Synapse 1.63 released

Hey all, it's time for another Synapse release! That's right, Synapse 1.63 is out, let's have a look at it.

Clarifications on "anonymised" server statistics

Synapse has the ability to report usage statistics to the Matrix.org Foundation (or to another location, if configured to do so). These statistics, such as number of users, number of rooms joined by the server, etc. (they don't feature any identifiable information about users and rooms) help us monitor the health of the public federation.

In this release of Synapse, we have updated our public documentation about this feature to clarify how it works and what exactly is being reported. This documentation can be found right here.

Note that previous documentation and prompts surrounding this feature called it "anonymised" server statistics. This could easily be misinterpreted, as while per-user statistics are not reported, homeserver server names are. We have therefore changed said documentation and prompts to be clearer about what is actually reported.

Note that your homeserver will never report any statistics if the report_stats configuration option is set to false. Server admins who are curious about which software is used by the Matrix.org Foundation to record server statistics can check out panopticon.

Improved filtering for public room search

This version of Synapse ships with an experimental implementation of MSC3827 which allows filtering public room search results by room type. This feature will enable better discoverability for Matrix Spaces (which are rooms with a specific type, under the hood), as it will enable clients to search specifically for public spaces.

This feature is still experimental as its MSC hasn't completed the MSC process yet, though it is in its final comment period at the time this post is being written. This means a stable implementation will be coming to Synapse very soon, so watch this space!

Everything else

Synapse 1.63 also includes a new rate limiter to limit invites per issuer. This rate limiter can be configured using the new rc_invites.per_issuer configuration setting, see the documentation for more information.

See the full changelog for a complete list of changes in this release.

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, villepeh and Petr Vaněk, as well as anyone helping us make Synapse better by sharing their feedback and reporting issues.