Matrix Live 🎙

Every month (in theory), we do an in-office wrap-up of some interesting project work from the team. This Matrix Live was recorded this afternoon in the Matrix Office, and features Valere explaining Cross-Signing, and Matthew demonstrating P2P/dendrite. (Apologies for the incorrect recorded screen at times! Video came straight from a live demo!)

Dept of Spec 📜

Here's your weekly spec update!

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

No MSCs entered FCP this week.

New MSCs:

No new MSCs have been created.

Random happenings

I (anoa) have been re-writing mscbot as it hasn't gotten much development love in the past year and there's lots of features we'd like to implement. Expect to see some of that next week. First feature the new implementation has is being able to track who is in the Spec Core Team via github teams instead of a config file.

Spec Core Team update

The Spec Core Team is working on MSC2260, MSC2261, and a QR-via-SAS thing which uhoreg is currently working on (this means less complicated, easier-to-scan QR codes for verification, which may have the side effect of FOSDEM demos being slightly less hilarious).

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣

FOSDEM 2020

FOSDEM happened, Matrix had a great time! Was awesome to see so many people at the stand, and the talks, and even at our social on Saturday night.
Congratulations to everyone who was able to buy a limited edition Matrix FOSDEM 2020 t-shirt! Check out our round-up here.

@florian:dsn.tm.kit.edu said:

Reporting from FOSDEM: Currently sitting in the Fixing healthcare data exchange with decentralized FOSS: Building a decentralized Infrastructure to fix medical data exchange in The Netherlands talk, and was pleasantly surprised to learn that they also want to integrate Matrix for decentralized messaging between healthcare providers themselves and patients.

Mathijs announced:

last week was FOSDEM and it was great!

Yes we covered that.

Matrix Meetup: London, 26th February 2020

Are you interested in a real-life, real-time Matrix-related meetup? Can you make it to London? Join us on the 26th February at Second Home in Spitalfields! More details to follow, for now please register your interest at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/matrix-london-meetup-26th-february-2020-tickets-93320354693.

Dept of Services 🚀

ungleich.ch offering paid Matrix hosting

@nico:ungleich.ch told us:

I was just pointed to here by evilham because of https://twitter.com/ungleich/status/1224375895995113474 - maybe it's of interest for anyone

This is quite exciting - a new provider is offering Hosted Matrix solutions, based in Switzerland. Go check out their offering: https://ungleich.ch/u/products/hosted-matrix-chat/.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite

Neil Alexander reported:

Quite a lot has been happening in the Dendrite space, both in terms of general development, usability improvements and also further P2P experimentation post-FOSDEM. The main highlights are:

• We have decided to require Go 1.13 for Dendrite going forward (our CI and tools have been updated to reflect this requirement)
• Some federation testing has taken place between Dendrite and Synapse and it's looking reasonably good bar a few bugs
• Initial support for distinguishing room versions has been added - this is the foundation work for being able to implement state resolution v2 and later room versions soon
• The /capabilities endpoint has been implemented and now contains information about m.room_versions
• Account data GET endpoints have been implemented
• Guest registration should now be working - thanks to prateek2211 for the contribution!
• The public rooms API is now wired up for roomserver events and (mostly) works for local rooms
• Some more /sync fixes are in now
• SQLite work is continuing thanks to Kegan's on-going efforts

We've also been really encouraged by the number of people at FOSDEM who came to speak to us about Dendrite and P2P. We're hoping to strategise further about the P2P work further in the coming weeks once Dendrite is in better shape, so watch this space!

Synapse

This week we’ve been working on alias auth rules, acme v2 support and moving groups apis onto a worker to aid performance. Sorry matrix.org has been a bit slow these past few days, we’re working on it and shipped some fixes earlier today.

Coming up are more perf improvements, more alias rules, getting sydent running in production on python 3. We’ll also ship v1.10.0 which contains some cross signing bug fixes.

Docker-matrix

Mathijs told us:

A docker image for synapse 1.10.0rc2 is available on mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.10.0rc2

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-irc 1.15.0

Half-Shot announced:

Good people, 0.15.0 is out!. Please go ahead and read the changes and see if there is something you like :). We will be shipping this out to all the other bridges in due course :)

mautrix-telegram

Tulir said:

I released v0.7.1 that includes some minor bugfixes, then added a !tg backfill command to backfill all history since the last bridged message. Future improvements may include more control over how many messages to backfill, automatically backfilling for new portals and freezing incoming message handling when a backfill is in progress.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

maubot

There's a new maubot plugin to post http.cat pictures to a room. It's installed into Cat Disruptor 6000 and can of course be self-hosted too. It has one command: !http \<status\>, that gets https://http.cat/<status>.jpg and posts it to the room.

mautrix-manager

Some time ago I also made this thing: https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-manager. It might theoretically do something useful in the future, such as allowing users to log into bridges from a single website instead of by talking to many bots. Currently it only does telegram and maybe facebook, but at least it has a fancy login UI. It could also support being embedded into Riot as a widget and/or integration manager at some point, since I made the auth thing with Matrix's OpenID feature and MSC1961.

Quotient project revived

kitsune told us:

The Quotient project is back from hibernation now that its lead developer settled in another half of the globe; commits and PRs start moving around again. Thanks to all those patiently waiting!

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

Nico said:

• You can now select more emojis in the emoji picker. (your font may not support them yet)
• The timeline should scroll a lot faster and room switching should be a lot faster.
• Fixed some alignment and sharpness issues in the logo
• You can now mute rooms (or set them to mentions only)!
• Some fixes around all kind of weird html escaping in usernames and messages.
• Move the reply popup into the timeline to fix some alignment issues and improve the look and feel.
• Fix an issue, where on windows the maximum database size was set to only a few bytes because of integer overflow.
• Fix a regression when importing key backups from Riot.
• Nheko now only sends the file name of a file as its name instead of the full path, fixing a privacy leak.

Riot WebExtension 🧩

stoic reported:

Version 1.5.8.5 is out

• SSO Login is now supported (so mozilla.modular.im logins work 🎉)
• Updated Riot Web to stable version 1.5.8
• Firefox-only:
  • Now correctly reopens riot tabs that were in containers when the Add-on updates
  • General tips on how to use containers to have multiple accounts can be found on the AMO description
• Get the Firefox Add-on here
• Get the Chrome Extension here

Riot iOS

Manu reported:

This week, we polished the E2E by default and cross-signing features we have implemented so far.

Riot Web

Ryan offered:

• Continuing focus on cross-signing post-FOSDEM to get everything ready for release
• QR codes and key sharing improvements planned for delivery in the near future
• Improved Seshat integration in Riot Desktop with more status info

Riot-Android

benoit reported:

Riot-Android (yes, the legacy app!): We have fixed the issue with SSO login with Firefox accounts, and issue with Video Call. Expect a release at the beginning of next week.

RiotX

benoit announced:

RiotX: we are still stabilizing the cross-signing implementation. Many other fixes are coming. Also SSO issue with Firefox accounts has been fixed, and we will also release a new version of the application next week.

matrix-presents

...is a matrix presentation client. The room of interest is #presents:half-shot.uk

It's also had a fair few changes since last time:

• QR codes now render if you are the presenter, for easy joining.
• You can react to slides as a guest, and they show up on the presenters screen :).
• Slides and their contents are cached in indexedeb (browser storage), to lessen the load on homeservers.
• Add UI to create rooms in the client, albeit without an editor just yet.
• Various CSS tweaks to try and make life better.

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. Join #ping: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!

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

This weekend Matrix will be well represented at FOSDEM! We'll have a stand (come visit!), but also note that we have THREE speaking slots (all on Sunday):

• Half-Shot will discuss Bridging All The Things with Matrix in UD2.208 (Decroly) at 11:15
• Matthew will present The Path to Peer-to-Peer Matrix in UA2.220 (Guillissen) at 14:30
• Matthew again will give a talk titled Making & Breaking Matrix's E2E encryption in K.1.105 (La Fontaine) at 16:00

No Matrix Live today - look out for a special edition this weekend!

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa told us:

Here's your weekly spec update!

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

No MSCs entered FCP this week.

New MSCs:

• MSC2427: Proposal for JSON-based message formatting
• MSC2425: Remove Authentication on /submitToken Identity Service API

Random happenings

MSC2260: Update the auth rules for m.room.aliases events and MSC2261: Allow m.room.aliases events to be redacted by room admins are being progressed to help address ongoing alias spam, while [WIP] MSC1543: Key verification using QR codes has been updated as the feature is being implemented for cross-signing - to be demoed as FOSDEM this weekend! Sorunome's MSC2403: Add "knock" feature

Spec Core Team update

The Spec Core Team is still working on implementation. Expect things to ramp up again after FOSDEM! (Looking forward to seeing some of you there!)

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil offered:

This week we’ve been continuing our E2EE UX bug hunt, getting Sydent ready for python 3, working on alias rules (MSC2260, 2261) and fixing some bugs in our ACME support.

Next week, we’ll ship the new improved Sydent, keep going with alias rules and dust off our master process sharding plans.

Synapse Deployment

Many projects updated:

Ananace announced:

Just pushed updated 1.9.1 tags for the K8s-optimized Synapse images, including support - and example config - for running with securityContext features enabled. With a separate media repo, it's now fully possible to run these images without root, and in completely read-only environment.

Mathijs announced:

The synapse 1.9.1 release images are available on avhost/docker-matrix:v1.9.1 and mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.9.1 The latter image also contains simple-antispam

and then

A docker image for synapse 1.10.0rc1 is available on mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.10.0rc1

ma1sd 2.3.0 released

ma1uta announced:

ma1sd 2.3.0 https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.3.0 Changes:

• Load DNS overwrite config on startup (from https://github.com/NullIsNot0)
• Remove duplicates from identity store before email notifications (from https://github.com/NullIsNot0)
• Fix room name retrieval after Synapse dropped table room_names (from https://github.com/NullIsNot0)
• Add logging configuration. Add --dump and --dump-and-exit options to just print the full configuration.
• Add the postgresql backend for internal storage.
• Improve logging configuration. Introduce the root and the app log levels.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome offered:

mx-puppet-bridge got some updates!

• way more tests (still not good enough test coverage, though!)
• enhanced reaction support (reaction deletions/redactions are now properly bridged from and to matrix)
• presence status now sets im.vector.user_status event to be in line with riots status labs feature (why doesn't riot just use the spec on presence status here?!)
• add a message deduplicator class that protocol implementations with echo back can easily implement
• fix various small bugs

As always, if you have any questions check out the support channel and please consider to donate! (Thanks sooooo much to everyone who donated so far!) 🦊

matrix-slack-parser

matrix-slack-parser is, similar to matrix-discord-parser, a parser for slack->matrix and matrix->slack messages. It has been created over this week and does proper parsing (meaning HTML parsing and slack blocks, etc.). mx-puppet-slack already implements this, which leaves matrix-appservice-slack to follow suit! (cadair expressed interest, so looking forward to that!)

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

@deepbluev7:neko.dev offered:

Nheko has added support kicking, inviting and banning/unbanning via the commands /kick, /invite, /ban and /unban with an optional reason specified after the userid. Kick and Ban buttons were also enabled for the userprofile. Furthermore some shortcuts for switching rooms (Ctrl+Up/Down) and paginating the timeline (PgUp/PgDown) were added. The shortcuts may change in the future though, so if those don't work for you, please give us feedback in #nheko-reborn:matrix.org or via the issue!

RiotX cross-signing implementation

benoit said:

RiotX: the team is mainly working on cross-signing implementation and device verification with QR code. It's nearly there https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1223205391531683845 !

FluffyChat Flutter is getting a Dark Mode

MTRNord said:

Sneak Peak of the next FluffyChat Flutter Update :)

FluffyChat Flutter is getting a Dark Mode for both mobile and web. Including a AMOLED compatible color version.

Dept of Bots 🤖

New Project: Pluggable Chatbot (PCB) written in Go

@sava:chat.zorbiro.com announced:

I started a new Pluggable Chatbot (PCB) written in Go. Still early development, but working hard on it. Bot is pluggable, meaning more functionality can be easily added to it. Check it out at https://github.com/srados/pcb.
Currently there are two examples available: echo and uppercase.

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

Final Thoughts 💭

Half-Shot offered:

I know it's a bit naughty to post rooms in here, but for developers looking to play around with Vue.js (with matrix), we've created a support room over at #vue:half-shot.uk

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Half-Shot talks to Neil about his new(ish) project, matrix-presents

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa reported:

Here are your spec updates for this week!

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs currently in Final Comment Period

New MSCs:

• MSC2422: Allow color on font tag
• MSC2416: Enhance m.login.token authentication type
• MSC2414: Make reason optional for reporting content
• MSC2413: Remove client_secret
• MSC2425: Remove Authentication on /submitToken Identity Service API

The Spec Core Team is still working on implementation, and likely will continue to be until after FOSDEM.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / P2P

Neil Alexander announced:

A fairly big PR was merged into Dendrite yesterday (and some more fixes today) which gets /sync working better and adds the /messages endpoint, so it's now actually possible to paginate around in channels and to see room history. This massively improves the user experience when logging into a Dendrite homeserver.

In addition, another small PR was merged to fix Riot user login in the normal login workflow (not registration) and the public rooms API has been wired up for roomserver events.

A couple of changes have also been merged into gomatrixserverlib, mostly fixing the creation of /backfill requests and allowing the use of custom http.Transports for federation traffic.

P2P work is continuing - stay tuned!

Synapse 1.9.0

Neil said:

This week we shipped 1.9.0 which contained new admin API endpoints as well as bug fixes for existing ones. Aside from that, we’ve been continuing on our E2EE UX bug hunt and python3ing sydent.

Next week, we’ll keep going on the e2ee ux bug hunt and sydent work. As well as dusting off MSCs 2260 2261 to improve room aliases management.

Deploying Synapse

Several packaging projects have been updated to deploy the new version:

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat
• also from the Debian repos thanks to @andrewsh:matrix.org

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-IRC hits 0.14.1

Half-Shot said:

Hello wannabe IRC and Matrix users! Today the bridge team bring you the 0.14.X series of the irc bridge. This is the mammoth release featuring all the Typescript changes and postgres stuff. The Postgres changes aren't as essential as they are for Synapse, but useful if you run a ~20k Freenode bridge.

The highlights are:

• Typescript is now used everywhere across the project, bringing a range of refactors.
• Postgresql support has landed, while still retaining NeDB support for the present.
• Storing your password will now cause a seamless reconnect to the IRC network, allowing you to set a password without having to bother NickServ.
• Sentry.io support has landed, to trace errors in the bridge.
• Added a reapUsers API endpoint, which allows the bridge to automatically prune users who have not interacted with the bridge for a long time.

Some of these features are still more experimental than others, so the next release hopes to clean up a lot of the outstanding bugs. That's all from us for now :)

mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome said:

A lot happened on the mx-puppet-bridge front! Mostly documentation and code cleanup to make future development easier.

• Introduce better documentation and a sample config
• Introduce a demonstration protocol implementation, mx-puppet-echo, meant to help those out who want to write their own protocol implementation
• Eliminate triple-usage of room/channel/chan, it's just called "room" everywhere now
• Split matrix event handling and remote event handling into their own files/classes
• Eliminate all usage of the any keyword, with the help of matrix-bot-sdk's event models
• Start writing tests to, well, auto-test the library
• Various small bugfixes

As always, feel free to drop by the support room and please consider to donate!

matrix-discord-parser

sorunome also added:

matrix-discord-parser is the joint matrix->discord and discord->matrix parser that both mx-puppet-discord and matrix-appservice-discord use. For sending messages matrix->discord optional auto-detection of code language for code blocks using highlight.js has been implemented.

Dept of Clients 📱

Riot WebExt 🧩

stoic announced this pretty cool project:

Always wanted to host your own version of Riot Web locally but never came around doing it? Meet Riot WebExt, an unofficial proof of concept Browser Extension that bundles Riot Web, so everything is locally served with the click of a button. Available for Firefox and Chrome!

Firefox AMO: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/riot Chrome Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lgpdpggoahhnlmaiompkgghldllldcjh GitHub: https://github.com/stoically/riot-webext Room: #riot-webext:matrix.org

Ditto Chat [v0.2.0] released!

Annie announced Ditto Chat v0.2.0!

Ditto Chat is a Matrix Client in React Native.

Added

• Ability to Create a New Room & Search for Users
• Notifications for Android
• Improved Timeline Rendering (support for m.notice)

Changed

• Color scheme is darker / night mode
• Improved Direct Message vs Group Detection
• Settings Screen Design (smaller, scrolls now)
• Loads fewer events, thus initial sync is faster

Fixed

• Various Visual Bugs

Download Links: https://dittochat.org
Room: #ditto:elequin.io

koma and Continuum, Kotlin Matrix projects

yuforia said:

koma, Kotlin library for building clients:

• Responses of the sync API can be received continuously using Flow (async lazy sequence) now. Compared to previous method which used Channel, Flow can be transformed and combined in a much more flexible way, and Flow stops when it's no longer being consumed, so no coroutine will be left running accidentally.

Continuum desktop client based on Koma:

• Improve startup speed a bit more (Render more UI widgets without waiting for IO operations to finish).

FluffyChat-Flutter is now available as a web app!

MTRNord reported:

Check it out at: https://christianpauly.gitlab.io/fluffychat-flutter/

It includes everything that the Android App does except for currently notifications and file sharing.

Riot iOS

Manu told us:

This week, in the cross-signing side, we updated e2e decoration, replacing padlocks with shields. We started working on the new device list in the room member screen.

RiotX, rainbows and other new features

benoit said:

RiotX: We are making progress on cross-signing and verification by QRCode. Also we are working to improve the network detection and paused sync thread issue. But the most important is: "/rainbow" command will be available soon 🌈 !

Riot Web

TravisR told us:

We've done a lot this week, and probably even more next week:

• Continuing on the cross-signing front with support for QR code verification, verification in the right panel, a bunch of shields to indicate trust, some bootstrapping in the secret store, and more!
• A release candidate for 1.5.8-rc.2 (please give this a test on riot.im/staging)
• An all-new invite dialog for creating DMs and bringing people into rooms.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰

Tampere Hacklab information display powered by Matrix

Cos reported:

tsw from Tampere Hacklab has made a read-only client for information displays. It's still in early development but can already be tried out. https://github.com/tswfi/matrix-viewer/

Dept of Jobs 💰

Neil announced:

Are there any French speaking Sys Admins reading this? If that's you then I want you to know that https://apply.workable.com/new-vector/j/766008FB0D/ exists and if you are interested to know more you should DM me. Remote is fine - though full time only.

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. Join #ping: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 🌡

Google Summer of Code 2020

Sometimes it seems like existence is a constant loop. Cycles within cycles are replayed, with only minor differences to help us discern the current and the foregoing.
How can we endure it?

It's not all bad though! Google have announced the return of the Summer of Code programme, and have updated their website with the current year (2020) and latest information.

Matrix will be applying to be a Mentoring Organisation, as we have for several years now. This year, we'd like to open the umbrella a little. If you think your (Matrix-related) project could help mentor a student, and that you could offer a meaningful project to that student, please contact me directly. For reference, there were four students under the Matrix heading last year, of which one was assigned to work with Kitsune on encryption support in libQuotient.

FOSDEM 2020

Will you be at FOSDEM this year? Matrix will be very well represented, so please come and see us at our stand, plus attend all of the three talks we'll be conducting. Many more details to follow!

Dept of Services 🚀

New from bit.nl, a public Matrix Homeserver focused on the Dutch market. Read the announcement and sign up here.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa offered:

Here are this week's spec 🐕️ updates!

Merged MSCs:

No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

No MSCs are in Final Comment Period.

New MSCs:

• MSC2413: Remove client_secret
• MSC2409: Proposal to send EDUs to appservices
  • This is a continuation of MSC1888

The Spec Core Team is still working on implementation, and likely will continue to be until after FOSDEM.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / P2P

Neil Alexander reported:

I've spent some time this week experimenting with integrating libp2p into dendrite and gomatrixserverlib to understand if we can get link-local homeserver discovery working along with direct or indirect federation. It's still early at the moment but I have had success with early federation requests working over libp2p—hopefully I'll have something interesting to show soon!

Synapse

Neil reported:

This week we’ve been continuing to work on migrating sydent to py3, improving admin tooling and working on fixing e2ee bugs. We’re also looking to make changes to allow admins the power to remove room aliases (MSCs 2260 2261).

Dept of Built on Matrix 🏗

Matrix Presents 📽️

Half-Shot told us:

What is it? Slideshows in Matrix, basically using the matrix room / event primitives to construct presentable federated slide shows.

What's new this week you ask? Well, it breaks less. It also does other neat things.

• Supports guests for viewing presentations, including the ability to specify a guest HS via the URL.
• Supports code highlighting in the presentation.
• Lots of CSS fixes to make slides line up properly.
• A fullscreen mode, which is actually unobstructive and quite handy.
• Presenter mode, which allows you to switch between following the presenters view of the room, and being able to view at your own leisure.
• Room joins now actually work, so you can be linked to a slide and expect to be able to view it.

Come check us out at #presents:half-shot.uk

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-imposter-bot, interesting relay idea

@mr_johnson22:matrix.org said:

matrix-imposter-bot - A bot that uses your account to repeat other people's messages. This gives relay-bot capabilities to puppet-only bridges. For more details, see https://github.com/mrjohnson22/matrix-imposter-bot

mx-puppet-bridge and other soru adventures

sorunome told us:

Will the development ever stop? Who knows! Here's the latest mx-puppet-bridge updates:

• Fix unbridging of direct chats
• Allow room-specific ghost avatar and name overrides
• Enhanced logging config
• Ability to configure name patterns for users/rooms/groups

mx-puppet-discord

Of course mx-puppet-discord received some updates, too!

• Receive notification on friends request
• Add optional profile syncing
• Implement guild-specific nicknames
• Implement variables for name patterns

mx-puppet-slack

What, mx-puppet-slack updates? Yay!

• Set external_url field
• Implement variables for name patterns

As always, if you have any questions, please drop by the support chat and consider to donate! 🦊🦊🦊

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko replies rendering

@deepbluev7:neko.dev said:

I added pretty rendering of replies to nheko. It uses the same rendering as for normal messages, so you will see an image being replied to and you can even play a replied to video. You can also click on the reply to navigate to that part of the history.

RiotX: Release v0.13.0

benoit said:

RiotX: Release v0.13.0 has been uploaded today to the PlayStore and should follow in F-Droid store. It contains typing notification feature, and new screens for Room profile and room members list, and new screen for Room Member profile. Those new screens are still missing a lots of features, that will be implemented in the next weeks. For F-Droid version, it contains a fix on the broken background sync. We are also making big progress on cross-signing implementation, and we have started to write integration tests on the SDK.

@bubu:bubu1.eu told us:

RiotX is now available via the f-droid.org repository here: https://f-droid.org/packages/im.vector.riotx/

Riot iOS

Manu announced:

We are still working hard on the implementation of cross-signing.

Riot Web Cross-signing update

Thanks to Ryan from the team:

All of this is part of cross-signing:

• Room shield decoration added
• New post-login device verification flow
• Toasts added to verify a new session
• Will begin working on post-login / registration bootstrapping flows

Fractal

Alexandre Franke reported:

In the past month, a few things happened:

• When redacting messages, they get removed from history view.
• Thumbnail for pasted images have been fixed.
• A handful of languages got updated.
• Moar refactoring.

koma + Continuum: kotlin lib and client

yuforia told us:

koma, Kotlin library for building clients:

• Update network library ktor to latest release 1.3.0
• Add option to use authentication with GET /_matrix/client/r0/publicRooms to fix HTTP Unauthorized errors with newer Synapse versions which may have allow_public_rooms_without_auth set to False.

Continuum desktop client based on Koma:

• Fix empty room directory list by always using the authenticated API POST /_matrix/client/r0/publicRooms

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy updates

Slavi told us:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now easily configure automatic Double Puppeting for all of its Mautrix bridges (Facebook, Hangouts, Whatsapp, Telegram). This is possible due to those bridges' integration with matrix-synapse-shared-secret-auth - yet another component that the playbook can install. Our documentation page for each bridge provides relevant information on how to get it enabled.

Also:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now install and configure matrix-appservice-webhooks, thanks to a contribution from Björn Marten from netresearch. Our documentation page about Appservice Webhooks tells you how to get started.

auto-update Riot-Web script

@murz:ru-matrix.org said:

I have created simple Bash script for auto-update Riot-Web to latest version. Because https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web now have no public Wiki, I publish it as Gist here: https://gist.github.com/MurzNN/ee64f98ab2e71b886c41d55594e5dd9e

ruby-grafana-matrix ingress updates

Ananace said:

My Grafana notification ingress gem received the missing piece of functionality for configuring it for posting both m.text as well as the original m.notice messages (as well as defaulting to m.text now as the more common expectation) - for those that want the messages to also provide Matrix notifications instead of just acting as an added history/flow. This can also be configured per-rule, so that you are able to have multiple notification ingresses configured with different message types.

It's always so lovely when people - other than myself - use my projects, especially when providing feedback on them. So many simple-to-implement features that get forgotten just because they weren't part of the original MVP.

Dept of Bots 🤖

TWIM bot updated for opsdroid 0.17

@cadair:cadair.com offered:

TWIM bot has been updates to use all the new features of opsdroid 0.17 it now supports Edits, both in updating it's database and by editing messages which get posted to #twim_updates:cadair.com . Also it supports 'TWIMing' a post by the user who posted it reacting with ⭕️, this is mainly designed as an easy way to mark images as TWIM posts. 🚀

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. Join #ping: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 📜

anoa informed us:

We've had a slight lull from people crawling out from winter holiday hibernation caves, but there's likely more to come as everyone gets back into the swing of things.

Merged MSCs

No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period

No MSCs are currently in FCP.

New MSCs

• MSC2403: Add "knock" feature
• MSC2399: Reporting that decryption keys are withheld

The Spec Core Team is continuing to work on implementation of existing MSCs.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse 1.8.0 is out now

Get the latest news here!

Synapse 1.8.0 has arrived, it contains a whole host of bug fixes and tweaks, most notably fixing some long standing problems with search.
More generally we are spending a lot of time improving the e2ee experience ahead of switching on e2ee by default, so watch this space.

Deploying Synapse

Several packaging projects have been updated to deploy the new version:

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat
• also from the Debian repos thanks to @andrewsh:matrix.org

matrix-media-repo v1.0.0 - repeat, v1.0.0!!

TravisR offered:

matrix-media-repo v1.0.0 has been released! If it is suitable for your environment, please give it a go.

Dendrite federation work!

Neil Alexander announced:

Federation fixes have been pushed to gomatrixserverlib and Dendrite's master branches, that include the following tweaks:

• Using the v2 endpoints for /send_join and /send_leave
• Fixing the resolution of room aliases to room IDs in the Dendrite federation API
• A rewrite of the auth chain functions which should be a bit smoother
• A couple of other minor tweaks to some of the types

In addition, I've spent the last few days working on Dendrite's storage backends, adding somewhat-hacky support for SQLite and investigating ORM modelling for some of the simpler components, as a part of getting Dendrite to run as a "true monolith" for the P2P work.

cortex (synapse worker in Rust) supports e2ee rooms

Black Hat offered:

cortex's federation sender finally supports e2ee rooms! I'm testing its performance on an Intel Atom z8350 and it looks great.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Matrix App for Zapier

@coppero1237 appeared to us, then announced:

The MVP is now available: https://zapier.com/developer/public-invite/77712/033209ffe96c0c0cdd618c8071355c01/

Use the Zapier App to integrate your Matrix room with any of Zapier's 1500+ apps, including:

• Github
• Trello
• Pagerduty
• Google calendar
• Jira
• Salesforce

Currently the MVP supports sending messages to a room. Reading messages from a room is future work.

If you're interested providing feedback, requesting a feature, future development, or just understanding how it works, please join the matrix room, #zapier:matrix.org

Source code: https://github.com/tyleradams/Zapier-Matrix

matrix-zammad bridge

Half-Shot offered:

matrix-zammad now supports reacting to tickets to close them, provided you've set up your puppeted token in the config. It's useful if you get a lot of spam tickets :p

mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome reported:

Lots of changes in mx-puppet-bridge!

• Allow sending status messages into bridged rooms
• add a bridgeChannel function for protocol implementations
• add config options to set displayname and avatar url of the AS bot
• leave the bridge bot of a bridged room, whenever possible
• auto-leave a puppeted ghost after an hour inactivity (to prevent DMs having three users in them)
• automatically dedupe media when uploading
• matrix group to remote protocol group mapping

mx-puppet-discord

Along with mx-puppet-bridge, things got implemented in mx-puppet-discord!

• allow bridging of single channels in a guild
• display an error if sending a message to discord fails
• add joinentireguild command
• handle webhooks properly
• map discord guilds to matrix groups

If you enjoy this software, please consider to donate, thank you! 🦊

And another mx-puppet-discord update!

• [User Tokens] Proper User-Agent spoofing - friends management now seems mostly safe! Leaving the warning thing in just-in-case, though

Dept of Clients 📱

📽️ Matrix Presents!

I'm adding this to the client section because it behaves like a client, but it's not what we'd normally think of...

Half-Shot reported:

Work has resumed on matrix-presents, newly rewritten in Vue.js! The project was first demoed back in Oggcamp 2018 where I gave a meta presentation on the virtues Matrix for other mediums. This time around, it's being brought back with:

• A user interface for managing, joining and creating slideshows.
• Control over how slides are advanced (pinned to the presenters view, or unlocked)
• Finer control over how slides are laid out, using a fragments system to build slides out of submessages.

This is currently in heavy development and will debut at Fosdem 2020!

A regularly updated version of the app is hosted at https://presents.half-shot.uk/.

(And for those of you expecting a form of table tennis, there is an easter egg in progress 😃)

Continuum, desktop client in Kotlin

yuforia offered:

Continuum, a desktop client in Kotlin:

• Update README to include information on building from source
• Fix: database not updated after leaving a room
• Move user's access token and list of joined rooms from database to more lightweight key-value storage

RiotX v0.12.0

benoit reported:

RiotX v0.12.0 has been released with some performance improvement, especially on initial sync and on timeline loading time. The release also contains bugfixes and a cleanup in the application settings. A new "developer mode" has been added to show advanced features only to power users. We are now working on the room profile screen, and we are making progress on the cross-signing implementation. Besides that, we are working to make RiotX available on the F-Droid store.

I must say RiotX is getting a lot more stable and reliable recently!

Riot iOS

Manu told us:

We are still working on the implementation of cross-signing and verification by DM.

Dept of Ops 🛠

K8s

In addition to mentioning Synapse 1.8.0 support, Ananace said:

Synapse 1.8.0 Kubernetes-optimized images are pushed, I've also updated the example manifests as part of some work on making it easier to deploy - expect a MVP of a Helm Chart some time Soon™

Also, to add a bit of context/information to this;

Helm is the de-facto standard package manager for Kubernetes clusters, where a Chart is a package for an application that can be installed and configured. The Helm Chart I'm working on won't be a one-click install to begin with, for the Minimum Viable Product it will require manually generating and storing the Synapse signing key - though I have thoughts on how to later delegate that to a small one-time job that Helm can run if necessary

Opsdroid 0.17

Cadair offered:

Opsdroid 0.17 was released in December, it comes with many changes but the main matrix improvements are support for extra event types like Replies, Edits, Reactions, Room Name changes, Room Topic changes, Alias changes, Room avatar changes, Power levels, and support for generic matrix state events. All these events are supported for both sending and implementing skills based on receiving them.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Let's reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

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 🌡

Responses to The Ecosystem is Moving

Matthew wrote a response to https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ : https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom/.

This is in response to a talk Moxie Marlinspike gave at 36c3. There is another response here from the XMPP community.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite and gomatrixserverlib

Neil Alexander announced:

My first TWIM update as a member of NV but I'm happy to announce that with some experimental changes to Dendrite and gomatrixserverlib, I've been able to get Dendrite-to-Dendrite federation working, which is a key component for the P2P work that we are planning!

matrix-media-repo v1.0.0-rc.2

TravisR reported:

matrix-media-repo has received its first ever release candidate (finally): v1.0.0-rc.1. It's complicated to set up, but please do give it a go if it suites your environment and use case, and report any bugs along the way.

v1.0.0-rc.2 was released later in the week to fix a small bug with exports in v1.0.0-rc.1.

Synapse 1.7.3 released

Synapse 1.7.3 includes an important bugfix, hosts are encouraged to upgrade.

Ananace reported that the K8s optimized Synapse 1.7.3 images have been updated, but you should find that all distributors have the latest version now.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome said:

mx-puppet-bridge received some updates!

• Automatic Puppeting, thanks to tulir PR!
• Allow protocol implementations to specify an external_url as per spec
• Double Puppeting: Option to specify a custom homeserver -> URL map for local setups where .well-known resolution isn't possible
• Fix unbridging of rooms (remove alias correctly)
• Set filename of uploaded avatars to circumvent a synapse bug
• Update matrix-bot-sdk dependency to 0.4.0

mx-puppet-discord and mx-puppet-slack

sorunome again:

Both mx-puppet-discord and mx-puppet-slack updated to the newest library version and implemented the setting of an external URL.

If you like these projects, please check out the support chat and consider to donate!

mautrix-telegram

Tulir said:

mautrix-telegram v0.7.0 was released.

Other than bugfixes, there were a few main changes since the first release candidate a month ago:

• Option for automatic custom puppeting using shared secret login
• version command to get the exact bridge version (also coming to my other bridges)
• Config checks to make sure important fields like permissions aren't left unconfigured

Full changelog available on GitHub: https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-telegram/releases/tag/v0.7.0

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir again:

Sticker bridging works slightly better now and added automatic double puppeting here too.

mautrix-cookiemonster

Tulir again:

To make the mautrix-facebook and mautrix-hangouts login flow simpler, I'm making a browser extension to eat cookies automatically rather than having the user go into the devtools. It's currently in development and should be ready by next week.

maubot

Tulir, busiest fellow in the North, again:

I finally got around to actually making the maubot github plugin, which is now spamming commits and other github things in all my project rooms.

Next up is per-room config options for webhooks and more matrix -> github actions (currently it's mostly just the github -> matrix webhooks). I might also end up making a more advanced plugin configuration system that supports multiple files, since jinja2 templates in a yaml file isn't that nice.

Dept of Clients 📱

FluffyChat for Android and iOS in Flutter

@krille:ubports.chat said:

MTRNord and me are working on FluffyChat for Android and iOS based on Flutter. You can already check it out if you like. :-) Install using F-Droid: https://mtrnord.gitlab.io/fluffychat-flutter-fdroid/fdroid/repo/ More info here: https://www.ko-fi.com/post/FluffyChat-for-Android-and-iOS-S6S71BMEY

Continuum

yuforia said:

Continuum, desktop client based in Kotlin, version 0.9.34:

• Perform database operations in an async way on IO dispatcher
• Added loading indicator when loading messages from server

Dept of Ping 🏓

Let's reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Tulir:

The ping room was upgraded to v5 last weekend. People who joined early got some nice and low pings before everyone rejoined :D

Also, @lub:imninja.net told us:

I created a #ping:maunium.net compatible bot in PowerShell https://gitea.lubiland.de/lub/pingposh/src/branch/master

Very nice - we don't see a lot of PowerShell in this ecosystem.

Final Thoughts 💭

Work is still happening on Cross Signing, patience will be rewarded sooner than you know.

Half-Shot is working on a fun and genuinely useful non-chat Matrix application, more on this soon.

36c3 was exciting, exhausing and educational. Thanks to everyone who made the Matrix Assembly one of the liveliest places around. :D

That's all I know 🏁

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

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

36c3: Matrix Assembly is the place to be

If you're at 36c3 this weekend, come and find us! Use c3nav app to find our assembly, or just join #chaosevents:matrix.org to come chat

Bundeswehr considering Matrix

Oleg said:

The German Army is considering using Matrix as "secure WhatsApp" for soldiers. (In German) https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Open-Source-Bundeswehr-baut-eigene-verschluesselte-Messenger-App-4623404.html

Dept of Servers 🏢

matrix-oauth

TravisR reported:

For those who want to integrate Matrix into their application with OAuth, there's now matrix-oauth ( #oauth:t2bot.io ). Ideally useful for "Login with Matrix" buttons, this is a relatively easy OAuth 2.0 provider to set up in front of your homeserver. In future it'll support more granular scopes to avoid having to give a real access token to the third party application.

A demo of matrix-oauth in action is available at https://demo.oauth.t2host.io/

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Amazon Alexa skill

TravisR offered:

Yelling at your Amazon Alexa to send a message to your Matrix contacts is now possible with matrix-alexa-skill ( #alexa:t2bot.io ). A hosted version using matrix-oauth is coming soon, assuming I can get the privacy policy and such over to Amazon to review in a timely manner, though you're more than able to self-host in a matter of minutes. Check out the README for more info - some experience with setting up complicated things is required.

mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome offered:

mx-puppet-bridge got a new feature: protocol implementations can now specify custom commands that are invoked via the provisioning room!

mx-puppet-discord

mx-puppet-discord received quite a few bug fixes and new features!

• Fix echo back of edits
• [User Tokens] being friends is enough now to DM each other!
• fix multi-edits
• [User Tokens] support group DMs
• Implement ability to bridge guilds!
• [User Tokens] add friends management

Description on how to use these features are found in the readme!

If you enjoy these projects, please consider to donate. Thank you!

Dept of Clients 📱

Spectral gains public room directory

Black Hat reported:

Public room directory and user directory support in Spectral is finally there!

Continuum, plus koma library

yuforia offered:

koma, a Kotlin library. Dominic Fischer (github: Dominaezzz) started working on the project last week and so far:

• In preparation for multiplatform support, converted JVM code to agnostic Kotlin, using the library atomicfu

• Added Github Actions configuration to run builds automatically

Continuum, desktop client based on Koma:

• Generate room name from members when neither name nor aliases are configured

Dept of Ops 🛠

ma1sd 2.2.2 released

ma1uta announced:

ma1sd (fork of the mxisd) 2.2.2 released: https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.2.2 Changes:

• bugfix
• added hash lookup for the ldap provider.

Dept of Services 🚀

kapsi.fi has set up a Matrix homeserver

Cos reported:

Finnish non-profit hosting service kapsi.fi has set up a Matrix homeserver for their members. Kapsi has around 5000 members and 20 volunteer administrators. Instructions for use (in FInnish) at https://www.kapsi.fi/palvelut/matrix.html

Dept of Bots 🤖

MatrixVideo2oggBot

@progserega:rsprim.ru reported:

Matrix bot for converting youtube video to voice.

Bot https://github.com/progserega/MatrixVideo2oggBot get youtube URL, download video, convert to ogg-vorbis audio and send it to user. Some times my friends give me youtube video-urls, but I do not have time for see it. But I have time when I go home in car. But on road network is not always good and at end of day battery is low and phone may be hot (when I connect to charger and play video) and freeze... Simple way for me - is convert youtube video to small size voice and download it to phone and play it as music in player playlist. Bot help to this. May be it help anybody also. 🙂

Matrix in the News 📰

Andres offered:

Matrix gets a mention alongside other four decentralized protocols in one of the biggest argentinian newspapers (regarding Twitter's iniciative of decentralization). https://www.lanacion.com.ar/tecnologia/cinco-iniciativas-descentralizar-redes-sociales-dejar-depender-nid2317548

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Matrix selected for the public Mozilla community

You may well have read about it by now, but Mozilla (purveyor of popular web browsers and champion of the open web) selected Matrix to replace IRC for their comms! You can read their own announcement here. Please note that this doesn't have to mean the death of Moznet on IRC - if someone wants to pick up matrix-ircd and finish it off, we can keep exposing an IRC listener too! Huge thanks to everyone who participated in the Mozilla trial and placed their trust in Matrix :)

A Glimpse of the Matrix

Florian reported:

Florian presented his poster A Glimpse of the Matrix:Scalability issues of a new message-oriented data synchronizationmiddleware at the 20th International Middleware Conference at UC Davis, California on 2019-12-11. The poster abstract describes measurements of the public Matrix federation and discusses scalability issues of the current message routing mechanism. Additional details can be found in the Extended Tech Report.

Those scientific publications were based on the data gathered by the DSN Traveller in 2018 which was part of Florian's master's thesis. The anonymized raw data was published in conjunction.

All related resources

pic.twitter.com/NYxbYllQ9F

— Middleware2019 (@middleware2019) December 12, 2019

Accessibility in Riot/Matrix

Very thorough article on accessibility in Riot/Matrix, written partly in light of the Mozilla announcement. https://marcozehe.de/2019/12/20/how-to-get-around-matrix-and-riot-with-a-screen-reader/

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse v1.7.2

Neil told us:

We shipped 1.7.2 (and 1.7.1) - all admins are encouraged to upgrade asap, note 1.7.1 is a security release, and 1.7.2 fixes a back pagination bug introduced in 1.7.1. Aside from that we are looking at implementing MSC2260: Update the auth rules for m.room.aliases events and adding a per media quarantine API.

Deploying Synapse

Several packaging projects have been updated to deploy the new version:

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat
• also from the Debian repos thanks to @andrewsh:matrix.org

Ruma

jplatte reported:

another blog post has appeared on the ruma website: https://ruma.dev/news/these-weeks-in-ruma-2019-12-14/

cortex workers performance

Black Hat has been using his Rust cortex Synapse workers project. He reported:

I flexed on other homeservers by making getflexedon.me the fastest homeserver in the ping room, made possible with cortex.

Black Hat does point out that this is still in a testing phase, but it's great to see workers being created.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

famedly-email-bridge

sorunome said:

Some more work has been done on famedly-email-bridge! Now you can define email routes (e.g. [email protected] -> @bob:example.org) and optionally have conversations create a new thread room, instead of dumping them into the email room.

zammad tickets bot

It might seem like Half-Shot hasn't made a new bridge in a while, but here he is:

I've started another bot project: https://github.com/half-shot/matrix-zammad. This currently splurts zammad tickets into Matrix rooms, and will eventually do a lot more.

Dept of Clients 📱

Continuum

yuforia said:

Continuum, client for the desktop:

• Start using experimental asynchronous Flow as observable value for UI. Making use of Kotlin's coroutine features, it makes it possible to update values while avoiding switching to the main UI thread. It's also easier to cancel on-going HTTP requests when their values are no longer needed.

Riot-iOS

Manu told us:

This week, we have been still working hard on verification by DM. We have started the implementation of cross-signing.

RiotX v0.11.0 released

benoit said:

RiotX: We've released RiotX v0.11.0 on Thursday. It includes support to open (some of) matrix.to links, soft (and hard) logout, and lots of small UI/UX/crash fixes. For the first release of 2020, we will change the way we handle the initial sync, which can be a long task, by running it in a foreground service. Also the room profile screen should finally arrive.

riot-web

Bruno reported:

this week I've been working on the new verification flow in the right panel. it's nearly there, but likely won't get merged today anymore.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Matrix Message github action

Nice and simple project for using Matrix messages in Github actions. See the code, or the marketplace page.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Final Thoughts 💭

It being the time of year that it is, some of us will be at 36c3 in a week or so, come chat in #chaosevents:matrix.org if you'd like to say "hi". (You can also say "Guten Tag", which is more fun!)

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 🌡

Matthew notes:

We'd like to welcome Twitter to the world of decentralised communication protocols after Jack Dorsey's announcement this week that Twitter is building a decentralised social media team. It seems that the constraints they're working with are to focus on decentralised reputation (supporting different content filtering algorithms), incentive models (presumably some kind of token) and avoiding consensus-based standards processes. It's worth noting that we've been working on decentralised reputation stuff in Matrix for a while now - of which MSC2313 - Moderation policies as rooms is the most concrete result so far, and it's great to see Twitter thinking about how to adopted different filtering mechanisms for their content. It sounds as if they're approaching this from a blockchain/incentives angle however, so it remains to be seen whether they'll be interested in our work - especially as Matrix doesn't have a microblogging client yet (but only because nobody has made one yet). We'll be trying to talk to them whatever to see if we can be of use, eitherway :)

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa said:

Here's your weekly update for what happened in spec land!

While it may look quiet from the state changes list, there's actually been a flurry of activity on MSC2376 and MSC2385 (for disabling URL previews on a per-message basis), MSC2380 (for a method of querying the metadata of a piece of media without downloading it) and MSC2346 (for showing metadata about the bridges that are currently active in the room)! Now's the time to jump in if you want to have your say!

Updates:

Merged MSCs

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period

• No MSCs in FCP.

New MSCs

• MSC2385: Disable URL Previews, alternative method

Spec Core Team:

The Spec Core Team is on the same track as last week with no specific 3 MSC focus, but working on bringing up a lot of MSCs across the board.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil announced:

Synapse 1.7.0 is out, check out all the details here, admins can now specify message retention policies at a server and room level. We also changed the defaults for the room directory to be privacy preserving by default.

Next up we’re taking a look at support for redacting room alias events 1, 2 as well as porting Sydent to python 3.

Deploying Synapse

Several packaging projects have been updated to deploy the new version:

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat
• also from the Debian repos thanks to @andrewsh:matrix.org

Dept of Clients 📱

Fractal

Alexandre Franke told us:

We gained the ability to save spellcheck language per room, which makes me quite happy as I keep switching between English speaking and French speaking ones and was growing tired of those red underlines and having to switch manually every time.

Data is stored in /user/{}/rooms/{}/account_data/org.gnome.fractal.language.

Continuum updates

yuforia said:

Continuum, Kotlin client for the desktop:

• Updated to Kotlin Json and HTTP libraries, removed Moshi and Retrofit from dependencies

• When there is an error when loading notifications, one can click to retry or view the cause

nheko

Nico said:

nheko mostly fixed bugs regarding the new file encryption this week and did some organizational stuff:

• We fixed a compliance issue, where Riot couldn't decrypt our media
• You can now actually see your encrypted images, when you sent them
• We fixed some tests regarding our session key export
• We fixed our coverage of our automated tests
• We did some prepwork for device verification
• A few minor usability fixes and code cleanups

RiotX v0.10.0

benoit told us:

RiotX v0.10.0 has been released on Tuesday, with some bug fixes and a new Breadcrumbs drawer to switch between rooms super super fast. Give it a try! Now we are implementing workflow when the access token get invalidated, with SoftLogout support. Also, we are still working on improving the initial sync management, which can be a long task on big account, and that causes some problem with the current implementation. Among various other subjects: matrix.to support, room profile screen, verification in DM, cleanup dependencies to reach the F-Droid store, we are quite busy!

Riot-iOS 0.10.4

Manu reported:

This week, we released Riot-iOS 0.10.4 with a couple of hot fixes on device verification. In parallel, we have been still working on verification by DM both on UI and SDK sides. As a collateral effect, the aggregation of m.reference has been implemented in the SDK. This means the SDK is now ready for message threading !

Riot Web + Cross-Signing

Ryan said:

Cross-signing keys and secret storage can be created in Settings for advanced users with the cross-signing feature flag enabled in labs, though please keep in mind that these features are still in development. More work is still needed to change to verifying users instead of devices. More accessibility fixes have landed as well.

Matthew added:

as part of all the work around cross-signing, we're shifting device verification to happen in the context of DMs so verification is done per-user rather than per-device, and so you can track your verification history and generally massively improve the UX. valere made a great video of how this is shaping up between RiotX and Riot/Web...

Check out the video here

Dept of Ops 🛠

ma1sd 2.2.1 released

ma1uta said:

Release 2.2.0 of the ma1sd (fork mxisd) https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.2.0 Changes:

• support of the MSC2140 (hash lookup)
• support of the MSC2134 (API v2)

and then...

ma1sd hotfix 2.2.1 released with a lot of bugfixes. Also the v2 API (MSC2140) was disabled by default because it breaks backward compatibility in lookup behaviour.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix bot functionality in Python

Cos reported:

I have created a modular bot for writing Matrix bot functionality in Python easily. It already has bunch of modules ranging from weather to calendar integration and more will come. Even the location bot from last week's TWIM is now implemented as a module. I hope you find it useful. PR's of new modules are always welcome. https://github.com/vranki/hemppa

Mlrdb, LDAP sync bot, announced

@dalang:mc.kircheneuenburg.de offered:

A Bot to sync LDAP groups to matrix rooms. Rooms will be created automatically and group member changes are reflected in the matrix rooms. The bot is currently in beta and documentation will be added in the next weeks. New features for simple integration will be added soon. Have a look at the repo: https://git.sr.ht/~davidlang/mlrbd

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰

mautrixfs - Matrix client as a FUSE filesystem

Tulir offered:

I've started a new project: mautrixfs is a Matrix client as a FUSE filesystem. It's very WIP and currently only supports reading events by ID. I'm hoping to have something more useful in a week or two.

tulir later added:

for media uploads, I just realized that my asynchronous uploads MSC would make it significantly easier to implement. It could have a file you read to allocate a mxc uri and then you could simply write the data to the file corresponding to that mxc uri

Matrix in the News 📰

Matrix featured in Skrolli

Cos offered:

Finnish computer culture paper magazine Skrolli published two articles spanning 5 pages about Matrix in latest edition. For non-subscribers the digital edition readable with mobile app is free for limited time. Read more (in Finnish) at https://skrolli.fi/

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

I chatted to Kilian from the new Nio project about his progress on a new iOS client.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Yesterday we announced the availability of zipped hoodies! The resulting avalanche of orders was a shock for our local Post Office, who watched with surprise as I burst in, laden with packages like a mule.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa offered:

Here's your news for what happened in spec-land last week!

Merged MSCs

• MSC2367: Add reason field to all membership events
• MSC2324: Facilitating early releases of software dependent on spec

MSCs in Final Comment Period

No MSCs are in FCP...

New MSCs

• MSC2380: Matrix Media Information API
  • This is a markdownification of MSC1310
• MSC2370: Resolve URL API
• MSC2375: Appservice Invite States
• MSC2376: Disable URL Previews

TravisR confirmed:

The spec core team is focused on implementing a bunch of MSCs so that we can make progress with the spec.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil told us:

This week we've mainly been tying up loose ends on the matrix.org data centre migration. Outside of that one interesting feature to land on develop is that of configurable message retention. It means that as an admin you can set a default period after which messages will be removed from the server (a year say), what’s more the default is configurable on a per room basis via state events. Note, this feature applies to messages only, not media (on its way!). Configurable message retention will be make it into the next versioned release.

matrix-synapse-ldap3

anoa said:

After 2 long years, matrix-synapse-ldap3 has finally gained another release: v0.1.4. If you want to allow users to sign in to Synapse using their LDAP accounts, then this is the module for you.

Get the release notes here: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-synapse-ldap3/releases/tag/v0.1.4

Dept of Clients 📱

Fractal

Alexandre Franke offered:

4.2.2 got released! Get it now off Flathub.

New features:

• Translation strings have been updated

Bugfixes:

• Newlines now work when markdown is enabled
• Account settings can be accessed again
• Redaction is working again
• Compatibility with HTTP-only (non HTTPS) servers has been restored
• Some crashes fixed

Under the hood:

• Code refactor is still going

As if all that wasn't enough, how about this image of Fractal running on a Librem5, from Adrien Plazas:

nheko

Nico offered:

Nheko just merged support for encrypted files in e2ee chats. This allows you to send and receive encrypted files and even play videos and other media in the new timeline. Those changes are still on the development branch, but will be included in the next release, which should be 0.7.0. If you want to try it out, you can get development builds here.

koma

yuforia announced:

koma, the Kotlin library behind the desktop client Continuum:

• Rewrite all Moshi json adapters with kotlinx serializers, replace API interface declared using Retrofit with HTTP requests constructed using ktor. The majority of the changes needed to enable multiplatform support is now made.

RiotX 0.9.1

benoit reported:

Released v0.9.1 on Thursday! This version includes a new login flow and account creation flow. Read marker has been reworked, to simplify user experience on mobile. Also you can type and send user pills.

We are now working on room and user profiles, and matrix.to link handling. Verification in DM development is progressing well. Also we implemented a first version of breadcrumbs, to switch between recent rooms very quickly.

Riot-iOS

Manu announced:

Riot-iOS 0.10.3 is on its way to Apple review. The release note is: This release includes bug fixes and improvements, like:

• Ask permission before opening a widget and the integration manager.
• Display room name, user name and user avatar in the Jitsi conference screen.
• Support Welsh and Italian languages.

Messagerie

Manu reported:

let me share Messagerie: https://github.com/manuroe/messagerie, an iOS app and, maybe, in the future, a MacOS app.

Messagerie is a chat app written to test SwiftUI and Combine to make a real and, hopefully, useful app. Messagerie misses a lot of things but it has:

• Support of Matrix using SwiftMatrixSDK
• E2EE
• Multi-account (swipe the navigation bar to switch accounts)
• Dark mode and auto-sizing fonts (well, they come for free)
• 4 screens at the moment: a Matrix login screen, a room list, a room screen and a very early beginning of a SwiftUI text composer to post text message

This is a personal and a side project, but RiotX-iOS will probably take benefit from it.

Riot Web means Cross Signing!

Ryan announced:

Riot Web is largely focused on nudging cross-signing forward over the last week. Key verification and cross-signing setup continues to make progress. We've also fixed a few bugs and merged some accessibility improvements.

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi reported:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy has been made more flexible in terms of how its services can be exposed to the web. Reverse-proxying using another local (in-machine or on-the-network) webserver should be easier. SSL-termination using Traefik is now also a possibility, although we're yet to confirm it as a success and document exactly how to do it. Read more in the CHANGELOG.

riot-desktop-builder docker image

Mathijs announced:

I created a dockerfile and corresponding docker image that can build the develop branch of riot-desktop for both windows and linux.

Dept of Bots 🤖

msc-chatbot

anoa announced:

msc_resolver2 is back and now isn't annoying with all new features like:

• actually showing you the MSC title when it links it
• not posting the same links multiple times
• not posting a link when you've already linked the msc in the original message
• ignoring edits
• ignoring content of replies

rejoice! Code is https://github.com/anoadragon453/msc-chatbot

malobot - send or receive location messages

Cos said:

It would be cool to be able to share location in Matrix rooms. This bot by cos solves the egg part in chicken and egg problem of having no clients able to send or receive location messages. Next we need a mobile client that can send location updates. Which one will be the first? https://github.com/vranki/malobot/

Dept of Ping 🏓

Final Thoughts 💭

swedneck made a room for discussing how matrix could be used to implement forums: #matrix-forums:permaweb.io

Mathijs pointed out that there is a Matrix feature which enables spoilers.

That's all I know 🏁

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