This Week in Matrix 2021-05-14

Matrix Live 🎙

This week Dan talks to Erik about the state of Synapse generally, and in particular the work Erik has been doing for performance.

Plus! Bonus content, demos! Half-Shot on the MS Teams bridge work, and Hubert previews Matrix over MLS!

Dept of Spec 📜

Matthew reported:

Some combination of me, Kegan, Bruno and neilalexander have been working on v3 of the CS /sync API. (Today's /sync API in matrix is v2; v1 was the old /events API). We're not yet at the point of publishing a draft or MSC, but it's coming soon. It's really exciting work which flips Matrix around so that sync scales independently of the number of rooms you're in - and it's at last possible to write rich clients which only ever sync the bare minimum data needed to work: i.e. lazy loading eeeeeeeeverything. Watch this space :)

anoa told us:

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3192: Batch state endpoint

• MSC3189: Per-room/per-space profile data

• MS3184: Challenges Messages

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3122: Deprecate starting verifications without requesting first

Merged Spec PRs

Here are all the actual MSC-related changes made to the raw Matrix spec this week!

• Clarify that implementations can use stable prefixes once an MSC proposal has merged

Spec Updates

There's been activity from the Spec Core Team on a number of different MSCs, such as MSC3189 (per-room/space profile data). Additionally a spec PR for Matrix URI schemes has been getting feedback and is moving forward at a quick pace! There was also some feedback from the team on MSC2448 (blurhashes) which I'll get around to answering shortly 🙂.

Otherwise I think this week was a bit implementation-heavy for the team (the Spec Core Team is a task in addition to our full-time jobs). Hopefully next week will grant us more of a breather.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

callahad announced:

Hello TWiMmers! The bulk of our update is in Matrix Live today, so go check out the video above ☝️ to hear about how we're reducing the amount of memory it takes to join large rooms, and why joins take so much memory in the first place.

Otherwise, we're mainly getting ready for the public debut of Spaces as a beta feature, but more on that next week... 😉

Oh, and before we go: please make sure your Synapse is up to date! We released 1.33.2 on Tuesday, which contains a low severity security fix.

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

Another installation of the regularly scheduled Kubernetes Helm Chart updates (and another bump of the deprecated Synapse image). Now up to Synapse 1.33.2 and Element Web 1.7.27.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-puppeteer-line

Fair told us:

matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.

This week was spent on stability improvements & bug fixes.

Calling for testers! The bridge is at a point where it's mostly usable, but it still has quite a few blindspots. If anyone is willing to try it out & report issues, it would be a great help!

Discussion: Matrix-LINE Puppeteer bridge Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/issues

Shout-outs to @lecris:lecris.me for being an early tester & having given a lot of useful feedback 🙂

Gitter

Eric Eastwood reported:

Last time, we updated you on starting DM conversations with Gitter users from Matrix. Now we have the other side of this complete! From Gitter, you can now start a one to one conversation with someone you see from Matrix 😀

Just hover over their avatar to bring up the user popover, then press the "Chat privately" button. 🗣

matrix-appservice-irc 0.26.0

Half-Shot reported:

Goooooooood afternoon folks and happy Friday! This week we're announcing the 0.26.0 release of the matrix-appservice-irc bridge which contains precious goodies:

• You can now disable the kick behaviour of the bridge on Matrix users if you are running a personal bridge, so losing your IRC connection no longer results in a kick.

• You can now remove bridges from rooms by using the admin room, so no need to use the provisioning API or modify the DB.

• We've added a new feature to allow you to specify bridge options on a per room basis using room state. At the moment you can modify the limits of the automatic pastebin system but more features like reply formats are to come!

As always please come tell us about it in #irc:matrix.org and make sure to check out the new docs if you get a bit stuck.

Dept of Clients 📱

Hydrogen

A minimal Matrix chat client, focused on performance, offline functionality, and broad browser support. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/

Bruno said:

Hydrogen can now leave rooms and forget archived rooms. URLs are now also clickable in the timeline. Get the full details in the release notes!

Element Clients

Updates from the teams

Web

• Element Web 1.7.28 is up on staging, targeting Monday for release.
  • New spaces Beta (new way of grouping rooms and people)
  • Added support for slash commands working in edits
• On develop:
  • Voice messages are nearing completion - enable the labs flag and give it a go :)
  • Performance improvements to app startup time. Let us know if you run into any issues!

iOS

• 1.3.7 is available on TestFlight. It should be on the App Store on Monday. Spaces are not yet available on Element-iOS but the app offers minimal support. The release contains a fix for background crashed due to PushKit
• At the platform level, we are still improving stability and performance:
  • Decryption operations to be moved outside the main thread
  • More robust on initial sync
  • etc

Android

• 1.1.7 is in open testing via playstore beta channel, Release candidate for Monday. Contains support for spaces beta, several improvements on attachment (video, compression…), as well as a bunch of bug fixes. All details here https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/releases/tag/v1.1.7

Delight

• “Spaces are coming” (I had heard something about that - BP)

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-spring-boot-sdk 0.5.0

Benedict announced:

matrix-spring-boot-sdk 0.5.0 is released and uses Trixnity now.

Dept of Services 🚀

GoMatrixHosting v0.4.6 released!

Michael offered:

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/pull/1046/files

Just had a new release, GoMatrixHosting v0.4.6

* Add database purge section.

* Add markdown copy of User manual.
* Tweak compress state find rooms timeout.

* Update compile AWX instructions for custom branding and radius fix.

Visit #general:gomatrixhosting.com to join in the discussion.

GoMatrixHosting offer a great way to get your own homeserver without needing to run it yourself. Check them out!

Matrix in the News 📰

Matrix was featured on fedoramagazine.org

farribeiro shared:

Fedora promoting the matrix https://fedoramagazine.org/access-freenode-using-matrix-clients/

Final Thoughts 💭

From Dept of Humour in #twim:matrix.org 😅:

• R1 Airport: Maybe I want to see if I can build some type of bridge between Matrix and CUPS.
• hifi: the sad part is that would probably be more reliable than just printing directly

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	neko.dev	422
2	xirion.net	471
3	matrix.kalleeen.fi	507
4	t2bot.io	516
5	alra.uk	556
6	thomcat.rocks	767
7	matrix.vgorcum.com	800.5
8	matrix.2kgwf.fi	817
9	nordgedanken.dev	828.5
10	trolla.us	878

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite01.fiksel.info	810.5
2	dendrite.s3cr3t.me	816
3	lankolol.de	931

That's all I know 🏁

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