Fractal Hackfest

Developers and creators of Fractal, the GNOME Matrix client, have been holding a Hackfest this week in Seville. Matthew and I caught up with them on video for Matrix Live this week, and discussed the product improvements they've been making and their plans for the next release (due next week!)

Matrix Spec

This Week in Ruma

We don't often get to feature news from Ruma, but this week there is an updated This Week in Ruma.

Ruma is not dead, however, and small improvements have continued over the last year. The Matrix spec has advanced quite a bit and many of the blocking issues for Ruma have been resolved. Rust's maturity is another story. async/await is still under development and this is the most significant blocking issue to progress on Ruma.

maubot new tooling

tulir has been working on tooling for maubot:

maubot got a command-line tool for building plugins and managing maubot instances. I also added some server-side stuff for easy registration of accounts in the management interface using synapse shared secrets, but the UI for that isn't ready. Also, I'm planning on adding some kind of small Matrix client in the management interface for manually managing the added bot clients. That might lead to a separate library that could be used in other projects or embedded in websites.

Max with a new release of mxisd:

mxisd hits v1.2.1 with a new maintenance release, fixing bugs and regressions from v1.2.0. Updating to v1.2.1 is strongly encouraged as v1.3.x will contain breaking changes and will not be a straight-forward update like v1.x has been until now.

Clients

Lazy-loading lands in QMatrixClient

kitsune has reported that lazy-loading, a Matrix feature that entails only loading room member details as needed, is now in libQMatrixClient master.

reference implementation in Quaternion will follow up

Black Hat has been testing the feature in Spectral, which uses the library, and says there is a 30%-50% reduction in RAM usage at startup.

Riot Web progress on /experimental and v0.17.8 released

Bruno has been working on /experimental, and I recommend taking a look at the progress there! The next version of Riot Web is closer than ever.

Improved read markers now available on /experimental, needs further tweaking though. Brought back community UX on redesign, other small improvements.

v0.17.8 was released with several bugfixes and improvements.

Riot iOS

Release made with these notes:

This new version supports the consent of matrix servers terms of service (including GDPR) in the registration flow. It also contains fixes for the "Empty room" bug, the registration issue on iOS 10, etc.

Get more information:

Riot Android

Release made:

This new version supports the consent of matrix servers terms of service (including GDPR) in the registration flow. Many bugfixes SDK contains KeyBackup

Get more information:

Servers

Synapse

A lot of focus on getting debian packages ready for python 3 - this is a blocker for our official python 3 release 0.34.0. Aside from that, finalising some outstanding state resolution behaviour (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1693) and dusting off event ids as hashes (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/1127.)

Dendrite

Brendan:

My internal audit of Dendrite is continuing, drawing a more and more precise picture of what's left to fix and implement. I aim to have it over by the end of the year, or the very early days of 2019 at the latest. Folks can track its progress through https://cloud.abolivier.bzh/index.php/s/qXi2KFjCQk2c6eG

modular.im now has Extra-Large instances available

Due to demand, modular.im Hosted Homeservers now has Extra-Large instances available. If you need to service 1,000+ users on a Matrix homeserver, this is the product for you!

linuxgaming.life homeserver is the number one Matrix homeserver focused on Linux gaming

swedneck has continues his work on linuxgaming.life:

I've added some bots, health monitoring, and dimension integration manager to linuxgaming.life, and made the website dark.

The homeserver is open for new registrations.

That's all I know!

If you'd like see your Matrix-related project featured in this blog post, come chat to us in #twim:matrix.org, and we'll see you next week!

The Foundation needs you

The Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit and only relies on donations to operate. Its core mission is to maintain the Matrix Specification, but it does much more than that.

It maintains the matrix.org homeserver and hosts several bridges for free. It fights for our collective rights to digital privacy and dignity.

Support us