Matrix Live

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) announces

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC4014: Pseudonymous Identities
• MSC4013: Poll history cache

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC3882: Allow an existing session to sign in a new session
• MSC3860: Media Download Redirects
• MSC2659: Application service ping endpoint
• MSC2249: Require users to have visibility on an event when submitting reports
• Mechanism to communicate 3PID binding updates or deletions to homeservers

Closed MSCs:

• MSC2463: Exclusion of MXIDs in push rules content matching

Spec Updates

A regular reminder that every Tuesday, the Spec Core Team (SCT) publishes their approximate priorities in the public Office of the Spec Core Team room - check it out to see what the SCT is working on. Similarly, if you’d like the SCT to engage with your MSC, mention so in that room.

The release of Matrix 1.7 is expected in the next 1-2 weeks! Keep an eye out for announcement blog post specifically for it. We'll call it out in the following TWIM as well of course :)

Matrix 1.8 is currently scheduled for around August 2023.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3914: Matrix native group call push rule!

This MSC adds a new push rule that causes your Matrix client to emit a notification if a group call (as defined by MSC3401 is started in a Matrix room. This MSC (obviously) depends on MSC3041, so that MSC will need to be accepted before this one can be.

There is currently a client-side implementation for this MSC, but it is missing a homeserver side one (for adding the push rule).

Check out the MSC if you're interested, or perhaps take a look at adding that server-side implementation?

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Shay says

Synapse

It's Friday Friday Friday which means it's time for another TWIM. This week the backend team released Synapse v1.83.0. Notable highlights include:

• Update support for MSC3983 to allow always returning fallback-keys in a /keys/claim request.
• Fix a long-standing bug where cached server key results which were directly fetched would not be properly re-used.
• Fix a bug introduced in Synapse 1.73.0 where some experimental push rules were returned by default.
• Add experimental support to recursively provide relations per MSC3981

And so much more! To read about everything in the release, take a look at the release notes here and otherwise have a great week.

Dept of Clients 📱

Cetirizine

A Matrix Client written for MTRNord

MTRNord says

Hi everyone :)

I recently started to work on my own personal Matrix client. It's still early in the progress, but I wanted to share it.

It mostly is based around some core concepts of element-web UI, however deviates from it quite quickly. Notable changes are that it merges the space and roomviews into a single list, it has a richtext editor, and it renders things slightly different but close to element-web.

Additionally, the client is using the matrix-rust-sdk-crypto-js bindings as underlying e2ee and sliding-sync as it's /sync implementation.

This week it's just a preview, but I hope to improve upon it and make it more usable for people. You will find plenty of bugs like e2ee not decrypting past messages, no upscroll, no verification. But for very basic chatting it should work already.

Feel free to peek into #cetirizine:midnightthoughts.space or have a look at the repo https://github.com/MTRNord/cetirizine or try it for yourself at https://mtrnord.github.io/cetirizine (Or just view the storyboard at https://mtrnord.github.io/cetirizine/storybook )

Note that since this is meant to be a personal client there is no support given, and it's purely "free and source available" but neither includes community support nor any form of professional support. This is to prevent mental exhaustion for myself. Also note that this is still very early into the process. So many things are missing or buggy. If you try it, be careful.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Danielle announces

• Our work on notifications continues with a big improvement to the stuck notifications bug hitting production this week!

  • The MSC 3981 is in review and other bug fixes are also continuing to land
  • The enhancements to Settings are underway, this week we’ve looked at mapping users current selections to the new design to ensure that a migration is as smooth as possible

• Our Accessibility work continues with more than 20 issues closed in the last few weeks. This will continue to be a priority for us over the coming few weeks so please continue to raise any issues or areas that we could be improving.

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

Manu announces

• The 1.6.0 release candidate for Element-Android is still being tested before it lands on the Play Store. It contains a major change where we switch the crypto module to use the rust crate from the matrix-rust-sdk.
• Still on Element-Android, we are improving accessibility on several screens
• Meanwhile on ElementX-Android, we added the upload of image, video and files. Room creation, invite and join is almost complete

Element X iOS (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Ștefan says

Hello Friday and goodbye to another productive Element X week. We’re working very hard on stabilizing the application and getting it ready for a new public release but meanwhile:

• Progress on the new rich reply rendering. Other message types coming next.
• Improved media uploading
• Notification improvements
• A brand new initial sync loading indicator
• plus a slew of tweaks, bug fixes and improvements

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Next-gen crypto-included SDK for developing Clients, Bots and Appservices; written in Rust with bindings for Node, Swift and WASM

Jonas Platte says

Over the last two weeks,

• SQlite replaced sled as the default on-disk state store backend!
• We added more convenient power level action checks and exposed them in matrix-sdk-ffi
• The FFI crate also gained support for sending image attachments through the timeline
• We made the timeline strip reply fallbacks (so replies don't get rendered twice)
• We've steadily been improving our logging
• And of course there were lots of bug fixes, CI improvements and refactorings as well
  • Notably, we optimized the size of some futures, which could be the solution for a stack overflow Windows users have been reporting from time to time (we're waiting for somebody who previously saw the bug to try out the latest version)

Dept of Ops 🛠

radicale-auth-matrix (website)

Aine says

Radicale is dead simple CalDAV/CardDAV server, it's not fancy, but does the job. The only caveat with Radicale we had at etke.cc is manual htpasswd-based user management which is painful both for us and our customers.

So, we did that thing, called radicale-auth-matrix and you can use it authenticate from radicale against your matrix server, delegating user management on matrix side, where you have proper API and even UI for that.

How it works? You enter your matrix account's credentials when login to your Radicale server, that's it! It even has simple hash-based cache to avoid unnecessary requests to matrix API once you logged in.

Pretty niche thing, but it pain caused by manual user management is gone 😄

Source code. We even have ready-to-use Radicale docker image with that plugin installed

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix administration and development courses (German) at Linuxhotel

Nik | Klampfradler 🎸🚴🏻 announces

The deadline for registrations for the two Matrix courses at the German Open Source training center Linuxhotel is fast approaching, and the courses, sadly, are at risk to be cancelled due to lack of interest:

• Matrix - Server administration, usage, and federation
• Matrix - Development and IoT

If you know someone who might be interested in 3 to 5 days of hands-on Matrix experience for their company, team, or as a hobbyist, please share the invitation ☺!

HarHarLinks reports

[m]-village@cccamp23

Hi TWIM! It's been 3 months since a good chunk of the Matrix community gathered at FOSDEM. We had lots of fun meeting people at FOSDEM itself and on top an overwhelming response to the #fosdem23-community-meetup:matrix.org we hosted on Friday in advance.

One of the next hacker events has now appeared on the horizon, namely Chaos Communication Camp 2023 happening August 15-19. Find all the info about it in several posts on https://events.ccc.de/category/camp-2023/ and in the rooms contained within the #camp2023:events.ccc.de space. Note that this event, while happening close to Berlin, Germany, and some of the presented content might be in German, the Camp still targets an international audience.

Some of us have already gotten together to organize a Matrix village at the CCCamp. If you are interested in attending or - even better - have any ideas to share, we invite you to join us in that room. In particular, we will meet next Monday (May 15) in a video conference in #chaosevents:matrix.org for planning, exchanging info, etc.

Matrix in the News 📰

Nightshade reports

A rather known tech related German journal talked about interoperability hurdles, MIMI, and also Matrix. The german article can be found on their website.

Dept of Ping

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	test.zemos.net	339
2	matrix.lukeog.com	442
3	coolegrane.farm	550
4	envs.net	620
5	kittenface.studio	1090
6	zemos.net	1692
7	rom4nik.pl	2282.5
8	wcore.org	2489
9	herkulessi.de	4554.5
10	mailstation.de	4803

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	test.zemos.net	108
2	l1qu1d.net	194.5
3	feline.support	286
4	777.tf	416.5
5	herkulessi.de	422
6	zemos.net	729.5
7	shiftsystems.net	961

That's all I know

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!