Synapse 1.61 released

Hey everyone! Guess what? Synapse 1.61 is out! Let's have a look at it.

🔗Farewell, groups

If you are new to Matrix, you might have not heard of the feature referred to as "groups" or "communities" (depending on the context). This feature allowed grouping rooms and users to better represent a community, one of which being +matrix:matrix.org which used to represent the Matrix community. This may sound similar to Matrix Spaces, and it would make sense since Spaces are meant to be a more powerful replacement for groups.

In Synapse 1.56, support for groups was deprecated, with a plan to fully remove it in a later release of Synapse. This has now been done as of Synapse 1.61, and most of the code supporting this feature has now been removed.

Note that this means that administrators of homeservers using workers can remove endpoints related to groups from their reverse proxy configuration. See the upgrade notes for more information.

🔗Media retention

A common issue we see homeserver administrators struggle with is managing the disk space used by Synapse. A non-negligible part of that disk space usage is dedicated to storing files uploaded by Matrix users, both local and remote.

Up until now Synapse would only provide administrators with limited, manual ways to manage the media store of their homeserver, via the admin API.

As of this release, Synapse now allows administrators to define retention lifetimes for local and remote media. This allows media that hasn't been accessed in a long time to be automatically deleted, therefore freeing up disk space. Server administrators wishing to control media retention more finely can also define different policies for remote and local media.

This feature can be enabled by configuring the media_retention setting, see the configuration guide for more information.

🔗Everything else

This release of Synapse introduces a change in the return value of the check_event_for_spam spam checker module callback, in order to allow modules more flexibility in communicating to users why their messages are rejected. This is part of ongoing improvement works around spam checker callbacks, watch this space next time for more information!

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) Beeper, Dirk Klimpel and Jacek Kuśnierz.