Synapse 1.72 released

It's not Christmas yet, but it's time for a new release! Say hello to Synapse 1.72.

It seems like this blog didn't self update through AI for the 2 preceding updates so this post will cover 1.70 to 1.72, sorry if this is a bit long but it's been a while :)

Announcements

Dropping support for PostgreSQL 10

PostgreSQL 10 has reached End Of Life: Synapse will no longer support it beginning with version 1.72 so please upgrade your database if you have not already done so.

Legacy Prometheus metric names disabled and to be removed

In previous versions of Synapse, some Prometheus metrics were emitted under two different names, an older name that was non-compliant with OpenMetrics and Prometheus conventions and a new compliant name.

Synapse 1.71 and later have the old metric names switched off by default.

For now it's still possible to get them by using enable_legacy_metrics: true, however server administrators still using legacy metric names are highly encouraged to migrate, as they will be removed in 1.73.

You can find the full list of renamed metrics here.

Changes to the events received by application services (interest)

Following the implementation of MSC3905, Synapse now only considers local users to be interesting to application services. In other words, the users namespace regex in an app service's registration file is only applied against local users of the homeserver.

Please note, this probably doesn't affect the expected behavior of your application service, since an interesting local user in a room still means all messages in the room (from local or remote users) will still be considered interesting.

You can find a bit more info in the MSC and in the upgrade notes.

The new stuff

Threads, threads, threads!

Several MSCs related to threads got implemented:

• MSC3856 provide an API to fetch threads and related metadata.
• MSC3771 and MSC3773 implementing per thread read receipts and per thread notification counts.
• MSC3874 allows to filter out messages belonging to threads from the main timeline (still considered experimental). Along with MSC3856, this should noticeably improve performance of rooms that use threads heavily.

This should significantly improve user experience related to threads, being through behavior or performance impact.

Linking events together

Relationships are great, even more between events than humans!

MSC3664 allows Matrix clients to be notified in real time of related events, so you can now be made quickly aware of this cat emoji reaction that your cat photo clearly deserved.

Additionally, Synapse 1.72 includes an implementation of MSC3912, allowing users to redact the relations of a message alongside the message itself. This is particularly helpful in cases like edits, where users usually want to see their edits redacted at the same time as the original message. Note that this implementation is currently incomplete and still experimental, though, so watch this space!

Faster joins, continued

We continue our journey to get everything going as transparently as possible when doing fast remote room joins.

If you missed it you can refer to this previous blog post to get a lot more infos, and feel free to grep Synapse changelog and the numerous related issues/PRs for all the gory details.

Everything else

See the full changelogs (1.70, 1.71, 1.72) for a complete list of changes in the releases. 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) Nico, sando38, realtyem, aceArt GmbH, Tuomas Ojamies, Ashish Kumar, asymmetric, Beeper, Ryan Miguel, Paul Tötterman, Abdullah Osama, Finn, Ivan Shapovalov, Dirk Klimpel, Jonathan de Jong, MichaIng and Aaron Raimist as well as anyone helping us make Synapse better by sharing their feedback and reporting issues.