This Week in Matrix 2022-03-25

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib announces

You might have been following our past efforts on making sure the DMA was meaningful. Those efforts are being rewarded, and Amandine covers in a blog post what this means for Element and other businesses in Europe. Matthew covers what this means for Matrix and end to end ecrypted services.

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) announces

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

New MSCs:

MSC3755: Member pronouns

MSCs in Proposed Final Comment Period:

MSC2246: Asynchronous media uploads

MSC3700: Deprecate plaintext sender key

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

MSC3667: Enforce integer power levels (merge)

Merged MSCs:

No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

Mostly continued review of MSCs, while implementation work continues on in the background.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2499: Fixes for Well-known URIs!

This MSC proposes some much-desired practical and usability fixes to the "Well-Known" discovery method for Matrix homeservers. This is part of the system that enables homeserver's to "delegate" their homeserver address (your Matrix ID is @alice:example.com, but your homeserver is listening for requests on homeserver.example.com).

Well-known for homeserver delegation was introduced a number of years ago, and since then some friction has arisen from various implementations. This MSC aims to address a collection of them!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Brendan Abolivier says

Hey everyone! This week we've released Synapse 1.55, which includes a bunch of new features, performance improvements and bugfix. If you're using Mjolnir to moderate your rooms, and/or synctl to manage your homeserver, this release also introduces a few changes you definitely want to be aware of, head over to the announcement on the matrix.org blog for more!

Yesterday, we noticed a compatibility issue with a newly released version of Jinja, which is the tool we use in Synapse to render e-mail and web templates. We've quickly put out Synapse 1.55.2 to address this - so if you were unable to start Synapse because of it just update and you should be fine 🙂 Note that this doesn't apply to deployments of Synapse using the matrixdotorg/synapse Docker image or Debian packages from packages.matrix.org since they are already using a compatible version of Jinja.

Apart from that, work continues towards integrating Poetry with Synapse, which should prevent this kind of issues from happening in the future, and on improving room join times.

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander announces

We've just released Dendrite 0.7.0, which has quite a lengthy list of changes:

The roomserver input API will now queue all events into NATS, which provides better crash resilience

The roomserver input API now configures per-room consumers, which should use less memory

Canonical aliases can now be added and removed

MSC2946 Spaces Summary now works correctly, both locally and over federation

Healthcheck endpoints are now available at:

/_dendrite/monitor/up, which will return 200 when Dendrite is ready to accept requests

/_dendrite/monitor/health, which will return 200 if healthy and 503 if degraded for some reason

The X-Matrix federation authorisation header now includes a destination field, as per MSC3383

The /sync endpoint now uses less memory by only ranging state for rooms that the user has participated in

The /messages endpoint now accepts stream positions in both the from and to parameters

Dendrite will now log a warning at startup if the file descriptor limit is set too low

The federation client will now attempt to use HTTP/2 if available

The federation client will now attempt to resume TLS sessions if possible, to reduce handshake overheads

The built-in NATS Server has been updated to version 2.7.4

NATS streams that don't match the desired configuration will now be recreated automatically

When performing a graceful shutdown, Dendrite will now wait for NATS Server to shutdown completely, which should avoid some corruption of data on-disk

The create-account tool has seen a number of improvements, will now ask for passwords automatically

The /sync endpoint will no longer lose state events when truncating the timeline for history visibility

The /context endpoint now works correctly with lazy_load_members

The /directory/list/room/{roomID} endpoint now correctly reports whether a room is published in the server room directory or not

Some bugs around appservice username validation have been fixed

Roomserver output messages are no longer unnecessarily inflated by state events, which should reduce the number of NATS message size errors

Stream IDs for device list updates are now always 64-bit, which should fix some problems when running Dendrite on a 32-bit system

Purging room state in the sync API has been fixed after a faulty database query was corrected

The federation client will now release host records for remote destinations after 5 minutes instead of holding them in memory forever

Remote media requests will now correctly return an error if the file cannot be found or downloaded

A panic in the media API that could happen when the remote file doesn't exist has been fixed

Various bugs around membership state and invites have been fixed

The memberships table will now be correctly updated when rejecting a federated invite

The client API and appservice API will now access the user database using the user API rather than accessing the database directly

In addition, there are some minor changes for Docker users:

Docker images are now published to GitHub Container Register as well as Docker Hub — they can be found here

Docker images are now being automatically generated for the main branch by CI and will be available on the :main tag

As always, feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite-related discussion!

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair reports

This week brings yet more bugfixes & stability to DMs: now, there should be no trouble sending messages into a KakaoTalk DM that hasn't been active for a few days.

The other major improvements are:

A command for listing your KakaoTalk friends list, appropriately named list-friends

Receiving images from KakaoTalk

I had hoped to finish support for sending images from Matrix by today, but I couldn't quite crack it in time--either KakaoTalk changed their API for sending media messages, or I'm doing something wrong 🙃

Nonetheless, the bridge is rapidly approaching a state of being usable!

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Syphon (website)

Chat with your privacy and freedom intact

0x1a8510f2 announces

Hi all 👋.

A little over a year has passed since our last update, but we're not dead! On the contrary, Syphon has seen some significant improvements over the last year both in terms of features and project structure; the project is more alive than ever before, and we're really excited to share some updates!

Core Team

Syphon now has a core team, consisting of @ereio:matrix.org (creator of Syphon), @ed:geraghty.london, @dnisbetjones:mozilla.org, and @0x1a8510f2:0x1a8510f2.space (me)! With some of the workload now being shared, we're hoping Syphon will grow even faster with less time needed to review and merge PRs, triage and fix bugs, evaluate and implement features and answer support requests.

Cross-platform Availability

Syphon has been steadily expanding its list of supported platforms over the past year:

@ed:geraghty.london worked hard to bring Syphon to Windows with full feature parity, including (currently unofficial) Windows builds of Syphon.

@btdmaster:asra.gr has created an AUR package of Syphon for Arch Linux users.

I've been busy creating a flatpak for Syphon which is available on Flathub.

Regular and official ARM64 builds are also planned soon, with the first manual one already released. Once the CI infrastructure is properly set up, these will be included for every release and the flatpak will receive ARM64 support too!

Releases

Between 0.1.7 (21 Mar 2021) and 0.2.12 (23 Mar 2022), 21 releases were published. Of course, too much changed to list everything, but here are some highlights:

Multi-account support 🎉

Media messages 🎉

Markdown support 🎉

Message editing 🎉

Key import and export 🎉

App lock with encryption 🎉

HTTP proxy support 🎉

Theme tweaks

3pid auth support

EXIF data removal from sent images

System brightness setting

Various customisation options

(Unencrypted) chat message search

Ability to deactivate an account

Countless new translations

Massive performance improvements

Numerous bug fixes (including encryption and SSO)

Lots of refactoring and cleanup

Many of these would not have been possible without our awesome contributors.

Translations

We have also received many contributions in the form of translations and Syphon now supports, at least partially, 26 languages. Of these, 6 languages are fully or almost fully translated. To deal with all the incoming translations, there is now also an official Weblate page for Syphon.

All of these translations are submitted by volunteers and we're really grateful for their contributions in making Syphon more accessible to an international audience.

Syphon Space

We also now have an official Syphon space which we use for support, development discussion or just friendly offtopic chat. Come join us if you like at #syphon-space:matrix.org!

SchildiChat (website)

SchildiChat is a fork of Element that focuses on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list for both direct messages and groups, which is a more familiar approach to users of other popular instant messengers.

SpiritCroc reports

SchildiChat-Android now has more styles of message bubbles! So if you prefer the Schildi-bubbles over the Element ones (which you can use too in SchildiChat if you want), you can now also select between bubbles with or without tail, and select some more round bubbles than what we had previously, which was a highly requested feature!

If you wonder what makes SchildiChat special except for the different design now that Element has bubbles as well: it's hard to describe in a couple of short sentences, as it's mostly in the details. So if you are interested in a list of things that we did on Android, I wrote up some aspects here. Note however that this list is usually not really kept up-to-date, and there might already be some things that are now outdated since I added them. However, it might give you some general ideas of what SchildiChat has to offer :)

Nheko (website)

Desktop client for Matrix using Qt and C++17.

Nico reports

Beep, boop, v0.9.3 is out. It's mostly bugfixes and small improvements, changelog below:

Highlights

New upload UX

Queue multiple uploads by pasting or dragging multiple files.

Videos will now properly have a thumbnail as well as images.

Duration, width and height is now also properly included so that clients can resize appropriately.

Thumbnails are excluded if they are bigger than the original image. (tastytea)

Improvements for mobile devices (Malte E)

You should now be able to scroll by touching anywhere with no random dead zones.

Preedit text can now be used in a completer and is properly sent

If an input method is active, pressing Enter will not send the current message.

Features

Optionally always open videos and images in an external program. (math)

Improvements

Build macOS releases against Qt 5.15.3 to resolve missing spaces after some punctuation.

Send the shortcode as the body for stickers without a body.

Elide long usernames in the timeline. (Malte E)

Cleanup the reply popup. (Malte E)

Use standard buttons where possible. (tastytea)

Various improvements to the bubble layout. (Malte E)

Enable online key backup by default.

Update the bundled gstreamer in our Flatpaks.

Translations

Indonesian (Linerly)

Estonian (Priit)

Finnish (Priit)

Esperanto (Tirifto)

Bugfixes

Fix hovering the action menu.

Try to avoid using unknown UIA flows.

Don't Components actively in use.

Fix screensharing.

Fix device id when doing SSO logins.

Downloads should be live now, flatpak might take a while to publish still :3

Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Julian Sparber reports

Hello folks, quick update on what major things happened in Fractal-next the last two month. The most exciting addition is definitely the SSO support we merged this week and therefore we could close a 2 years old issue.

Timeline

You can now send files via drag-n-drop and via the file send button to a room. It also includes a nice preview for Images.

The timeline now shows audio messages with a small inline player.

Fractal-next lets you now remove messages you sent

Session verification

During first login, Fractal checks if the user hasn't started session verification from another client before offering to start a new one

The QrCode scanning is now spec compliant, and asks for user's confirmation after scanning.

We dropped screenshot support for QrCode scanning, since it makes the UX worse without adding any real benefit.

Room details

The room details show now the members of the room including the power level

Login

Fractal-Next now supports SSO 🎉️

We implemented auto-discovery of the homeserver via .well-known

FluffyChat (website)

Krille Fear announces

Sorry that I was a little bit silent in the last weeks. So much stuff to do...

If you haven't heard it yet (because I have not made it that much public yet) there are experimental video calls in FluffyChat now. You need to enable them first under Settings > Chat and then you can try them out. They should be fully compatible with the Element video calls. But be aware that they are very unstable at the moment and may let your app crash.

FluffyChat 1.3.1 has been released

This release contains a lot of updated translations and bugfixes. I'm very excited about the new keyboard shortcuts from TheOneWithTheBrain. Also in your stories you can now pick the background color and the size of the picture. This is still a little bit experimental but I will share of course update the stories MSC asap. Thanks to all contributors and translators.

Changelog:

Allow app to be moved to external storage (Marcel)

Translated using Weblate (Arabic) (Mads Louis)

Translated using Weblate (Basque) (Sorunome)

Translated using Weblate (Basque) (—X—)

Translated using Weblate (Chinese (Simplified)) (Eric)

Translated using Weblate (Czech) (Sorunome)

Translated using Weblate (Dutch) (Jelv)

Translated using Weblate (English) (Raatty)

Translated using Weblate (French) (Anne Onyme 017)

Translated using Weblate (Galician) (Xosé M)

Translated using Weblate (German) (Maciej Krüger)

Translated using Weblate (Indonesian) (Linerly)

Translated using Weblate (Irish) (Graeme Power)

Translated using Weblate (Persian) (Anastázius Darián)

Translated using Weblate (Russian) (Nikita Epifanov)

Translated using Weblate (Swedish) (Joaquim Homrighausen)

Translated using Weblate (Turkish) (Oğuz Ersen)

Translated using Weblate (Ukrainian) (Ihor Hordiichuk)

Update proguard rules to a more modern setup (MTRNord)

chore: Minor story viewer fixes (Krille Fear)

chore: Remove story line count and make answering to stories online (Krille Fear)

chore: Update dependencies (Dependency Update Bot)

design: Make pinned events use less vertical space (Krille Fear)

feat: Extended stories (Krille Fear)

feat: Restrict map zoom to tile server capabilities (Marcel)

feat: implement keyboard shortcuts (TheOneWithTheBraid)

fix: Build on macOS (Krille Fear)

fix: Emojipicker issues (Krille Fear)

fix: Hide redacted stories (Krille Fear)

fix: Mark story as read (Krille Fear)

fix: Open room from notification click produces errors (Krille Fear)

fix: SSO on Android 12 (Krille Fear)

fix: Send read receipts on all taps (Krille Fear)

fix: make fluffy usable at 720 px wide (Raatty)

fix: Add forgotten sendOnEnter (Krille Fear)

refactor: Switch to just audio for playing sounds (Krille Fear)

Ement.el (website)

Matrix client for emacs

alphapapa announces

[[https://github.com/alphapapa/ement.el][Ement.el]], a Matrix client for Emacs, has learned to create new rooms and invite users to rooms. Feedback is appreciated; see our chat room, [[https://matrix.to/#/#ement.el:matrix.org][#ement.el:matrix.org]], or the issue tracker on the repo.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

kittykat announces

Threads will be released behind a labs flag in the next release and enabled by default in the Release Candidate (RC) from 5th April

If you’re using an older version of Synapse (<v1.55.0) you might experience compatibility problems with stable prefixes. After upgrading Element to v1.18.0 unstable threads will be moved to the main room timeline

Groups have been deleted on develop. It has also landed alongside other fairly major changes so please definitely report issues if you see them

Continuing work to remove skinning from the application. This is a fairly major change to how everything works under the hood, so when it lands please report any issues with the app as most will be subtle and therefore might be missed.

Currently expected to land on or about April 5th

Component replacement will still be possible (and this will be documented)

In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):

Thread list is now ordered by last reply

Fixes for the room list counter

Last stretch of threads acceptance testing before releasing to beta

Iteration to the new search dialog to integrate people & public rooms search into the new experience.

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Doug says

Element 1.8.7 was released on the App Store after delays with the review: we’ve made ignoring users easier and now suggest a Matrix ID when using “Sign in With Apple” to resolve the issue.

Space creation and management will be available in the next release, due next week.

We had some issues with publishing releases to TestFlight so the latest release candidates haven’t been updated publicly - we have been testing them internally so releases will not be delayed

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

adam reports

Our current in progress release 1.4.6+ is running a little behind schedule, however when it does land it'll contain:

Fixes in the timeline for missing messages, inconsistent read marker, decryption crashes and the room icon looking like donut

Improved Threads via MSC3440

The ability to share a user specified location

For the forks, a heads up that we've updated our development branch Kotlin version to 1.6.0 which involved overhauling a lot of our when statements

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synatainer (website)

Synapse Maintenance Container – Docker container with tools for synapse & postgres database maintenance

saces reports

Synatainer v0.3.1 has been released

New since v0.2.0

add a db-shell and scripts to reset the state compressor

add options for passing purge/keep room lists

Start it without command and let it do its magic :)

What it does by default:

daily:

purge all rooms without local members

run the state autocompressor (small setting 500/100)

weekly:

delete old remote media (>90 days)

delete old message history from public joinable rooms (>180 days)

monthly:

run the state autocompressor (big setting 1500/300)

vacuum the database

Source: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

Compose example: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer/-/snippets/2264828

If you are looking for a docker container with just the auto compressor for linux amd64/arm64 in it, her you go: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/rust-synapse-compress-state

Dept of Bots 🤖

Mjölnir (website)

The moderation bot for Matrix

Gnuxie announces

We have released Mjölnir v1.4.1 (via v1.4.0)

Which in addition to fixes, includes a few new tools that you might find useful:

a protection for detecting & measuring federation lag in your rooms

bugfixes for the synapse antispam module (in particular squashing a bug that was removing users from the profile directory when blocking was disabled)

a new message length limiter for the antispam module

a new command to grab admin permissions from rooms being administrated by users on your homeserver

a command to show when users in a given room have joined

another command to filter through recent room joiners by the time they joined.

Improvements that make writing protections easier.

Don't forget you can join our development room #mjolnir:matrix.org if you have any have any questions for setting up and running Mjölnir!

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

HarHarLinks announces

don't miss #otwsu:matrix.org on March 30th!

Thib adds

The theme of the episode is "analytics and privacy". We will have guests from the awesome non-profit Exodus Privacy to shed some light on analytics: what can your apps know about you and how you can get better informed.

Nad from Element will give us the perspective from the other side: as a vendor, does it make sense to use analytics? Are there better alternatives? Is there a way to do it right?

Join us in #otwsu and on matrix.org/open-tech-will-save-us

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	359
2	envs.net	482.5
3	aria-net.org	522
4	jeroenhd.nl	753.5
5	g3la.de	761
6	kohlernet.de	761
7	tardis.omaelse.de	1074.5
8	tchncs.de	1274.5
9	matrix.ring-0.net	1602
10	asra.gr	1629.5

#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	matrix.sum7.eu	318.5
2	conduit.cyberdi.sk	463
3	cry.is	514
4	rustybever.be	580.5
5	beckmeyer.us	798
6	matrix.awesomesheep48.me	1096
7	dendrite.neilalexander.dev	1164
8	dendrite.beckmeyer.us	3950

That's all I know 🏁

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

The Foundation needs you

The Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit and only relies on donations to operate. Its core mission is to maintain the Matrix Specification, but it does much more than that.

It maintains the matrix.org homeserver and hosts several bridges for free. It fights for our collective rights to digital privacy and dignity.

Support us