Ben Parsons

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

We missed it at the time, but wanted to share in TWIM. Terence Eden, noted UK technologist, shared a thorough, compelling argument for the UK Government to use Matrix as a foundation for the digital workplace.

This is a long read, but a detailed argument. Also please note that this is was produced for the purpose of an MSc course of study, it was not commissioned for any other purpose, as the preamble makes clear.

Next, a high billing for Beeper this week, who have been working hard and getting product out!

Beeper update

Tulir reported:

It's been a month since our last update. A lot of the work since then has been on making everything more reliable, but we've also added new features to our clients and started making some new bridges.

Desktop

• Added thread UI for Slack-bridged rooms. Internally they're just replies like before, but the client will intelligently collapse replies in Slack rooms into threads.

• Merged upstream Element additions like voice messages.

  • Also merged some features that aren't in Element yet, like Giphy integration.

iOS

• Released Beeper iOS to Testflight.

Android

• Added grouping rooms by chat network based on the m.bridge state event. The UI is similar to spaces, but they're not actual Matrix spaces (yet).

• Added support for Android 11's "conversation" notifications.

Bridges

• Android Messages is turning out difficult to reverse-engineer to a sufficiently reliable level, so we're building a new SMS bridge into our Android app. It'll also be available as a standalone open-source app, which already exists at https://gitlab.com/beeper/android-sms (but doesn't have any setup instructions yet).

• We've funded development of a LinkedIn bridge. sumner will post a more detailed update about that.

We're hiring React, iOS, Android and SRE/Devops engineers. If you're interested, check out https://angel.co/company/beeperhq or DM Eric Migicovsky.

Dept of Spec 📜

MSC state changes:

• "MSC3262 aPAKE authentication" was created.
• "MSC2918: Refresh tokens" was proposed for FCP

Bruno has been working on aggregations as part of his work for Hydrogen. He reported:

I've been cleaning up the relations MSCs, finding a balance between documenting the current state and not losing track of community concerns. I've started with MSC 2674 which is the very basic format of relations, and will move on to annotations/reactions (MSC 2677) next week.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad announced:

We're pleased to announce the release of Synapse 1.37.1 this week, which includes mitigations for the recent distributed spam attack across the public Matrix network. We advise upgrading as soon as possible.

Otherwise, Synapse 1.37 highlights include:

• A new, generic interface for extension modules (See this week's Matrix Live for more info!)

• Completed server-side support for MSC2403: Add "knock" feature and Room Version 7.

• An experimental implementation of MSC2716: Incrementally importing history into existing rooms (#9247) as part of Element's work to fully integrate Gitter into Matrix.

• A more nuanced implementation of Synapse's optional user-interactive authentication ("UIA") grace period (#10184).

...and a bunch of smaller bug fixes and performance improvements.

Check out the blog post for more.

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

Got another week of Helm Chart updates, with the Synapse chart getting a bunch of worker improvements and additional configurability, as well as being updated to first 1.37.0 and then 1.37.1

Dept of Bridges 🌉

LinkedIn <-> Matrix Bridge

sumner reported:

I'm excited to announce that I started working on a new bridge for bringing LinkedIn messages to Matrix! It's currently in the early stages of development and not production-ready. The current feature set includes: backfill from LinkedIn, user name and profile picture sync, message sending from Matrix -> LinkedIn, and real-time message puppetting from LinkedIn -> Matrix. There's much more to come, and you can join #linkedin-matrix:nevarro.space for updates. Development is being funded by Beeper, and is being designed with integration into Beeper as it's primary goal. However, the bridge is open source (Apache 2.0) and will be available to self-host. The source code is here: https://github.com/sumnerevans/linkedin-matrix.

Great work from Sumner! Glad to see people have the option to bridge their LinkedIn messages!

matrix-puppeteer-line update

Fair reported:

matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.

Better LINE->Matrix read receipt bridging is now supported in the testing branch! The bridge now checks all LINE chats (not just the most recently-used one) to see if messages you sent have been read (in LINE). This works by cycling through all LINE chats where the final message is posted by you and doesn't have a "Read" marker on it yet (or for multi-user chats, if your last message hasn't been read by everyone in the room).

With that, I'll consider the bridge to be in Early Beta! 🎉 I'm now testing the bridge for myself to iron out a few kinks, and am preparing a PR to the matrix.org webpage to have this listed on https://matrix.org/bridges/.

Discussion:

#matrix-puppeteer-line:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/issues

Matrix Adapter for WebThings 0.4.0

Christian told us:

This addon for the WebThings gateway lets you send Matrix messages when your IoT fridge is empty – or whatever you have connected to your gateway.

The update fixes predefined messages getting sent to the default room and is the first to be tested against gateway version 1.0.0. https://gitlab.com/webthings/matrix-adapter or in the addon list of your WebThings gateway

Dept of Clients 📱

NeoChat

Carl Schwan announced:

This week, NeoChat gained support for a Global Menu on Plasma and macOS. Aside from that, we fixed a few crashes.

But the biggest news of the week is that we will get funding from NLNet to implement E2EE support in Quotient and NeoChat as part of their grants to improve the internet. We will report on our progress on that front here!

This is terrific news, big thanks to NLNet for making this choice!

FluffyChat

FluffyChat is the cutest cross-platform matrix client. It is available for Android, iOS, Web and Desktop.

krille said:

FluffyChat 0.33.0 has been released.

Just a more minor bugfixing release with some design changes in the settings, updated missing translations and for rebuilding the arm64 Linux Flatpak.

Features

• redesigned settings

• Updated translations - thanks to all translators

• display progress bar in first sync

• changed Linux window default size

• update some dependencies

Fixes

• Favicon on web

• Database not storing files correctly

• Linux builds for arm64

• a lot of minor bugs

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) offered:

Hello World! I am here to bring you Nheko news!

We merged the Spaces branch, which means Nheko master can now show some spaces. Peeking unjoined rooms, nesting spaces and creating them should be coming soon. We are also looking into how to fit knocking into the UI (we already rendered incoming knocks in the timeline for a while).

You can also now edit still pending messages, which should help if your server is slow and you notice a typo. The edit will then get queued and be sent as soon as the server acknowledges they received the original message. Apart from that there have been some improvements to the readability of the room list and some other UI elements.

Last but not least, we switched out our entire http backend from Boost to Curl. For that I wrote a simple wrapper around Curl. This fixes about 10 issues around connection shutdown, brings proxy support, http/2 and http/3 support and in general makes Nheko crash less and reduces latency a LOT! This will obviously cause some pain for packagers, but I hope it isn't too bad. Some of the issues this fixes only had 2 digits in our bugtracker and one was even filed by benpa!

Have a nice weekend everyone! ♥

Fractal

Alexandre Franke told us:

Chris tweaked the UI in various places. It’s a lot of small details that together make for a smoother experience. I encourage you to read the details in the description of !782. This is the only MR that landed since last week, but our people have been hard at work nonetheless. Kai blogged about his journey working on the search bar of doom and Alejandro shared his own struggle. In the meantime, Julian’s work has mostly happened upstream in matrix-rust-sdk.

Element Clients

Updates sent by the teams

Delight team

• Spaces:
  • Research: We’ve been reaching out to people to walk us through how they use Spaces now and what they’d like to see different to help us learn and iterate;
  • Restricted room access: Some good progress towards shipping improved team spaces

Web

• v1.7.32-rc.1 is on https://staging.element.io/ in advance of release on Monday - please test!
• Some major progress on conversion to TypeScript, finding some bugs along the way. The main source of the element-desktop project is now fully converted to TypeScript!
• A styled player component for the audio messages feature, available in the labs section.

iOS

• v1.4.4 (https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/releases/tag/v1.4.4) is available in TestFlight. It should be on the App Store on Monday
• It contains a bug fix for Single Sign-On (SSO)
• We started to attack some papercuts. Expect more in the coming weeks.

Android

• We are actively implementing the highly expected voice message feature!
• A release candidate v1.1.12 will be available during the week-end
• We are focusing to fix some crashes, to improve the stability of the application

Vocie messages!

kazv

tusooa reported:

kazv is a matrix client based on libkazv.

Talk to us on #kazv:tusooa.xyz .

Updates

0. @tusooa:tusooa.xyz fixed a thread-safety issue that caused crashes. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/kazv/-/merge_requests/6

1. We now have a new developer @nannanko:tusooa.xyz . She implemented a login failure prompt for kazv. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/kazv/-/merge_requests/4

You can get the current AppImage build at https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/kazv/-/jobs/611/artifacts/browse .

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-bot-sdk v0.5.19

TravisR announced:

v0.5.19 of the matrix-bot-sdk is out now with fixed power level checking (with an added utility function), improved default error logging, and a typo fix in reply creation. Check it out, and visit #matrix-bot-sdk:t2bot.io for help & support.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Matrix Navigator 0.1.2

Christian told us:

It's an alpha-stage webapp for developers to replace curl for room state administration.

This week I added features for better member management, including kick, ban and unban. https://gitlab.com/jaller94/matrix-navigator

Dept of Services 🚀

GoMatrixHosting v0.5.1 🚀

Michael told us:

Exciting new update, we can now wireguard an on-premises server from just about anywhere and make it work with the AWX system. This is useful when your server doesn't have a static or public IP address, or when some other networking issue prevents you from running a Matrix service on it.

Follow of on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/GoMatrixHosting

Or come say hello on Matrix: #general:gomatrixhosting.com

* Add '00 - Create Wireguard Server' template for AWX admin to provision Wireguard servers that on-premises servers can use to connect.

* Subscription involved can view an additional '0 - {{ subscription_id }} - Provision Wireguard Server' template.
* Add /docs/Setup_Wireguard_Server.md guide.

* Add onboarding script for Windows 10 users.
* Raise maximum download size to 200MB.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Mjolnir

TravisR offered:

Mjolnir is a moderation bot for communities on Matrix. It helps with a lot of the actions covered by the moderation guide, including capabilities to apply bans from other trusted communities. It's still a bit terse in its documentation, but if you're looking for a featureful moderation bot then it's worth a go.

In related news, Mjolnir v0.1.18 is out with a couple quality of life fixes - if you've been bothered by the log spam, it's now fixed :)

Dept of Guides 🧭

Matrix Limits

Ryan said:

I started a tiny repo to collect various limits and related factoids about the Matrix specification and implementations. I hope that distilling and summarising such things at glance will make it easier to see what is and is not possible.

If you know of more that should be listed, please contribute! 🙂

Self hosting your own Matrix server on a Raspberry Pi

Peter Roberts announced:

@ed:selfhostingblog.com of theselfhostingblog.com has written a guide on getting started with Synapse on a Raspberry Pi using Docker Compose. You can read it here.

Public Rooms News 🏟️

Matrix Science Reading Group

Florian said:

Together with J. Ryan Stinnett, I created the 🔖 #matrix-science-reading-group:dsn.tm.kit.edu for exchange of and on scientific papers, books and related resources on all things Matrix: Topics ranging from peer-to-peer broadcast overlay networks over conflict-free replicated data types to end-to-end encryption. Investigating security, performance, deployability, or whatever else is interesting, by methods from observation over simulation to formal verification. 🎓️ Please join if you want to read about papers that might not be Matrix-related enough to make it into TWIM, or want to engage in the discussion. 😊 The resulting papers are collected at: https://github.com/jryans/awesome-matrix#research

German Element translation feedback

Libexus announced:

Hallo deutschsprachige Matrix-Community!

#element-uebersetzung-feedback:matrix.org ist ein Raum für Feedback zur deutschsprachigen Übersetzung aller Element-Clients.

Hast du einen Fehler gefunden, ist etwas unklar oder hast du ein Anliegen an uns? Dann schreibe es gerne hier hinein!

Jederzeit willkommen sind natürlich auch neue Übersetzerinnen und Übersetzer. Joint dazu einfach #element-translation-de:matrix.org, #element-translations:matrix.org und lest euch den Translation Guide durch.

---

Hello German-speaking Matrix community!

#element-uebersetzung-feedback:matrix.org is a room for feedback about the German translation of Element.

Have you found a mistake, is something unclear or do you have a suggestion? Please write it there!

Also, we are always happy about new translators (for all languages!). Just join #element-translations:matrix.org and have a look at the translation guide on how to get started!

Room of the week

timokoesters told us:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

---

This week's room is: #fossmaintainers:matrix.org

"A public space for Free/Open Source Software maintainers to swap notes and discuss their craft. Inspired by https://github.com/github/maintainerweek, all maintainers welcome!"

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, tell me in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

• Valere presents the latest Spaces UX
• Neil Alexander shows off P2P progress
• ChristianP shows Matrix Navigator
• Eric Eastwood (Gitter fellow!) shows off MSC2716 (message history batches)
• Rich vdH presents Jaeger for Synapse profiling
• Bruno presents reactions in Hydrogen

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Room of the week

timokoesters said:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

---

This week's space is: RPG

Biggest room: #D&D:matrix.org

"Casual chat about Dungeons & Dragons, tabletop RPG, OSR, DM tips, player stories, world building, and more."

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, tell me in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa told us:

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3173: Expose stripped state events to any potential joiner
• MSC2778: Providing authentication method for appservice users

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC3255: Use SRV record for homeservers discovery by clients

Spec Updates

Spaces work continues with MSC3083 (Restricted room memberships), which will include a new room version due to the new join_rule of `restricted. On the other side of things, MSC3245 (voice messages) and by extension extensible events, is moving as the implementation work is pushed forward. Lots of activity on MSC3215 (improved moderation tooling) as well which will no doubt prove to be invaluable as the Matrix network continues to grow.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timokoesters reported:

After some more work on swappable database backends, I worked on a few small features:

• User directory improvements (show remote users and appservice puppets)

• /state endpoint

• /event_auth endpoint

• Filter our room directory based on the search term

• /search over multiple rooms

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

anoa said:

Knock, knock TWIM! It's a new week, and I'm filling in for Dan today to bring you an update on Synapse's latest progress!

Hot off the heels of Synapse 1.36.0’s release last week, we’ve put out 1.37.0rc1! It includes the long-awaited “room knocking” feature (note that no clients currently support knocking), a completely reworked pluggable modules interface and experimental support for backfilling history into rooms. With knocking support in, this means Synapse now has support for room v7!

Among those exciting updates, we also have the usual churn of bug fixes and improvements across the board. Many updates to the documentation as well as we lean into using the new Synapse documentation site more and more. Please help us test the RC if you can!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

This week too sees some Kubernetes chart updates, with element-web being updated to 1.7.31 and matrix-synapse getting some fixes for envvars and mounts, as well as some improvements to the ingress support.

YunoHost

Mamie offered:

YunoHost is an operating system aiming for the simplest administration of a server, and therefore democratize self-hosting.

Synapse integration had been updated to 1.34.0 (1.35.1 available in branch testing)

Element Web integration had been updated to 1.7.28 (1.7.29 available in branch testing)

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Gitter

Eric Eastwood offered:

It has been several months since we last updated you on MSC2716 for backfilling historical messages into existing rooms but we made some big progress this week and merged an experimental Synapse implementation taking us one step closer to importing the massive archive of messages on Gitter over to Matrix! This iteration will only make the historical messages visible on the local homeserver but we have plans to make them federate in the next. It's still early days on this before we can actually use it on Gitter. Here is a proof of concept to get your juices flowing:

Dept of Clients 📱

Hydrogen

A minimal Matrix chat client, focused on performance, offline functionality, and broad browser support. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/

Bruno said:

Released Hydrogen 0.2.0 with:

• support for receiving and sending reactions ❤👍🚀
• adds a right panel with basic room information, thanks to @MidhunSureshR! Watch this space in the near future for more functionality soon.

Loving Hydrogen right now. It's fast and works great! See Bruno present reactions as one of the Matrix Live demos (scroll up)

NeoChat

Carl Schwan announced:

In terms of code, this week we didn't get much activity. The only noteworthy news is that we can now send spoilers, and use two new commands: /tableflip and /unflip thanks to Smitty van Bodegom.

Aside from that, we had 2 productive BoFs during Akademy 2021. The first one was about creating a library with shared chat visual components for KDE's chat apps: NeoChat for Matrix, Tok for Telegram and Kaidan for XMPP, KDE Connect and Spacebar for SMS, ... The second BoF was more about NeoChat and Quotient and we discussed how to move forwards with some problems (e.g. non-hacky text input auto-completion) but also the roadmap around E2EE, Spaces and Widgets support. Speaking about E2EE, we will have some very good news to announce next week, stay tuned!

/me only learned about /tableflip and /unflip this today... and looking forward to this E2EE news!

Fractal

Alexandre Franke announced:

In the past couple of weeks, Alejandro and Kai started the coding period of their GSoC internship and explained on their blogs what they will be working on. Their projects are respectively to add support for multiple accounts, and to bring Fractal Next to feature parity with current stable. Read more details on their blogs, and subscribe to them to keep informed as they go!

Julian managed to land the “Explore” view, our room directory. There may be some changes down the road, but it looks good for now:

Newcomer Giuseppe De Palma removed bashisms from our git hook because they were preventing him from contributing. They then went on to tweak the history style to remove the grey background around it. They also got rid of a papercut from the login form: before his intervention, users needed to provide the full homeserver URL with the http:// or https:// scheme prefix. It will now default to HTTPS.

We also did some housekeeping work that should improve the experience for people joining us on the Fractal Next fun. After being away for a while, Christopher Davis came back with a patch to add a couple more build related directories to our .gitignore. Julian cleaned up the pseudo-milestone description that we had in the README, now that we have a proper Gitlab milestone. And finally, I added a warning on the login screen to better reflect on the Work In Progress state of the branch.

Element Clients

Updates from the teams! Android will return next week.

Delight team

• Spaces:
  • Drag and drop for reordering Spaces is now live on Android! And testable on develop for Web
  • We’ve also added labs flags to Web & Android to test a few different things, in particular
    • Toggling ‘Home’ to show all rooms, or only rooms which don’t belong to Spaces
    • Toggling to not show People in Spaces
  • Please try them out! After living with a different config for a few days, we’d love to hear your feedback!

Web

• 1.7.31 released on Monday
• Nightly builds of Element Desktop optimised for Apple silicon are now available for testing! Please give it a try and report any issues.
• Added libera.chat to room directory on develop, staging, and app. It will appear in desktop builds as well next time they update.
• On develop
  • Various CI tweaks and performance improvements
• In flight
  • Adding large account performance tests

iOS

• 1.4.2 released on Monday. 1.4.3 with the fix on wellknown on Thursday
• Fix a bug where the wellknown was no more fetched
• Device dehydration is available in the SDK
• Still good progress on voice messages

Quaternion

kitsune offered:

0.0.95 RC is out, available from the usual place at GitHub, and also as Flatpak from Flathub. The usual stabilisaton/bug fixing work, no new features compared to betas. This version is considerably better, and more stable, than 0.0.9.4 - packagers are welcome to push it as if it were the final release. Translators, please help to complete more languages: Polish is at 90%, Spanish almost 80%, and French just below 60% - you can make a difference!

Dept of Encryption 🔐

New paper: “Key Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees”

Florian offered:

Here is a scientific paper for all interested in decentralized end-to-end encryption cryptography protocols, like Matrix' Megolm, or the MLS future of Matrix: The preprint “Key Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees” by Weidner, Kleppmann et al., which will appear in the ACM CCS 2021 Conference, surveys existing centralized and decentralized end-to-end cryptography protocols, Olm/Megolm (labeled as “Matrix”) among them, and discusses why the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) IETF draft has its problems with decentralization. Following that, they come up with their own decentralized protocol, including a security and performance analysis. They improve asymptotic complexity when compared to Olm/Megolm, and the assumptions on the underlying communication layer are easily fulfilled by Matrix. They also discuss that the very good asympotic complexity of MLS cannot be reached for a decentralized end-to-end cryptography protocol.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Quotient

kitsune reported:

Last week's news actually, but libQuotient master branch can built with Qt 6 now, laying ground for the GSoC works on PyQuotient - Python bindings for libQuotient. The library has also been updated to follow the latest CS API specification, which means basic low-level support for knocking, with higher-level library API for it coming later.

🧙 Polyjuice Util

Polyjuice Client is a Matrix library for Elixir

uhoreg said:

Polyjuice Util is a library of Matrix functions for Elixir that can be used for both client-side and server-side applications. Polyjuice Util 0.2.0 has been released, which includes functions for common errors, handling identifiers, and for checking room permissions. Thanks to Nico for his contributions to this release. This release also contains some backward-incompatible changes. See the changelog for more information.

Polyjuice Client 0.4.1 has also been released, which uses the new Polyjuice Util release, and adds support for the whoami endpoint (thanks to multiprise).

Dept of Ops 🛠

synadm 0.30

jojo said:

Hello dear Synapse Admins, synadm v0.30 is out. lt seems I was in "story telling mode" already when I wrote the release notes yesterday. That should perfectly suit a TWIM article as well 🙂 So there you go, copy/pasted from https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm/releases/tag/v0.30 with love:

New

synadm finally got some nicely rendered documentation pages hosted at https://synadm.readthedocs.io.

"Login as a user" admin API support:

• synadm user login <user id>

• Have a look at the new command's docs

New subcommand matrixsupporting execution of regular Matrix commands. As a first shot a command to issue any Matrix API call has been implemented:

• synadm matrix raw endpoint/url -m post -f data.json

• synadm matrix raw endpoint/url -m put -d '{"key1": "value1"}' --prompt

• The new command's docs

Note that this is meant to be a convenience function in case a Synapse homeserver admin wants to quickly help users e.g set specific settings available via regular Matrix calls and not the Synapse admin API directly. Also note that it is not meant to replace the awesome Matrix CLI tools that are already out there. matrix-commander, matrixcli to mention just a few.

The second command below matrix is:

• synadm matrix login <user id>

• The new command's docs

It implements a plain login on a Matrix server using username and password. It can even be used to retrieve a token for an admin user, e.g helpful for setting up fresh synadm installations. Read about it here

Improved

The README has been updated to point to the nicely rendered docs recently published at https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/develop/usage/administration/admin_api/index.html

Notes

Update via PyPI or git as described in the update chapter: https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm#update

Thanks to the friendly people in #synadm:peek-a-boo.at for reviewing, testing, discussing functionality and giving advice. And for this release, a special thanks to @hpd:hpdeifel.de https://github.com/hpdeifel

Matrix Navigator v0.1.1

Christian said:

Matrix Navigator aims to be a replacement for curl when querying and mutating room states, including permissions.

• Plenty of fixes (reminder, this is still alpha software)

• Allows to join, leave rooms and inviting users.

• New wide-screen layout

• Errors are now shown in input fields or alerts.

https://matrix-navigator.chrpaul.de

Code and roadmap: https://gitlab.com/jaller94/matrix-navigator

Dept of Services 🚀

Thoughts on Matrix account ownership

Thib told us:

with the change of policy we deployed on GNOME's Matrix instance, it occurred to me that we had overlooked an important aspect in our relationship with Matrix: do we own our Matrix account? And the answer is... maybe! In this post I cover the differences between personal account, organisation-owned account, the importance of segregating activities on Matrix... and why this may change with Portable Identities in the future

https://blog.ergaster.org/post/20210622-owning-your-matrix-account/

Dept of Jobs 💰️

Tchap are hiring!

Thib reported:

the French government deployed Tchap, an instant messaging based on Matrix. They are looking for tech and processes oriented people to improve the service.

https://beta.gouv.fr/recrutement/2021/06/15/tchap-devops.html (🇫🇷) https://beta.gouv.fr/recrutement/2021/06/15/charge.ou.chargee.de.deploiement.html (🇫🇷)

Final Thoughts 💭

Andy reported:

I know this isn't TWIM-worthy, but I figured people in this room would find it interesting: yesterday there was a very popular post on reddit about how we don't appreciate email enough, and in the comments there were some mentions of matrix as the counterpart for messaging:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/o6cs4l/comment/h2s5dcz/

Actually I think this is very interesting. Worth taking a read to understand how people not already using Matrix might see the world.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Talking to Half-Shot about Libera Chat IRC bridging.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

GNOME community loves Matrix

Thib reported:

The GNOME community loves Matrix and wants it to grow! That's why it's closing registrations on its instance. What? Yes, we want both to provide the best experience for our community and to be a good citizen in the Matrix universe.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa said:

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Closed MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3234: Send currently open room in client to bots

Merged MSCs:

• MSC2732: Olm fallback keys

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3173: Expose stripped state events to any potential joiner (merge)

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3246: Audio event/waveform representation in extensible events

• MSC3245: Voice messages (using extensible events)

• MSC3244: Room version capabilities

Spec Updates

Feedback from the Spec Core Team has landed on MSC3244: Room version capabilities, MSC3083: Restricted room membership and a myriad of others. Travis has stormed in with MSC3245: Voice messages via Extensible Events and MSC3246: Audio event/waveform representation in extensible events and as a result MSC1767: Extensible Events has gotten some love.

Finally MSC3173: Expose stripped state events to potential joiners reached FCP this week, which is a step towards informing clients about the state of a room before they attempt to join or knock on it, which allows for nicer client UX when deciding whether you want to join a room or not.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

callahad offered:

This week's big news is the release of Synapse 1.36 which completely eliminates memory spikes when joining rooms! I'll let the "Joining Matrix HQ" graph speak for itself:

We also fixed a few bugs with presence (especially over federation or on a worker process), and would strongly encourage you to upgrade.

We'll spend the next few weeks on smaller changes as we prepare our Q3 goals, but we look forward to sharing those with you when we have them.

Happy weekend, TWiM!

Happy weekend to you too! Let's upgrade to 1.36 this weekend!

synapse-media-proxy

f0x said:

Actively deployed to pixie.town's Synapse now, and running very smoothly. Happy graphs show 91% of requests are handled without Synapse involved.

Also demonstrated the very seamless drop-in enable and disable, just changing the reverse proxy url back and forth from Synapse, and with this you could cautiously try this out for your own server, but stay in touch with #synapse-media-proxy:pixie.town

https://git.pixie.town/f0x/synapse-media-proxy

autodiscover-server-configuration

Got an update after realizing that maunium.net's horrible but technically correct server discovery didn't get handled correctly yet https://www.npmjs.com/package/@f0x52/autodiscover-server-configuration

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace told us:

This week sees another installation of the regular Kubernetes updates, bumping the Synapse chart and image to 1.36.0

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Heisenbridge

hifi offered:

Heisenbridge roundup!

Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.

• Plumbing private/invite-only rooms is possible

• IRC quit messages are visible as leave reasons

• Nick changes are now displayed in leave reason instead of a notice

• Prioritized Matrix->IRC queue for improved responsiveness while sending out a lot of messages

• Improved AUTOCMD with multi-command support

• Improved ZNC support with display of external messages by yourself

• Improved plumbing message formatting: ZWSP in sender names, smarter truncation

• IRC user displayname cases update if PRIVMSG source differs from current

• New rooms respect cases of IRC nicks and channels

• Conduit related fixes, thanks Peetz0r!

• Channels with keys on IRCnet now rejoin correctly

• Finally 100% working identd so it works on all tested networks

• Cleaned up SASL support which makes server messages during authentication visible

• Proper cleanup when leaving Heisenbridge rooms

• Tiny bugfixes everywhere!

Currently working towards 1.0 release so mostly bug hunting and improving existing code and features.

Call for mutual help! The plumb feature needs more testing on busy IRC channels. If you need to plumb public Matrix rooms and IRC channels on any IRC network that does not have a public bridge available or just want to use a relaybot on IRC side for some reason hit me up on #heisenbridge:vi.fi and we can setup a test plumb, free of charge! Only requirements are that I can lurk around to monitor how it works and there's nothing offensive on-topic.

In other news @warthog9 submitted an article to opensource.com how to use ZNC and Heisenbridge together to keep using your existing IRC bouncer with Heisenbridge as a client for it. Pretty cool stuff!

Thanks!

matrix-appservice-irc weights in at release 0.27.0

Half-Shot told us:

Hola everyone! Today we're releasing the latest in bridge greatness, matrix-appservice-irc 0.27.0. This release contains the bulk of our work done for libera.chat. As always, thanks to the community for testing, writing up issues and creating PRs so that we can build better bridges to our friends on other networks.

The highlights are:

• Username/password SASL authentication support. The bridge now lets you set a !username.

• Bridge operators can now choose to block messages in the I->M direction while Matrix users are not joined to IRC as a privacy preservation technique.

• You can now configure the bridge to publish rooms to the public room directory (rather than the appservice directory). The bridge can now also use the whole alias namespace (e.g. #foo:libera.chat -> #foo).

• Numerous bug fixes and quality of life fixes!

This is now live on libera.chat, and will be live on the other bridges very soon!

Watch Matrix Live for more from Half-Shot.

matrix-puppeteer-line

Fair reported:

matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.

Even more read receipt improvements are here! In summary, with the magic of MSC2409, the bridge shouldn't ever "view" a LINE chat on your behalf in order to sync a message (which would send a read receipt to your chat contacts, even though you didn't read the chat yourself). For LINE messages that require viewing its chat in order to be bridged, like images/stickers (to get the image) and messages in multi-user chats (to know who sent them), the bridge instead sends a "placeholder" message that gets updated with the real LINE message content when you view the placeholder. That way, the bridge will only view a LINE chat when you view its Matrix portal.

A few stability fixes have been pushed as well. Namely, sync should be less likely to accidentally skip chats.

Only one final read receipt improvement remains, for LINE->Matrix read receipt bridging (which I mentioned last week): to make the bridge check all LINE chats (not just the most recently-used one) to see if messages you sent have been read (in LINE). This will work by cycling through all LINE chats where the final message is posted by you and doesn't have a "Read" marker on it yet.

Once that is taken care of, I'll consider the bridge to be in beta! 🎉

Discussion: #matrix-puppeteer-line:miscworks.net

Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Element Clients

Updates from the teams

Delight team

• Spaces:
  • The highly requested drag & drop for reordering of Spaces has entered RC, expect it soon
  • New settings to setup aliases for spaces will also land in next release
  • Ongoing work to improve team spaces with restricted rooms.
  • We have a plan for iOS

Web

• 1.7.31 RC on staging
  • Various tweaks and improvements to the Spaces beta experience
  • Added room intro warning when E2EE is not enabled
  • Improved message forwarding UI
  • Improved timeline reflow and room list filter performance
• On develop
  • First version of web perf metrics dashboard available, updated for each commit to develop
  • Fixed reply thread perf regression which was sending lots of /context/undefined requests
• In flight
  • Continuing to improve application performance
  • Working on Apple silicon desktop builds
  • Working on translation mismatch errors
  • Starting work on message bubbles, building on existing work from the community
  • Fuzzy matching for the room list filter in progress
• Coming soon
  • Voice messages: we're in the testing stages and looking for feedback before they go live. Give it a go and let us know!

iOS

• The new side menu and the new UI to join a room by alias are on develop.
• The security settings screen has been updated to match the UX of element-web. The iOS app now uses the same wording for “Security Phrase” and “Security Key”
• Device dehydration now works in the SDK. We need to polish the work before merging the PR
• Voice message is still progressing well. We need to figure out how we will deal with the ogg format on iOS. We also need to add a cache to improve performance in the audio (and encryption) processing

Android

• Theme changes are now merged on develop and will be included in release 1.1.10. All the themes and styles have been moved to a dedicated gradle module. This is the first step to be able to develop new app features using dedicated modules. Other steps are required for us to be able to do that though (create a core module, etc.).
• All the PlayStore descriptions have been pushed to the PlayStore using Fastlane, should be live soon. F-Droid already has the up to date translations for the store assets. Thanks to all the contributors on Weblate!
• Release 1.1.10 will be prepared today. Expect it to be in production next week if everything is fine.

NeoChat

Carl Schwan said:

Last week was another busy week in NeoChat. Carl made the room list sidebar resizable and improved the responsive design of the settings pages.

Janet Blackquill implemented custom emojis using the im.ponies.user_emotes extension. For now auto-completion works, the custom emojis will be displayed in the emoji picker and lastly there is also an UI to add new emojis. We plan to implement more of the im.ponies MSC (custom stickers, sticker pack) soon :)

Smitty van Bodegom implemented spoilers and added /j and /leave alias for /join and /part. He also fixed the spellchecker trying to spellcheck commands like /rainbowme.

Oh and finally NeoChat was also featured on last week's "This Week in Linux" podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaPWx_z_50s Don't forget to follow us on Twitter @NeoChatKDE or Mastodon @[email protected], to get your latest news about NeoChat.

Akademy is also happening this weekend and next week. KDE is using Matrix and BigBlueButton for the conference. There will be a lot of talk, training and bofs. We have a bof the 22th June at 16th. It's virtual and everyone is welcome to join and discuss with us NeoChat development.

FluffyChat

FluffyChat is the cutest cross-platform matrix client. It is available for Android, iOS, Web and Desktop.

krille offered:

FluffyChat 0.32.0 is out now 💪 and targets improved stability and a new onboarding flow where single sign on is now the more prominent way to get new users into the app.

This release also introduces a complete rewritten database under the hood based on the key value store Hive instead of sqlite.

This should improve the overall stability and the performance of the web version.

[pioneer] told us:

Here's the FluffyChat subreddit, in order to provide more structured way of discussions, keep questions asked again and again in one place, and refer to older answers whenever the need is, as well as just to hang out https://www.reddit.com/r/fluffychat/

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) told us:

We've slowly been adding spaces support. Nheko can now show your spaces in the sidebar, filter on them and show a (very basic) overview page for a space. We are still playing around with what to actually put there, allow you to expand and collapse subspaces in the sidebar and allowing you to peek into rooms in a space, which you haven't joined yet. Creating and modifying spaces is also still work in progress until we figure out a proper design for it.

Nheko also now supports deeplinking using the matrix:// scheme

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Matrix Dart SDK

krille offered:

The Dart language now has a new SDK for Matrix developed and maintained by famedly.com and published here:

https://pub.dev/packages/matrix

It provides a fully featured base for Dart and Flutter applications including E2EE, and Cross Signing. After more than 2 years of development we now declared it as stable. The Matrix Dart SDK (formerly known as famedly SDK) was initially a rewrite of the FluffyChat backend which was written in JavaScript. It came a long way since then and is now the base for the Famedly App and for the Flutter version of FluffyChat.

Hyper-targeted callback: Hey Naren, Famedly are the Matrix-using folk I was telling you about. This is the latest version of their Dart work and will be a great place to start building from.

kazv

tusooa offered:

kazv is a matrix client based on libkazv.

Talk to us on #kazv:tusooa.xyz .

Updates

We got an AppImage build for x86-64 GNU/Linux systems. Feel free to try -))

https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/kazv/-/jobs/452/artifacts/browse

Dept of Ops 🛠

Matrix Navigator

Christian announced:

Hi, I started a small, static webapp last weekend for viewing and modifying room states.

It can locally store multiple access tokens and helps debug and maintain room permissions. It's not looking fancy yet but already proved useful for many of the matrix.org IRC support requests.

https://matrix-navigator.chrpaul.de/ (statically hosted)

https://gitlab.com/jaller94/matrix-navigator (license not yet decided)

Dept of Bots 🤖

maubot/gitlab

Tulir told us:

The GitLab maubot plugin recently received major improvements to webhook handling. The Matrix messages now look much nicer (similar to the GitHub maubot plugin) and it also sends fancy reactions for CI status.

It's already in use in #nheko:nheko.im and Beeper's internal commit log room. It's unfortunately not yet available on t2bot.io, because I'm too lazy to write a migration script to copy data from the very old standalone gitlab bot written in Go.

In the future I might figure out some interoperability between the github and gitlab plugins so that I can also get CI reactions for my repos (which are primarily on github, but have CI on gitlab)

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Interoperability event hosted by, and featuring, Matrix

Denise offered:

Tomorrow Element will host an event alongside Protonmail, Open-Xchange and Open Forum Europe on the DMA and the topic of interoperability. This will be hosted on Matrix, based on the infrastructure first used during FOSDEM. The event will be livestreamed over on #interop-sme:matrix.org

Registration is free here: https://openforumeurope.org/event/a-new-business-model-for-the-internet-how-a-strong-digital-markets-act-can-enable-smes-to-deliver-a-better-internet/

NB this event took place earlier in the week, but we still wanted to honour it!

Message à Caractère Informatique

Brendan Abolivier announced:

I've been invited to appear in the latest episode of Clever Cloud's tech podcast Message à Caractère Informatique, where we talked mostly about Matrix and decentralisation, but also about a bunch of other interesting things ranging from timbl minting his source code as an NFT to how to hack autonomous car with sound. It was loads of fun, thanks to them for the invite!

The episode, which is in French (sorry non-French speakers!), is available here: https://www.clever-cloud.com/fr/podcast/episode48/

Perhaps to pique (French word?) our interest Brendan Abolivier added:

(if anyone's curious about the autonomous car hacking, which I found particularly interesting, the paper we were discussing is in english https://spqrlab1.github.io/papers/ji-poltergeist-oakland21.pdf 😛)

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Server_Stats

MTRNord said:

After some fixes the bot is now back in shape. This means that all Rooms should again have the correct names from now on and accept invites again. Be aware the bot currently doesnt support encrypted rooms.

As a side effect also https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/spaces now found 3x the rooms as before.

Also the webpage got a big overhaul which brings a lot more mobile phone friendliness :) So you can finally properly use it on your phone as well.

Another change is that tombstoned rooms now get filtered from the list to keep it clean.

For developers a API reference is now available at https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/api

Also if you use the apis please note that the content is gzip encoded. The server currently doesnt respect the Accept-Encoding Header.

On the side of internal changes is now that the retries are limited to 5 times instead the previously buggy amount. This should reduce join requests from my server drastically.

For people usings the /servers api endpoint there is also now a include_members option. This means https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/servers?include_members=true

now also gives unique servers based on known members.

Dept of Guides 🧭

A Matrix bot created with Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib!

krazykirby99999 reported:

This bot is written with short, easy to understand Python code. Try writing your own bot with Python and Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib!

https://simple-matrix-bot-lib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples.html#a-rock-paper-scissors-bot

This project is also a bot in itself, but I believe it is a great form of documentation, hence Guides section.

Easy guide to joining Matrix

Bram told us:

After having tried to convince several people to join the Matrix, my main conclusion is that it's too difficult for people. Apps that big tech companies produce are so simple that having to choose a client, choose (or set up) a homeserver and building bridges is too much of a push factor from the Matrix.

To help those people, I've written a quick guide that should help people without a programming background join the Matrix. I'm using this as a reference when people ask how they could join the Matrix, feel free to do this yourself as well: https://noordstar.me/b/how-to-join-matrix.md

Matrix in the News 📰

German universities survey

Remember the survey of German universities we reported on a few weeks ago? There is now an english-language version of the results available.

Wired article now online

Cat announced:

Remember the Wired article we spotted in the print edition and got a blurry picture of? It has now made it onto their website. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/matrix-encrypted-messaging-app-governments

Final Thoughts 💭

Room of the week

timokoesters reported:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

---

This week's room is: #calibre:mailstation.de

"People reading eBooks usually know Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/), one of the most prominent ebook management solutions by Kovid Goyal. We've had an "unofficial" (as in: Kovid doesn't like real-time communications :) ) channel on what used to be freenode that I've moved to Libera and which is - of course! - bridged to #calibre" ~Philantrop

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, send a Matrix message in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Room of the week

timokoesters said:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

---

This week's room is: #art:matrix.org

"Share your artwork and drawings and chat about it. You don't have to be good!"

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, send an email to

[email protected] or a Matrix message in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

Yep, go ahead and email your suggested Matrix room-of-the-week to Timo!

Dept of Spec 📜

kegan said:

MSC3079: Low Bandwidth CS API now has an experimental implementation containing a proxy server and mobile bindings! In addition, there's a blog post explaining how to use this implementation to add low bandwidth support to your servers/clients! This implementation will use about 22% of the bandwidth that the normal CS API would use. Please be aware that low bandwidth Matrix is in its infancy and is subject to change without notice.

anoa said:

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2778: Providing authentication method for appservice users (merge)
• MSC2732: Olm fallback keys (merge)

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3234: Send currently open room in client to bots

Spec Updates

Mostly Spaces and E2EE work this week. New spec release is still in the works.

Graph will return in a future edition!

Dept of P2P 👥

Pinecone

Neil Alexander told us:

I have spent quite a bit of time lately working on Pinecone network convergence for P2P Matrix. There's still quite a bit to do in order to call Pinecone "complete", but a network of 50 nodes now bootstraps entirely from cold much more quickly and converges on full end-to-end reachability in roughly 6 seconds. This is a significant improvement to before! Keep an eye out for future P2P Matrix demo builds using these new protocol changes.

This chart also represents interest in Pinecone over time!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timokoesters told us:

Hello! The last two weeks I mostly tried to make our database backend swappable so we don't need to rely on the sled database anymore. I was able to try out rocksdb, but there were bugs in the rust bindings which required inefficient and unsafe workarounds.

If you know about other key-value databases that work better with Rust, please comment on the issue:

https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/issues/74

• Feature: Swappable database backend

• Improvement: Don't apply push rules for users of other homeservers

• Fix: is_direct now works for locally invited users

• Fix: Deactivated accounts are now actually deactivated (-> performance improvements for appservice puppets)

synapse-media-proxy

f0x offered:

This week I implemented the remaining API route for URL previewing. Already has some nicer url preview results like showing images with Twitter posts and proper YouTube previews instead of the cookie wall text :)

With this, synapse-media-proxy should be a drop-in overlay for all Synapse's /_matrix/media routes. I don't really recommend using it in prod yet however, but I have a test instance that could use some responsible disclosure pentesting at https://media.pixie.town, please DM me @f0x:pixie.town if you find anything :)

https://git.pixie.town/f0x/synapse-media-proxy
synapse-media-proxy now has a room at #synapse-media-proxy:pixie.town

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad reported:

🚪 Knock, knock... It's Friday!

After over a year of work and over a hundred commits, we're now one major step closer to supporting MSC 2403: Add "Knock" feature, which allows users to request admission to rooms which would otherwise be invite-only. Specifically, last Wednesday we merged (#6739) which is an experimental implementation of the MSC, under an unstable prefix. Knocking is not available in any current room versions — we need to implement room version 7 for that — but the remaining work is minimal¹ compared to what it took to get to this point. 🙂 Major kudos to Sorunome, Anoa, and Clokep for their work on both the spec and implementation.

Otherwise we're looking forward to releasing Synapse 1.36 early next week, and we have some great things in store... but I'll not spoil them today! 🤫

From everyone on the Synapse team, have a great weekend!

¹: Well, on the server-side at least. No clients support knocking, yet...

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace reported:

This week too comes with an update on the Helm Charts I'm maintaining, with an update of element-web to 1.7.30

Docker-based development environment for Matrix

psrpinto wrote:

Hi folks. Some time ago I asked here about any projects that provided a local Matrix "node" through docker, and it seemed not much existed in that space, so I went ahead and created the following repo:

https://github.com/Automattic/matrix-env

Docker-based development environment for Matrix. Provides a local sandbox with the following pre-configured services:

• synapse: the reference homeserver implementation
• synapse-admin: homeserver admin UI
• element: a web-based Matrix client

If this is something that would be useful to you, feel free to give it a try and send some feedback, either here or through GitHub issues. Thanks in advance! I hope this is helpful to some of you 🙇

Thanks uhoreg for passing this on! Looks like a really useful way to get a local env running

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Libera.chat IRC bridge work continues

Half-Shot reported:

Hi folks, just a quick update on the Libera.chat bridge situation. We're still rapidly working on the bridge, the milestone highlights for this week are:

• Nearly 6k Matrix users are now connected to IRC and growing by the minute.

• We're midway though our #matrix* Freenode to Libera channel/bridge migrations.

• FOSDEM has been migrated over

• We're still working through our backlog of migration requests from users, a lot of you phoned in!

We're still continuing to rapidly work on the bridge, with a release expected on Monday 🤞. For any of you who aren't in the know yet, you can start bridging to libera.chat by simply joining a channel like #libera-matrix:libera.chat or by searching the libera.chat room directory.

I'm hoping we'll be nearing the end of our journey on this bridge, and it will settle into a natural stable state over the coming days! Anyway, thanks everyone for your patience and we hope to see you on Matrix or IRC!

IRC Bridge 0.27.0-rc1 leaps out of the gate

Half-Shot offered:

Hi bridge followers, today we've released 0.27.0-rc1 of the IRC bridge containing a huge number of changes following all the work we've been doing on libera.chat. Notable things to call out in this release are:

• We've refactored the node-irc library to be typescripty and modern, rather than the quite old JS that it was.

• SASL support for username/password auth has landed, which hopefully means a smoother login process for many. (We're aware of some issues around setting usernames, watch this space)

• Allowing you to spin up the bridge with complete control over the alias namespace of a host (e.g. #libera:libera.chat links to #libera).

• And finally, a privacy feature to block incoming IRC messages when Matrix users are not all joined which is requested by some IRC networks.

Please report bugs as you see them to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc, and let's all pray this will be a smooth release :)

matrix-puppeteer-line

Fair offered:

matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.

Read receipt improvements are here! They are in temporary branches until they've been tested for stability:

• The better-receipts-dm branch contains some smarts to prevent Puppeteer from having to "view" a LINE DM chat in order to sync it, which would make the contact you're DMing think you've read their messages when it was really Puppeteer that "saw" them. However, this doesn't work for non-text messages (like images) or messages in group chats.

• The better-receipts-msc2409 branch (which extends the above branch) uses MSC2409 to detect when you read a bridged message on Matrix, so it can tell Puppeteer to view it on LINE on your behalf. This will let your LINE contacts know when you've read their messages.

After this, only a few read receipt improvements are left to be made:

• Make Puppeteer check all LINE chats (not just the most recently-used one) to see if messages you sent have been read (in LINE). This will work by cycling through all LINE chats where the final message is posted by you and doesn't have a "Read" marker on it yet.

• Use MSC2409 to avoid having to view a LINE chat when syncing non-text messages (like images). The idea is to send a placeholder message that will get replaced with the real message (which requires Puppeteer to view the LINE chat) only when you actually view the placeholder.

Discussion: #matrix-puppeteer-line:miscworks.net

Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) reported:

I've been slowly refactoring the room and communities list to prepare it for spaces. This work is now mostly complete, changing ~4000 lines of code, of which 1500 just got deleted. All of the sidebars are now expandable and collapsible, so you can see the full name of your tags and communities and the lists should also update more dynamically now. Startup also only takes half as long as before on my system and Nheko uses 100MB less memory for my account. Next week I'll probably add spaces to the communities list as well as the room list.

Apart from that LorenDB has been rewriting the member list as well as the invite dialog in Qml and manu has been making progress on the room directory. All of that seems to be coming along nicely and behave much more reasonably than the old versions. There has also been a lot of progress on the Italian and Esperanto translations as well as a few smaller bug fixes and performance improvements.

I hope we will make it to space next week!

Element Clients

Updates from the teams.

Delight, a team aiming to delight users

• We’re making good progress on the ability to re-order Spaces on Web & Android, expected to land soon!
• We’re also adding aliases to Space creation, to make it easier to share and onboard other users
• On iOS, we recently merged a refactor with a new sidebar design which lays the foundations for iOS joining the Spaces beta
• We’ve also been working on adding pagination to the Space Summary API on Synapse
• Meanwhile, we’re also shepherding various MSCs through the spec process to improve private Spaces in the very near future

Web

• 1.7.30 released on Monday
• On develop
  • Upgraded to React 17
  • First GitHub Actions pipeline for web
• In flight
  • Continuing to improve application performance
  • Adding dashboard for performance benchmarks
  • Working on Apple silicon desktop builds
  • Working on translation mismatch errors

iOS

• 1.4.1 released on Tuesday on the App Store
• The new side menu and voice messages are coming.
• We are setting up Towncrier to avoid merge conflicts on our CHANGES files. Those conflict prevent Github Actions, our CI, from starting
• We fixed several annoying bugs regarding VoIP and app stability

Android

• Element Android 1.1.9 has been pushed to production
• We are working with the design team on the dark and light themes, not forgetting the black theme, to ensure some coherence across the application and also to clean up some legacy code. There were too many shades of grey… We will also do the same work on TextAppearance.

NeoChat

Carl Schwan said:

This week was a busy week for NeoChat. We added tons of cool stuff! We rewrote the setting page to add a bit of organization in the settings. This also pushed us to add new appearance options. You can now add a blur effect as background, change the color scheme of NeoChat and switch between bubbles and a more compact layout as you wish.

Another thing we worked on was spellchecking. NeoChat will now add a small red underline under misspelled words and will suggest corrections. This is using the Sonnet frameworks and will integrates perfectly with your personal dictionary from your other KDE apps.

Finally something we added two weeks ago but forgot to mention, we added a quick room switcher using the Ctrl + K shortcut.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

libQuotient

kitsune reported:

Another small release - libQuotient 0.6.7 is out, fixing an issue causing NeoChat to not add rooms to the roomlist after joining. Thanks to Carl Schwan for hunting the problem down!

Tobias Fella added:

Apparently my work-in-progress end-to-end-encryption implementation for libQuotient was bad enough to cause performance problems on my homeserver (Sorry about that!). This should be fixed now 🙂

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Server_stats

MTRNord announced:

Changes

• Server now uses warp instead of actix-web

• /relations request instead of 10s now takes 2s overall

• Added a /servers api endpoint which returns all servers based on the room_ids. (It splits of the server_name from room_ids and puts them into an array)

Bug Fixes

• Aliases with emoji will now get recognized.

Thanks to jo , Nico , joepie91 🏳️‍🌈 and poljar for helping to archive these improvements and hinting where improvements were possible to be made :)

Dept of Guides 🧭

A guide for creating simple Matrix bots with Python and Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib

krazykirby99999 told us:

https://simple-matrix-bot-lib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart.html

Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib allows anyone who needs a bot in a Matrix Room to do so without having to spend unnecessary time learning a complex framework!

https://i.imgur.com/xL4ZBO3.png https://i.imgur.com/UFsJMzS.png

Dept of Grants 💰️

Code Lutin grant program

numéro6 told us:

If you live in France (or eurozone) and your Matrix-related project need some funds, you may candidate to the 2021 #MécénatCodeLutin grant program for FLOSS by Code Lutin. Candidates may fill the dedicated form before july 8th.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Wired UK feature article

Wired UK have published a feature on Matrix in their print edition this month. We'll be sure to link to it when it's made available online!

German-universities poll

jfkimmes shared:

I just learned that in a poll of 89 universities in Germany, Matrix ranked third place in the chat category already.

The source is in only available in German, unfortunately: https://zenodo.org/record/4817795

However, the conclusion list (first table) may be understandable from context. It lists the top three solutions per category with their respective number of universities using it.

Oleg clarified:

The evaluation was "which solution are you using".

Florian added:

The Instant Messaging part starts at slide 15, the first chart on that slide is "which solution do you use", the second is "How content are you with the solution?", with Matrix having the best average of all solutions, namely ~8.8/10.

also JCG:

What's also noteworthy: Those using matrix are the happiest with the solution

\o/

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa offered:

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3231: Token authenticated registration

• MSC3230: Spaces top level order

• MSC3226: Per-room spell check

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

This week the Spec Core Team has been reviewing various Spaces MSCs, most recently MSC3230 (Space ordering). We're also hoping to square away the aggregations MSCs (message editing, reactions, etc) once and for all, though this will likely take a concerted effort from a few members to pull off.

Finally MSC3231 is a (currently draft status) MSC from Callum, one of Matrix.org's GSoC students this year! His project aims to allow native token-based registration to homeservers (the idea is so that you can generate a few tokens from your registration-disabled homeserver and hand them out to a few trusted friends and family members).

And finally, work still continues on finishing up the technical portions of the new release process for the spec. As mentioned last week, we've attempted to split the work up over multiple people in order to get it done quicker. Slowly but surely...

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad said:

Hello from the Synapse team! A short update for a short workweek (thanks, bank holidays!):

• Synapse 1.35 was released this week! The Spaces flag is on by default, a bunch of bugs were fixed, and we've landed many of the prerequisites to eliminating RAM spikes on room joins.

• 📚 We have new docs! 📚 Anoa converted our docs to build with mdbook (#10086), and you can now browse them at https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/! Check it out and let us know what you think. (Note: Not all of the pages have been converted from reStructuredText to Markdown yet, so some might render a bit strangely, but the structure is there!)

Catch you next Friday! 👋

synapse-media-proxy

f0x announced:

Another round of updates on my smart caching media proxy. After refactoring a lot (as always), I implemented thumbnailing! Now the only big feature left to add is url previewing. I also have a test deployment configured on media.pixie.town now, so you can try fetching a bit of remote media through there, or view this submissions screenshot

metrics

Got started implementing a Prometeus /metrics endpoint, with a rudimentary Grafana dashboard for my test installation.

comparison with matrix-media-repo

While they both implement Matrix' media endpoints, they serve rather different niches, where matrix-media-repo fully decouples the media repo aspect, my proxy cooperates with Synapse's filesystem and database, to speed up operation while ultimately making it a seamless drop-in and removal process.

also :P

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

And another weekly installment of Kubernetes Helm Chart (and deprecated Docker image) updates, tracking the Synapse releases this week (1.35.0/1).

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Heisenbridge demo video

hifi shared this great demonstation video of Heisenbridge:

Half-Shot hit us late with a pair of updates:

Security release for the matrix-appservice-irc and matrix-appservice-bridge library

Hello. This week we've released an update to the https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/ library containing a security fix for room upgrade handling. The security report will come later, but for now we advise anyone using the room upgrade handler feature to upgrade to 2.6.1. By the same token, we would also advise all IRC bridge admins to update their bridge to 0.26.1.

The Libera.chat bridge is still ongoing

Howdy folks. As you've likely seen over the last few days, we're still hard at work getting the final pegs in place for the libera.chat bridge. As usual, you can start using the bridge now while it's in beta by going to #<foo>:libera.chat, but we're hoping to have the thing stable by next week. Catch us in #libera-matrix:libera.chat for the juicy gossip about it.

matrix-puppeteer-line

Fair reported:

matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.

• Send a bridge notice when getting unexpectedly logged out of LINE, to warn you to log in again.
• Improve resiliency of LINE user avatar syncing.
• Properly support syncing LINE rooms with participants who aren't in your LINE friends list (This was harder than it sounds...!)

These changes (and ones before it) will be merged to master once I reorganize some messy commits.

The next big task is still to fix outbound read receipts (i.e. to make it so that the bridge syncing a message doesn't make your > LINE contacts think you actually read that message). Once that is done, I'll consider the bridge to be in beta.

Discussion: #matrix-puppeteer-line:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Thunderbird Matrix support

freaktechnik announced:

Thunderbird now has Matrix support based on matrix-js-sdk enabled in the Nightly builds.

The star feature is probably that we support multiple Matrix accounts in the same client. Right now all your unencrypted rooms with text messages should work fine. While we think we won't destroy your account's state, it's still recommended to use a testing account with it. During account setup, it will ask you for a password, even if the homeserver supports SSO. If you intend to log in through SSO, just leave the password field blank.

We're not quite at the point where we support all the things you love about chatting with Matrix. Many of the missing features and polish to make communication successful are tracked in this meta bug. The goal for that milestone is to enable Matrix in our Beta builds.

You can get a Thunderbird Nightly build at the bottom of thunderbird.net by switching from "Beta Channel" to "Nightly Channel". If you run into bugs with the Matrix integration, please report them through this form. When filing a bug, please include debug logs. You can copy the debug logs for the account by going to the "Show Accounts" dialog, right clicking the account and selecting "Copy Debug Log". Note that the debug log may contain information from any of your conversations, so you might want to check the contents before posting it anywhere.

Also, check out Matrix Live!

NeoChat

Carl Schwan announced:

NeoChat 1.2, our third major release, was released this week bringing many improvements to the timeline and text input component. If you missed it, you can read the announcement here: https://carlschwan.eu/2021/06/01/neochat-1.2-bubbles-better-text-editing-and-more/ and we even have a nice release video :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lcH4tm6uTk

Other than that, we started working on an integration with KDE web shortcuts functionality to quickly search selected text on the web: https://invent.kde.org/network/neochat/-/merge_requests/279.

Nheko

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) told us:

Callum, our GSoC student, after spending some time on Synapse, had now his first go at Nheko's codebase. He implemented, that you can now just enter the server name on registration instead of the full URL. This means entering conduit.rs or matrix.org works now nicely, since those servers are actually hosted at a different URL. He's now working on the Token Registration MSC, which he will implement in Synapse and Nheko, so exciting times ahead!

We also had a small contribution from pcworld, who fixed that if you only viewed the room list in the narrow layout, you would not get notifications for the last selected room.

I'll leave you with some words, that you may have heard a few times already: "Watch this space for next weeks update!"

Fractal

Alexandre Franke reported:

A dozen merge requests have been integrated in our fractal-next branch since last week.

Amongst the more trivial changes, Julian made sure rooms are added to the sidebar in batch (!737) to improve performances, added in-app notifications for invite errors (!760), added a menu entry to leave rooms (!769), and implemented display of user and room avatars (!770). We also gained a right-click-menu entry to display event sources thanks to Kévin (!766).

Element Clients

Updates provided by the teams.

Delight team

• We’re continuing progress on implementing Blurhash on Web & Android to improve the image loading experience, especially on low bandwidth
• On Spaces, we’ve started working on the ability to drag and drop to re-order Spaces, along with improving adding aliases to public Spaces

Web

• 1.7.30 RC on staging
  • Improved layout performance in the timeline and room list
  • Refined the message action bar UI
• Continuing to improve application performance
  • Recent focus on minimising browser layout work when things change
  • Reducing DOM size
• Working on Apple silicon desktop builds

iOS

• 1.4.0 is available on the public TestFlight. We expect to make it available on the App Store on Monday. It has:
  • Performance improvements
  • Crash fixes
  • New languages: Esperanto, Portuguese (Brazil), Kabyle, Norwegian, Swedish, Japanese and Welsh.
  • There are some API breaks in MatrixSDK due to those performance improvements.
  • We have now a MXLog module with log levels! It is now possible to disable all logs from MatrixSDK
• We continued to work on performance and stability and will continue to for the coming sprint period: https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/milestone/55

Android

• 1.1.8 has been released to production, and 1.1.9 has been released to beta on the PlayStore
• We are currently working with the design team on the light and dark theme of the application, especially colors and text appearance. Lots of cleanup to do...

Hydrogen

A minimal Matrix chat client, focused on performance, offline functionality, and broad browser support. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/

Bruno announced:

Released Hydrogen 0.1.56 this week, with redactions. In the meantime, I've been making good progress on reactions, which should hopefully get released early next week. Midhun has made good progress on the right panel, ironing out the last bugs.

Here's a sneak preview of reactions (with slow network to show off the local echo animation):

kazv

tusooa reported on kazv:

kazv is a matrix client based on libkazv. Talk to us on #kazv:tusooa.xyz.

Updates

I guess it's a long time from our last twim. Here's what is going on in that time:

• We used fluent for translations. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/kazv/-/merge_requests/1
• We supported read and save client state. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/kazv/-/merge_requests/2
• A work-in-progress, but we are displaying some common event types; there are even chat bubbles (>w<) Check out a screenshot below: (yes, and we got a new logo)

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix @ FrOSCon this year

Oleg said:

On August 21-22 the annual Free and Open Source Conference (short FrOSCon) will take place. Usually the conference takes place in a German University of applied Sciences Bonn Rhine Sieg. This year it will be virtual. On the positive side - we don't need to travel.

As German Matrix community grows this is a great opportunity to meet each other and hack together.

Matrix Dev Room

We are planing to do a virtual Dev Room this year. The idea is to exchange on the latest Matrix development and projects, get to know each other and drink <your_favorite_beverage> (virtually) together. 😉

To make it happen we need your help!

Dev Room is living from talks and workshops - this is your chance to present your Matrix project or to do a workshop!

Language: preferably German, but English is also ok

Submission is until 2021-06-11, but please give us feedback ASAP so we can create a plan now.

If it's your first talk or workshop some free of charge coaching is included. 😉

Also help in organizing the Dev Room (moderation, timekeeping) is needed.

Matrix Open Source booth

It was a great place to chit-chat and to get your in-depth answers regarding Matrix at FOSDEM this year. 👍️

We also planing to have a virtual booth at FrOSCon.

We need your support in answering questions about Matrix or just to have a good time.

Get in touch

If you want to take part please contact @oleg:fiksel.info (or [email protected]) ASAP to add you to the Dev Room participants list.

BTW: we also have a #FrOSCon:fiksel.info room

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Circles

cvwright reported:

• Set up a new (virtual) EU homeserver in Frankfurt, so European folks can join the beta starting next week

• Use StoreKit to detect when a user is in Europe and should therefore use the EU homeserver, both for GDPR and to minimize latency

• Made some progress toward supporting m.video messages

• Experimented with using the new iOS photo picker to better protect users' privacy Homepage: https://kombuchaprivacy.com/circles/ Source code: https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios

You can also support circles on Kickstarter.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa reported:

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3202: Encrypted appservices

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC2876: Allowing widgets to read events in a room

Merged Spec PRs

• Deprecate verifications that don't begin with a request

• Change space's valid order range to 0x7E

Spec Updates

Travis rolled out MSC3202 to aid in the quest for end-to-bridge encryption without having to rely on /sync. Otherwise the Spec Core Team has been reviewing MSCs and focusing on the last remaining spec PRs needed before cutting a new spec release. Watch this space!

Awesome to be able to VISIBLY see the progress in that graph!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad offered:

The big news this week was the launch of Spaces, supported by the release of Synapse 1.34.0.

However, there were quite a few other fixes, improvements, and additions: I'd encourage you to read the release announcement for those.

But more than anything, we're hard at work realizing the room-join memory improvements we talked about in last week's Matrix Live, and we expect to have some exciting news to share next week. Concretely: the pull request to support incremental parsing of join responses was merged, and several pull requests (#10017, #10018, #10035) to simplify and slim down the code for verifying event signatures are in review.

See you next week! 🚀

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timokoesters said:

Here are some Conduit news!

• Feature: Handle incoming read receipts over federation

• Feature: Send read receipts over federation (MVP done)

• Improvement: Make UIAA (user-interactive authentication API) work like in Synapse (this gives us better client support)

• Refactor: Sending code refactored to make EDUs over federation possible

• Fix: Remove old presence events when restarting Conduit

• Fix: Array bounds bug in server_server.rs

• Fix: Power level content override adds to the default event instead of replacing it

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace said:

And this week brings another instance of the regularly scheduled Kubernetes updates, with Element-web going to 1.7.28 and Synapse having been bumped to 1.34.0 on both the deprecated image and the chart.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

libera.chat IRC network news

Half-Shot offered:

Howdy folks! I'm sure many of you read the news about the new libera.chat IRC network starting up, and many of you also reached out (via pretty much every channel available) to ask about a potential bridge. libera.chat are doing a remarkably good job of getting spun up but are hyper busy with all the inbound users and need a bit more time, so in the meantime I would ask that everyone subscribe to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1324 to listen for changes as they happen.

The matrix.org bridge team are on the case! Expect news in the near future :)

Dept of Clients 📱

Element Client Updates

Submitted by the teams

Delight

• Spaces are now live! 🚀 Test them on Element Web, Desktop & Android (iOS is coming soon!)
• In short, Spaces are a new way to group rooms and people together, and are slated to replace legacy groups/communities
• We’d love your feedback! Either submitted in app or in #spaces-feedback:matrix.org
• Read the full blog post

Web

• 1.7.28 released
  • New spaces Beta (new way of grouping rooms and people)
  • Added support for slash commands working in edits
• 1.7.29-rc.1 on staging
  • Improved startup performance by focusing decryption on recent rooms
  • Fixed reaction duplication
• Continuing to pursue application performance generally
• Improving day to day developer experience with more TypeScript conversion

iOS

• 1.3.9 has been published on the app store
• Some performance improvements have been merged on develop:
  • Reduce the number of decryptions. A decryption takes about 5ms on iPhone X. On an account with 500 rooms this allows us to skip thousands of decryptions on an initial sync
  • Those decryptions do not happen anymore on the main thread

Android

• Lots of dependency upgrade following the release with Space (1.1.7).
• Next release candidate, 1.1.8 will also contain improvements on Spaces.
• We have set up towncrier flow to better handle changelog generation.
• Also Element Android project is now using GitHub actions, but it cannot run the integration tests for the moment.

Fractal

Alexandre Franke offered:

As announced in the general Matrix GSoC post, we are lucky to get two interns this year again. Alejandro (whose previous work includes switching to matrix-rust-sdk for syncs) will implement multi-account support, while Kai (also a regular contributor by now) will help bring our application rewrite to the same functionality level as our current nightly and stable versions. Both projects will build on top of Fractal Next.

Julian came back from his vacation and immediately got quite busy reviewing and merging contributions from others. Kevin (also known as zecakeh) and him made good progress on several fronts:

• Room handling was improved. We now keep track of whether the user joined them, left them, or has been invited to them, as well as their categories (favourites, low priority…).

• The sidebar uses these categories and now uses a single list with GtkFilterListModels instead of one list per category. The greatly simplifies code for things like moving a room from one category to another.

• History style has been tweaked, state events and timestamps have been added.

• Markdown can be enabled from the newly implemented popover and the message composer offers syntax highlighting, although a bug currently makes it so that sent messages are still not sent with a formatted_body.

• A persistent state store is used to load rooms on startup while sync is in progress.

Last but not least, new contributor Raatty implemented room name and topic display in the header bar.

Hydrogen

A minimal Matrix chat client, focused on performance, offline functionality, and broad browser support. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/

Bruno announced:

Released 0.1.53 with support for linking to room this week, which should allow to add Hydrogen to matrix.to soon. Also started working on redactions, which is useful in itself and also lays the foundations for reactions and edits coming next.

Nheko reviewed

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Check out this flattering portrait of Nheko on the Brodie Robertson "Linux Tips & Tricks" channel.

https://odysee.com/@BrodieRobertson:5/nheko-reborn-lightweight-native-matrix:8

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma

Ruma is a set of Rust library crates around Matrix

jplatte offered:

We've been quiet in the past weeks, but certainly not due to lack of activity! So many awesome things have happened, I don't even know where to start. I guess I'll go chronologically:

We published so many new crate releases. Most of our crates didn't see non-alpha releases for almost a year and now we've finally reset that counter! Now you can depend on ruma 0.1 and get bug fixes and new functionality through cargo update without having to worry about breaking changes. Huge thanks to @zecakeh for automating our release process, without that this would have taken so much longer.

We got initial spaces support! I'm super excited that we're now enabling client authors to take spaces into account, even if "taking into account" will initially just mean filtering out space rooms from their room lists. Code-wise, this was actually a relatively small change, with ruma-client-api receiving support for room types and ruma-events receiving support for the event types m.space.child and m.space.parent.

We're swapping out ruma-signatures' crypto library. Since ring, which is what we've been using so far, doesn't currently support cross-compilation to WASM, there's long been some interest to exchange it for something else for webbrowser homeserver experiments. A viable alternative library was identified a while ago and now @ShadowJonathan has taken on the task of implementing the switch.

In addition to unblocking the WASM usecase, this work revealed a bug in ring, which generated invalid PKCS#8 documents. We are pretty confident that once the switch away from ring (including a small compatibility shim to convert the invalid documents), a certain class of signature verification failures that Conduit has been getting will be fixed.

We're taking part in GSoC again. As you might have seen in the earlier blog post, two students are working on Ruma as part of GSoC this year: @Frinksy (for the first time) and @DevinR528 (for the second time).

Apart from that,

• @132ikl fixed a bug with unsetting avatar URLs

• @abhikjain360 added email validation endpoints to ruma-identity-service-api

• @132ikl fixed a small bug in our release automation

• @Frinksy added helpers to construct the fallback for rich replies

• @132ikl improved event relation support for encrypted events

• @jplatte (that's me) made ruma-client independent of the underlying HTTP client library

• @abhikjain360 added phone number validation endpoints to ruma-identity-service-api

• @gnieto fixed a small serialization bug in ruma-federation-api

• @DevinR528 cleaned up our crate manifest files

• @zecakeh added a TagName type for m.tag events (+ followup API improvement)

• @DevinR528 enabled a set of lints across the entire project

• @jplatte integrated the state-res crate into our monorepo

• @gnieto improved the error handling for HTTP request construction

• @zecakeh cleaned up our non-room event enums

• @ShadowJonathan improved some code examples in our documentation

• @poljar added support for remaining to-device key verification events

• @jplatte replaced uses of SystemTime with custom timestamp types

• @poljar added support for v1 of the QR verification events and methods

• @DevinR528 added code generation for redaction methods on our event content enums

• @zecakeh improved our markdown to formatted message helper functions

• @timokoesters added (unstable) master_keys and self_signing_keys support to the federation-api get_keys response

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

This Ansible playbook is meant to easily let you run your own Matrix homeserver.

Slavi told us:

Thanks to Aaron Raimist, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports Hydrogen - a new lightweight matrix client with legacy and mobile browser support.

By default, we still install Element, as Hydrogen is still not fully-featured. Still, people who'd like to try Hydrogen out can now install it via the playbook.

Additional details are available in Setting up Hydrogen.

Also...

Thanks to Toni Spets (hifi), matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports bridging to IRC using yet another bridge (besides matrix-appservice-irc), called Heisenbridge.

To get started, see our Setting up Heisenbridge bouncer-style IRC bridging documentation.

Dept of Services 🚀

etke.cc updated

Aine reported:

etke.cc updates

etke.cc is "spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy as a service" and we got some updates:

• New services: miniflux, wireguard, languagetool, email service for you domain (based on awesome Migadu) and consultations

• Website redesign - made with ❤ ourselves instead of old generic template

• announcements room migrated to public room without encryption, but with invites and previews

Dept of Bots 🤖

Community -> Space Bot

TravisR said:

If you're trying out all those cool Spaces (Element Blog) and have some old Communities/Groups hanging around, I have the bot for you.

spacebot makes quick work of the conversion by translating as much as possible to the Space structure. Simply DM the bot and say !convert +group:example.org and it'll go off and make your Space.

The bot doesn't invite everyone from your Community to your Space, giving you a chance to configure the Space further before advertising it within your rooms.

The source can be found on GitHub if you feel like running your own or seeing how simple it is under the hood. #spacebot:t2bot.io is a great place to get help if you're having problems getting it going, and #help:t2bot.io would be glad to assist you if the t2bot.io deployment doesn't do the right thing.

P.S.: Spaces are currently considered Beta in Element, so they might not be perfect just yet. #spaces:riot.ovh is the room to join if you have questions about Spaces.

Hemppa

Hemppa the Bot is a multipurpose bot for writing modules super easily in Python.

Cos offered:

Hemppa the bot is a general purpose Matrix bot written in Python. This week it gained two useful admin tools: Kick by wildcard (for cleaning up zombies after bridge decomission) and making tombstones to point room to a new one. https://github.com/vranki/hemppa

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

raspberry-noaa-v2 matrix support

Cadair said:

A little bit different, but matrix related, this week I added Matrix push support to the raspberry-noaa-v2 project. This is a project which runs on a raspberry pi to automate receiving, decoding and post processing of images over radio from weather satellites. It's easy to build a cheap ground station for this with little more than a USB SDR dongle and a metal coat hanger. If you want to see the pictures I am decoding you can join #weather:cadair.com.

Cadair, living in the north of England, will only see this symbol unfortunately 🌧️

Server_Stats Voyager Project

MTRNord announced:

The Project now has a proper webpage at https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/ !

Newly added Features are:

• A List of all the rooms that are found

• A list to find the links (either outgoing or incoming) for a room. So a 1 level deep view into the graph as a table.

• An FAQ with some information about the project, known data issues and more

• A websocket at wss://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/ws that allows you to get the updates directly pushed as soon as a room lands in the db. Effectively the fastest way to get data updates.

Planned features for the webpage

• AR and VR Graphs

• A Space Finder that allows you to find the discovered spaces

Be aware that this page is very new and therefor might have bugs. It also isn't yet mobile optimized.

For questions, suggestions or fast updates check the #server_stats:nordgedanken.dev Room or for questions regarding issues with the bot in a specific room feel free to write a DM to MTRNord :)

Possible Bug that needs manual fixing

Due to a bug with my homeserver or synapse it happens for some rooms that synapse generates a lot of join events (Lots of "server_stats bot made no change" messages). If you see this please write a message to MTRNord so I can manually prevent my bot from trying to join the room over and over again as I cannot easily detect this kind of issue before joining.

The issue can be followed at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/10021

midnight from cvwright

cvwright offered:

This might be of interest for TWIM. It's a little web app that supports token-based registration in the Matrix UIAA. Sort of like matrix-registration, but aiming for compliance with the UIAA spec

https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/midnight

Dept of Built on Matrix 🏗️

Circles, new social network on top of Matrix

cvwright offered:

Circles is a new project to build an E2E encrypted social network on top of Matrix. https://www.kombuchaprivacy.com/circles/ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cvwright/circles-a-secure-social-app-for-friends-and-family

It's really early days for this project, but please check it out!

Final Thoughts 💭

farribeiro reported:

The fedora project is discussing which domain to take in https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/so-what-domains-should-we-use-for-our-matrix-server/29842

Un-burying the lede: Fedora are making the jump to Matrix!

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Google Summer of Code 2021 participants have been announced! This year Matrix has been assigned seven students.

Projects

R Midhun Suresh: Right Sidebar for Hydrogen client

R Midhun Suresh from the Mar Baselios College of Engineering & Technology in Trivandrum, India will be working on Hydrogen this summer, mentored by Bruno Windels. He will be working on adding a right panel to the room view, including a member list and room information. He will be blogging at https://midhunsureshr.github.io throughout the project.

Devin Ragotzy: Ruma's Automated Checks

My name is Devin Ragotzy. I am a student at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, studying computer science. I was lucky enough to work last summer on Ruma and have continued to contribute to the project. I was accepted to work on Ruma's automated checks project, mentored by Isaiah Inuwa, Jonas Platte, Timo Kösters. The goal of the project is to create a linter capable of enforcing Ruma-specific style and practices. I hope to get this tool to a working state by the end of this summers GSoC!

Abhinav Krishna C K: First-Class Email Bridge

Abhinav Krishna C K from NSS College of Engineering in Palakkad, India will be working on Building First-Class email bridge for Matrix this summer mentored by Half-Shot and tulir. This will enable Matrix to be connected with Email by translating incoming SMTP traffic to Matrix messages, and then bridging Matrix messages back into emails.

Frinksy: Extend Ruma's API coverage

My name is Adam Blanchet, and I am a student from the University of York in the UK.
I am happy to say that I have quite a few mentors: Isaiah Inuwa, Jonas Platte, Timo Kösters and Nico from Nheko.
My project is to extend Ruma's API coverage. I'll be doing a few things: finishing coverage of the Identity Service API, adding the "knock" feature to Ruma and finishing the implementation of QR code verification. If time allows it I will also work on implementing other MSCs or features such as "Event notification attributes and actions". I hope that my work will help enable other Rust-based Matrix projects, such as Conduit and Fractal, to implement more features.

Timo added:

Hello, I am Timo Kösters. I study Computer Science in Germany and spend most of the remaining time developing Conduit, a Matrix homeserver built on top of Ruma. I use Ruma all the time and will be mentoring Adam Blanchet to make it even better.

Vladyslav Hnatiuk: PyQuotient

My name is Vladyslav Hnatiuk, I'm a student of Vienna University of Technology and my project is PyQuotient.
The aim is to simplify creating of a Matrix Qt-based clients in Python by providing Qt-based SDK and avoid writing a large part of functionality manually. And to not reinvent the wheel PyQuotient will be bindings for the existing library libQuotient that provides SDK for Matrix for C++ applications. I'll be mentored by kitsune, the author of libQuotient and also libQuotient-based Matrix IM client Quaternion. I hope PyQuotient will facilitate the development of Matrix clients in Python with Qt, and it will be a small contribution to the promotion of Matrix, especially in Python world.

kitsune added:

If this experience proves to be successful, there’s a good chance Quaternion will eventually switch to Python.

Callum Brown: Token Authenticated Registration

Hi there, I'm Callum, a Londoner who'll be starting a physics degree in September. For GSoC I'll be working on adding Token Authenticated Registration to Matrix. This will allow homeserver admins to restrict who can sign-up by requiring a token to be submitted during registration. I run a small homeserver for friends and family, but don't have the resources to make registration public, so I have wanted this feature integrated into Matrix servers and clients for quite a while! I'll be working with Nico, anoa, and red_sky to write an MSC, implement the server side in Synapse, and the client side in Nheko. Thanks to the mentors and Matrix.org for the opportunity to work on this!

You can follow along with this project's progress throughout the program at https://calcuode.com/matrix-gsoc/.

Nico, mentor added:

Nico here, one of the Mentors. Personally I am super excited about this project! I have been using Matrix for a while now and I think Nheko is pretty good by now. But there is still a barrier, if I want my friends and family to use Matrix: They can't easily sign up! I have tried creating them accounts and telling them to change their passwords, having a dedicated registration page or just telling them to just use a different server, but nothing of that made me happy and it added friction to the already hard process of getting someone to try a new messenger! As such I am super excited for this, because it will make signing up your friends and family to your personal instance, without it having to be public, sooooo much simpler!

Jaiwanth: Exporting Conversations From Element

Jaiwanth Vemula from the IIT Kharagpur University in India will be working on Exporting Conversations in Element this summer, mentored by Michael (t3chguy). This work will enable users to easily export their conversations for archival or sharing, this is a feature which has been missed in Element for a very long time!

Fractal

There are also two projects under the GNOME organisation with students working on Fractal, a Matrix client for GNOME.

• Alejandro Domínguez: Fractal: Multi account support
• Kai A. Hiller: Fractal NEXT

Students become Mentors

I asked: how many of those who are mentors this year have ever been GSOC students? The answer is that this year four of the mentors were once GSoC students themselves!

• Half-Shot (2016): Bark: Microblogging in Matrix
• Michael Telatynski (2017): Improving Riot (+Analytics) and Matrix Discoverability
• Andrew Morgan (2017): Qubes MIME Handlers
• Julian Sparber (2018): Improve the Fractal UI

EOF

That's all! Seven projects in 2021 is awesome, and we're looking forward to seeing updates from the students!

Matrix Live 🎙

This week Dan talks to Erik about the state of Synapse generally, and in particular the work Erik has been doing for performance.

Plus! Bonus content, demos! Half-Shot on the MS Teams bridge work, and Hubert previews Matrix over MLS!

Dept of Spec 📜

Matthew reported:

Some combination of me, Kegan, Bruno and neilalexander have been working on v3 of the CS /sync API. (Today's /sync API in matrix is v2; v1 was the old /events API). We're not yet at the point of publishing a draft or MSC, but it's coming soon. It's really exciting work which flips Matrix around so that sync scales independently of the number of rooms you're in - and it's at last possible to write rich clients which only ever sync the bare minimum data needed to work: i.e. lazy loading eeeeeeeeverything. Watch this space :)

anoa told us:

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3192: Batch state endpoint

• MSC3189: Per-room/per-space profile data

• MS3184: Challenges Messages

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3122: Deprecate starting verifications without requesting first

Merged Spec PRs

Here are all the actual MSC-related changes made to the raw Matrix spec this week!

• Clarify that implementations can use stable prefixes once an MSC proposal has merged

Spec Updates

There's been activity from the Spec Core Team on a number of different MSCs, such as MSC3189 (per-room/space profile data). Additionally a spec PR for Matrix URI schemes has been getting feedback and is moving forward at a quick pace! There was also some feedback from the team on MSC2448 (blurhashes) which I'll get around to answering shortly 🙂.

Otherwise I think this week was a bit implementation-heavy for the team (the Spec Core Team is a task in addition to our full-time jobs). Hopefully next week will grant us more of a breather.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

callahad announced:

Hello TWiMmers! The bulk of our update is in Matrix Live today, so go check out the video above ☝️ to hear about how we're reducing the amount of memory it takes to join large rooms, and why joins take so much memory in the first place.

Otherwise, we're mainly getting ready for the public debut of Spaces as a beta feature, but more on that next week... 😉

Oh, and before we go: please make sure your Synapse is up to date! We released 1.33.2 on Tuesday, which contains a low severity security fix.

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

Another installation of the regularly scheduled Kubernetes Helm Chart updates (and another bump of the deprecated Synapse image). Now up to Synapse 1.33.2 and Element Web 1.7.27.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-puppeteer-line

Fair told us:

matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.

This week was spent on stability improvements & bug fixes.

Calling for testers! The bridge is at a point where it's mostly usable, but it still has quite a few blindspots. If anyone is willing to try it out & report issues, it would be a great help!

Discussion: Matrix-LINE Puppeteer bridge Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/issues

Shout-outs to @lecris:lecris.me for being an early tester & having given a lot of useful feedback 🙂

Gitter

Eric Eastwood reported:

Last time, we updated you on starting DM conversations with Gitter users from Matrix. Now we have the other side of this complete! From Gitter, you can now start a one to one conversation with someone you see from Matrix 😀

Just hover over their avatar to bring up the user popover, then press the "Chat privately" button. 🗣

matrix-appservice-irc 0.26.0

Half-Shot reported:

Goooooooood afternoon folks and happy Friday! This week we're announcing the 0.26.0 release of the matrix-appservice-irc bridge which contains precious goodies:

• You can now disable the kick behaviour of the bridge on Matrix users if you are running a personal bridge, so losing your IRC connection no longer results in a kick.

• You can now remove bridges from rooms by using the admin room, so no need to use the provisioning API or modify the DB.

• We've added a new feature to allow you to specify bridge options on a per room basis using room state. At the moment you can modify the limits of the automatic pastebin system but more features like reply formats are to come!

As always please come tell us about it in #irc:matrix.org and make sure to check out the new docs if you get a bit stuck.

Dept of Clients 📱

Hydrogen

A minimal Matrix chat client, focused on performance, offline functionality, and broad browser support. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/

Bruno said:

Hydrogen can now leave rooms and forget archived rooms. URLs are now also clickable in the timeline. Get the full details in the release notes!

Element Clients

Updates from the teams

Web

• Element Web 1.7.28 is up on staging, targeting Monday for release.
  • New spaces Beta (new way of grouping rooms and people)
  • Added support for slash commands working in edits
• On develop:
  • Voice messages are nearing completion - enable the labs flag and give it a go :)
  • Performance improvements to app startup time. Let us know if you run into any issues!

iOS

• 1.3.7 is available on TestFlight. It should be on the App Store on Monday. Spaces are not yet available on Element-iOS but the app offers minimal support. The release contains a fix for background crashed due to PushKit
• At the platform level, we are still improving stability and performance:
  • Decryption operations to be moved outside the main thread
  • More robust on initial sync
  • etc

Android

• 1.1.7 is in open testing via playstore beta channel, Release candidate for Monday. Contains support for spaces beta, several improvements on attachment (video, compression…), as well as a bunch of bug fixes. All details here https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/releases/tag/v1.1.7

Delight

• “Spaces are coming” (I had heard something about that - BP)

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-spring-boot-sdk 0.5.0

Benedict announced:

matrix-spring-boot-sdk 0.5.0 is released and uses Trixnity now.

Dept of Services 🚀

GoMatrixHosting v0.4.6 released!

Michael offered:

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/pull/1046/files

Just had a new release, GoMatrixHosting v0.4.6

* Add database purge section.

* Add markdown copy of User manual.
* Tweak compress state find rooms timeout.

* Update compile AWX instructions for custom branding and radius fix.

Visit #general:gomatrixhosting.com to join in the discussion.

GoMatrixHosting offer a great way to get your own homeserver without needing to run it yourself. Check them out!

Matrix in the News 📰

Matrix was featured on fedoramagazine.org

farribeiro shared:

Fedora promoting the matrix https://fedoramagazine.org/access-freenode-using-matrix-clients/

Final Thoughts 💭

From Dept of Humour in #twim:matrix.org 😅:

• R1 Airport: Maybe I want to see if I can build some type of bridge between Matrix and CUPS.
• hifi: the sad part is that would probably be more reliable than just printing directly

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matrix Server_Stats Bot

MTRNord announced:

The first iteration of visually representing the data gathered by Server Stats Discoverer (traveler bot) is now publicly available at https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/

It for now is only a graph of room relations but in the future is supposed to be extended for a server based graph as well as a Table to search your room within.

Be aware that the page is best viewed and used on desktop. Clicking a Room Node will open a new tab with the matrix.to link. If this fails this might be because of no canonical alias being available.

For the developers the data can be taken from https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/relations The format currently is only available in the d3js format but in the future that API also will be extended for different usecases.

For any feedback like accessibility issues or other issues please reach out to me either via DM or in #server_stats:nordgedanken.dev

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa said:

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3174: An error code for spam rejections

• [WIP] MSC3173: Expose stripped state events to any potential joiner

• MSC3160: Message timezone markup

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3122: Deprecate starting verifications without requesting first (merge)

Merged MSCs:

• MSC1772: Matrix spaces

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3161: Printable tickets

• MSC3067: Prevent/remove legacy groups from being in the spec

• Related Groups (i.e. flair)

• Add groups stuff to spec

Merged Spec PRs

Here are all the actual MSC-related changes to the raw Matrix spec that landed this week!

• #3177 Remove group identifiers

• #3170 Remove v1 identity service API

• #3169 Downgrade identity server failure to FAIL_PROMPT instead of FAIL_ERROR

• #3167 Specify that email handling converts to lowercase first

• #3166 Spec device_id on whoami

• #3163 Describe social-sign-on (multiple SSO providers)

Spec Updates

A reminder that #sct-office:matrix.org is available to communicate directly with the Spec Core Team. A clarification from the last edition of TWIM is that this room is intended to be a low-traffic room solely for asking about the status of a/your MSC, rather than the Spec process or anything else. There is however #matrix-spec-process:matrix.org for discussion of the Spec process, and #matrix-spec:matrix.org for discussion of the Matrix spec and MSCs in general.

Otherwise the Spec Core Team has been doing a little bit of house-keeping. For those that have been living under a rock, Spaces is an upcoming feature intended to replace the old Groups/Community stuff with a much-improved implementation. And one that will actually make it into the spec! We've closed all old groups-related MSCs as they are now obsolete.

Additionally we've been giving some feedback on MSC2946 (Spaces Summary) which is another part of the Spaces puzzle (and is still a blocker for the release of the feature), as well as MSC3079 (Low Bandwidth CS API) which allows Matrix to operate on resource constrained devices and networks. Yours truly has also been making some PRs (one, two) to help clarify the Spec process.

Dept of P2P 👥

Pinecone

Neil Alexander reported:

Yesterday we announced the source code release of Pinecone, our new peer-to-peer overlay network, which we are developing under the P2P Matrix banner.

If you missed it, we wrote a blog post that explains some of the juicy details. The source code is available on GitHub.

Join us in #p2p:matrix.org for the latest P2P developments!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad offered:

It's a release! Synapse 1.33 is out, and we plan to release a security patch for it on Tuesday, May 11th. This follows our previous discussion where we committed to trying to decouple routine security updates from our regular feature releases.

Read the release notes for details, but the big news is that we finally have experimental support for moving presence off of the main process. We're still testing it, but we hope it will allow instances that need presence to more easily scale out.

In last week's TWiM we shared a graph of Synapse's memory use when joining Matrix HQ for the first time. In particular, we saw a spike to 1.4 GB before settling at 800 MB.

In the week since producing that graph, we've managed to nearly eliminate the spike, halving it to 760 MB. After backfilling history, the room settles at around 650 MB:

These changes are still a work in progress, but we hope to get them merged into Synapse in time for the 1.35 release on June 1st.

Additionally, Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) has a request:

I wrote a patch for synapse, that reduces the size of almost empty incremental syncs by 50% (30% if you include http headers). If you are a client developer, you may want to test your client against a synapse with that patch applied, since it broke quite a few clients, that relied on synapse sending empty fields. While synapse sends empty fields, other server implementations, like conduit, don't, so fixing any issues here will help with portability across different server implementations too. With a bit of hope this patch can actually be applied in a few weeks to the official synapse, but it was backed out from the next RC because of the breakage. So if you can, please test your client, which you are developing, against the following PR and fix any issues you experience from it: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/9919

Thank you!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace said:

The regular updates for my Helm charts (and still deprecated Synapse image) have been pushed, for Synapse 1.33.0/1 and the Matrix Media Repo 1.2.8. (technically last week, but it was after friday, so I'm throwing it in again)

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-imessage on iOS

Tulir announced:

The initial alpha version of Brooklyn is now public, which means you can now (try to) use mautrix-imessage on a jailbroken iOS device for iMessage bridging. Setup instructions are on docs.mau.fi: https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/imessage/ios/setup.html

Brooklyn was developed by ethanrdoesmc. It's an app/tweak that handles communicating with iMessage and runs mautrix-imessage as a subprocess for the Matrix side. The initial alpha supports basic text and media message bridging. Sending and receiving tapbacks, replies, read receipts and typing notifications will also be supported in the future.

Feedback is welcome in the mautrix-imessage room: #imessage:maunium.net

Heisenbridge

hifi told us:

Heisenbridge the bouncer style Matrix IRC bridge has seen numerous updates in the past week:

• Identd implementation to get verified usernames on IRC

• TLS support for IRC connections

• IRC excess flood prevention with a buffer

• Proper long message splitting from Matrix to IRC

• Retry support for Matrix requests to work around homeserver downtime/restarts

Minor fixes to ghosting issues and some other stuff. This will be the last big update for a while as it has mostly stabilized enough for daily use.

More testers are still welcome to get the remaining issues ironed out so if you need to connect to unbridged and unplumbed networks and run your own homeserver it would be an excellent time to try it out.

Thanks!

matrix-pstn-bridge

KB1RD reported:

Experimental support for call bridging has landed. Now you can call phone numbers right from Matrix, with partial support for MSC2746. A few things to keep in mind:

• The bridge is still in alpha -- I wouldn't trust it for anything secure at the moment. I would love to hear feedback from tests, though!

• If you tried any of the earlier versions, you will need to re-run the link command since I made some breaking changes. Sorry.

Just a reminder, the GH repo is here and the Matrix room is #matrix-pstn-bridge:kb1rd.net . There's also a general VoIP bridging room at #matrix-voip-bridging:kb1rd.net.

matrix-appservice-irc has a new release candidate

Christian reported:

The IRC bridge matrix-appservice-irc has a new release candidate. The upcoming version 0.26.0 will include many features and bug fixes. Here are three highlights:

• Allow third-party bridged users to change their nickname with the self-serve command !irc nick anothername (thanks vranki)

• Allow room moderators and bridge admins to unlink rooms using the !unlink command

• Add support for specifying the paste bin limit in room state with the org.matrix.appservice-irc.config event type.

Please test it and flag any issues you have upgrading:

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/v0.26.0-rc1

Dept of Clients 📱

FluffyChat

FluffyChat is the cutest cross-platform matrix client. It is available for Android, iOS, Web and Desktop.

krille announced:

FluffyChat 0.30.0 has been released

In this release we have mostly focused on bugfixing and stability. We have switched to the new Flutter 2 framework and have done a lot of refactoring under the hood. The annoying freezing bug should now be fixed. Voice messages now have a new backend which should improve the sound quality and stability. There is now a more professional UI for editing aliases of a room. Users can now see a list of all aliases, add new aliases, delete them and mark one alias as the canonical (or main) alias. Some minor design changes and design fixes should improve the overall UX of the app exspecially on tablets.

Version 0.30.0 will be the first version with arm64 support. You can download binaries from the CI and we will try to publish it on Flathub. Together with the new Linux Desktop Notifications feature, this might be interesting for the Librem 5 or the PinePhone. Sadly I don't own one of these very interesting devices. If you have one, I would very like to see some screenshots of it! :-)

Additionally, Shine told us:

Fluffychat update: Native Fluffychat Linux build now works well on aarch64 devices!

If you want to try the binary from CI, keep in mind that GDK_GL=gles needs to be set to force it to use the OpenGL ES. Flatpak build on Flathub already has it set up and works out of the box.

Some distributions can have issues with input fields and virtual keyboard, making it look like the input is set up as right-to-left. To my understanding, it's an issue of certain older GTK versions with Flutter.

Nice sticker

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) told us:

Nheko now should stop showing you actions, that you can't do anyway, because that is confusing and useless. This includes the following and more:

• Invite members, if you have no invite permissions.

• Delete messages, if you don't have redaction permissions.

• Send a message, reply to one, edit one and more, if you can't even send the message!

Tell us, if we missed something or we removed an action, that you actually have permissions to do!

Apart from that we also started working on some of the features for the next major release. That release will mostly focus on bringing End-to-End-Encryption out of beta. As a first step, Nheko now shows if a message was sent from a verified device or not. This has 3 different trust levels:

• green: The message is from a device you verified. Either by device verification or cross signing.

• greyish: The message is from an unverified device, but that user has never rotated their master signing key and has cross-signed that device. As such we can probably assume, that this is a trusted device. For extra safety, you should of course verify that user, but if it is just an internet personality you will never meet, you trust you are speaking to the right party anyway and can't really verify them anyway, since you don't know how they look either! We don't want to prompt users with red warning signs in such cases, which will lead to them not doing verification properly, because they just want the red marks to go away. Many people are also not interested in the MITM aspects of E2EE. We think this is an okay tradeoff, but any feedback is welcome of course! This is basically Trust On First Use (TOFU), if you heard that term before.

• red: The device is not verified. This can have a few reasons. Either we verified the user, but they didn't verify that device. Or we didn't verify that user and they have changed their master key at some point. Or the signatures for that device are wrong, etc. If you see such a device, you should probably investigate, why that is the case.

These are some biggish changes, so if you experience issues, tell us in #nheko:nheko.im!

Fractal

Alexandre Franke reported:

Hot on the heels of our previous announcement and building on the fresh foundations of our rewrite, Julian got busy on room history. It now appears when a room is selected in the sidebar! To make that selection easier, room filtering in the sidebar has been implemented by new contributor Veli Tasali. Once a room is selected and displayed, messages can even be sent to them! Sounds like we’re done and the client is ready… SHIP IT! Not really though, as it’s still very basic, but at least the bare minimum to make it actually usable is now here.

As a nice bonus, we do lazy loading, and rooms are now added to the sidebar in batch on startup to ensure good performances. The sidebar also got some refinements from Kévin (!732 and !736).

Finally Veli also helped us get the docs for fractal-next published, lowering the barrier to entry for other new contributors. They are available at https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/fractal/fractal/.

For further details, Julian published a technical overview of the internals of the new codebase.

Element Clients

Updates provided by the teams

Delight

• We’ve been shepherding MSC1772 into the spec which has now exited final comment period and merged!
• Alongside, we’ve also been iterating on the Spaces implementations all round in preparation for wider testing soon, which has included
  • Iterating on filtering on Web to filter all Spaces
  • Iterating on logic for showing notification badges to avoid single DMs spawning multiple badges
  • Iterating on ‘Home’ to instead behave more like ‘All’
  • Iterating on implementations across the web, iOS, Android & Synapse to use stable prefixes
  • & lots of other small tweaks

Web

• Element Web 1.7.27-rc.1 on staging
  • Added localisation support to the desktop layer (for menu items etc.)
  • Fixed encrypted search indexing on Windows
  • Hardware media keys are now ignored, so they'll go to other apps as intended
• On develop
  • Calling architecture reworked to support multiple streams, please report any issues
• 1.7.27 release planned for Monday

iOS

• 1.3.6 is in review for the App Store. We have polished and fixed several issues on 1:1 and group calls. The release contains fixes for several bugs and crashes.

Very excited about the Spaces progress! Looks like everything that I found in recent testing is fixed!

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity released

Benedict announced:

Trixnity finally got released this week. It's a Kotlin multiplatform Matrix SDK for high level access to Client-Server API and Appservice API. It has all (and some more) features from matrix-spring-boot-sdk which is based on Trixnity now (an update for that will be released soon). Trixnity can currently be used on JVM and JS as platform (Native is not working yet). It is also very customizable by adding custom room and state event types.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Cactus Comments 🌵

Asbjørn offered:

Cactus Comments is a federated comment system for the open web built on Matrix.

We released the Cactus Comments Web Client v0.9.0!

This version introduces a display name field for guest users, so guest users finally have sensible names.

It also brings the option to use HTML data attributes for configuration.

• Comment sections can now be initialized using data-* attributes on the script tag (Thanks to @NicolaiSoeborg for !5).

• Allow using strings for any config parameter, including booleans and numbers.

• Users can now set a displayname when commenting as a guest.

• Some styling improvements for text inputs.

/ipns/latest.cactus.chat is updated to point to the latest release, so sites linking there should already be using the new version.

Come play with the demo: https://cactus.chat/demo

Join our Matrix room: #cactus:cactus.chat

Phonehome stats viz

Matthew reported:

I did a video a few months back trying to show the physical layout of Matrix over the years by looking at the phonehome stats and the number of active users per server (showing full-mesh edges between the top 100 servers, heatmapped by how busy the servers were at either end of the edge). There was a bug in the phonehome stats during 2017, but it's still fairly cool...

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Matthew presents the MSC process! Get slides here.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

University of Innsbruck featured in heise.de

Oda Nobunaga said:

The German IT platform Heise has conducted an interview with the university of Innsbruck which chose Matrix/Element over Microsoft Teams. Reasons: it's free, decentralized/federated, expandable and secure.

https://www.heise.de/news/Zusammenarbeit-MS-Teams-als-Lockangebot-in-eine-geschlossene-Microsoft-Umgebung-6030514.html

"free, decentralized/federated, expandable and secure" sounds like a great set of reasons!

Heise article, naturally, is in German. Element have some content in English discussing the deployment, and how well-suited Matrix is for universities. Finally, the best kind of feedback: an Innsbruck professor cheers the utility of federation:

And the best thing: The federation across different institutions really works. I can still participate in project related chats with my former team @ETH_en while seamlessly supporting lectures at @uniinnsbruck. All out of one tool, one login. pic.twitter.com/6LXHcu7Jjf

— Jan Beutel (@jan_beutel) April 30, 2021

Famedly Fellows on Linux Lounge

Nico offered:

Btw if anyone wanted to hear Krille and me live, we are live at the linux lounge now. It's in GERMAN! https://theradio.cc/blog/category/shownotes/linuxlounge/

Exciting! Possibly. For the lucky few who can understand it anyway!

Lazalatin added:

If anyone did miss the opportunity to listen to the live stream: Here you can find the recording, with show notes, as well: https://rec.theradio.cc/item/ll244/
We were happy to have Krille and Nico with us. 🥳
(website in german as well as the stream recording)

:D

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa offered:

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• There were no new MSCs created this week.

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC1772: Matrix spaces (merge) (5 days remaining)

Merged MSCs:

• MSC2713: Remove deprecated v1 Identity Service API

Abandoned MSCs:

• MSC3137: Define space room type, subset of MSC1772
• [WIP] MSC2356: Bulk /joined_members endpoint

Spec Updates

We've opened up a new room for MSC authors to come and ask about the MSC process, as well as for review and feedback on their MSC ideas over at #sct-office:matrix.org. If you're unsure what the next steps for your MSC are, or aren't sure whether an idea would make sense for inclusion in the Matrix Specification, then this room is the perfect place to ask about it. Come on by!

In terms of MSC work, Spaces remains one of the most active topics in the spec this week, with MSC1772 finally reaching Final Comment Period! A lot of work went into writing and reviewing the MSC, as well as crafting the implementation - so congratulations to everyone involved! Of course, any concerns can still be raised over the next 5 days by anyone before the proposal is ultimately merged to the spec.

There are a number of changes being merged to the spec as we move swiftly towards the next major Spec release. Those that have merged this week are:

• MSC2403: Knocking and MSC2998: Room Version 7

• MSC2874: Single SSSS

• MSC1544: Key verification using QR Codes

Otherwise there's been a smattering of discussion and updates on various MSCs, such as MSC2730 (verifiable forwarded events), MSC2249 (requiring a user to be able to see an event to report it) and MSC2516 (voice messages).

Thanks for reading!

Also - knocking is now published to the unstable spec, check it out at: https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/client-server-api/#knocking-on-rooms

Dept of P2P 👥

P2P Matrix

Neil Alexander announced:

We've just released the first public P2P Matrix demo using the experimental Pinecone protocol. There are builds available for Android right now and iOS is following shortly via Testflight as soon as it passes Apple's beta review:

• Android 10+: https://appdistribution.firebase.dev/i/394600067ea8ba37

• iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/Tgh2MEk6 (wait for build 73!)

If you enable the static peer in the peer-to-peer settings, you can join us in the #beachparty:3bf0258d23c60952639cc4c69c71d1508a7d43a0475d9000ff900a1848411ec7 room!

The demo will attempt to connect to other devices using Bluetooth Low Energy, even if internet connectivity isn't available. Local connectivity over Wi-Fi is also supported. It's still very rough around the edges and there are lots of bugs, but feel free to give it a go!

Join #p2p:matrix.org for more chat and to provide feedback!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timokoesters said:

• Feature: Implement /devices

• Feature: Send invites over federation

• Improvement: Verify signatures for incoming requests

• Improvement: Room directory now loads a lot faster

• Fix: Retrying transactions works correctly now

We managed to work on a few features the last two weeks, but there are some very annoying issues with major Matrix clients:

• E2EE does not work Element Android <-> Element Android

• Wrong room version warnings on Element Web

• Cross signing unreliable on Conduit (but works with Fluffychat)

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad said:

We expect to release 1.33 on Tuesday; more on that next week. But generally speaking, much of our development focus has been on profiling the memory usage of small homeservers joining large, highly-federated rooms for the first time. For example, we see a graph like this when joining Matrix HQ:

At a first pass, we're aiming to significantly reduce the initial spikiness of that graph, and we think #9910 will help with the subsequent slow ramp up in memory.

We've also been discussing how to balance our relatively rapid release cadence with managing low severity security issues. If you have any thoughts, preferences, or relevant experiences to share, please comment here!

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Heisenbridge announced

hifi said:

Announcing a new bouncer style Matrix IRC bridge to bridge the gap between IRC and Matrix in a way that's easy to configure and manage by homeserver administrators for small scale deployment.

Meet Heisenbridge https://github.com/hifi/heisenbridge 🥳 (it's a Breaking Bad reference 🤦)

It's written in Python and started off as an experiment if it's possible to create a somewhat well performing stateless IRC bridge that's practically almost zero configuration. It quickly found a use case of being able to join !channels on IRCnet that hasn't been possible in the past.

Intended target audience are people who run their own homeserver and would like to transition from a combination like ssh+irssi to pure Matrix (with weechat-matrix, of course!) but still keep IRC close without losing the "fine details" of the protocol that happens when plumbing a room properly.

As the bridge is written by someone who doesn't really know Python help is much appreciated in the form of filing issues, sending pull requests or just discussing about it on Matrix to tell how you would like to use it!

Development and support in #heisenbridge:vi.fi

Thanks!

matrix-puppeteer-line updated

Fair offered:

matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.

Updates:

• Inbound read receipts! But with a view caveats:

  • Receipts are only fetched for the "most recently active" room.

    • Example: if you send a message in room A, then room B, receipts will only be fetched for room B and not room A, until you (or someone else, from LINE) posts in room A.

    • This will be fixed in the next update. I have an idea for some Puppeteer trickery to get it working.

  • Read receipts in group chats are bridged as annotations (reactions) instead of "real" read receipts, until all members of the chat have read a message.

    • This is because LINE's read receipts for group chats don't tell show who read a message, but only how many people a message was read by.
    • To capture this in Matrix, instead of sending read receipts for a group chat message, the bridge puts a reaction of "Read by #" on it, with "#" matching how many people read the message so far. Once everyone in the chat has read a message, the reaction is removed and a "real" receipt is sent for all users.

• Internal changes to message syncing that should hopefully make inbound messages more reliable, or the very least improve code maintenance.

Discussion:

#matrix-puppeteer-line:miscworks.net

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) offered:

Hey there, it is your friendly neighborhood cat client! Pardon, chat client!

Jedi18 implemented forwarding of messages. Just select a message and press Alt-F or use the context menu to send a message to the room you select in the popup! This encrypts and decrypts messages and media appropriately, but be aware that sending an encrypted file to an unencrypted room uploads the file unencrypted. (In all other cases the media is not uploaded again.)

Furthermore matrix.to links are now rewritten to matrix:-URIs internally. This means joining rooms and such should now work the same across both of them. It also makes navigation to events work now and even has a shiny highlight effect now! You can also create links to events now from the context menu. These are generated as matrix.to links, since currently the onboarding experience should still be better. Once the next version of the matrix.to website gets deployed, you can even just click there to open the event in Nheko! (Instead of having to copy a /join command).

Since "Copy link to event" was confusing to people and AppAraat opened his present box, only to realize it did not contain "Copy link location", we implemented that too as well as a copy action, to copy the event body for good measure. I hope everyone who got confused will forgive me!

Apart from that we also updated our screenshots on https://nheko-reborn.github.io/ (and all AppStream based store pages) to be higher resolution and reflect the current design. Furthermore we fixed the login on conduit homeservers and that no rooms were shown, if the server didn't support the groups API.

That's all, and keep on c(h)atting! <3

NeoChat

Carl Schwan told us:

We rewrote the room managing code moving it from QML to C++ and unify how we manage rooms in NeoChat. This allowed us to support the matrix-URIs scheme, making it possible to open rooms and show user information when clicking on a matrix: link in your browser. Sverin Saji improved the look of the typing indicator and Jan Blackquill improved the keyboard navigation.

Watch The Matrix

Doug offered:

This week I published the first public build on TestFlight:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/a06n3gN4

There are a few reports of issues when signing in which I'm looking into. A few other changes include:

• Round complications show [ ] instead of an empty icon (some have been disabled for now).

• When signing in, the homeserver can be detected from the username.

• Various performance and bug fixes for sync responses.

• The app now has an icon and more purple accents.

As requested by benpa after my last update, here's a video of it running on a device:

/me doesn't need to buy an Apple Watch ... /me doesn't need to buy an Apple Watch

Element Clients

Updates from the teams.

Delight

• We’ve been maturing and iterating on MSC1772 in anticipating of wider testing of Spaces in the near future
• On Web, we’ve been iterating on designs & implementations for a beta, including tweaking filtering to display rooms from all Spaces
• On Android, we’ve been doing the same, and have merged the initial Spaces implementation onto develop
• On Synapse, we’ve been implementing restricting rooms based on the Space Summary API

Web

• 1.7.26 released on Monday
  • Added persistence of unsent messages across app restart
  • Improved room list filtering performance
  • Improved the image detail view
• On develop
  • Element Desktop is now available for localisation in Weblate
• In progress
  • Improving room join UX, ensuring you can get back to a room when it finally joins
  • Converting more files to TypeScript, including key modules like EventTile and friends

iOS

• 1.3.5 has been published to the App Store on Monday.
• We have been polishing the new VoIP design this week. It should be merged into develop early next week and released in the App Store the week after.
• We want to focus on code quality. We set up GitHub actions in our 3 repos. They run both unit tests and integration tests. We need to fix some of our 600+ tests in the SDK but we now have a CI able to complain about test failures.

Android

• The Spaces have landed on Element Android, on the develop branch. We are working to stabilize the feature before the release in beta next week.
• In parallel, we are working to stabilize the whole application, and provide a better support on Android 11.
• Also it will be possible in the next release to compress video before sending, which is a very expected feature.

Hydrogen

A minimal Matrix chat client, focused on performance, offline functionality, and broad browser support. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/

Bruno said:

Invites and other goodies have landed in 0.1.46 & 0.1.47!

If you spend any amount of time with Bruno, eventually the topic of sourdough will arise - now it's even sneaking into his updates!

Dept of VoIP 🤙

matrix-pstn-bridge

KB1RD told us:

I announced this project last week. It's exactly what it sounds like: A puppetting bridge to puppet a telephone number from Matrix. It's currently pre-alpha and not ready for use on public-facing HSes.

Not too much has happened in the last week as I've been a bit busy. The main thing is that there's now a dev branch where outbound voice calls work. Other than the 2014 SIP experiment, I think this is the first bridge to make voice calls work?

I hope having a reference VoIP bridge can help pave the way for more VoIP bridging. I'm already looking into how code can be generalized for other bridges. For example, I've opened an issue in matrix-bot-sdk to add helper classes and stuff for VoIP support. I'd be curious to see how other bridge builders think this could be accomplished. 👀

If you're interested in PSTN bridging specifically, there's a room for that.

If you're interested in VoIP bridging in general, there's a room for that, too

Dept of Services 🚀

etke.cc - like Element Matrix Services, but on your servers, under your control and without restrictions

Aine reported:

Some context: I like how simple EMS allows you to setup the Matrix homeserver, but it lacks any internal tuning or customization ability. Do you want more? OK, setup it yourself and try to stay normal while trying to configure coturn to properly run in docker cluster. Because of that, I did a service where you can order initial setup and configuration of homeserver (yes, with coturn in docker cluster!) and with full control of customization and fine-tuning of manual configuration (website even has step-by-step guide how the process works).

It's based on the amazing spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy with additional stuff like system security hardening and maintenance

Announcements: #announcements:etke.cc

Source: https://gitlab.com/rakshazi/matrix-ansible/ It contains basic security stuff like ufw and fail2ban, system maintenance like updating packages, cleanup of old logs and docker images, configuration of swap, some additions like absurdly simply healthcheck page and website deployment to base domain. Documentation may be found in readme files for each role

GoMatrixHosting v0.4.5 is here!

Michael said:

GoMatrixHosting v0.4.5 is here!

https://gitlab.com/GoMatrixHosting

The FLOSS Matrix hosting system built on AWX, it enables you to manage multiple Matrix servers for many clients in both a commercial or non-commercial context. We are currently doing a free giveaway of on-premises server plans, if you're an experienced user or Matrix admin you can receive a free on-premises subscription and hopefully provide us with some feedback.

For more updates on this project visit our Matrix room: #general:gomatrixhosting.com

GoMatrixHosting was previously Oasis Hosting - looks like they're making great progress improving their product, may be time to have another look.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Matrix_Stats Discoverer (bot) ( @server_stats:nordgedanken.dev )

MTRNord reported:

Some of you might already have seen that bot show up in rooms. To clear up some confusion around it I will briefly explain what it does and what it is supposed to do:

What does it do?

The Bot is simply existing to do the same task as Matrix Traveler (bot) already did for years now. It joins rooms, listens for an alias, tries to join it.

The main difference between these 2 bots is that my bot also searches for aliases in old messages.

What does it save?

It only saves the relations between rooms. This means it knows which room was posted where. It doesn't know who posted it, when it was posted, why it was posted or any other content of messages.

However due to matrix' nature it does need to get the data once onto a synapse to read trough it. This means it has the data on my synapse. (Running in helsinki at hetzner).

What can I do if I do not want it?

The easiest way is to just ban it. It will fully forget that room.

Kicking works too but it might again join if it gets found again.

Where is the source?

The source code is available at https://git.nordgedanken.dev/MTRNord/server_stats/-/blob/main/src/bot/mod.rs

For further questions feel free to join #server_stats:nordgedanken.dev

Also note this bot is still very early in development which is why it does not respond to you yet on any commands. This will be added in the near future as well as a readme in the repository

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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