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!

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib says

Taking my GNOME Foundation hat on for this news: the GNOME Foundation is adopting Matrix! Is this TWIM worthy? It probably wouldn't have been if it wasn't for all the great work of Gwmngilfen! We published a joint blog post (though in all fairness Greg did all the heavy lifting) to explain how the decision was taken, and transparently share the data we had at hand.

In practice that means after years of Matrix being around in the GNOME community and being the most popular platform, it's finally moving out of the grey zone of "everyone is using it but some older contributors really like their current set up, so it exists but it's not officially our primary platform". For now we're keeping both our Matrix instance and the bridge to GIMPnet (the IRC network GNOME people have been using for years). The major change is that IRC is now our legacy, so if tradeoffs have to be made Matrix will keep the premium experience.

Again, huge shout out to Gwmngilfen who gave meaning to the data I handed to him.

https://blog.ergaster.org/post/20220425-adopting-matrix/

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) reports

Spec

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:

• MSC3784: Using room type of m.policy for policy rooms
• MSC3783: Fixed base64 for SAS verification

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC3244: Room version capabilities

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

Hello again everyone! Your regularly-scheduled TWIM Spec update has returned, along with graph-based media!

Quick news to point out this week is that a new maubot plugin has been written to simply note the details of MSCs after their IDs ("msc1234") have been posted in a room. The bot supports multiple MSC IDs in a message, message edits, threads and end-to-end encrypted rooms.

A copy of the bot is currently running under @mscbot:matrix.org, so feel free to invite it to a room if you'd find that useful!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3216: Synchronized access control for Spaces!

This MSC serves as an alternative to MSC2962, and essentially allows for user permissions to be simultaneously enforced across a set of rooms in a Space. This would allow functionality to users of platforms like Discord, where a user can be a moderator in a guild, and thus in all of that guild's channels.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

richvdh says

A few operational issues have taken up quite a bit of the team's time this week, but we've still found time to cut a couple of release candidates of v1.58. Highlights include:

• Locked python dependencies for our Docker images and Debian packages, thanks to David's poetry work.
• Some big performance fixes, including an optimisation to login from Erik and one to message backfill from yours truly.

We're also excited to see quite a few contributions from outside the core maintenance team: thanks to Dirk, Beeper, Famedly and everyone else in the community who has made pull requests!

Meanwhile on the core team, Sean has been continuing to lay groundwork for faster room joins, and Olivier has been doing some exciting work so that we will (finally) be able to test Synapse in worker mode under Complement.

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander says

This week we announced Dendrite 0.8.2 with a bunch of usability fixes. As always, join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more discussion and updates.

Features

• Lazy-loading has been added to the /sync endpoint, which should speed up syncs considerably
• Filtering has been added to the /messages endpoint
• The room summary now contains "heroes" (up to 5 users in the room) for clients to display when no room name is set
• The existing lazy-loading caches will now be used by /messages and /context so that member events will not be sent to clients more times than necessary
• The account data stream now uses the provided filters
• The built-in NATS Server has been updated to version 2.8.0
• The /state and /state_ids endpoints will now return M_NOT_FOUND for rejected events
• Repeated calls to the /redact endpoint will now be idempotent when a transaction ID is given
• Dendrite should now be able to run as a Windows service under Service Control Manager

Fixes

• Fictitious presence updates will no longer be created for users which have not sent us presence updates, which should speed up complete syncs considerably
• Uploading cross-signing device signatures should now be more reliable, fixing a number of bugs with cross-signing
• All account data should now be sent properly on a complete sync, which should eliminate problems with client settings or key backups appearing to be missing
• Account data will now be limited correctly on incremental syncs, returning the stream position of the most recent update rather than the latest stream position
• Account data will not be sent for parted rooms, which should reduce the number of left/forgotten rooms reappearing in clients as empty rooms
• The TURN username hash has been fixed which should help to resolve some problems when using TURN for voice calls (contributed by fcwoknhenuxdfiyv)
• Push rules can no longer be modified using the account data endpoints
• Querying account availability should now work properly in polylith deployments
• A number of bugs with sync filters have been fixed
• A default sync filter will now be used if the request contains a filter ID that does not exist
• The pushkey_ts field is now using seconds instead of milliseconds
• A race condition when gracefully shutting down has been fixed, so JetStream should no longer cause the process to exit before other Dendrite components are finished shutting down

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

The bridge should finally be at "Good Enough" status--and to celebrate, I've bumped the version to 0.2.0 🥳

Features & fixes include:

• KT->Matrix file messages
• Matrix->KT room leaves
  • To leave a KT channel from Matrix, issue the !kt leave command in a portal room.
• Ability to name the virtual "device" for the KakaoTalk login session created by the bridge
  • This makes it easier to distinguish between multiple login sessions of the bridge
• Improvements to KT->Matrix joins, kicks, and admin status
• Many significant stability & correctness improvements
• Docker support
  • This is currently in the testing branch until I can confirm that it works properly

I've also opened a PR to showcase this bridge on https://matrix.org/bridges/ 😃

---

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 📱

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle says

Threads

• The Threads Beta is live! Turn it on in Labs

  • Let us know your feedback as we continue to work on this feature.

• The next step for Threads is improving our notifications and push rules on threaded messages. We’ve drafted some MSCs and are excited to move them forwards.

Community testing

• Thank you all who joined the async community testing sessions.

• Next week, we are planning to test:

  • Improvements to the new search experience on web
  • Video rooms!
  • And the new release candidate

• 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 says

• We have increased our pool of issue triagers, so expect to meet more of our web team on GitHub

• Published epic issue for our tech strategy for 2022

• The way that read receipts are displayed in rooms with lots of people has improved

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

  • Focusing on resolving last issues with threads, currently blocking on MSCs for read receipts for threads and push rules for mutually related events
  • Video rooms are getting ready to enter beta!

Element iOS (website)

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

Danielle announces

• The leaving space experience is now in line with web: you can leave all rooms, none of the rooms or only selected ones
• Our first time user experience and create account flow is being improved.
• Started prototypes for IA experiments. We’re hoping to make the app much easier to use and will test out new interactions and patterns to see what works for users.

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle reports

• Hard at work fixing bugs - we’ve squashed one where the UI would freeze after incremental syncs and we’ve also made improvements to the read line and read markers.
• Our team is still working on the sign up flow. It’ll be ready soon and we hope that new-to-element users will find it much easier (and less scary) to create an account and get chatting.
• We’ve started designing and building prototypes for a new home experience; we’re excited to start experimenting with ways we can simplify our app.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Thirdroom (website)

A browser-based open metaverse client

Matthew reports

lots of exciting progress happening on Third Room - an open metaverse client powered by Matrix: https://github.com/matrix-org/thirdroom/discussions/47

Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP says

v0.6.2

• Added: A "Remember login" checkbox lets you decide whether to store an access token in localStorage.
• Added: The room lists now have external matrix.to links.

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

Our last update included the words "if things go to plan", and even though that's usually calling for trouble, not so this time! We released Ruma 0.6.0 yesterday and apart from a tiny missing feature that was fixed and released as 0.6.1 today, everything went smooth 🙂

The biggest breaking changes are

• new owned identifier types – calling .to_owned() on &UserId now gives you an OwnedUserId instead of Box<UserId>
• a new event enum hierarchy, where redacted events are better taken into account

Also, with this release we can now claim practically 100% coverage of Matrix v1.2, that is you can send and receive requests for all specified endpoints of the various APIs, as well as send and inspect all specified event types, all with a strongly-typed Rust API.

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi reports

Thanks to Aine of etke.cc, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now set up the Buscarron bot. It's a bot you can use to send any form (HTTP POST, HTML) to a (encrypted) Matrix room

See our Setting up Buscarron documentation to get started.

Buscarron (website)

Web forms (HTTP POST) to matrix

Aine reports

the Miounne's successor is here - meet Buscarron!

There were no news about miounne for a while because we worked on a new "iteration" that can handle matrix encryption (thanks to the mautrix-go).

So, here is it - Buscarron v1.0.0 with e2e encryption and multiarch (arm32, arm64, amd64) support. It can handle any HTTP POST/HTML form and send it to a (encrypted) matrix room. Of course, Buscarron has small neat features like spam checker and rate limiter.

etke.cc is migrating to Buscarron and deprecating Miounne.

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

Dept of Bots 🤖

Location streams bot for MSC3489

ChristianP announces

I wrote a small, extensible bot that replays GPX recordings as a location sharing stream. This is an implementation of MSC3489: Sharing streams of location data with history and may help you debug the feature or see it with real world data. Join my Space to see this in action (with the Element Web Labs feature): #geo-trackers:iot-staging.ems.host or run the bot with your own rooms and GPX files. https://gitlab.com/jaller94/matrix-location-sharing

Opsdroid (website)

An open source chat-ops bot framework

Cadair says

Opsdroid 0.26 has been released this week. Included in this release are some improvements to the Rasa NLU parser if you want natural language training for your matrix bots as well as some small documentation improvements to the matrix connector and other bug fixes. Big thanks to Oleg for many of the changes as well as all the other contributors.

Matrix Community Manager (website)

The highly configurable message aggregation and filtering bot for matrix!

Sleuth reports

Matrix Community Manager has seen some work in the features department over the past week.

With the new Ansible playbook I think it's possible for someone with a bit of Ansible experience to get this bot up and running in under 10 minutes. I did a fresh install in 4 minutes. That is a fresh VPS and creating a new matrix account. Instructions for the Ansible deploy can be found here.

The major features are:

• An Ansible playbook that should simplify the installation process for new users.
• Edits to the message that triggered the bot will now be reflected in the bots message. This bot now has a feature Twitter doesn't have :laughing:.
• Hashtags are now called filters. Filters are more customizable allowing for custom delimiters and now show the originating room.
• The AutoJoin feature has filters to control who or from where invites will be excepted.
• Announcements can have more than one output room. Using a comma separated list of room ids.

A few bugs were fixed as well:

• Some text characters were causing messages to be classed incorrectly thus causing crashes.
• Exotic characters specifically in links were causing crashes.

Come chat on Matrix

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix Meetup Berlin

ChristianP says

We're meeting on Fri, 6th May at 6:30 PM in the c-base. Please join us, if you're looking for locals who work with Matrix and use it regularly. Our Matrix room is Matrix Meetup Berlin.

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 Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

dmr says

Hello again everyone. This week the team released Synapse 1.57.0, followed by a 1.57.1 patch release that fixed a problem in the 1.57.0 docker image.

This week was a little on the quieter side again, with some of us away on holiday and others away with illness. Nevertheless, this week develop saw a variety of activity. Some personal highlights:

• Shay's effort to document Synapse's numerous config options landed. This is a huge and comprehensive effort that'll help administrators to understand all the options they have to configure Synapse.
• Further progress from Rich on the fast room joins project. In some tests we've seen a 5x speed-up over the status quo!
• A subtle bugfix from Erik which corrects incorrect counts in one of the Admin API endpoints.
• The remainder of the poetry work has landed. There were a few last-minute complications in CI to smooth out, but we've now finished the migration. Synapse's docker images and debian package now come with a fixed set of dependencies (even transitive ones) in a way that lets us support multiple Python versions and interpreters.

We're looking forward to shipping these in Synapse 1.58, whose RC is scheduled for Tuesday the 26th of April.

I'm also keen to see how PR 12522 from Rich and Olivier progresses. It aims to fix a nasty memory bug which can cause Synapse to get stuck in an OOM loop.

As ever, I'd like to express thanks to our community of users, server operators and contributors. Thanks are also due to @callahad: today is his last day of managing the Synapse team. We're all going to miss him and wish him well: thank you for everything you'd done over the last year and a half.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Heisenbridge (website)

Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.

hifi reports

Release v1.12.0 🥳

• Make MAXLINES and PASTEBIN option available to every room & global defaults (thanks @BtbN)
• Fix 'NoneType' is not iterable error (thanks @BtbN)
• Upgrade to Mautrix 0.16

Not much to see here. A small contribution release which is always a nice thing when people come around and help 🤗.

Go and get some ☀️ sunlight from GitHub, PyPI or matrix-docker-ansible-deploy!

Thanks!

Dept of Clients 📱

Sailtrix (website)

Sailtrix is a matrix client for SailfishOS

HengYeDev says

Summary of development this week

• Sailtrix is fixed on Sailfish 4.4, which added sandboxing to all apps
• Sorting is fixed in the favorites tab
• The create room dialog is fixed
• Some validation is added to the login page
• Sharing with other apps and bluetooth is added for newer Sailfish versions
• SSO seems to be working, still in testing

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat announces

Location sharing

• As a follow on from our previous launches, the team is building “live location sharing”. This will allow you to automatically share where you are in the world with others for a period you choose (15 minutes, 1 hour, or 8 hours), instead of sending a single static location.

Community testing

• We ran our first async community testing session this week. Thank you all who joined in! We found 13 issues so far, which is good going.
• We have some new features landing for the search experience on Web, join us for testing from Thursday!
• You can join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org to find out more!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle says

• Threads is in Beta! The team is hard at work smashing bugs and improving notifications so that we can remove the beta label and get everybody access to our new feature!
  • If you’re using Threads, don’t forget to give us your feedback.
• This week the team discussed how our Web product looks and feels to new users. While we use our own products all the time, it can be good to take a step back and ensure that our product decisions benefit all users, including the newbies. Watch this space for more info in the coming weeks as we continue to trial things that we hope will make onboarding to Element easier.
• In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
  • Video rooms are coming together nicely, with the addition of lobby screens and room list stickiness to wrap up the design implementation

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu announces

• The newest version of the app (1.8.13) is ready! In this release we’ve made a bunch of improvements and bug fixes, check it out here.
  • Our favourites include: Force touching room previews no longer update your read receipts, there’s a congratulations screen for new users when creating an account, and we’ve reduced the number of home page reloads.
• Also new in product are presence indicators! From your home page or DMs you’ll be able to see if a user is present or away. Note; this is only supported if your homeserver has it enabled.
• Upcoming; We’re working on adding ‘mention pills’ when tagging users in a room.
• Please note; We’ll soon be removing support for iOS 12 and iOS 13

Element Android (website)

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

benoit says

• The team is working on fixing bugs and making improvements to flows like “ignore user”. We’ve also made some changes to the way we format code.
• Element Android 1.4.12 is ready to be released but currently on hold in the Play Store due to rules around User Generated Content (UGC). We’re chatting with Google and the new update should be available soon.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

We've added two major user-facing features to populus viewer:

1. A two-up view in the pdf viewer, allowing you to view and annotate two pages at once on a wider screen
2. An audio viewer, complete with audio annotation, so that you can annotate temporal segments of an audio recording

I'm especially excited about the latter - being able to discuss audio recordings will be a great teaching tool, and I'm hoping it might also be useful for things like people who want to talk about podcasts together (for purposes of editing, or just for fun), and people who want to annotate recordings of public talks of various kinds. The last use case would also be pretty well served by video annotation - so that's now rising on the agenda. I've created an MSC, here where I'll be filling in the details of a proposed format for interoperable audiovisual media annotations. As always, if you've got questions, want to follow development progress, or just want to talk about the future of social annotation on Matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.

nheko-krunner (website)

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

LorenDB says

nheko-krunner has finally been released! Version 0.1.0 contains several handy features such as searching your rooms, joining new rooms, and starting and switching to direct chats. Furthermore, if a room has unread notifications, nheko-krunner will let you know by tacking on a notification count to the room name (e.g. This Week in Matrix (TWIM) (1). Currently this feature is not disable-able, but I plan to dive into writing KCMs (KConfig Modules) soon so that I can add a toggle for this.

Hopefully a few people find this handy, and remember that if you don't use KDE, nheko still has a handy D-Bus API that you can use to write integrations with other software.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

Jonas Platte says

Over the last weeks, we've been doing a lot of refactoring in preparation for the 0.5.0 release, but we also

• Added support for retrieving room account data
• Made it easier to create a client while being offline
• Fixed a rare bug with SSO login (localhost didn't always resolve, so we switched to 127.0.0.1)
• We made some progress on sliding sync and adding an FFI interface for the main matrix-sdk crate

Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart.

Henri Carnot [famedly] says

We haven't done any regular posts about it in a while, but the SDK sees almost weekly releases. (We did release version 0.8.20 last week) If you forgot about it, the Matrix Dart SDK is the SDK FluffyChat, the Famedly clients and a few others use. Let me summarize some of the changes for those who haven't kept up:

One of the killer features is probably WebRTC support 🚀. It handles all the signalling for you, which makes integrating call support into your Flutter or Dart Matrix client fairly simple. Currently it supports version 1 of the call protocol, which is still an MSC and implements a few of the other MSCs. Experiments with group calls are still in progress.

We also switched databases a few times and tuned it more (we posted about FluffyBox last year). The database backend should now be a lot more stable and more performant, while also using less memory.

Continuing with stability, we worked a lot on how the timeline is stored and structured, leading to a much more robust experience. The SDK is also now completely nullsafe 🎉, which gets rid of a lot of annoying error modes. There were some fixes to E2EE here and there, but mostly the experience has been really solid and didn't need much work.

Some of the more recent developments include widget support as well as improving the file upload experience. The SDK now inserts a dummy event for a pending upload, images are thumbnailed and resided in a different isolate and uploads are automatically retried after a connection failure. We are also working on improving the push support, making it easier to fetch events from a push.

And I'm currently working on bringing fragmented timeline support. Nico told me it would be pretty (not) easy to do... and I have to say, he was right. Good first issue 🙃

See you next week ;)

Dept of Ops 🛠

Nix-matrix-appservices

Pacman99 announces

I've created a NixOS module, nix-matrix-appservices, that can simplify the bootstrap and maintenance of matrix appservices on nixos. With it, appservices can be spun up easily with registration and tokens handled by the module. Most mautrix and mx-puppet bridges have been tested to work and they can be setup in a couple lines of nix code. There are plenty of options you can make use of to configure more complex appservices. You can find the the code, matrix room(gitlab badge), and usage information here: https://gitlab.com/coffeetables/nix-matrix-appservices

Synatainer (website)

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

saces announces

Synatainer v0.4.0

New since v0.3.x

• autocompressor have only one setting
• add a golang tool stui - synatainer terminal ui
• replace the vacuum shell script with stui

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

For now it can only do a full vacuum and show some rugged formatted database info

[docker run -it --rm registry.gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer:latest] stui vacuum-db --help
[docker run -it --rm registry.gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer:latest] stui db-info

The doc have 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

Compose example: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer/-/snippets/2264828

---

If you are looking for a docker container with just the auto compressor for linux amd64/arm64 in it, her you go: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/rust-synapse-compress-state

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi announces

Thanks to Julian-Samuel Gebühr (@moan0s) - moanos [he/him], matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now help you set up matrix-registration-bot - a bot that is used to create and manage registration tokens for a Matrix server.

See our Setting up matrix-registration-bot documentation to get started.

Slavi says

Thanks to Aine of etke.cc, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now set up Borg backups with borgmatic of your Matrix server.

See our Setting up borg backup documentation to get started.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

MinesTRIX (website)

A privacy focused social media based on MATRIX

Henri Carnot announces

just did release V.1.5.5 today, this is the last update since a few months ago.

Some of the changes are:

• feat: compliance to the latest version of MSC3639: Matrix for the social media use case
• feat: added images support for posts. You can now send multiple images in a post and display them in a gallery view.
• feat: New emoji picker, you can now select and react to message in one continuous press.
• feat: Comments nesting, (using threads)
• feat: Image comment (read only :()
• feat: Dark theme support
• feat: New settings page (added a lab section :D, seems you need to have one if you want to build a proper Matrix client)
• feat: proper emoji support for desktop. Thanks fluffychat :)
• feat: Initial story support
• feat: various UI enhancements.

Concerning the messaging feature:

• feat: Initial poll support
• feat: read only spaces support
• feat: room list search box
• feat: chat settings dialog
• feat: read receipts list dialog
• feat: reaction list dialog
• feat: now use rounded avatar. Let's be consistent with other clients.
• feat: better display for replies and m.notice.
• feat: Localization support thanks to the Matrix Dart SDK

And some work already in for multiple profiles support, and profile as space (just use a public space to store your profile rooms).

If you are interested, come say hi in the room.

PS: You can also help us to design the underlying MSC, especially, we need some opinions on how to name things (the profile rooms) the room !!

Dept of Ping 🏓

We know you missed it, 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:

• MSC3761: State event change control
• MSC3760: State sub-keys
• MSC3759: Leave event metadata for deactivated users
• MSC3758: Expand push rule conditions
• MSC3757: Restricting who can overwrite a state event

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs had FCP proposed this week.

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3667: Enforce integer power levels

Spec Updates

There's been lots of new MSCs this week! Three of them - those regarding state restrictions and subkeys - are related to the ongoing live location sharing work that Element is currently working on. See MSC3672 for the current state of the spec work for that feature.

Otherwise the spec core team has been reviewing a flurry of MSCs this week. This includes MSC3383 (Include destination in X-Matrix Auth Header), MSC3700 (Deprecate plaintext sender key) and MSC2246 (Asynchronous media uploads). Exciting things in the pipeline!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2815: Proposal to allow room moderators to view redacted event content!

Another MSC in the sphere of moderation, and one that aims to put moderation control more in the hands of room admins rather than homeserver admins. A similar MSC in this realm is MSC3215 (Aristotle), which aims to send event reports to room admins, rather than homeserver admins that may not even have control over the malicious user.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier announces

Happy Friday everyone!

In case you missed it, we've released the first release candidate for Synapse 1.56 on Tuesday. This one includes a couple new module-related features, but also quite a few bugfixes and internal improvements. I'll talk about this in more details next week when Synapse 1.56 gets properly released, but the key points of this release is that Synapse will now refuse to start if it's configured with unsafe registration settings (i.e. open registration without any form of verification) as well as if it's running against a PostgreSQL database with the wrong locale values. Have a look at the upgrade notes for more information about this.

Apart from that, the team still continuing work on the two main topics I've been mentioning in previous weeks: fast room joins and integrating poetry. The latter is getting reeeally close to the finish line now, as the pull request has recently entered the review stage. So watch this space for more exciting news on this topic!

That's all for this week, catch you all next time 🙂

matrix-media-repo (website)

Matrix media repository with multi-domain in mind.

TravisR reports

MMR v1.2.12 is out now with a bunch of added features, removal of in-memory cache (per last release's deprecation notice), and some bug fixes.

Most notable are some added/improved support for JPEG XL, HEIF, and HEIC thumbnails, content ranges support (allowing the ability to skip to a part of a video), and a way to make the logs a bit quieter.

Give it a go and report issues to the issue tracker 🙂

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Half-Shot announces

It feels like one of these comes out nearly every month, which probably means we're doing something right! This release takes a step back and fixes quite a few of our more longstanding bugs and fixes many nits here and there. Please read the change notes carefully as some APIs have moved around and your load balancers / config may need adjusting. One final note is that this release drops support for Node 12, making the minimum version Node 14.

Once again, thanks to the wider Matrix community for filing bugs and submitting PRs, it's very much appreciated!

matrix-appservice-bridge 4.0.0

Half-Shot says

More updates! This week the bridge library itself gets a major update. We've made a few breaking changes, notably we now expect target homeservers to at least be Matrix v1.2 compatible. Also, this release brings the new "Provisioning and Widgets API" which allows developers to start creating HTTP APIs for their bridges which work for both provisioning mode (shared secret tokens) and widget API style (authenticating via Matrix OpenID token sharing). This stuff is still a little experimental, but it's starting to power our new experiments in the bridge world.

You can check out the release here

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

Media messages, both from or to KakaoTalk, are now supported! The biggest exceptions are inbound files & stickers. The latter may be a hard sell to get working, due to how KT manages stickers, but I'll look into it some more before giving a concrete answer.

The bridge is also now responsive to disconnects, like when you log in from another KakaoTalk desktop client (since the bridge mimics the desktop client, and KT only allows one desktop client to be logged in at a time!). Luckily, not all KakaoTalk APIs rely on the same connection that chatting does, meaning that some functionality can continue to work even when "disconnected". The bridge now takes advantage of this, meaning that profile-management commands (currently just the list-friends command) will work even if you get disconnected from chats for whatever reason.

The bridge is drawing ever closer to "good enough" status... Please give it a try if curious!

---

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

matrix-appservice-irc (website)

Node.js IRC bridge for Matrix

Half-Shot reports

Heyo, we released a hotfix release for the IRC bridge this week. This fixed a rather nasty regression where the bridge would kick everyone from the Matrix side when a Matrix ban list is updated. People who aren't using the new ban lists feature don't need to upgrade.

Please check out https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.33.1 for more details

Dept of Clients 📱

Michael says

The perthchat.org team has created their own Android client, a promotional fork of the popular Element Android client!

For more details checkout: https://news.perthchat.org/perthchats-new-android-app/ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.perthchat.app

Nheko (website)

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

Nico announces

1.0 is a big number and a step not taken lightly. But Nheko has been in development for half a decade and we think it is time to take a step forward! As such we worked hard to fix readability issues in the app. Your messages should now be readable on any theme, because we send the first half as white text and the second half as black text (thank you, rrogalski for the contribution). For accessibility reasons this is enabled by default. We also added an improved typing indicator. Sometimes it is hard to notice when a message is too long, as such we gradually adjust the background color the longer the message gets. It also helps a lot, if you have a bad theme and can't read the text against the background color. Just enter a few characters and the background will change, so the messages should become readable. But that is not all! We all know some people have a harder time seeing colors than others. So for accessibility we also slowly rotate the screen, so that even if your display is monochrome, you don't miss out. Please see the attached video for a demo or check out our release candidates here and here.

Before this month we also rewrote the room creation dialogs to be less confusing. We now have separate dialogs for direct chats and group chats, which should cut down confusion between the options by a lot. You can also now edit the topic and name of a room inline and Malte added a jump to bottom button. On mobile you can also now drag to the sides to reply. Last but not least, you can now knock on rooms from Nheko using /knock or if an invite failed because you were not allowed to join a room and you can add a reason to room joins, leaves, invites, knocks and everything. Some of those features require the server to support Matrix v1.1, so make sure you update your servers to use them.

Nico announces

Excuse the blurry picture, but Bubu just sent me this and I just had to share it!

Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

NeoChat now has a KRunner plugin thanks to work done by Nico (not the one from Nheko 🙂). This allows plasma users to search for and open matrix rooms directly from their desktop. You will be able to enable it from the KRunner settings after the next release.

Snehit changed the room preview to no longer show markdown characters, fixing a few situations where this would be unexpected.

On the end-to-end encryption side, we're currently working on implementing device verification.

Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Julian Sparber reports

This week I have something really exciting to report. We moved Fractal-next to the main development branch. This means that we now have nightly flatpak builds[1], so users can already try out the new version of Fractal without having to build it from source. This will also give use much more feedback and many more bug reports, hopefully not too many :) Note that this isn't a release and the software should still be considered unstable.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal#development-version

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

It’s April Fool’s day but there will be no tricks here; We’re far too excited to share all our good work with you 😉

Message Threading

• Exciting news for Threads; Next week we’re releasing a public beta!

  • It’ll be opt-in, so don’t forget to head to Settings and join in if you haven’t already.

• We’re still working on perfecting notifications, so none of your messages are missed.

• The team is also working hard at improving the stability of Threads, ahead of the release next week.

• As always, please let us know your thoughts and feedback!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Kegan says

Coming soon to an Element-Web near you...

Danielle announces

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

• Voice rooms are now known as video rooms! We’ve landed some new designs to help make the experience more coherent, and bring them out of ‘prototype’ status.
• Threads! From next week you’ll be able to turn on threads in all versions of Element but for a sneak preview you can head to Labs in Develop or Nightly and access Message Threading from there.
• We’re continuing to work on our updated search experience: we are going to be merging the people and room search dialogs into the new search experience and adding filtering. Expecting work to start early next week.
• Along with some feature work in Labs, the team is hard at work closing issues and clearing pesky bugs.

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu reports

• Our latest release is a hotfix (1.8.10) resolving a crash that occurred when uploading a photo via the camera in the timeline.
• Following a team discussion and input from all areas we’ve decided to change how we launch new languages in Element. We’ll soon be moving to an automatic rollout model meaning, if there’s any amount of a language available, and it’s set as your preference, you’ll see it in the app.
  • Previously we’d wait until hitting the 80% mark and then manually push the translation. This leaves too much room for us to forget, or restricts access to those languages hanging around the 70% mark…
• Other things we’ve been working on this week include; improving the new user experience, and starting to prototype with the layout for the app.
• We released spaces on iOS this week! Where you could only view spaces before, you can now create and manage them from your phone. We have more improvements planned for the next release.

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle announces

• The Android team has been determined over the past weeks to improve our internal process, increasing efficiency and quality of building and deploying. With that in mind, we’ve recently published a guide for PRs on our Android Repo. It’s still a draft right now but if you want to know more about our approach, read it here.
• In terms of building we’re continuing on our path of improving the quality of the app by focussing on bugs and UI issues.
• We’re also working on improving our new user experience to make it easier for newbies to get up and running on Element Android!

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

matrix-streamchat (website)

Matrix powered stream overlay for OBS, to integrate live chat in your favorite (selfhosted) streaming setups.

f0x announces

matrix-streamchat got it's first proper release, after some battletesting by another streamer :D https://git.pixie.town/f0x/matrix-streamchat/releases/tag/0.0.2 hosted instance is also available at https://streamchat.pixie.town

Matrix Highlight (website)

A decentralized and federated way of annotating the web based on Matrix.

Daniel announces

Matrix Highlight got an update this week. I've switched the highlighting widget to use a shadow DOM, which means styles from the page don't affect styles from the extension itself. This used to affect quite a lot of pages, but shouldn't be much of a problem anymore!

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 says

This week, we

• updated the space-hierarchy rooms chunk type to use a decicated join-rule type
• added support for more transitional extensible-event types
• removed the origin field from PDUs
• added support for MSC2654 (Unread count)

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

Jonas Platte announces

In the last two weeks,

• Support for vodozemac as an alternative to libolm has been merged, and enabled by default 🎉
• A bug around invitations to previously-left rooms was fixed

There was also a decent amount of internal cleanup / developer experience work, so if you previously tried to contribute but ran into weird IDE bugs or code inconsistencies, make sure to check back. The same goes for sliding sync, which has been making decent progress – stay tuned!

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

andybalaam reports

I'm doing a talk about Matrix at the ACCU Conference on Saturday 9th April. Recordings of talks will be available soon after the conference, and tickets are still available to be there live in person or online! Here's the talk summary:

The Matrix network provides messaging (like WhatsApp or Slack) that offers all the features you expect, but without centralised control: it's an open standard, and anyone can run a server. The servers link together, so you can talk to other people even if they use a different server (kind of like email).

In the first half of this session, we will explore the basics of the protocol: making simple HTTP requests to send and receive messages, and discuss some of the interesting distributed-systems issues that make writing a server exciting.

In the second half we will explore the fact that messaging is only one potential use of this network, and look into some examples of other real-time use cases that are in active development, taking note of how these use cases benefit from the real-time and distributed nature of the network.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

matrix-art (website)

An image gallery for Matrix

MTRNord (they/them) reports

There was some silence lately on this, but activity is picking back up.

Mainly, the project is getting rewritten. Why? Well, I learned from the issues and ran into issues with the framework used. There are going to be various changes to the architecture (like no more SSR, no nextjs, pwa support and more).

Feel free to follow https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-art/pull/121 for progress.

Another big thing that's going to change is that I am working on a complete redesign. While I am still fairly early in the iterations, I wanted to share the first art direction Matrix Art is going to go. The main changes are that I try to have an art language which distinguishes it from the other proprietary players, as well as compensating for the fact that Matrix Art has a much lower volume of images on it's feed. Please be aware that this is way before the first round of polish. :)

If you want to connect with matrix-art please join the room: #matrix-art:nordgedanken.dev or follow/star the github project :)

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 Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib announces

You might have been following our past efforts on making sure the DMA was meaningful. Those efforts are being rewarded, and Amandine covers in a blog post what this means for Element and other businesses in Europe. Matthew covers what this means for Matrix and end to end ecrypted services.

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:

• MSC3755: Member pronouns

MSCs in Proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC2246: Asynchronous media uploads
• MSC3700: Deprecate plaintext sender key

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3667: Enforce integer power levels (merge)

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

Mostly continued review of MSCs, while implementation work continues on in the background.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2499: Fixes for Well-known URIs!

This MSC proposes some much-desired practical and usability fixes to the "Well-Known" discovery method for Matrix homeservers. This is part of the system that enables homeserver's to "delegate" their homeserver address (your Matrix ID is @alice:example.com, but your homeserver is listening for requests on homeserver.example.com).

Well-known for homeserver delegation was introduced a number of years ago, and since then some friction has arisen from various implementations. This MSC aims to address a collection of them!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier says

Hey everyone! This week we've released Synapse 1.55, which includes a bunch of new features, performance improvements and bugfix. If you're using Mjolnir to moderate your rooms, and/or synctl to manage your homeserver, this release also introduces a few changes you definitely want to be aware of, head over to the announcement on the matrix.org blog for more!

Yesterday, we noticed a compatibility issue with a newly released version of Jinja, which is the tool we use in Synapse to render e-mail and web templates. We've quickly put out Synapse 1.55.2 to address this - so if you were unable to start Synapse because of it just update and you should be fine 🙂 Note that this doesn't apply to deployments of Synapse using the matrixdotorg/synapse Docker image or Debian packages from packages.matrix.org since they are already using a compatible version of Jinja.

Apart from that, work continues towards integrating Poetry with Synapse, which should prevent this kind of issues from happening in the future, and on improving room join times.

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander announces

We've just released Dendrite 0.7.0, which has quite a lengthy list of changes:

• The roomserver input API will now queue all events into NATS, which provides better crash resilience
• The roomserver input API now configures per-room consumers, which should use less memory
• Canonical aliases can now be added and removed
• MSC2946 Spaces Summary now works correctly, both locally and over federation
• Healthcheck endpoints are now available at:
  • /_dendrite/monitor/up, which will return 200 when Dendrite is ready to accept requests
  • /_dendrite/monitor/health, which will return 200 if healthy and 503 if degraded for some reason
• The X-Matrix federation authorisation header now includes a destination field, as per MSC3383
• The /sync endpoint now uses less memory by only ranging state for rooms that the user has participated in
• The /messages endpoint now accepts stream positions in both the from and to parameters
• Dendrite will now log a warning at startup if the file descriptor limit is set too low
• The federation client will now attempt to use HTTP/2 if available
• The federation client will now attempt to resume TLS sessions if possible, to reduce handshake overheads
• The built-in NATS Server has been updated to version 2.7.4
• NATS streams that don't match the desired configuration will now be recreated automatically
• When performing a graceful shutdown, Dendrite will now wait for NATS Server to shutdown completely, which should avoid some corruption of data on-disk
• The create-account tool has seen a number of improvements, will now ask for passwords automatically
• The /sync endpoint will no longer lose state events when truncating the timeline for history visibility
• The /context endpoint now works correctly with lazy_load_members
• The /directory/list/room/{roomID} endpoint now correctly reports whether a room is published in the server room directory or not
• Some bugs around appservice username validation have been fixed
• Roomserver output messages are no longer unnecessarily inflated by state events, which should reduce the number of NATS message size errors
• Stream IDs for device list updates are now always 64-bit, which should fix some problems when running Dendrite on a 32-bit system
• Purging room state in the sync API has been fixed after a faulty database query was corrected
• The federation client will now release host records for remote destinations after 5 minutes instead of holding them in memory forever
• Remote media requests will now correctly return an error if the file cannot be found or downloaded
• A panic in the media API that could happen when the remote file doesn't exist has been fixed
• Various bugs around membership state and invites have been fixed
• The memberships table will now be correctly updated when rejecting a federated invite
• The client API and appservice API will now access the user database using the user API rather than accessing the database directly

In addition, there are some minor changes for Docker users:

• Docker images are now published to GitHub Container Register as well as Docker Hub — they can be found here
• Docker images are now being automatically generated for the main branch by CI and will be available on the :main tag

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

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair reports

This week brings yet more bugfixes & stability to DMs: now, there should be no trouble sending messages into a KakaoTalk DM that hasn't been active for a few days.

The other major improvements are:

• A command for listing your KakaoTalk friends list, appropriately named list-friends
• Receiving images from KakaoTalk

I had hoped to finish support for sending images from Matrix by today, but I couldn't quite crack it in time--either KakaoTalk changed their API for sending media messages, or I'm doing something wrong 🙃

Nonetheless, the bridge is rapidly approaching a state of being usable!

---

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Syphon (website)

Chat with your privacy and freedom intact

0x1a8510f2 announces

Hi all 👋.

A little over a year has passed since our last update, but we're not dead! On the contrary, Syphon has seen some significant improvements over the last year both in terms of features and project structure; the project is more alive than ever before, and we're really excited to share some updates!

Core Team

Syphon now has a core team, consisting of @ereio:matrix.org (creator of Syphon), @ed:geraghty.london, @dnisbetjones:mozilla.org, and @0x1a8510f2:0x1a8510f2.space (me)! With some of the workload now being shared, we're hoping Syphon will grow even faster with less time needed to review and merge PRs, triage and fix bugs, evaluate and implement features and answer support requests.

Cross-platform Availability

Syphon has been steadily expanding its list of supported platforms over the past year:

• @ed:geraghty.london worked hard to bring Syphon to Windows with full feature parity, including (currently unofficial) Windows builds of Syphon.
• @btdmaster:asra.gr has created an AUR package of Syphon for Arch Linux users.
• I've been busy creating a flatpak for Syphon which is available on Flathub.
• Regular and official ARM64 builds are also planned soon, with the first manual one already released. Once the CI infrastructure is properly set up, these will be included for every release and the flatpak will receive ARM64 support too!

Releases

Between 0.1.7 (21 Mar 2021) and 0.2.12 (23 Mar 2022), 21 releases were published. Of course, too much changed to list everything, but here are some highlights:

• Multi-account support 🎉
• Media messages 🎉
• Markdown support 🎉
• Message editing 🎉
• Key import and export 🎉
• App lock with encryption 🎉
• HTTP proxy support 🎉
• Theme tweaks
• 3pid auth support
• EXIF data removal from sent images
• System brightness setting
• Various customisation options
• (Unencrypted) chat message search
• Ability to deactivate an account
• Countless new translations
• Massive performance improvements
• Numerous bug fixes (including encryption and SSO)
• Lots of refactoring and cleanup

Many of these would not have been possible without our awesome contributors.

Translations

We have also received many contributions in the form of translations and Syphon now supports, at least partially, 26 languages. Of these, 6 languages are fully or almost fully translated. To deal with all the incoming translations, there is now also an official Weblate page for Syphon.

All of these translations are submitted by volunteers and we're really grateful for their contributions in making Syphon more accessible to an international audience.

Syphon Space

We also now have an official Syphon space which we use for support, development discussion or just friendly offtopic chat. Come join us if you like at #syphon-space:matrix.org!

SchildiChat (website)

SchildiChat is a fork of Element that focuses on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list for both direct messages and groups, which is a more familiar approach to users of other popular instant messengers.

SpiritCroc reports

SchildiChat-Android now has more styles of message bubbles! So if you prefer the Schildi-bubbles over the Element ones (which you can use too in SchildiChat if you want), you can now also select between bubbles with or without tail, and select some more round bubbles than what we had previously, which was a highly requested feature!

If you wonder what makes SchildiChat special except for the different design now that Element has bubbles as well: it's hard to describe in a couple of short sentences, as it's mostly in the details. So if you are interested in a list of things that we did on Android, I wrote up some aspects here. Note however that this list is usually not really kept up-to-date, and there might already be some things that are now outdated since I added them. However, it might give you some general ideas of what SchildiChat has to offer :)

Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

Beep, boop, v0.9.3 is out. It's mostly bugfixes and small improvements, changelog below:

Highlights

• New upload UX
  • Queue multiple uploads by pasting or dragging multiple files.
  • Videos will now properly have a thumbnail as well as images.
  • Duration, width and height is now also properly included so that clients can resize appropriately.
  • Thumbnails are excluded if they are bigger than the original image. (tastytea)
• Improvements for mobile devices (Malte E)
  • You should now be able to scroll by touching anywhere with no random dead zones.
  • Preedit text can now be used in a completer and is properly sent
  • If an input method is active, pressing Enter will not send the current message.

Features

• Optionally always open videos and images in an external program. (math)

Improvements

• Build macOS releases against Qt 5.15.3 to resolve missing spaces after some punctuation.
• Send the shortcode as the body for stickers without a body.
• Elide long usernames in the timeline. (Malte E)
• Cleanup the reply popup. (Malte E)
• Use standard buttons where possible. (tastytea)
• Various improvements to the bubble layout. (Malte E)
• Enable online key backup by default.
• Update the bundled gstreamer in our Flatpaks.

Translations

• Indonesian (Linerly)
• Estonian (Priit)
• Finnish (Priit)
• Esperanto (Tirifto)

Bugfixes

• Fix hovering the action menu.
• Try to avoid using unknown UIA flows.
• Don't Components actively in use.
• Fix screensharing.
• Fix device id when doing SSO logins.

Downloads should be live now, flatpak might take a while to publish still :3

Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Julian Sparber reports

Hello folks, quick update on what major things happened in Fractal-next the last two month. The most exciting addition is definitely the SSO support we merged this week and therefore we could close a 2 years old issue.

Timeline

• You can now send files via drag-n-drop and via the file send button to a room. It also includes a nice preview for Images.
• The timeline now shows audio messages with a small inline player.
• Fractal-next lets you now remove messages you sent

Session verification

• During first login, Fractal checks if the user hasn't started session verification from another client before offering to start a new one
• The QrCode scanning is now spec compliant, and asks for user's confirmation after scanning.
• We dropped screenshot support for QrCode scanning, since it makes the UX worse without adding any real benefit.

Room details

• The room details show now the members of the room including the power level

Login

• Fractal-Next now supports SSO 🎉️
• We implemented auto-discovery of the homeserver via .well-known

FluffyChat (website)

Krille Fear announces

Sorry that I was a little bit silent in the last weeks. So much stuff to do...

If you haven't heard it yet (because I have not made it that much public yet) there are experimental video calls in FluffyChat now. You need to enable them first under Settings > Chat and then you can try them out. They should be fully compatible with the Element video calls. But be aware that they are very unstable at the moment and may let your app crash.

FluffyChat 1.3.1 has been released

This release contains a lot of updated translations and bugfixes. I'm very excited about the new keyboard shortcuts from TheOneWithTheBrain. Also in your stories you can now pick the background color and the size of the picture. This is still a little bit experimental but I will share of course update the stories MSC asap. Thanks to all contributors and translators.

Changelog:

• Allow app to be moved to external storage (Marcel)
• Translated using Weblate (Arabic) (Mads Louis)
• Translated using Weblate (Basque) (Sorunome)
• Translated using Weblate (Basque) (—X—)
• Translated using Weblate (Chinese (Simplified)) (Eric)
• Translated using Weblate (Czech) (Sorunome)
• Translated using Weblate (Dutch) (Jelv)
• Translated using Weblate (English) (Raatty)
• Translated using Weblate (French) (Anne Onyme 017)
• Translated using Weblate (Galician) (Xosé M)
• Translated using Weblate (German) (Maciej Krüger)
• Translated using Weblate (Indonesian) (Linerly)
• Translated using Weblate (Irish) (Graeme Power)
• Translated using Weblate (Persian) (Anastázius Darián)
• Translated using Weblate (Russian) (Nikita Epifanov)
• Translated using Weblate (Swedish) (Joaquim Homrighausen)
• Translated using Weblate (Turkish) (Oğuz Ersen)
• Translated using Weblate (Ukrainian) (Ihor Hordiichuk)
• Update proguard rules to a more modern setup (MTRNord)
• chore: Minor story viewer fixes (Krille Fear)
• chore: Remove story line count and make answering to stories online (Krille Fear)
• chore: Update dependencies (Dependency Update Bot)
• design: Make pinned events use less vertical space (Krille Fear)
• feat: Extended stories (Krille Fear)
• feat: Restrict map zoom to tile server capabilities (Marcel)
• feat: implement keyboard shortcuts (TheOneWithTheBraid)
• fix: Build on macOS (Krille Fear)
• fix: Emojipicker issues (Krille Fear)
• fix: Hide redacted stories (Krille Fear)
• fix: Mark story as read (Krille Fear)
• fix: Open room from notification click produces errors (Krille Fear)
• fix: SSO on Android 12 (Krille Fear)
• fix: Send read receipts on all taps (Krille Fear)
• fix: make fluffy usable at 720 px wide (Raatty)
• fix: Add forgotten sendOnEnter (Krille Fear)
• refactor: Switch to just audio for playing sounds (Krille Fear)

Ement.el (website)

Matrix client for emacs

alphapapa announces

[[https://github.com/alphapapa/ement.el][Ement.el]], a Matrix client for Emacs, has learned to create new rooms and invite users to rooms. Feedback is appreciated; see our chat room, [[https://matrix.to/#/#ement.el:matrix.org][#ement.el:matrix.org]], or the issue tracker on the repo.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat announces

• Threads will be released behind a labs flag in the next release and enabled by default in the Release Candidate (RC) from 5th April

• If you’re using an older version of Synapse (<v1.55.0) you might experience compatibility problems with stable prefixes. After upgrading Element to v1.18.0 unstable threads will be moved to the main room timeline

• Groups have been deleted on develop. It has also landed alongside other fairly major changes so please definitely report issues if you see them

• Continuing work to remove skinning from the application. This is a fairly major change to how everything works under the hood, so when it lands please report any issues with the app as most will be subtle and therefore might be missed.

  • Currently expected to land on or about April 5th
  • Component replacement will still be possible (and this will be documented)

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

  • Thread list is now ordered by last reply

  • Fixes for the room list counter

  • Last stretch of threads acceptance testing before releasing to beta

  • Iteration to the new search dialog to integrate people & public rooms search into the new experience.

Element iOS (website)

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

Doug says

• Element 1.8.7 was released on the App Store after delays with the review: we’ve made ignoring users easier and now suggest a Matrix ID when using “Sign in With Apple” to resolve the issue.
• Space creation and management will be available in the next release, due next week.
• We had some issues with publishing releases to TestFlight so the latest release candidates haven’t been updated publicly - we have been testing them internally so releases will not be delayed

Element Android (website)

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

adam reports

Our current in progress release 1.4.6+ is running a little behind schedule, however when it does land it'll contain:

• Fixes in the timeline for missing messages, inconsistent read marker, decryption crashes and the room icon looking like donut
• Improved Threads via MSC3440
• The ability to share a user specified location

For the forks, a heads up that we've updated our development branch Kotlin version to 1.6.0 which involved overhauling a lot of our when statements

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synatainer (website)

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

saces reports

Synatainer v0.3.1 has been released

New since v0.2.0

• add a db-shell and scripts to reset the state compressor
• add options for passing purge/keep room lists

Start it without command and let it do its magic :)

What it does by default:

• daily:
  • purge all rooms without local members
  • run the state autocompressor (small setting 500/100)
• weekly:
  • delete old remote media (>90 days)
  • delete old message history from public joinable rooms (>180 days)
• monthly:
  • run the state autocompressor (big setting 1500/300)
  • vacuum the database

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

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

Compose example: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer/-/snippets/2264828

---

If you are looking for a docker container with just the auto compressor for linux amd64/arm64 in it, her you go: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/rust-synapse-compress-state

Dept of Bots 🤖

Mjölnir (website)

The moderation bot for Matrix

Gnuxie announces

We have released Mjölnir v1.4.1 (via v1.4.0)

Which in addition to fixes, includes a few new tools that you might find useful:

• a protection for detecting & measuring federation lag in your rooms
• bugfixes for the synapse antispam module (in particular squashing a bug that was removing users from the profile directory when blocking was disabled)
• a new message length limiter for the antispam module
• a new command to grab admin permissions from rooms being administrated by users on your homeserver
• a command to show when users in a given room have joined
• another command to filter through recent room joiners by the time they joined.
• Improvements that make writing protections easier.

Don't forget you can join our development room #mjolnir:matrix.org if you have any have any questions for setting up and running Mjölnir!

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

HarHarLinks announces

don't miss #otwsu:matrix.org on March 30th!

Thib adds

The theme of the episode is "analytics and privacy". We will have guests from the awesome non-profit Exodus Privacy to shed some light on analytics: what can your apps know about you and how you can get better informed.

Nad from Element will give us the perspective from the other side: as a vendor, does it make sense to use analytics? Are there better alternatives? Is there a way to do it right?

Join us in #otwsu and on matrix.org/open-tech-will-save-us

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 my guest is Adam who created the minimalistic Android client your family wants… by accident. And Adam has more ideas for the future.

Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR 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

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC3754: Removing profile information

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've mostly been working on our existing projects. Unfortunately this means little to report this week, but if there's something that needs out attention then please mention it in #sct-office:matrix.org 🙂

Dept of P2P 👥

Pinecone (website)

Peer-to-peer overlay routing for the Matrix ecosystem

neilalexander reports

Things have been relatively quiet on the P2P front recently as we have been working on fixing bugs in Dendrite, but we will be releasing build 94 of the P2P demos for iOS and for Android soon, which feature new fair queuing in Pinecone. This should help to reduce congestion from single nodes. It also includes all of the latest Dendrite updates.

• Android: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uK_BcHGiAYHkN6OAA7P73obAquwShRg5
• iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/Tgh2MEk6

The demos are still very rough around the edges — join us in #p2p:matrix.org for discussion!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

dmr says

Hello everyone. It's been a quieter week for the Synapse team---many of us are away this week.

We released Synapse 1.55.0rc1 yesterday, a little later than usual. A full release is still planned for the coming Tuesday (22nd March). Please note that this release breaks compatibility with Mjolnir 1.3.1 and earlier. Administrators using Mjolnir should ensure it is upgraded before upgrading Synapse to 1.55.0rc1.

Otherwise, the release candidate includes:

• New tools in the module API enabling modules to prevent administrators from deleting rooms and deactivating users. Half-Shot explains the movtivation here.
• Experimental support for using Twisted's asyncio reactor. If this is feasible, it might allow us to leverage tools and libraries for Python's growing asyncio ecosystem.
• A performance fix for logging in on large accounts.
• A variety of other bugfixes and internal tweaks.

Please feel free to try it out and let us know how you get on: either in the #synapse:matrix.org or on GitHub if you encounter any unexplained problems. As ever, many thanks to all contributors involved.

Behind the scenes we've been working on a few longer-term projects:

• Continued support for threading (MSC3440) and the mechanism which supports it, relations (MSC2674).
• Managing Synapse's dependencies using poetry to formally lock requirements across all our debian and docker releases.
• Performance investigations: we're looking at getting better profiling information; and seeing if we can reclaim CPU cycles by cancelling processing when a requester terminates their request early.

Hopefully we'll see these plans come to fruition over the coming weeks.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair says

This week brings some bugfixes to DMs, and general improvements to the way channels are synced on startup.

I've also written some setup instructions to assist anyone wanting to try this bridge out for themselves!

As for bugs, I just stumbled upon a big one just now: if a KakaoTalk channel hasn't had activity for a few days, sending a message in its Matrix portal may crash. This happens because of the KakaoTalk API's apparent eagerness in forgetting about inactive channels (IIRC content that's a few weeks old is deleted from their servers, for privacy reasons), and the likely fix is for the bridge to use the right API calls to trigger those channels back into an active state before trying to interact with them.

Once that's fixed, the next thing I'll get out of the way (for the sake of completeness) is the web-based login interface, which all of the other mautrix-python bridges support (and is quite nice for privacy-conscious users that would rather send their KakaoTalk passwords directly to the bridge, instead of through a Matrix homeserver).

After that, I'll work on contact searching & inviting contacts to group chats or DMs.

---

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

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

Nico announces

After our release last week, of course all the bugreports came out of the woodworks. As such we fixed issues with device ids being set incorrectly after SSO, screensharing, overlapping in the reply popup and UIA flows without fallback support like https://github.com/devture/matrix-synapse-shared-secret-auth showing up as UIA stages. Key backup is also now enabled by default (if it has the correct signatures and everything), various layouting fixes and more.

We'll probably make a bugfix release in the next few days.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Kegan announces

I have been working on integrating MSC3575: Sliding Sync into Element-Web. This is a pretty large endeavour but there has been a lot of progress on it already!

There now exists a JS-SDK PR to add the core bits of Sliding Sync (along with E2EE/to-device extensions), and a React-SDK branch which adds the Labs flag, config.json section for the proxy URL, and sets up room subscriptions when you select a room. The net result?

This is still early days: you cannot scroll the room list yet and there's still many outstanding issues to fix before it can land on mainline, but it's at the stage where it's almost ready for people to try out. Watch this space...

Thib reports

• Continuing with the removal of the skinning layer, instead recommending module replacement - please talk to us in #element-dev:matrix.org if this is a surprise.

• Continued removal of Groups/Communities - we’re expecting it to land this week (for release on about April 11th).

• Continuing development of live location sharing.

• We’ve reduced tsc errors by 70% in react-sdk unit tests!

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

  • We're working on a prototype for voice rooms, which are persistent voice chats similar to Discord's voice channel feature. Expect this to receive more attention and polish over the coming weeks
  • Threads are now using the stable prefix m.thread and are currently undergoing acceptance testing. We’re hoping to launch it out of labs in the next few weeks.

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu says

• The release on the App Store is still blocked on the review. We continue to work hard to solve this issue.
• The threads feature received a lot of polish and bug fixes. We are not far from making them out of the LABS setting.
• The timeline got several bug fixes.
• We fixed memory leaks in the share extension.
• The name and avatar customization after account creation is almost done.

Thib says

• We’re currently at the last mile of testing for space creation & space management on iOS. Thanks to everyone who helped with community testing last week!
• We’re currently on track to merge and ship these changes at the end of this month.
• Once released, Element on all platforms will have parity across the core spaces feature set!

Element Android (website)

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

adam announces

• 1.4.4 has dropped across all channels, we've had some promising early feedback that the storage/RAM usage is starting to decrease, as always thanks for the reports and keep them coming! Full release notes available in the usual place

• Threads are levelling up and becoming driven by MSC3440, increasing their reliability and cross device consistency. If you're already using threads we'll automatically migrate them for you in the next release 1.4.6

• Live location sharing work has started! Soon you'll be able to share and receive location updates in real time

Cinny (website)

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

Lozenge reports

v1.8.1 & v1.8.2

Bug fixes:

• Fix new messages don't appear
• Fix pressing a key with an active highlight jumps in history
• Fix not all emoji-only messages being detected as Jumbo-emoji
• Fix muted room show unread indicator
• Fix view source shows original event for an edited message
• Fix wrong notification count and NaN notification
• Fix ⌘ CMD + k hotkey not working MacOS
• Fix sending message not mark room as read

Release: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny/releases/tag/v1.8.2

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 🎛️

Thirdroom (website)

A browser-based open metaverse client

Robert Long says

Our metaverse-on-matrix project is progressing quickly!

• Robert and Nate have been working on updating the Third Room demo to use the latest bitECS and threecs work as well as moving rendering and game update loops off the main thread!
• Bruno has been porting Native Group VoIP to Hydrogen SDK which Third Room will use for both spatial voice chat and DataChannels
• Ajay has a working scaffold of the early UI concepts paired with Hydrogen SDK to incorporate the room list and chat views.

More design work is happening as well, here's our latest from Rian

Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP says

v0.6.0 & v0.6.1

Want to purge a space recursively? Matrix Wrench now has a button for that. It will try to fetch a list of all sub spaces and rooms and offer you to delete them via the Synapse Admin API.

Also, you can now knock on rooms and the room lists allow to navigate to a room page by clicking on a room ID.

Next up will likely be searchable lists for rooms and users as well as other usability and layout improvements. The goal is to have a nice-looking, stable v1.0 release for its anniversary on 13th June. I'm looking for help with design and documentation.

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 says

Nothing user-facing changed last week, but this week:

• @timokoesters fixed some bugs in the state resolution code around knocking (room version 7) and restricted rooms (room version 8 / 9)
• @zecakeh added loads of primary extensible event types:
  • m.image
  • m.video
  • m.audio
  • m.location
  • m.voice
• @ShadowJonathan added support for the server-version endpoints for the server-server API (MSC3723) and the identity-service API (MSC2320)
• [@zecekeh] added support for threads and translatable text messages
• I (@jplatte) moved the prev_content state event field into unsigned as per Matrix v1.2
• @zecakeh cleaned up the module structure for discovery-related endpoints

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

Jonas Platte reports

In the last few weeks,

• @gnunicorn created separate crates for the different storage backends
• @zecakeh made it easier to initialize those storage backends
• I (@jplatte) created a ClientBuilder to simplify client initialization
• @zecakeh moved some functionality into a new Encryption type to improve the API structure
• I updated the SDK to make use of Ruma's support for the v3 endpoint paths on servers that support it
• I improved the quality of the SDKs logs as part of some profiling experiments

Additionally, these things have been in progress for a while and deserve a mention as well even though they're not finished yet:

• @gnunicorn is working on sliding sync (MSC3575)
• @poljar is working on integrating vodozemac, a libolm reimplementation in Rust

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:

• MSC3751: Allowing widgets to read account data

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs had FCP proposed this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered FCP this week.

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3440: Threading via m.thread relation
• MSC3316: Add timestamp massaging to the spec

Spec Updates

Keeping in step with our quarterly spec releases, the release of Matrix v1.3 is expected to land sometime early Q2 2022. This release will include Threads (as defined by MSC3440), as well as a number of other MSCs which land in the meantime.

Speaking of other MSCs, client developers should be aware of upcoming work to support live and static location sharing in the ecosystem. A notice on the subject has been posted today in the Matrix Client Developers room.

A reminder that the matrix-doc GitHub repository has been split into two new repositories: matrix-spec and matrix-spec-proposals. Read more about this in the last edition of TWIM.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2398: proposal to allow mxc:// in the "a" tag within messages!

This MSC makes the case for allowing linking to MXC content by using of an <a> tag in the HTML-formatted formatted_body field of a m.room.message. As MXC urls could contain HTML files, it could be rather useful to link directly to them, as you would any other webpage. Your client would then translate this to an http/s URL which can be used to view/navigate to the file.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

Brendan Abolivier reports

We've released Synapse 1.54! It includes quite a lot of nice improvements, including around URL previewing, and new callbacks for third-party modules. Check out the release announcement for more info on all this goodness.

We've also landed more of the ground work to improve the time it takes for new servers to join big rooms, which Rich was talking about last week. Aside from this, we're continuing the effort towards switching Synapse to use Poetry, which will enable reproducible builds for Synapse. These are some very exciting projects which will be maturing in the coming weeks, so watch this space!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace says

Missed last weeks update, but my charts rolled along regardless. Currently serving; element-web 1.10.6 and matrix-synapse 1.54.0 (and matrix-media-repo 1.2.10)

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

The basics of the bridge are now ready! Backfilling, message sending, and message receiving are now implemented...albeit quite buggy and untested.

For anyone curious to try it out, installation follows the same general steps as tulir's Python-based mautrix bridges, plus a backend Node module that must be launched before the Python component of the bridge. I'll write a README with proper setup instructions soon!

Just note that for the time being, updates to the bridge may invalidate its database!!. I won't guarantee stable DB upgrades until the bridge's early growing pains have settled down.

Reminder that my KakaoTalk ID is fair-mw if anyone wants to help me test things out 🙂

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Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

SmallTalk (website)

Minimal Android messenger powered by Matrix

adam reports

👋 I'm happy to finally reveal the side project I've been working on - SmallTalk, a tiny native android matrix client focused on chatting with family and friends!

I've been wondering, how small can you make a functional native android matrix client? So far 1.7mb! (*when served from an app bundle)

Features

• E2E encryption (including importing Element E2E keys)
• Merged room and DM list
• Message bubbles
• Push notifications

Currently in closed beta whilst ironing bugs, improving error handling and adding basic features like accepting invites, however apks are available on github for eager testers!

Nheko (website)

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

Nico says

I am happy to present you a new release with the cute name 0.9.2!

Apart from losts of bugfixes, expect the following:

Highlights

• Message bubbles (Malte E) 💬
  • Give a colorful and space saving background to messages.
  • Optionally shrink the usernames to save even more space.
  • Your messages are on the opposite side of messages sent by other users.
• Basic widgets 🗔
  • Widgets in a room are shown below the topic.
  • Open them in your browser to view them.

Features

• Autocompleter for custom emotes using ~. Note that this currently inserts raw html into the message input.
• Support running Nheko without a secrets service using a hidden setting.
• Add zooming and panning to the image overlay.
• Add a manpage. (tastytea)
• Offline indicator. (LorenDB)
• Proper previews for unjoined rooms in spaces (on supported servers).
• /reset-state /command to reset the state of a single room.
• Allow hiding some events from the timeline. (tastytea)
• Hidden read receipts. (Symphorien)
• Open room members dialog when clicking the encryption indicator.
• Click to copy room id. (Malte E)
• Allow specifying a reason for message removal, bans and kicks. (tastytea)

Improvements

• Speed up blurhash and jdenticon rendering.
• Use fewer threads for image decoding reducing memory use.
• Document secret service installation on Arch. (Marshall Lochbaum)
• Make edits replace previous notifications for the same message on Linux.
• Add alternatives for Alt-A as a shortcut on systems where that is already used.
• Apply clang-tidy suggestions. (MTRNord)
• Make custom emotes twice as high as the text to improve legibility. (tastytea)
• Ensure high quality scaling is used for custom emotes. (tastytea)
• Reduce allocations for the timeline by around a factor of 2.
• Render messages half as often, when displaying them for the first time.
• Increase maximum number of items in completers to 30.
• Run the gstreamer event loop also on macOS and Windows.
• Make presence update dynamically.
• Cleanup the raw message dialog.
• Make settings responsive.
• Improve Login and Registration pages.
• Add custom stickers & emotes to Q&A.
• Improve scrolling on touch screens. (Malte E)
• Reduce size of state events.
• Update OpenSUSE install instructions. (LorenDB)
• Use newer flatpak runtime.
• Fallback to using the shortcode in custom emotes, when there is no title set. (Ivan Pavluk)
• Improve a lot of hovering behaviours.
• Make spinboxes in scrollable pages unscrollable. (Malte E)
• Fix deprecation warnings in gstreamer code. (Scow)
• Make room directory fit mobile screens. (Malte E)
• Make room search accessible on mobile. (Malte E)
• Fix calls on mobile.
• Add arch binary repo. (digital-mystik)
• Improve long topics in the room settings. (Malte E)
• Fix typos. (ISSOtm)
• Improve the message input on mobile devices. (Malte E)

I hope this one works for you and we didn't break too much stuff and thanks a lot to everyone who contributed!

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

Welcome back to another week at Element!

Message Threads

• Our MSC 3440 completed its final comment period this week which is a super exciting move forwards for our team! We are now using a stable prefix and server-side support for Threads so the whole experience should be much better.
• The team is hard at work fixing bugs so that we can launch with as much confidence in our solution as possible.
• If you’ve been using Threads whilst in Labs, please keep giving feedback and raising any issues you may find.

Community testing

• Join #element-community-testing:matrix.org to help out with the testing
• Coming up this week:
  • Spaces on iOS: Tuesday, 15th Mar at 16:00 UTC / 17:00 CET

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle says

• On Web we’re focussed on improving the app and fighting bugs;
  • This week we are seeing fewer reports of decryption errors!
  • On Develop, you should no longer find that editing messages messes with their formatting.

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

• Pinned messages are getting some attention in Labs. Keep providing feedback for us!

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu announces

• The next app store release is delayed due to some flows that do not match Apple guidelines - we’ll be updating the Apple SSO default values and introducing “Decline & Block” to invitations.
• This week we checked-in on our language status and updated some things; We now support Ukrainian.
• We’re working hard at updating the activity indicators in the app. While we work on the performance and load times in general we want to enable users to go about their tasks without being blocked by the activity indicator. The new indicator sits towards the top of the screen and should be out of the way for most tasks, whilst still informative. Let us know what you think!
• The iOS team are also improving the onboarding experience for new users; aiming to make Matrix account creation as simple as possible.

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle announces

• We’re continuing on our path to increase the quality and usability of the app; the next release is v1.4.4 (already available for beta testers!) includes things like moving the typing indicator from the top bar to the bottom of the timeline.
• We are also improving our PR process. In particular we want to reduce the time the submitters have to wait to get a review.
• Our onboarding flow is being updated. We want new users to have a simple and straight-forward experience when they’re creating an account.

Cinny (website)

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

Lozenge reports

Namaste 🙏,

We are happy to announce that Cinny now support all the features of Spaces — a way to group rooms in Matrix. This means that you can now create new spaces from client, add rooms or subspaces inside them or manage the added rooms. We have also made our unique feature of Pinning spaces to sidebar more easy and organized. With this option all the spaces and subspaces will be visible at one place and you can select the one you want to pin or remove. One more unique feature we added with update is the Categorized subspaces, what this do is make all the subspaces inside a space appear as categories. This is helpful when there are deep nested spaces inside a space and breadcrumb is pain to navigate back and fourth. Keep in mind that this ignore the nesting of subspaces and all of them will appear under mainspace, but nice thing is that you can select which subspace you want to categorized and which not. Another exciting update related to spaces is the Drag-and-Drop. Earlier there was no option to reorder pinned spaces but now with DnD you can reorder them as you like.

Apart from spaces this update also include option to drag and drop files, ||sending spoiler||, desktop notification and viewing event source. (Thanks to @ginnyTheCat for these amazing additions.)

Full changelog is available at: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny/releases/tag/v1.8.0

Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in Join our channel at: https://matrix.to/#/#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 announces

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

1. The PDF viewer now has nicer tooltips
2. The width of sidepanels is now adjustable
3. Searchbars now have hints to help find the keyboard shortcut
4. Error messages are now displayed more uniformly
5. Populus-viewer now has an icon
6. Failed messages are now indicated, with the option to resend

Fixed some bugs:

1. room avatars should now update more quickly
2. highlights should always display immediately after joining a new discussion

And added a service worker, for a better offline experience.

Finally, we've opened a new draft MSC (just a stub at the moment) to create a format for annotations on text documents. So... matrix annotations as a vim plugin? The future is bright 😎

As always, if you're interested in this work, or in the future of annotation and scholarship on matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.

matrix-streamchat (website)

Matrix powered stream overlay for OBS, to integrate live chat in your favorite (selfhosted) streaming setups.

f0x announces

Matrix Streamchat got it's first alpha release, and was successfully set up + used by someone else this week Recorded a little demo video on the setup with OBS: https://youtu.be/HmJ3XwJXB7I, and implemented the GUI for configuring the chat's settings and looks, to then copy the link into an iframe (embedded chat) or OBS (overlay).

Gatho (website)

Invite friends to your event with a one-click RSVP link - no matter which chat/social app they use!

Jake C reports

Gatho.party is a replacement for Facebook Events for small social gatherings. I've used it for a number of parties and received great feedback, and I'm seeing others are starting to use it too 🎉

To receive confirmations of attendance you can either:

• Use the included Matrix bot to automatically sync RSVP emoji reactions in a linked Matrix room (great for your friends on Matrix or in a bridged Signal chat)
• Send a unique one-click RSVP links to you friends without Matrix (eg. Instagram DMs, SMS)
• And as of this week, guests can "self serve" and add their own RSVP via the unique event link, so you can just drop the event link in a Facebook Messenger chat or iMessage group (without email or phone verification at the moment, so hosts will need to moderate if their guests go rogue and add multiple fake names!)

Other recent improvements are:

• Ability to delete guests
• Improved call to action and copy text for when a guest with a "magic" link is prompted to RSVP
• Confetti animations when your guests RSVP via the Gatho website as "Going"

I'm currently testing an experimental chat embed using Matrix Live so your guests not on Matrix can optionally see your linked Matrix room - I've found some of my friends join Matrix after seeing this so they can join the action!

I'm keen to eventually use Cactus Comments once I figure out a bit of Elm and have more spare time so that non-Matrix guests can post too.

The Gatho website and bot is open source (AGPL-3.0) on Github, PRs and Github issues are very welcome! It's built using Next.js in Typescript.

I'd love to hear your feedback! Join the Matrix room at https://matrix.to/#/#gatho-events:matrix.gatho.party

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Polyjuice (website)

Elixir libraries related to the Matrix communications protocol.

uhoreg says

Polyjuice Client Test is a tool for testing Matrix clients by creating a predefined environment for each test. Since the last time it was mentioned in TWIM,

• more tests have been added: a test for basic end-to-end encryption message sending and receiving, symmetric key backup (MSC3270), and key withheld codes (MSC2399). More tests (and improvements to existing tests) to come.
• the UI has improved a bit. Sorry, it's still ugly, but slightly less so. Also, now you can search through the tests.
• I am now running a publicly-accessible instance of it at https://test.uhoreg.ca/ so you can test your clients without having to set it up yourself. This instance is stable-ish, in that it should always be available, but may be restarted randomly, in which case you may need to re-start your tests.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synatainer (website)

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

saces announces

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

New since v0.1.0:

• added arm64 support
• improved output of purge_history.sh

Start it without command and let it do its magic :)

What it does by default:

• daily:
  • purge all rooms without local members
  • run the state autocompressor (small setting 500/100)
• weekly:
  • delete old remote media (>90 days)
  • delete old message history from public joinable rooms (>180 days)
• monthly:
  • run the state autocompressor (big setting 1500/300)
  • vacuum the database

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

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

Compose example: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer/-/snippets/2264828

---

If you are looking for a docker container with just the auto compressor for linux amd64/arm64 in it, her you go: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/rust-synapse-compress-state

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

libli

unonde says

hello! wanted to show a small matrix web client made with unminified js/html/css & web components (wip++) https://libli.org/ https://gitlab.com/sctlib/libli + https://gitlab.com/sctlib/matrix-room-element looking forward feedback comments or anything, cheers & viva la matrix!

for now it only uses default matrix messages, and it is read only, so users have to login/register/CRUD through element (or any other client) the idea would be to give back users control on their data, allow them to "collect" (individually or as group), any type of content, gathered into matrix room

For now, the client is making HTTP requests to matrix API, to fetch the data of a (public) room, all message & state events. it also give a "clean URL" libli.org/room:server.tld so users can access their "profile" (chat room) easily (just like a twitter, instagram, medium) page

Dept of Guides 🧭

Self-Host a Matrix Map Server

JulianF reports

Following Element's recent announcement of location sharing with support for self-hosted map tile server, I went ahead and set up one, and have written a blog post about it, explaining how to go a little further than the currently published guide, and with Ansible scripts included. *> https://wrily.foad.me.uk/self-host-a-matrix-map-server

Extensible Events

andybalaam reports

Andy Balaam wrote a blog post explaining extensible events - it shows simple examples of what message events look like now, and how they change with extensible events. It also covers the abbreviated forms of m.message: m.text and m.html, which can make it somewhat more confusing to understand.

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 Status of Matrix 🌡️

TravisR says

t2bot.io - a public integrations network for Matrix - has passed 1 Million known rooms and 8.3 Million bridged users. 10,000 of these rooms are attributed to Voyager (a bot which actively goes out to find rooms to map Matrix, with the map currently down for maintenance), leaving the remaining ones either bridged, previously bridged, or using a different integration offered by t2bot.io for free.

The 8.3 Million users are mainly Discord and Telegram users which have been brought over to Matrix through bridges. The stats say "excluding Twitter-bridged" because there's 424,832 old accounts from back in the day when t2bot.io had a free Twitter bridge available. To further break this down, about 6.8M are Telegram users (12% of Telegram) and 1.3M are Discord (<1% of Discord).

For perspective, t2bot.io has about 569 Million events stored in its database and sees approximately 30 thousand people bridged daily from the wider world into Matrix through its bridges.

This post is just a milestone update, but it also serves as a reminder that running your own server/bridges is also possible. In fact, it's even recommended to have better control over your own data and avoid latency issues that large providers, like t2bot.io, can unintentionally introduce. Synapse is relatively easy to set up with minimal sysadmin knowledge (guide), and there's always paid offerings like Element Matrix Services (for home and also for fun) and Beeper for a richer bridging experience than t2bot.io can feasibly provide.

TravisR adds

in the eternal battle of "t2bot.io should be successful" and "please oh god self-host", the above^

Thib reports

It is to be noted that eQualitie has set-up public Matrix and Element instances for Ukrainian people who are struggling right now. If you are in Ukraine or are in touch with Ukrainian people who need secure communications, you can show them https://kyiv.dcomm.net.ua, https://odessa.dcomm.net.ua, or https://kharkiv.dcomm.net.ua depending on their location so they get instructions on how to create an account on Matrix and stay in touch

Dept of Spec 📜

Kegan reports

MSC3575 Sliding Sync work is progressing, and a number of new features have been added to the MSC with implementations in the built-in web client in the proxy. A list of changes include:

• spec/proxy: the ability to filter the room list by room name.
• spec/proxy: Aninitial flag on the room to distinguish between updates and the initial sync for a given room. This can be used as a hint to clients to determine if they should update/replace their local data for that room.
• proxy: more efficient algorithm for determining overlapping sets of ranges, resulting in fewer bytes over the wire when scrolling.
• proxy: the client implementation now supports sending basic text messages as well as issuing/join,/invite,/leave commands.
• proxy: the client implementation now has a developer HUD which tracks the Tx/Rx bytes as well as a visual representation of the sliding window.

The net result is a basic but incredibly low bandwidth syncing client: 60.79KB to download an entire initial sync on matrix.org. Further improvements will be done on the client to make sure it doesn't scale with the number of rooms on the user's account (it currently does because it naively adds a placeholder for each room in the list) to ensure it remains extremely snappy and a vision for what Sliding Sync can do in practice, right now. Please continue giving feedback on MSC3575 or in #sliding-sync:matrix.org as the API is still in development and will change depending on what clients require.

Andrew Morgan (Element) 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

Created MSCs:

• MSC3746: Render image data in reactions

MSCs with newly proposed Final Comment Period:

• No FCPs were proposed this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3440: Threading via m.thread relation (merge)
• MSC3316: Add timestamp massaging to the spec (merge)

Closed MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3710: User groups

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

Heads up! You may have noticed some changes to the matrix-org/matrix-doc github repository this week. The first major one being that it no longer exists!

We have separated it out into two repositories:

• matrix-org/matrix-spec - the source text of the spec. Issues and pull requests filed here should relate to the source of the spec.
• matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals - all Matrix Spec Change proposals. New MSCs should be filed against this repository as pull requests. Issues should not be filed against this repository (and no, the issue tracker cannot be disabled, as it would cause transferred issue link redirects to 404).

The primary motivation for this was to separate concerns of interacting with matrix-org/matrix-doc. Those interacting with the spec's source would have to wade through long-lived spec proposals, while those only interested in spec proposals would need to filter out spec source files and other issues and PRs related to them. This also helps writing tooling against the repo either as it no longer needs to filter MSCs via issue labels.

Existing links to matrix-doc should be automatically redirected by github to the right place. MSC authors and developers should update their git remote settings to point to the new repos.

What happened in detail to achieve this was:

• matrix-doc was renamed tomatrix-spec-proposals
• matrix-spec was created
• All files other than the "proposals" folder were transferred frommatrix-spec-proposals tomatrix-spec
• All open issues frommatrix-spec-proposals were transferred tomatrix-spec

Further details are available here: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/927

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3383: Include destination in X-Matrix Auth Header!

This MSC asks for the simple change of adding a "destination" field to the Authorization header of federation requests. This would have the benefit of allowing reverse proxies - potentially handling traffic for multiple homeservers - to know where requests should be sent. Or for forward proxies, which could validate outgoing requests from a homeserver before they're sent.

There is currently some discussion on the fundamental idea of the MSCs, which will need to be resolved first before it can move forwards.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

richvdh announces

Quite a varied bag this week! Firstly we cut a release candidate for Synapse 1.54.0, which we hope to release next week. As ever, testing and feedback is much appreciated.

Our switch to Poetry for dependency management has come a few steps closer, by removing tox from our Continuous Integration, and converting some of our ad-hoc scripts to proper Python entry points.

Meanwhile we've been continuing to knock out blockers to improving room join speeds, including better exception handling and logging, and some exciting work to reduce wasted work when a client disconnects while we're still processing a request.

We've also been taking a wider look at performance problems, such as slow /sync and /login times.

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

Kegan reports

I have been asked by numerous people over months if there are any kind of graphs comparing Synapse and Dendrite. Up until now, my answer has been "as far as I know, no". However, this got me thinking whether I can use Complement to engineer some kind of performance testing infrastructure. After hacking on it for a day or two, I can now share some of the work I've done in this area. There now exists two new binaries in the Complement repo: perftest and perfgraph. The former will run some tests and output a .json file. The latter will consume these files to generate .svg graphs. The tests performed include:

• Creating a bunch of rooms with different users. (currently 10 users and 50 rooms)
• Joining a bunch of rooms with different users.
• Sending messages into rooms with different users. (currently 100 messages)
• Doing an initial sync for all users.
• Updating the display name of all users.
• Doing an incremental sync for all users.

The metrics are collected using docker stats. This means the entire container is measured, not just the homeserver binary (e.g any daemons or assistive processes are included in the metrics) and includes:

• CPU time consumed
• Memory consumed
• Bytes transmitted/received
• Disk read/writes
• Time taken

Here are some results:

This was a surprising find and probably indicates that Dendrite has a memory leak somewhere when creating events. However, the fun doesn't stop there. We can also use this tool to compare different versions of the same homeserver:

This allows us to quantify any performance improvements we've been working on, and you can clearly see how we're being more efficient with CPU in newer versions. But the fun doesn't stop there either. We can also compare different flavours of the same version of a homeserver:

You can quantify the cost of running sqlite or postgres for your particular installation.

Care must be taken when interpreting results. Lower doesn't always mean better. For example, a low readout on "create_users" may be a cause for concern as it might indicate that the server is not hashing passwords correctly (e.g using bcrypt/scrypt which are designed to consume CPU/memory). Servers which don't implement all of the specification will also be abnormally low on CPU/memory (e.g not having to calculate unread counts or handle push notifications naturally means less work to do so less resources consumed). Furthermore, these tests do not yet test federation, so expensive remote joins are not measured (remote joins require the joining server to check signatures, hashes, etc of a lot of events which doesn't happen for local servers). That being said, I have hopefully illustrated how useful this tool can be for both server developers trying to improve their software and server admins who want to use the right server for their hardware. The graphs are still a work-in-progress and there's a lot more that can be done in this area beyond a few days work, but it's a start.

neilalexander says

Today we've released Dendrite 0.6.5 which contains early push notification support as well as a number of fixes and improvements. This release includes the following changes:

• Early support for push notifications has been added, with support for push rules, pushers, HTTP push gateways and the /notifications endpoint (contributions by danpe, PiotrKozimor and tommie)
• Spaces Summary (MSC2946) is now correctly supported (when msc2946 is enabled in the config)
• All media API endpoints are now available under the /v3 namespace
• Profile updates (display name and avatar) are now sent asynchronously so they shouldn't block the client for a very long time
• State resolution v2 has been optimised further to considerably reduce the number of memory allocations
• State resolution v2 will no longer duplicate events unnecessarily when calculating the auth difference
• The create-account tool now has a -reset-password option for resetting the passwords of existing accounts
• The /sync endpoint now calculates device list changes much more quickly with less RAM used
• The /messages endpoint now lazy-loads members correctly
• Read receipts now work correctly by correcting bugs in the stream positions and receipt coalescing
• Topological sorting of state and join responses has been corrected, which should help to reduce the number of auth problems when joining new federated rooms
• Media thumbnails should now work properly after having unnecessarily strict rate limiting removed
• The roomserver no longer holds transactions for as long when processing input events
• Uploading device keys and cross-signing keys will now correctly no-op if there were no changes
• Parameters are now remembered correctly during registration
• Devices can now only be deleted within the appropriate UIA flow
• The /context endpoint now returns 404 instead of 500 if the event was not found
• SQLite mode will no longer leak memory as a result of not closing prepared statements

Spec compliance, as measured by Sytest, currently sits at:

• Client-server APIs: 76%, up from 65% last time
• Server-server APIs: 95%, up from 94% last time

As always, you can join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite discussion and announcements.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Half-Shot reports

matrix-hookshot reaches 1.2.0

Hey folks, I'm back from holidays and I'm proud to say that hookshot is kicking out release after release. This release is especially large and contains a bounty of new features and fixes. Of note are:

• JIRA Datacenter (On Premise) is now supported.
• You can now configure fine grained permissions for users on the bridge by userId, homeserver domain or room membership (think spaces).
• Generic webhooks has sprouted a versioned API, with v2 allowing for finer control over the output.
• GitHub connections now include the closing comment when issues and PRs are closed.
• GitHub connections will also notify a room when an existing issue has been relabled to one filtered by that room.
• Figma now uses MSC3440 for comment threads.

But seriously go check out the release, there is way more there than I can include in this TWIM post. Happy webhookin, matrix gang!

In case you did not know, Hookshot can be installed via spantaleev's Ansible playbook. In addition to updates for this new release, the role has recently gotten some improvements and fixes by the community, so in case you had issues before, now is the time to try again!

P.S oh and I almost forgot, we rehomed to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-hookshot. This doesn't change much, other than some redirects in your browsers cache.

Half-Shot adds

permissions:
* actor: '*'
  services:
  - level: commands
    service: github
* actor: '!the-internal-element-room:matrix.org'
  services:
  - level: manageConnections
    service: '*'
* actor: '@random-on-the-side-user:homeserver.org'
  services:
  - level: manageConnections
    service: '*'

Allows anyone to run github commands in rooms. User part of the room listed can actually go and create connections to anywhere (we use it internally at $work), and then there is a final random user who gets those permissions because they refuse to join that room :p

matrix-appservice-irc (website)

Node.js IRC bridge for Matrix

Half-Shot reports

matrix-appservice-irc 0.33.0

Two bridge updates from matrix.org in one week? You would be forgiven for thinking it was FOSDEM Christmas.

The highlights are:

• Support splitting users from different homeservers into different IPv6 blocks. We used this at FOSDEM to split attendeeds into a different ILINE.
• Added a new metric clientpool_by_homeserver which lists the states of IRC clients, by the top 25 homeservers. Useful to know who is using your bridge.
• Add support for subscribing to moderation policies. This allows a bridge admin to subscribe to Matrix "ban lists" and filter who can use their bridge.

This release also now requires Node 14.x as Node 12.x will be out of support very soon.

See the changelog for yourself over at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.33.0

Dept of Clients 📱

Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

This week, we've fixed a few annoying issues in NeoChat:

• On platforms with a system tray, NeoChat no quits correctly when the system tray integration is disabled
• Similar state events are now aggregated into a single message (so no more scrolling through "Moderation has changed the access control lists" 🙂)
• Sending messages starting with a ':' works correctly again

We've also improved NeoChat's startup time from cache by a factor of several hundred, depending on the situation

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat says

• Released v1.10.5 and also v1.10.6 as a hotfix for a crash
• Surveyed users and collated feedback from search result ordering for improvements to the new search experience (enable it in Settings -> Labs in production)
• In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
  • Pin drop location sharing has been added
  • Fixed message ordering issues in threads
  • Fixed threads discovery when scrolling back in a room
  • Added a couple of new ways to access pinned messages, in the room header and info panel
  • Improved the reliability of pinned messages with edits

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu announces

• New release, v1.8.3, is out
• Still improving the activity indicator
• Working on missing messages bugs
• Making progress on the registration flow by setting name and avatar
• In development:
  • We will be trying out Spaces on iOS at 16:00 UTC / 17:00 CET on Tuesday, 8th of March. Head over to #element-community-testing:matrix.org to hear the latest on all testing sessions!
  • Live location sharing has started
• In labs:
  • An option to use the last member avatar and name in the timeline

Element Android (website)

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

adam reports

• Our newest release, v1.4.2, is out!
• Progress is being made on fixing “unable to decrypt” errors (UISI) - re-architected legacy code.
• Our language capabilities have expanded with improved Japanese translations (special thanks to the contributor for this!)
• The team is working on process improvements to reduce incoming PR backlog and getting to those faster.
• We’re actively looking into the reported increased memory usage.
  • As always, thank you for feedback and reports, it helps a lot.
• For those using the SDK, we’ve deprecated the main Matrix entrypoints, more information here

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

matrix-streamchat (website)

Matrix powered stream overlay for OBS, to integrate live chat in your favorite (selfhosted) streaming setups.

f0x says

a very simple invite-accepting bot as part of matrix-streamchat to more easily facilitate peeking into rooms over federation. You run one on your guest-access enabled homeserver, invite it to your remote room, and now all guest accounts from your server know they are in fact allowed to publicly read the room over federation without joining themselves. https://git.pixie.town/f0x/matrix-streamchat/src/branch/main/autojoin-bot

Dept of Widgets 🧩

Mjolnir Widget (website)

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

MTRNord (they/them) reports

Mjölnir Moderation Widget

There have been a few changes to the widget:

• Ability to kick people was added
• Inter font was added to improve readability
• Work on having a setup page for the bot was added which allows to easily add the bot to your room (sets up permissions and invites the bot as required)
• Added support for a state event which tells the widget about "who is the bot?" and "which lists does this bot monitor?" Which also allows you to use the widget without being in the banlist room yourself. (See https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-moderation-widget#use-a-state-event-to-allow-showing-relevant-lists-only-in-the-dropdown for more information)

Dept of VoIP 🤙

Element Call (website)

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

Matthew reports

Element Call has entered beta! Head over to https://call.element.io (formerly matrixvoip.dev) to play with in-browser native Matrix voice/video calling powered by MSC3401, supporting all webrtc-capable mobile & desktop browsers. See all the details over at https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-element-call/

• Offers high quality video calls with around 6 or 7 participants as a small & simple, standalone app that allows anyone to drop into a video conference easily.
• This is beta - please file bugs at https://github.com/vector-im/element-call/issues and be aware that currently all participants need good bandwidth
• This is the first implementation of MSC3401: a spec for secure, federated voice and video conferences.
• Integrations into other clients are coming soon, Hydrogen is working on it right now
• We’ll also be developing a server to mix media streams so calls can scale up to much larger number of participants. The server will only ever see your encrypted media, so calls will stay secure and confidential.

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 reports

We're back (to TWIM)! Here's some highlights from the past few months:

• Stronger types for some things:
  • Base64 which ensures you always decode / encode with the appropriate base64 dictionary [@jplatte]
  • TransactionId which is simply a little more explicit than String and easier to generate a random instance of [@jplatte]
• Stable support for lots of previously-unstable functionality that got stabilized upstream as part of the Matrix specification releases v1.1 and v1.2 [@zecakeh]
• Support for versioned endpoints in the client-server API [@ShadowJonathan]
• Rehaul of our module structure to match the client-server API's new versioned endpoints (before: r0::foo::get_bar, after: foo::get_bar::v3) [@ShadowJonathan]
• More fine-grained feature flags for MSC implementations (before: everything behind unstable-pre-spec, after: most things behind dedicated unstable-mscXXXX features) [@zecakeh]
• matrix.to URI parsing [@zecakeh]
• MatrixUri type [@zecakeh]

All of these changes are available in version 0.5.0 which was released about two weeks ago.

Additionally, @zecakeh recently started implementing extensible events and doing some pretty heavy internal refactoring that will make our release process faster and hopefully make contributing to Ruma easier as well.

With all these changes we're very close to supporting all of Matrix v1.1 (and Matrix v1.2 too!), with the only major omission being Secure Secret Storage and Sharing (SSSS). Some work on that was done as far back as last year's GSoC but it was blocked on a medium-sized refactoring of how we handle account data. I'm planning to get that over the finish line over the next weeks.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synatainer (website)

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

saces announces

Start it without command and let it do its magic :)

What it does by default:

• daily:
  • purge all rooms without local members
  • run the state autocompressor (small setting 500/100)
• weekly:
  • delete old remote media (>90 days)
  • delete old message history from public joinable rooms (>180 days)
• monthly:
  • run the state autocompressor (big setting 1500/300)
  • vacuum the database

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

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

Compose example: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer/-/snippets/2264828

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix Scribe

JulianF announces

I'm working on a little hobby project, The Matrix Scribe.

The Matrix Scribe helps us re-post or transcribe messages into matrix that we received from somewhere else, posing as different ghost users to represent the original authors.

Scribe will post this:

Ann I'm Ann.

Bob Hello! I'm Bob.

when I write this to @scribe-bot:

@julian /scribe as Ann

@julian I'm Ann.

@julian /scribe as Bob

@julian Hello! I'm Bob.

That is an illustration of the goal. The output part works already; the bot part isn't implemented yet.

Why?

• I want to encourage people to experiment and play with extending Matrix in creative ways.
• As a building block for myself towards building more usual matrix bridges. Scribe is the input half of the matrix half of a bridge, so literally one quarter of a typical matrix bridge.
• I hope that I myself and maybe some other people will find Scribe fun or useful in itself.

If you find this interesting...

• Come and say hello in the matrix room: #matrix-scribe:foad.me.uk
• See the blog post or the project README (similar content in both)

Scribe is not intended to mislead users. It should be deployed in such a way that its use is clear, and require appropriate permissions.

maubot_azuracast

boris reports

a simple bot https://github.com/borisrunakov/maubot_azuracast built with maubot, that you can use to request data from your azuracast self hosted instance. It's not much but ok...

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

J. Ryan Stinnett says

I'll be speaking at the new HYTRADBOI conference (29 Apr) about building collaborative, open software on Matrix. All of the talks sound super interesting, highly recommended! 😄 The talks will be public after the conference as well.

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!

OTWSU 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (Element) 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

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3589: Room version 9 as the default room version
• MSC3582: Remove m.room.message.feedback

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC3744: Support for flexible authentication
• MSC3743: Standardized error response for unknown endpoints
• MSC3741: Revealing the useful login flows to clients after a soft logout
• MSC3735: Add device information to m.room_key.withheld message

Spec Updates

MSC3440 continues to be the focus on much review as the proposal inches towards entering final comment period.

Otherwise both MSC3589 (room version 9 as the default room version) and MSC3582 (remove m.room.message.feedback) merged this week. The former brings with it updated versions for rooms as they continue to be created across the federation, whereas the latter is simply a nice clean up to the existing spec :)

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3593: Safety Controls through a generic Administration API!

This MSC aims to introduce a set of generic administrative APIs for Matrix homeservers, starting with those that could potentially be useful for user moderation.

There has long been talk of adding administration APIs akin to Synapse's Admin API to the spec, in part to reduce the number of tools that are specifically created for it, and thus can only be used with Synapse.

Feedback welcome!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

Shay announces

This week we released Synapse 1.53.0! This release adds support for sending to-device messages to application services, adds a background database update to purge account data for deactivated users, and adds more features to improve performance and stability, as well as bugfixes and improved documentation. Check out the release notes here.

In addition to the release, work continues on improving the performance of room joins-progress is being made! Finally, we began the process of switching over Synapse to use Poetry for dependency management-keep your eyes peeled for more information on that project as it develops.

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander says

This week we released Dendrite v0.6.4 which contains a significant number of improvements and fixes. It includes the following:

• All Client-Server API endpoints are now available under the /v3 namespace
• The /whoami response format now matches the latest Matrix spec version
• Support added for the /context endpoint, which should help clients to render quote-replies correctly
• Accounts now have an optional account type field, allowing admin accounts to be created
• Server notices are now supported
• Refactored the user API storage to deduplicate a significant amount of code, as well as merging both user API databases into a single database
• Guest registration can now be separately disabled with the new client_api.guests_disabled configuration option
• Outbound connections now obey proxy settings from the environment, deprecating the federation_api.proxy_outbound configuration options
• The roomserver input API will now strictly consume only one database transaction per room, which should prevent situations where the roomserver can deadlock waiting for database connections to become available
• Room joins will now fall back to federation if the local room state is insufficient to create a membership event
• Create events are now correctly filtered from federation /send transactions
• Excessive logging when federation is disabled should now be fixed
• Dendrite will no longer panic if trying to retire an invite event that has not been seen yet
• The device list updater will now wait for longer after a connection issue, rather than flooding the logs with errors
• The device list updater will no longer produce unnecessary output events for federated key updates with no changes, which should help to reduce CPU usage
• Local device name changes will now generate key change events correctly
• The sync API will now try to share device list update notifications even if all state key NIDs cannot be fetched
• An off-by-one error in the sync stream token handling which could result in a crash has been fixed
• State events will no longer be re-sent unnecessary by the roomserver to other components if they have already been sent, which should help to reduce the NATS message sizes on the roomserver output topic in some cases
• The roomserver input API now uses the process context and should handle graceful shutdowns better
• Guest registration is now correctly disabled when the client_api.registration_disabled configuration option is set
• One-time encryption keys are now cleaned up correctly when a device is logged out or removed
• Invalid state snapshots in the state storage refactoring migration are now reset rather than causing a panic at startup

Sytest compliance is up slightly:

• Client-server APIs: 67%, up from 65%
• Server-server APIs: 95%, same as before

As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite-related chat!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace reports

And my Helm Chart updates continue as they do, with matrix-synapse being updated to 1.53.0

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair reports

Here are the first steps for a bridge to KakaoTalk! The bridge is based on mautrix-python (having used mautrix-facebook as a starting point--there's still plenty of Facebook-specific code in there), with the backend handled by node-kakao (connected via RPC, as there seems to be no Python API for KakaoTalk!).

The bridge doesn't do much yet; all it can do is log in & sync your list of chats (if that). But it's under rapid development & decent momentum, so hopefully it will be usable soon!

For anyone brave enough to try it out, its setup steps are very similar to that of any of the Python-based mautrix bridges (though Docker is currently unsupported).

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

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

Nico announces

We made a small release that just is compiled against the new mtxclient version to fix an issue with servers announcing support for Matrix v1.1 or higher. We strongly recommend you update before the next Synapse stable release is out.

Apart from that Nheko now has support for hidden read receipts (thanks to symphorien, see MSC2285). ZenWalker updated our usage of deprecated gstreamer APIs. Malte has been spending a lot of effort on improving the scrolling experience on the PinePhone as well as allowing to search on mobile. Forwarding should now work properly again as well as calling on mobile and we fixed a small memory leak when opening some dialogs.

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

“Twosday” wasn’t the only exciting thing happening this week. Take a peek at everything else we had going on…

Coming to a Poll near you…

• From next week’s releases, you’ll discover two new updates on polls! First off, you’ll be able to edit a poll as long as no one has yet voted on it - which is great if you create a poll and realise you’ve made a small mistake. Even better, there’s now a new type of poll: ‘closed polls’ don’t show any results until the poll has ended, to keep the surprise.

Location Sharing

• Location Sharing is now available by default for users on all platforms, except desktop (where you can receive but not send locations). Check it out!
• The next stage is live location sharing and ‘pin dropping’, expect more soon.

Threaded Messaging

• Designed to make catching up on rooms easier, and to keep the main timeline as clutter free as possible, Threads are nearly here.
• You can try Threads out on all platforms - you’ll find them in Labs. This feature is experimental; let us know your feedback, and report any bugs as we continue to improve.

Community testing

• We will be looking at search result ordering on Web as part of the new search experience at 17:30 UTC / 18:30 CET on Tuesday, 1st of March
• We’re also hoping to test Threads on mobile devices towards the end of the week, join the testing room to get involved!
• Head over to #element-community-testing:matrix.org to hear the latest on all testing sessions!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle announces

• The EleWeb team has been working on Spaces, Threads, and defects this week.
• We are starting to look at batched updates, which could be bringing performance improvements to us.
• On the process improvement side, we are looking at test coverage and process improvements around PR submission. Don’t be surprised if our developers start a conversation around tests when you submit your next PR 🙂
• V1.10.5 release candidate is available and release is expected to go out on Monday, 28th February.
• And don’t forget; the new and improved search experience is available. It’s in Beta so turn it on, try it out, and send us your feedback!
  • We will be talking to the community about planned improvements in the next Community Testing Session on Tuesday over in#element-community-testing:matrix.org

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

• Improvements to Threads reliability are happening everyday. We’re also making some tweaks to the user experience details, like dragging and dropping files into the Thread panel.

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu reports

• Next week’s release (1.8.3) includes changes and improvements we’ve made to our overall app experience by closing some pesky UI defects.
• This week we’ve also been working on improving the reliability of our Labs features. If you’ve turned on Threads or Bubbles in Labs you may have experienced app slow downs or crashes. In the next version, these will be minimised.
• Spaces on iOS are also getting some attention at the moment and we’re hoping to improve the user experience of Spaces on Mobile.

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle announces

• The next release of Android (1.4.2) includes support for “@ room” and other usability defects you might have seen before… Fixes include steadying the notification badge in the room list, adding the correct interactions on bottom sheets, and opening a DM from the Space member list.
• We’ve also been working on upgrading the voice message experience, adding improvements like scrubbing! Keep sending voice notes and let us know what other improvements we should make.
• Our onboarding flow is also getting a new lick of paint. We want new users to our platform to have a simple and straight-forward experience when they’re creating an account.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

Populus-Viewer

Over at Populus-Viewer, we're continuing to refine the UX, for maximum focus, efficiency and enjoyment. Since last time we've:

1. Reworked the mobile view controls into a sidebar design.
2. Improved the generation of highlight rectangles.
3. Made sure that LaTeX and code listings are always displayed nicely
4. Made it possible to modify text selections within a PDF using the keyboard
5. Added "one-click" links for onboarding new users into a particular server, SSO flow and PDF collection.

We've also had some bug fixes related to federation, and had some of our first ever (maybe the first on matrix - first in the history of the universe?) federated social annotation sessions.

Populus-Philarchive

Populus-Philarchive, our proof-of-concept discussion overlay for preprint archives, now incorporates an OAI-PMH harvester, so it can aggregate OAI bibliographic metadata, and use that data for room creation and discovery. The implementation is pretty general, so it should be easy to tweak for any archive that supports OAI-PMH.

MSC3574

MSC3574 - marking up resources got some love this week, as we added a proposal for serializing annotations on matrix that ought to be compatible with the w3c web annotation data model. This paves the way for interoperability between the matrix annotation ecosystem and services like hypothes.is, and hopefully will make matrix a compelling option even for institutions where compliance with existing web standards is a must.

As always, if you'd like to chat about any of these developments, come visit us at #opentower:matrix.org !

Circles (website)

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

cvwright reports

The Circles beta on iOS continues inching toward a public release later this Spring.

• This week I added support for infinite scrolling on timelines. (Previously, scrolling the timelines was very clunky -- the user had to manually tap a button to "Load More" every 10-15 posts.)
• Also added a confirmation dialog when the user attempts to leave a group.

On Android, the prototype is coming along nicely, thanks to the efforts of our new developer Taras:

• The login screen works
• Currently working on implementing the timeline of social posts for groups

Dept of Widgets 🧩

Mjolnir Widget (website)

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

MTRNord (they/them) reports

In the last 2 weeks, I increasingly had to learn how to moderate rooms properly, which brought up a lack of nice Mjölnir gui for me. Due to that, I just started to write one. It is at the time of writing still fairly young.

The current features are:

• An overview of the ban list data the user is in (Not for the specific Mjölnir currently. Also requires a user to have joined the list room)
• A quick form to ban a person
• A form to redact someone or a message

Planned features are:

• Support for showing MSC1929 information if available
• Writing a patch for Mjölnir, so the widget can know which banlist the bot watches, so only relevant lists show up.
• Editing the banlist (aka unbanning)
• Adding support for more advanced features like deactivation of users and removal of media on the matrix-media-repo.
• Covering most of Mjölnir's commands
• Redact on ban and similar utilities you might want while banning.

Small getting started (it is simple :D)

To use it, you simply can add it to your Mjölnir Admin room by putting /addwidget https://moderation_widget.nordgedanken.dev?room_id=$matrix_room_id (the variable will get replaced automatically) in the message bar and pressing enter. The widget runs entirely client side, so this is not sending any events to my server. If you still are concerned due to the big amount of permissions asked, you can just build it yourself and host it.

Code and Room

Code is at https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-moderation-widget Room is at: #mjolnir-widget:nordgedanken.dev

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

mtxclient (website)

Client API library for Matrix, built on top of libcurl

Nico reports

You know what would be embarrassing? If changing the version number of something broke Nheko... Well, completely unrelated, mtxclient 0.6.2 is out now which fixes an issue where it would aggressively validate that version numbers started with an 'r'. Otherwise that release is API and ABI compatible, so if packagers could pick that up as a bugfix release into stable releases, that would be great!

Matrix-Rust-SDK-Bot-Framework-Helper (website)

A toolkit for writing commandbots more efficient in rust for matrix.

MTRNord (they/them) says

0.3.1

A small update was released, merging 2 month old PRs.

The changes are mainly features being now deactivated because we did not actually use them and fixing the example in one case. No updates to dependencies.

0.4.0

Dependencies have been updated to the newest versions.

Dept of Ops 🛠

andrewsh reports

The distribution-provided Debian packages for Synapse will only be provided for Bookworm (in testing/unstable) and Bullseye (in bullseye-backports). If you’re still using Buster (through buster-backports-sloppy), consider switching to Bullseye or, alternatively, to packages provided by the Synapse upstream. 1.52.0 is the last version to be provided for Buster through the backports repository.

saces reports

I did not find a docker container to ease/automate synapse and postgres maintenance, so I started one: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer

Dept of Bots 🤖

reMarkable

Paul announces

I saw an interesting (to me) reMarkable telegram bot somewhere. But I prefer matrix and node.js was more difficult to deploy on embedded. So I wrote a reMarkable matrix bot in Go. https://gitlab.com/ptman/remarkable-matrix

matrix-ukraine-donation-bot

krazykirby99999 says

A Matrix chat bot to send donation links to aid Ukraine in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Setup

Install Python 3.8 or higher

Install python-poetry

python -m pip install poetry

Clone Repository

git clone https://github.com/KrazyKirby99999/matrix-ukraine-donation-bot.git

Install Dependencies

cd matrix-ukraine-donation-bot
python -m poetry install

Usage:

Set environment variables

HOMESERVER=https://matrix.org
USERNAME=matrix-ukraine-donation-bot
PASSWORD=password # or ACCESS_TOKEN=syt_...

Run main.py

python -m poetry run python main.py

Example:

Matrix Community Manager (website)

Looking for a bot to manage events and feedback from your community?

Sleuth reports

Looking for a bot to manage events and feedback from your community?

MCM an information bot. It manages the flow of information between community leaders and their community.

It aggregates messages from community members in several ways.

• A @ mention. You can mention the bot with a message.
• A Direct Message. Members of your community can message this bot privately.
• hash tags. Using hash tags members of your community can send messages tagged to go to a specific back room.

You as an administrator of the bot can send timed announcements to any room using the built in matrix administration interface. You can also manage tags, add and remove admin of the bot, add automatic replies and more. All from the comforts of your Matrix client.

If you have any questions or want help please join #Matrix-Community-Manager:matrix.org Docs and installation guide can be found here

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!