This week I chatted with Jason Robinson about all things decentralisation, especially his projects socialhome, the-federation.info, and feneas.org. Jason has been interested in decentralisation for many years, and had a lot to say about how we can look forward to a more decentralised Internet.
completely redone way of generating mxisd configuration, letting people unleash the full power of mxisd without us having to explicitly add support for new features
mxisd 1.3.0-ready. We default to a stable mxisd release still (1.2.2), but people can try the much-improved 1.3.0 alpha releases even now (e.g. matrix_mxisd_docker_image: "kamax/mxisd:1.3.0-alpha.2").
libQMatrixClient 0.4.2 has been released, fixing a security issue (the library could be tricked into altering the local room state by fake state events - those without state_key). The master branch of the library is updated as well - it is strongly recommended to update to either 0.4.2 or master, depending on which branch you live on.
For those who want to help testing Quaternion or just can't wait to the next release, we now have CI builds collected at bintray: https://bintray.com/qmatrixclient/ci/Quaternion. Linux and macOS are already there, and Windows binaries will also be available any day soon.
v1.10.0 fixes Matrix-to-Slack image upload, and no longer sends markdown-formatted @-mention links in the plaintext body of Matrix events; instead, it uses plaintext username the way text-only clients traditionally have it.
The version bump is also the project's 100th commit, and I've updated the supported feature checklist in the README to paint a more comprehensive picture of what is and isn't supported, and link out to the GitHub Issues for some of the unsupported features, in hopes of making life easier for users and encouraging contributions.
opsdroid's Matrix connector is now a core part of the library rather than an external addition. This should open up a lot of cool possibilities for doing fancy stuff with bots on matrix. Many thanks to Cadair for helping with this.
mxisd has a new alpha release: v1.3.0-alpha.2 - Fixes a set of issues from alpha.1 and is now close to v1.2.2 stability. If you are already on alpha.1, update is highly recommended.
made some minor changes to continuum to make the GUI more intuitive. Now when there are no joined rooms, buttons for joining or creating rooms are shown instead of an empty list. And when there are issues with syncing or syncing takes longer than usual, a status bar with options is shown.
Still not quite sure if it's a good idea, but at least the input area component is very nice. It should also make it easier to add more fancy stuff like html tables and selecting messages (for replying/redacting)
Riot iOS
We are still working on the key backup screens. The last bit on the SDK side, the passphrase support, has been implemented this week.
Reskin is almost done. It just needs some small adjustments. We will release a beta soon so that we can gather users feedback.
This week, we have also fixed small but boring UX issues in Riot and we will continue to do so up to the end of the month and FOSDEM!
Riot Android
Reskin is almost done too and available on develop builds.
Benoit has started to implement the key backup passphrase management in the SDK. Valere is still improving push notifications at the code level but also at the display level.
We are working hard to polish the app for FOSDEM.
Modular
Rick reports:
We now have a HipChat migration tool - https://www.modular.im/tools/hipchat-migration. This tool helps migrate a HipChat workspace to your very own Modular Hosted Homeserver. Migration is performed by uploading an exported copy of an existing HipChat workspace so that the tool can automatically re-create all of the users and rooms (including messages and attachments) on your new Matrix homeserver. Once the migration is complete all of the migrated users will be emailed with login instructions, so that they can seamlessly continue chatting where they left off in HipChat. If your organisation (or if you know of an organisation that) has not yet decided what to do when Stride & HipChat is discontinued next month, come and try Modular!
People have been generally happy about the flood of new issues following the completion of the internal audit last week, and a few folks have been opening PRs addressing some of the “good-first-issues” labeled ones, which has been amazing to see, including fixing room joins and a couple of default variables. Thanks a lot to Cnly and Behouba for these!
On my end, this week mainly consisted in reviewing most of these PRs (and merging them when that was possible), while anoa worked on making Dendrite's CI more complete and reliable, especially by configuring it to run sytest against Dendrite which will allow us to better track its compliance to the Matrix specification.
Discord bridge v0.4.0 is out now, nothing new since rc1 because it was that good. There have been no changes since rc1 because either Sorunome did a stellar job of keeping things stable, or nobody spoke up out of fear :p. Thanks one and all for continuing to run the bridge.
Neo v4: Iris is coming up, focusing on design first. It will be based on React, and the matrix js sdk I didn't plan ahead enough with old Neo (v3), so it became a bit of a clobbered togeather mess, which I'm trying to prevent this time around https://git.lain.haus/f0x/iris
That's all for now
Come chat in #twim:matrix.org to discuss what's happening, and especially come and share what YOU'VE been working on!