Last year was the first time FOSDEM was hosted on Matrix, and it was generally a huge success - and so the FOSDEM team trusted us again this year and we’re happy to say that it seems to have gone really well! This year’s FOSDEM was massive once again, featuring 654 speakers, 731 events, and 103 tracks.
This year hosting the event went smoother than last year, the only significant issue was some of the Q&A Jitsis not being broadcast to the devrooms on Saturday before 10:15 UTC, for which we offer our apologies to the speakers impacted. This turned out to be a problem with the Matrix<->Jitsi access control sync system which hadn’t showed up during earlier testing, but we patched around it rapidly on the day.
The most notable difference between this year and the previous year has been the usage of a “attendees.fosdem.org” instance in addition to the original “fosdem.org” one, specifically for attendees. The graphs speak for themselves: Synapse could handle the load of the 23K users (13K joined users and 10K lurkers) spread across a total number of 941 rooms. The real eye-opener however is that of the 13K joined users, only 4K came came from the FOSDEM attendee server, and 1K from Libera Chat, meaning that ~70% of the Matrix participants were already on Matrix and came in from existing servers! 🤯 That means the vast majority of people attended over federation. Decentralisation at work, people! It works! We didn’t host the conference… you did!!
But not only did the backend handle the load smoothly: the general user experience felt tightly integrated. People were welcomed by a tailor-made home page in Element to help them navigate through all the tracks and stands:.
One of the great things is it doesn’t require heavy modifications to Element: anyone who installs their own instance of Element can use a simple html file to display relevant information to their audience.
New this year, we also generated a space hierarchy for the whole conference at #fosdem2022:fosdem.org to help navigate the maze of rooms, making it even easier for users on their own servers to jump in:
Another greatly appreciated feature was the famous “maximised widgets” I (Thib) keep telling you about in Matrix Live episodes. Attendees and speakers could give the conference the central attention it deserved while simultaneously keeping an eye on what was happening in the chat.
From the speaker's perspective, we tried to streamline the user journey as much as possible: a bot invited them to a backstage room, in which they joined a Jitsi widget while their talk was being played in the track or devroom. They could see the most upvoted questions by the audience in a dedicated widget. A few minutes before their pre-recorded talk was over, a countdown (new this year!) could be displayed to tell them and the host they were about to go live. At the end of the countdown, the backstage Jitsi was broadcasted to the track so the speaker could answer the questions.
If you want to have an in-depth look at the backend’s architecture, it didn’t change much from last year. You can have a look at last year’s blog post for the details on the setup. Most of the heavy lifting was around the conference bot used to set rooms up, create the spaces, populate them with widgets, arrange layouts and trigger countdowns before going live…
Huge thanks to the FOSDEM team for trusting us, massive shout-out to Element Matrix Services and Element’s Ops and infrastructure team for their fantastic job in setting everything up and making sure everything was ready in time, a sincere thank you to all the fantastic speakers who shared awesome content, and finally to all the attendees. What a weekend!
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://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
I'd also like to point out that v1.2 released on 2/2/2022 :)
Otherwise, thank you to aaronraimist and devonh from the community for their fixes to the spec's text that merged this week. They are highly appreciated!
This MSC proposes to pave a way to allowing relating an event to multiple other events, which unlocks some additional use cases. Go check it out if you're interested in extending Matrix's capabilities even further!
Synapse 1.52.0rc1 is out, but honestly, we're just all hands on deck for FOSDEM tomorrow! As a reminder, members of the Synapse team will be giving a couple of talks during at the event:
Today we've released Dendrite 0.6.1 which contains a number of fixes and improvements. This release includes the following changes:
Roomserver inputs now take place with full transactional isolation in PostgreSQL deployments
Pull consumers are now used instead of push consumers when retrieving messages from NATS to better guarantee ordering and to reduce redelivery of duplicate messages
Further logging tweaks, particularly when joining rooms
Improved calculation of servers in the room, when checking for missing auth/prev events or state
Dendrite will now skip dead servers more quickly when federating by reducing the TCP dial timeout
The key change consumers have now been converted to use native NATS code rather than a wrapper
Go 1.16 is now the minimum supported version for Dendrite
Local clients should now be notified correctly of invites
The roomserver input API now has more time to process events, particularly when fetching missing events or state, which should fix a number of errors from expired contexts
Fixed a panic that could happen due to a closed channel in the roomserver input API
Logging in with uppercase usernames from old installations is now supported again (contributed by hoernschen)
Federated room joins now have more time to complete and should not fail due to expired contexts
Events that were sent to the roomserver along with a complete state snapshot are now persisted with the correct state, even if they were rejected or soft-failed
Spec compliance, as measured by Sytest, currently sits at:
Client-server APIs: 65%
Server-server APIs: 94%
As always, you can join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite discussion and announcements.
It's FOSDEM! Don't forget to checkout my 5 min ramble about custom stickers and emotes in Matrx: https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/matrix_custom_stickers/
In preparation for FOSDEM, I've also been working on some goodies so that you can participate using Nheko in a limited manner:
Previews for rooms are now fetched for spaces using the hierarchy API
Widgets for the talks should be shown below the topic as links
While this isn't grand, it should be good enough for some to participate using Nheko. You will need the latest master (some commits aren't even pushed at the time of writing!), but if you are just watching, this should give you an easy way to fetch the talk link for each room. You will still have to watch the actual talk in your browser though.
LorenDB also added a big, fat, red offline indicator. If your server dies because of FOSDEM, now Nheko will tell you.
I hope you all will have a great time and I hope I see you around!
Very customizable, with ability to adjust any keybinding/functionality
A multi-account client
Adjusts to any screen size
After 6 months of inactivity on the Mirage project, Moment brings it back to life. We have fixed some important issues and will continue to maintain Moment!
🎺 We've released Hydrogen 0.2.24 and 0.2.25 with session backup writing and some bug fixes! From now on you shouldn't need to have another client running along hydrogen for keys to be written to the key backup!
Welcome to another week of TWIM at Element! Here’s our updates:
Polls and Location Sharing
Polls is now out of labs, and available in the composer for all users with the latest app versions.
Location sharing is also now available on the mobile apps. For now you will need to enable it in settings in order to see the composer icon and send your location.
Threads
Threaded Messaging is making forward progress on all 3 platforms; we’re aiming to help clear up cross-talk on the timeline by moving side-convo’s to the right panel. If you want to try it out, it's available in Labs on Web. We’ll be pushing Threads into Labs on Mobile in the next release!
Bubbles are now available! Keeping your inbound messages on the left, and your outbound messages on the right your timeline should now be easier to skim read. This layout is off by default but to see it in action, update your Message Layout appearance preferences from Settings.
Metaspaces have landed! Giving users a new way to display favourites, DMs and rooms outside of other spaces. Switch these on in Quick Settings at the bottom left of your app.
In Labs (Enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or Nightly)
New and improved Search!
Provide feedback on your experience directly from the Search window.
Threads, including design updates. The MSC is available hereMSC3440
We’ve been working hard on improving the startup and resume times, you should start to see these in your app in 1.7.0.
Work on a Rust prototype is underway. We’re excited to learn about the opportunities and advantages of this approach as we start to learn and experiment.
Also, Xcode13 & iOS15 compatibility has been added for developers
Coming soon in 1.8.0! Bubbles and an improved Onboarding experience
Threads will also be hitting Labs on Mobile soon so let us know what you think.
A hotfix (1.3.18) on Android will fix some bugs we found in this week’s release.
Bubbles will also be landing soon, you can find this new feature in Settings > Preferences > Timeline. The feature has been merged to develop if you want to give it a try!
Threads have also been merged on develop.
We’ve been making improvements to the Onboarding experience for new users too.
In Labs
Threads will soon be in Labs on Mobile. Switch it on and try it out!
Here's a big populus viewer update! Since last time, I've been mostly working on improving the user experience and onboarding for non-experts, as well as making my teaching-assistant bot a little smarter - this work is ongoing. But I have had time for a few new features 😁
I've reworked the sidebar for the PDF view, improving the aesthetics and allowing for a "fullscreen" view of PDF content.
I've added user-directory search and improved the usability of the invite modal.
The reason that MSC3574 is not a final draft is that I'm increasingly looking at the w3c's web annotation data model as a compelling foundation for annotations on Matrix. Stay tuned for a upcoming MSC, or come over to #opentower:matrix.org to talk about the future of annotation on Matrix!
I've also been working on a proof-of-concept for one Matrix use-case that I'm hoping Populus can help fill. Social annotation can be a good tool for getting feedback on works in progress, or for discussing new research with your team or lab. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just pop open a paper on a preprint archive and start commenting, or say "hey friends, I'm reading this paper, what do you think?" And wouldn't it be nicer if you could do that and host the discussion on your university or team's Matrix server?
Here's a first pass at that idea: https://opentower.github.io/populus-philarchive/
At the moment works by just pasting in paper codes from philarchive.org - it'll preview bibliographic information and give you a list of discussions taking place around a given paper, with the option to create a new one. Sessions are shared with populus-viewer, and pdfs continue to be hosted by the original archive. There are a number of clear upgrade paths, by integrating with a preprint archive that has an open search API, or even by adding an OAI-PMH metadata harvester to the backend, to combine the metadata from a bunch of open paper archives. I'm really excited to see where this work goes.
I have been working on a little project over the last week: nheko-krunner. nheko-krunner is a KRunner plugin that loads rooms from nheko, displays them to the user, and allows the user to activate said rooms. How does it do this? Well, I've also been creating a D-Bus API for nheko! This code has not been merged yet, but once it is, you will be able to create your own plugins that access nheko via D-Bus!
The current functionality of nheko-krunner is simply (1) search and switch to rooms that you are in (not unlike the Ctrl-K switcher), and (2) join rooms from their aliases.
If you want to try out nheko-krunner, you will need to build from the dbus branch in my personal fork of nheko and then install nheko-krunner from the above repo.
I hope that somebody finds this useful and I am excited to see what other D-Bus plugins may show up in the future!
The versions 0.4.x brought improvements to the network log, letting you spot and investigate HTTP errors, bad JSON and network errors.
Ideally, I want to focus as much on the Matrix Spec as possible, but for the v0.5.0 I might venture into the territory of the Synapse Admin API, e.g. for listing and deleting media in a room. Please contact me, if you have use cases around media moderation you'd like me to consider.
No new release this week. I've been working on the video sending functionality, and I am looking forward to seeing what that enables ya'll to do!
In the meantime, I've published a template / demo bot you can find here: https://github.com/WesR/Halcyon-stock-bot . In just 37 lines of (unminified) code, this little bot:
Sets a status message
Automatically joins rooms via invite
Searches messages for $stocks mentioned, then formats and replies the current price and daily percent change for all the tickers in the message
Screenshot below
I'm always looking for more feedback, and love to see what people are working on. Come hangout in the Halcyon room: https://matrix.to/#/#halcyon:blackline.xyz
Lastly, for more info at on the bot library visit https://github.com/WesR/Halcyon
Happy Hacking!
The Polyjuice Project has a new component: Polyjuice Client Test, a tool for testing Matrix clients. Each test has its own preconfigured homeserver environment, implemented using the Polyjuice Server library, and can be customized according to the needs of the test. Only a few tests are implemented so far, but many more are planned, initially focusing on testing functionality related to end-to-end encryption. You can see a demo of it in the Matrix Live video.
matrix-corporal (as of version 2.2.3) is now published to Docker Hub (see devture/matrix-corporal) as a multi-arch container image with support for all these platforms: linux/amd64, linux/arm64/v8 and linux/arm/v7. Users on these ARM architectures no longer need to build matrix-corporal manually.
New version comes with in-memory caching for thread relations. It significantly decreases amount of requests to homeserver during thread relations solving, both for MSC3440 threads and reply-to chain fallback
Fonts now get hosted on the page itself due to the legal issues in Germany with Google Fonts hosted fonts
Profile page has a rough UI to edit the profile page if logged in
Licence gets now correctly displayed according to the Creative Commons Licence requirements
Initial work on translations has started. A Weblate instance has been set up at https://trans.nordgedanken.dev for this.
German translation was added
Progress on the HS side to be able to use it as a public registration server for anyone who wants to post to Matrix Art. (yes, this really has a public registration HS)
Mjölnir instance is set up which also is used to moderate Matrix Art in complete (Aka it is joining on creation.) This is used for being able to moderate the website.
ChatStat is an R package for making reports on Matrix rooms.
Ahead of my lightning talk on Sunday, ChatStat has been polished up and given it's first release. You can get it here. Huge thanks to @johrpan:johrpan.de for their contributions too.
The main highlight since my last TWIM is that we actually have report generation now! You can see an example here, or check the project wiki for an example of using the raw data with ggplot2 to make custom plots of your own.
The season 2 of Raising Dion (a Netflix TV show) featured shortly a video call with Riot/Element and a few other open source software (e.g. Karbon). Oh and you might recognize a few usernames in the sidebar 😅
Circles has made it into a small German speaking Apple News site/App called ifun.de.
„Circles-App: Neue alte Ideen für private soziale Netzwerke“ https://www.iphone-ticker.de/circles-app-neue-ideen-fuer-private-soziale-netzwerke-185764/
There wasn’t a mention of Matrix - which is kind of exciting really. This means it can just be the transparent layer of great apps :)
Kudos to Aaron for adding a GitHub action to matrix.org's repository to check for typos, and taking the time to fix them all! Worry not fellow proofreaders, our post-publication TWIM proofreading tradition is not extinct: some typos are not caught by the CI, such as misspelling of proper nouns (e.g. Devianart) or articles (e.g. "an proofreader" won't make the CI upset)
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.
The release of Matrix v1.2 is right around the corner, and is expected to go out on February 2nd. This is in line with our quarterly release cycle for the spec going forwards.
Please reach out to us in #sct-office:matrix.org if there are any last-minute MSCs that haven't started/finished Final Comment Period that you believe should be included!
A concept similar to robots.txt for the web, but for Matrix! Currently the way to inform room-crawling bots in Matrix today is by banning/kicking them from the room. However, this doesn't allow you to blanket prevent bots from joining - nor does it only inform bots that they should access some of the room's data. It's a binary switch.
Consider if you wanted your room to be crawled, but the room topic to not be indexed. This MSC could help with that! Give it a read/review if you're interested.
Have you ever pinged someone by accident, because you replied to a message with their name in it or maybe even a whole room mention? Or are you avoiding replies for that reason? Did the quote of a messages suddenly vanish when someone edited their message in a client? Or are you just in general unhappy with replies only showing what type of message was replied to, instead of showing the actual image being replied to (on mobile for example)? Were you annoyed, that you could only reply with a text message, but not an emote message, an image, a sticker or even a video?
I spent a bunch of time trying to remove the blocker for that in the Matrix specification, you can find the proposal here: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/2781
As it turns out, it is not quite as simple, because notifications for replies to your messages rely on a bunch of implicit interactions, which is why I also wrote another MSC to fix that: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3664
I'm a bit unhappy with replies across the matrix ecosystem at the moment and I hope this is a small step towards improving things. It's certainly not as exciting as spaces, voip, threads or stickers, but it is something which affects me every day and I think those small papercuts need some attention too.
I hope some of you share my love for the less exciting stuff!
To add onto Nico's efforts, I think that mentions today are based on too many "false-positives" (ping on displayname or username mention), and i kinda wish for the "just mention them" UX of discord, telegram, whatsapp, and so many other messengers.
So I've also made a proposal that tries to bring some explicitness in that, a new push rule that'll fire on "mention"; https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3517
It'll look for any @-MXID mention in the plaintext, or look for an <a>-mention "pill" in the HTML. It is a hack, but it is the most correct way of determining if you've been pinged in matrix, at the moment.
In terms of reply fallbacks - the Spec Core Team gave an overwhelming thumbs up to removing reply fallbacks via MSC2781... but given practically this causes a cascade of other work (defining and implementing push_rules for replies, and defining and implementing push_rules for threads (MSC TBD)) and so as a temporary transitional measure we've instead made reply fallbacks best effort (MSC3676). This means that clients can now reply using non-textual events, and we can use replies as a fallback for threads for non-thread-capable-clients/ASes once MSC3440 lands. To be clear, the intention is still to incorporate all of Nico's excellent contributions on MSC2781 and MSC3664 however.
Hello TWIM! Last week we released Synapse 1.51. This is a great release which includes lots of performance work around sending aggregations down /sync. It also makes Spaces much more reliable: we tracked down a bug with caching which could cause some sub-spaces to randomly appear empty when queried over federation. We also removed the 50 result limit when listing the contents of a Space.
We're also starting to see some promising results experimenting with ways to make room joins faster (MSC2775). It's not quite ready to demo, but we should have something to show off before too long. 🤞
We know that it has been a while coming but today we have released Dendrite 0.6! This version contains a number of significant changes, including switching away from Kafka to NATS JetStream and refactoring a number of other components. We have been making architectural changes recently to help Dendrite scale better in the future and to fix a number of race conditions that were present before. Federation in particular is much smoother and better behaved in this release, with overall lower CPU and memory usage and less resource spikes.
NATS JetStream support, deprecating Kafka and Naffka
The roomserver now being responsible for fetching missing events and state instead of the federation API, which fixes some race conditions
Strict ordering and asynchronous input support in the roomserver input API, which smooths out incoming federation significantly
Consolidated federation API, including functionality from the now-deprecated federation sender and signing key server components
Database-backed device list synchronisation, which is now more reliable
Correct gap checking when fetching missing events and state
Better behaviour and lower resource usage by the /event_auth endpoint
Spec compliance, as measured by Sytest, currently sits at:
Client-server APIs: 65%
Server-server APIs: 94%
This is a highly recommended update so if you are running a Dendrite server, please upgrade! As always, you can join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite discussion and announcements.
Hey folks, no releases this week but a general update on a little project of ours. I've been working through the problem of making bridges easier to use and supplimenting our command interfaces with pretty buttons and forms. To that effect, we've landed out first PR on adding widget communication support to the matrix-appservice-bridge library \o/.
You can see some of the details here https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/pull/365
but that's not all. I'm doing a talk about this whole subject at FOSDEM which you can tune into! See the deets at https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/matrix_next_gen_interfaces/
Next to spec work, progress on porting Nheko to 100% qml continues. This week I ported the login and registration pages. I also did some minor cleanups on them and prep work for future improvements (like buttons for each SSO provider or providing email address and registration token inline instead of in a separate popup, if the server requires it). Logging in or registering is often the first thing a user does on a client or maybe even the first thing they do on Matrix! As such I should really spend more effort optimizing that feature, that usually falls off the priority list because I don't use it often!
Once Nheko is 100% Qml we should also see lower memory usage again, here is a screenshot from a Nheko instance with over 100 rooms, that's been running for a few days of active use on Windows:
We also fixed an issue where Nheko could crash the notification service, because it sent images not following the Freedesktop notification specification and tasty spent some time further improving the man page.
Hello folks, it's been a while since we last spoke! We have been focused on the code, but we're long overdue for an update. A lot has happened since November. Fractal-Next is getting closer to feature parity with current Fractal, and even supports new things:
Timeline
Fractal-Next now allows you to open and save sent files
It also displays images, videos and stickers in the timeline
You can also get a better view of media send to the room thanks to the built-in media viewer
It (finally!) supports reactions (displaying them and sending new ones)
User verification
Fractal-Next now supports verification of other users by scanning their QR code, or via emoji
When a user is verified, an icon is displayed next to their username in the list of room members
Room details
The room details show now the members of the room including the power level
General UX
Fractal-Next is better integrated with GNOME's secret management service Seahorse
It supports room upgrades
It also supports inviting users to a room
Users can change the category of rooms in the sidebar via drag and drop or by using the context menu
Release candidate was late as we have more regressions and release blockers than normal: last minute fixes include a couple of crashes when hanging up a call from the picture-in-picture view and in the appearance tab of settings, plus chasing a crashing bug on Linux.
Metaspaces has landed in the release candidate: it will give you a new way to group your favourites, DMs and rooms outside of spaces. You can switch these on in the Quick Settings menu at the bottom left from Monday.
Bubble layout for messages has landed for the upcoming release!
This release will update to Electron 15 which uses a newer Chromium, so if you host your own Jitsi, please make sure it’s up to date, or you may find calls start breaking.
Nightly testing went well on Tuesday, with 47 test cases showing up 15 new issues
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
New thread fallback using the reply chain
Better stability when home server supports threads API defined in MSC3440
We are intending to add the new and improved search to the next release candidate on 8th Feb, community testing planned for next week
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
Matrix highlight got experimental support for Firefox! It's still a bit crashy, but it shouldn't be much harder to stabilize it, and get the tool working properly there, too. Firefox is my personal browser of choice, and others have requested it, so it's nice that it's on the horizon :)
Also, after the discussion in Matrix Live and with some minor tweaks, I was able to get the extension to play nice with conduit! So that's now a viable alternative if you want to use Matrix Highlight with your own, self-hosted server.
Circles is a project to build a secure, end-to-end encrypted social network using Matrix technology.
This week the primary focus was on updating Circles to work with the latest Matrix iOS SDK. I also successfully built and packaged the first beta release from an Apple M1 Mac.
The next step is to develop and integrate a new, more secure password-based login based on the BS-SPEKE protocol. This will replace Circles' current approach, which is described in MSC3265. Hopefully the new login flow will also be of interest to the broader Matrix community.
Our search continues for an Android developer to help us bring Circles to the world's largest mobile device platform. If you are excited about working with Matrix, Android Studio, and Jetpack Compose, send a resume and cover letter to [email protected].
Trixnity version 1.1.0 has been released! It adds support for room key backup, which makes developing a matrix client a lot more comfortable.
Here is the changelog:
Added key backup support!
RoomService::getAll() returns a reactive list of reactive rooms instead of a reactive list of rooms. This allows to implement huge room lists without performance losses in the UI.
Some reactive data can be accessed in a non reactive way. Note that you will then only get a snapshot of the data.
Prevent sending room keys as to device messages, when they cannot be encrypted (e.g. due to missing one time keys).
Hello again! Halcyon is a python Matrix bot library created with the intention of being easy to install and use.
With this release, we have reached our second release milestone! Check out the roadmap in notes.md (located in the repository), for what is planned for RC3!
I'm really happy about the performance and functionality gains for this release. If you have any questions or bug reports, come and chat with us over in https://matrix.to/#/#halcyon:blackline.xyz
More info at on the project at https://github.com/WesR/Halcyon
Added
Detailed room info is here! The bot will now cache and provide room info with each message, automatically refreshing in the background. Check out usage.md for info on what is provided
get room admin / moderators, topic, related groups and more
Better polling through long polling (Thanks @forden:matrix.org for pointing out this improvement)
send images with the new send_image() function. It includes simple toggles for blurhash and thumbnail generation
More examples in /examples
General roadmap and documentation updates
Fixed
A fix for the slow polling, which might have also caused issues on systems with frequent network drops (Thanks @octt:matrix.org)
Bubo is a friendly little owl (bot) that helps maintain your community. It's been over a year since cutting the last release, so the changelog contains a bunch of things, namely:
Added command to set power levels in rooms.
Added users command to list and create users in a configured Keycloak. Optionally send invites via keycloak-signup, a web app that allows self-registering with Keycloak via short lived tokens.
Add logging to a Matrix room.
Bubo admins and coordinators can now be set based on room memberships.
Add command to make Bubo unlink and part itself from a room.
Add command to list rooms Bubo maintains but is not admin in.
Add command to recreate a room. This follows the upgrade room functionality, but does it without needing admin permissions (basically almost everything except a tombstone event). Useful if for example you have accidentally lost admin in a hundred or so rooms in your community. Which may have happened 😅
The communities command is now deprecated (support for spaces coming in the next version).
Additionally some other changes and fixes, see changelog for full details.
Plans for next up features include syncing with Discourse to replicate spaces from Discourse groups and populate space members from Discourse group memberships (when Discourse shares the same Keycloak SSO provider with the homeserver).
🔗Reaching another feature Milestone – Submitting images via Matrix Art.
Matrix Art now supports logging in with any account (well-known not supported yet. You need to provide the full server address) and submitting images through the interface.
You can now either just log in (No benefit though at this time as comments and follows are missing) or create a Matrix Art Profile.
An Account can also be created later. An Account would create a Profile room at #<mxid> on your server if it doesn't exist.
This currently is only possible by doing a logout and login in again with the box checked. A better way will be added soon.
Editing the Profile is not yet implemented at this time.
These 2 changes should allow some people to experiment with this. Mobile design is not tested at this time.
Submits should work. If you were previously logged in, you will need to log out and back in for some variables to get set correctly.
Registration is still WIP as there is some more moderation prep needed before the server accepts the registrations.
I hope people cheer in and post their images :)
(Also, please use the nsfw flag if required. This will make them hidden on the front page but shown in your profile page. I will block people that don't use it from the instance otherwise. Please be sensible.)
Apparently, a German school forked FluffyChat and is using it for homeschooling: https://www.golem.de/news/matrix-grundschule-forkt-messenger-2201-162562.html
(German only news article)
Sources: https://gitlab.com/hermanncoders/hermannpost
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://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
Work on preparing the release of Matrix v1.2 is currently underway. As of today, the Spec Core Team is aiming for a release of Matrix v1.2 on February 2nd.
If you know of any MSCs which you believe should be included in Matrix v1.2, but haven't started/finished Final Comment Period yet, please bring them up in the #sct-office:matrix.org, and we'll take a look. Thanks!
When I first came across this MSC, I didn't know what "Early Media" as a concept referred to. Even after skimming the MSC... I still didn't really know. But I'll demystify it here in case it peaks your interest and you would like to learn more.
Early media is essentially any media that is exchanged between the moment you start a call, to the moment the other side picks up (a connection is established). For instance, the ringing you hear while waiting for someone to pick up (called "ringback tones"), or the "busy" tone you hear when the line is busy. Those audio bits are known as "early media". Video can also fall into this category (though that's less common).
This MSC would essentially allow Matrix to introduce these concepts in Matrix-only calls (though these days the client just plays sounds while connecting), but more crucially would allow Matrix to interoperate with other protocols (like SIP) that expect to handle these features.
So yay, more interoperability and bridge compatibility!
After a somewhat bumpy process, we released Synapse 1.50 on Tuesday! The big thing you need to be aware of is that we're turning off support for Python 3.6 and PostgreSQL 9.6, including Linux distributions which ship with those versions by default (like Ubuntu 18.04 LTS). Please make sure your infrastructure is up-to-date.
I'm personally very excited that we tracked down a bug which could cause device list updates to get lost when being sent over federation. When device lists fall out of sync, it can cause failures when attempting to decrypt messages, since the keys may not have been sent to all of the user's devices.
We've also made quite a lot of progress in allowing Application Services to support end-to-end encryption via the still-experimental MSC3202.
For MSCs which have been merged into the Matrix Spec, we now implement MSC3419, allowing guests to send state events into rooms, and we now use stable identifiers for cross-signing and fallback keys per MSC1756 and MSC2732.
Looking to the future: We're aiming to release 1.51 next week so it has plenty of time to burn in before we host FOSDEM 2022. This is a pretty quick turnaround from 1.50, but we'll return to our usual fortnightly release cadence for subsequent releases. To that end, 1.51.0rc1 is out today; give it a shot. 😉
Hello again! In the last week we continued to optimize the rocksdb backend and Conduit in general, trying to get it as memory efficient as possible. Using valgrind we could see that memory was not getting released in some cases.
We found out that switching to the jemalloc allocator completely got rid of this problem and memory usage seems to be a lot more stable now!
All of this is currently available on the next branch. We are preparing to make a v0.3.0 release soon!
And back to regular form, my Helm Charts have gotten some upgrades again; element-web got upgraded to 1.9.9, and matrix-synapse got both 1.50.0 and 1.50.1 (the configuration generated by the chart shouldn't be affected by the .0 bug, but always good to upgrade)
To keep your timeline clean and ordered we’ll soon be introducing threaded messages to Element. Currently the team is working hard on the fallback solution, and polishing up the user interface.
Threads is already in Labs on Web, so go ahead and check it out!
For mobile, we’re hoping to release Threads to Labs in the next few weeks.
Polls
Get ready to start asking more questions… Polls are nearly ready to go! You’ll be able to ask folks things like; their favourite superhero, which day you should grab lunch, or even the best way to make tea (milk first, always). ☕️
If you just can’t wait ‘til we’re ready to launch, you can enable Polls from Labs.
Location Sharing
Location sharing is almost here! You’ll soon find a new setting to turn this on, which will give you the location sharing icon in your composer and can be used to tell people exactly where you are!
The setting will be in the next release on iOS and Android, and will start “off” by default. Once the feature is settled in, we’ll turn it on by default.
We’re moving forwards with our PostHog Analytics implementation and are super excited to start to get to know how our users experience Element. Remember; it’s off by default and you have to opt-in to share.
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
With the coolest project name by far, the Bubbles team is working hard to bring you message bubbles ASAP! These should land in the next week or so but are available in Labs today.
The integration of analytics tracking has been included in the most recent version of the app. Using PostHog Analytics we’ll be able to make informed product decisions for our app as we’ll have more visibility into the usefulness of each feature.
Remember; Analytics is opt-in and you don’t have to share any info with us. If you choose to opt-in we’ll start to learn how users use Element and how we can simplify your experiences.
We’ve had some trouble with the stability of our releases this week but the team’s been working hard to get it all ironed out. Our latest update to the app store fixes some bugs and includes the option to enable analytics.
Analytics? Yes! Knowing how our users traverse our app, and understanding this cross-platform, will help us to tailor to your needs and make impactful improvements. If you don’t want to send anonymised event info to Element, no problem! Just say no. If you change your mind, there’s a toggle in Settings.
In development:
Message Bubbles? Yes, please! With a week of successful testing internally we’re nearly ready to release message bubbles into the wild. We’re excited to see what you think.
Element’s first time user experience could use a little help, so the team have been working on improvements to our sign up flow that will hopefully reduce confusion for newbies.
Next up: Bulk editing of rooms for updating room power levels or aliases in masses.
If you're a maintainer of a homeserver, space or bridge, please let me know your use cases.
It's a small cli tool that does exactly what it says - exports matrix messages from a room. As example you can check etke.cc/news - that page and all items on it generated by emm from #news:etke.cc room.
The tool gracefully supports room aliases, message edits, custom templates (check the contrib/ dir for example) and 2 export modes - single (all messages exported to a single file) or multi (each message exported to separate file, that's how etke.cc/news works)
Circles is a project to build a privacy-respecting, end-to-end encrypted social network on top of Matrix. It was originally built out of the desire for a safer way to share baby photos with friends and family, but it can be used by anyone who wants easy sharing combined with strong security.
Recent news:
The Circles iOS app is back in beta on TestFlight. Builds 0.99 (6) and 0.99 (8) are rolling out now.
The latest updates fix some bugs in Circles' use of Matrix's encrypted recovery feature to improve the reliability of E2E encryption.
FUTO, the new company behind Circles, is hiring an Android developer to help us bring Circles to Android. Interested candidates should send a resume and cover letter to [email protected].
The (old) Circles homepage: https://kombuchaprivacy.com/circles
The code on Github: https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios
long time no see! Today I come with a new internal etke.cc tool that publicly available, because open source matters.
Honoroit is a helpdesk matrix bot with end-to-end encryption support, that utilizes MSC3440 (Threading) to act as a proxy between a customer (any matrix user) and your backoffice (users added in special room), each customer's room = thread in a backoffice room, where multiple operators can send messages to the same customer at once.
Pretty bad description, I know - check the source code to see screenshots.
Updates:
the v0.9.2 release brings the fallback reply-to mode, so even on matrix clients that doesn't support threads yet you can use it with good ol' replies.
the v0.9.3 release fixes commands parsing in the reply-to mode and adds prefixes to the thread topics
Matrix Art received some minor changes since the last twim post:
You can now get a rss feed of the posts at https://art.midnightthoughts.space/posts.rss (This is in the same format as devianart does their feeds)
Mobile should be mostly fixed
The About-info isn't hardcoded anymore but now uses an event type.
The page now uses the Roboto Font instead of the default font, which helps with readability.
Matrix Art cmes with a basic Text Logo now
Links to the profile page are now easier to notice
Blurhashes are now supported for images
The repo now has the Apache-2 License applied
Dependencies have been pinned
Various small design improvements were made
Images now have size hints so the page doesnt jump around as much when loading
Lots and lots of metadata was added to each page for SEO
Check it out at https://art.midnightthoughts.space
Check the Code out at https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-art
Or join the Chat at #matrix-art:nordgedanken.dev
Planned for this week is to add registration and usage of external profiles. As soon as that works I am also going to make uploading images work. So with a bit of luck in the next TWIM anyone is able to post their images :)
Hi TWIM. I published a long-planned, long-in-the-making, long-winded report of how I containerised my matrix-synapse homeserver and its PostgreSQL database in order to get ahead of the application dependency deprecations. This was something I couldn't find for myself, so I put this together to help anyone else who might need it. (And it does contain a TL;DR section!)
I’ve created [blog post|(https://helderferreira.io/matrix-well-known-with-cloudflare/) explaining the way to host the static well-known files using cloudflare workers gaining speed and stability
During the holidays I recorded a podcast about Matrix and Element with AnDaolVras/La Cantine Brestoise, which is a French non-profit organising tech events and operating a coworking space in Brest, France. The episode (in French, sorry!) came out on Monday and can be found on their website, on YouTube as well as on most podcast platforms 🙂
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://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
Hot on the heels (relatively speaking) of v1.1 of the Spec being released in November, v1.2 is now on the horizon! As a reminder, we're working towards quarterly releases of the spec going forwards - no hard dates yet though.
While this is certainly an improvement in speed, when it comes to writing software and updating implementations: quarterly spec updates may actually seem too fast. This is OK; implementations of the spec are not expected to update as soon as a new spec release is published. Rather, it is more realistic to expect that the ecosystem updates gradually over the course of the next few months/year after the release.
Happy Friday everyone! Today the Synapse team has released Synapse 1.50.0rc2. It fixes a particularly nasty federation-breaking regression that crept in during 1.50.0rc1. If you're currently running 1.50.0rc1, we implore you to update to 1.50.0rc2 as soon as possible!
In other news, a reminder that as of Synapse 1.50.0rc1, we have ended support for Python 3.6 and PostgreSQL 9.6 as per our dependency deprecation policy, as upstream has marked them as end-of-life.
We'll let the community test 1.50.0rc2 over the weekend to ensure that no other regressions have emerged (please test if you can)! If not, expect Synapse 1.50 to land sometime early next week.
Support CHGHOST caps (prevents leave+join on host change) ✅
Fix owner auto-registration (regression) 🐛
Upgrade to Mautrix 0.14 ⬆️
Sending RELAYMSGs have been requested for a while so now we do support that if the cap is added to request list. This makes plumbs on networks that support it work nicer. Receiving RELAYMSGs has not been implemented yet so they show up as external like before.
If you prefer keeping your IRC rooms clean without any IRC noise (mode changes etc.) you can now use a new FORWARD command in the network room to make all such events happen in the network room instead. This affects in-room commands as well.
ZNC users can now enjoy messages coming from your own clone in IRC rooms (including PMs!) if you wish so by keeping the znc.in/self-message cap enabled. This isn't extremely well tested yet but feedback welcome.
Not a breaking change but the caps support will cause connections to networks that ignore CAP requests take a few seconds longer unless you remove all the default caps for said network and it will never try requesting them again.
Mautrix 0.14 upgrade bumps the minimum version as well so packages beware.
We rewrote the whole settings page (as a stepping stone to 100% QML). Please test it and complain about everything I broke! We also tried to organize it a bit better so that similar settings are grouped together and tried to use the right controls for the right things. Best case you didn't notice anything. ;-)
And we also now show which profile a notification is for on KDE. I don't think other DEs have such a feature, so those will just show the generic Nheko as always.
We're about to release 0.2.23 after somewhat of a release hiatus. We've been working on two fronts:
Get the SDK out! Hydrogen was always meant to be easy to embedded, reuse in parts, and make customized versions of. But until now, actually doing that was quite challenging. Now that the SDK is out, you can use the hydrogen-view-sdk package in your projects and use parts of Hydrogen in your application. It's still early days, and we're still working out what symbols should be exported (finding a balance between APIs we want to support and utility), etc. Expect updates in the coming weeks. We're also not yet promising API stability for now, some APIs will very likely still change. Once we hit 1.0, we won't change things from underneath you anymore without increasing the major version.
Rich reply previews: as part of providing minimal support for threads (representing them as replies), we're switching from using the embedded reply fallback and actually looking up the replied-to message. One benefit is that reply previews will now updated when they are redacted (and edited, once we support that :).
Also fix some minor other things, like loading images when they are only partially visible, and a very basic location tile.
Issue with thread panel rendering timeline has been fixed
Reviewing plans for backward compatibility with clients that don’t support threaded messages
Polls
iOS and Android starting on the next phase of development, look out for poll editing and other exciting changes! You can enable polls in the Settings, under Labs.
You can now opt in to sending anonymous analytics data in the user settings on all platforms. Please enable it in the “Security & Privacy” menu, under “Analytics” to help us understand better how Element apps are used.
Mobile app users will see an opt-in screen on first startup on Android in 1.3.14 and iOS in 1.6.12
Maximised widgets merged into the release candidate and on track for the next release (see the Beyond Chat section for more info on this feature)
Fix code blocks being wrongly wrapped causing the line numbers to misalign, this was a regression in 1.9.8
Fixed ability to edit horizontal rules in markdown
Fixed some edge cases around Spaces not updating properly causing rooms to show up in the wrong Space
Add ability to cancel an outbound message during its encryption phase
Fix wrongly sending typing indicator when restoring a draft when changing room
Replace kick terminology with remove to be more inclusive
In labs (you can enable labs in Settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
Polishing bubbles layout
Upgrade to Electron 16 for Element Nightly - we are expecting this to help resolve some of the issues caused by Electron. Intending to release to production in 1.9.10 (two weeks away)
The maximised widgets feature in Element Web that Timo K. has been working on is now available for everyone on develop, and it's on track for the next web release. 🚀 It's a great match for widget-based collaborative editors, dashboards, games, and more. The widget becomes the focus of the room. You can optionally show chat from the room in a side panel, allowing easy discussion of the document / dashboard / game.
To try it out, add a widget to a room in the usual way, then look for the new "maximise" button in the room info panel's widget section. Please let us know in #beyond-chat:matrix.org or in issues if you have any feedback. 😄
Beeper is a universal chat app built on top of Matrix. We've created 12+ open source Matrix bridges and integrated them into an easy to use all-in-one service which does not require setting up your own homeserver. You can learn more at beeper.com.
Our team is growing! We’re now at 25 people, all remote around the world. Recent additions include hifi (creator of Heisenbridge) and Finn (creator of signald).
We are hiring many full-time remote roles including:
Bridge developers
iOS engineers
Product designers
Learn more here and apply through that site, or message @eric:beeper.com
Beeper Desktop
We recently released a Beeper Desktop update with a new room list and a ton of UI improvements. Check out the video below!
Made it easier to triage your inbox by moving unread dots to left
Made the list of connected bridges more compact
New link previews
Loads of bug fixes including improvements to scrolling
Most importantly, we launched a cloud Mac service that allows you to use iMessage with Beeper if you do not have access to an always-on Mac computer. Included with your Beeper subscription!
Voice messages are bridged in native format in both directions for all Beeper bridges
Signal bridge now supports disappearing messages
All Instagram message types are now bridged
Added support for Telegram message reactions
WhatsApp bridge now backfills 3 months worth of chats
Beeper Android
Coming soon: A recent addition to our Android team has added encrypted search by massaging seshat into the app. Expect an upstream PR for this into Element Android as well!
Trixnity version 1.0.0 is out! I decided to make it 1.0.0 not because it is out of beta, but because it has most features you need to build a usable client.
That means: cross signing has landed into Trixnity! The next big features will be room key backup and push notification.
Here is the changelog:
fully support cross signing
load members of rooms in an async way (you don't need to catch errors anymore)
reactive displayname and avatar url of the logged-in user
reactive avatar url for rooms
reactive is-direct-room state for rooms
better Android support for thumbnails
make part of device keys API public
merge SecureStore into Store (encrypt your database if you want to keep secrets secure)
move trixnity-client-api model-classes into separate module to use them e.g. for a matrix server implementation (thanks to @NicolasJouanin)
fixed long standing bug of wrong room name calculation
account data events are handled as if they have a key (like state events) to bypass inconsistency in the spec (maybe this will lead into a MSC)
Just cut a new release of the Ruby Matrix SDK, with 2.5.0 there's some preliminary support for Matrix 1.1 and the client/v3 API, the information for room knocking is exposed properly, some threading issues have had workarounds applied, and a bunch of fixes have been applied.
Currently running my own ping bot with it, I'm doing the GitHub (and hopefully also GitLab at some point) releasetracker bot, I've got my definitely not suitable for production MatrixFS, there's a notification module for TheForeman which we use at the university. And I've got some MSC hacks as well, like the MSC2108 testbed.
I just open sourced a library called Matrix-CRDT: https://github.com/yousefED/matrix-crdt - feedback very welcome! It allows you to use Matrix as a backend for decentralized, local-first collaborative apps. Above you see a collaborative rich text editor (like Google Docs) powered by Matrix!
You can try the Rich text editor here: https://bup9l.csb.app (see also the links in the repo, e.g. there is also a collaborative todo-list example)
If you have a distributed data structure and an algorithm that ensures all participants end up with the same result when their actions are combined, then that's effectively a CRDT as well. For Matrix, there a few research papers like https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.06488 which examine the CRDT-like properties.
First stable release of the gh-bot which is a simple webhook to Matrix bot made in Python.
As of now, the bot supports webhooks from Github, Gitlab and Gitea (although support for this one is very light).
Some other projects might do that way better than this bot but this is a learning project, to learn step by step how client interact with servers.
The next step would be to add a CRT.sh integration to get notified when a certificate is issued for a certain range of domains (which is something we want since we saw an IRC bot do the same).
Matrix-Art is a new social network prototype on Matrix.
It is a direct Devianart style clone. It currently has a focus on only images but is going to get extended to other media types eventually.
I am doing this as a toy project, so it may sometimes have slow progress. The goal is covering the main functions Devianart provides (Posting, Sharing, Profiles, Following, Collections, Comments) as well as integrations to other social networks on matrix using MSC3639.
A lot of things are currently still missing, but I am trying to get uploading working next :)
An instance is hosted at https://art.midnightthoughts.space/ and the code is at https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-art
Currently, the interface is limited to viewing basic data from a matrix room. In the future, there are plans to have an open registration as well as login with any account to use it. :)
Note however that I suggest against using your personal account just yet, even though the login works, as it may have unexpected room joins at this time. This is known and expected, but not production ready.
Also, at this time, there are no plans of e2ee support. This may get added after the main features are finished.
I just wrote an article about my experience using Matrix, and the question... is it worth posting in the news? The article is written in Russian and published on Habr... and since it's pretty big I'm not sure about translating it to English 😅
Here is the link: https://habr.com/ru/post/599777/ - it also mentions TWIM.
What a pleasure it is to be back with the community for the new year! This week Erlend is detailing what Commune is, and I'm flabbergasted by how well thought-through the project is.
This week in Matrix should be called Three Weeks in Matrix, since there hasn't been TWIM updates during the holiday season. Nico has published a first and second communitwim while I was away. All the news reports since the last official TWIM still made it to the post you're currently reading!
Your regular spec person, anoa, is out today so you're stuck with me, not-anoa. This time I got the script to work though 😇
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.
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week the last little bit, we've been working on getting MSCs merged into the formal spec itself in preparation for v1.2 this quarter. We expect the release to happen quite soon and to contain Spaces, room versions 8 and 9, and refresh tokens (no spec PR yet) in addition to all the other wonderful stuff which has landed.
The merged MSCs can be seen over at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/ where they're queued up for the next release. Look out for Added in v1.2 labels throughout the spec, denoting what is new and exciting.
The random MSC this week is MSC2192: Inline widgets (I promise it was random, after a few re-rolls). Inline widgets are a concept that allows for rich functionality in the timeline without needing to necessarily specify an explicit event type. For example, video embeds, minigames, etc could all be represented by inline widgets instead of dedicated event types.
The MSC needs updating to handle MSC1767: Extensible Events (and friends), but once there it could be a very powerful bit of functionality, with free fallback thanks to Extensible Events.
Sliding sync (aka sync v3) is described in MSC3575 - it's still very early days for the proposal which means a lot can change: and YOU can be a part of that. Please take a look at the MSC and provide any and all feedback, be it on the names of keys, format of JSON objects, or the kinds of operations that can be performed. I'm particularly interested in feedback from client developers who have complex room list sort orders or room list filtering requirements and bot/bridge developers who typically don't have a visible room list UI. Any and all feedback at this stage is welcome, visit #sliding-sync:matrix.org to join the discussion.
We're back! New year, new release candidate: we published Synapse 1.50.0rc1 today, marking the end of life for our Python 3.6 and PostgreSQL 9.6 support. We've also extracted some shared utilities into their own package, matrix-common, which is used by Synapse, Sygnal, and Sydent.
We'll talk more about what's in 1.50 next week when it formally releases.
v1.2.9v1.2.10 got released as a maintenance update. With early support for Matrix 1.1, S3 storage classes, and blurhash fixes it's worth the upgrade though there are other goodies - check out the changelog, and report bugs to the issue tracker 🙂
And as a end-of-year update, my Helm Charts have gotten updated yet again. With element-web ending up on 1.9.8, matrix-synapse on 1.49.2 (and .1 before that), and matrix-media-repo on 1.2.10
The first iteration of a Dendrite Helm Chart has been released under the k8s-at-home charts repository. It currently supports a full monolithic deployment and requires minimal configuration to get up and running (just need to generate a matrix key and mount it as per the instructions).
If polylith is your thing then I recommend the chart by S7evinK for now, although it is likely these charts will merge in the future.
An add-on for the matrix-appservice-webhooks bridge. Webhooks are essentially web interfaces for applications to "push" data to. The bridge can receive messages in a certain format, which is nice if the notifying app can be configured. Often it cannot.
Advanced Templating! It is now possible to set format and msgtype based on arbitrary values from the webhook JSON via Jinja2. Shoutout to qg for suggesting this and giving their feedback!
compatibility with matrix-appservice-webhooks forks that read avatarUrl instead of avatar_url
allow mxc:// URL avatars
improvements to the GUI, including automatically resizing text areas and msc:// avatar URL preview
improvements to templates/examples including making use of above features
Howdy folks, it is the time of the year where everyone scarpers! Anyway, perfect time to announce that matrix-hookshot has gotten it's first major release!. 1.0.0 is here!
For those not in the know, the hookshot bridge is used to bridge GitHub, GitLab, JIRA and Generic Webhooks into Matrix rooms. It doesn't just bridge into existing rooms, but can also spawn dynamic rooms based on aliases, send you your notifications in a DM and do lots of other wonderful things!
The notable changes from the 0.1.0 release are:
The bridge has now been renamed from matrix-github to matrix-hookshot.
Now supports JIRA and Generic Webhooks in addition to GitHub and GitLab.
You can get involved and start playing with it by checking out the release here
And that will be my last TWIM entry of the year. Have a good one and stay safe all 🐶
That was in 2021! Half-Shot is back in 2022 with more news
Hey folks! It was only last year we released the 1.0 release of hookshot, after many years of work to get it that far. I'm happy to announce that this week we've got another release. There are a number of buxfixes and improved documentation pieces landing (special shoutout to HarHarLinks for ensuring the docs are competent). The highlights are as follows:
Added support for Figma webhooks. this also means the archival of my old project matrix-figma
Support GitLab wiki page change events.
Added a new script validate-config which allows you to check your config file for simple errors. Handy for people writing ansible roles!
Add support for a html key on generic webhooks to set the HTML content of a Matrix message.
The project can be found over at https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-hookshot/, with pretty pretty docs at https://half-shot.github.io/matrix-hookshot. We're also in #hookshot:half-shot.uk if you prefer using Matrix to learn about these things!
UNPLUMB network command to force unplumbing without being in the room
Proper SASL external with CertFP with mechanism override option (see notes)
Disconnect and cleanup from networks that have no rooms open ♻️
Reply (and reject) DM requests to ghosts with QUERY command ↪️
Try to keep IRC users in the room at all costs if they are on the IRC channel
Fix assumption of all IRC replies to have arguments
Prevent accidental namespace changes to cause mayhem
Finally convert from homegrown Matrix API stuff to Mautrix
Bump Mautrix requirement to 0.12=>0.14
Conduit support was broken in 1.8.x but fixed again in 1.9.0, sorry
Finally there's network level spaces support with a new SPACE command. This creates a new bridge controlled space for the network and automatically manages rooms in and out. There's an issue/feature with Element that all rooms that have been converted to DMs with /converttodm will appear in all bridge spaces. The workaround is to convert them back to regular rooms.
CertFP SASL has been updated to do SASL external flow by default. If you are upgrading and have used CertFP with OFTC you need to run SASL --mechanism=none for it to connect again.
Abandoned networks where the user has left all rooms including the network room will now automatically disconnect and cleanup. This is more in line what people would expect and prevents idle connections from hanging around.
This is a small bug fix release. If you reported an issue, there is a 15% chance it is fixed now! This release also supports pinned messages, although those will only show up after someone changed the pinned messages in a room currently (we didn't want to force a full resync just for such a small feature). The spaces list is also now nested, Nheko offers you quick access to your recently used reactions and Nheko will show you your direct chats in the sidebar. Apart from that there are quite a few bugfixes and smaller improvements, you can find the full changelog and downloads here: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/releases/tag/v0.9.1
Thank you everyone, who helped shape this release!
Nheko now is a lot more efficient. We now use one Threadpool instead of 3, got rid of more than 60% of the allocations when scrolling through messages, layout half as much content when scrolling, blurhashes decode in 10% of the time and jdenticons allocate ~10% as much temporary buffers. We also deleted around 1000 lines of unused code. Tooltips also shouldn't steal the mouse focus when scrolling anymore, which could lead to sudden stalls when scrolling.
Additionally edits now replace existing notifications, tastytea added a manpage and fixed blurry or incorrectly sized custom emoji, you can now send custom emotes via the inline completer using ~ and completers now show a scrollable list with more Elements than before. Advanced users can also now opt into an insecure client side secrets storage via a hidden setting.
We're baaaaack! Anyway, last week Drake just translated all of Nheko into Spanish, you can now zoom in and pan in the image viewer, emojis shouldn't split up into their segments anymore and Nheko should always be sending the qualified version of it (according the to the unicode test files, not by just appending FE0F). Blurhashes should be even faster still and we now have support for running the call event loop on macOS and Windows (although call support is still disabled there for now).
We are also now working to restructure our README. It has a lot of outdated stuff in it and you really want to see screenshots pretty early in the README! You can sneak a peak here: https://nheko.im/nheko-reborn/nheko/-/tree/README_updates
This week the Threads team has focussed their efforts on improving some of the smaller details and pesky bugs we’ve found in our first rounds of testing.
If you’d like to help us test Threads we’ll be asking for help in the Community Testing room over the next few weeks. Join#element-community-testing:matrix.org to stay in the loop.
Polls
Polls is available in Labs on all clients! While we know there are some minor improvements to be made, we’re proud of where we are and would love for you to start using it!
Community Testing
Our next session will be on Wednesday, 12th January at 16:00 UTC (17:00 CET). We will be testing the new release candidates on all three platforms! Join us at#element-community-testing:matrix.org
Work continues on the integration of PostHog analytics. With your explicit permissions we’ll receive anonymous usage data that will allow us to understand the areas of Element that are helpful (or not). This info will help fuel things like our Information Architecture project.
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
Information Architecture improvements are still being worked on - try it out by enabling things like the new Spotlight search and Breadcrumbs.
Message Bubbles are improving; We’ve been hard at work preparing them for a release in the coming weeks.
During the Christmas break we increase the speed of the app launch by 7x! Once stabilised this update will land with you.
Analytics changes have been merged into the RC and opt-in will be available soon.
In development:
More Spaces improvements are underway; You’ll soon be able to add rooms to Spaces, update room settings, and have room interactions on the ‘long-press’.
Improved onboarding! We’re hoping to make the first few steps in Element easy by simplifying some of the first tasks users take in the app, including signing up.
We’ve started building Message Bubbles on iOS. This will help to distinguish the messages you send from the messages you receive.
We now implement MSC2574! This MSC proposes a standard format for marking up resources (PDFs, other document formats, audiovisual media, websites, geospatial data...) using Matrix.
Room avatars are now displayed in the welcome view for PDF rooms
There's now a UI for using spaces to manage and share PDF collections
Reactions now work like element-web: click to mirror an existing reaction or redact your previous reaction
Next, I'm aiming to implement MSC3592, which proposes a standard format for basic markup on PDFs. Stay tuned! And if you're interested in learning more, come visit #opentower:matrix.org.
Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms. After formerly calling it Matrix Navigator or Matrix Screwdriver, I finally settled on the name Matrix Wrench. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Version v0.2.0 comes with a Network Log which displays curl equivalents for all network requests. It also allows to easily add and remove room aliases.
https://gitlab.com/jaller94/matrix-wrench/
Cactus Comments is a comment system for the open web, built on Matrix.
We released version v0.11.0 of the client!
The client has been relicensed to LGPL. This means that you can now use Cactus Comments in non-GPL compatible projects.
But mainly, this release brings a bunch of CSS improvements: introducing automatic dark mode, and making it easier to change colors with CSS variables.
Here's the changelog:
Relicense from GPLv3 to LGPLv3.
Rewrite large parts of the stylesheet to use flexbox.
Introduce CSS variables to the stylesheet.
.dark and .light CSS classes with default values for dark/light mode.
Bugfix: "View More" button no longer blinks when auto-refreshing short comment sections.
matrix-bot-sdk has had a v0.6.0-beta.3 release with beta support for crypto! It even includes documentation!
The crypto is considered beta quality at the moment: good enough to use for somewhat unimportant bots, but not fully recommended for production just yet. With that being said, I'm interested in bugs you run into - please use the issue tracker if you run into crypto not working.
Tutorials for the crypto setup are at https://turt2live.github.io/matrix-bot-sdk/tutorial-encryption.html
Note for appservice support to work then you'll need a Synapse with these PRs enabled (may require manual merge too):
https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/11538
https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/11617
https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/11215
For non-linux platforms, the rust-sdk will try to build itself which means you might need a working Rust stack. The Rust SDK repo itself has more information:
Bots and appservices don't automatically support encryption, but adding encryption should be easy. The Rust SDK dependency is required in either case, sorry.
Complement has seem some updates this week in the test output that is produced onto the CLI. Details on how to add this to your CI process are contained in the README. Here's the difference when viewed using Github Actions:
Polyjuice Newt, the newest addition to the Polyjuice project, is an Elixir binding for vodozemac, the new Olm/Megolm implementation in Rust. At the time of writing, Polyjuice Newt supports encryption and decryption using Olm and Megolm, but by the time you read this next year, it may also support the SAS verification functions and pickling/unpickling.
I don't think we've previously had any Nix/NixOS/nixpkgs related entries in TWIM, so I'll start ^^
The current unstable channel has extended its Matrix ecosystem support to also include Heisenbridge and Conduit packages and modules. This makes it super easy to deploy any of those services: For example, my configuration for Heisenbridge is 21 lines long, and Conduit is only 11 lines. You can browse the available configuration options online: services.matrix-conduit, services.heisenbridge (note that some of them are freeform and simply forward to the upstream configuration).
For those that are not into NixOS, a module is the code that turns the declarative configuration files into your running system setup. As an example, if you enable services.heisenbridge the following things are done for you:
Create a new heisenbridge user and group for the service
Create and manage the registration file for the homeserver (i.e. automatically regenerate it after the configuration changed)
Create a systemd service that runs the heisenbridge command with the requested bridge configuration. The unit also sets a few systemd security hardening options.
Jip J. Dekker did the initial work of adding Dendrite support to the playbook back in January 2021. Lots of work (and time) later, Dendrite support is finally ready for testing.
The playbook was previously quite Synapse-centric, but can now accommodate multiple homeserver implementations, with Synapse still remaining the default.
A new Matrix guide has come into town: https://joinmatrix.org
In the hopes to expand Matrix's reach to the non-technical population, this guide is intended to give quick directions on how to use Matrix, as well as clear comparison between Matrix and other dominant platforms.
The pages are available on GitHub. Open to contributions!
Hey all, it's me again, not-anoa, with your spec update. I don't have a graph for you this week, but I do have curated content which hopefully holds you over until next week 🙂
This week we've seen a few new MSCs get opened up:
As demonstrated, a few of them are follow-on work from aggregations. A lot of the work is an effort to get MSC2675 - Serverside aggregations of message relationships through FCP - it's changed quite a bit in the last week, so if you reviewed it before then please give it a quick read!
Thib has caught me quite close to the deadline on TWIM, so while I don't have a random MSC for you this week I do recommend some light reading around aggregations and extensible events - these are both major features for Matrix and help shape the future for other, even more exciting, features.
The goal of this MSC is to restrict who can access files in your content repository, which is used to share files, images, voice messages and more on Matrix. Currently this is secured by using random identifiers, but this MSC wants to add a few more restrictions: A signed-in user can still access everything, but if you don't provide an access token, when downloading media, you either can access no media, only media that was sent from that server, only media which the server already downloaded or everything. The level of access can be set by the server admin.
I think this would be really nice to have, but it has various challenges when implementing it in clients and when it needs to work across federation. It could limit how much random users can fill up your disk though, which is especially important for small server admins!
Happy holidays! This week we released Synapse 1.49.0, our last planned release of the year. This is the last release that supports Python 3.6 or PostgreSQL 9.6; if you've not upgraded, now is the time!
Most notably, this release includes stable support for MSC2918: Refresh tokens. This is a more secure alternative to long-lived access tokens, and we'd encourage clients to implement support for refresh tokens as described in the MSC.
We also released Sygnal 0.11, which includes loads of bugfixes. For the Element-managed Sygnal instances, this release has reduced our daily Sentry error rate by over 99%, dramatically improving the signal-to-noise ratio of our monitoring.
Sydent is the reference Matrix Identity server. It provides a lookup service, so that you can find a Matrix user via their email address or phone number (if they have chosen to share it).
I've just published the third and final post on Sydent's type annotations (part 1, part 2). This one is more reflective and tries to quantify our efforts: how well have we done?
We are planning to have a small release next week, that fixes a few issues with the 0.9.0 release. It would be lovely if some of you could test one of our nightlies or could check if the translations for a language you speak are up to date in our weblate.
Some of the fixes this week include another crash fix for handling matrix links from your browser, notification bubbles that can show values over 9000(!), better preview images for sticker and emote packs created in Nheko, allowing you to click links in replies, a few layout and click area fixes. Nheko now also keeps track of your latest reactions and gives you easy access to them in the hover menu.
Nheko now also finally supports pinned messages! Most of you probably don't know, but that feature has pretty much always been in the matrix spec, but very few clients expose it. Today Nheko joins that rank! It's part of our goal to provide better support for building communities. Topics can be quite limiting, because they can only contain plain text. Pinned messages allow for much more creative freedom! They can also be encrypted, while state events currently never are, but the key for that isn't reshared, so currently experience in encrypted rooms is a tradeoff. Maybe we'll go for an encrypted description event in the future, but for now this seems to be a good solution to bridge the gap.
Let's hope the current master branch is good and we'll have a release with ALL THE FIXES next week! And thank you everyone, who already translated and reported issues! It took less than 10 hours to have 5 languages updated to 100%! Last year we didn't even have that many languages at 100%! You guys are AMAZING! <3
List of threads in a room is now more accurate and viewing very long threads has improved with the integration with the homeserver APIs. (These APIs are not enabled on matrix.org yet.)
Threads on mobile platforms are catching up to Web, with many changes in review.
Iterated on the design for restricted history threads and search results across all platforms.
Design for thread previews in room list has been improved for mobile platforms.
Improved Android bottom sheet expandable and scrollable behaviour design.
We’ve created MSC3567 to fix some edge cases with API calls
Gathering feedback to incorporate into the next phase of development, join us for the community testing session on Monday at 17:00 in #element-community-testing:matrix.org
Continuing with polishing & bug fixing for full mesh calling app. One remaining bug somewhere causing members to not connect properly. Finalising how much of registration & login we can/want to implement for the short term until it’s replaced by OAuth login.
Tested all three Release Candidates (RCs) at the same time for the first time! Did not find any new web issues when testing first time user experiences and basic interactions on Web. We found 6 new issues on Android and 9 on iOS.
Tried out the Information Architecture changes on web with the Delight team. Very exciting to see these changes available in Labs already!
Closed 33 out of 60 re-tested encryption issues on Web and prioritised a few to be considered for upcoming work.
We’ve been working on auto-generating code and documentation for events raised by our client analytics (code here, PR for documentation generation here). This allows us to publish a comprehensive list of everything our analytics capture, which is great both for end users and for people doing analysis.
In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
First milestone reached on Information Architecture! To try it out, enable “Threaded messaging”, “Use new room breadcrumbs” and “New spotlight search experience” in the Labs settings.
We’re actively collecting feedback on IA to review in the new year.
Fixed an issue around some voice messages not playing in bridged rooms.
Polls changes are in this week’s release candidate (RC) and will be available behind a Labs flag in the next release.
Analytics changes have been merged into the RC and opt-in will be available soon.
In development:
Spaces is coming closer to completion: we’re there on space creation, adding rooms to spaces, space management and more. Release coming in the new year!
Work on implementing new login flow continues, with more improvements incoming.
Improvements to the timeline performance (faster display, faster scroll) after updates to the way we store timeline events.
Analytics framework has been merged, opt-in request will be shown to users once more translations have landed. For now, you can enable it in the settings.
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
I've been working on a matrix-based tool for highlighting and annotating websites. By building on top of matrix, we can effectively have a decentralized, federated and collaborative way to leave notes and highlights on pages. I wrote a brief introduction on my blog, as well as made a little bit of a simple demo video. Here's a copy-pasted list of planned and existing features:
Current: Create and send website annotations over Matrix.
Current: Store data in a decentralized and federated manner.
Current: Share highlights with other users, including those on other servers.
Current: Group annotations together and create multiple annotation groups
Planned: Use Matrix's End-to-End encryption to ensure the secure transmission and storage of highlight data.
Planned: Leverage the new m.thread MSC to allow users to comment on and discuss
highlights.
Planned: Use something like ArchiveBox to cache the current version of a website and prevent annotations from breaking.
Matrix highlight for probably the last time this week. Highlight comments and self-editing are implemented, though I'm not sure I'll stick with this particular model.
I've been teaching a class this semester using a tool built on the matrix-js-sdk and tentatively entitled populus-viewer. Populus-viewer uses Matrix as a backend for the social annotation of PDFs, with the goal of helping matrix become a platform for teaching and scholarly collaboration. If you're interested in learning more, or adopting populus-viewer in your teaching, come visit #opentower:matrix.org!
Populus-Viewer currently supports:
Annotation of PDFs with highlights and pin-drops
Matrix conversations based on annotations
Audio and video messages
Replies, reactions, and redactions
Markdown for rich text
LaTeX for mathematical notation
Typing notifications
Synchronized reading position across devices
SSO, with single-click links for embedding in an LMS like Canvas or Blackboard.
As the project develops, I'm hoping to continue to polish the reading experience, and to add support for other mime types (audio and video especially).
TWIM I got started on the chat part of matrix-streamchat, to provide a lightweight embeddable Matrix client to be used alongside streams in Owncast and PeerTube. It will use guest access, and lots more features to come like extensive custom emote support. For now refactoring a bunch of things first before adding more flashy things, but who knows, you might see me do it live on https://stream.pixie.town
Introducing vodozemac (https://github.com/matrix-org/vodozemac) - a rewrite of libolm in Rust by poljar and dkasak! The intention is for this to become the reference Olm implementation going forwards, and to get it audited asap (and benefit from all of Rust’s nice safety and parallelism features, and better crypto primitives!)
simplematrixbotlib is an easy to use bot library for the Matrix ecosystem written in Python and based on matrix-nio. Version 2.5.0 adds improvements to the config feature.
Add allow/block lists: This allows bot developers to specify allow/block lists of users who have permission to interact with the bot using regex.
Permissions can checked with Match.is_from_allowed_user(), which lets the bot developer choose which responses are restricted.
The allow/block lists can by modified at runtime via the Config.add_allowlist(), Config.remove_allowlist(), Config.add_blocklist(), and Config.remove_blocklist() methods.
A thank you to HarHarLinks for their contributions to version 2.5.0!
Dimension, an integration manager alternative for Element, has received a bunch of updates over the last couple weeks:
Added (early) support for matrix-hookshot's GitHub, Jira, and Webhooks bridging.
Most of a redesign complete to make it feel more like an Element UI rather than something special and third party.
If you're interested in helping out in getting the redesign finished, please check out https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-dimension/issues/458 which has reference mockups and linked issues. The major parts are the "complex bots" (Travis CI, RSS, etc) and the sticker integration. Unfortunately, I don't have enough free time to work on it myself in the near term, but will get back to it eventually 🙂
And now, a complementary screenshot of the Good™ parts:
The homeserver should be in the form of https://domain.tld
The username should be the username, not the user id. (krazykirby99999, not @krazykirby99999:matrix.org)
The room_id should be the internal room id of the room, not the published address. (!QQpfJfZvqxbCfeDgCj:matrix.org, not #thisweekinmatrix:matrix.org) This can be found under Room Options > Advanced > Room Information in the Element Client.
matrix-imposter-bot - A bot that uses your account to repeat other people's messages. This gives relay-bot capabilities to puppet-only bridges.
I made this project a while ago to hack in a relay mode to the mautrix Facebook bridge. But as of this week, that bridge supports relaying natively! 🎉 Thus, my main motivation for maintaining imposter-bot is obsolete, and the project will be on indefinite hiatus.
With that said, it can (mostly) still be used to add relay support to any bridges that don't yet support a relay mode themselves--but native relay support is always better!
Thanks to everyone who's shown interest in the project, and to tulir for making such great bridges!
A project has started to re-implement the venerable mIRCstats for Matrix! It's in very early stages, right now it only does "getting a data-frame of events for a list of rooms" and has no actual visualisations baked in yet. However, we're moving quickly, and I hope to have some initial easy-to-use viz in place over the Christmas break.
The project is written in R (because I am an R user, and its good for data and viz work :P) and you can find it here. If you're new to R and want to give it a go, check out the extremely brief howto I just wrote here. I look forward to all the ways you will tell me it's broken!
Board games are great. And Matrix and its widget api turned out to be an excellent environment to create collaborative board games. With some really impressive conditions:
I don't have to maintain a server with a database.
I don't have to create a custom account systems user need to register. They play with their matrix account, which also makes accessibility great. Someone invites you in a room with the game and you can play!
I just need to host one static file and ppl will be able to play as long as that static site exists.
This project tries to be two things. A tech demo and inspiration to what is possible with widgets (Especially, with the changes on how widgets can be displayed in element (Check the "matrix live" Demos! 😊) )
Second it should serve as source and resource. For ideas and solutions on how no trust games can be executed without server (third party) side logic. And, for the ones interested, also as a resource on how widgets are implemented.
Last but not least the game Saint Petersburg is really fun. It takes a couple of minutes to grasp the rules but it is one of those games where there are so many things that can be considered with simple rules that it becomes more and more exciting with each round. So I really invite you to check out the rules and give it a try. Its best to start in the Git Repo or join the this room: #st-petersburg-auth:matrix.org
To put it simple, the widget works like this: The game state is stored in the room state and is updated through the widget directly.
This of course raises questions: How is it still possible to prohibit users from cheating and manually changing parameters like, how much money they own. Everyone (who has the permission) is always able to send whatever state events they want?
How is it possible to draw random cards if there is no third party involved. Could I not just send a state event with the cards that I hope are going to be drawn and are beneficial for me. Can we make card drawing deterministic? Not really since then everyone know what is going to happen. Which kind of breaks the game...
I would be super happy, if someone is interested and wants to find answer to the questions above by checking out the README.
There is an article (exclusive to paid subscribers) in the German tech news/magazine website heise.de about
"Running your own messaging service using the matrix server"
https://www.heise.de/ratgeber/Eigener-Chatserver-Mit-dem-Matrix-Server-einen-Messaging-Dienst-betreiben-6289020.html
Last week the Matrix Scientists had turned this room into a portal to TWIM bot's ship tank so we could all fuel it with news about our work. The spec and hookshot news were reported late when the tank was already full, sending TWIM bot's ship into hyperspeed mode 🚀
We lost contact with the bot for a few days but managed to restore a connection with it. It appeared to have crashed on the green planet of Fuj'ehr. Its ship shattered in pieces at impact! 💥
The bot managed to find most of them, but some critical pieces of the engine were missing. We needed to find those pieces quickly before the mushy ground of Fuj'ehr swallows them forever! 😱
The Editor has asked the Matrix Scientists to reconfigure the room and bridge it to TWIM bot's navigation tools. Each news report highlighted the position of a piece of engine on its map. 🗺️
This week my guests are the FluffyChat and MinesTRIX maintainers, following the v1 release of the simple and beautiful FluffyChat… and they want to work together!
Version numbers of each homeserver, updated daily using a GitHub Action, are now added onto my public homeserver list, in hopes that it will further aid those choosing a homeserver to use Matrix on.
Very handy to quickly know if a server is well maintained or not before making it your new home!
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://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
Extensible events are coming! With lots of potential usecases to be built on top of the concept (such as threading, polls, and any type of data one would like to through on top of existing room events), extensible events are finally getting some love. New MSCs are available above, which detail some of these usecases. Exciting times!
A small correction from last week's issue: the next aggregations MSC to be focused on (after MSC2675 (serverside aggregations) is MSC2677 (annotations and reactions), as it's a more pressing blocker for usecases such as threading and polls.
Otherwise, the Spec Core Team is continuing to wind down in preparation for the holidays ☃️
Quite a novel concept, and one that would enable many usecases, such as the ones described in the MSC itself.
Check it out if that's something that interests you!
This week we cut Synapse release candidate 1.49.0rc1 It includes a bunch of work to supporta plethora of MSCs (MSC 2675, MSC3030, MSC2918, MSC2946), a crop of bugfixes and improvements to our documentation which incorporate Synapse's old wiki. And as ever, there's a bunch of internal type hinting to keep the Synapse team's blood pressure at healthy levels.
The formal release of Synapse 1.49.0 is scheduled for the coming Tuesday. This will be the last Synapse release of 2021 as the Synapse team prepare for a break over the Christmas period. Releases will continue at the usual pace in the new year, with 1.50.0rc1 slated for 2022/01/04 and 1.50.0 for 2022/01/11.
Please note: Synapse 1.49 will be the last version to support Python 3.6, PostrgreSQL 9.6, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic): by our next release, these will have reached their upstream end-of-life. If you're reliant on any of these platforms, please ensure you have plans to upgrade.
In other news, we're preparing to release a new version of Sygnal with a series of fixes for common errors. This should make Sygnal administrators much happier by removing an awful lot of error spam from logs!
Sydent is the reference Matrix Identity server. It provides a lookup service, so that you can find a Matrix user via their email address or phone number (if they have chosen to share it).
This week has seen yet another set of updates to my Helm Charts, with element-web being bumped to 1.9.6 and matrix-synapse seeing fixes to non-standard port configurations and better support for modern ingressClass handling.
If you are using Nheko on a mobile device like the PinePhone, you should now be able to swipe between the room list and the spaces list. Since I don't use a PinePhone, feedback will be appreciated!
NeoChat version 21.12 is out! You may have noticed that this version number is roughly twenty times higher than the previous one. This means that NeoChat is now twenty times as good as the last version. Or it means that version numbers are utterly meaningless and we switched to a date-based version number system since NeoChat is now released together with many other plasma-mobile related apps. This also means that new versions will arrive monthly from now on. New features and fixes in this version include - but are not limited to:
Spell checking while writing a message
Improved markdown to html conversion when sending a message
Built-in theme switching
Various fixes to login, logout and account switching
Threads is making excellent progress; This week we held 2 internal testing sessions, both of which went swimmingly.
We’re continuing our hard-work on Notifications to fix those up as best we can.
Also, we started work on the Threads Filter. The filter will allow you to choose between all the threads in a room and threads you’ve actively participated in.
If you’re using the Labs version of Threads, let us know what you think so far!
If you've ever tried to find a message back in the past, you've experienced the burdensome task of having to scroll back manually for days, even months! With the jump to date headers, that will be a thing of the past 😌. Clicking any date separator in the room timeline, will give shortcuts to jump to last week, last month, jump to any date using the date picker, or even the beginning of the room to follow a room upgrade chain.
This is currently still in a draft pull request state but will give another update when it lands in Element Labs for everyone to use.
Element Android 1.3.9 has been released on the PlayStore and is available for the beta testers:
This version adds support for draft voice messages and a new design for URL previews.
Opt-in PostHog analytics will land soon, and will be included in the next release.
A new "Legals” screen has been added to Settings in order for users to see all legal info pages for Element, the user's homeserver and the user's identity server (if any).
The next release candidate will be prepared next Tuesday.
Commune is a communications suite built on top of matrix. Commune aims to bring together chat, discussions, email and other interactive apps into a single matrix client.
So here’s the thing ahq (dev) and I (product) have been working on: https://github.com/commune-org/commune
It’s a chat/forum hybrid. Still in pre-alpha, proof-of-concept stage.
TWIM I wrote a Matrix powered stream overlay for OBS, to integrate live chat in your favorite (selfhosted) streaming setups. Was a great little 2 evening project to develop while livestreaming it's development :)
You can find the code and instructions at https://git.pixie.town/f0x/matrix-streamchat
and a hosted instance at https://streamchat.pixie.town
jOlm has seen two releases since the previous update, v1.0.7 and v1.0.8. jOlm now supports (and requires at least) the latest libolm version 3.2.7. Please note that we deprecated a number of methods in favor of renamed siblings. The majority of the old ones will be removed in the upcoming jOlm 1.1 release, likely published soon after libolm's announced security release on Dec. 13th. Please follow suit and update your implementations accordingly.
If you've got room for more video content, I also said more things about bridges. In this one, we do a live code session for a twilio bridge and watch it fly! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5q3FLLvRn4
Wily has launched an iOS Matrix client to enable messaging in restricted- or poor networks. mText and Room events are transferred as DNS payload, thus bypassing most captive portals, while message headers are minimized to enable messaging in very low bandwidth/high latency networks.
Wily Messenger is in POC stage, missing i.e. encryption at the moment, among others. We are committed to develop it further and invite a Kotlin developer to join our journey. DM @hp:hq.wily.im
We've set up a new Element Space for the Element family of clients and projects, finally. Feel free to join it at #community:element.io and be sure to check out #community:matrix.org while you're there for everything Matrix related.
The members of the Federation have been very active and helped TWIM bot to find all the pieces of its ship! TWIM bot assembled everything together and put the engine back in its place... but at the last moment, as it was ready to take off, another bright spot appeared on the map following madlittlemods late report!
How could this happen? All the pieces of the engine were already there! Unsure of what to do, the bot asked Earth for directions. Earth confirmed: it was worth going to that new bright spot on the map.
The bot welded back the plate of the engine casing, made sure nothing could get into the ship in its absence, and started heading to the mysterious spot. The signal of our communication tools with TWIM bot weakens as it enters in the thick forest of Fuj'ehr…
One thing you might not know is that TWIM bot is a space traveler, sent by the Matrix scientists to explore that zone called "The Possibilities". The #twim:matrix.org room is a portal to its energy tank, and we had received a distress signal!
To help the TWIM explorer fulfil its mission, we asked the Matrix community to fuel it with news before it crashed into space debris made of aggregated ignorance!
This week again, the community has been very active and explored many possibilities of the Matrix universe!
For this week's Matrix Live my guest is Amandine and we're discussing how Element and 50 other organisations are trying to shape the future of EU's law for more interoperability. Bonus point: we have a double bridge demo with Matrix, Slack and Telegram!
This year, the Matrix.org Foundation is excited to host the first ever Matrix.org Foundation and Community devroom at FOSDEM. A full day of talks, demos and workshops around Matrix itself and projects built on top of Matrix. Read (and answer to) our Call for Partipactions!
A group of Finnish Matrix admins have set up a free homeserver for Finnish public called pikaviestin.fi (literally instant messenger dot fi). It offers a bunch of bridges and registration requires an e-mail address in one of Finnish e-mail providers or organizations. We welcome all Finns to register there and help decentralize Matrix. Support room can be found at #aula:pikaviestin.fi
That's a fantastic initiative! Kudos to all the sysadmins involved!
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://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
The end of the year is drawing to a close. Thus many of the Spec Core Team members are focusing on implementation in order to meet deadlines. Review is still occurring though! As above, we have MSC3419 (allow guests to send more event types). This was born out of next-generation VoIP work, but it should have a positive impact on improving the guest experience in Matrix on the whole.
Otherwise work is still ongoing by Bruno and others on untangling the aggregations MSCs, specifically MSC2675 and MSC2676.
And finally, Alexandre Franke has PR'd some work to allow for matrix.org's OpenAPI spec to be widely available, meaning anyone with a Swagger (or other OpenAPI viewer) client can easily pull it and start sending requests against a Matrix homeserver. Fun times!
I want to start by drawing attention to a blog post which we published today: Type coverage for Sydent: motivation. This the first in a series of three articles discussing what we've learned from making Sydent pass the mypy type checker in strict mode. Improving type coverage across Synapse, Sygnal, and Sydent has been a major focus of the backend team at Element for the past few months, and we think we've learned a few useful things in the process.
This week we also released Synapse 1.48 with loads of internal improvements, new Admin APIs, better alignment with the Matrix 1.1 spec, and more. We're planning one more release for the year, 1.49 on December 14th, and then we're taking a break until Synapse 1.50 on January 11th.
Importantly: Synapse 1.49 will be the last release to support Python 3.6, PostrgreSQL 9.6, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic) — if you're reliant on any of these platforms, please ensure you have plans to upgrade.
Let us know what you think of the article (and the Synapse release!), and we'll see you next week!
Sydent is the reference Matrix Identity server. It provides a lookup service, so that you can find a Matrix user via their email address or phone number (if they have chosen to share it).
I've just published a blog post (part one of three) about our efforts to improve Sydent's type coverage. It should hopefully be of interest to anyone who works with Python or is interested in static analysis more generally.
In the vein of Gitter feature parity on Matrix, we've made the first steps towards a better public static archive. We merged an experimental implementation of MSC3030 into Synapse which lets you use the unstable /timestamp_to_event client API endpoint go from a given timestamp to the closest event ID. This will allow us to implement a calendar jump to date interface to be able to navigate to any day in the rooms history. Our first target to add the jump to date UI in is Hydrogen since we plan to server-side render Hydrogen for the actual public static archive as well.
To enable the MSC3030 unstable API endpoints in Synapse, add experimental_features -> msc3030_enabled: true to your homeserver.yaml:
GET /_matrix/client/unstable/org.matrix.msc3030/rooms/<roomID>/timestamp_to_event?ts=<timestamp>&dir=<direction>
{
"event_id": ...
"origin_server_ts": ...
}
Also as part of MSC3030, when you use the client API endpoint, if your homeserver sees that the closest event it has locally in the database is next to a gap in the history, it will go out and ask other federated homeservers what they have as the closest event instead.
GET /_matrix/federation/unstable/org.matrix.msc3030/timestamp_to_event/<roomID>?ts=<timestamp>&dir=<direction>
{
"event_id": ...
"origin_server_ts": ...
}
*--
MSC2716 to import batches of historical messages is still marching along getting some polishing passes and strengthening the assertions in the Complement tests to make sure things are going absolutely correctly. It's also good to see Beeper utilizing it and catching a fewbugs along the way 💪.
Stop the press. This is a last minute TWIM. We've been beavering away on matrix-hookshot. It's gained many features in the last week, but the big thing is that hookshot has gained the ability to provision connections over a provisioning API, which means it should hook nicely into Dimension (and other integration managers, in the future)!
Other notable features are:
Support for multiple webhooks per room
Support for the username/text fields on an incoming webhook (slack style)
Named webhooks, so each hook now has a sensible displayname
The ability to spawn GitHub actions from rooms using the !gh workflow run command
Lots of new supported events from GitLab, such as reviews and tag pushes
Hosted documentation (so all of the above is easy to setup), it's a bit in progress atm.
We're aiming for a release very very soon, hopefully in the next week or so!
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.
In a new release being published just now we added the possibility to mark rooms as unread also on Web/Desktop (using MSC2867, huge thanks to @alangecker for his PR on Element Web!).
This has already been implemented in SchildiChat-Android and is now enabled on both by default.
We finally figured out what caused the issues with the flatpak on GNOME, especially on Arm. It should now work properly, if you use Flathub. On the Pinephone (and other systems, that don't set a locale/use the C locale), timestamps should now not be needlessly long anymore. Redactions got a face-lift to distinguish them better from normal messages. We added a workaround for Synapse not allowing you to leave a banned room. We now delete the room from the room list permanently if Synapse returns "unknown room" when trying to leave it. Spaces can now show the entire hierarchy in the sidebar (if you pull it out) and you can navigate to subspaces by clicking on them in the roomlist, even if you collapsed the space hierarchy in the sidebar.
The new design has bigger message bubbles with fancy shadows and bigger fonts. The contrast has been improved and some elements, like the time on every single message bubble, are now hidden by default. But they are not gone! Detailed message information are now accessible in the new message info page, where we not also can see the message type and the timestamp, but also the whole JSON source code of each timeline event.
Spaces have got a lot improvements and bug fixes. They have moved to the bottom bar of the chat list (while this bottom bar is still hidden if you have not joined any space yet). The multi account switcher have instead been moved to a top left drop-down menu. So we finally got rid of the drawer, which seems to be a deprecated material design feature anyway. This new UX makes spaces much easier to use. You can long press on them to go to the space settings and long press on any chat in the chat list, to add or remove a chat to (or from) a space.
We still have no support for the spaces summary API though so we don't have yet the ability to discover new rooms inside of a space but this feature might land soon in the Matrix Dart SDK.
FluffyChats multi account is still in beta but got a lot of bug fixes as well. You are now able to sort your accounts in "bundles" which can be very handy. The new account switcher button gives you a much better overview over your connected Matrix accounts now.
We did a lot refactoring under the hood in our Matrix Dart SDK and have improved our in-app database a lot. On the web it now uses IndexedDB natively while it tunes all database transactions on all platforms. This leads to the fastest FluffyChat experience we ever had and makes the app finally kinda usable with bigger accounts on all platforms. The room list is now lazy loaded which speeds up the app start (especially with multi account enabled) a lot.
Choose your own primary color
This was a long requested feature. You can now choose your favorite color to style your FluffyChat for your needs:
What will you choose? Let me know in the comments. I mostly like blue on my Ubuntu desktop.
Ahhh by the way... What does it mean that we now have FluffyChat 1.0.0? It does NOT mean that the previous versions were not yet stable or ready for daily use. It just means that we make so many changes at once that we thought, bumping the first digit of our pseudo-semver version string might make sense. We totally messed up our versioning and are now going to do it better. Promised!!
What's next?
We are often asked: What is the roadmap of FluffyChat?
Well... we still don't have a clear roadmap and might never have. FluffyChat is completely driven by volunteers. But what I can say that we would like to do in the next months is:
Better QA -> We would like to write some integration tests, push release candidates before new releases and involve everyone in testing them to offer the best stability possible.
Native video calls -> Yes! There will soon land support for native video calls in the Matrix Dart SDK and we are going to implement this in FluffyChat.
Stories -> Like you might know from SnapChat, WhatsApp or Instagram, stories are little messages you can send to all of your contacts and which will disappear after 24 hours. I would really like to implement this in FluffyChat!
Better notifications for iOS
Deeper support for spaces
Knocking feature
Drag&Drop for web
But as I said this is what we would like to do. We can't give any warranties on anything. We can only do our best. But you can help us if you like (You don't have to).
Join the FluffyChat community: https://matrix.to/#/#fluffychat:matrix.org
Report bugs at our issue tracker: https://gitlab.com/famedly/fluffychat/-/issues
Help with the translations and join our translators team: https://matrix.to/#/#fluffychat-translation:matrix.org
Help with development directly in GitLab <3
... or support us on Liberapay so we can organize more FluffyChat developer meetings: https://matrix.to/#/#fluffychat-translation:matrix.org
On Web, work continues on notifications and integration with homeserver APIs to improve user experience.
On Mobile, link sharing has been added and work is about to start on notifications.
Polls
Polls are nearly ready! If you enable this feature in labs, you can create a poll with several options, and people can vote on it.
We’re working on the finishing touches, and the first version of polls will be available in a release (on Element Desktop, Web, Android and iOS) within a few weeks.
Community testing
We closed 34 encryption bugs which had been resolved by improvements to the workflows and user interfaces.
Due to the overwhelming success with bug squash sessions in the last few weeks, we are making these a regular feature. Our next session will be on Thursday 9 December at 17:00 UTC.
Trixnity, a multiplatform Matrix SDK written in Kotlin, has grown up since the last release 6 month ago! It has it first release candidate for v1.0.0!
If you don't heard about Trixnity: Trixnity aims to be strongly typed, customizable and easy to use. You can register custom events and Trixnity will take care, that you can send and receive that type.
The most exciting thing is the new trixnity-client module. It provides a high level client implementation and allows you to easily implement clients for Desktop, Mobile and Web. You just need to render data from and passing user interactions to Trixnity. The key features are:
exchangeable database
fast cache on top of the database
E2E (olm, megolm)
verification
room list
timelines
user and room display name calculation
asynchronous message sending without caring about E2E stuff or online status
media support (thumbnail generation, offline "upload", etc.)
redactions
At the moment, Trixnity only supports JVM in all modules, but JS and Native will follow soon (to be exact: when Kotlin 1.6.10 and ktor 2.0.0 is released). I also implemented the module trixnity-olm, which implements the wrappers of libolm for Kotlin JVM/JS/Native.
Cross signing is one of the next big features, I want to implement.
I'm exploring the matrix-rust-sdk on my live stream every week. I'm working on a simple Rust bot for Matrix. Come watch me struggle with the compiler on PeerTube or Twitch every wednesday at 14:00 UTC!
Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?
This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.
Following the late reports of the spec and hookshot updates, TWIM bot's ship went into hyperspeed. Our dear bot lost control of the ship and we lost its signal. We're doing our best to contact it and hope it's safe!
This year, the Matrix.org Foundation is excited to host the first ever Matrix.org Foundation and Community devroom at FOSDEM. A full day of talks, demos and workshops around Matrix itself and projects built on top of Matrix.
Matrix is the open source project that publishes the Matrix open standard for secure, decentralised, real-time communication, and its Apache licensed reference implementations.
We encourage people working on the Matrix protocol or building on it in an open source project to submit a proposal! Note that companies are welcome to talk about the Matrix details of their open source projects, but marketing talks are not welcome.
We want this devroom to be a space where the Matrix community can show its work, where developers can talk about the challenges they faced and how they overcame them, and where people can get a glimpse of the future of the Matrix protocol and ecosystem.
The talks will be pre-recorded in January. They will be played during FOSDEM, followed by a session of live Q&A depending on the format. During the playback of the talk, people will be able to comment and ask questions in the chat (via Matrix!).
The talks can follow one of three formats:
5 min lightning talk, ideal to showcase your project and make people want to have a look at it
20 min talk + 10 min Q&A, for topics that can be covered briefly
50 min talk + 10 min Q&A for more complex subjects which need more focus
We strongly encourage you to prepare a demo when it makes sense, so people can actually see what your work looks like in practice!
Of course, the proposal must respect the FOSDEM terms as well:
The conference language is English. All content must relate to Free and Open Source Software. By participating in the event you agree to the publication of your recordings, slides and other content provided under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY).
We expect to receive more requests than we have slots available. The devroom organisers (two community members and one core team rep) will be reviewing the proposals and accepting them based on the potential positive impact the project has on Matrix (as defined in by the Mission section of https://matrix.org/foundation).
If a project proposal has been turned down, it doesn't mean we don't believe it has good potential. Maintainers are invited to join the #twim:matrix.org Matrix room to give it some visibility.
