This Week in Matrix 2018-05-18

On the Web

Enter the Matrix

Brendan produced a really, really informative article introducing Matrix. As someone who is still very new to the project I found this writing to be very clear and informative, so thank you! The article made it to the top of Hacker News, where you can find a discussion of both the article and Matrix itself.

Presentation about Matrix

martinkrafft presented about Matrix at wossat a New Zealand Open Source show and tell meetup. His talk can be seen here, and focuses on the benefits of Matrix for users.

Spec Proposals

As you may have seen from the previous blog post, we have a new drive to advance the Matrix Specification itself. Part of this is https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals, which lists all the spec change proposals we've accumulated so far, and describes the flow for getting new proposals merged. There is a new room, #matrix-spec:matrix.org for discussion, please join if you want to get involved in this process. Check out the page and the blog post for more detail.

Next up: try to turn some of the many WIP proposals into Spec PRs...

Fractal Hackfest 2018

Fractal Hackfest 2018: was super successful and productive by all accounts, and there were many! Check out reports from Daniel García Moreno (Day 1, Day 2), Eisha Chen-yen-su, Adrien Plazas, Julian Sparber, Tobias Bernard and Alexandre Franke.

A major topic at the Hackfest was a discussion of splitting the Fractal client into two UIs for the different behaviours of messaging apps. For anyone interested in product design thinking this is a genuinely fascinating topic. I encourage you to read "Banquets and Barbecues", Tobias' excellent coverage of the latest thinking. The different chat personas are very well explained and the post brings up some of the immediate technical challenges too.

Projects and Products

mxisd v1.1 RC1 available

Max reports on mxisd, a Federated Matrix Identity server for self-hosted Matrix infrastructures:

mxisd v1.1 RC1 is out, addressing various privacy issues and being more GDPR-friendly overall. Testing and feedback from the community is very much appreciated

Dimension

Dimension, an open source integrations manager for matrix clients from TravisR, now supports sticker packs.

Ruma

Rust-based Ruma has new activity, starting with the release of ruma-api-macros 0.2.0. This moves ruma-api-macros from dependency on hyper to using types from the http crate. This will give more flexibility about library and framework choices for ruma-client-api and ruma-client.

Federation Tester Graphical Frontend

f0x produced and shared a graphical frontend for the federation tester, already getting some use. Check it out at https://neo.lain.haus/fed-tester/ and see the source on GitHub.

Synapse

• Synapse 0.29 out - pretty much a maintenance release.
• Chunk PRs are landing, providing a long-term solution to the ‘depth' issue which is still impacting #matrix and #matrix-dev.
• Lots and lots of GDPR work - you can follow progress at https://github.com/vector-im/riot-meta/projects/7.
• Fixes SYN-1(!!!) - server notifications in general.
• ...and a last minute update from Andrej Shadura that the official Debian packages for Synapse are now up-to-date in Debian Unstable!!

Riot/Web

• Riot/0.15 is out! With Stickers, Electron 2.0, Firefox E2E speed ups and lots of polishing
• Working on GDPR now - cookie warnings have already landed on /develop, for instance. Remaining is the consent flow, and the deactivation/erasure flow.
• Currently on a blitz to mop up P1 bugs
• Accidental mission to replace Draft with Slate to make the RTE robust.
• Upcoming: enabling Jitsi everywhere; E2E cross-signing; member lazyloading.

Riot/Mobile

• Sticker sending is almost done!
• GDPR work in progress
• Released a fix for unreliable notification (and bg syncing) on Android 8 on Fdroid (released on Wednesday - please update!)

Neo Alpha 0.05

neo alpha 0.05 was announced by f0x, go take a look at https://github.com/f0x52/neo/releases/tag/alpha0.05. From the changelog:

features to bridge better with telegram, like Replies and Stickers, general ui improvement with fontawesome icons added: Replies Receiving stickers

and more

Discord Bridge

Half-Shot and anoa are working on the matrix-appservice-discord, and have embarked on bridging Discord edited messages to Matrix

headed up by anoa, feedback for this is useful as it's early days, https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-appservice-discord/pull/131

They've been writing tests and crushing bugs along the way. This is all in aid of the coming 0.2.0 release.

gomuks

A gomuks package was added to added to NixOS nixpkgs, shows interest in the client: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/40510.

CromFr doge bot

CromFr has been working on a doge bot, which he describes as a hack over the hyper / haiku bots", and is hosted on TravisR's https://t2bot.io/. Go try it out in the test room #test-doge-bot-crom:matrix.org.

Independent Client-Server interactions

Lots of excitement at the variety of independent clients and servers able to interact over the matrix protocol. The images above show The Construct (server) and gomuks (client), and then mxhsd and Fractal. A fundamental part of matrix is to be an open protocol, so it's great to see entirely independent implementations liaising together! While implementing mxhsd, Max has been documenting spec omissions in a branch of the spec - we're hoping he will contribute these back!

Honourable mention for mujx, who was sending messages with nheko and Ruma a year ago!

Matrix Core team expansion

• Stève - 17th May (yesterday)
• Amber - 21st (Monday)
• Anoa - 21st (Monday)
• Hubert - 28th May
• Half-Shot - 4th June ...and one more community member, hopefully (just sorting paperwork currently!)

Heads up that we're consciously trying to hire a mix of folks from the Matrix community as well as those outside it - and avoid hiring the whole community, both to ensure diversity of viewpoint & experience in the core team, and also to avoid cannibalising folks who working on their own commercial projects on top of Matrix. We'd prefer Matrix to be as decentralised and heterogenous as possible, needless to say - and instead try to support folks in building on Matrix without hiring them into the core team (where we'd expect them to focus on the core project for everyone's benefit). This may change once we have Matrix set up as a separate foundation, once we've got out of beta, of course.

New Rooms

• #matrix-spec:matrix.org is a new room dedicated to discussions on specific matrix spec proposals, as part of the process we're building around contributing to the matrix spec.
• f0x is hosting a new room dedicated to Matrix client developers #matrix-clients:lain.haus
• #test-doge-bot-crom:matrix.org to test CromFr's doge bot.
• #PokemonShit:matrix.org a new room for Pokemon discussion.

Next week in Matrix

Next week I'll take a look at Matrix-related GSOC 2018 projects, what the plans are and how the first few weeks are going.

So Long...

That's all for now! Join us on #TWIM:matrix.org if you'd like to make an announcement and be featured in this series.

Check out this week's Matrix Live below, and we'll see you next week!