Synapse 1.56 released

Happy release day everyone! Synapse 1.56 is out! Let's have a look at what's new in this release.

Additional restrictions around registration

One common abuse scenario we have seen on Matrix over the years is attackers making use of public homeservers with open registration to automatically create multiple accounts in order to evade sanctions. Sometimes, this can lead to these public homeservers being banned across multiple public rooms despite their administrator(s) not being directly at fault.

In order to mitigate this, starting from this release, Synapse will refuse to start by default if it is configured with open registration with no additional verification. This means users wishing to register on these homeservers will need to authenticate themselves, either via email, recaptcha or registration tokens.

Please see the upgrade notes for more information.

So long groups, and thanks for all the fish

Long-time users of Matrix might remember when, way back in 2017, we introduced groups (also known as communities in some clients). Groups would let users define a curated set of users and rooms to represent a given community that others could refer to. We even used to have +matrix:matrix.org which was the official group for the Matrix team and community.

If this sounds a bit familiar to you (and remind you of a certain other feature of Matrix), that's no coincidence. Some time ago, we had already identified a good amount of shortcomings with groups, and decided to redesign the feature entirely and release it under the name "spaces". If you're curious about this, then you may wish to read the spaces announcement blogpost we released at the time.

Now that spaces have been out of beta for some time, and have shown to be a very useful feature to the ecosystem, we decided it was time to retire support for groups from Synapse, after more than 4 years of good and loyal service. This release of Synapse deprecates the feature, with a plan to disable it by default in Synapse 1.58 (which is expected to be released next month).

Everything else

As of this version, Synapse will also refuse to start the if the Postgres database it is running against has a non-C locale, in order to prevent accidental database corruption. See the upgrade notes for more information.

This release also includes the ability for modules to register server administrators through the register_user method, as well as a new method to allow modules to store external 3PID associations into Synapse's database.

See the full changelog for a complete list of changes in this release. Also please have a look at the upgrade notes for this version.

Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including (in no particular order) Dirk Klimpel, Beeper, Famedly, IronTooch and villepeh.