Matthew Hodgson

Hi folks,

On October 19th (next Thursday, as of the time of writing) we're going to be back in Berlin for various meetings - and we're incredibly excited that BlueYard have offered to host the world's first ever official Matrix and Decentralised Communications Meetup at their offices in Kreuzberg!  Matthew, Amandine and maybe others will be attending and speaking from the core team, and giving a VIP tour of the long-long-long-awaited Groups/Communities features in Matrix and Riot as well as some of the other good stuff in the pipeline - and we're also excited to have Exul joining us from the community to talk about his recent Matrix<->Rocket.Chat bridging adventures.  We're also expecting some exciting folks to join us from the Ethereum community to talk about decentralised realtime comms in their ecosystem - plus if anyone wants to talk about other Matrix/XMPP/Tox/Briar/Richochet or similar projects please ping us and let us know asap!

Update: we're excited to announce that Jack Fransham from Polkadot (who are very active Riot/Matrix users - and just raised >$130M in their token generation event yesterday) will also be joining us to tell us all about how Polkadot bridges together different blockchains!. (The original speaker was Marek Kotewicz, but availability didn't work out).

Update 2: and our final speaker is confirmed as Maximilian Möhring, CEO of Keyp, who's going to talk about their self-sovereign decentralised identity system.

Update 3: ...and we have a last minute addition for a lightning talk from Secushare (Psyc + GNUnet, fully decentralised p2p encrypted comms)!!

Space is limited to 70 attendees, so please register on Eventbrite asap if you'd like to come!

As a taster: the official video of our massive talk from the ETHLDN meetup a few weeks ago was just released (see below).  The meetup in Berlin will have different content and be more free-form, letting folks ask their own questions and steer the conversation and discussion as you see fit: so please come hang out in person, grab pizza and beer courtesy of BlueYard, and find the answers to all the deepest Matrix questions you never knew you even had...!

See you next week! :D

We've just released Synapse 0.23 - which contains a bunch of significant performance improvements, bug and stability fixes - as well as a few new features: basic spam checking (the ability to configure your homeserver to reject events which match arbitrary rules, both from users and other servers) - and long-awaited support for privacy-preserving ('event_id_only') push notifications.  This means that apps can choose to register themselves to receive push notifications which do not contain any information about the actual push, but instead act as a simple "wake up!" event, which triggers the app to then sync via the client-server API in order to display the actual push notification details.  This is particularly useful for push notifications for E2E encrypted rooms, as it means the client has a chance of decrypting the message in order to display the push notification details in the UI (if the user wants that).  matrix-ios-sdk and matrix-android-sdk are in the process of being moved over to use the new 'event_id_only' push format.

Long-awaited Communities/Groups will land in Synapse 0.24, which should come quite soon (we're almost ready to merge it to develop, but it's a major update so we wanted to get 0.23 out the door first).

As always, you can get your latest Synapse from https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse or a OS repository of your choice (we've just released the official Debian packages).

🔗Full details of Synapse 0.23:

Features:

• Add a frontend proxy worker (PR #2344)
• Add support for event_id_only push format (PR #2450)
• Add a PoC for filtering spammy events (PR #2456)
• Add a config option to block all room invites (PR #2457)

Changes:

• Use bcrypt module instead of py-bcrypt (PR #2288) Thanks to @kyrias!
• Improve performance of generating push notifications (PR #2343, #2357, #2365, #2366, #2371)
• Improve DB performance for device list handling in sync (PR #2362)
• Include a sample prometheus config (PR #2416)
• Document known to work postgres version (PR #2433) Thanks to @ptman!

Bug fixes:

• Fix caching error in the push evaluator (PR #2332)
• Fix bug where pusherpool didn't start and broke some rooms (PR #2342)
• Fix port script for user directory tables (PR #2375)
• Fix device lists notifications when user rejoins a room (PR #2443, #2449)
• Fix sync to always send down current state events in timeline (PR #2451)
• Fix bug where guest users were incorrectly kicked (PR #2453)
• Fix bug talking to IPv6 only servers using SRV records (PR #2462)
• Fix regression in performance of syncs (PR #2470)

Occasionally folks ask why we don't update the blog more often - we're infamous in only doing big formal updates once every 3 months, unless there's something very specific to yell about.  However, it's possible that some readers don't realise that we have been publishing a weekly status update blog since July - albeit a video blog: Matrix Live!  The episodes are published on YouTube (for now, although in future we're going to use Matrix to distribute them), and are first made available to Quadratic ($5+) Patreon supporters.  After a week we make them public to everyone though and add them to the YouTube Playlist.  The videos also have very brief bullet-point summaries of the contents in the description for those who don't have time to watch and just want to skim for interesting stuff.

We appreciate that video blogs are unusual for a FOSS project relative to written blogs - but we've chosen to go down this path because counterintuitively it takes much less time to just speak about what's going on than write it down; for whatever reason my blogposts always seem to take hours to write as I get sucked into the details and try to be as comprehensive and accurate as possible.  Whereas just chatting about it with Amandine is much easier, and given that we do it anyway; why not film it for everyone's benefit?  We always film the show in one continuous take (hence the "live"), so it's literally only eating 10-15 mins out of our week.

Eitherway, just wanted to remind anyone who reads this blog that the video blog exists, and to gently encourage folks to donate at Patreon or Liberapay if they want to get access to the videos on the day they air, rather than having to wait for a week!  Finally, we'd suggest that folks subscribe to the playlist itself on YouTube even if they don't donate, so they can be reminded about new eps.

So, without further ado, here's an alarming montage of Matthew & Amandine geeking about Matrix, in case you've missed the show so far!

TL;DR: If you love FOSS-friendly hardware and if you love Matrix, please preorder a Purism Librem5 Matrix-native smartphone, so we can fully bring native Matrix communication to both phones and desktop!

It's been just over a month since Purism announced the campaign to fund the Matrix-native Librem5 FOSS smartphone - and the campaign is doing pretty well, with 54% of its target reached as of the time of writing!  So in a shameless attempt to whet everyone's appetite and encourage everyone to fund the remaining 50%, we thought we'd share some of the experiments we've been doing with running native Matrix clients on a pure Linux phone.

Unfortunately the Librem5 doesn't exist yet, but we do happen to have an BQ Aquaris E5 Ubuntu Phone hanging around - so we wondered: Is it possible to run a native desktop Matrix client like mujx's Nheko on a Linux phone, given all the latest Qt voodoo? And just how hard is it anyway to update the Qt platform abstractions (or GTK for that matter) for a given platform?  In retrospect, we probably should have just run uMatriks on it - a proper dedicated Ubuntu Touch Matrix Client, but then we wouldn't have had a useful tour of maintaining the guts of a Qt distribution on mobile :)

So the core problem of running a client like Nheko on Ubuntu Touch is that it uses lots of fun glossy stuff from Qt 5.9, whereas Ubuntu Touch is still on Qt 5.4, which is over 2 years old now.  Also, it's been written as a desktop client so needs a bit of tuning to support a 'fat-finger' mobile form factor, although this is just a simple matter of programming and is a very similar problem to ensuring the desktop app has a nice responsive design on small screen window sizes (similar to how the telegram desktop client handles it).  In the end, we focused on solving the Qt problem: building a custom Qt 5.9 for Ubports (the community project who do a fantastic job of continuing Ubuntu Touch development since Canonical pulled out), while for simplicity building it on top of the current ubports distribution (which is effectively still Ubuntu 15.04).  The reason for all this Ubuntu stuff rather than using PureOS is simply that it's not far enough along, and we don't physically have a Librem5 dev kit yet to play with!

In practice, this has been a fascinating process: setting up a crosscompiler to build all of Qt5.9, and then porting the ubuntumirclient Qt Platform Abstraction to work with Qt5.9, as well as (finally) working out how to build a Qt5.9-compatible custom Maliit input context platform plugin to get the onscreen keyboard (OSK) up and running.  But we got there in the end, and it was rather fun to finally see the Nheko splash screen popping up on the Aquaris E5! :D

There was then a bit of a nightmare to get the OSK to work, thanks to https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-46009 causing the plugin to be silently not updated - but could then log in and the app worked great (albeit a bit slow thanks to being a debug build on the energy-efficient but slow Mediatek MT6582 SoC):

Now the next step here would obviously be to tweak the app properly to layout on a phone (bigger fonts; bigger buttons; resize the window to make room for the OSK; separate the Left Panel from the timeline view; etc) - but the point here was more to show a fully fledged native Matrix client running on a current Linux Phone environment and see how it feels.  And we're happy to say that it leaves us dying to get our hands on a proper Librem5 so we can work with Nheko, uMatriks, libqmatrixclient and all the other native Matrix client projects to see how we can get the best possible native client experience running in PureOS for the phone!!

Finally, there doesn't seem to be much documentation out there on how to do a heavy customisation of Ubports like this, so for the sake of posterity, here's the guide if anyone else is crazy enough to try this (or for when Ubports gets around to doing an official update to Qt 5.9 for their OS!).  A versioned copy of this lives over at this gist.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to preorder!

Matthew

🔗Recipe: Librem5 experiments with an Ubuntu Phone and Nheko

Starting point: one old BQ Aquaris E5 ubuntu phone, running some old version of Ubuntu Touch which had got completely stuck (UI only unfreezing for 2-3 seconds every 2-3 minutes).

Step one: flash to latest UBPorts image:

• Set up Ubuntu desktop as a host (as per https://docs.ubuntu.com/phone/en/devices/installing-ubuntu-for-devices)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-sdk-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-device-flash
sudo apt-get install phablet-tools

• Grab an adb-compatible recovery image (yes, seems like the right place is someone's personal webspace...)

wget http://people.canonical.com/~jhm/barajas/recovery-vegetahd.img

• If your Ubuntu desktop is running in a VM, make sure you have USB 2.0 or 3.0 support enabled (in Virtualbox this needs the extension pack installed). USB 1 is too slow and the flash will timeout, semi-bricking the phone.
• Press volume-up and power on the phone during boot to get at the bootloader. Make sure it's not plugged into USB
• Select fastboot
• Plug into USB
• Flash the recovery image and latest UBPorts OS:

sudo ubuntu-device-flash --server=http://system-image.ubports.com touch --device=vegetahd \\
                         --channel=15.04/stable --bootstrap --recovery-image=recovery-vegetahd.img \\
                         --developer-mode --password=secret

• Ensure the system OS is writable. (Ubuntu Touch runs the OS partition read-only by default to protect users. In this case, you can always re-flash it if all goes wrong.)

sudo phablet-config writable-image

• Get an SSH server running on the phone before you go insane

adb shell
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh start # password is as set when flashing.

Step two: cross-compile latest Qt 5.9 for the phone.

Ubuntu 15.04 shipped with 5.4, which is pretty old now, and too old for nheko. Based on https://rm5248.com/cross-compile-qt-for-arm/

# grab the source for Qt5
git clone git://code.qt.io/qt/qt5.git
cd qt5
./init-repository

# grab the right dev headers (as qtubuntu needs dbus & atspi support)
ssh phablet@phone "sudo apt-get install libdbus-1-dev libatspi2.0-dev libssl-dev"

# grab a copy of the root filesystem on the phone for the cross-compile to run against.
# you could also sshfs mount or something if you could be bothered.
mkdir ~/phone
rsync -avz --exclude /proc --exclude /run --exclude /sys --exclude /dev \\
           --exclude /android --exclude /var/lib/lxc phablet@phone:/ ~/phone/system
export ROOTFS=~/phone

# install the crosscompiler.
# We probably have to use GCC 4.9 so that it can link ok against the older system libraries
# (libstdc++ etc) on Ubuntu Touch 15.04
sudo apt-get install arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++-4.9

# fix up the absolute symlinks (important!)
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/rm5248/cross-compile-tools.git
./cross-compile-tools/fixQualifiedLibraryPaths $ROOTFS /usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++-4.9

# define a mkspec target for armhf
cd ~/qt5
cp -a qtbase/mkspecs/linux-arm-gnueabi-g++ qtbase/mkspecs/linux-arm-gnueabihf-g++
cat > qtbase/mkspecs/linux-arm-gnueabihf-g++/qmake.conf <<EOT
#
# qmake configuration for building with arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++
#

MAKEFILE_GENERATOR      = UNIX
CONFIG                 += incremental
QMAKE_INCREMENTAL_STYLE = sublib

include(../common/linux.conf)
include(../common/gcc-base-unix.conf)
include(../common/g++-unix.conf)

# modifications to g++.conf
QMAKE_CC                = arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc-4.9
QMAKE_CXX               = arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++-4.9
QMAKE_LINK              = arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++-4.9
QMAKE_LINK_SHLIB        = arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++-4.9

# modifications to linux.conf
QMAKE_AR                = arm-linux-gnueabihf-ar cqs
QMAKE_OBJCOPY           = arm-linux-gnueabihf-objcopy
QMAKE_NM                = arm-linux-gnueabihf-nm -P
QMAKE_STRIP             = arm-linux-gnueabihf-strip

!host_build {'{'}
        QMAKE_INCDIR_OPENGL     = $ROOTFS/usr/include/GL
        QMAKE_LIBDIR_OPENGL     = $ROOTFS/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf
        # GCC 4.9 apparently doesn't know where its own libstdc++ headers are when cross-compiling...
        QMAKE_INCDIR            = /usr/arm-linux-gnueabihf/include/c++/4.9.3 \\
                                  /usr/arm-linux-gnueabihf/include/c++/4.9.3/arm-linux-gnueabihf
{'}'}

load(qt_config)
EOT

# build it!
./configure \\
    -v \\
    -confirm-license \\
    -prefix /opt/qt5-arm \\
    -sysroot $ROOTFS \\
    -opensource \\
    -nomake examples \\
    -nomake tests \\
    -opengl es2 \\
    -qpa ubuntumirclient \\
    -xplatform linux-arm-gnueabihf-g++ \\
    -platform linux-g++ \\
    -feature-accessibility \\
    -feature-accessibility-atspi-bridge \\
    -feature-webrtc \\
    -feature-proprietary-codecs \\
    -reduce-exports

make -j8

# go to lunch

make install

If anything goes wrong, a good bet (having backed up your new mkspec target) is to git clean everything:

git submodule foreach --recursive "git clean -dfx"
git clean -dfx

Step 3: compile qtubuntu for Ubuntu-specific Qt stuff like the integration with the Mir display server (hey, at this point it feels like we're building our very own zombie Ubuntu Touch 17.04... :/)

# grab dev package deps
ssh phablet@phone "sudo apt-get install libubuntu-application-api-dev libudev-dev"
rsync -avz --exclude /proc --exclude /run --exclude /sys --exclude /dev \\
           --exclude /android --exclude /var/lib/lxc phablet@phone:/ ~/phone/system
~/cross-compile-tools/fixQualifiedLibraryPaths $ROOTFS /usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++-4.9

# grab the qtubuntu source
bzr branch lp:qtubuntu

# find an version old enough that it builds against the old mir in 15.04
bzr revert -r 345

# cherrypick patches so it builds against qt 5.9...
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~phablet-team/qtubuntu/trunk/revision/354
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~phablet-team/qtubuntu/trunk/revision/372
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~phablet-team/qtubuntu/trunk/revision/394
# ...we probably need others too.

/mnt/build/qt5/qtbase/bin/qmake -spec /mnt/build/qt5/qtbase/mkspecs/linux-arm-gnueabihf-g++

# we probably should have told Qt about more pkgconfig libraries when we built it, so as to not have to do it manually here...
export PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR=$ROOTFS/usr/lib/pkgconfig:$ROOTFS/usr/share/pkgconfig:\\
$ROOTFS/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/pkgconfig/:$ROOTFS/opt/qt5-arm/lib/pkgconfig/
export PKG_CONFIG_SYSROOT_DIR=$ROOTFS

# might need to manually explicitify the --sysroot definitions in qt's qconfig.pri
# as otherwise QT_SYSROOT seems not to be getting picked up for reasons unknown

make -j4
cp src/ubuntumirclient/libqpa-ubuntumirclient.so $ROOTFS/opt/qt5-arm/plugins/platforms/

# Need to build our own libmaliitphabletplatforminputcontextplugin.so for onscreen keyboard, as
# you can't mix Qt platform plugins between versions - see https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-46009
cd
bzr branch lp:ubuntu/vivid/maliit-framework
cd maliit-framework
# add QMAKE_LFLAGS+='-lQt5Network -lGLESv2' to config.pri

# technically don't need to build all of maliit - only the platform inputcontext plugin is required
export QMAKEMODULES=/mnt/build/qt5/qtdeclarative/mkspecs/modules 
/mnt/build/qt5/qtbase/bin/qmake -spec /mnt/build/qt5/qtbase/mkspecs/linux-arm-gnueabihf-g++
make -j4

# build the input-context plugin
cd input-context
# change the version of the plugin in main.cpp so that it's picked up by Qt 5.9 (the API hasn't changed;
# it's just the difference between an explicit and implicit version):
# Q_PLUGIN_METADATA(IID "org.qt-project.Qt.QPlatformInputContextFactoryInterface.5.1" FILE "maliit.json")
/mnt/build/qt5/qtbase/bin/qmake -spec /mnt/build/qt5/qtbase/mkspecs/linux-arm-gnueabihf-g++

make -j4
make install

# rsync our beautiful new Qt5.9 over to the phone, including the qtubuntu plugin
rsync -avz $ROOTFS/opt/qt5-arm root@phone:/opt/

Step 4: cross-compile nheko as an experiment

# check it out
git clone --recursive git+ssh://[email protected]/mujx/nheko
cd nheko

# define a cross-compile toolchain (https://cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_Cross_Compiling)
cat > Toolchain-arm-linux-gnueabihf.cmake <<EOT
# this one is important
SET(CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME Linux)
# this one not so much
SET(CMAKE_SYSTEM_VERSION 1)
# needed to get the right flavour of ARM
SET(CMAKE_SYSTEM_PROCESSOR armv7)

# specify the cross compiler
SET(CMAKE_C_COMPILER   /usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc-4.9)
SET(CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER /usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++-4.9)

# where is the target environment
SET(CMAKE_SYSROOT  $ROOTFS)
SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH  $ROOTFS)

# sort out our includes...
SET(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "${'{'}CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS{'}'} \\
    -I$ROOTFS/usr/include/c++/4.9 \\
    -I$ROOTFS/usr/include/arm-linux-gnueabihf \\
    -I$ROOTFS/usr/include/arm-linux-gnueabihf/c++/4.9")

SET(CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS "${'{'}CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS{'}'} \\
  $ROOTFS/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libc.so.6 \\
  $ROOTFS/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libm.so \\
  $ROOTFS/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libhybris-egl/libGLESv2.so.2")

# search for programs in the build host directories
SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_PROGRAM NEVER)
# for libraries and headers in the target directories
SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_LIBRARY ONLY)
SET(CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_INCLUDE ONLY)

SET(CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH $ROOTFS/opt/qt5-arm)
EOT

# grab its dependencies on the phone and sync them over to your local phone FS copy
ssh phablet@phone 'sudo apt-get install liblmdb-dev'
rsync -avz --exclude /proc --exclude /run --exclude /sys --exclude /dev \\
           --exclude /android --exclude /var/lib/lxc phablet@phone:/ ~/phone/system
~/cross-compile-tools/fixQualifiedLibraryPaths $ROOTFS /usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++-4.9

# gen the makefile
sudo apt-get install cmake
cmake -DLMDB_LIBRARY=$ROOTFS/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/liblmdb.so \\
      -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=`pwd`/Toolchain-arm-linux-gnueabihf.cmake \\
      -H. -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
# remove -march=native from CMakeLists.txt

# build it
VERBOSE=1 make -C build -j4

# XXX: you might need to touch the Toolchain file and then run again to pick up
# the CXX_FLAGS correctly for some reason.

# run it!
rsync -avz $ROOTFS/home/phablet/nheko phablet@phone:/home/phablet
ssh phablet@phone "export MIR_SOCKET=/run/user/32011/mir_socket;
                   ./build/nheko --desktop_file_hint=unity8"

# N.B. if debugging under gdb, use `handle SIGILL nostop`

Step 5: Package nheko

# make sure you have a manifest.json, nheko.png, nheko.apparmor and nheko.desktop.
# If you don't have an icon, the app won't show up.
# you can grab it from the matthew/mobile branch of github.com/matrix-org/nheko
click build ./
scp im.vector.nheko_0.1_all.click phablet@phone:

# install it
ssh phablet@phone pkcon install-local --allow-untrusted im.vector.nheko_0.1_all.click

# ...and then swipe down on the app listing to hopefully see the app there.
# if that doesn't work, you can manually launch it with:
ssh phablet@phone ubuntu-app-launch im.vector.nheko_nheko_0.1

Hi folks,

Over the last few weeks there's been a huge movement in the cryptocurrency communities over needing to find a better communication medium than Slack.  Some of the biggest communities for projects like Status, Aragon, TenX, Tezos, OmiseGo, Polkadot and many others are getting overrun by phishing attacks where malicious users have set up bots which auto-DM users joining the room in order to try to extract private keys to steal funds.  Slack has very limited support for avoiding this sort of abuse (especially at the free service tiers), so the search is on for an alternative solution.  There seems to be some confusion over what Matrix & Riot can and can't do to help the situation, so we thought we'd write a blog post about it (especially after we had so much fun at the ETHLDN meetup last week!).

To be clear: we see Ethereum, Bitcoin, Ripple, Stellar and all the other decentralised currencies as being very closely related to Matrix.  Just as distributed ledgers disrupt the fragmented oligopoly old-school banking industry, we want Matrix to disrupt the relatively old-school communications systems of today. And so we'd really rather like that Matrix and Riot rocked when it comes to supporting cryptocurrency communities, and this is something we intend to dedicate resources to long term: we've got some big plans.

🔗Things Matrix provides:

Decentralisation. Rather than each community having its own silo, with users having to juggle accounts over all of them, Matrix decentralises rooms over all the different servers. Users can have a single account and still jump into all the other communities (as well as the rest of the Matrix universe). However, each community can run its own server instance (if they want to) and have complete control over its behaviour.

Encryption. Matrix has first-class end-to-end encryption (although the UX in Riot needs refinement and is technically still beta).  This is great for encrypting rooms which need privacy - although it does come at the expense of being able to do server-side content filtering, which is desirable for fixing phishing attacks. So you probably don't want to turn on encryption for rooms which need phish filtering (or you could use a bot to decrypt and autoremove malicious content).

A standard real-time API. One bit of feedback we've heard recently is that “Riot has no realtime API”.  This is spectacularly untrue; Riot is a client for the Matrix protocol, which is in and of itself an open standard realtime API for messaging, which you can use for writing whatever bots and extensions your heart desires.

Finely grained permissions per room. Likewise there seems to be some confusion over Matrix's access control model.  In Matrix, each user in a room has a ‘power level' - typically a number between 0 and 100.  By convention, normal users who have just joined the room have 0; the room creator and ‘admins' have 100; and ‘moderators' have 50.  Pretty much every access you can do in a room then has a threshold which defines how much power a user needs to perform the action.  It doesn't get much more finely grained than this!

Ability to disable DMs and room invites. Architecturally Matrix lets you prevent users who use a given server from receiving invites (the homeserver can just autoreject the invites, based on some set of rules). We're currently putting together a quick demo to show this off in the Synapse server implementation, but it boils down to having an option to cancel invites here (federated) and here (local). Check out the demo below!

Ability to filter content. Similarly, Matrix architecturally lets a given server filter out messages based on content or some other pattern from being received by its users. We're also putting together a demo of this too in Synapse, which boils down to redacting inappropriate events here (federated) and here (local). The demo isn't quite ready yet but we'll update this & yell when it is. Check out the demo below!

UPDATE

the DM/invite disabling and spam/phish filtering code has now landed on the develop branch of Synapse, and we've deployed an demo example of it at https://phishfree.riot.im.  Messages containing the word 'SPAM' are filtered, and invites are disabled (unless you are the local server admin).

Other stuff. Matrix and Riot give loads of other fun stuff too:

• Widgets - the ability to embed arbitrary apps into your rooms (video conferences; currency tickers; DApps; wallets; monitoring dashboards; etc.).
• 100% Native clients on iOS & Android (including Jitsi video conferencing & Widgets, as of the develop branch!)
• Read receipts! (how can you live without them on Slack?!)
• Internationalised to 20+ languages (thanks to the community! :)
• Bridges through to IRC, Slack, Gitter, and more.
• All sorts of alternative clients (e.g. nheko, quaternion) and SDKs
• Insanely scalable and performant next-generation server ( Dendrite) on the horizon
• An open spec for the protocol.
• 100% Apache-licensed FLOSS.  Riot/Web is particularly easy to hack on and theme & customise as needed.
• Ability to disable federation for a room if you really want to lock it down to the users & rules of a single server.

🔗Things we need to improve:

**Groups (aka Communities):  **One of the biggest missing features in Matrix is the ability to define groups of users & rooms, similar to a Slack team or Discord server, which can be used to organise together a set of discussions and generally give a feeling of community.  We've been working hard at this and expect to see it land in Riot/Web in the next few weeks.  In the meanwhile, you can see some of the UX we're aiming for here!

**E2E UX (and Riot UX in general):  **While the underlying encryption of Matrix is solid, the UX exposed by Riot needs considerable work - specifically to improve the device verification flow and automatically share keys between trusted devices.  We're continuing to work on this over the next few months.  Likewise there are many areas for possible improvement in Riot's overall UX and design that we're working through as urgently as we can.

Active Application Services: The per-server filtering described above is good if you just want to protect users on a given server (e.g. the server you point your community at).  However, if you want to filter all the messages for a given room which may be federated over multiple servers, you need a way to define a centralised chokepoint to define the filtering rules.  Architecturally this is meant to be performed by an ‘Active Application Service' in Matrix, but we've not yet defined or implemented this API.  The idea for the room to define a list of services that messages are filtered through by all servers before they may be accepted for the room.  This would be the ideal solution to the phishing-filtering problem, but in practice filtering just local users (and perhaps disabling federation for particularly sensitive rooms or servers) is probably good enough for the immediate problem here.

Hope this provides some much-needed clarity to the debate! If there are other features cryptocurrency communities need to thrive please let us know, as we'd like to actively help to support decentralized communities.   #matrix-dev:matrix.org is probably the best place for further questions :)

Finally: one thing that has come up a few times in this discussion has been “Matrix's funding crisis means they may not be here to stay”.  All I can say is that Matrix is here to stay. Even if the core team ended up just being Matthew hacking away by himself funded by Patreon/ Liberapay, we have a large and passionate wider dev community who aren't going anywhere.  But more importantly (and not wishing to jinx it), in the last few weeks we have received offers of significant funding which may hopefully resolve the funding crisis for the foreseeable.  Nothing is signed yet, but watch this space, and meanwhile I strongly suggest betting on Matrix being here to stay!

--Matthew

Hi folks,

This is a big news week in Matrixland: hot on the heels of releasing Matrix Widgets and Riot 0.12, we have another massive announcement to make!

We've been approached by Purism to partner up to provide the communications subsystem for their upcoming Librem 5 smartphone - for which they are launching a crowdfunding campaign starting today! The whole idea of the phone is to provide unprecedented privacy, security and autonomy by running an entirely FOSS Debian-based GNU/Linux stack (even including CPU & GPU drivers!), and we are incredibly proud and overexcited that the folks at Purism have asked the Matrix core team to provide the native dialler and messaging app for the phone.  Yes, this means that the phone will literally boot by default into Matrix for all its primary communications (although, being FOSS, you could of course use a different dialler if you wanted).  The intention is to be a very usable and flexible phone for folks who value freedom, privacy and simplicity over the (relative) quagmire of iOS or Android - and of course jumping way ahead of where Apple or Google are in terms of integrating next-generation communications into the very heart of the device.

This is unbelievably exciting, as Matrix's vision from the outset has been to provide an open, decentralised and encrypted alternative to the Public Telephone Network - and the idea of devices emerging which are native to Matrix is a dream come true. It also gives us the excuse that we've been looking for to produce a truly excellent lightweight native Matrix client, built to run on both handset and desktop devices, complete with end-to-end encryption.  We're not sure whether this is going to end up being Qt or GTK based yet, but expect to see the Matrix team getting a lot more involved in the current native Matrix client projects (nheko, Quaternion, ruma-gtk, matrix-glib-sdk, qmatrixclient etc) in future!

Depending on the success of the crowdfunding campaign, it may also give us scope to finally build out proper carrier-grade Matrix<->PSTN bridges: letting Matrix clients terminate and originate VoIP calls on the public phone network.  It's long been an embarrassment that Matrix hasn't had this given that pre-Matrix we spent our lives building commercial SIP gateways and softphones for telcos, and the ability to use Matrix as a proper VoIP softphone on dedicated hardware is incredibly appealing.  Obviously the phone will also support GSM calling, but the intention is to default to WebRTC calling using Matrix whenever the phone has good IP connectivity - making it truly an IP-first smartphone.

Now, this is obviously a very ambitious project, but we believe that Purism is able to deliver based on the work they've done already with crowdfunding and shipping Librem 15 and 13 laptops, shipping with as open a FOSS stack as is possible on contemporary hardware, complete with unique privacy features such as hardware kill-switches for Camera, Wifi, Bluetooth etc.  We met with them at GUADEC 2017 and subsequently heard trusted reports from DebConf 2017 of the quality of the hardware.  It seems that as the company has gathered experience their ambitious goals have become more and more attainable - and it's also interesting that their dev team is significantly made up of core Debian developers (including Chris Lamb, the Debian Project Leader for 2017).  We're particularly excited from a philosophical perspective that the Librem 5 is targeting the NXP (Freescale) i.MX6 or i.MX8 ARM-based processor and Vivante GPU - both of which can be run without any proprietary microcode or proprietary drivers.  From everything we've heard, this is going to be a spectacularly FOSS-friendly device.

So, if you're interested in being first to own the world's first ever Matrix-native phone, or if you want to support the creation of a kick-ass native Matrix desktop/handset client, or perhaps if you want carrier-grade VoIP in Matrix... then please head over to Puri.sm and join the campaign!  Needless to say, if the campaign is successful it will also significantly help Matrix's current funding situation.

Finally, for more context, here's a special mid-week episode of Matrix "Live", featuring Matthew and Todd Weaver, the CEO of Purism, discussing the Librem 5 and what it means for both Purism and Matrix!

As always, feedback on this project is very welcome - come tell us in #matrix:matrix.org what you think!  And thank you, if you choose to support this campaign :)

Matthew, Amandine & the team.

Hi all,

We've been working hard over the last few months on the brand new concept of Matrix "widgets” (sometimes called “apps”, but we'll call them “widgets” here to be marginally less ambiguous) - and we're super excited to see an initial implementation of them land today in Riot/Web 0.12 (alongside always-on Rich Text Editor - the culmination of huge amounts of work by Aviral Dasgupta in his GSoC 2016 project and Luke from the core Matrix team).  For user-focused details about Riot 0.12 you should probably head over to the Riot blog; meanwhile we'll focus here on widgets from the developer perspective.

Widgets are a deceptively simple idea: the ability to pin small form-factor webapps (called widgets) into a given Matrix room, letting admins build up a dashboard of functionality which is then in common and automatically available to everyone who views that room.  You can think of it as being similar to installing an app onto a smartphone, but instead pulling it into a Matrix conversation.  This could be a Jitsi video conference, or a collaborative document editor, or a Grafana dashboard, or anything you can imagine really (assuming its security headers support embedding).  Here's an example of a room with an ongoing Jitsi conference coupled with a Grafana graph, as you might use for a devops war room:

The URLs of the widgets are stored in the state of the room with some high-level layout hints, and the idea is that any Matrix client will be able to expose the widgets for the current room to a user.  For a simple command-line client this could just be listing the URLs of the widgets so the user can open them in a browser; for a web client like Riot/Web they're embedded via iframes; for a native client like Riot/iOS they could be shown via a WebView - or there's always the chance of the native client recognising the URL being requested and swapping it out for an optimised local native implementation instead.  For now, widgets don't really have a way of communicating with the host Matrix client (other than by speaking Matrix to the homeserver!), although we're looking at adding a PostMessage API to improve this.

Now, in an ideal world we would have enough bandwidth to have formally added widgets to the Matrix spec, but unfortunately we are way behind on spec work currently, thanks in part to our current funding problems. (Remember, if you like Matrix, please donate or get your company to donate otherwise we are at real risk of hitting a very big funding wall).  Rather than formal spec, we've focused on rushing an initial implementation out the door in matrix-react-sdk (and thus riot-web) to see how they work first in reality.  Riot/iOS and Riot/Android are coming soon - although we've special-cased the Jitsi video conferencing widget in iOS to be implemented natively, which is actually available already on develop(!)

Right now the widgets supported by Riot are prefixed behind the im.vector.modular.widgets state event, whose format is something like:

{
    type: "im.vector.modular.widgets",
    state_key: "widget1",
    content: {
        type: "grafana",
        url: "https://matrix.org/grafana/whatever",
        name: "matrix.org bridges dashboard"
    }
    room_id: "!foo:bar.com",
    sender: "@kegan:matrix.org"
}

Currently the only layout hint is that the order of the event determines the order in which the widget should be displayed on the page.  Riot/Web's initial implementation is very naive and shows only up to two widgets per page, although we're hoping to make this much more generic and flexible in future.  To add widgets in Riot/Web you can now hit the new widget manager button in the top right - and to show/hide existing ones in the room you can hit the show/hide app drawer button in the bottom right.

The UI for adding widgets to a room in Riot is currently via Modular - the new name for Riot's SaaS integration hosting platform, formally codenamed Scalar.  This is a separate webapp loaded in an iframe which guides you through choosing widgets to embed which are hosted by Modular, although in the near future we'll also add UI to let you specify widget URLs directly.  If you need this today, you'll need to manually inject a state event like the one above into the room to provision the widget.

This is very much the minimum viable implementation of widgets: the stuff left to do includes:

• Adding them to the spec, and getting clients other than Riot using them!
• Supporting better layouts (especially to allow for more screen real-estate) and more than 2 widgets
• Ability to add widgets directly, for situations where Modular isn't available
• Speccing APIs for widgets to interact directly with the host client - with the appropriate permissions model
• Adding lots more prepackaged widgets to the Modular store!

Modular comes with 6 widgets ready to go: Grafana, Jitsi, Etherpad, YouTube, Google Docs and Custom Widget (which lets you add any arbitrary URL into the room). The most exciting of these is probably Jitsi, which provides Hangouts-style video conferencing into any room.  This provides a welcome alternative to our 'native' conferencing functionality which sadly got stuck in a permanent early beta - and includes full screensharing as well!  The only catch is that it hasn't been released on iOS yet, and Android is still be to be implemented - but the experience is a still massive improvement over what we've had historically.  Here's a screenshot of some of the core team doing a 6-way conference with the native Jitsi functionality now included in Riot/iOS!

Finally, if you want to write your own widget, just create a webapp and play with it via the Custom Widget interface.  If it's something useful for other people then please ping us on #matrix-dev:matrix.org and we'll see about getting it added as a preset application in Modular.

We think widgets are an awesome example of how Matrix can be used to coordinate collaboration between users in a room - for now it's just simply ensuring that users are looking at the same set of webapps when in a room, but in future you can see how it could extend to co-browsing, co-editing, payment functionality, or generally using Matrix to coordinate things other than textual/voip chat.  The sky's the limit, and we're hoping the Modular store (and other app stores) will start overflowing with apps in the near future!

As always, feedback is very welcome on new experimental stuff like this - so please come tell us what you think in #matrix:matrix.org!  And finally: huge kudos to Rick, Kegan, Rob, and everyone else who have been working away bringing Widgets to life.  It's the beginning of a new era :D

Matthew

Hi folks,

Something that has kept coming up since we ran into funding problems in July is the idea that Matrix could launch a cryptocurrency - a token for use when exchanging items of value within Matrix. This isn't such a far-fetched idea: folks are already starting to look at how to sell content/services within Matrix, and the idea of using a Matrix-specific currency rather than credit card, PayPal, or an existing cryptocurrency could have some major advantages. Specifically:

• It would let the value of the currency (in terms of its exchange rate relative to other currencies) grow in value directly linked to the growth and success of the Matrix ecosystem as a whole.
• In future it could help us reward folks who run Matrix infrastructure (homeservers, identity servers, etc) by "mining" or "farming" style allocations of currency
• It could also be a very useful tool for helping fight spam in future.  One way of proving that a user should be allowed to contact strangers (other than a vouching system) could be to spend some money.
• An "token generation event" or "initial coin offering" where we sell initial allocations of the currency to the Matrix & cryptocurrency community could be a rather useful way to raise enough money to fully support the core Matrix team going forwards.

Meanwhile, Matrix itself is obviously already a fairly successful decentralised application ecosystem, and we believe that the above points give us a much better reason than average to actually launch a currency.  It's important to note that we don't have plans at this point to evolve the Matrix protocol itself into being able to support cryptocurrencies - we'd instead piggyback on top of an existing established distributed currency ledger.  (Later on, rewarding folks who run Matrix infrastructure by mining would require more interesting integration with Matrix, of course).

However (and this is the important bit), whilst we've been thinking about this a lot over the last few months, we have not yet announced anything concrete.  Over the last few days it's come to our attention that there are some people advertising a "Matrix.org ICO Presale".  This is not legitimate - we are not yet running an ICO or presale, and if/when we do the only place you will hear about it is here on the Matrix.org website.  It looks possible that this is a scam to try to steal Ethereum.  We have not yet authorised anyone to sell hypothetical Matrix currency.  If you see this rumour around please let us know so we can try to understand where it's coming from and set the record straight.

Anyway, we thought it was worth giving an update on our thoughts about cryptocurrencies - and to publicly clarify that anyone claiming that they are running a Matrix.org ICO is lying.

We'd genuinely be very interested to hear feedback from the community on whether an ICO for Matrix would be a good idea or not - #matrix:matrix.org is probably the best place to discuss it.  It's important to understand that our core focus will always be on Matrix itself, where we still have a lot of work to get through - and if we do an ICO it'll be in partnership with specialist cryptocurrency experts, and hopefully minimise the impact to the core Matrix project itself.  But right now, we would be foolish not to be seriously considering the option.

thanks,

Matthew, Amandine & the team.

Hi folks,

Thought it was worth giving a quick status update on what's going on since our last blog post, which explained the funding situation Matrix has found itself in.  The TL;DR is that we're still here; things are moving faster than ever (not least as we refocus on getting everything needed to get Matrix funded and sustainable in the longer term), but we still need concrete support from the community (both company sponsorship and personal donations) to ensure things keep going at the current rate.

🔗Funding Status

So, the good news is that we had a great initial response to last week's call to help - right now we have 199 people signed up on Patreon (go on, be the 200th! you know you want to :D), ~30 on Liberapay, and 14 bitcoin donations.  This sums up to just over $2000/month - which is getting close to our initial Patreon goal of $2500/month to helping support half the cost of the less senior devs working on Matrix. Endless thanks to everyone who has donated - especially the 19 folks (18 on Patreon, one on Liberapay) who have so generously pledged $50 or more a month!! Meanwhile, if you're reading this and you haven't pledged support yet - please consider heading over to Patreon or Liberapay or Bitcoin 1LxowEgsquZ3UPZ68wHf8v2MDZw82dVmAE and helping keep the project running.  Literally every dollar counts.

Meanwhile, while Patreon & friends are headed in the right direction to support one developer, we still have another 10 people working on all the various core components of Matrix itself who need to be supported in the near future.  (We look to be safe for the next month or two, but beyond that we're counting on having solved this problem ;).  Right now we are hoping that companies who believe in Matrix and/or are building services on top will step up to sponsor development - as it's pretty obvious that accelerating Dendrite, final E2E, Groups etc will improve professional Matrix-based services immeasurably.  If this sounds like you, please get in touch asap.

We're also able to provide paid consulting and development (and prioritised development) services on Matrix (through Vector, the for-profit company responsible for Riot) for large pieces of work - for instance, if you're anxious to see enterprise-focused Matrix features land sooner than later, please reach out.

Exciting news is that we already have one concrete offer of paid consulting work from a very major company who happens to love Matrix, building out Integrations capabilities which should directly benefit the wider Matrix ecosystem - and we also are very proud to announce our very first official corporate sponsor (see the next section for details)!  However, we still have a long way to go, so don't be shy about getting in touch: we need your support!

Heads up that we've also started our various reward schemes for supporters - folks donating more than $5 on Patreon will have already heard most of this update in the first episode of the video blog that Amandine & I posted last Friday; and folks donating more than $10 will have heard some of the other details first hand through the broadcast of the global team weekly sync on Monday!  We're still figuring out how to get these rewards over to liberapay & bitcoin supporters (not helped by both services being anonymous...).  We haven't yet opened up the #matrix-supporters:matrix.org room as maintaining the accesslist is effectively blocked on Groups landing.  We also want to use Groups to manage the various lists of supporters around the place, so apologies that we haven't got the lists published yet!

Finally on the funding side of things: we're setting up the Matrix.org Foundation non-profit legal entity this week, letting us accept donations and sponsorship in a way which can directly fund the core developers (more details as we have them).  As soon as it's incorporated, we'll be able to sign up fully on Liberapay to accept donations there.

🔗Announcing UpCloud: our very first official Matrix.org Corporate Sponsor!

As hinted above, we're incredibly excited and happy that UpCloud have signed up as our first official corporate sponsor.  UpCloud has already been hosting all of Matrix.org's infrastructure for the last 6 months (no mean feat, given the scale of the Matrix.org synapse & postgres!) - and last week they committed to extend their sponsorship further to help the project out in our time of need.

We've been very impressed with UpCloud's service since migrating over back in February - particularly their spectacularly fast block IO (~350MB/s write, 92,000 IOPS, and over 5GB/s read!!) which is incredibly useful for running a huge synapse deployment like Matrix.org's - and they have a great footprint of datacentres around the world.

They also like Matrix so much that they've written this great tutorial for getting Synapse up and running on their hosts - and best of all, they have a special $25 discount for anyone in the Matrix community who wishes to use them: check out https://www.upcloud.com/matrix/ for the details!

We'd like to thank them profusely for being first in line to support us - and we look forward to seeing how far we can push their hardware over the coming months! :D

🔗Development Status

Finally, loads and loads of stuff is happening on Matrix itself.  The main headlines are:

• Groups.  Work in Synapse and matrix-react-sdk is happening at breakneck speed to get Groups out the door as soon as possible, so we can use them both to support the funding drive and in general to implement one of the most asked-for features of Matrix: the ability to group rooms together into a well-defined community (similar to Slack Teams or Discord Servers etc).  The way Groups work is to let users define groupings of both users and rooms; you can also define a metadata for the group to let you build homepages similar to the one which Riot/Web sprouted a few months ago.  You can then refer to the group of users when inviting/banning/kicking etc - or when managing your own roomlist.  We think it's going to completely change how people use Matrix, and can't wait to see it land on riot.im/develop, although it's still a few weeks away.
• E2E Crypto.  We have three main things remaining here, after which E2E should be much much more usable for day-to-day purposes:
  1. Fixing the matrix-js-sdk to store crypto state in indexeddb rather than localstorage, to prevent multiple browser tabs racing and corrupting localstorage (which provides no locking mechanism).  This turns out to be much more of an epic than we thought, as indexeddb's APIs are all strictly async, resulting in a whole bunch of previously synchronous APIs in matrix-js-sdk needing to become async too, as well as requiring us to switch promises library at least from Q to Bluebird.  However, most of this is now done so hopefully the new storage layer will land shortly.  https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/2325 is the bug tracking this one...
  2. Fixing the overall UX of managing devices in a room (including key shares).  https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/4522 is the bug for this one :)  Relatedly we also need to ensure invitees can decrypt messages in e2e rooms before they join (if history visibility allows it) - this is https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/3821
  3. Fixing the UX of verifying devices (including cross-signing devices), to minimise the pain in verifying device ownership. https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/2142 is the master bug for this.
• Integrations.  A large slice of the team is working on our next-generation integration hosting platform, which is starting to look unspeakably awesome.  We'll be yelling loudly about this once there's something to see and play with...
• Rich Text Editor.  This was originally a GSoC project from last year, but is finally on by default now in matrix-react-sdk - letting users author their messages with full WYSIWYG behaviour and critically have a radically improved autocompletion UI/UX, including emoji, user names, room names, etc.  You can check it out at riot.im/develop already :)
• Mentions.  We're finally semantically tagging references to users in messages so that they can be displayed nicely in the UI, and help with highlighting notifications!  This is due as soon as the Rich Text Editor work has finished.
• Mobile SDKs.  The iOS & Android teams are currently on a mission to get parity between the iOS & Android SDKs and matrix-react-sdk.  This is stuff like implementing the new User Search API; Membership Event List Summaries; Dark theme(!); Translations; etc.  Progress is looking good!
• Synapse performance.  Many many optimisations when calculating push rules when sending messages, which was taking up a substantial amount of the send path time.  Synapse develop looks to have reduced this significantly now - and as of Monday we're running the new optimisations on Matrix.org.
• Dendrite.  Lots of work going into implementing Invitations currently, including improvements to the overall append-only log architecture to support them nicely.
• Riot-Static.  This is one of our GSoC projects this year, written by Michael Telatynski (t3chguy) - providing a full static (no-JS) read-only view of Matrix, suitable for dumb web browsers and search engines.  It's looking really exciting (although needs CSS) - there's a copy currently deployed over at https://stormy-bastion-98790.herokuapp.com/.

Meanwhile, there's a tonne of stuff happening in the community - an excellent summary may be found at this Community Round Up blog post by uhoreg!

So: this is where things stand right now - the team is sprinting away getting all the stuff above landed, and meanwhile I'm spending most of my life worrying about funding.  We'll try to keep blogging more regularly to give better visibility on progress on both the funding & development situation, as well as to ensure there's a written public record as well as the regular supporter-only updates.  However, for the latest realtime updates and sneak previews and tidbits you'll probably want to sign up on Patreon or Liberapay :D

--Matthew

[EDIT: I got the UpCloud stats completely wrong - they are even faster (by 10x!) than I quoted; the figures are now updated :)]

Hi folks,

TL;DR: if you like Matrix (and especially if you're building stuff on it), please support us via Patreon or Liberapay to keep the core team able to work on it full-time, otherwise the project is going to be seriously impacted.  And if you're a company who is invested in Matrix (e.g. itching for Dendrite), please get in touch ASAP if you'd like to sponsor core development work from the team.  And if you're a philanthropic billionaire who believes in our ideals of decentralisation, encryption, and open communication as a basic human right - we'd love to hear from you too O:-)

I was expecting this blog post to be the Matrix Summer Special, focusing entirely on the incredible progress and updates we've made in the last few months in Matrix.  However, instead I'm going to talk about something different and literally critical to Matrix's success.

As many people know, Matrix.org development has historically been exclusively and very generously sponsored by a large multinational telecoms infrastructure company for whom most of the core team once built telco messaging apps.  However, despite the project progressing better than ever (more on that later), we have just had our funding dramatically cut by >60%. [Update: as of Aug 2017 it is effectively cut entirely, with enough $ left over to cover until end of October.]

We seem to be suffering from a darkly amusing paradox, as the rationale from our corporate overlords is essentially: “Wow! Matrix is doing great and growing well - and you seem to have all sorts of exciting people and companies using and building on it.  But we've been footing the whole development bill since the outset in May 2014, and this simply doesn't feel fair.  We're happy to keep funding though - but only if others do too!”.  In other words, in some ways we are a victim of our own success...

So we now find ourselves in the situation that despite the project looking better than ever and having a tonne of amazing stuff in the pipeline, we are suddenly missing the funding to keep the core team working on it.  And the team is quite sizeable - reflecting the ambition and size of Matrix: right now we have effectively 11 people working specifically on Matrix itself: 1 on Synapse, 1 on Dendrite, 1 on e2e crypto, 2 on matrix-react-sdk (which powers Riot/Web), 2 on matrix-ios-kit / matrix-ios-sdk, 2 on matrix-android-sdk, 1 on bridges, and me (Matthew) managing the overall project.  (This ignores folks who overlap the team who are working specifically on Riot stuff).

Over the last few years we've had countless people ask if they can financially support Matrix. We haven't been able to accept it for various reasons, but now is the time for us to step towards a more independent setup, and avoid a repeat of the situation we're currently facing by opening up to external support.

So we need help from the community to keep going!  Please head over to Patreon or Liberapay and put some money in the meter (or send some bitcoin to 1LxowEgsquZ3UPZ68wHf8v2MDZw82dVmAE or ether to 0xA5f9a4f9E024F6D727f7afdA9257e22329A97485). In return, you'll get to keep Matrix evolving at a decent rate, be a member of the upcoming +supporters:matrix.org group (complete with flair badges!), and other benefits like access to #matrix-supporters:matrix.org - a new dedicated room for prioritised support, discounted goodies from Riot once paid services arrive, access to a weekly supporters-only status podcast(!), and of course receive our eternal thanks. :)

Meanwhile, if you're a company who depends on Matrix: please get in touch. We have the option for you to sponsor core Matrix development (e.g. Dendrite) or for us to provide you with more targeted support or feature development.  We're already talking to several organisations who want to accelerate Dendrite specifically - and the more support we have there the faster we can go.

We'd also like to thank UpCloud for sponsoring hosting for the Matrix.org synapse instances - UpCloud has been coping impressively with the massive I/O and CPU/RAM requirements we have, and we recommend them unreservedly for folks looking to run their own homeservers.

Finally, one of the longer term plans to help fund Matrix is to get sponsorship from Riot, once Riot starts offering paid services. So, if you're an investor who's interested in the for-profit sides of Riot (paid integrations and paid Matrix hosting) then please get in touch with the Riot team ASAP!

Moving forward we are confident that we can secure funding, through sponsorship and Riot paid services, but in truth this decision caught us by surprise and so we need help both long term but also right now!

And whatever the funding situation, we're of course always looking for contributions for code, bug reports, or just spreading the word about the project too! :)

🔗Status Update

(or scroll to next section to see why this is bigger than "just" decentralised encrypted communication)

Despite the funding issue, the project really is going very well. Our vital stats (as seen through the lens of the matrix.org synapse) are looking like this:

And meanwhile, looking back at the last big update (Holiday Special 2016), we can compare our progress with our goals for 2017 thus far:

• Getting E2E Encryption out of beta ASAP.

This has progressed massively - we haven't really yelled about it yet, but latest https://riot.im/develop/ now finally implements the ability to share message keys between clients to let them decrypt older history and fix “unable to decrypt” errors (Mobile coming soon).  Meanwhile various root causes of “unable to decrypt” errors have been gradually eliminated; I can't actually remember the last time I saw one! Once key-sharing and improved device verification UX is fully tested and tuned we should be able to declare E2E out of beta.

Work on fixing the final causes of "unable to decrypt" (UISI) errors in E2E is progressing well: here's a sneak preview of things to come!! pic.twitter.com/0oGJjm8ZHT

— Matrix (@matrixdotorg) May 25, 2017

• Ensuring we can scale beyond Synapse – i.e. implement Dendrite

Likewise, Dendrite is on track: we've implemented all the Hard Stuff which forms the skeleton of Dendrite (core federation, message signing, /sync, message sending, media repository etc) - which takes us to over 50% of Phase 1. After phase 1, we will have an initial usable release for all the core functionality.  Synapse's performance has also improved enormously this year.

New milestone for Dendrite: sending messages over federation BOTH WAYS between dendrite & synapse! A bit more polish & we can cut an alpha!! pic.twitter.com/DWs6rFqZcQ

— Matrix (@matrixdotorg) June 23, 2017

• Getting as many bots and bridges into Matrix as possible, and doing everything we can to support them, host them and help them be as high quality as possible – making the public federated Matrix network as useful and diverse as possible.

Bridges and bots continue - from the core team we have a ‘puppeting' Telegram bridge (matrix-appservice-tg), and from the wider community we have Discord, Skype, Signal, new Rocket.Chat and more.  Getting them polished and live is certainly an area where we need more manpower though.

• Supporting Riot's leap to the mainstream, ensuring Matrix has at least one killer app.

Riot has been sprouting new releases every few weeks, with a huge emphasis on proving UX:

• an entirely new streamlined sign-up process
• the new concept of home pages
• a user directory search that actually works
• internationalised to 27 languages
• compact layout
• loads of desktop improvements
• piwik analytics support; etc.

There is still a lot of UX work to be done, but it's converging fast on being a great entry point into the Matrix ecosystem, driving its growth across different groups and communities..

Meanwhile, a massive update to the iOS & Android apps just landed yesterday, switching to an entirely new UI layout to separate People from Rooms, synchronized Read Markers, and more!

• Adding the final major missing features:
  • Customisable User Profiles (this is almost done, actually)

This is still hovering at ‘almost done', and will be needed for some of the implementation of Groups (see below)..

• Groups (i.e. ability to define groups of users, and perform invites, powerlevels, etc. per-group as well as per-user)

Groups are also in testing in Synapse too!  These will probably be the single biggest change to Matrix that we've seen since E2E encryption landed: it changes the dynamic of the whole network, given users can explicitly declare allegiance to different groups, which in turn have their own home pages and directories etc.  It lets users form communities, and declare their participation in those communities (if desired), and also lets rooms be grouped together.  One of our single biggest requests has been “subrooms” and we're incredibly excited to see how well Groups solve this.

• Threading

Sadly no progress on Threading so far this year.

• Editable events (and Reactions)

We're hoping to get looking at this (at last!) once Groups are done.

• Maturing and polishing the spec (we are way overdue a new release)

You'll have noticed that in the “how many people work on Matrix?” stats above, we didn't mention anyone working on the Spec.  Because right now there isn't anyone explicitly maintaining it, unfortunately; updates are done best-effort when everyone's primary responsibilities allow it.  That said, there's quite a lot of good stuff currently unreleased on HEAD. This is something which is obviously critical to fix once we have sustainable funding sorted again.  We can only apologise to folks like the Ruma developers who have suffered from the spec lag. :(

• Improving VoIP – especially conferencing.

VoIP is improving lots on iOS, thanks to Denis Morozov's GSoC project, and meanwhile we have all new conferencing powered by Jitsi on the horizon in the next few weeks too.

• Reputation/Moderation management (i.e. spam/abuse filtering).

Lots of thinking about this (see below), but no development yet.

• Much-needed SDK performance work on matrix-{'{'}react,ios,android{'}'}-sdk.

About 40% of the desired performance work has happened here (although not all has gone live yet).

• …and a few other things which would be premature to mention right now. :D

All will be revealed in the next week or two - but suffice it to say that Integrations are going to be getting a Lot More Useful™. :)

🔗Reflections

There are very very few people actually working professionally on trying to build general-purpose open communication networks and protocols.  There's us, some XMPP, IRCv3 and GNU Social/Mastodon folks, GNU Ring, Tox, Briar, Secure Scuttlebutt, IPFS, Status.im, Ricochet… and that's literally all the major projects I can think of (sorry if I missed you!).  There's probably only 50 developers in total working in this domain as their day job.

Meanwhile, there are literally hundreds of thousands of folks trudging away building more and more near-indistinguishable proprietary closed communication systems - trapping users inside ever more silos and fragmenting the basic ability to communicate on the ‘net.  It's like a world where the open web was pushed into a tiny underground resistance, and everyone else was trapped in the walled gardens of AOL and Compuserve (or more contemporarily: Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc).

In other words: the whole world of decentralised communication desperately needs your support.  This is a clear case of user choice and freedom: to give users the ability to pick who they trust with their data and metadata, without being forced into unilaterally trusting the Silicon Valley megacorps.  And this, dear Reader, is your chance to fix the world for the greater good. Seriously, the Matrix team is one of a handful in the world in a position to continue to push things in the right direction and avoid us falling into a permanent dystopia where communication is even more closed and proprietary than the Public Telephone Network!

Finally, there's an even bigger issue at stake here than open communication.  As an open network, people can literally publish whatever content they like into Matrix - same as the web or the internet itself.  As a result, there's scope for spam; abusive/malicious content; propaganda; and generally the whole spectrum of the best and worst of humanity.  Now, if we were a centralised system like Facebook, we might hire thousands of content moderators to frantically impose a rulebook on ‘acceptable' content.  Or we might build invisible filter-bubbles for our users based on their social graph, cocooning them from scary unfamiliar content outside their social circles and reinforcing their preconceptions (whilst the resulting self-affirmation keeps them coming back, viewing more and more ads).

But we're decentralised, and we have no absolute moral arbiter, and nor should we - on an open network it should be up to users and users alone to define and manage their own worldview and alignment.  Plus we are not fiscally obligated to keep users coming back to view more ads no matter what.  Instead, we are forced to confront the fundamental problem: building tools which empower users to curate and visualise their own content filters; letting them filter out the stuff they're not interested in or find repellant… while still helping them be aware of their own viewpoint and the shape of the world beyond it.  We haven't really started building this yet, but in the long term our feeling is that these tools will literally be vital for the survival of the human race (e.g. exposing anti-climate-change propaganda for what it is or helping users opt out of World War 3) - let alone the success of decentralisation.  A world where users blindly consume propaganda is doomed, and it's a fascinating situation that the same tools which will allow Matrix users to tune out the rooms, users and conversations they're not interested in could be directly applied to the bigger global problem.

So: Matrix needs you. Please become a supporter on Patreon or Liberapay, and help us save the world :)

• Matthew, Amandine & the whole Matrix.org team.