Thib

🔗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.

🔗#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

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.

🔗#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

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.

🔗#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

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.

🔗#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

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.

🔗#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

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.

🔗#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR reports

Hey all, it's been a holiday for much of the team this week, so from the plane of Maple trees I present to you the spec update.

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

🔗MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3604: Room Version 10

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3816: Clarify Thread Participation (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC3828: Content Repository CORP Headers
• MSC3827: Filtering of /publicRooms by room type

🔗Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been working on getting Matrix 1.3 out the door and generally working towards a better process for handling releases alongside critical proposals for the protocol. The goal is to be able to ship these major features while reducing the risk of a release falling behind. Watch this space for more details as this should result in MSCs getting through the process a little bit quicker.

For Matrix 1.3, we're targeting Thursday, June 16th, 2022 as our release date, though this comes with a small asterisk: we're looking to land quite a lot of stuff so might have to adjust the date once more as needed. We do feel reasonably confident in the date though - watch for blog posts titled Matrix 1.3 in the coming weeks.

🔗Random MSC of the week

The script has chosen MSC2846 - Decentralizing media through CIDs as your random MSC this week. The MSC raises an interesting question about how to make media more akin to events in Matrix. If you're interested in this area, take a read of it and the related MSCs.

🔗Dept of GSoC 🎓️

🔗Encrypted Search for Matrix

burgers says

Hey there, I'm Aditya Rajput (aka BURG3R5), a sophomore at IIT Roorkee, India. This summer I'll be working on implementing encrypted Search in Matrix rooms. More details about this project can be found here. Once a week, I'll be blogging about my progress (plus some neat stuff I find during research) in this blog. Technical discussion and more frequent updates can be found in the public room #encrypted-search:matrix.org.

While writing my GSoC proposal, I'd already made some progress w.r.t. the actual code required for this project, and my preliminary implementation can be found here.

Looking forward to working in this ecosystem with you all!

🔗Kazv Project

nannanko announces

Hello everyone, my name is nannanko. From today, I will officially participate in GSoC to contribute code to the Kazv Project. I hope I can get along well with you all.

🔗3rd Party Authorised Room Membership

kuries says

Hey there! I'm Binesh Munukurthi, a Computer Science student from India. I'll be working on the 3rd Party Authorised Room Membership project for this year's GSoC.

This project aims to develop an application that has the ability to delegate membership of a room based on a user’s interaction with other third party services. For more details on what I'll be implementing, please refer to the link

I'll be posting my weekly updates here If you are interested in knowing more about the project's progress, feel free to join the public room #matrix-cerberus:cadair.com.

I look forward to spending a wonderful summer with you all! Thanks!

🔗NeoChat

flyingcakes announces

Hi! I'm Snehit Sah. I will be contributing to KDE's Matrix client, NeoChat, during GSoC. I will add Spaces support to the application. My progress can be followed at my blog. Hoping for a fun stay!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

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

Shay says

This week was a short one, but work continues on fast room joins, testing Synapse with workers on Complement, and increasing the efficiency of Synapse with regard to database i/o. In addition, we released v1.60.0 (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases), which includes

• work to reduce the possibility of database corruption
• a fix to a bug introduced in Synapse 1.60.0rc1 that would break some imports from synapse.module_api

🔗Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

Till reports

This week we released Dendrite 0.8.7! This is a highly recommended update since it fixes some fairly large bugs:

• Support added for room version 10
• A number of state handling bugs have been fixed, which previously resulted in missing state events, unexpected state deletions, reverted memberships and unexpectedly rejected/soft-failed events in some specific cases
• Fixed destination queue performance issues as a result of missing indexes, which speeds up outbound federation considerably
• A bug which could cause the /register endpoint to return HTTP 500 has been fixed

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

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Quadrix

JFA announces

Quadrix is a single-codebase, multi-platform project, using the meanwhile deprecated ReactXP framework (Microsoft's answer to Flutter), which compiles to iOS, Android, and web/Electron. The Quadrix apps are available in the main app stores for mobiles and desktops (including Snapcraft and Flathub). Repo is at https://github.com/alariej/quadrix. Would be great to have a few people test the apps and leave feedback in the repo or in the (still empty) #quadrix:matrix.org room!

Important: Quadrix doesn't support E2EE yet, but it's on the TODO.

🔗Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan says

• Our prototypes for a new app layout are going well. Just a few people have early access in order to give us feedback to ensure we’re building a new layout that works for everyone. Watch this space!
• We’ve been working on improving our onboarding flow so that users signing up for Matrix and Element find it much easier. This work is making great progress.
• Live location sharing is also making great progress and is quickly approaching the beta phase
• On the ElementX front we’ve been busy adopting async/await, introducing state machines, a new design kit component and hooking up crash reporting and sentry.io

🔗Element Android (website)

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

Manu reports

• We are a bit late on the release candidate. We want to fix a performance regression when switching spaces. It will be available early next week.
• We have merged the UnifiedPush PR from P1gP1g. We are doing some adjustments but users will be able to choose their push distributor soon.
• The prototypes that are with a small group of early access tester are going down a storm - we’re getting lots of great feedback that will help to build a new app layout that works for all.
• Our improvements to the first time user experience are nearly ready for testing and shipping! We’re hoping to make our onboarding experience a lot simpler for folks that are creating an account.

🔗Cinny (website)

Cinny is a Matrix client focused on simplicity, elegance and security

Lozenge reports

Cinny v2.0.4

🔗What's changed

• Fix emoji autocomplete in some cases
• Hide verify button if Cross-Signing is not enabled
• Add support for building docker image for linux/arm64
• Fix drag-n-drop not working in desktop app
• Add dev-tools to production builds of desktop app
• Fix copy-paste not working on macOS in desktop app
• Flatpak package for the desktop app

Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in/ · Join our channel at: #cinny:matrix.org · Github: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny · Twitter: https://twitter.com/@cinnyapp

🔗Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

🔗Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

The last two weeks have been focused mainly on nuts-and bolts improvements to user experience, rather than any big new pieces of functionality. We've:

1. Added upload previews for PDFs and audiovisual media, so you can confirm you're uploading the right thing before creating a discussion.
2. Added a method to precompute PCM data for more accurate waveforms in audiovisual-media-based discussions.
3. Allowed for join rules and annotation visibility to be modified separately in settings
4. Added support for URLs linking directly to particular events

As always, if you're interested in social annotation on matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org!

🔗Dept of VoIP 🤙

🔗Element Call (website)

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

Matthew reports

We've had breakthroughs this week on implementing a native Matrix SFU (selective forwarding unit) which speaks MSC3401, thanks to Sean DuBois - all round WebRTC superstar, project lead for the Pion WebRTC implementation for Go, and author of WebRTC for the curious.

Sean generously contributed an initial proof of concept to show how you'd build an MSC3401 SFU using Pion at https://github.com/matrix-org/sfu-to-sfu - which (I think?) is the first time that the first implementation of a major core MSC has been contributed from outside the core team. Huge thanks to Sean to setting the ball going on this - the current PoC demonstrates not just SFU capability but also the decentralised cascading architecture which makes MSC3401 unique. The initial PoC speaks a 'test jig' version of MSC3401 hooked up to a simple web client for experimentation, but Matthew's now experimenting with adding genuine Matrix support to it via mautrix-go, and hooking up Element Call to speak to it.

Adding SFU support to Element Call will mean that we can support more than ~7 simultaneous calls - and with MSC3401-style decentralised cascading, we should be able to support hundreds or even thousands. There's lots of work remaining here, but the ball is now rolling. For more info about SFUs and MSC3401, check out Matthew's CommCon 2021 talk (which was what prompted Sean's implementation work here!)

Separately, we've been running Element Call on staging with E2EE enabled for the last few weeks, and should be releasing the first major Element Call update next week. And once SFUs land, then Element Call can exit beta - watch out Zoom!

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗libolm (website)

uhoreg announces

libolm 3.2.12 has been released. The main update in this release is that the olm_sas_calculate_mac_fixed_base64 is now exposed in all the official bindings, so that MSC3783 can be implemented. Aside from that, there have been some minor fixes and improvements. See the changelog for more information.

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben says

While most of the work in the background continues (Sliding-Sync PoC, Wasm+NodeJS support, UniFFI macros), the first few parts surface through the cracks and show themselves in new PRs: basic wasm web-js and nodejs support has landed with more APIs, tests and documentation on the way; the Sliding Sync PoC has been upgraded to the latest JSON layout and now provides a first set of reactive API via FFI, too. Furthermore this week has seen a bunch of cleanups, simplifications and clarifications around the OlmMachine and crypto types, and we're fixing a bug in the state store, where not all data has been properly encrypted in the past.

👉️ 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 announces

Dart Matrix SDK : Version 0.9.9

This week, the team released version 0.9.9. In this new version, we added a search function to allow searching for an event in database and on server through several requests to the /messages endpoint.

There was also some work on updating the image size when generating thumbnail, which allow saving a bit of calculation when sending events. If using a custom resizer make sure to update the resize response as here.

We also did some refactor with the event sender getter. The getter result is now a future to allow requesting the member event to the server if we cannot find it in memory, to help fix the issue when the user was not found in memory.

Finally, a quick helper function (client.waitForSync) was added. It allows you to wait for a room to appear in (left, join, invited) section of the sync response.

See you next time ;)

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗Matrix Community Manager (website)

The highly configurable message aggregation and filtering bot for matrix!

Sleuth announces

Only a small update this week. One new feature and some much needed Ansible improvements.

Pipes move messages from one room to an other. Useful if you are in important rooms but only want to monitor a single room. The Ansible role can now manage more aspects of MCM. Mainly in the post setup phase. The major one being if you run into encryption errors for any reason you can run the playbook with the fix tag and it will generate you a new device ID and encryption store.

• Pipes move all messages from one room to an other.
• Adding a filter now uses the room the command was sent from by default if the roomid is not specified.
• Ansible role now has tags for start, stop, configs, fix and all.
• Ansible role backs up the configuration.toml file to prevent the possibility of data loss.

Gitlab releases Come chat on Matrix

🔗Dept of Ping 🏓

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

🔗#ping:maunium.net

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

🔗#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

🔗Dept of Social Good 🙆

Thib says

Element has signed the open letter of the Global Encryption Coalition, of which we are members of. We are working with them to push back against any intrusive measures that could compromise the privacy of users.

🔗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:

• MSC3821: Update the redaction rules, again
• MSC3820: Room version 11
• MSC3819: Allowing widgets to send/receive to-device messages
• MSC3818: Copy room type on upgrade
• MSC3817: Allow widgets to create rooms

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC3267: Reference relations
• MSC3604: Room Version 10
• MSC2676: Message editing 🎉
• MSC3816: Clarify Thread Participation

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3787: Allowing knocks to restricted rooms

🔗Spec Updates

Some new MSCs popping up this week around widgets, room types, fixing notifications with threads and room version 11! Though note that the last one currently serves as a means for the Spec Core Team to publicly track what should be included in room version 11, and is by no means is its content considered final.

The Spec Core Team are currently focused on room version 10 and getting Matrix v1.3 out the door soon. There's also been some discussion on MSC2676: Message editing this week, with the intention of finally landing that in the spec. Thanks to richvdh for driving the charge there.

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC1902: Split the media repo into s2s and c2s parts!

Homeservers currently make use of Client Server Media APIs to pull media from other homeservers over federation. This has worked for a long time, but is a bit of a confusing blur of the lines between client<->server and server<->server traffic. It also makes it difficult to require different authentication rules for clients versus servers.

This MSC aims to help clean that up. Take a look if you're interested!

🔗Dept of GSoC 🎓️

Thib says

It's May 20, and Google has announced the results for its Summer of Code program.

This year the Matrix.org Foundation participated, and we could be granted the five slots we asked for!

• Jayesh Nirve is going to work on WebRTC support for FluffyChat, mentored by Krille
• nannako is going help handling multimedia files in kazv, mentored by tusooa
• Aditya Rajput will implement encrypted search for Matrix, mentored by cvwright
• Munukurthi Binesh is going to work on 3rd Party Authorised Room Membership, mentored by Cadair
• r0hit2005 will work on updating the implementation of VoIP support, mentored by Nico

Many thanks to all the candidates, we had some very strong proposals this year.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier announces

This week we released Synapse 1.59, which features a bunch of niceties including new features, bug fixes and performance improvements. Read all about it, including increased flexibility for workers and improvements on push rules, on the matrix.org blog!

Aside from this, the team is still hard at work and focusing on making Synapse better, among other things by looking at improving performances on room join and decreasing memory usage.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗matrix-hookshot (website)

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

tadzik says

matrix-hookshot 1.7.0 is out

Last week new version of Hookshot came out starring the following changes:

• Docker images can now be built cross-platform. Thanks Paul for getting arm64 builds going!
• Improved GitLab push hook formatting: markdown commit hashes, link "N commits" to the list of commits, if there are more commits than can be shown only link instead, and show committer unless a single person committed and pushed
• RSS feed support got a configuration widget: now need for using bot commands anymore! (though they are still supported)
• Added widgets.openIdOverrides option to help developers test configuration widgets locally
• Fixed regression where GitHubRepo and GitLabRepo connection config options were not being honoured

and more! Visit #hookshot:half-shot.uk to follow the development in real-time.

🔗matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

Last week's testing updates are now in master!

Also included:

• Better error handling: if the backend hits an error that causes your connection to KT chats to be dropped, the bridge should notify you about it (not that it should ever happen in the first place, but you never know!)
• Better logging: the Node module can be configured to print the arguments of RPC commands received from / sent to the Python module. The example Node config includes a default set that should be helpful for general debugging.
• Room metadata bridging: setting an Open Chat title & topic from Matrix should work now!
  • Setting the title of a Direct Chat should work too, but topics remain unbridged (since KT Direct Chats don't have topics/descriptions)
• Defensive error handling: Attempts to add a non-friend user to a DM will be refused by the bridge, since KT only allows Direct Chats between friends
  • KT does allow "1:1 Open Chats" between non-friends, but those aren't bridged yet

Also, testing adds support for joining KakaoTalk rooms from Matrix, either by joining an existing portal or providing an Open Chat URL to the bot with a join command. ...However, I've been unable to test this, since KT is stingy about whom it allows to join Open Chats! So please give this a try if you can.

In other news, this bridge is now listed on Matrix.org! 🥳 Thanks Thib !

Also, for the time being, I will be taking a hiatus from this bridge & the LINE bridge, as I'll be quite occupied for the foreseeable future on account of having joined Element 🤩!! (The bridges aren't paused forever--I just have to work out the details of their future before making any promises I can't keep 🙂)

Special thanks to all those who have given feedback & advice on these bridges, and to Beeper for having sponsored their development ❤️

---

• Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net
• Testing room: #kakaotalk-bridge-testing:miscworks.net / https://open.kakao.com/o/gjGQFuae
• Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

🔗matrix-appservice-discord (website)

A bridge between Matrix and Discord.

Half-Shot announces

Hello! Just a notice to say that the `matrix-appservice-discord project has kindly been adopted by the matrix.org foundation, which means that hopefully there will be a lot more time available to maintain it than when it was my personal project! We expect to have a new update for you (the first one in 1.5 years) very soon! If you've got any questions about this, please feel free to ask in the usual spots like #discord:half-shot.uk.

Happy bridging!

🔗Heisenbridge (website)

Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.

hifi says

Release v1.13.0 🥳

• Read default port and listen address from config url (@BtbN)
• Improvements to pillifying IRC nicks, again
• Fixes for AUTOQUERY not always working correctly
• Allow anyone to use STATUS command to get their own status
• Filter control characters only for plumbs so people can send garbage to IRC if they wish from Matrix
• Support for converting IRC color codes to Matrix (@tjaderxyz)
• Fixed compose docker Synapse configuration for registration
• Improved Python 3.10 compatibliy (@BtbN)
• Hidden room to hide joins using restricted rooms join rule (@BtbN)

Some cool stuff this time around! Aside from many bug fixes this release has two great new features: IRC message colors and hiding invites from channels.

IRC colors are enabled by default and are rendered how your Matrix client sees fit. They can be disabled per network if needed.

Hiding joins works with room v9 restricted join rules feture to allow IRC ghosts to join rooms without an invite from the bridge bot first. This clears some clutter and may even make joining a bit faster in the long run - we will see. This feature is disabled by default and needs to be enabled by the bridge administrator as it is consiered a "labs" feature for now.

Go and get a Dell from GitHub, PyPI or matrix-docker-ansible-deploy!

Thanks!

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

In the last weeks, we've landed a few smaller features and papercut fixes in NeoChat:

• Urls will now more often be shown as links
• A couple of input processing bugs have been fixed, which lead, among others, to fewer broken ASCII emojis :)
• Clicking on a notification will now properly open NeoChat even on wayland 🥳
• Users can now disable sending typing notifications

We're also making progress on the end-to-end encryption support where we hopefully will soon have news from libQuotient's side.

🔗Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat says

Threads

• Finished private read receipts (in review), which is needed to proceed with read receipts for threads (MSC3771)
• Continue work on implementing push rule for manually related events (MSC3772)
• Notifications for threads (MSC3773) is blocked on the two MSCs above
• Layout tweaks and bug fixes on all platforms

Community Testing

• We ran 47 different tests on this week’s RC and found 20 defects/potential improvements
• We are inviting community testers to take part in the Android and iOS app layout experiments
• 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 says

• Improved logging Jitsi errors for video call issues
• Added option to ignore user when reporting spam
• Made lots of improvements to our automated tests
• Show metaspaces even when there are no real spaces joined
• Add shortcut to get to the explore space page more easily via the space avatar in the left panel
• Remove invites from breadcrumbs
• Fall back to untranslated strings rather than showing error for missing translations
• Improve lightbox (image viewing when you click on an attached file or profile pic)
• Improve email verification dialog on registration page
• In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
  • Minor improvements to copy and layout for video rooms, and improve removing stuck devices
  • More polishing of context menus

🔗Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan says

Element iOS

• We have a release candidate available that squashes quite a few problematic bugs
• Mention pills have been improved and are now better than ever
• Work is continuing on the new authentication flows and live location sharing
• Launching home layout experiment next week

Element X

• The iOS FII crate is now being checked on the CI and has been merged into the main RustSDK branch
• We're making progress on crash reporting tools and rage shakes
• Starting on adopting Swift's async/await throughout the project

🔗Element Android (website)

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

benoit says

• Launching spaces layout experiments next week
• Release 1.4.16 is out. Should be available in production at the beginning of next week. Sadly this release will not be available on F-Droid.
• FTUE screens are nearly finished. We are implementing the latest ones. For instance Email input and validation.
• Also still working on the integration of the crypto Rust SDK. We are at a point of fixing the remaining issues.

🔗Cinny (website)

Cinny is a Matrix client focused on simplicity, elegance and security

Lozenge says

Cinny v2.0.3 - What's changed

• Add the ability to focus on paste
• Add allowCustomHomeservers config option
• Fix crash in a room without m.room.create state event
• Fix message edit isn't reflected in the reply
• Fix join room with alias
• Fix crash on leaving room

Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in/ · Join our room: #cinny:matrix.org · Github: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny · Twitter: https://twitter.com/@cinnyapp

🔗Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

🔗Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

In the last two weeks, populus-viewer has seen some exciting changes:

• Blurhash support, following MSC2448: Using BlurHash as a Placeholder for Matrix Media
• A redesigned landing page, and general CSS overhaul
• An improved layout algorithm for bartabs in PDF margins
• Support for video annotations, following MSC3775: Markup Locations for Audiovisual Media

Here's a demo video of video annotation, and a screenshot of the new landing page:

🔗Dept of Widgets 🧩

🔗Mjolnir Widget (website)

A widget for moderating with mjolnir. Highly WIP. Use at your own risk!

MTRNord (they/them) reports

Hi, just some small update this week:

• Philantrop 🏳️‍🌈 pointed out the widget was missing the room ban type, which is now added to the widget.
• The ban list view now also shows the room id of the room the ban is from. (it will get extended to be an alias at some point. This is planned)
• Dependencies have been updated.

Check it out at https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-moderation-widget or join #mjolnir-widget:nordgedanken.dev if you have any questions.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben says

Post release (we have release 0.5.0 last week) the main focus was on minor fixes and bigger features we had pending but didn't want to merge before. Aside from a few documentation and other minor fixes - among others switching to resolver v2 or more accurate power_level calculation - the biggest merge was around the FFI interface for Apple (iOS and Mac), which we have initial support for now 🎉.

The main work is currently happening behind the scenes, while we prepare for the upcoming tasks - like WASM and NodeJS support for the crypto-crate and work on UniFFI. We are also hardening our processes for improved security and risk management around our code base, dependencies and the potential to ship binaries.

👉️ We are very happy about the influx of people, who joined our developer community questions since the release. We'd like to take this opportunity again to invite anyone else interested in hacking on matrix in rust to 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.com

Henri Carnot reports

Matrix Dart SDK : Version 0.9.6

This week, the team released version 0.9.6.

This release brings various bug fixes. We fixed cache corruption with fragmented timeline, and we now gracefully handle invalid recent emojis states.

Also, we now properly update the user lastActiveAgo on presence event updates and not when opening a room.

Finally, we moved the MSC2835 support into its own extension.

See you next time ;)

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

Samuel Philipp says

We are proud to announce that Ossrox is now listed as a hosting provider on matrix.org! 😍 We offer Matrix Home Servers via https://ossrox.org - for the time being only in the German-speaking area. We are dedicated to hosting open-source software and also offer other services in the messaging, groupware and web meeting segments. If you got any questions, just reach out to us at #public:ossrox.org.

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

addanno says

Hello Matrix friends. We have recently launched an online learning platform that has Element at its core. We added some great features such as annotations for both course material and web pages. Here is an overview video of what we are doing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY3safwbllQ

🔗Dept of Ping 🏓

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

🔗#ping:maunium.net

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

🔗#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

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] MSC3815: 3D Worlds
• [WIP] MSC3814: Dehydrated devices with SSSS
• MSC3813: Obfuscated events

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs had final comment period proposed this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3787: Allowing knocks to restricted rooms (merge)

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3790: Register Clients

🔗Spec Updates

The Spec Core Team has decided to not include MSC3440 (threading via m.thread relations) specifically in the upcoming Matrix v1.3 release. We previously stated that it would be in v1.3, but there's a few unproven MSCs (namely MSC3773 (notifications for threads)) which make it feel improper to put threads into the spec at this stage. We're aiming for a future (very near) spec release to contain threads, assuming we can get enough of the feature landed. This is a very similar approach to what we did with Spaces: while the core feature existed as FCP-concluded for a while, we wanted to give some other MSCs a chance to land before writing it up formally.

As a follow-on from this, any implementations that are currently assuming "v1.3" spec support translates to threading support should note the following:

• Clients which are pre-emptively checking for v1.3 in /versions should stop doing that. Look for org.matrix.msc3440.stable as an "unstable" feature flag instead.
• Servers which offer MSC3440's behaviour should expose it on stable endpoints and expose org.matrix.msc3440.stable for clients to detect.
• Optionally, clients and servers can drop support for the org.matrix.msc3440 (truly unstable) flag, given clients & servers should have already upgraded.

At the spec level, we'll still be writing up MSC3440's dependencies (aggregations and friends), but will notably be missing MSC3440 specifically in v1.3. If folks can update their clients urgently, it would be massively appreciated!

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2596: Proposal to always allow rescinding invites!

A simple change to the auth rules to help prevent an edge case where one is able to invite a user, but not disinvite them as the latter requires a separate permission. The MSC attempts to solve this by always allowing the cancellation of invitations you've sent.

A small MSC, but one with some open threads still. Perhaps a good opportunity to go in and clean it up!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

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

squah says

Hello everyone. This week the team cut a release candidate for Synapse v1.59, which includes:

• New module API support for editing push rules.
• Experimental support for MSC3266, federated room summary and MSC3786.
• Updates to support for MSC2285, hidden read receipts.
• Many bug fixes and internal improvements!

Meanwhile, the core team has looking at caches and memory usage: Erik has been looking at ways to reduce the memory usage of small servers, Shay's been adding some exciting new config options to limit the total memory usage of Synapse and David's added the ability to reload the cache factors of a running Synapse instance via SIGHUP.

In parallel, Olivier's been doing groundwork to reduce replication traffic for workerised Synapse deployments, Andrew (anoa) has been looking at media retention policies and work continues on faster room joins.

🔗Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander reports

This week we've actually made two releases — Dendrite 0.8.4 and Dendrite 0.8.5 — which are both primarily targeting performance and bug fixes.

We've also released our new living documentation, which is available at https://matrix-org.github.io/dendrite/, which features new installation instructions and documents that will be helpful to Dendrite server administrators. We will be writing more documentation and expanding this over time.

Changes include:

• The built-in NATS Server has been updated to version 2.8.2
• Monolith deployments will no longer panic at startup if given a config file that does not include the internal_api and external_api options
• State resolution v2 now correctly identifies other events related to power events, which should fix some event auth issues
• The latest events updater will no longer implicitly trust the new forward extremities when calculating the current room state, which may help to avoid some state resets
• The one-time key count is now correctly returned in /sync even if the request otherwise timed out, which should reduce the chance that unnecessary one-time keys will be uploaded by clients
• The create-account tool should now work properly when the database is configured using the global connection pool
• Fixes a regression introduced in the previous version where appservices, push and phone-home statistics would not work over plain HTTP
• Adds missing indexes to the sync API output events table, which should significantly improve /sync performance and reduce database CPU usage
• Building Dendrite with the bimg thumbnailer should now work again (contributed by database64128)

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

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair reports

Most of this week's fixes are in the testing branch, so try it out!

• Ability to DM your own KakaoTalk puppet
• Fix to the problem of needing to DM a puppet twice to start chatting with them
• Fixes to leaving KakaoTalk chats from Matrix (via the !kt leave bot command)
• Nicer output of the whoami command, to make it easier to click on your own KakaoTalk puppet to DM it

Coming soon:

• Proper support for setting an Open Chat title & topic from Matrix
• Support for joining KakaoTalk rooms from Matrix, either by joining an existing portal or providing an Open Chat URL to the bot with a join command

---

• Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net
• Testing room: #kakaotalk-bridge-testing:miscworks.net / https://open.kakao.com/o/gjGQFuae
• Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Ement.el (website)

Matrix client for Emacs

alphapapa announces

Ement.el, a Matrix client for [GNU Emacs](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs], received some more updates this week:

Additions

• New Transient-based command menu for room buffers, bound to ?.
• New command ement-list-members, which lists all members in a room.
• Member completion now completes from all members in a room (rather than only those whose messages have been seen).
• Power-level events are displayed.
• Grouped membership events have tooltips showing each member's individual event.
• When usernames are colorized, message bodies may optionally be colorized in a less intense shade of the same color, so they are easily distinguished yet easy on the eyes (and, of course, the shading is customizable).

Changes

• When displaying usernames in the margin, names that are wider than the margin are abbreviated, with the full name in the tooltip.

Fixes

• Typing notifications (recently broken--oops!).
• Sending direct messages marks new direct rooms as direct rooms.
• Event notifications for rooms not displayed in a buffer.

As always, feel free to join us in #ement.el:matrix.org.

🔗Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

Hello and welcome to another Element TWIM!

Threads

• We’re still hard at work improving the Threads Beta experience for y’all. Starting with Notifications and UI polish.
  • We’ve fixed some visual bugs on all of our platforms this week
  • We’re continuing work on MSCs for improvements to read receipts, push rules, and thread notifications in general.

Community testing

• Next week, we are planning to test:

  • Video rooms
  • And the new release candidate

• We have a new consent form for testers to fill in! 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

• We’ve improved how messages are deleted, along with other defects. Some of our favourite improvements include:
  • Fixed room history visibility when you have keys to decrypt messages
  • Improvements to viewing long room topics
  • A number of UI tweaks and polishes including improved layout to the settings
  • Fix the way pills look
• The team is actively moving tests to Cypress; You can find the latest test runs here

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

• Video Rooms! Turn them on and try them out, we’re continuing to squash bugs
• We added a “copy link” option to the context menu
• Removed some of the older features from labs
• Improved ordering in the new search dialog

🔗Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan says

• The newest version of the app (1.8.14) was released on Monday! In this release we’ve made a bunch of improvements and bug fixes, check it out here
• 💊 We also merged an initial version of mention pills and are working on ironing out edge cases. Exciting!
• There’s good progress on the new authentication flows and live location sharing, both of which we’re looking forward to sharing and testing with you soon.
• On the ElementX front we're nearly done with the DevX setup and are working towards using the latest Rust SDK
  • unit and UI test runs on the CI and Codecov.io coverage reports
  • swiftlint, danger-swift and sonarcloud.io checks for code quality
  • automatic generation of PR builds, published on diawi
  • scripts for importing and reusing localizable strings from Android
  • towncrier changelogs and more

🔗Element Android (website)

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

Danielle reports

• We’ve been working on smashing bugs, improving stability, and reducing crashes.
• Our first time user flow is progressing - we’re starting to test the new authentication flow internally and will be asking for help testing this soon.

🔗Cinny (website)

Cinny is a Matrix client focused on simplicity, elegance and security

ajbura says

Cinny v2.0.0: Session verification and other e2ee features

🔗Features

• Redesign app/user settings
• Add support to manage cross-signing and key backup
• Add support to manage sessions
• Add Session verification by emojis
• Add recently used section to emoji board
• Add LaTeX / math input and rendering support
• Add notification sounds
• Add sound on incoming invites
• Sort DM's by activity
• Sort search results by activity
• Improve jump to unread button
• Replace confirm and prompt with custom dialogs
• Adapt to different device widths
• Native application using Tauri

🔗Bugs

• Fix loading on older browsers
• Fix crash on load and room creation on dendrite
• Fix can't open spaces from public room list
• Fix max power level in room permissions
• Fix incorrect custom html crashing app
• Fix crash on unable to getContent of tombstoned room
• Don't enable e2ee for bridged platform

See release at: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny/releases/tag/v2.0.0

🔗Cinny for desktop

Since this release, we are also shipping a desktop app of Cinny for Windows, MacOS and Linux. You can download the app for your platform from https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny-desktop/releases

Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in/ Join our channel at: #cinny:matrix.org Github: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny Twitter: https://twitter.com/@cinnyapp

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben reports

The Rust Matrix team is very excited to announce the next major release Matrix SDK 0.5 "stores and native crypto", now available for everyone by adding matrix-sdk = "0.5.0" to their dependencies in their Cargo.toml. This first major release in about 8 months brings significant changes many have been waiting for:

• Better, safer, native-er crypto: matrix-sdk 0.5 ditches libolm in favor of Vodozemac, the completely fresh rust-native re-implementation of the crypto crate. It has also been audited, the report of which is scheduled to be released soon.
• Store revamp: the entire cache storage infrastructure for crypto and state has been restructured to allow for full plug-ability, with even the two default supported backends, sled and indexeddb both being separate crates now. And as a matter of fact, a community-driven sql implementation has already been published as beta (with postgres and sqlite support) by charlotte 🦝.
• WebAssembly; both of these changes also allow us to finally make WASM a Tier 1 supported target for the SDK. Not only does it build and even use the browser native indexeddb for permanent storage, we also have CI tests ensuring nothing will break this support going forward.
• Features, Features and Process: there's plenty more features and bug fixes in this release, e.g. native thumbnail generation support, as well as changes on our processes going forward.

For more details, check out the Release Notes.

Sidenote: If you want to contribute, or just learn Rust by actually doing it, we recommend taking a look team at the help wanted issues in our repo.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗Buscarron (website)

Web forms (HTTP POST) to matrix

Aine announces

Buscarron v1.1.0 is here

Buscarron is the new backoffice of the etke.cc and its main feature is to receive web forms (HTML/HTTP POST) and convert them into (encrypted) matrix messages.

So, what's new?

• Email confirmation after form submissions with Postmark
• Templates support for redirect URLs
• Automatically ban spammers, scanners and bots

Check out the source code and say hi in #buscarron:etke.cc

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗Who's In This Room Matrix Bot

Jake C says

If you use Matrix with the Signal bridge (or any bridge) with relay mode enabled, your guests have probably experienced the confusion where they don't know who else (on Matrix) is in the chat as only Matrix can double-puppet.

When this bot is added to a Matrix room, it will announce:

• Who the room members are when a new Signal user joins;
• When a Matrix user joins or leaves, who that Matrix user was.

I built it just this afternoon using the excellent matrix-bot-sdk, but it's in Typescript and has plentyful unit tests!

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!

PRs for adding support for other chat apps (basically identifying which bridge from the puppeted username) are very welcome! https://github.com/jakecoppinger/whos-in-this-room-matrix-bot

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

J. Ryan Stinnett says

The videos from the HYTRADBOI conference a few weeks back are now publicly available, in case anyone was curious but couldn't make the conference. I gave a talk about building collaborative, open software on Matrix. The whole conference was great, so I recommend browsing the schedule for videos that may interest you. 😄

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

uhoreg reports

Loomio, an open source collaborative decision making tool, now supports integrating with Matrix rooms using their chatbot. They previously supported other (lesser) chat systems, but have recently added support for Matrix.

🔗Dept of Ping 🏓

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

🔗#ping:maunium.net

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

🔗#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

🔗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:

• MSC3787: Allowing knocks to restricted rooms
• MSC3786: Add a default push rule to ignore m.room.server_acl events
• MSC3782: Matrix public key login spec
• MSC3780: Knocking on action=join
• MSC3779: "Owned" State Events
• MSC3775: Markup Locations for Audiovisual Media
• MSC3773: Notifications for threads
• MSC3772: Push rule for mutually related events
• MSC3771: Read receipts for threads

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC3787: Allowing knocks to restricted rooms

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

"Wowza, that's a lot of new MSCs!" I hear you say. This is actually a listing of the last 3 weeks, as it was pointed out to me that the last 3 editions of TWIM have not all features an MSC status update - which means some MSCs may not have necessary made it into the limelight.

As such, here's those from this past week, as well as the ones that were missed!

🔗Spec Updates

It's that time of the year again - a new Spec release is on the horizon! Matrix v1.3 is expected to land sometime this month, and will include:

• MSC3440 (threads) + related MSCs
• MSC3787 (knock+restricted join rules)
• MSC3604 (room version 10)
• Any other MSCs which have so far been accepted, but not yet made it into the spec.

MSCs which land between now and v1.3 might get incorporated if easy enough, though chances are they'll slip to v1.4 (expected next quarter).

On top of that, the other bit of news is that the proposal-in-review label has now been removed from the matrix-spec-proposals repo and thus all MSCs. This doesn't mean your MSC is no longer in review! We simply found the label redundant along with the other labels in the process (it was attached to all MSCs which hadn't been accepted/merged yet, which means very little) and thus we decided to remove it to reduce noise.

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2881: Message Attachments!

This MSC has actually been potentially(?) superseded by MSC3382. In short, both look to provide a solution to the problem of attaching (multiple!) images to messages, such that clients can display an album of images in a single event in the timeline.

Check it out if you're interested in introducing such a feature!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

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

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

Synapse v1.58.0 was released this week! Check out the v1.58 blog post for the full scoop, but the highlights are:

• Our Docker images and Debian packages are now built from a dependency lockfile courtesy of Poetry. Props to David for leading the charge on this multi-week epic.
• An experimental implementation of MSC3383 has been contributed by @Bubu and @jcgruenhage at Famedly, which will help with proxying federation traffic, amongst other uses.
• An experimental implementation of MSC2815 has been merged, which allows room moderators to view redact event content for the purposes of moderation. This was contributed by @tulir at Beeper.
• Device list updates are now asynchronous thanks to Erik, leading to much faster login times for accounts in big rooms.
• plus many other bug fixes and improvements!

We also released a v1.58.1 patch shortly afterwards to address an issue with the Debian packages on some configurations. Server admins not using the Matrix.org Debian packages do not need to install this patch release.

Otherwise, ongoing work from the core team continues with Sean and Rich working on faster room join performance, Olivier pushing forwards on testing Synapse with workers in Complement, while Erik has been tackling general performance work.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Half-Shot reports

Hey folks! We're announcing our 1.6.0 release for matrix-hookshot today. More features in this release: tadzik has gotten involved and given us support for RSS feeds in this release. You can check out how to get going with those in our hosted documentation.

The highlights this time around are:

• Add RSS/Atom feed support (#315)
• Add support for GitLab in the widgets configuration UI. (#320)
• Send a notice when a GitLab merge request gets some review comments. (#314)
• Add new !hookshot gitlab project command to configure project bridges in rooms. See the docs for instructions. (#321)
• New hookshot_connection_event(_failed) metrics for tracking successful event handling. Reinstate matrix_* metrics which were previously not being recorded. (#312)

🔗matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

This week brings another round of big improvements & new features!

Features & fixes include:

• Fixes to Docker support & the documentation for setting it up
• Changes to the login flow
  • The bridge can now be configured to enforce a login flow that more closely matches the official KakaoTalk desktop client's, and to better warn you when a new login will kick out another one of your KT sessions. This will hopefully prevent the bridge from getting KT accounts banned!
• Backfilling for KT->Matrix read receipts
• Commands for adding/removing KakaoTalk friends
• Commands to edit your KakaoTalk ID & mark it as shared or hidden
• Matrix->KT DM creation, i.e. the ability to create a new DM with a KakaoTalk user from within Matrix
  • This might fail on the first attempt at creating a DM. If it does, try re-inviting the KakaoTalk puppet to the room.
• Many stability & correctness improvements

With the combination of friends list curation & DM creation support, it should now be possible to connect with KT contacts entirely from Matrix! Simply add some friends, list them, and invite a listed friend to a 1:1 room!

---

• Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net
• Testing room: #kakaotalk-bridge-testing:miscworks.net / https://open.kakao.com/o/gjGQFuae
• Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

🔗matrix-appservice-irc (website)

Node.js IRC bridge for Matrix

Half-Shot announces

Hi folks, note that today (Wednesday) we released a high security update for the matrix-appservice-irc bridge. Please update to 0.34.0 as soon as you can.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Thunderbird (website)

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

freaktechnik reports

This week we released Thunderbird Beta 101.0b1. It includes a bunch of bug fixes for the Matrix implementation and shows reactions as system messages, so you know when someone gives you a 👍️.

🔗Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

Someone on Twitter complained that no chat client works like MSN anymore, where you could have separate windows for each chat. So for MSN compatibility we added that. (It is a bit experimental still, expect some stuff to not work or crash)

Bulbu also went through a lot of effort to add a second set of emoji shortcodes to Nheko. Those should be more familiar to people coming from other platforms or clients while the old shortcodes are available still as well. We also saw a lot of progress on the Finnish, Chinese, Indonesian and Russian translations, animated images should work properly in the image viewer again, buttons for opening the member list are now clearly marked with a people icon next to them. The memberlist is also now search- and sortable.

Anyway, have a look at how important multiple windows are:

🔗FluffyChat (website)

Krille Fear reports

FluffyChat 1.4.0 has been released with a lot of bug fixes, performance improvements and new designs. Take a look at the new designed sign up screen, which also now supports recommended homeservers from joinmatrix.org

Krille Fear reports

Full changelog:

• design: Display icon for failed sent messages (Krille Fear)
• design: Display own stories at first place and combine with new stories button (Krille Fear)
• feat: Add "Show related DMs in spaces" settings (20kdc)
• feat: Better image sending experience (Krille Fear)
• feat: Display event timestamp if selected (Krille Fear)
• feat: Faster image resizing (Krille Fear)
• feat: Groups and Direct Chats virtual spaces option (20kdc)
• feat: New onboarding design (Krille Fear)
• feat: Onboarding with dynamic homeservers from joinmatrix.org (Krille Fear)
• feat: Play audio messages in stories (Krille Fear)
• feat: Use native imaging for much faster thumbnail calc on mobile (Krille Fear)
• feat: add Dockerfile for nginx/web builds (TheOneWithTheBraid)
• feat: allow to create widgets (TheOneWithTheBraid)
• feat: remove diacritics (henri2h)
• feat: irish language support (Graeme Power)
• feat: Enable screensharing on Mobile
• feat: support AppImage builds
• feat: Improve spaces design
• fix: Android theme is not auto updating when system theme changes (Krille Fear)
• fix: Chat view becomes gray for a second on sending reaction (Krille Fear)
• fix: Don't request new thumbnail resolution on every window resize (Samuel Mezger)
• fix: Dont display own failed-to-send events in stories (Krille Fear)
• fix: Hide markdown in chat list preview and local notifications (Krille Fear)
• fix: Hide pinned events if event is not accessible or loading (Krille Fear)
• fix: Image sending (Krille Fear)
• fix: Make audioplayer waveforms thinner and better clickable (Krille Fear)
• fix: Some story layout bugs (Krille Fear)
• fix: Widgets dialog crashes (Krille Fear)
• fix: login form supports switching fields via tab (Philip Molares)

🔗Ement.el (website)

Matrix client for Emacs

alphapapa announces

Ement.el has received several updates since the last time it was mentioned in TWIM:

Additions

• A new room list command, ement-taxy-room-list, shows rooms grouped "smartly" (and programmably). (It will be made the default soon; until then, call the command to use it.)
  • The new room list shows unread-notification/highlight counts, similar to Element.
• Basic support for spaces:
  • Rooms (and spaces) can be added to and removed from spaces.
  • Rooms are listed under their spaces in ement-taxy-room-list.
• Reactions can now be toggled off (i.e. redacted) by clicking them, like in Element.
• Command ement-room-send-file allows uploading non-image files to rooms, and file messages are now displayed usefully, so the files can be downloaded or viewed.
• Command ement-ignore-user ignores and unignores users.
• Command ement-tag-room adds and removes favourite, low-priority, or custom tags on rooms.
• Command ement-room-occur allows searching messages in a room buffer, similar to Emacs's occur command (i.e. it locally searches already-received messages).
• Membership events are now coalesced by default, similar to Element (especially helpful in large public rooms, like bridged IRC rooms, where join/part spam can be overwhelming).
• "In reply to" links in replies, as well as other matrix.to links, can be activated in a room buffer to go to the linked message.
• Mentions in outgoing messages are HTML-linkified (aka "pilled"), like Element.
• Generated avatars for rooms that have none, similar to Element. (Only displayed in ement-taxy-room-list for now.)
• Option ement-shr-use-fonts (disabled by default, which prevents HTML messages from being displayed in a different font).
• Faces for favourite/low-priority rooms.
• Redacted messages that are still known locally are now displayed with a strikethrough (after reconnecting, their content will be unknown).
• When images are disabled, image messages are presented as clickable URLs, so they can still be viewed.
• Some events, like membership events and images, are displayed alongside a vertical bar to help distinguish them from normal messages.
• Even "hotter"-looking timestamps for rooms updated in the last hour.

Changes

• Refactored notification system. Now easier to configure (see M-x customize-group RET ement-notify RET).

Fixes

• Improved error handling when looking up homeserver hostnames and .well-known URIs.
• Improved error handling when processing malformed events.
• "Elemental" display style (not used by many users, apparently).

Come join us in #ement.el:matrix.org!

🔗Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat announces

🔗Element

Decryption

• Progressing through implementing sharing keys for past messages (MSC3061)
• Improved UTD (Unable to Decrypt) analytics to gather more insight on the most common errors faced by users

Community testing

• Thank you all who joined the async community testing sessions.
• We tested 51 cases and found 16 issues and potential improvements this week in the RC (release candidates) between all platforms
• Next week, we are planning to test:
  • New search experience on Web
• 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!

madlittlemods (Eric Eastwood) reports

In this months demos (also shown off at the top of the TWIM post), Eric showed off a proof of concept to anonymize your screenshots so you can easily include more context when submitting logs or bug reports without worrying where the bug occurred. The current concept will color block all of the text on the page to still maintain the structure of the app but completely hide the content itself.

This still has a ways to go before it's integrated in Element under the click of a button so if anyone wants to take over or give feedback, go comment on the issue, https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/9615. If you want to use the anonymization now, you can manually run the JavaScript snippet from the issue in the browser devtools.

This mode could even be further extended further to include event_id labels in the corner of each message to easily correlate the logs to the screenshot.

Happy screenshotting!

kittykat reports

• Continuing with UI polish and MSCs for releasing threads out of Beta:
  • MSC3771: Read receipts for threads
  • MSC3772: Push rule for mutually related events
  • MSC3773: Notifications for threads
• We are testing out Sonarcloud, you’ll see comments from the sonarcloud bot in new PRs about bugs, vulnerabilities and other inconsistencies that it has found
• Our first time user experience is getting some attention in Web. We’re working on simplifying a user’s first session as we know it can be pretty daunting
• As part of our efforts to improve PR review times, we have put together some guidance on how to choose a good issue to work on
• There have been some bug fixes and improvements around ending Jitsi calls
• In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
• Check out this week’s Matrix Live for a preview of video rooms :)

🔗Element iOS (website)

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

Manu says

• We’re thinking about new ways to give flexibility on the Home screen - watch this space!
• The new Create Account flow is being implemented, currently we’re working on the captcha and T&Cs pages
• Fix several crashes like when searching or when clicking bottom bar twice
• Improve interaction with spaces which are in a space
• ElementX-iOS
  • We are going to share more and more about ElementX-iOS, a complete rewrite of the Element-iOS app using matrix-rust-sdk. We made a prototype last quarter. The result was so promising that we want to go full steam on it
  • We are finishing the setup of the project to have a good developer experience
  • Then, we will attack user stories listed in this board that target the personal message use case
  • Watch the today TWIM video with Stefan, Manu and Thib for more details

🔗Element Android (website)

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

benoit announces

• Work is moving forward with our proposals for a new app layout, we’re excited to share it with you
• Our Create Account experience is still being updated, we’re currently working on ensuring that the Sign-in pieces work as expected
• Fixed a number of crash bugs around calls, launching app and space list
• Notifications have have been improved so that there is a noise for every notification which is received when they are enabled, in line with how web and iOS work
• On the SDK side, we are working to improve / clarify / document the public API. It’s still in progress, but the generated API documentation is already visible here: https://matrix-org.github.io/matrix-android-sdk2/

🔗Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

🔗Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr reports

Over the last two weeks, the theme in populus-viewer development has been permissions:

1. The settings menu for rooms has been redesigned
2. It's now possible to assign and remove standard roles (admin and moderator) from populus viewer
3. It's now possible to set power levels for standard events and actions from populus viewer
4. It's now possible to ban and unban using the membership management modal
5. Redacting the messages of others is now exposed as an action for those with that permission.

Besides that, I've been having some fun on the css-overhaul branch reorganizing some design elements, and centralizing the color CSS in a few variables, opening the way for things like a dark mode and user-definable themes. Here's a peek at the new milder and more welcoming default look:

gleachkr says

The permissions work now has us at one thousand commits. Here's to the next thousand! 🎉 As always, if you want to learn more, follow project progress, or talk about the future of social annotation on matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.

🔗Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP announces

🔗Matrix Wrench 0.7.0

I'm working on a few features for Wrench's anniversary on 13th June. Here's a bug fix for storing identities and a new button to check your membership status in a room.

• Added: A "Am I a member?" button tells your membership state in a room.
• Fixed: Unchanged identities got deleted from localStorage when editing identities twice.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict says

After a few release candidates and weeks later, we released Trixnity 2.0.0 today! It contains many breaking changes due to a large refactoring, which allows us to share a lot code between server and client implementations of the Matrix APIs. This means, that Trixnity can be used to implement matrix servers in addition to application services and clients!

Trixnity finally has support for Kotlin/JS. You can implement a browser client or even better: multiplatform client. Support for Kotlin/Native will follow soon (e. g. for iOS clients). Right now, there is no trixnity-client-store implementation for JavaScript (e. g. IndexedDB), so you need to stick with InMemoryStore at the moment.

Besides notification support (push rules are evaluated), we introduced helpers to get the complete timeline as Kotlin-Flow (no more complicated loops to get the timeline). You can even subscribe to all timeline events, which is really helpful to implement bots with e2e encryption support. Speaking of e2e encryption: libolm is bundled into trixnity-olm jars, so you don't need to build olm by your own anymore.

These are the most important features. For the complete changelog, have a look at the release candidates.

🔗Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart.

Henri Carnot [famedly] announces

This week the team released version 0.9.0 which contains new features and some refactoring as many deprecated endpoints were removed so make sure to use the new ones when doing the migration. Support for the Element recent emoji (io.element.recent_emoji) was added. A new method to get the last read marker was added. Lastly, the timeline logic was enhanced, and it's now possible to load the timeline at a specific event. So you can load the room to the last event and then paginate through the new events. When reaching the last event, the timeline will automatically allow new events to be added in the timeline when received.

See you next week ;)

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

Cadair announces

I have spent the day ignoring more important things and trying to have something to TWIM. I wrote (yet another) GitHub Action for sending build status to matrix rooms. This action looks at all the completed jobs in your workflow and posts a combined status for the workflow as a message and reactions for all the individual jobs, inspired by the maubot GitLab plugin.

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗Sundar

Hyperbased in Hyperspace says

Hello together. I made a generic bot, named Safed Sundarata, or Sundar in short, that should make it easy to get basic special functionality working. It has a lot of different functionality so you have an example code to work off of. The main motivation for this bot was to provide an !error <code> command for the developers in the ReactOS Matrix Rooms, which translates error codes to human readable text. Then of course i added other useful or fun commands to the bot. You want to read the Readme to find out more. This is the first time i ever wrote a bot, so feedback and corrections to the Source Code are highly appreciated. It is written in Go using the mautrix-go framework (thanks tulir and everyone who worked on this making it easy!). Even easier is to run and build it with go, no insane build system with broken dependencies required, which was the reason why i made it from scratch.

🔗Mjölnir (website)

The moderation bot for Matrix

Gnuxie 💜🐝 announces

🔗Mjölnir

We have released v1.4.2 of Mjolnir https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir/releases/tag/v1.4.2 which includes:

Bot:

• A new JoinWaveShortCircuit protection, thanks to Jonathan with https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir/pull/280. This protection can be used to detect a mass-join scenario and set the room to invite-only.
• Change of behaviour: Mjolnir will now apply server ACL and member bans to the most recently active rooms first (while syncing). The order was random before.
• The causes of errors at startup (e.g. via misconfiguration) have been made more clear.
• The image with the latest tag on dockerhub is now correctly in sync with the main branch.

Synapse Module:

• The python module version is now in sync with the current git tag.
• The Readme's example config has been fixed (thanks to Maranda ).

🔗graim (website)

A bot to moderate communities bridged with Discord via matrix-appservice-discord

luphoria announces

I am releasing a brand new moderation bot, graim! This bot allows you to moderate communities that are bridged with Discord via matrix-appservice-discord. You can tie a Matrix account to a Discord account, and moderate both platforms seamlessly from either end! Graim supports one Discord server and as many Matrix rooms as you want, per instance. :) You can run it yourself from the Github - https://github.com/luphoria/graim You can join the matrix space, which is bridged to the Discord server

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

andybalaam says

I'm streaming every week live coding Rust and Matrix at https://twitch.tv/andybalaam and https://andybalaam.uk.to (Owncast). Feel free to join me as I write a Rust Matrix bot. I'm currently on a side quest to add Redis support to the matrix-rust-sdk crypto store. You can watch past streams at diode.zone/a/andybalaam.

🔗Dept of Ping 🏓

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

🔗#ping:maunium.net

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

🔗#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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