This Week in Matrix 2021-06-25

Matrix Live 🎙

• Valere presents the latest Spaces UX
• Neil Alexander shows off P2P progress
• ChristianP shows Matrix Navigator
• Eric Eastwood (Gitter fellow!) shows off MSC2716 (message history batches)
• Rich vdH presents Jaeger for Synapse profiling
• Bruno presents reactions in Hydrogen

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Room of the week

timokoesters said:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

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This week's space is: RPG

Biggest room: #D&D:matrix.org

"Casual chat about Dungeons & Dragons, tabletop RPG, OSR, DM tips, player stories, world building, and more."

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If you want to suggest a room for this section, tell me in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

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://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3173: Expose stripped state events to any potential joiner
• MSC2778: Providing authentication method for appservice users

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC3255: Use SRV record for homeservers discovery by clients

Spec Updates

Spaces work continues with MSC3083 (Restricted room memberships), which will include a new room version due to the new join_rule of `restricted. On the other side of things, MSC3245 (voice messages) and by extension extensible events, is moving as the implementation work is pushed forward. Lots of activity on MSC3215 (improved moderation tooling) as well which will no doubt prove to be invaluable as the Matrix network continues to grow.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timokoesters reported:

After some more work on swappable database backends, I worked on a few small features:

• User directory improvements (show remote users and appservice puppets)

• /state endpoint

• /event_auth endpoint

• Filter our room directory based on the search term

• /search over multiple rooms

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

anoa said:

Knock, knock TWIM! It's a new week, and I'm filling in for Dan today to bring you an update on Synapse's latest progress!

Hot off the heels of Synapse 1.36.0’s release last week, we’ve put out 1.37.0rc1! It includes the long-awaited “room knocking” feature (note that no clients currently support knocking), a completely reworked pluggable modules interface and experimental support for backfilling history into rooms. With knocking support in, this means Synapse now has support for room v7!

Among those exciting updates, we also have the usual churn of bug fixes and improvements across the board. Many updates to the documentation as well as we lean into using the new Synapse documentation site more and more. Please help us test the RC if you can!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

This week too sees some Kubernetes chart updates, with element-web being updated to 1.7.31 and matrix-synapse getting some fixes for envvars and mounts, as well as some improvements to the ingress support.

YunoHost

Mamie offered:

YunoHost is an operating system aiming for the simplest administration of a server, and therefore democratize self-hosting.

Synapse integration had been updated to 1.34.0 (1.35.1 available in branch testing)

Element Web integration had been updated to 1.7.28 (1.7.29 available in branch testing)

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Gitter

Eric Eastwood offered:

It has been several months since we last updated you on MSC2716 for backfilling historical messages into existing rooms but we made some big progress this week and merged an experimental Synapse implementation taking us one step closer to importing the massive archive of messages on Gitter over to Matrix! This iteration will only make the historical messages visible on the local homeserver but we have plans to make them federate in the next. It's still early days on this before we can actually use it on Gitter. Here is a proof of concept to get your juices flowing:

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:

Released Hydrogen 0.2.0 with:

• support for receiving and sending reactions ❤👍🚀
• adds a right panel with basic room information, thanks to @MidhunSureshR! Watch this space in the near future for more functionality soon.

Loving Hydrogen right now. It's fast and works great! See Bruno present reactions as one of the Matrix Live demos (scroll up)

NeoChat

Carl Schwan announced:

In terms of code, this week we didn't get much activity. The only noteworthy news is that we can now send spoilers, and use two new commands: /tableflip and /unflip thanks to Smitty van Bodegom.

Aside from that, we had 2 productive BoFs during Akademy 2021. The first one was about creating a library with shared chat visual components for KDE's chat apps: NeoChat for Matrix, Tok for Telegram and Kaidan for XMPP, KDE Connect and Spacebar for SMS, ... The second BoF was more about NeoChat and Quotient and we discussed how to move forwards with some problems (e.g. non-hacky text input auto-completion) but also the roadmap around E2EE, Spaces and Widgets support. Speaking about E2EE, we will have some very good news to announce next week, stay tuned!

/me only learned about /tableflip and /unflip this today... and looking forward to this E2EE news!

Fractal

Alexandre Franke announced:

In the past couple of weeks, Alejandro and Kai started the coding period of their GSoC internship and explained on their blogs what they will be working on. Their projects are respectively to add support for multiple accounts, and to bring Fractal Next to feature parity with current stable. Read more details on their blogs, and subscribe to them to keep informed as they go!

Julian managed to land the “Explore” view, our room directory. There may be some changes down the road, but it looks good for now:

Newcomer Giuseppe De Palma removed bashisms from our git hook because they were preventing him from contributing. They then went on to tweak the history style to remove the grey background around it. They also got rid of a papercut from the login form: before his intervention, users needed to provide the full homeserver URL with the http:// or https:// scheme prefix. It will now default to HTTPS.

We also did some housekeeping work that should improve the experience for people joining us on the Fractal Next fun. After being away for a while, Christopher Davis came back with a patch to add a couple more build related directories to our .gitignore. Julian cleaned up the pseudo-milestone description that we had in the README, now that we have a proper Gitlab milestone. And finally, I added a warning on the login screen to better reflect on the Work In Progress state of the branch.

Element Clients

Updates from the teams! Android will return next week.

Delight team

• Spaces:
  • Drag and drop for reordering Spaces is now live on Android! And testable on develop for Web
  • We’ve also added labs flags to Web & Android to test a few different things, in particular
    • Toggling ‘Home’ to show all rooms, or only rooms which don’t belong to Spaces
    • Toggling to not show People in Spaces
  • Please try them out! After living with a different config for a few days, we’d love to hear your feedback!

Web

• 1.7.31 released on Monday
• Nightly builds of Element Desktop optimised for Apple silicon are now available for testing! Please give it a try and report any issues.
• Added libera.chat to room directory on develop, staging, and app. It will appear in desktop builds as well next time they update.
• On develop
  • Various CI tweaks and performance improvements
• In flight
  • Adding large account performance tests

iOS

• 1.4.2 released on Monday. 1.4.3 with the fix on wellknown on Thursday
• Fix a bug where the wellknown was no more fetched
• Device dehydration is available in the SDK
• Still good progress on voice messages

Quaternion

kitsune offered:

0.0.95 RC is out, available from the usual place at GitHub, and also as Flatpak from Flathub. The usual stabilisaton/bug fixing work, no new features compared to betas. This version is considerably better, and more stable, than 0.0.9.4 - packagers are welcome to push it as if it were the final release. Translators, please help to complete more languages: Polish is at 90%, Spanish almost 80%, and French just below 60% - you can make a difference!

Dept of Encryption 🔐

New paper: “Key Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees”

Florian offered:

Here is a scientific paper for all interested in decentralized end-to-end encryption cryptography protocols, like Matrix' Megolm, or the MLS future of Matrix: The preprint “Key Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees” by Weidner, Kleppmann et al., which will appear in the ACM CCS 2021 Conference, surveys existing centralized and decentralized end-to-end cryptography protocols, Olm/Megolm (labeled as “Matrix”) among them, and discusses why the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) IETF draft has its problems with decentralization. Following that, they come up with their own decentralized protocol, including a security and performance analysis. They improve asymptotic complexity when compared to Olm/Megolm, and the assumptions on the underlying communication layer are easily fulfilled by Matrix. They also discuss that the very good asympotic complexity of MLS cannot be reached for a decentralized end-to-end cryptography protocol.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Quotient

kitsune reported:

Last week's news actually, but libQuotient master branch can built with Qt 6 now, laying ground for the GSoC works on PyQuotient - Python bindings for libQuotient. The library has also been updated to follow the latest CS API specification, which means basic low-level support for knocking, with higher-level library API for it coming later.

🧙 Polyjuice Util

Polyjuice Client is a Matrix library for Elixir

uhoreg said:

Polyjuice Util is a library of Matrix functions for Elixir that can be used for both client-side and server-side applications. Polyjuice Util 0.2.0 has been released, which includes functions for common errors, handling identifiers, and for checking room permissions. Thanks to Nico for his contributions to this release. This release also contains some backward-incompatible changes. See the changelog for more information.

Polyjuice Client 0.4.1 has also been released, which uses the new Polyjuice Util release, and adds support for the whoami endpoint (thanks to multiprise).

Dept of Ops 🛠

synadm 0.30

jojo said:

Hello dear Synapse Admins, synadm v0.30 is out. lt seems I was in "story telling mode" already when I wrote the release notes yesterday. That should perfectly suit a TWIM article as well 🙂 So there you go, copy/pasted from https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm/releases/tag/v0.30 with love:

New

synadm finally got some nicely rendered documentation pages hosted at https://synadm.readthedocs.io.

"Login as a user" admin API support:

• synadm user login <user id>

• Have a look at the new command's docs

New subcommand matrixsupporting execution of regular Matrix commands. As a first shot a command to issue any Matrix API call has been implemented:

• synadm matrix raw endpoint/url -m post -f data.json

• synadm matrix raw endpoint/url -m put -d '{"key1": "value1"}' --prompt

• The new command's docs

Note that this is meant to be a convenience function in case a Synapse homeserver admin wants to quickly help users e.g set specific settings available via regular Matrix calls and not the Synapse admin API directly. Also note that it is not meant to replace the awesome Matrix CLI tools that are already out there. matrix-commander, matrixcli to mention just a few.

The second command below matrix is:

• synadm matrix login <user id>

• The new command's docs

It implements a plain login on a Matrix server using username and password. It can even be used to retrieve a token for an admin user, e.g helpful for setting up fresh synadm installations. Read about it here

Improved

The README has been updated to point to the nicely rendered docs recently published at https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/develop/usage/administration/admin_api/index.html

Notes

Update via PyPI or git as described in the update chapter: https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm#update

Thanks to the friendly people in #synadm:peek-a-boo.at for reviewing, testing, discussing functionality and giving advice. And for this release, a special thanks to @hpd:hpdeifel.de https://github.com/hpdeifel

Matrix Navigator v0.1.1

Christian said:

Matrix Navigator aims to be a replacement for curl when querying and mutating room states, including permissions.

• Plenty of fixes (reminder, this is still alpha software)

• Allows to join, leave rooms and inviting users.

• New wide-screen layout

• Errors are now shown in input fields or alerts.

https://matrix-navigator.chrpaul.de

Code and roadmap: https://gitlab.com/jaller94/matrix-navigator

Dept of Services 🚀

Thoughts on Matrix account ownership

Thib told us:

with the change of policy we deployed on GNOME's Matrix instance, it occurred to me that we had overlooked an important aspect in our relationship with Matrix: do we own our Matrix account? And the answer is... maybe! In this post I cover the differences between personal account, organisation-owned account, the importance of segregating activities on Matrix... and why this may change with Portable Identities in the future

https://blog.ergaster.org/post/20210622-owning-your-matrix-account/

Dept of Jobs 💰️

Tchap are hiring!

Thib reported:

the French government deployed Tchap, an instant messaging based on Matrix. They are looking for tech and processes oriented people to improve the service.

https://beta.gouv.fr/recrutement/2021/06/15/tchap-devops.html (🇫🇷) https://beta.gouv.fr/recrutement/2021/06/15/charge.ou.chargee.de.deploiement.html (🇫🇷)

Final Thoughts 💭

Andy reported:

I know this isn't TWIM-worthy, but I figured people in this room would find it interesting: yesterday there was a very popular post on reddit about how we don't appreciate email enough, and in the comments there were some mentions of matrix as the counterpart for messaging:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/o6cs4l/comment/h2s5dcz/

Actually I think this is very interesting. Worth taking a read to understand how people not already using Matrix might see the world.

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	maunium.net	517
2	int21.dev	520
3	matrix.sp-codes.de	607
4	trolla.us	615
5	aria-net.org	765
6	vonderste.in	812.5
7	heitkoetter.net	832
8	lily.flowers	991
9	thomcat.rocks	1237.5
10	kittenface.studio	1559

#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	1300.5
2	weber.world	2473

That's all I know 🏁

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