Matrix Live S3E17: Hello Ryan

This week you're stuck with me, but I'm chatting to Ryan, who works on Riot web. Having previously worked at Mozilla, Ryan has a LOT of interesting things to say about Firefox, the browser market, the importance of decentralisation, Matrix being GREAT, and more.

arewereadyyet.com: Matrix 1.0-ready Federation

https://arewereadyyet.com is not just an amazing domain we somehow managed to buy, it's also the first place to look for progress towards full Matrix 1.0 readiness. Read more details at https://matrix.org/blog/2019/03/15/matrix-1-0-https-arewereadyyet-com/.

Spec

Lots of activity but most notably MSC 1915 (a blocker for Matrix 1.0) is making progress. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1915

Synapse . . . 1.0?

It's all about 1.0 for the Synapse gang this week. This means performance improvements across the board in the form of read receipt batching, user directory (room directory coming soon!) and rate limiting on log in and registration APIs.

Brendan shipped the low bandwidth CoAP proxy we demo'd at FOSDEM

As well as a bunch of spec implementation projects to ensure that Synapse (and Sydent) are ready for Synapse 1.0.

Synapse workers projects

Turn-of-phrase of the week from Half-Shot ("make it more performant and less crashy"):

synapse-netcore-workers is progressing as strongly as ever. This week has mainly been supporting a couple of users trying to use the fed sender, and also trying to make it more performant and less crashy. I've been using it solidly for two weeks now, and by and large it's been working nicely :)

Black Hat has been working on Cortex, a similar project in Rust:

Support for replication protocol in Cortex is mostly complete. A federation sender worker implementation is being worked on. If anyone is interested or wants to contribute, please go to #cortex:encom.eu.org

Construct

Lots of progress this week. I'd like to give a special thanks to Yan Minari for another great week of testing, bugfixes and feature requests.

  • We implemented features related to room directory lists, reporting content, ignoring users, VoIP turnServer, prev_content in state events.
  • Improving SSL: allowing configurable lists of ciphers, and sending/receiving SNI.
  • At the lower level: adding support for Linux AIO features that are present in newer kernels, giving a nice performance boost.

For more Construct news watch the repo or join #zemos-test:matrix.org

New Client for Android: Pattle

Wilko announced Pattle, a Matrix client for Android:

Hey all, I've been working on my Matrix Android app, Pattle! The goal of Pattle is to be an easy to use app for Matrix, with it's design inspired by popular apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. Development happens here, and contributions are encouraged! The app is not currently suited for daily use, but some functionality is there, such as registering, logging in and viewing chats. Currently it's an Android only app using the official Matrix Android SDK, but the plan is to support iOS and web too, in the future. There's also a sort of design document available, stating how Pattle differs from standard Matrix apps and what it's goals are. The intent of the design document is to make development easier later on for other platforms

Quaternion 0.0.9.4 beta 2 available

kitsune:

Quaternion 0.0.9.4 beta 2 (too many numbers? That too shall pass) is out, with bugfixes and translation updates. Notably, Quaternion won't crash on upgraded rooms in some cases, and won't cry in #gsoc:matrix.org and other v3 rooms. Translators are still strongly encouraged to push forward - due to all the features and fixes, there are many untranslated strings across the board! Also, some bugfixes are still in order before we can call the release RC, and some of them are really easy - so if you'd like to contribute, it's a great time to start!

Riot Web

  • Preparing for 1.0.4 release with lots of small polish fixes
  • Planning our roadmap for the next few quarters

Riot iOS

iOS released 2 times. Last release was to fix an issue with invalid scalar token. Review of one PR from the community for iOS10 notifications. Started implementing device verification with emoji.

Riot Android

We've released v0.8.25 on Thursday, containing refresh of invalid scalar token, and some bugfixes. Links on m.notice messages are now clickable again.
Started implementing device verification with emoji.

RiotX (Android)

  • We started to setup build tools and CI configuration.
  • The timeline scroll issues are addressed.

FluffyChat 11 released

Ubuntu Touch fans rejoiced this week as a new version of FluffyChat was made available: https://open-store.io/app/fluffychat.christianpauly

  • Improved stability and performance
  • New translations - thanks to all translators
  • Design improvements to make FluffyChat look more like a common Ubuntu Touch app
  • Better tablet support
  • Lots of Bugfixes which caused a critical error
  • Fixed the automatic scrolling up to the last seen message
  • Fixed disabling account

miniVector v0.8.25

miniVector is a minified Android Matrix client derived from Riot Android. v0.8.25 keeps it up to date with Riot Android.

Matrix Ruby SDK

Ananace is returning his attention to the Matrix Ruby SDK:

I just realized that I haven't had lazy loading activated by default in the Ruby SDK, despite having had lazy loading code in place since ages back, so now that's going to be the default value going forward.

Further:

I started hacking - just a couple of hours or so ago - on a notification sender for The Foreman, a server orchestration system. So it can forward notifications to Matrix. https://github.com/ananace/foreman_notification_send

If you're using, or considering using, The Foreman for orchestration this may be very useful.

maubot

tulir:

maubot plugins can now add their own endpoints to the main maubot webserver. The pingstat plugin I announced last week uses this feature for the leaderboard widget: https://maubot.xyz/_matrix/maubot/plugin/pingstat/stats?room_id=!MbRaSiMIRhhxDtJENL:maunium.net

matrix-appservice-bridge 1.8.0, matrix-appservice-irc 0.12.0-rc1: room upgrades and more

Half-Shot:

matrix-appservice-bridge got a 1.8.0 release last night, featuring automatic handling of room upgrades for all your room upgrade needs. Providing your bridge uses the RoomStore as designed, it's literally a few lines to enable :). Changelog here

What is this? A matrix-appservice-irc release? No, it's a release candidate. Announcing that 0.12.0-rc1 is now out and about for folks to play with. More IRC updates to come in the future :)

mautrix-whatsapp

tulir:

mautrix-whatsapp now has support for postgres databases thanks to a pull request by @Rennerdo30

mautrix-telegram

tulir:

mautrix-telegram got a pull request with a pytest setup and a few unit tests by @V02460. I haven't merged that one yet, but will soon.

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy supports Dimension

This is really neat, and a shout-out that these playbooks are my preferred way to install Synapse and other components. Slavi:

Thanks to NullIsNot0, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now (optionally) install the Dimension Integration Manager.
The playbook can now also assist with serving the base domain from the Matrix server, thus making it easier for some folks to set up well-known Server-Delegation.

Self-hosting guide for NixOS

Florian:

I wrote a Matrix self-hosting guide for the NixOS operating system: Check its progress and give it a test if you're a fellow NixOS user!

banhammer: new bot for applying a ban policy

jcgruenhage reports that:

I wrote a small bot that takes a kick/ban policy from room state from all rooms it's a member of and tries to enact that policy. In practice that means it applies a regex to all MXIDs and tries to kick/ban them based on that. It's been a request of TravisR , source code is available at https://gitlab.com/jcgruenhage/banhammer, documentation is still lacking but will hopefully soon be added

matrix-wug support for Navajo script

Continuing his theme of Native American languages, Dandellion added Navajo script to matrix-wug.

FreedomBox Tutorial: Setting Up a Chat Server with Matrix and Riot

It's been possible for some time to set up a Matrix server with FreedomBox, and they just recently released a video tutorial showing the process.

Around the Internets

There were a whole lot of outages for the big names this week - good time to think about self-hosting?

That's all I know

So that's all I have to say! I hope you enjoyed this edition of This Week in Matrix, and whether you did or you didn't, I'd love too hear from you in #twim:matrix.org. If you have Matrix news to share, that's the place to come and do so!