This Week in Matrix 2019-12-20

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Matrix selected for the public Mozilla community

You may well have read about it by now, but Mozilla (purveyor of popular web browsers and champion of the open web) selected Matrix to replace IRC for their comms! You can read their own announcement here. Please note that this doesn't have to mean the death of Moznet on IRC - if someone wants to pick up matrix-ircd and finish it off, we can keep exposing an IRC listener too! Huge thanks to everyone who participated in the Mozilla trial and placed their trust in Matrix :)

A Glimpse of the Matrix

Florian reported:

Florian presented his poster A Glimpse of the Matrix:Scalability issues of a new message-oriented data synchronizationmiddleware at the 20th International Middleware Conference at UC Davis, California on 2019-12-11. The poster abstract describes measurements of the public Matrix federation and discusses scalability issues of the current message routing mechanism. Additional details can be found in the Extended Tech Report.

Those scientific publications were based on the data gathered by the DSN Traveller in 2018 which was part of Florian's master's thesis. The anonymized raw data was published in conjunction.

All related resources

pic.twitter.com/NYxbYllQ9F

— Middleware2019 (@middleware2019) December 12, 2019

Accessibility in Riot/Matrix

Very thorough article on accessibility in Riot/Matrix, written partly in light of the Mozilla announcement. https://marcozehe.de/2019/12/20/how-to-get-around-matrix-and-riot-with-a-screen-reader/

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse v1.7.2

Neil told us:

We shipped 1.7.2 (and 1.7.1) - all admins are encouraged to upgrade asap, note 1.7.1 is a security release, and 1.7.2 fixes a back pagination bug introduced in 1.7.1. Aside from that we are looking at implementing MSC2260: Update the auth rules for m.room.aliases events and adding a per media quarantine API.

Deploying Synapse

Several packaging projects have been updated to deploy the new version:

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat
• also from the Debian repos thanks to @andrewsh:matrix.org

Ruma

jplatte reported:

another blog post has appeared on the ruma website: https://ruma.dev/news/these-weeks-in-ruma-2019-12-14/

cortex workers performance

Black Hat has been using his Rust cortex Synapse workers project. He reported:

I flexed on other homeservers by making getflexedon.me the fastest homeserver in the ping room, made possible with cortex.

Black Hat does point out that this is still in a testing phase, but it's great to see workers being created.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

famedly-email-bridge

sorunome said:

Some more work has been done on famedly-email-bridge! Now you can define email routes (e.g. [email protected] -> @bob:example.org) and optionally have conversations create a new thread room, instead of dumping them into the email room.

zammad tickets bot

It might seem like Half-Shot hasn't made a new bridge in a while, but here he is:

I've started another bot project: https://github.com/half-shot/matrix-zammad. This currently splurts zammad tickets into Matrix rooms, and will eventually do a lot more.

Dept of Clients 📱

Continuum

yuforia said:

Continuum, client for the desktop:

• Start using experimental asynchronous Flow as observable value for UI. Making use of Kotlin's coroutine features, it makes it possible to update values while avoiding switching to the main UI thread. It's also easier to cancel on-going HTTP requests when their values are no longer needed.

Riot-iOS

Manu told us:

This week, we have been still working hard on verification by DM. We have started the implementation of cross-signing.

RiotX v0.11.0 released

benoit said:

RiotX: We've released RiotX v0.11.0 on Thursday. It includes support to open (some of) matrix.to links, soft (and hard) logout, and lots of small UI/UX/crash fixes. For the first release of 2020, we will change the way we handle the initial sync, which can be a long task, by running it in a foreground service. Also the room profile screen should finally arrive.

riot-web

Bruno reported:

this week I've been working on the new verification flow in the right panel. it's nearly there, but likely won't get merged today anymore.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Matrix Message github action

Nice and simple project for using Matrix messages in Github actions. See the code, or the marketplace page.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	getflexedon.me	312
2	thinker.eu.org	346
3	tedomum.net	384
4	aime.lesmatric.es	440
5	dodsorf.as	463
6	bubu1.eu	534.5
7	lyseo.edu.ouka.fi	558.5
8	maunium.net	563
9	matrix.vgorcum.com	654
10	testmatrix.vgorcum.com	751

Final Thoughts 💭

It being the time of year that it is, some of us will be at 36c3 in a week or so, come chat in #chaosevents:matrix.org if you'd like to say "hi". (You can also say "Guten Tag", which is more fun!)

That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!