Thib

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

This Week in Matrix 2022-06-03

03.06.2022 19:04 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

TravisR reports

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

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

πŸ”—MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

New MSCs:

πŸ”—Spec Core Team

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

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

πŸ”—Random MSC of the week

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

πŸ”—Dept of GSoC πŸŽ“οΈ

πŸ”—Encrypted Search for Matrix

burgers says

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

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

Looking forward to working in this ecosystem with you all!

πŸ”—Kazv Project

nannanko announces

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

πŸ”—3rd Party Authorised Room Membership

kuries says

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

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

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

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

πŸ”—NeoChat

flyingcakes announces

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

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—Synapse (website)

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

Shay says

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

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

πŸ”—Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

Till reports

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

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

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

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—Quadrix

JFA announces

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

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

πŸ”—Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan says

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

πŸ”—Element Android (website)

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

Manu reports

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

πŸ”—Cinny (website)

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

Lozenge reports

Cinny v2.0.4

πŸ”—What's changed

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

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

πŸ”—Dept of Non Chat Clients πŸŽ›οΈ

πŸ”—Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

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

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

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

πŸ”—Dept of VoIP πŸ€™

πŸ”—Element Call (website)

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

Matthew reports

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

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

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

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

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—libolm (website)

uhoreg announces

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

πŸ”—matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben says

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

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

πŸ”—Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart and maintained by Famedly

Henri Carnot announces

Dart Matrix SDK : Version 0.9.9

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

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

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

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

See you next time ;)

πŸ”—Dept of Bots πŸ€–

πŸ”—Matrix Community Manager (website)

The highly configurable message aggregation and filtering bot for matrix!

Sleuth announces

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

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

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

Gitlab releases Come chat on Matrix

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1the-apothecary.club450
2envs.net462
3polarbear.army473
4alemann.dev504
5aria-net.org530.5
6conduit.rs618
7tilduke.org643.5
8almum.de662
9keks.club731
10quyo.de879

πŸ”—#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1conduit.rs294.5
2dendrite.matrix.org305
3dendrite.neilalexander.dev387
4conduit.grich.sk433
5foxo.me465
6rustybever.be512
7cry.is521
8kszczot.pl527

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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

This Week in Matrix 2022-05-20

20.05.2022 20:03 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

πŸ”—Dept of Social Good πŸ™†

Thib says

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

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

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.

πŸ”—MSC Status

New MSCs:

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

  • No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

πŸ”—Spec Updates

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

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

πŸ”—Random MSC of the Week

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

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

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

πŸ”—Dept of GSoC πŸŽ“οΈ

Thib says

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

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

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

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

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier announces

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

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

πŸ”—Dept of Bridges πŸŒ‰

πŸ”—matrix-hookshot (website)

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

tadzik says

matrix-hookshot 1.7.0 is out

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

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

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

πŸ”—matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

Last week's testing updates are now in master!

Also included:

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

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

In other news, this bridge is now listed on Matrix.org! πŸ₯³ Thanks Thib !

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

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


πŸ”—matrix-appservice-discord (website)

A bridge between Matrix and Discord.

Half-Shot announces

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

Happy bridging!

πŸ”—Heisenbridge (website)

Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.

hifi says

Release v1.13.0 πŸ₯³

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks!

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

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

  • Urls will now more often be shown as links
  • A couple of input processing bugs have been fixed, which lead, among others, to fewer broken ASCII emojis :)
  • Clicking on a notification will now properly open NeoChat even on wayland πŸ₯³
  • Users can now disable sending typing notifications

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

πŸ”—Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat says

Threads

Community Testing

  • We ran 47 different tests on this week’s RC and found 20 defects/potential improvements
  • We are inviting community testers to take part in the Android and iOS app layout experiments
  • For more info on our next testing sessions (sync or async), you can join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org!

πŸ”—Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat says

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

πŸ”—Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan says

Element iOS

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

Element X

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

πŸ”—Element Android (website)

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

benoit says

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

πŸ”—Cinny (website)

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

Lozenge says

Cinny v2.0.3 - What's changed

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

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

πŸ”—Dept of Non Chat Clients πŸŽ›οΈ

πŸ”—Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

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

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

πŸ”—Dept of Widgets 🧩

πŸ”—Mjolnir Widget (website)

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

MTRNord (they/them) reports

Hi, just some small update this week:

  • Philantrop πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆ pointed out the widget was missing the room ban type, which is now added to the widget.
  • The ban list view now also shows the room id of the room the ban is from. (it will get extended to be an alias at some point. This is planned)
  • Dependencies have been updated.

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

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben says

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

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

πŸ‘‰οΈ We are very happy about the influx of people, who joined our developer community questions since the release. We'd like to take this opportunity again to invite anyone else interested in hacking on matrix in rust to check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.

πŸ”—Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart and maintained by famedly.com

Henri Carnot reports

Matrix Dart SDK : Version 0.9.6

This week, the team released version 0.9.6.

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

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

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

See you next time ;)

πŸ”—Dept of Services πŸš€

Samuel Philipp says

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

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

addanno says

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

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

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1envs.net441.5
2thewords.faith482
3almum.de551
4lw1.at661
5matrix.org768
6aria-net.org897
7quyo.de963
8mindlesstux.com970
9shortestpath.dev1205
10phorcys.net1395

πŸ”—#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1conduit.grich.sk179
2grin.hu702
3cry.is705
4sspaeth.de1174

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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

This Week in Matrix 2022-05-13

13.05.2022 18:50 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

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

πŸ”—MSC Status

New MSCs:

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

  • No MSCs had final comment period proposed this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

Merged MSCs:

  • No MSCs were closed this week.

Closed MSCs:

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—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:

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.

πŸ”—Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander reports

This week we've actually made two releases β€” Dendrite 0.8.4 and Dendrite 0.8.5 β€” 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.

πŸ”—Dept of Bridges πŸŒ‰

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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.

Community testing

πŸ”—Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle reports

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

πŸ”—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
  • πŸ’Š 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

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of Ops πŸ› 

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Dept of Bots πŸ€–

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Dept of Events and Talks πŸ—£οΈ

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. πŸ˜„

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

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.

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1envs.net451
2loang.net576
3jameskitt616.one842.5
4aria-net.org857
5jeroenhd.nl892
6mindlesstux.com983
7shortestpath.dev1014
8quyo.de1345
9matrix.nicfab.it1571
10halogen.city1599

πŸ”—#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1jameskitt616.one171
2loang.net307
3foxo.me540
4cry.is763
5kszczot.pl777.5
6dendrite.matrix.org844.5
7beckmeyer.us851.5
8dendrite.neilalexander.dev1225.5
9schuwi.science1620
10sspaeth.de1978

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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

This Week in Matrix 2022-05-06

06.05.2022 00:00 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

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.

πŸ”—MSC Status

New MSCs:

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

  • No MSCs are in FCP.

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

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!

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of Bridges πŸŒ‰

πŸ”—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)

πŸ”—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!


πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—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 πŸ‘οΈ.

πŸ”—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:

πŸ”—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)

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat announces

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—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 :)

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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/

πŸ”—Dept of Non Chat Clients πŸŽ›οΈ

πŸ”—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! πŸŽ‰ 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.

πŸ”—Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP announces

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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 ;)

πŸ”—Dept of Ops πŸ› 

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.

πŸ”—Dept of Bots πŸ€–

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—MjΓΆlnir (website)

The moderation bot for Matrix

Gnuxie πŸ’œπŸ announces

πŸ”—MjΓΆlnir

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 ).

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Dept of Events and Talks πŸ—£οΈ

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.

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1maunium.net271.5
2envs.net388
3aria-net.org472
4matrix.nkrw.art687
5quyo.de719
6computerlie.be809
7magdeburg.jetzt847.5
8mindlesstux.com877
9alemann.dev1008
10fab.network1196

πŸ”—#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1matrix.awesomesheep48.me310
2conduit.grich.sk445
3dendrite.s3cr3t.me455
4cry.is579
5foxo.me738
6beckmeyer.us752
7grin.hu1142
8sspaeth.de1255.5
9forlorn.day1680
10pohiijekpkd55sbbrcbufkner2wkq3lcv7ruyxwjsgimrb5acbiupead.ml1813

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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

This Week in Matrix 2022-04-29

29.04.2022 19:05 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

πŸ”—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/

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

Andrew Morgan (anoa) reports

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—MSC Status

New MSCs:

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

  • No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

  • No MSCs were merged this week.

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—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:

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.

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Dept of Bridges πŸŒ‰

πŸ”—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 πŸ₯³

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/ πŸ˜ƒ


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

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of Non Chat Clients πŸŽ›οΈ

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—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 πŸ™‚

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.

πŸ”—Dept of Ops πŸ› 

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Dept of Bots πŸ€–

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Dept of Events and Talks πŸ—£οΈ

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1maunium.net259
2envs.net315
3neko.dev366
4carnot.cc481
5tchncs.de562.5
6jeroenhd.nl588
7broccoli.town604.5
8kohlernet.de762
9matrix.cirk2.de867
10quyo.de1126

πŸ”—#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1carnot.cc294
2matrix.sum7.eu389
3cry.is499.5
4foxo.me654
5rustybever.be693.5
6matrix.awesomesheep48.me898
7beckmeyer.us899
8sspaeth.de991
9dendrite.matrix.org1370.5

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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

This Week in Matrix 2022-04-22

22.04.2022 00:00 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of Bridges πŸŒ‰

πŸ”—Heisenbridge (website)

Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.

hifi reports

Release v1.12.0 πŸ₯³

  • 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 πŸ€—.

Go and get some β˜€οΈ sunlight from GitHub, PyPI or matrix-docker-ansible-deploy!

Thanks!

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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 β€œlive 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!

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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 β€˜mention pills’ when tagging users in a room.
  • Please note; We’ll soon be removing support for iOS 12 and iOS 13

πŸ”—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 β€œignore 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.

πŸ”—Dept of Non Chat Clients πŸŽ›οΈ

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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 πŸš€. 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 πŸŽ‰, 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 IΒ have to say, he was right. Good first issue πŸ™ƒ

See you next week ;)

πŸ”—Dept of Ops πŸ› 

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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

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

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi announces

Thanks to Julian-Samuel GebΓΌhr (@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.

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

πŸ”—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 !!

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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.

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1envs.net359.5
2intothecyber.space443
3tedomum.net468
4maescool.be693
5jeroenhd.nl729
6jauriarts.org734
7alemann.dev855.5
8nevarro.space969
90wnz.at998
10quyo.de1494

πŸ”—#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1nognu.de278
2cry.is391
3rustybever.be558
4sspaeth.de700.5
5beckmeyer.us911
6grin.hu981

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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

This Week in Matrix 2022-04-01

01.04.2022 19:05 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

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.

πŸ”—MSC Status

New MSCs:

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:

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—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 πŸ™‚

πŸ”—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 πŸ™‚

πŸ”—Dept of Bridges πŸŒ‰

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

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

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—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 πŸ™‚). 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.

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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 πŸ˜‰

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!

πŸ”—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 β€˜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.

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—Dept of Non Chat Clients πŸŽ›οΈ

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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 πŸŽ‰
  • 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!

πŸ”—Dept of Events and Talks πŸ—£οΈ

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.

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

πŸ”—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 :)

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1envs.net449
2neko.dev455
3tchncs.de475.5
4aria-net.org484
5quyo.de535.5
6settgast.org737
7catgirl.cloud975
8alemann.dev1066
9jeroenhd.nl1228
10maescool.be1422

πŸ”—#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1cry.is215
2nognu.de368
3conduit.grich.sk417
4sspaeth.de616.5
5xethos.net798
6dendrite.s3cr3t.me1256.5

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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

This Week in Matrix 2022-03-25

25.03.2022 00:00 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

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.

πŸ”—MSC Status

New MSCs:

MSCs in Proposed Final Comment Period:

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

Merged MSCs:

  • No MSCs were merged this week.

πŸ”—Spec Updates

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

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—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 πŸ™‚ 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.

πŸ”—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 β€” 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!

πŸ”—Dept of Bridges πŸŒ‰

πŸ”—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 πŸ™ƒ

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

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—Syphon (website)

Chat with your privacy and freedom intact

0x1a8510f2 announces

Hi all πŸ‘‹.

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 πŸŽ‰
  • Media messages πŸŽ‰
  • Markdown support πŸŽ‰
  • Message editing πŸŽ‰
  • Key import and export πŸŽ‰
  • App lock with encryption πŸŽ‰
  • HTTP proxy support πŸŽ‰
  • 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!

πŸ”—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 :)

πŸ”—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:

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Features

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

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Translations

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

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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 πŸŽ‰οΈ
  • We implemented auto-discovery of the homeserver via .well-known

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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) (β€”Xβ€”)
  • 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) (XosΓ© M)
  • Translated using Weblate (German) (Maciej KrΓΌger)
  • Translated using Weblate (Indonesian) (Linerly)
  • Translated using Weblate (Irish) (Graeme Power)
  • Translated using Weblate (Persian) (AnastΓ‘zius DariΓ‘n)
  • 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)

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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 β€œSign 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

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Dept of Ops πŸ› 

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Dept of Bots πŸ€–

πŸ”—MjΓΆlnir (website)

The moderation bot for Matrix

Gnuxie announces

We have released MjΓΆlnir 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 MjΓΆlnir!

πŸ”—Dept of Events and Talks πŸ—£οΈ

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

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1neko.dev359
2envs.net482.5
3aria-net.org522
4jeroenhd.nl753.5
5g3la.de761
6kohlernet.de761
7tardis.omaelse.de1074.5
8tchncs.de1274.5
9matrix.ring-0.net1602
10asra.gr1629.5

πŸ”—#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1matrix.sum7.eu318.5
2conduit.cyberdi.sk463
3cry.is514
4rustybever.be580.5
5beckmeyer.us798
6matrix.awesomesheep48.me1096
7dendrite.neilalexander.dev1164
8dendrite.beckmeyer.us3950

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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

This Week in Matrix 2022-03-18

18.03.2022 18:56 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib
Last update: 18.03.2022 18:52

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

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.

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

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.

πŸ”—MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

  • No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

  • No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

πŸ”—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 πŸ™‚

πŸ”—Dept of P2P πŸ‘₯

πŸ”—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 β€” join us in #p2p:matrix.org for discussion!

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—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:

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.

πŸ”—Dept of Bridges πŸŒ‰

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Cinny (website)

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

Lozenge reports

πŸ”—v1.8.1 & v1.8.2

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Dept of Non Chat Clients πŸŽ›οΈ

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP says

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—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:

πŸ”—matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

Jonas Platte reports

In the last few weeks,

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

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1aria-net.org512.5
2pavot.ca784
3matrix.optoutpod.com836
4alemann.dev1532
5nevarro.space1560
6matrix.cirk2.de1729.5
7gottliebtfreitag.de2029
8mtrx.fail2116
9matrix.infra.reflect-media.de2408.5
10roeckx.be2577.5

πŸ”—#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1nognu.de375.5
2rustybever.be386.5
3cry.is396.5
4matrix.sum7.eu504
5dendrite.matrix.org587.5
6beckmeyer.us741
7sspaeth.de1024
8conduit.cyberdi.sk1078
9dyoxide.online1339.5

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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

This Week in Matrix 2022-03-11

11.03.2022 00:00 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

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.

πŸ”—MSC Status

New MSCs:

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:

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—Homeserver Deployment πŸ“₯️

πŸ”—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)

πŸ”—Dept of Bridges πŸŒ‰

πŸ”—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 πŸ™‚


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

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—SmallTalk (website)

Minimal Android messenger powered by Matrix

adam reports

πŸ‘‹ 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)

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—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:

πŸ”—Highlights

  • Message bubbles (Malte E) πŸ’¬
    • 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 πŸ—”
    • Widgets in a room are shown below the topic.
    • Open them in your browser to view them.

πŸ”—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)

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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!

πŸ”—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 β€œDecline & 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.

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Cinny (website)

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

Lozenge reports

Namaste πŸ™,

We are happy to announce that Cinny now support all the features of Spaces β€” 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

πŸ”—Dept of Non Chat Clients πŸŽ›οΈ

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—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).

πŸ”—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 πŸŽ‰

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

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of Ops πŸ› 

πŸ”—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

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

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—Dept of Guides 🧭

πŸ”—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

πŸ”—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.

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1neko.dev308
2envs.net380
3maescool.be406
4tedomum.net450
5matrix.uni-marburg.de548
6catgirl.cloud610
7synod.im754
8settgast.org841.5
9jeroenhd.nl1052
10matrix.infra.reflect-media.de1160

πŸ”—#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1rcp.tf225
2nognu.de301
3rustybever.be306
4cry.is460.5
5beckmeyer.us636
6sspaeth.de665.5
7xethos.net817.5
8grin.hu1003.5
9kwolek.io1107
10dendrite.beckmeyer.us1554.5

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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