Synapse 1.65 released

Hey everyone! We've just released Synapse 1.65! Let's have a peek at what's inside.

Private read receipts

A feature that the more privacy-focused users of Matrix have been missing was the ability to hide read receipts from other users. Read receipts in rooms can tell a user which messages another user has read in a room. However, they can also be an unwelcome indicator that a user is currently reading a certain room, thus giving away the user's activity on Matrix at a given time.

Hiding one's read receipts from other Matrix users is unfortunately not as straightforward as simply preventing a client from sharing read receipts with the server. This is because read receipts are also used by Matrix homeservers to calculate how much of a room a user has read, and generate notification counts for rooms accordingly.

Synapse 1.65 introduces stable support for private read receipts. This feature, described by MSC2285, allows clients to send a different type of read receipt to the server. This then tells the homeserver to use this piece of information to update the user's notification counts, but not to share it with other users.

Improved room management APIs for modules

This version of Synapse includes two new module API methods to help Synapse modules interact and manage rooms. The first one, lookup_room_alias, allows modules to retrieve the room ID corresponding to a given room alias. This works both for local and remote aliases. The second one, create_room, allows modules to create new rooms on behalf of an existing user.

The update_room_membership method has also been updated in this release of Synapse to allow modules to join a room the server is not already in via federation. This can be done by using the new remote_room_hosts argument, which takes a list of homeservers to try to join via.

Everything else

Synapse 1.65 stabilises the implementation of MSC3827, which allows filtering public room searches on room types. This means it is now possible to search specifically for public spaces. For more information on this feature, see the Synapse 1.63 announcement.

Additionally, Synapse 1.65 implements the new experimental error codes documented by MSC3848. Once stabilised, these error codes will allow clients to show more specific errors to their users about why an event could not be sent.

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, andrewdoh, Julian-Samuel Gebühr and Dirk Klimpel, as well as anyone helping us make Synapse better by sharing their feedback and reporting issues.