giveth-bot

For some more context:

Giveth is re-engineering charitable giving, by creating an entirely free, open-source platform, built on the Ethereum Blockchain.

The current giveth-bot:

handles welcoming people, can answer questions and handle our crazy points dishing system to reward contributors!

🔗mautrix-telegram

mautrix-telegram now has an official 0.3.0 release. Says tulir:

No major changes since the release candidates last week, except a Telethon update that might have fixed history backfill.

🔗"The End of GSOC"

Well, it may well be the end of the Julian's GSOC 2018 experience with the Fractal project, but I think Google will continue to run the programme. Check out Julian's experience (and the large number of issues resolved!) in this blog post.

🔗OggCamp

This weekend Neil and I will be representing Matrix at OggCamp, "an unconference celebrating Free Culture, Free and Open Source Software, hardware hacking, digital rights, and all manner of collaborative cultural activities", if you will be there, come find and chat to us. We'll be the two nerdy-looking guys, so we should be easy to spot.

🔗We'll meet again…

But for now, you can watch Neil host Matrix Live below (using the fan-favourite format of walking around the office), and come chat to us in #twim:matrix.org

🔗Community Guides Index

As part of an overhaul of the documentation surrounding Matrix, I'm planning to launch a "Community Guides Index". This will be a page or section on Matrix.org with links to useful and informative documentation hosted elsewhere. If you have or know of informative articles, please let me know, or share them in #TWIM:matrix.org.

🔗Clients

🔗Seaglass

Seaglass now supports E2E rooms, leveraging matrix-ios-sdk! Additionally, maintainer neilalexander has had a productive week:

Seaglass has had many updates, including:

• message coalescing
• room settings (history/join rules and changing aliases/addresses)
• loading member list in rooms
• some starting work on loading avatars
• various UI and stability tweaks!

🔗Quaternion: new redacted message handling options

Many of you will have seen the incredible volumes of spam plaguing Freenode over the last few weeks. Kitsune has added new features to Quaternion to help:

In response to the recent spam deluge from Freenode Quaternion has got an option to tidy up your timeline after all the spam-cleaning: you can hide all redacted messages or just those that came from recently joined users (along with the join message). So as long as the spammer gets moderated, it can become inexistent for you. The experimental code doing that will eventually be moved to libQMatrixClient for the benefit of Matrique, uMatriks and other clients based on the library.

This is especially cool: moving functionality to the lib for the benefit of other projects makes me very happy. :D

🔗Fractal GSOC write-ups

Eisha and Julian finished their GSOC 2018 Fractal involvements this week, and Eisha has a blog post recounting her experience: My Final Report for GSOC 2018. Julian will have his ready too.

🔗Riot

Big updates are on the horizon for both iOS and Android, with 0.7.0 of iOS headed to TestFlight today with a release due once it's through beta & AppStore review.  More details once the releases are out!

Meanwhile on Riot/Web, Lazy Loading members is pretty much complete - just writing end-to-end tests to ensure that encryption still works well when lazy loading is enabled.  Next up is actually progressing the redesign at last!

🔗Spec status

• MSC1425/MSC1501 richvdh has been thinking about Room Versioning
  • A summary in his words: "room upgrades are implemented by creating a new room, shutting down the old one, and linking between the two"
• MSC1497 thorough discussion happening against Matthew's proposal for Capabilities support in the CS API
• MSC1442 though you may have seen it previously, I recommend anyone who is able to take a look at Erik's "State Resolution: Reloaded" proposal. This documents his "thoughts on the next iteration of the state resolution algorithm that aims to mitigate currently known attacks". It very clearly explains the current problem, and the proposed solution. While heavy, I found it really useful for helping to understand State Res and everything it affects.
• MSC1485 tulir proposes "Hint buttons in messages", which effectively provide pre-defined responses for users. This is especially valuable for Bots which can only accept a certain range of replies. I'd love to see this implemented, having long ago built a "choose your own adventure" engine using similar features from another messaging platform.

🔗APIs and SDKs

🔗Gene, minimalistic client-server api for Matrix

Not strictly this week, but we missed it before. ma1uta has been working away on his Java-based Matrix suite. Gene is a more lightweight API implementation than Jeon, covering all of the current C2S spec. A big motivation is to be able to use Gene on Android, which is not possible for Jeon due to it having more dependencies.

🔗Ruby Matrix SDK

The Ruby Matrix SDK now has auto-generated, proper documentation, thanks to Ananace. v0.0.2 is the current release, but it's under active development and v0.0.3 is expected presently.

🔗Telegram Puppeting on t2bot.io with mautrix-telegram

TravisR has rolled out tulir's mautrix-telegram bridge for everyone on t2bot.io's bridge.

This is a public trial to see how the bridge copes with multiple people puppeting their accounts. Of course, you don't need to puppet your account unless you want to. For more information on how to set this up, please visit https://t2bot.io/telegram

As part of this project, mautrix-telegram 0.3.0 release candidate was released.

🔗Informo project releases SaltStack states

vabd, from the Informo project, arrived to say they have produced "a set of SaltStack states that includes deploying fully working Synapse homeservers: https://github.com/Informo/salt-states"

They introduce the Informo project:

Informo's a project (still a work in progress, currently) that aims at bypassing censorship of information on the Internet, by basically having news items go through a decentralised and federated network made of Matrix homeservers. Since we need to host nodes to this network (at least for testing purposes), we've worked on a working and automated infrastructure using SaltStack, which involved hand-writing a few SaltStack states, including states handling the installation and configuration of working Synapse homeservers. In the spirit of giving back to the community, we're publishing all of those hand-written states (available at the GH link above) under the GPLv3 license. If you want to discuss with us about what we're doing, or this topic specifically, please join us in #discuss:weu.informo.network ? The project is still pretty much a WIP and the technical specifics (even the ones we already implemented in our projects) are still under discussion and subject to changes (as mentioned in the GH repo's readme). All I can add for sure to what we already say is that we'll be working in partnership with NGOs to promote the project in countries where the press is heavily censored, and we're planning on implementing a cryptographic verification chain of some sort to reduce the risk of intentional disinformation.

🔗Synapse 0.33.2

Synapse 0.33.2 is out now:

The release focuses on performance, notable highlights include reducing CPU consumption through speeding up state delta calculations and reducing I/O through lazily loading state on the master process Separately work continues on our python 3 port and we hope to have something concrete to trial very soon – we're really excited about this and expect step change improvements in CPU and memory use.

Latest synapse is now available on Debian thanks to andrewsh.

🔗Room Tagging

This is not from this week at all, other than that it was new information to me. Actually it's ancient, matrix-wise, but I think it's interesting for those who don't know! Although Riot doesn't have an interface for adding custom room tags ("Favourites" and "Low Priority" come by default), Matrix supports arbitrary strings as room tags, and will display them if you add them via another CS API call. To facilitate this TravisR created a small script, tag_room.sh, which makes it very simple to set your own room tags.

🔗FIN

That's all folks! Remember, lots of progress is happening with the Spec, if you want to be involved or follow along the best place to start is by joining #matrix-spec:matrix.org.

No Matrix Live this week due to vacation and general scheduling fun; sorry!

If you have documentation or articles related to matrix, let me know!

We'll meet again!