Thib

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.

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

MSC3844: Remove unused policy room sharing mechanism

MSC3828: Content Repository CORP Headers

MSC3827: Filtering of /publicRooms by room type

MSC2153: Add a default push rule to ignore m.reaction events

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

MSC3818: Copy room type on upgrade (merge)

MSC3255: Use SRV record for homeservers discovery by clients (close)

MSC2836: Threading (close)

Threading API (close)

New MSCs:

MSC3856: Threads List API

MSC3852: Expose user agent information on Device

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 🙂

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 🙂

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!

Dept of Servers 🏢

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.

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!

Dept of Clients 📱

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 “use 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!

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.

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 “match system settings” to the Font size screen.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

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

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)—and it has been tremendous. Latest tests put the loading time to first view on the first 20-ish rooms at a 150ms range 🎉.

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.

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

Dept of Ops 🛠

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.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

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!

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!

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.

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.

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)

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

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 happening—and contribute, if you like.

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

#ping:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	maunium.net	239.5
2	babel.sh	432
3	trygve.me	479
4	envs.net	555.5
5	maximiliangaedig.com	660.5
6	alemann.dev	674
7	kittenface.studio	752.5
8	pikaviestin.fi	798
9	kootstra.frl	881
10	babel1.eu	946.5

#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.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	babel.sh	151.5
2	kernel-error.com	281
3	babel1.eu	303.5
4	foxo.me	447
5	rustybever.be	499
6	grin.hu	520.5
7	cutema.re	679.5
8	zemos.net	1179.5

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 2022-07-22

22.07.2022 18:57 — This Week in Matrix — Thib
Last update: 22.07.2022 18:39

Matrix Live 🎙

An episode with the maintainers of Threematrix, the 100% Rust bridge between Matrix and Threema!

In addition to that, Open Tech Will Save Us will be back on Wednesday 27 at 16:00 UTC! The topic will be "what makes a platform", or more specifically: "are Linux or the web platforms". There are many fascinating topics to discuss, such as "is it possible to create an app for Linux" (it's not as simple as it sounds), "why are some people against theming?", or "why do developers want to use platforms".

And to answer that, who other than the Linux desktop most advanced projects GNOME and KDE, and people working on Matrix, the protocol that wants to become as unmissable as the web itself, and more specifically on a deeper integration of widgets with Matrix clients?

You can join #otwsu:matrix.org to ask your questions on July 27 during the live show, and bookmark either https://stream.matrix.org or the YouTube stream.

Dept of Spec 📜

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.

MSC Status

MSC status updates from the past week!

New MSCs:

MSC3852: Expose user agent information on Device

MSC3851: Allow custom room presets when creating a room

MSC3849: Observations and Reinforcement

MSC3848: Introduce errcodes for specific event sending failures

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

MSC3844: Remove unused policy room sharing mechanism (merge)

MSC3828: Content Repository CORP Headers (merge)

MSC3827: Filtering of /publicRooms by room type (merge)

MSC2153: Add a default push rule to ignore m.reaction events (close)

Accepted MSCs:

MSC3786: Add a default push rule to ignore m.room.server_acl events

MSC3267: Reference relations

MSC2832: HS -> AS authorization header

MSC2676: Message editing

MSC2285: Private read receipts

Closed MSCs:

MSC3429: Individual room preview API

Merged MSCs:

No MSCs were merged to the spec this week.

Spec Updates

Lots of MSCs moving through the pipeline in the last couple weeks! As always, be sure to take a look at those in Final Comment Period above - only a few days left to comment on them before they merge/close!

Otherwise the Spec Core Team is looking to try and get a handle on the current MSC backlog - this means taking a look at all of the open MSCs, triaging them and organising them into a loose priority queue. This is likely to take quite a while to do and may not ever be complete - but should give us and everyone else an idea of what's expected to land in upcoming Matrix spec versions.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3217: Soft kicks!

The idea this MSC proposes is to add a possible m.softkick field to room membership events of type "leave", which if present will inform clients that the user has only been kicked temporarily, and they are welcome to rejoin.

This helps with the IRC bridging use case laid out in the MSC.

ChristianP says

Offline Matrix Spec for Dash and Zeal

I use Zeal – an offline documentation browser using the same docsets as Dash for MacOS. It allows me to browse MDN, ExpressJS docs, NodeJS docs and other languages and formats while not relying on the Internet when traveling. They have "208 awesome docsets", and I guess you know which one I'm missing – or used to miss, until I packaged it myself.

Introducing: The Matrix Spec for Dash and Zeal

If you use Dash or Zeal, give it a try. Let me know, if you find pages that are not working. I hope that Matrix will be included in their list of user-contributed docsets.

Note, this is not an official release distribution of the Matrix Spec. Enjoy at your own risk of this breaking or not getting updated.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Construct Server

Jason Volk says

Construct server has been refurbished to support the Ubuntu 22.04+ platform. I am happy to report that Construct performs faster and more reliably than ever before. It's been a long time since the last update due to COVID-related health problems, but development has picked up again. I'd like to thank @manu_kamath:matrix.org and @uis246 for their contributions, and of course Yan Minari for keeping things together over the past year. Additional work implementing the latest MSC's will continue in the coming weeks so I encourage everyone to show support in #construct:zemos.net and contribute if possible.

Several enhancements have taken place this release, so I'd just like to highlight one here: The media database has been eliminated and has been integrated into the main events database. Construct did always store media in rooms by splitting files into blocks, but it offloaded the content block to separate storage leaving just a hash of the content in the matrix event. Construct now stores blocks directly in event content via hardware-accelerated base64 encoding. The result performs better because there's only one database query instead of two, and the room can be shared between servers in a Construct Cluster.

Construct is a performant and robust Matrix Server and Natural Language Processor. Please be mindful of any laws in your country which require registering your instance for commercial use.

https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct

Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier announces

This week we've released Synapse 1.63! This release includes a few features such as better rate limiting for invites, as well as experimental support for MSC3827 which allows filtering public room search results by room type. The latter will, once stabilised, allow for better discoverability of public spaces since it will allow clients to specifically look for them. Read all about this new release on the matrix.org blog: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/07/20/synapse-1-63-released

We've also spent some time clarifying documentation and prompts about the usage statistics Synapse automatically reports if configured with report_stats set to true. The new documentation page lists exactly what is reported and how this reporting works. This clarification work included removing the use of "anonymised" when referring to this feature to make it clearer that, even though Synapse does not report identifiable information about users and rooms, it does report the homeserver's name (i.e. the value of the server_name configuration setting).

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace says

Since people seemed to like seeing updates on my Helm Charts; matrix-synapse got bumped to 1.63.0 and then 1.63.1, as well as receiving some expanded handling of workers - all worker instances now come with both startup- and liveness probes attached by default.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Threematrix (website)

A bridge to the Threema messenger

Moritz Stückler says

Say hello to a new bridge in Matrix universe (or rather fediverse): Threematrix. As you might've guessed from the name: It's a bridge between the Threema messenger and Matrix. Threema is a very popular messenger in europe, especially in German speaking countries (it's a swiss company). We've just released our very first alpha version – it's a very simple bot bridge for now, but we have quite a lot of improvements on our todo list. Currently, it only works with the (paid) Threema Gateway API product, but we're trying to talk to Threema to come up with a more affordable hobbyist pricing model for bridge use. Feel free to follow our releases in the GitHub repo, follow our Mastodon account and join our Matrix room to stay up to date or ask any questions.

P.S.: We're two freelance developers and we're being funded by the German Prototype Fund program. If you're an OSS developer in Germany, check them out!

matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Andrew F says

Hookshot 1.8.1

Hello all -- since our last TWIM announcement, Hookshot has been updated from 1.7.2 to 1.8.1. Aside from usability fixes and documentation improvements, there have been some notable changes to generic webhook support:

XML webhook payloads are now decoded instead of being treated as blobs of text. This means they render more nicely as room messages, and more importantly, it allows them to work with custom JavaScript transformations. (#410)

GET requests for generic webhooks are no longer supported by default. For details, refer to the documentation. (#397)

As usual, visit #hookshot:half-shot.uk to follow the development in real-time.

Dept of Clients 📱

Quadrix (website)

A Minimal, simple, multi-platform chat client for the Matrix protocol.

JFA says

Quadrix v1.2.2 is now available for Linux (https://snapcraft.io/quadrix, https://flathub.org/apps/details/chat.quadrix.Quadrix) and Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=chat.quadrix.android). Other platforms will soon follow.

New in this release:

Spanish translation!!!

Fix for the Jitsi Meet link displayed to non-Quadrix users (thanks to @alpabrz:matrix.org)

Please leave feedback/comments at #quadrix:matrix.org or in the issues at https://github.com/alariej/quadrix (stars welcome :-)

Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

I got a fantastic release for you to day and it won't fit inside a normal sized update so without further ado, here are the highlights:

Notification counts 💯 (LorenDB, d42)

You can now see notification counts in more spaces, like your task bar or in the community sidebar.

For better work-life balance you can hide the notification counts on a per space basis.

For notification counts in the task bar your desktop environment needs to support the Unity protocol.

Notifications are also preserved across restarts now.

Moderation 👮‍♀️

You can now change the permissions and aliases of a room.

Permissions are shown in the Memberlist

A new /redact command to redact an event or all messages by a user.

You can now provide a reason when inviting, knocking, kicking and banning users.

Faster startup ⚡

On at least some systems startup should now be instant even with thousands of rooms.

Encryption improvements 🛡️

Support for the most recent changes to Matrix E2EE including fallback keys, no longer relying on the sender_key.

Compatibility and stability improvements when dealing with different base64 encodings and when verifying users and devices.

Fetch the whole online key backup at the click of a button.

Integration with external apps 🗺️ (LorenDB)

Nheko now has a D-Bus API, which you can enable in the settings menu.

This allows applications like KRunner or Rofi to list and switch between rooms.

If you are reading this a bit early, the release builds might still be cooking, but they should be available in the next few hours. There about 40 more features and at least 30 bugfixes waiting for you, so checkout the release here: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/releases/tag/v0.10.0 . I'd like to thank as always everyone who contributed to this release, it has been a pleasure to work with you folks and I hope I will see a few of you in the next release as well.

As you might be able to tell, moderation features were a big topic this release. But they are clearly not done yet and I expect more of those to land in the future now that Nheko is fairly mature. There are also a few other cool features planned, so while this release is exciting, there will always be more! Same bad client, same bad... wait, this is not my outro!

Please give this release a whirl and tell us how you like it in #nheko:nheko.im!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat says

We’ve made more improvements to the new search

Added a new emoji effect for 💝 which you can also send with a /hearts command in the composer

CicadaCinema and luixxiul have submitted more layout polishes to the app

Frequently used emojis will appear at the top of the autocomplete suggestions in the composer

Meanwhile, work continues on message favouriting and live location sharing

Lazy Loading tests have now been migrated to Cypress. We are coming closer to finishing porting.

Code style guide is now in final commenting period

This week’s release (1.11.1) has been delayed until next Tuesday while we fix some last minute issues

Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan announces

Version 1.8.23 (with in-app notifications!) is now available on the AppStore

The new first time user experience is getting very close to release

Good progress is continuing to be made on the new home screen layout

We can now silence unwanted push notifications, dare I say, finally!

We have started experimenting with adopting Sync V3 in ElementX

And, as always, we have fixed various bugs including edited messages not showing the right text

Element Android (website)

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

benoit announces

Release 1.4.28 has been dropped, to give us time to fix the regression and performance issue added when key share history was worked on. The next RC 1.4.30 will be done next week as usual.

We have started to work on using the new Realm Kotlin SDK (we are using the legacy Java SDK at the moment): it should improve the stability of the app (and so the crash free session) and improve devX. Nearly all the possible blocking points have been handled. This will force us to use suspend methods, which will be useful for ElementX.

Latest tweaks on FTUE have been merged on develop. We will iterate on a few things, but we are close to releasing the feature! New wordings for FTUE are waiting for translations on Weblate. Thanks to all the contributors!

We have set up a nightly build using Firebase app distribution. We keep it internal for the moment, we will see in the future if we want to open it to the community.

Open Super dApp (Android)

Brendan A. Miller reports

New project! open-super-dapp-android is a fully open source, open standard, decentralized "super app" including a secure, encrypted Matrix compatible messenger based off of the Element Messenger, and an Ethereum crypto wallet and web3 browser based off of Alpha Wallet. Our mission is to foster, and provide access to, a decentralized and secure digital commons for all. Github repo: https://github.com/2gatherproject/open-super-dapp-android

OSD is a downstream project of Element, aiming to provide the functionalities of a "super app" like WeChat, just as an open, distributed and not-for-profit app instead of a proprietary, closed and for-profit one.

This software is pre-alpha, actively seeking contributors, donors and maintainers/leaders. Get in on the ground floor and help build something amazing!

Currently, Open Super dApp builds and runs with full functionality of the Element messenger and Alpha Wallet in the same Android app, with all existing tests passing. Efforts to further integrate their functionalities are just beginning.

Next steps include:

Demonstrate easy to use person to person Ethereum payment functionality between Matrix users.

Provide a powerful and easy to use messaging and payment javascript API for use by web3 applications accessed through the Open Super dApp. Produce sample web dApps using this API.

Centralize cryptographic secrets between the wallet and the messenger.

Build a parallel iOS version for iPhones using Element iOS and Alpha Wallet iOS.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

tusooa says

We released 0.2.0 of libkazv. Change log is as follows:

Support streaming uploads. https://gitlab.com/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/1

Fix ctx.dispatch() returning promises resolving to empty EffectStatus. https://gitlab.com/kazv/libkazv/-/commit/c7796a6ab8325773bf47fe83254a377204d6abcf

Prevent leaking full file path when uploading to matrix server by using only basename for the request.

Deal with timeline gaps properly. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/1

Record state events in timeline. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/2

Add support for streaming download. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/3

Add support for Boost.Serialization. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/4

Support encrypted attachments. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/5

Allow custom random generator with crypto. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/6

Support auto-discovery. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/12

Support profile API. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/13

Support kick/ban API. https://lily-is.land/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/15

Support room heroes. https://lily-is.land/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/16

Add coverage report. https://lily-is.land/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/17

Deprecated

makeDefaultEncryptedSdk() is now deprecated. Use makeDefaultSdkWithCryptoRandom() instead.

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben says

This week has seen an merges of many minor, partially longer-pending PRs into the mainline code base: among them a fix for a longer pending CI problem with Apply builds, an update to latest ruma and many minor fixes and style improvements. We've also gotten the Crypto-bindings for the JS in web using WASM a lot further, the only thing remaining for a release are some last minute PRs and fixes in the release infrastructure. But the most changes to the code base this week have been coming from the appservice department, who've submitted, reviewed and merged a whopping seven PRs this week, fixing various problems and adding a bunch of appservice specific features.

Beyond purely code changes this week has seen a lot of project starts, too: For ones, with the help of the rust team, the iOS Team has started integrating the Sliding-Sync/Sync V3 into the upcoming Element-X-Series; the team has put up the first PR to add integration tests against an actual synapse server (some issues pending); a workshop set out the first ideas for the new upcoming timeline API; and a very interesting draft PR was brought in from community member docweirdo proposing a new API on top of the existing SDK to have futures wait for actual completion - no more sending a message and observing sync for the appropriate response yourself.

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

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synatainer (website)

Synapse Maintenance Container – Docker container with tools for synapse & postgres database maintenance

saces reports

Synatainer v0.4.1-RC1

Synapse Maintenance Container – Docker container with tools for synapse & postgres database maintenance

A lot of things added and changed, and I'm sure I missed something, so I will go with a release candidate this time

New in v0.4.1-RC1

enable PGPASSFILE support for better database password handling

add tools to detect and maybe fix synapse issue 12507 and 13026 (No state group for unknown or outlier event)

internal: added an extension for mautrix-go to serve synapse admin api requests

lots of iternal changes

stui is a typical golang binary, it's also available as stand alone version from the release page

Tools for No state group for unknown or outlier event
[docker run -it --rm registry.gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer:0.4.1-RC1] stui 12507 --help
[docker run -it --rm registry.gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer:0.4.1-RC1] stui 13026 --help
The tools scan the database for the issues and tells you which rooms are affected. Adding the --fix option, it ~~destroys your database~~deletes the bogus extremeties. Use at your own risc. And make a backup.

The doc have still a lot of space for improvements…

Start the container without command and let do its magic :)

What it does by default:

daily:

purge all rooms without local members

run the state autocompressor (500/100)

weekly:

delete old remote media (>90 days)

delete old message history from public joinable rooms (>180 days)

monthly:

vacuum the database

Source: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi reports

Thanks to Stuart Mumford (@Cadair) for starting (PR #373 and PR #622) and to Julian-Samuel Gebühr (@moan0s) for finishing up (in PR #1894), matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now help you set up maubot - a plugin-based Matrix bot system.

See our Setting up maubot documentation to get started.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Auto-reply maubot plugin

Brendan Abolivier says

Because I don't like having to change my display name to tell coworkers when I'm away, I've written a maubot plugin for an auto-responder bot.

It allows me to signal when I'm away, at which point anyone who sends a message in an existing DM will be sent an automated reply so they know that I'm away, when I'll be back, and how to reach out to me in case of emergencies (it does this once per DM until I come back). When I'm back, I just need to tell the bot and it will automatically turn off the auto-responder and give me a summary of the DMs in which I've missed messages while I was away.

The source code and package for this plugin are available right here: https://github.com/babolivier/maubot-autoreply 🙂

MSC Bot

minecraftchest1 says

I just created a simple bot that generates a MSC url from the specified MSC id. The source code for the project can be found at https://mau.dev/minecraftchest1/mscbot/. And example instance can be found at @maubottest1:synapse1.arsrobotics.org Demo and use the bot in #msc-bot:synapse1.arsrobotics.org

Cat reminds us

This feature is already in the MSC bot used in #matrix-spec or atleast in one of those bots.

Matrix Release Tracker (website)

A release tracker that posts updates into Matrix rooms

Ananace announces

My release tracking bot received a bunch more work since the last update. It now supports tracking repos, groups, and user stars on GitHub, GitLab (both .com and self-hosted), as well as Gitea (though Gitea requires a token for reading stars). And also tracking "releases" - a.k.a. tags - on bare Git repos, at least as long as they don't require SSH key authorization. Things are getting ever closer to a 1.0 release, with only really some missing bang commands and error reporting being the remaining pieces.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

HOPE conference

cel reports

HOPE conference (today/tomorrow/Sunday) is using Matrix https://hope.net/

End of Matrix Summit 2022 CfP

ChristianP announces

The Matrix Summit 2022 is a community event taking place Thu, 25th to Sun, 28th Aug at c-base in Berlin. Today's the last day to propose presentations and workshop. The exact deadline is 22:22 (Europe/Berlin).

Will you be in Berlin and have a Matrix project to talk about? Can you organise a workshop about how to use Matrix? How does your community or workplace use Matrix? Submit your proposal now!

https://cfp.summit2022.matrixmeetup.de

Matrix-DevRoom at FrOSCon

ChristianP reports

FrOSCon is a conference that takes place in Siegburg/Bonn, Germany on 21st and 22nd August. Most presentations will be German, but there are some in English as well. It's all about free, open source software.

And, best of all, we'll have an entire DevRoom track for a day – full of Matrix. Furthermore, you can come by the Matrix stand for that famous hallway track. ✨ I know I'll be there. 👋

https://programm.froscon.org/2021/events.html#matrix%20track

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

#ping:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	envs.net	309
2	babel.sh	392
3	keks.club	473
4	rom4nik.pl	641
5	babel1.eu	750.5
6	alemann.dev	793
7	mindlesstux.com	892
8	kittenface.studio	989
9	roeckx.be	1063
10	supersandro.de	1110

#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.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	babel.sh	172.5
2	dendrite.matrix.org	275
3	joeth.uk	294
4	babel1.eu	302
5	dendrite.babel.sh	509.5
6	rustybever.be	708

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 2022-07-15

15.07.2022 18:54 — This Week in Matrix — Thib

Matrix Live 🎙

This week Matthew gives us a general update on everything Matrix and Element. What is going on with Sliding Sync, OpenID Connect or P2P Matrix? Let's find out!

We're also pleased to announce the next episode of Open Tech Will Save Us has been scheduled. We will be talking live and interacting with you on July 27, 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST) on the subject of platforms with people from GNOME, KDE and Element.

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) reports

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

MSC3847: Ignoring invites with policy rooms

MSC3846: Allowing widgets to access TURN servers

MSC3845: Draft: Expanding policy rooms to reputation

MSC3844: Remove unused policy room sharing mechanism

MSC3843: Reporting content over federation

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

MSC3786: Add a default push rule to ignore m.room.server_acl events (merge)

MSC3267: Reference relations (merge)

MSC2832: HS -> AS authorization header (merge)

MSC2676: Message editing (merge)

MSC2529: Proposal to use existing events as captions for images (close)

MSC2285: Private read receipts (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

No MSCs were accepted this week.

Merged MSCs:

No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

The Spec Core Team took a concentrated effort to work through our priority backlog of MSCs, resulting in the decent amount of MSCs hitting FCP this week!

Thankfully the community has nearly matched this number by adding quite a few more MSCs into the fray. But we're still up by 1!

Perhaps one of the most exciting MSCs to move forwards is MSC2676: Message editing, which allows users to edit events (including messages) that they've previously sent. Part of the aggregations work, this functionality has been used extensively throughout the ecosystem. But only now is it making its way into the spec proper. I'm also personally excited about MSC2285: Private read receipts, which allows users to read a room's contents without advertising it.

Of course the above MSCs are still in Final Comment Period; a 5 day period where anyone can raise their concerns about an MSC before it is accepted. So if you have any last-minute comments, be sure to get them in now!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2666: Get rooms in common with another user!

Another MSC I'm personally excited about! This MSC provides an endpoint on the homeserver to request the rooms (or spaces) you have in common with another user. I would find this useful for incoming DMs from users I may or may not know. Note that the client may not already have this information if it is making use of lazy loading room members, so it needs a way to ask the server for this information.

Looks like the MSC is currently sitting in the Spec Core Team's review backlog. We'll get to it soon!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

Shay reports

The Synapse team has been hard at work! This week we published Synapse 1.63.0rc1. Among the notable features are support for MSC3827: filtering /publicRooms by room type, allowing for better discovery of Spaces. You can read more about that here. In addition, the release contains a number of bugfixes, updates to the documentation, and internal changes focused on reducing memory usage and increasing performance, as well as supporting the long-standing goal of faster room joins. More on these next week in the official release announcement!

Conduit (website)

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

Timo on Conduit ⚡️ says

Good news, as you might have noticed, conduit.rs is back online and better than ever! Matrix.org is so kind and donates this Linux server to me. I already host a discord appservice and handle 23k messages per day and, most importantly, now I'm at the top of both #ping rooms ;)

On the development side, I'm currently working on a big refactor, see https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/merge_requests/365 and please give feedback if you have experience this is your chance to have a lasting impact.

Dept of Clients 📱

LordMZTE ⚡️ reports

rofi is a application launcher and dmenu replacement. https://github.com/davatorium/rofi. I made a little plugin for it to switch channels on the nheko matrix client https://mzte.de/git/LordMZTE/rofi-nheko

Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

You can now edit aliases in Nheko! This means you can publish your own aliases in the room directory as well as in the room. If an alias can't be used by people (because it isn't listed in the room directory), that alias is highlighted in red with an easy option to fix it (if you have permissions to do so). You can also easily switch the primary (canonical) alias of the room.

With this the feature set I wanted to have for the next release is complete. I wanted to focus on improving moderation and room management capabilities in Nheko and it does now have a very basic sets of capabilities to do so. I do already have plans to expand on them though!

So instead of working on new features, I will be focusing on bug fixes. For a start if someone has the username room, Nheko will now omit the reply fallback to prevent pinging the whole room. The verification window now also should always be big enough to show its contents and we now properly explain to users, why emojis might look different on different devices fixing an issue reported via Twitter... There is also a new icon for the room directory (it is now a building, very punny, huh?).

Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

Tobias has done some internal refactoring, which will allow us to create more automated tests and prepare for the eventual Qt6 migration

Nvrwhere has improved NeoChat's Timeline layout: On a wide window, the bubbles will now be centered in the window, in order to better use the space while not stretching the timeline out too far

He's also fixed several papercut issues around the UI, for example editing and replying using the keyboard shortcuts

The browser will now properly open when clicking on a link when using wayland

The first part of Snehit's GSoC project is almost ready to land: The room list is gaining a list of spaces, which can be used to filter for the rooms included in that space

We're also moving forward on the E2EE support, with NeoChat now allowing a user to send an encrypted message into a matrix room - provided libQuotient supports it 🙂

Tobias is also working on improved Reaction & Emoji pickers, which will allow users to select different variants like skin tones and which will behave better on mobile devices

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat says

Community testing

After some successful testing on current registration flows, we are running testing sessions on the new and improved registration flows over the next week.

Join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org to give it a go!

We are also moving away from spreadsheets over to TestRail, a test case management tool which will help us track regressions and issues. We’ll be offering our community testers a change to try it out over the next few weeks.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat reports

Started experimenting with matrix-react-sdk for an improved crypto(graphy) experience

The share screen button in video rooms on desktop has been temporarily removed until the underlying issues can be resolved

We have removed most of unused code in the Element Web repositories and are working on setting up tools to avoid forgetting to remove unused code in the future

The new search experience and DM flow have received some bug fixes and polish in addition to more polish to CSS

For community contributors:

We have added a checklist for PRs

We are nearing completion on our first code style guide

Check out the code style PR

Final commenting period expected to start next week

We’ve been tackling our process around reviewing PRs to reduce review time, taking a two pronged approach at focusing on reviewing new PRs quickly and resolving our oldest non-draft PRs every week

Did you know that some of our issues in GitHub are labelled with “Help wanted” and “good first issue” if they’re especially suited for community contributions?

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

Live location sharing has received some updates to permission handling and improvements to labels

The new user type screens which are part of registration have landed on develop.element.io and will be released around 2nd of August

Message pinning has also received a bug fix for edited messages

Element iOS (website)

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

Doug reports

Version 1.8.22 RC was released to TestFlight and comes with the following changes:

In-app notifications are now available.

A shiny new offline indicator that's visible in more parts of the app.

A handful of fixes for issues when making calls.

Unfortunately this build was rejected following the latest requirements for account deletion in the App Store Review Guidelines. We’re looking into ways we can resolve this problem.

We have started to use Sentry to provide more insights into technical issues encountered whilst using the app.

Work continues on implementing the new app layout.

Element Android (website)

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

adam says

1.4.28 is being prepared with the following changes:

Makes the build process compatible with F-Droid again!

Fixes for voice messages not playing and some characters showing in their escaped html form - such as quotes showing as "

Nightly builds are on the way, these builds will be under a separate Application ID allowing them to be installed alongside the production Element app. Expect more information to come soon.

We’re investigating general performance regressions across the app, with some improvements already in the pipeline.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr announces

In the last two weeks or so, we've made some UX improvements:

unified SSO and ordinary login cards

unified media and regular file-uploads, and improved drag-and-drop support

improved feedback while validating login and registration input

We also added one feature that friends of mine were requesting 😃: annotations can now be equipped with a "motivation" (part of the w3c web annotation data model, mentioned in MSC3574), and filtered by motivation. This makes it easy to, for example, mark some discussions as "questions" about the text, which is pretty useful when managing a class.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

ruby-matrix-sdk (website)

Ruby SDK for the Matrix communication protocol

Ananace says

And I've now finally managed to cut a long-overdue new 2.6.0 release of the Ruby SDK, which includes better support for concurrent multi-threaded usage as well as improvements on Ruby 3.0+. (The tests are currently green for Ruby 2.6 to 3.1)

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben reports

The team is proud to announce the first release of @matrix-org/matrix-sdk-crypto-nodejs to npmjs.com (0.1.0-beta.1) for all the best npm user friendliness you can get. This marks the first release of the crypto ffi for nodejs from the rust team supreseeding the previously existing project. It is also the very first release for nodejs featuring the great new vodozemac core (replacement of libolm). We've marked this as a beta release while we work out any remaining minor hickups or problems, so if you see something, say something! However, the main point of contact to it for most people is probably TravisR |s Nodejs Bot SDK, which is already consuming that beta in its latest release.

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

matrix-bot-sdk (website)

A TypeScript/JavaScript SDK for Matrix bots

TravisR reports

matrix-bot-sdk v0.6.0

After a year of working on different ways to support encryption, the bot-sdk has finally stabilized on the rust-sdk crypto crate for crypto bindings internally. Tutorials on how to get your bot/appservice set up and working with the new crypto code are here (note that for appservices you'll need to turn on EDUs and MSC3202 in Synapse). If you run into problems, please report bugs or pop by #matrix-bot-sdk:t2bot.io on Matrix for help.

Alongside support for encryption, v0.6.0 brings a whole lot of other functionality for appservices, Synapse Admin API users, and bots wanting to make use of real DMs. Check out the full changelog here.

Dept of Ops 🛠

axon.sh (website)

joe announces

axon.sh v0.17.0 has been released which adds support for managing per-user ratelimits, and includes a fix for a bug related to server discovery. Please try it out and report your experience in #axon:matrix.thisisjoes.site, I'd appreciate feedback!

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix Release Tracker (website)

A release tracker that posts updates into Matrix rooms

Ananace says

A whole heaping of work has landed for my release tracker project, with it now supporting tracking releases for projects (loose projects, all users stars, or all projects under a namespace) on both GitHub and GitLab (for .com as well as self-hosted instances). Documentation is currently still a bit lacking, but hoping to have more information both on setting it up as well as using it Soon™.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

ACCU Talk

andybalaam announces

my conference talk at ACCU this year is now out on YouTube: Matrix is a Distributed Real-time Database. I explain what Matrix is, and show how to use curl to send and receive messages, and why it's "interesting" to write a server, and, as the title hints, I introduce the idea that Matrix can be for a lot more than messaging.

Matrix Summit Conference Berlin

/dev/saces announces

Reminder: Matrix Summit Conference Berlin call for participation ends next week

As announced earlier, there will be a conference all about matrix. (See TWIM 2022-07-01)

We encourage everyone with matrix-related projects, products and ideas to come around and give a talk: From the past to the future, from the moment of the idea, the story of the creation or the vision of the future. We’d like to understand the principles as well as the technology. The conference is from people for people, so if you’d like to talk about yourself, your community, your organization, please do. Showcase yourself and your relation to the Matrix world. Let's get to know each other! We aim to compile a versatile program. We are open to contributions of any length, from 5 minutes (lightning talks) to presentations and talks to workshops and hacksessions up to 5 hours. We’ll come together to discover, celebrate and enjoy the world of matrix. Also, if you have any arty, cultural or playful contribution in mind, please offer it.

➡️ Proposals for the Matrix Summit in Berlin can be submitted until next Friday (2022-07-22 22:22, TZ=Europe/Berlin) via pretalx. 📝

Related spaces and rooms 💬: #matrix-summit-berlin-2022 #matrix-summit-2022-orga

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

#ping:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	maunium.net	263
2	matrix.org	265
3	neko.dev	280
4	conduit.rs	336
5	nognu.de	422.5
6	babel.sh	596
7	alemann.dev	678
8	pikaviestin.fi	739.5
9	shortestpath.dev	765
10	matrix.nicfab.it	897

#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.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	babel.sh	192.5
2	conduit.rs	198
3	maunium.net	207
4	matrix.sum7.eu	234.5
5	rustybever.be	234.5
6	sspaeth.de	262
7	neko.dev	299
8	dendrite.matrix.org	331.5
9	joeth.uk	352
10	babel1.eu	378.5

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 2022-07-08

08.07.2022 18:45 — This Week in Matrix — Thib

Matrix Live 🎙

Rick and I talk about the the brand new Chatterbox. Is it Riot Embedded rebranded? Did the world need yet another embedded chat solution? Can I host mine? Can I make it clever? Let's find out!

Dept of Spec 📜

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.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

[WIP] MSC3842: Placeholder for power levels & extensible events

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

MSC3244: Room version capabilities (close)

Accepted MSCs:

No MSCs were accepted this week.

Merged MSCs:

No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Core Team

The Spec Core Team did some shuffling of our backlog board this week in order to ensure that all in-flight and in-focus items are reflected on it.

Outside of that was the usual rounds of MSC review by team members.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2199: Canonical DMs!

While the name may not make much sense to the layperson, the idea of a "canonical" Direct Messaging room (DM) is one that would always be referenced whenever a DM between two people is requested. That is, instead of potentially having a few different DM rooms with someone, both you and the other person would always know which room to use when DM'ing each other.

We don't really have this today. DM rooms are just group rooms with only you and someone else in them. If you attempt to DM another user, your client will try to guess the best room to use for this through some clever heuristics. What's lacking is a defined way to always arrive at the same room for this action.

This MSC attempts to define one, and would allow other functionality to be built on top of it, such as definitively knowing which room to send user-to-user data into, and to read from.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier says

This week the Synapse team released Synapse 1.62! It features a lot of changes, including a fairly big update of spam checker callbacks, performance improvements around syncing and device management, improved customisation of .well-known client files, and much more. Read all about it on the Matrix.org blog: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/07/06/synapse-1-62-released

Apart from this, we've been working on refining and fine-tuning our processes as a team over the past few weeks, which, among other things, resulted in the creation of this documentation that gives contributors some insight on how we review pull requests on Synapse. Olivier has also landed his work on running Complement (our next-gen integration test suite) against instances of Synapse using workers, which is a massive improvement for our CI.

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace announces

Hello again TWIM, updates to my Kubernetes charts have been rolling along as usual, though I've been a bit more silent about them. This week sees the addition of a synatainer chart though, for those who want it for maintaining their K8s Synapse. (And the Synapse chart was also updated to 1.62.0, and element-web to 1.11.0) If you have any questions, comments, requests for assistance, etc with them then #matrix-on-kubernetes:fiksel.info is where you want to go.

Dendrite Helm Chart (website)

Helm Chart to deploy Dendrite on Kubernetes

jonnobrow announces

The k8s-at-home dendrite helm chart now optionally configures ingress resources for dendrite in polylith mode. It has also had some bugs fixed and been updated to support the most recent version of dendrite.

Check out the chart here: https://github.com/k8s-at-home/charts/blob/master/charts/incubator/dendrite/README.md

Dept of Clients 📱

Quadrix (website)

A Minimal, simple, multi-platform chat client for the Matrix protocol.

JFA reports

Quadrix v1.2.0 has now been released. It's already available for Linux (https://snapcraft.io/quadrix, https://flathub.org/apps/details/chat.quadrix.Quadrix) and Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=chat.quadrix.android). The Windows, MacOS and iOS versions are awaiting approval from the respective stores.

New in this release:

Brand new icons from Remix Icons (https://github.com/Remix-Design/RemixIcon)

Messages can be redacted (for now only by the message owner)

Users with admin power can kick other users from rooms

Users can start a DM room directly from the member list in a group room

Please leave feedback/comments at #quadrix:matrix.org or in the issues at https://github.com/alariej/quadrix (stars welcome :-)

Note: The PR (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/pull/1348) to publish Quadrix on the matrix.org client list has been submitted more than a month ago, but still awaiting approval. Anyone here can help?

Nheko (website)

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

Nico says

You can now edit aliases in Nheko! This means you can publish your own aliases in the room directory as well as in the room. If an alias can't be used by people (because it isn't listed in the room directory), that alias is highlighted in red with an easy option to fix it (if you have permissions to do so). You can also easily switch the primary (canonical) alias of the room.

With this the feature set I wanted to have for the next release is complete. I wanted to focus on improving moderation and room management capabilities in Nheko and it does now have a very basic sets of capabilities to do so. I do already have plans to expand on them though!

So instead of working on new features, I will be focusing on bug fixes. For a start if someone has the username room, Nheko will now omit the reply fallback to prevent pinging the whole room. The verification window now also should always be big enough to show its contents and we now properly explain to users, why emojis might look different on different devices fixing an issue reported via Twitter... There is also a new icon for the room directory (it is now a building, very punny, huh?).

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle announces

Our new release, v1.11.0 is live. This release includes;

Search leaving Beta! Thanks for all your support and feedback so far we’re excited that this is now the default experience for all.

Video rooms are officially in Beta! Previously this was a labs flag but we’re making good progress, keep your feedback coming!

We’re working on converting tests to Cypress. This week we focussed on lazy loading and we’re nearly at the finish line

Please note; As we make progress on improving our automated testing, we are asking for more tests to be provided alongside all PRs

Many more improvements to CSS are continuing to land thanks to community contributions

Fixed issues with URL previews

Removed obsolete code from the left panel filtering

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

More bug fixes have gone in to live location sharing

Element iOS (website)

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

Danielle says

We’ve had lots of updates with our latest iOS release, check out the full list but here’s our favourites:

You can now mark a room as read from the room list. Open the context menu to see the new option

We updated the way reactions look on the timeline

There’s now an accessibility label and hint when you send voice messages

User pills now use the latest data when you’re mentioned

Chatterbox (website)

Chatterbox lets you securely embed Hydrogen on any website!

Thib says

You have probably seen it, this week Element released Chatterbox, an embedded chat client you can use to build chat assistants, chatbots… or probably other use cases we didn't even think of. It's OSS and really just a lightweight Matrix client. Rick talks about it in greater length with me in today's Matrix Live.

✍️ Release blog post: https://element.io/blog/element-launches-chatterbox/ ⌨️ Chatterbox source code: https://github.com/vector-im/chatterbox 🧰 Hydrogen SDK: https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/blob/master/doc/SDK.md 🤖 OpsDroid FOSDEM talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHs2eLp5nwE&list=PLl5dnxRMP1hW7HxlJiHSox02MK9_KluLH&index=3

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Cactus Comments (website)

Cactus Comments is a federated comment system for the web, based on the Matrix protocol.

Asbjørn announces

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

Just released a small update for the web client: cactus-client v0.13.0

Fix for missing end tokens in sync responses from Synapse >= v1.61.0 (Thanks to Tom Price for !20).

A prettier animation while loading comments.

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

Also, while we're here: we're surprised and delighted to so many people using Cactus Comments! We just crossed 300k guest users registered on cactus.chat (roughly equivalent to 300k unique anonymous users). 🎉

An unfortunate side-effect is that we're having to up our hosting game to keep up with you all - and it's getting a bit expensive on our student budgets. We set up a donations page on Open Collective, in case any of you would want to help out. ✨🫂

🌵 Thanks!

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

Join our Matrix room: #cactus:cactus.chat

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben reports

After a long hunt, we've eventually found a significant problem with napi-rs, the layer we use in between Rust and Node.js for the crypto-nodejs, in the way it manages the memory coming from async functions in rust. With that out of the way and the last remaining features implemented, we are on the final stretch into in putting out the first prerelease of crypto-nodejs-bindings—brace for it to come near your next npmjs.com early next week 🤞🤞.

While that has still occupied most of the teams' time, the community hasn't been idling either, and implement the API for permalinks to events, exposes the authentication service over FFI and an API to get invite details for Invited Rooms. Thanks everyone!

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

matrix-room-element (website)

A custom html element, web component, to display the latest messages from a matrix room

@ugp:matrix.org says

matrix-room-element -> [email protected] (GPLv3)

<matrix-room-element/> is a web component (vanilla JS/HTML/CSS & distributed un-minified) that can be imported and inserted in any web page, to display the content of a (public, soon with authentication, and private room support) matrix room.

preview: https://sctlib.gitlab.io/matrix-room-element/

gitlab: https://gitlab.com/sctlib/matrix-room-element

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@sctlib/matrix-room-element/

Development is continuing, some new web-components have now prototypes:

<matrix-login/>, <matrix-logout/>, <matrix-auth/>

<matrix-create-room/>, <matrix-edit-room/>, <matrix-join-room/>

<matrix-send-event/>

<matrix-event/>

It is still heavy in development, and still looking for the right patterns (web components, and matrix).

We're trying to make composable components that can be inserted in any web page, and maybe help users use Matrix as a CMS, embedable anywhere (web). Our first use case is on https://libli.org (that now comes with a /login endpoint - alpha) (this event in libli, loading a matrix-room-element with correct room-id/event-id, https://libli.org/thisweekinmatrix:matrix.org/$KsbQ0JsqAXN9g-57M-aXyVohZYM3SZkKKkuUb9dW928).

Looking forward for use-cases, feedback, attribute naming discussion, simple patterns to make to code readable. (topics: #matrix-room-element:matrix.org #libli:matrix.org )

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi says

Thanks to Julian Foad, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports installing the ntfy push notifications server for you.

See our Setting up the ntfy push notifications server documentation to get started.

JulianF adds

To explain what it's for: Using the UnifiedPush standard, ntfy enables self-hosted (Google-free) push notifications from Matrix (and other) servers. Especially useful for users of Google-free Android (such as from f-droid).

If you try it, please report any feedback or problems or improvements in #matrix-docker-ansible-deploy:devture.com . Any updates to the scripts or docs may appear first on my branch before being merged into the playbook.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Who's In This Room Bot

Jake C says

Announce Matrix room members to Signal users in bridged chats with relay mode (as they can't see them), building on the excellent Signal bridge

Your favourite bot for social chats with Signal & Matrix friends just got better!

The bot will now:

Not show full Matrix usernames to Signal users (they can't use them). It will send their display name if it exists, otherwise their username prefix.

Send message on invite rather than join, as Signal users may not understand Matrix join vs invite semantics

Send read receipts so you know it's working

I don't currently have a public bot, but if anyone is interested please join #whos-in-this-room-bot-discussion:jakecopp.chat and say hello!

I'm getting great feedback in my local friend groups with it! PRs or issues very welcome.

https://github.com/jakecoppinger/whos-in-this-room-matrix-bot

Mjölnir (website)

The moderation bot for Matrix

Gnuxie reports

Hi everyone, we have released Mjolnir v1.5.0

which includes:

The option for reports to be polled via the synapse admin API (rather than configuring proxy pass-through)

The option to disable the displaying new reports in moderation room (so that you can use the TrustedReporters protection without the abuse reports features)

A !mjolnir rules matching <entity> command to search watched lists.

Glob support to the kick command.

A background queue for kicking (to reduce the load of large glob kicks)

A slight improvement to the performance of the redact command

An improvement to documentation (including dedicated setup documentation)

A new mute action for the since command !mjolnir since 1day mute 100

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

#ping:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	neko.dev	294
2	envs.net	433
3	babel.sh	447
4	hs-bremerhaven.de	495
5	nognu.de	510.5
6	alemann.dev	540.5
7	keks.club	551
8	mail.at	554
9	shortestpath.dev	583
10	asra.gr	992

#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.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	matrix.org	282
2	babel.sh	284
3	sspaeth.de	292.5
4	dendrite.matrix.org	350
5	babel1.eu	396
6	conduit.grich.sk	438
7	rustybever.be	493
8	dendrite.babel.sh	915
9	grin.hu	1774
10	zemos.net	7526

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 2022-07-01

01.07.2022 19:03 — This Week in Matrix — Thib

Matrix Live 🎙

I had the chance to have Ryan with me for a special edition of Open Tech Will Save Us on Thunderbird to celebrate their 102 release, which includes Matrix support for the first time in a stable release.

We covered many interesting topics, such as the importance of specifying the expected behaviour of clients and servers in a protocol to deliver the best experience to end users (wink, wink, reminds you of something?), why Thunderbird was more dormant and is now vibrant as ever, what they plan for the future. I had good fun and I hope attendees did too! Next episode is going to be at the end of July, but you can already join the Open Tech Will Save Us room

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew reports

Audrey Tang, Digital Minister for Taiwan is offering sponsorship for full localisation of Element and other leading Matrix clients into zh_Hant_TW - see https://twitter.com/audreyt/status/1542296087310258176. If you're interested in helping out, please get in touch with Thib and we'll coordinate.

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) announces

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

MSC3840: Ignore invites

MSC3839: primary-identity-as-key

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

MSC3840: Ignore invites

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

Bits and pieces of review by both the Spec Core Team and the community peppered about different MSCs.

Various changes to the spec text itself, particularly from @aaronraimist, @DMRobertson and @Kloenk. Thank you all!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2974: Widgets: Capabilities re-exchange!

This MSC is a relatively simple it. Currently widgets are only allowed to specify their capabilities (what the widget is allowed to do, like reading the logged-in user's display name) when the widget is loaded. This MSC attempts to allow that model to be extended to let widgets ask for additional (or fewer) permissions over time.

I can't help but be reminded of the shift in permissions on iOS and Android here in how they shifted from "ask all permissions up front" to "ask for permission for each thing when it's used in the app" :)

Check it out if widgets are your thing!

Dept of Outreachy 🎓️

andybalaam announces

New Matrix Intern Usman has just started on his project to prototype Favourite messages in Element Web. He's written a blog post introducing himself and the project: https://yaya-usman.hashnode.dev/outreachy-blog-introducing-myself

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier says

This week the Synapse team released Synapse 1.61.1! This is a security release which addresses a high severity vulnerability in URL preview feature. Server administrators are encouraged to update as soon as possible! We have published a blog post explaining the vulnerability and detailing a few workarounds that can be implemented on homeservers which can't be updated right away: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/06/28/security-release-synapse-1-61-1

Other than that we have published the first RC for Synapse 1.62.0 (which was followed today by a second bugfix RC). Synapse 1.62 will feature an improved spam checker API for modules, performance improvements around device lists, more customisation for .well-known client files and much more. Watch this space next week for the full rundown 🙂

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander announces

This week we released Dendrite 0.8.9 which contains a number of improvements around backfilling room history, amongst other things.

Features

Incoming device list updates over federation are now queued in JetStream for processing so that they will no longer block incoming federation transactions and should never end up dropped, which will hopefully help E2EE reliability

The /context endpoint now returns "start" and "end" parameters to allow pagination from a context call

The /messages endpoint will no longer return "end" when there are no more messages remaining

Deactivated user accounts will now leave all rooms automatically

New admin endpoint /_dendrite/admin/evacuateUser/{userID} has been added for forcing a local user to leave all joined rooms

Dendrite will now automatically attempt to raise the file descriptor limit at startup if it is too low

Fixes

A rare crash when retrieving remote device lists has been fixed

Fixes a bug where events were not redacted properly over federation

The /invite endpoints will now return an error instead of silently proceeding if the user ID is obviously malformed

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Thunderbird (website)

Thunderbird is a free open-source email, calendar & chat app.

freaktechnik says

Thunderbird 102 with Matrix support is now available for download at https://thunderbird.net/. The Matrix implementation reflects what's been previously discussed in TWIM with some additional bug fixes. You can read more about what's new in our blog post. Ryan discussed the Thunderbird 102 release as well as the project in general in this week's Open Tech Will Save Us, give it a listen for the latest inside scoop.

Nheko (website)

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

Nico says

Have you ever noticed that some people are just plain @*%&!§%"+? Well, to quickly deal with what they wrote, Nheko now has a /redact @userid:server.name command, so you can redact everything they wrote (as long as it is in the currently cached section of the timeline). Note that you will run into rate limits when using that and Nheko is not yet applying an appropriate backoff in that case.

Similarly, q234rty fixed a lot of cases where icons in Nheko were either blurry or the wrong size. We fixed a few crashes, the room list should now not sometimes store the wrong order of rooms, brausepulver made large avatars cropped locally (since servers don't guarantee any size over 96x96 when cropped and synapse doesn't properly save the full image size in that case) and added a menu entry to copy a roomlink. You can also now define new powerlevels for users instead of using the existing levels in the room and Jason fixed some compiler warnings when a private member struct doesn't have an explicit constructor on some compilers. Nheko also now downloads the full online key backup when you explicitly toggle the switch.

A more noticeable topic might be, that Nheko now requires servers which support the v1.1 API or later and will not allow you to login or register otherwise. At the same time we also enabled support for the shiny and new knock_restricted rule and all remaining groups code was removed (you know, the feature from before spaces were cool).

I also updated Nheko on my work laptop now and since I was quite surprised by how fast it starts now (while my room count is over 900 !), I attached a video of that below for your pleasure.

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat says

This week is an exciting time in Element land! We have one feature coming out of beta and another going in: the new search experience is going live with the next release, while video rooms will become available for testing. You can already preview them in the release candidate!

Threads

After investigating ranged read receipts, we are looking at per thread read receipts again as a more practical approach.

Community testing

RC testing done:

Web - MD/HTML support in Space/Room topics

iOS - regression testing of messages, reactions and rooms

Next week:

Create DM only on first message

For more info on our next testing sessions (sync or async), you can join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat announces

The new search experience is coming out of labs with the next release! Including much UI polish and ordering improvements.

Video rooms are going to be available for everyone to try out in beta!

Work on improving our testing continues with more crypto tests being migrated to Cypress and improvements to test reliability

Fixed Jitsi video and audio defaults, and improved default layout when video is minimised

We have had many more CSS changes to polish layout, including this change to fix tile bubbles!

And finished converting matrix-react-sdk to TypeScript

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

Made improvements to live location sharing

Nico says

Because sometimes you just have to do something else and it might be interesting to some people:

I fixed calls not working when trying to use Element Web with a Conduit server: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/8931

I fixed Element Android still using the unstable endpoint (i.e. the one from the MSC, that proposed it) to list aliases: https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/pull/6288

Sometimes fixing something that annoys you isn't even that hard, and since it annoys you, you have some motivation to fix it. I call this Anger Driven Development (ADD). If you have some things that annoy you, I encourage to try fixing them for a bit. It might help out some other people too. If that makes you want to contribute to Nheko, don't hesitate to join #nheko:nheko.im and ask me to help you out with whatever fix you are trying to contribute.

This time I just decided to clean out some issues, that came up in the Conduit development channel and that weren't fixed yet. Turns out it was just a few lines to change and it hopefully makes the Matrix experience better for everyone in the long run. The changes were also quickly reviewed and are merged now. Do you have any such little fixes that no one hears about, but you are proud of them? Please post about them, I'd love to see them!

Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan announces

Are you enjoying Location Sharing but have tired thumbs from tapping every time you need to update your location? Then fret no more! Element 1.8.20 features our new Live Location Sharing feature, now available in Labs.

Live Location Sharing: Now in Labs, we’ve added the ability to send your location in real time to the people and rooms of your choice!

Mark as Read: Quickly mark a single room as read by long-pressing it on the home screen.

Annoying bugs fixed: It’s much easier to tap the names and avatars of room members, voice messages now work better with VoiceOver enabled and it is significantly faster to create a new room.

Element Android (website)

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

kittykat announces

The fix for the bug around accepting invites to DMs has landed in the Google Playstore with version 1.4.25

We also made improvements to registration, password reset, and other first user experiences

Room list loading has had a revamp with more intuitive loading indicators

Location sharing has had many improvements (live location sharing is available in labs if you’d like to take it for a spin)

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben says

Over the last few weeks, a significant push on rust-crypto-support for Nodejs has taken place, e.g. this PR. Major parts are available, the infrastructure to create releases ready, however, a pretty rare huge memory allocation that causes a crash in Nodejs on the CI has blocked progress of the team recently. Debugging this costs a lot of time and it is yet unclear, how much of a problem this really is (as the cause stays mysterious), however it has also been seen in the wild on Windows now-- a concerning development.

But that doesn't mean, there isn't any development going on. Thanks to the active community around the project, we now have a fix to prevent us from processing the same transaction twice, a method to create permalinks, you can now verify sessions through FFI as well as use the Client Builder via FFI. Thanks everyone!

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

Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart and maintained by Famedly.

Henri Carnot says

Dart Matrix SDK: Version 0.10.2

This week, the team released version 0.10.2. In this version, we added experimental support for native group call signaling MSC3401. We have been playing with it in our internal clients, and we have to say that we are pretty happy with the result! There are still some bugs, as sometimes a new call is creating instead of joining the existing one. But it's looking great!

We also took the opportunity to fix some bugs in call handling. Now the ringtone is properly properly when rejecting a call. Also, when opening the client, we don't trigger a call event anymore if the call end event is in the sync response.

We also did some refactoring for the sync handler, reducing the usage of JSON objects and adding some try catch to handle issues when handling event room updates. We switched to custom CachedStreamController so even if the stream has already been listened to, you can still access the last sent value.

Finally, when sending messages when under unreliable connection, messages could be sent out of order. This is now fixed thanks to the implementation of a message sending queue.

See you next time ;)

Dept of Instance Managers

axon.sh (website)

An interactive command-line administration tool for Synapse written in Bash.

joe says

This week's release completed support for resolving, creating, and deleting room aliases. Get the code and contribute at https://git.thisisjoes.site/joe/axon.sh (supports GitHub and GitLab login) and join #axon:matrix.thisisjoes.site for discussion and updates!

synadm (website)

Command line admin tool for Synapse (Matrix reference homeserver)

jojo reports

Two is better than one! Ascurius joined the synadm team and helps maintain the github repo, code new features and support users on github and #synadm:peek-a-boo.at.

Thanks to all synadm users, feature requesters and contributors, issue submitters and #synadm:peek-a-boo.at members. It's fun to maintain a project and see its community grow each day!

Some features from the latest releases we'd like to highlight:

The local part of an MXID can now be used as the <user_id> argument in various synadm commands. Of course, there is still the possibility to use the full MXID if desired.

We have added a shadow-ban command so that admins now can more easily deal with abusive users: synadm room shadow-ban

The room state API is now supported, try synadm room state

And with the help of that API we created a command to easily generate a list of rooms and corresponding admins and mods: synadm room power-levels

The synadm room search command was adapted to make better use of current Synapse versions possibilities.

Documentation chapter around using synadm together with Synapse instances deployed with matrix-docker-ansible-deploy.

The magic around "retrieval of the own homeserver name" got a massive overhaul. This affects several user and media subcommands.

Have a look at the releases list for more details: https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm/releases

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix Summit Conference Berlin calls for your participation.

Yan announces

The will be a 2 days conference about matrix.

26th to 27th august 2022 @c-base in Berlin.

With the first Matrix Summit Conference we try to showcase the matrix-eco-system in its whole width and depth.

We are looking for talks and workshops around matrix-related projects and products. We are interested in all aspects of those: From the past to the future, from the moment of the idea, the story of the creation or the vision of the future. We’d like to understand the principles as well as the technology. The conference is from people for people, so if you’d like to talk about yourself, your community, your organization, please do. Showcase yourself and your relation to the Matrix world. We try to compile a versatile program. We are open to contributions of any length, from 5 minutes(lightning talks) to presentations and talks to workshops and hacksessions up to 5 hours. We’ll come together to discover, celebrate and enjoy the world of matrix. Also, if you have any arty, cultural or playful contribution in mind, please offer it.

You can enter proposals until 2022-07-22 22:22 (Europe/Berlin), 3 weeks from now in our pretalx

Matrix-summit-berlin-2022 matrix summit space

The #matrix-summit-berlin-2022 space will contain all rooms and subspaces related to the event. For the organization of the summit we have orga-room. Just come by if you like to know something or help with the summit. There is a gitlab organisation which contains our codebase and issuetrackers.

Sponsors?

We try to make everything low cost. But we need some money for food, drinks, merch, travel, accommodation. Please contact Yan or write mail, when you can sponsor the event.

Note this is a community event that is not organised by the Matrix.org Foundation.

Matrix User Meetup Berlin

saces announces

Next Matrix user meetup 6.7.2022, 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 brougth 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

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

livematrix (website)

An oversimplified, easy to implement, embedded live chat widget that allows your website's visitors to send messages seamlessly to your Matrix account.

osousa announces

The widget is Built using Svelte, so everything goes in one nice bundle, its fast and awesome to embed. No need for external libraries or big framework.js files. Just import into your website's structure one JS and one CSS files. The server uses Golang, the Binary is only 3.2MB in size. Make sure you configure the .env file.

A demo and more information about livematrix can be found here: https://github.com/osousa/livematrix

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

#ping:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	nognu.de	809
2	isaffine.name	818
3	alemann.dev	829
4	quyo.de	983
5	norrland.xyz	1033.5
6	mindlesstux.com	1036
7	vern.cc	1100.5
8	kanp.ai	1535
9	utzutzutz.net	1747.5
10	roeckx.be	1754

#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.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite.matrix.org	290.5
2	sspaeth.de	321
3	kernel-error.com	360
4	matrix.org	538.5
5	dendrite.s3cr3t.me	556
6	rustybever.be	811.5
7	xethos.net	1046.5
8	zemos.net	20859

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 2022-06-24

24.06.2022 20:16 — This Week in Matrix — Thib

Matrix Live 🎙

This week was very busy and we unfortunately didn't have the time to record a Matrix Live. Everything will be back to normal next week!

Dept of Spec 📜

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.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

MSC3834: Opportunistic user key pinning (TOFU)

MSC3837: Cascading profile tags for push rules

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

The big news from the spec ~~this~~ last week is the release of Matrix v1.3 🎉 (read the blog post if you haven't already)! Roughly three months since the release of Matrix v1.2, this release brings improvements such as knocking on rooms, room version 10, reduced metadata in encrypted messages and the first pieces of aggregations finally landing in the spec proper. And more! See the blog post for the full changelog.

Most of the Spec Core Team has been away this week, thus there has not been much moving forwards. But we do have two new MSCs from @duxovni and @Johennes, which you can view above.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3077: Support for multi-stream VoIP by @SimonBrandner!

This MSC allows for differentiating between different incoming streams of media coming from a single user by adding a sdp_stream_metadata dictionary to Voice over IP (VoIP)-related events. This is a relatively simply addition with useful functionality, such as allowing a single user to share both their camera feed and screen share at the same time!

Check it out if that kind of stuff interests you!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit (website)

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

Timo ⚡️ reports

Conduit v0.4.0 just came out and fixes all the problems you were having* and more! Read the changelog on https://conduit.rs/changelog

Dept of Clients 📱

Element iOS (website)

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

Doug says

Live Location Sharing will be available in Labs in the next release.

There has been a focus on bug fixes for Element iOS this week. Some highlights include:

Making sender avatars tappable again when using Message Bubbles layout.

Opened images are no longer cropped when multitasking on iPad.

It is now much easier to tap the first message below a sender’s name when using the plain timeline layout.

And on the ElementX side:

Message Bubbles were added as the default timeline style.

The Settings screen is now starting to take shape.

Theming applied to most of the other screens using our colour palette.

Element Android (website)

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

adam announces

1.4.24 released to beta testers which includes support for UnifiedPush and fixes for voice recordings and duplicated messages in the timeline

We're making it easier to opt in to Live Location Sharing by displaying the labs setting within the location sharing flow, no need to hunt down the setting anymore!

We have also fixed some outstanding crashes around opening large images in the timeline and signing out

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr announces

Over the last few weeks we've:

improved interactions around file uploads

improved the look of file messages

reworked the login design

added topic configuration to room settings

added previews of room name and topic in tooltips for room icons

added handling for an eventId component of annotation URLs

Along with a number of other minor bugfixes and UX improvements. And, we've added one neat new user-facing feature: inline previews of video and audio annotations. This one is a little hard to explain, but a video is worth ten thousand words:

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma (website)

A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.

Jonas Platte announces

Over the last month since the last update, we

Released Ruma 0.6.4 with a bug fix for rich reply fallback generation

Added support for pretty much everything from Matrix 1.3, which was to a large extent just the removal of feature flags for previously-unstable functionality

Thanks to @zecakeh for both implementing most of these features and now stabilizing them in Ruma!

Improved reply and thread support

Improved the still somewhat experimental state resolution implementation used by Conduit (not yet merged):

Add m.federation to authorization rules

Add room version 10 support

Fix some bugs in power-level handling

Got a community contribution for X-Matrix authorization header parsing (taken from Conduit and improved; not yet merged)

Added methods to sanitize messages (not yet merged)

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

Jonas Platte says

This week, we

Improved our JS bindings and how they're tested

Significantly improved CI times

Created a new, more readable Login API and deprecated the old one

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

#ping:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	supersandro.de	495
2	krutonium.ca	502
3	jeroenhd.nl	717.5
4	mindlesstux.com	913.5
5	anter.io	1010
6	quyo.de	1191
7	mailstation.de	1328
8	nognu.de	1925
9	matrix.org	2257.5
10	matrix.nicfab.it	2347

#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.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	kernel-error.com	263.5
2	dendrite.matrix.org	357
3	rustybever.be	692.5
4	evulid.cc	877
5	zemos.net	3064.5

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 2022-06-10

10.06.2022 18:28 — This Week in Matrix — Thib

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

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.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

There were no new MSCs this week.

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

MSC2832: HS -> AS authorization header

MSC3715: Add a pagination direction parameter to /relations

FCP was proposed earlier, but all concerns have been cleared this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

MSC3816: Clarify Thread Participation

Spec Updates

The release date for Matrix v1.3 has been set in stone for Thursday, June 16th 2022! Expect a blog post on the day detailing all of the new additions.

The bot that posts MSC updates in #matrix-spec:matrix.org and elsewhere has been switched from @mscbot:amorgan.xyz to @mscbot:matrix.org. The backend of the bot uses https://github.com/Informo/specs-bot/.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2000: Server-side password policies!

This is a proposal that adds a mechanism for homeserver administrators to define a password policy for users. This policy can decide rules such as a minimum password length, whether a digit is required, etc. This policy can be enforced by the homeserver when a user registers an account or changes their account password and is communicated to the client so that it can also be enforced locally.

Astute readers will possibly note that authentication in Matrix will eventually be replaced by OAuth2 (MSC2964). This will move operations like password policy enforcement from the homeserver to a separate authentication service, essentially removing the need to reinvent-the-wheel in a homeserver.

Registration, login and managing passwords and connected third-party IDs is often a complex part of a Matrix homeserver. Moving these out to a separate authentication service will both unlock new features (log in with Matrix!) as well as reduce the resources required to implement a Matrix homeserver.

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

r._.hit announces

Hey there, I am Rohit. I'll be participating in GSoC this summer, under the Matrix organization.

For my project, I'll be working on the desktop client, Nheko. Specifically, I aim to work on its VoIP Library and also on implementing and updating some of the features to concur to specification changes to the Matrix protocol, which include

Improved VoIP Signalling

VoIP Call Transfers

Muting Calls

I plan on starting a blog and hopefully will do so soon. In the meanwhile, if you want to know more about the project you can visit here and join the #nheko:nheko.im to participate in discussions.

Looking forward to learning and interacting with the community.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

Shay says

Work continues on speeding up federated room joins, improving testing, and reducing database i/o. In addition, some lovely features have been added:

Add new media_retention options to the homeserver config for routinely cleaning up non-recently accessed media.

Experimental support for MSC3772: Push rule for mutually related events.

Update to the check_event_for_spam module callback: Deprecate the current callback signature, replace it with a new signature that is both less ambiguous (replacing booleans with explicit allow/block) and more powerful (ability to return explicit error codes).

Add storage and module API methods to get monthly active users (and their corresponding appservices) within an optionally specified time range.

Support the new error code ORG.MATRIX.MSC3823.USER_ACCOUNT_SUSPENDED from MSC3823.

Add a configurable background job to delete stale devices.

Improve URL previews for pages with empty elements.

Allow updating a user's password using the admin API without logging out their devices. Contributed by @jcgruenhage.

This is in addition to quite a number of bugfixes!

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander says

This week we released Dendrite 0.8.8, which contains the following improvements:

The performance of state resolution has been increased significantly for larger rooms

A number of changes have been made to rate limiting:

Logged in users will now be rate-limited on a per-session basis rather than by remote IP

Rate limiting no longer applies to admin or appservice users

It is now possible to configure additional users that are exempt from rate limiting using the exempt_user_ids option in the rate_limiting section of the Dendrite config

Setting state is now idempotent via the client API state endpoints

Room upgrades now properly propagate tombstone events to remote servers

Room upgrades will no longer send tombstone events if creating the upgraded room fails

A crash has been fixed when evaluating restricted room joins

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

Dept of Bridges 🌉

MandM-bridge

karl says

For all Mumble users out there, there is a new matrix bridge which works with ZeroC ICE interface to communicate with newer versions of Murmur.

Currently, the most interesting features are:

Bridging text messages of specific channels or a whole Murmur to a Matrix room

Bridging images posted in the Matrix room to Murmur

Representing Murmur clients with puppets in the Matrix room

You can find the bridge here: https://github.com/karlpip/MandM-bridge Also feel free to join #mandm-bridge:og.lushkush.nl for questions or suggestions!

matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Half-Shot says

Security Release

Hello friends. This week we bring you a security release for matrix-hookshot. Please ensure you have upgraded to at least 1.7.2, and have read the security advisory. Thanks!

The changes are as follows:

Add support for GitHub enterprise. You can now specify the URL via enterpriseUrl in the config file. (#364)

Add ability for bridge admins to remove GitHub connections using the admin room. (#367)

Dept of Clients 📱

FluffyChat (website)

Krille Fear says

FluffyChat 1.5.0 goes Material You

FluffyChat 1.5.0 has been released and will soon be in all stores. This release comes with a bunch of bugfixes and introduces the first iteration of a Material You based design. We also try to support Android 12 accent colors (while this does not seem to work yet). On other platforms, our own purple shape will stay the default.

I like the new Material You design while we needed to tweak it at some points. Also the dropdown menu misses some elevation but this is a known issue in the Flutter repo which will be fixed soon.

This is also the first build with Flutter 3 which should improve the performance a little bit. Unfortunately it brings some regressions. We are forced to ship a little bug with it: Sharing on iPads seems to be broken. I'm very unhappy with this situation but otherwise we would have ended up in different releases for different platforms. As there afaik are not that many iPad users out there, we decided to live with this compromise and ship a bugfix release asap.

Yeah... Flutter has a lot of pros but also a lot of cons. Every new release of this framework leads to the fear of new regressions. Shipping a new major release where basic stuff like "Sharing" is just broken, is totally stupid... but that's the decision of Google. :-P

We didn't want to wait to ship the new design and also we needed a new release to come back to F-Droid where FluffyChat wasn't available in the last weeks because of a ProGuard problem, which should be fixed now.

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

Happy Friday! 🚀

Threads

Threads is in Beta and progressing. We’re working hard setting up the foundational work needed to improve read receipts and notifications cross-platform.

Keep sending feedback and rageshakes as we’re also continuing to improve the UI and fix any bugs that are raised.

Community testing

We’re moving closer to getting the new search experience out of beta, thanks for all your help on testing so far.

Next up: Big regression testing session on Android, after the removal of communities/groups (Wednesday or Thursday TBC)

For more info on our next testing sessions (sync or async), you can join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle reports

The Web team has been hard at work and we’ve made accessibility improvements, UI updates to the composer, and updates to the pill layout for RTL (right-to-left) languages

Also added is support for markdown and HTML in room topics, and some tweaks to the Widgets UI here and here.

Improvements are being made to CI for automated tests in Cypress, to the setup itself and more tests have been added.

Video rooms have been released into beta!. Thank you for your feedback so far, keep it coming.

Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan announces

We’re continuing our bug fixing spree and the latest release has fixed some of the more significant problems we had

We’re working towards adopting a new notification filtering entitlement and we will soon be able to silence those pesky empty notifications

Our “Edit Home Screen Layout” experiment is running well and we hope to be sharing the results of the diary study and prototypes soon.

The new first time user experience is continuing to make good progress and is quickly approaching finalisation

We are now allowing account deactivation for users that signed up through SSO

On ElementX we have merged the new crash reporting service and we are starting to see reports come in. We’ve also successfully integrated an initial version of the DesignKit and added room filtering

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle says

1.4.19 is available and fixes some small bugs, including a fix for the regression surrounding space switching performance.

Our prototype study is nearly at a close - we’ve received a lot of great feedback on our suggested changes to the home screen and space switching interactions.

We’ve been working on integrating UnifiedPush for both Google Play and FDroid versions of our app.

The team is finalising the updates to the create account flow. It will be ready for testing soon.

Dept of VoIP 🤙

Element Call (website)

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

Florian Heese reports

Element Call Beta 2

This week we landed Element Call beta 2 (https://call.element.io) including a bunch of nice updates. First of all, everything is now end-to-end encrypted by default: not only the WebRTC streams but also the matrix signaling (It was consciously disabled in beta 1 for debugging purposes). Moreover, we have experimental support for spatial audio rendering. Give it a try — you can find it in the settings section. It's a lot of fun to play with and really supports immersion during a video call. This release also introduces a whole new experimental way of communicating: Walkie-talkie mode. In that mode, videos are disabled, and everyone is muted by default. To speak, press the ‘push-to-talk’ (PTT) button — takes me back to my childhood 🙂

For further details follow this blog post: https://element.io/blog/element-call-beta-2-encryption-spatial-audio-walkie-talkie-mode-and-more/

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart and maintained by Famedly.

Henri Carnot announces

Version 0.9.12

This week, the team released version 0.9.12. In this version, we updated our Matrix API Lite package, in which we fixed the issue with the room hierarchy endpoint with some improper parsing and wrong type coming from the generation of the spec Open API documentation.

We also did some housekeeping and renamed some methods and getter to make them explicit. For example, the futureSender getter is now an asynchronous method called fetchEventSender() to make it clear that calling this function may trigger an API call.

Possibility to override the supported Matrix spec version but we don't really recommend using it for production.

See you next time ;)

Dept of Internet of Things 💡

cvwright reports

Here's a fun Matrix-based project for you, sponsored by yours truly and my employer FUTO.

The "Golden Tiger" senior capstone project team at Portland State University just delivered the results of two quarters's design and implementation work on a secure/private, self-hostable, end-to-end encrypted cloud security camera using Raspberry Pi's and Matrix. The idea of this prototype project was to provide similar functionality to commercial services like Ring or Nest, but without letting any nosy third party see inside (or around) your home.

The students' code is available on Github in two repos:

The in-home Raspi camera controller

The React/Cordova frontend

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

#ping:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	samlord.me	335.5
2	neko.dev	386
3	maescool.be	403
4	plocki.org	491
5	krutonium.ca	516
6	synapse1.arsrobotics.org	705
7	quyo.de	986
8	ewsandor.com	1063
9	shortestpath.dev	1294.5
10	alemann.dev	1333

#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.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	flatturtle.xyz	325.5
2	rcp.tf	334
3	dendrite.matrix.org	349.5
4	dendrite.neilalexander.dev	384
5	kszczot.pl	482
6	rustybever.be	601
7	sspaeth.de	656

That's all I know 🏁

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