Thib

148 posts tagged with "Thib" (See all Author)

This Week in Matrix 2022-10-28

28.10.2022 19:07 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

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

πŸ”—MSC Status

New MSCs:

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

Merged MSCs:

Closed MSCs:

πŸ”—Spec Updates

MSC3917: Cryptographically Constrained Room Membership is rather interesting. It aims to make room membership in a room cryptographically verifiable via a "Master Signing Key" that's controlled by users. This is in addition to the homeserver signatures typically placed on events in Matrix. The purpose is to prevent a homeserver from being able to lie about your membership in a room. While not the end-all-be-all solution to this particular problem, it's certainly a well-reasoned take.

πŸ”—Matrix @ IETF 115

This last week (well, last few months), the Spec Core Team has been working on defining Matrix as the standard for interoperable messaging at the IETF level, under MIMI. The current drafts can be found in these places:

  • Matrix as a transport for MIMI: https://turt2live.github.io/ietf-mimi-matrix-transport/draft-ralston-mimi-matrix-transport.html (MSC3918)
  • Matrix as a message format for MIMI: https://turt2live.github.io/ietf-mimi-matrix-message-format/draft-ralston-mimi-matrix-message-format.html (MSC3919)

We'll be publishing these as proper Internet-Drafts once submissions open back up at IETF in a week or so. In the meantime, if you have any feedback then please let us know on the MSCs πŸ™‚

πŸ”—Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3032: Thoughts on updating presence!

A loose collection of thoughts on how presence (the ability to see whether people are online/office) may be improved at the Matrix protocol level, and how it could be integrated into a profiles-as-rooms feature (MSC1769). Check it out if presence is something you're interested in!

TravisR explains

A soon-to-be working group within the IETF called "More Instant Messaging Interoperability" (MIMI) is aiming to solve, well, messaging interoperability for primarily reasons of the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA). The DMA requires "gatekeepers" to interop with other platforms while maintaining the same level of encryption, and we think Matrix is the perfect fit for this use-case. While we'd likely be saying goodbye to Olm and Megolm in the process, we'd be saying hello to Messaging Layer Security (MLS) and its decentralized counterpart DMLS - a good thing in our books, at the moment.

In terms of what we've done this week in publishing our drafts (and soon to be real Internet-Drafts under the IETF process), we're formally proposing that Matrix's Federation API and event schema be used for messaging interoperability. Our very own Matrix spec process will be impacted by this sort of direction as it makes it (theoretically) "harder" to change details of the spec. To avoid it being extraordinarily difficult, we'll be nailing down some of the edge cases of the Federation API and event format ( πŸ‘€ extensible events) naturally as we work closer and closer to an RFC series. We'll also be making some architectural changes to our specification itself to better support half of it being in the IETF domain, like defining room versions more clearly and splitting non-core spec out of the way. It's worth noting that this is a relatively slow process as we work towards the deadline of DMA a few years from now, but the changes might be felt by the ecosystem on a more rapid scale.

At the moment, we're planning to attend IETF 115 to help keep Matrix on the map for MIMI and raise our feedback about the proposed working group charter. Discussions about whether Matrix is the correct fit are already ongoing, but expected to increase as we get closer to IETF 116 next quarter. We were also already at IETF 114 a few months ago where many of these conversations started.

Future work is currently expected to come through under my name, as have the current drafts (both with obvious input from Matthew as project lead). Watching this space and the spec process for updates is best πŸ™‚

πŸ”—Dash User-Contributed Docset

ChristianP says

The Matrix Spec 1.4 is now available as a Docset for the Dash offline documentation reader. You can install this docset from Dash's Preferences > Downloads > User Contributed. This docset will likely be kept up-to-date by me. This is not an official distribution channel of the Matrix Spec team – things may break.

If you're using the open-source reader Zeal, you'll have to install new versions manually: https://gitlab.com/jaller94/dash-matrix-spec#use-with-zeal

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—Telodendria (website)

Jordan Bancino says

Hi everyone, I'm working on a little Matrix project called Telodendria.

Telodendria is eventually going to be another homeserver implementation. It isn't one yet; I'm still in the very early stages of prototyping it, and writing some boilerplate code, but I've been encouraged to throw the project out there for more exposure, so here we are!

Telodendria is written in ANSI C, will use a custom flat-file database, and relies only on a POSIX system to be built and run. It won't pull in any dependencies; as much as possible will be written from scratch, including the HTTP stack, JSON parser, and any other baseline stuff a Matrix homeserver needs.

πŸ”—Why?

One of the goals is simply to build a useful homeserver, but also just to learn about the inner workings of Matrix and the technology that supports it, as well as to have a bit of fun in the process.

At this point we've got Synapse, Dendrite, Conduit, Construct, and a few other great projects. So you're probably asking, What practical reasons are there to build another homeserver? The best answer to that is in Telodendria's manual, but what it really comes down to is being portable and lightweight. It'd be cool to have a Matrix homeserver server that can run anywhere, but specifically targets the more obscure operating systems like the BSDs. Additionally, it should be light enough to perform well on Raspberry Pis, routers, cheap VPSs, and other low-power and low-storage devices that might not be as capable of running a full database plus a hefty Matrix homeserver.

For me personally, I just want a homeserver that feels like it belongs on OpenBSD and is capable of handling my use case without having to install any third-party packages. I'm a digital minimalist that wants to cut down on his software requirements, and Telodendria is one of the ways I've set out to do that.

πŸ”—Want to get involved?

There's definitely plenty of code and documentation to be written, so if you're looking for a challenge and believe in the project's philosophy, you're highly encouraged to get involved in whatever way you're able.

The development discussion happens entirely on Matrix. If you're unsure where to start, start by joining the project rooms listed in the manual. Do be sure to also check out main project website, which has a list of all the manual pages. The manual should contain much of the information you'll need to get started, but it's far from complete, so if you find the information to be insufficient, don't be afraid to ask questions in the rooms listed above.

πŸ”—Conduit (website)

Conduit is a simple, fast and reliable chat server powered by Matrix

Timo on Conduit ⚑️ announces

Great news! The FUTO organization selected me for a grant to sponsor me working on Conduit. I want to finally work on the big remaining issues like threads, backfilling, spaces and so on. Also keep an eye on the Conduit v0.5 release. It is almost done and contains many bug fixes. You can already try it out by compiling conduit-next.

πŸ”—Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

dmr announces

A lot of the Synapse team are out at the moment; we have mostly been in maintenance mode, both for the project and the Matrix.org deployment. With that said: we released Synapse 1.70.0 on Tuesday followed by a 1.70.1 patch release today. Highlights include:

Thank you as ever to our community of contributors, server operators and users who've been involved in this release. We'll be cutting a release candidate for Synapse 1.71 on the upcoming Tuesday (1st November), aiming to release the week after (8th November).

As for this week: we've been testing Synapse against the recent Python 3.11 release, dealing wit h CI deprecations and working through our backlog of old PRs. Lots of small things to juggle!

πŸ”—Homeserver Deployment πŸ“₯️

πŸ”—Helm Chart (website)

Ananace announces

Since I happen to have a few free minutes this friday;

My Helm Charts continue to stay up-to-date, with element-web at 1.11.12 and matrix-synapse on 1.70.0 (though refer to #homeowners:matrix.org before updating)

Ananace reports

And another little update on my Helm Charts; matrix-synapse 1.70.1 is now available as well

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—Nheko (website)

Desktop client for Matrix using Qt and C++17.

Nico announces

I guess the most exciting news is that the macOS M1 builds are now merged to master and will be available for the next release. Seems like those are even faster on macOS that the intel builds! (Time from launch to be able to send a message is about 1 or 2 seconds.) The builds are using the generous cirrus CI open-source offering, so thank you!

Another good news is that a fox fixed the upload widget sometimes breaking Nheko when trying to upload specific files on some platforms. Apart from that there were also minor fixes to room sorting in communities, performance fixes to the parent community links as well as work on enabling more warnings when developing Nheko (to ensure our code is better quality, more secure and less error prone).

If you want to find out more about Nheko, our official community is currently being set up at #community:nheko.im!

πŸ”—Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Danielle says

  • Along with some bug fixes we’ve been adding more updates to some features currently in Labs!

    • Check out a newly improved Threads; with recent updates deployed, threads notifications should be much more reliable these days. We’ve still got more work to do but the improvements are great.
    • Video rooms and Element Call in the desktop version now supports screen sharing.
    • The rich text editor is also getting regular updates and expanded functionality.
  • In the pipeline for us over the next few weeks are improvements to notifications and matrix.to links.

πŸ”—Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Ștefan announces

  • In order to enhance our ability to test before launch we’ve now got Nightly builds on ElementX iOS. Our internal testers are able to use the app for longer before we prep for release to the App Store and that will increase the quality of our product.
    • We’ve also made other improvements to our performance testing.
  • The composer has had a few upgrades recently - keep your eyes open for that and let us know what you think!
  • Work on voice broadcasting is moving ahead quickly
  • We’re working on signing in via QR code and other enhancements in this area.
  • And last but not least, ElementX is very close to getting e2e encryption support!

πŸ”—Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

benoit announces

  • The new app layout has been out for a few weeks now and we’re keeping an eye on feedback and numbers. So far it seems like most people like it though we’ve heard great ideas about improvements we can make in the future. Keep it coming!
  • We’re working hard on increasing the test coverage in our app so that we have even more confidence in the app we’re pushing to the Play Store.
  • Under Labs, there’s some new features. Check out:
    • The new composer. It’s What You See Is What You Get and hopefully a lot more straight-forward to use!
    • There’s also a new way to manage your devices and notifications on different clients.

πŸ”—Dept of Non Chat Clients πŸŽ›οΈ

πŸ”—nheko-krunner (website)

A KRunner plugin to list joined rooms and possibly other things from nheko.

LorenDB says

I have updated nheko-krunner to work with the latest D-Bus API from nheko. There is no new release out yet, but expect to see a release (possibly with other cool things) after the next nheko release.

πŸ”—Circles (website)

E2E encrypted social networking built on Matrix. Safe, private sharing for your friends, family, and community.

cvwright reports

Happy Friday all! Once again we have a new build of the Circles Android app for your beta testing enjoyment.

πŸ”—Updates in this release (v1.0.5)

  • Renamed the app back to "Circles". Technically the proper name of the app is "FUTO Circles", but it will show up on your home screen as simply "Circles", similar to how Google Photos is "Photos" and Google Maps is "Maps". The Circuli name was too hard for most English speakers to pronounce, and it didn't solve our other issues with the name. "FUTO Circles" should do the trick.
  • We're keeping the Circuli name for our online service.
  • Added QR-code-based device verification.
  • Made registration tokens optional, i.e. it's up to the server whether to require them or not. Currently we do require registration tokens on our servers, and you can sign up with the token 0000-1111-2222-4444.

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Next-gen crypto-included SDK for developing Clients, Bots and Appservices; written in Rust with bindings for Node, Swift and WASM

ben announces

Long-awaited and with a bunch of final bug-fixes on the server side, this week eventually saw the merging of the sliding sync extensions, enabling e2ee and to-device message support via sliding-sync on main. With that, and some additional APIs on, a new Element-x with e2ee support was made available. A release that also features the latest work on the timeline API, which, too, has seen its fair share of progress this week - mainly internal fixes and debugging helpers.

As a result of the sliding sync work, just earlier today, an important PR was opened for jack-in, the experimental debugging TUI client based on matrix-rust-sdk (which we use for debugging sliding sync): now allowing you send (encrypted) messages, too.

Following last weeks announcement we also made the Rust-Sec public, indicating why we recommend upgrading to 0.6.1, which we released shortly prior.

Other than that, work has been progressed in the background on the pretty complex problem of async in uniffi and system-specific runners, namely libdispatch on ios rather than tokio, as well as work on uniff proc-macros.

οΈπŸ‘‰ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.

πŸ”—libQuotient (website)

A Qt5 library to write cross-platform clients for Matrix

kitsune reports

A new beta for libQuotient 0.7 is out, with a few fixes and improvements across the board but especially in E2EE-related code. This one is still a bit too early for Linux packagers but we're steadily approaching the release. The release notes are available at a usual place: https://github.com/quotient-im/libQuotient/releases/tag/0.7-beta2

πŸ”—Dept of Events and Talks πŸ—£οΈ

πŸ”—Matrix User Meetup Berlin

saces says

Next Matrix user meetup 2.11.2022, 8 pm @ c-base

Meet other matrix users, chat about Matrix, the rest, and everything else, discuss your Matrix ideas, sign each other in persona, and maybe spice the evening with a good mate or beer.

Also when the bbq is lit you may wish you brought your favorite item :)

Every first Wednesday of the month in the c-base at 8pm ('til the next pandemic).

Matrix room: #mumb:c-base.org

πŸ”—Dept of Interesting Projects πŸ›°οΈ

πŸ”—Chatrix (website)

Matthew announces

Automattic look to be working on a wordpress plugin called Chatrix, forked from Element’s Chatterbox (in turn built on Hydrogen)… https://github.com/Automattic/chatrix-frontend

πŸ”—hg-dashboard (website)

thejhh announces

We published our example dashboard fullstack app at Github. It uses Matrix as one of the database options to save application's stored state -- and also contains sample configurations for multiple Matrix Home servers. The project is complete full stack sample project which can be used to kick start new projects. It has REST backend written in TypeScript using Spring Boot style API implementation, architecture copied from enterprise Java world to TypeScript. The frontend is implemented with ReactJS. It also has docker-compose configurations and a simple testing framework implemented.

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1neko.dev318
2keks.club474
3alemann.dev531
4trygve.me532.5
5utzutzutz.net588
6justinruiter.nl680.5
7mozilla.org1290
8kittenface.studio1702
9rom4nik.pl1894
10matrix.cirk2.de2523

πŸ”—#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1dendrite.matrix.org196.5
2kumma.juttu.asia244.5
3willian.wang479
4frai.se502.5
5grin.hu509.5
6conduit.hazmat.jacksonchen666.com522.5
7forlorn.day727
8rustybever.be879
9dendrite.s3cr3t.me1303
10valha.la1547

πŸ”—That's all I know

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

This Week in Matrix 2022-10-21

21.10.2022 19:33 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib
Last update: 21.10.2022 19:20

πŸ”—Matrix Live

This week

πŸ”—Dept of Status of Matrix 🌑️

Gwmngilfen reports

AnsibleFest 2022 happened this week, and the work the community has been doing with Matrix got quite some attention! We got a mention during the Day 1 Keynote (YouTube) and again during an interview with theCUBE.net. Both are worth watching πŸ™‚

Thanks to the shoutout from Adam in the Keynote, we've had 40 new people join the #social:ansible.com room πŸš€ and lots of interest in Matrix at the Fest Community Booth. Huge thanks to @maxamillion:one.ems.host and @cybette:ansible.im for their time! ❀️

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

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

πŸ”—MSC Status

New MSCs:

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

Closed MSCs:

Accepted MSCs:

  • No MSCs were accepted this week.

πŸ”—Spec Updates

The Spec Core Team are continuing to work on spec maintenance in the run up to Matrix v1.5 (due next month!). Again, if you'd like to help out with small fixes and corrections to the spec, feel free to take a look at the list of open spec clarification issues. Thank you!

πŸ”—Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2700: Thumbnail requirements for the media repo!

This MSC has the goal of clarifying the mimetypes of media that a homeserver both MUST and SHOULD support thumbnailing for. The intention is to give clients a clearer picture of what file formats will receive a proper thumbnail before they are uploaded to the homeserver.

Comments on the MSC seem to suggest that the MSC as it stands does not completely solve the problem: while it does give clients an explicit list of supported mimetypes, the list is quite short. And the list of SHOULD mimetypes cannot be relied on.

The MSC also clarifies that encrypted media should always be uploaded with a mimetype of application/octet-stream, instead of the original media's mimetype, which seems like a welcome and uncontentious point. And finally, it defines 501 M_UNSUPPORTED to be returned instead of an internal server error on thumbnailing failure.

I believe the next step for this MSC is for the current threads to be incorporated into the text; so don't miss the threads when reading it!

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Brendan Abolivier announces

This week we've released Synapse 1.69! It comes with improved caching tools for third-party modules, and support for a bunch of experimental features, such as thread-aware read receipts (MSC3771) and an approval flow for new registrations (MSC3866). As part of this release, we've also laid out the removal schedule for the long-deprecated legacy Prometheus metric names, and the generate_short_term_login_token module API method. Read all about it on the matrix.org blog: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/10/17/synapse-1-69-released

Another big thing in Synapse 1.69 is experimental support for faster remote room joins! You can read more about it on the blog: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/10/18/testing-faster-remote-room-joins but briefly, we are ready for server admins to begin testing, with some caveats. If you've read the post and feel confident, turn it on, give it a spin and let us know how it goes!

Alongside 1.69, we're also disclosing a moderate severity vulnerability that we fixed back in Synapse 1.62. If your deployment runs a Synapse version older than 1.62, and is openly federating, please update to a more recent version of Synapse at your earliest convenience. More info on this in advisory GHSA-jhjh-776m-4765 and CVE-2022-31152.

This week we've also released the first release candidate for Synapse 1.70 (1.70.0rc1). This release will include experimental support for thread-aware notifications (MSC3773) and filtering (MSC3874), improved validation, advertising support for Matrix 1.3 and 1.4, and the usual load of bugfixes and internal improvements. We're very grateful to anyone helping us make Synapse more stable by testing and running release candidates, and reporting bugs to the issue tracker and general feedback to #synapse:matrix.org πŸ™‚

πŸ”—Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander announces

This week we released Dendrite 0.10.4 which contains the following features and fixes:

  • Various tables belonging to the user API will be renamed so that they are namespaced with the userapi_ prefix
    • Note that, after upgrading to this version, you should not revert to an older version of Dendrite as the database changes will not be reverted automatically
  • The backoff and retry behaviour in the federation API has been refactored and improved
  • Private read receipt support is now advertised in the client /versions endpoint
  • Private read receipts will now clear notification counts properly
  • A bug where a false leave membership transition was inserted into the timeline after accepting an invite has been fixed
  • Some panics caused by concurrent map writes in the key server have been fixed
  • The sync API now calculates membership transitions from state deltas more accurately
  • Transaction IDs are now scoped to endpoints, which should fix some bugs where transaction ID reuse could cause nonsensical cached responses from some endpoints
  • The length of the type, sender, state_key and room_id fields in events are now verified by number of bytes rather than codepoints after a spec clarification, reverting a change made in Dendrite 0.9.6

As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more related discussion.

πŸ”—Dept of Bridges πŸŒ‰

πŸ”—matrix-hookshot (website)

A multi purpose multi platform bridge, formerly known as matrix-github

Andrew F reports

matrix-hookshot 2.4.0 is here with yet more features!

Good news everyone. This release adds improved JIRA & GitHub event support. Here are some highlights:

  • Multiple JIRA connections may now be added to a single room (as well as across multiple rooms).
  • JIRA widgets now properly support adding listeners for issue creation -- a small bug prevented it from working last release.
  • JIRA widgets now support adding listeners for issue updates. This was technically already supported, but it wasn't shown in the widget -- now it's there for the world to see.
  • JIRA connections now support version events. So far, this includes version creation, updates, and releases.
  • GitHub connections now support workflow completion events.
  • The stability of GitHub login sessions has been improved overall.

As usual, feel free to join #hookshot:half-shot.uk for setup advice & feedback.

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—Nheko (website)

Desktop client for Matrix using Qt and C++17.

red_sky (nheko.im) says

Nheko now has native builds for Apple silicon macs! No need for Rosetta! If you have an Apple silicon device, please check out the latest nheko nightlies so we can get feedback on how it’s working!

πŸ”—Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Danielle reports

  • The new release candidate is available in staging ahead of the release early next week. Try it out!
    • The new WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) composer is available in Labs soon; It’s in active development and we’ll be adding more functionality soon.
  • Notifications research is near conclusion; We trawled hundreds of GitHub issues, discussions, looked at competitors and interviewed some users. We’re really excited to bring improvements to your experience.
  • We’re beginning work on integrating the Rust matrix_sdk_crypto into Element Web (to replace the existing libolm-based implementation of encryption)

In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):

  • Threads is making great progress and we’re hoping you’ll start seeing these improvements in the next few weeks! Keep your eyes open for updates.

πŸ”—Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Manu announces

  • Element-iOS RC 1.9.9 available on the public TestFlight with under labs settings:
  • New device manager
  • WYSIWYG editor
  • Voice Broadcast is on heavy development. We have recording and playback working.
  • ElementX work is resumed with full support of iOS16 and XCode14

πŸ”—Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

benoit announces

  • Release candidate 1.5.4 is available for the tester on the PlayStore. It includes a lot of new features, most of them behind lab flags: new device management, new WYSIWYG editor, Voice broadcast, etc. Also the application is now targeting Android 13 devices. Please refer to the full changelog for more details.
  • We are working to migrate from the Realm Java SDK to the Realm Kotlin SDK. This is a big change, which should simplify developers' lives, but also reduce the number of crashes related to Realm.

πŸ”—Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle reports

Community testing

  • Help us test the WYSIWYG editor and other new features at 4pm on Wednesday 26th Oct
  • For more info on our next testing sessions (sync or async), you can join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org!

πŸ”—Dept of Non Chat Clients πŸŽ›οΈ

πŸ”—Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

It's been a little while since our last update, but Populus development continues! In addition to the usual bugfixes, we've made a number of ergonomics improvements suggested by the experiences of other users at my university. These include:

  1. Buttons for message actions (react, redact, reply, and so on) are now displayed in a way that doesn't overlap with sender names

  2. Avatar images for discussions can now up uploaded simultaneously with discussion creation.

  3. Older collections of discussions can be "archived" using m.lowpriority

  4. Moar tootips!

We've also made some minor graphical improvements: loading messages are now indicated with a nice low-contrast SVG hint, rather than the literal-minded "loading message" message. Some icons have been improved, and the bartab (lines in the margins) display logic has been improved. And, we're now on the latest JS-SDK version.

πŸ”—Dept of VoIP πŸ€™

πŸ”—Element Call (website)

Native Decentralised End-to-end Encrypted Group Calls in Matrix, as a standalone web app

Florian Heese says

πŸ‘‹ Hello form the VoIP team. This week we have a bunch of news. 1) We released Element Call version 0.3 with a lot of UX polishing including i18n (thx to the great community) and paving the way for a proper 2) integration into Element Web and Desktop. If you want to give it a try:

  • Use https://develop.element.io or Element Desktop Nightly
  • Enable in Settings -> Labs -> Calls
    • Element Call Videorooms
    • New group call experience
  • Now you can create
    • A new video room backed by Element Call or
    • Enable Calls in the Rooms settings of a room and just press the regular call button
  1. And by the way we also added screen-sharing with Element Desktop Nightly using the embedded Element Call.

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Next-gen crypto-included SDK for developing Clients, Bots and Appservices; written in Rust with bindings for Node, Swift and WASM

ben announces

While the sliding sync extensions are being tested and bugs found during the tests reported and fixed, the FFI for the new timeline API has been approved and merged this week. The third big chunk that was merged this week, was a refactoring to Replace QR with SAS verification and the yet to be merged signaling for SAS verification.

While forcing the (not clearly spec'ed) sending of authentication tokens for get_profile and get_display_name, we've also noticed a bug where we sometimes, unintentionally include the access_token in debug output - and fixed that. We will be providing a patch release and RustSec about this soon.

Other than that, this week has seen many smaller fixes, like making the store-setters on client-builder actually adhere to the builder pattern or removing string from storerrors, and improvements like the API to set local trust or setting workspace wide dependencies for uniffi and others.

πŸ‘‰ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.

πŸ”—Dept of Events and Talks πŸ—£οΈ

cos announces

Zoo 2022, a Commodore 64 Demoparty has decided to bridge it's various chat channels via Matrix. You can join via Matrix, Discord, IRC or Telegram and participate in the party programme. The actual party will be held 28.-30.10 in Orivesi, Finland. https://2022.zooparty.org/

πŸ”—Matrix in the News πŸ“°

Matthew says

our friends at Bluesky announced their application protocol for building decentralised social media called AT. While not based on Matrix, there are some parallels, and some stuff we may be able to steal get inspiration from around portable identity :) https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1nognu.de351
2maescool.be453
3mindlesstux.com939
4kittenface.studio1079
5alemann.dev1251
6zemos.net1399
7rom4nik.pl1581
8kit.edu2082
9projectsegfau.lt2292
10valha.la2639

πŸ”—#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1dendrite.neilalexander.dev196
2dendrite.matrix.org223.5
3kumma.juttu.asia273.5
4rustybever.be496.5
5dendrite.s3cr3t.me655.5
6forlorn.day1297
7frai.se9140
8zemos.net15335

πŸ”—That's all I know

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

This Week in Matrix 2022-07-29

29.07.2022 19:01 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

TravisR says

Hello everyone! For this week's spec update you get me, Travis, instead of anoa (sorry). The heart of Matrix is the specification, modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals - learn more at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals/

Be sure to read the Spec Core Team (SCT) section in today's update for some exciting news about Matrix though - this has a good chance of affecting how the MSC process works in the future.

πŸ”—MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

New MSCs:

πŸ”—Spec Core Team

The SCT has been powering through MSCs for the second week in a row, using a new internal process to encourage activity and hopefully keep momentum going. If there's an MSC you think should be on the agenda, please visit the #sct-office:matrix.org and raise it for consideration πŸ™‚

We've also been at IETF 114 to talk about MIMI - an initiative to define a standard for messaging interoperability inspired by the DMA. Matrix appears to fit perfectly into this use-case, so we've been talking with various folks involved to ensure Matrix is on the radar, including preparing our own Internet-Draft to demonstrate how it could work. MIMI is not currently a working group within the IETF, but the expectation is that it will be soon - we look forward to this happening, and are eager to contribute to the process here - or proposing Matrix itself to IETF as an initiative in its own right.

Watch this space for updates, or visit #matrix-spec:matrix.org to ask questions πŸ™‚

πŸ”—Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3554: Extensible Events - Translatable Text!

This MSC covers an Extensible Events (MSC1767) schema definition for translatable text! This would allow a client to send a message in multiple languages, with the receiver able to choose which language they're prefer to see the message in (ideally falling back to a default or machine translation if their preferred language was not available).

Like other MSCs that rely on Extensible Events, MSC1767 will need to land before this MSC can. But until then, it's great to see all of the wonderful things this feature will allow Matrix to do!

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Shay says

Greetings! We have been hard at work on Synapse this week. Work on faster room joins continues. In addition, Synapse 1.64.0rc2 was released. Notable features include:

  • support for room version 10
  • per-room rate limiting for room joins
  • support for Implicit TLS for sending emails and much more, as well as a number of bugfixes, improvements to the documentation, and other changes to make Synapse leaner, faster, and generally more awesome.

πŸ”—Construct Server

Jason Volk reports

This week The Construct server runs on Alpine Linux using freshly cut docker images building on the 0.7 release announced last week. A few images are available for preview while a more complete matrix is filled out. I am proud to announce to TWIM that Construct offers the most compact docker image for a Matrix server at just under 15 MiB; the only caveat is that media thumbnailing won't be available.

There's still a lot of room for optimization and docker experts to critique! Feel free to join the discussion at #construct:zemos.net and check out https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct today!

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Danielle announces

  • It’s holiday season but that won’t slow us down! We’ve been hard at work fixing defects and improving features.
  • Our recently released new search experience is continuing to be improved. This week we’ve added more accessibility, so it can be helpful to all.
  • We’ve completely finished the migration of our tests.
  • There’s a new β€œuse case” screen for users who sign up, it asks folks who they'll talk to the most on Element and, in the future, that will help us to tailor the experience.

In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):

  • Video rooms continue to improve. Check it out!

πŸ”—Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Ștefan reports

  • It’s an exciting week for both our mobile teams as we’re ready to release our new authentication flow! If you’ve been reading TWIM for a while you’ll know that we’ve been working hard, across all Element teams, to improve our onboarding experience. Part of this work on iOS was a new Create Account flow.
    • We’re rolling the changes out slowly, so don’t panic if you don’t see the new experience yet!
  • In even more exciting news, our test coverage has increased with a big bump. We’ve gone from 12% to 51%!
  • We’ve also continued to make updates and improvements to our location sharing feature.
  • On the ElementX front we have our first proof of concept for sliding sync (sync v3) working and we’ve almost finished setting up snapshot and integration testing. We also have Rust logs, a new authentication service and performance tests incoming.
  • Finally, the account deactivation button has had a change of copy - this keeps us inline with Apple guidelines around deleting and deactivating accounts.

πŸ”—Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

Danielle says

  • Our new Nightly releases are now available and allowing us to catch any bugs or regressions even faster - exciting!

  • It will soon be easier than ever to create an account on Element, so if you’ve been waiting for an update before you recommend us to others, it’s nearly time! We’ll be rolling these changes out slowly over the next week or so.

    • Alongside the new create account flow will be an updated sign in and reset password experience. Check it out and let us know what you think.
  • Also in this release we’ve added a β€œmatch system settings” to the Font size screen.

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict says

Trixnity 2.2.0 has been released.

  • Mac builds are enabled, which means, that olm is bundled into macOS and iOS builds too. So no need to build olm yourself anymore.
  • trixnity-crypto has been introduced, which contains the matrix e2e-encryption stuff and was previously located in trixnity-client. The relocation allows you to possibly use this in e. g. appservices. Key trust level calculation, key backup, key verification will be moved into it too.
  • client: basic event relation support has been added to be prepared for the next matrix spec
  • client: added server discovery
  • updated to kotlin 1.7
  • some bug fixes

πŸ”—matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben reports

It's been a week of quite, constant progress on many fronts, most not that visible to the outside observer. For once, the progress on integration sliding sync into element-x for iOS has taken up speed, with many smaller bug fixes and additional features exposed through the FFI being added and performance optimisations. After the internal jack-in testing tool, this is the first actual trial of sliding sync for rust (and after the js-implementation, only the second client to actually use sliding sync overall)β€”and it has been tremendous. Latest tests put the loading time to first view on the first 20-ish rooms at a 150ms range πŸŽ‰.

More visible to the keen observers of the repository has been that we've updated the event_handler API to allow removing existing handlers, an important step towards implementing completion guaranteeing API calls, and that we've support for custom encrypted events now.

πŸ‘‰οΈ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.

πŸ”—Dept of Ops πŸ› 

πŸ”—matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi reports

Thanks to MdotAmaan's efforts, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports bridging to Discord via the mautrix-discord bridge. See our Setting up Mautrix Discord bridging documentation page for getting started.

Note: this is a new Discord bridge. The playbook still retains Discord bridging via matrix-appservice-discord and mx-puppet-discord. You're free too use the bridge that serves you better, or even all three of them (for different users and use-cases).

Slavi reports

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports bridging to Kakaotalk via matrix-appservice-kakaotalk - a bridge based on node-kakao (now unmaintained) and some mautrix-facebook code. Thanks to hnarjis for helping us add support for this!

See our Setting up Appservice Kakaotalk bridging documentation to get started.

πŸ”—Dept of Events and Talks πŸ—£οΈ

πŸ”—A New HOPE (NYC) concluded (website)

cel says

Thanks Element Matrix Services (EMS) for hosting our homeserver (hope.net)!

Previously: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/07/22/this-week-in-matrix-2022-07-22#hope-conference

See you in 2024, hopefully!

πŸ”—May Container Hackers (MCH) concluded

https://mch2022.org/

MCH2022 in the Netherlands successfully occurred!

MCH2022 has an IRC-bridged Matrix room: https://matrix.to/#/#_oftc_#mch2022:matrix.org

HOPE and MCH had a bridge room/tent: https://wiki.mch2022.org/Hope#HOPE-MCH_Portal

See you in 2026 or so!

πŸ”—Matrix Summit schedule

Yan says

By the end of last week we received a bunch of proposal for talks and workshops for the conference. It were all together 32 proposals and we accepted almost all of them.

We released already multiple versions of our schedule. The current version is 0.5 html json

There is even some space left for late comers. In case you decide spontaneously to come and want to talk let us know, we will find a way.

πŸ”—Tickets

You now get tickets for the summit for the fantastic price of 0 euro. We like to know in advance how many people will come. If you have already a ticket and can’t come please let us know. So we can give them to people on the waiting list.

πŸ”—Sharing is caring

I case you have a room or ride to share or you are looking for transport or accommodation please visit our #matrix-summit-sharing:c-base.org.

ChristianP reports

If you'd rather listen to Yan and me talking about the Matrix Summit and its schedule, we recorded a podcast episode for you to get informed on the go.

https://fyyd.de/episode/9085227 (German)

πŸ”—Dept of Interesting Projects πŸ›°οΈ

πŸ”—Effektio (website)

ben reports

The team of effektio, the mobile-first organizing app build on matrix, is happy to announce the new website. Aside from the revamped team section, we are particularly excited about the new product progress page, as the questions "what are you building exactly, and how far are you with the progress" are commonplace. With the product page we hope to provide more clarity what we mean, in actual features, when we say "organize yourself, your friends, family, clubs and all other communities from the palm of your hand". Each feature also links right into the specific section of the Github project, so you can get an unobstructed view of the actual progress happeningβ€”and contribute, if you like.

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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.

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1maunium.net239.5
2babel.sh432
3trygve.me479
4envs.net555.5
5maximiliangaedig.com660.5
6alemann.dev674
7kittenface.studio752.5
8pikaviestin.fi798
9kootstra.frl881
10babel1.eu946.5

πŸ”—#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1babel.sh151.5
2kernel-error.com281
3babel1.eu303.5
4foxo.me447
5rustybever.be499
6grin.hu520.5
7cutema.re679.5
8zemos.net1179.5

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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