This Week in Matrix 2023-09-01

Matrix Live

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib says

We’d like to thank everyone for their patience as we continue to work toward restoring the Libera.Chat bridge, and apologize for the continued inconvenience. We’ve heard from many people and communities who are impacted, who have confirmed that operating this bridge is an important service and we remain committed to getting it back online.

It’s been a month since our last update and folks have been reaching out, so we wanted to take this opportunity to provide a brief update.

The bridge team at Element is still actively working on the issues that led to the bridge being disabled in the first place. You can see some of the work that’s in flight through GitHub PRs: #1757, #1766, #1764, #1734.

We’re also looking into a way to transition responsibility for the bridge from Element to being directly run by The Matrix.org Foundation over the coming months - more details as we have them.

Unfortunately, we do not yet have a clear timeline for bringing the bridge back online. We’ll continue providing regular updates and will share more information as soon as we can. Thank you again for your patience! Please do not hesitate to reach out at #libera-matrix:libera.chat if you have any questions or concerns.

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:

• There were no new MSCs this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC4026: Allow /versions to optionally accept authentication (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

New MSCs in detail

In this new segment, we aim to give a bit more context as to why an MSC was opened, beyond what is available in the MSC's introduction.

For MSC4026, the primary motivation came out of the Element Backend team's desire to selectively enable new and experimental Matrix features for only a subset of users on matrix.org. Experimental features are exciting, but also have the chance to break clients completely. By only enabling a feature for a small subset of users, system administrators can ensure that there is no breakage before widening the set of users.

By adding optional authentication to the /versions client endpoint, which has a set of unstable_features flags, the homeserver is able to know which user the request came from. From there, it can decide whether a certain feature should be advertised as enabled or disabled.

The expected outcome of this is safer deployments - and ultimately less panicking when (not if) something breaks.

Spec Updates

Matrix v1.8 was released last week, and hot on the heels we're now working towards Matrix v1.9, due November 2023.

See the "Upcoming in Matrix 1.9" section of the linked blogpost for the MSCs that the Spec Core Team plan to land in time for v1.9!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3160: Message timezone markup!

This MSC proposes new HTML syntax for formatted m.room.messages with a <time> tag that could display a time automatically based on the receiving user's timezone/12 or 24hr/etc. preferences. This saves users from manually calculating timezone offsets in their head.

I think this would be an excellent feature, and I've seen it in use already in platforms like Discord. Discord lacks any UI for the user to construct these though, instead hoping users just magically figure it out. This leads to sites like https://hammertime.cyou/ existing. But it would be nice to see clients providing a similar native UI.

What do you think? Have thoughts? Leave them on the MSC as a new pull request comment!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

dmr says

This week we released Synapse 1.91, which contains

• admin API improvements for locking users, and filtering admins in user searches;
• performance improvements for state resolution in old rooms and during high replication traffic; plus
• improvements to the single-sign-on configuration

We are aware of a performance regression in this release which gradually consumes more CPU over time. We have just (within the last hour) begun to understand this and have a fix planned. We'll need to test this properly at the start of next week; you can expect a bugfix release shortly after, if all goes well.

The full changelog is available on GitHub. Thank you to our contributors for this release: Alexander Fechler, Gabriel Rodríguez, Nick Mills-Barret, Nico, Matthew Ma, Maximilian Bosch and Theodore Ni.

Aside from the release, this week we have been working on a few small bugfixes, which should make a nice addition to the upcoming 1.92 release.

In other news, for the last few releases Erik has been working to fix database corruption problems relating to room retention and purging historical events. He put out a call for testing in the Synapse Announcements room last Friday. It is not risk-free, but if anyone is feeling bold and is prepared to handle potential data loss, we would appreciate testing and feedback.

Finally, let me once thank our community of server operators in the #synapse:matrix.org room. It is an invaluable asset; we are indebted to everyone for all of your efforts and are extremely grateful.

Dept of Clients 📱

Benedict says

Just wanted to mention, that Konstantin Tskhovrebov created a really cool little Matrix messenger based on Trixnity. It is called smalk, uses Compose Multiplatform and already works on Desktop, Android and iOS with the same code base. Maybe web is coming soon too.

Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

This week, we've implemented a bunch of cool features:

• You can now create matrix accounts directly in NeoChat. As part of the, the entire login UI has been revamped to a more modern look.
• On the other end of an account's life cycle, we've also implemented deactivating accounts
• You can now forward messages to a different room
• The right sidebar has been improved for mobile devices

Apart from that, we're improving a lot of our code behind the scenes and preparing for the move to Qt6 (hopefully completed later this

Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element-iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 16+.

Ștefan says

Happy Friday everybody, ending another week that very much kept us on our toes:

• Polls are making quite the appearance 1, 2
• We started showing the room notification config in the room list
• The rich text editor is now actually part of the app but under a feature flag
• We’re working out the last kinks for OIDC
• We have a new placement for the start chat button and prettier avatars and usernames
• The app is faster than ever thanks to some clever mechanics under the hood
• Fixed bugs here, there and everywhere
• And we even improved our testing coverage and performance tracking

Element X Android (website)

Android Matrix messenger application using the Matrix Rust Sdk and Jetpack Compose

benoit reports

• Element X Android is not far from being released to production, but we want to fix the issue about notification without content first. This happens when the SDK cannot decrypt the Event content.
• Polls are now enabled, you can create, vote and end polls, and they are correctly rendered in the timeline.
• We have started to integrate Element Call to the application.
• Still working on polishing OIDC and making progress on integrating the Rich Text Editor.
• We are fixing lots of bugs, keep reporting bug reports, it’s really helpful!

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict announces

A small Trixnity release this week (v.3.10.4):

features/improvements:

• add default user agent "Trixnity"
• allow subscribeAsFlow in SyncApiClients Subscribable

bugfixes:

• fix createRoomRepositoriesModule

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 few weeks, we added

• RoomInfo subscriptions, makes fetching room list entry data faster for EX
• Client integration for widgets is starting to take shape
• Initial support for showing polls in the timeline landed
• Initial support for OIDC landed! (some iOS-specific problems remain)
• A non-fuzzy room list filter
• Creation of HTML messages over FFI (without going through markdown)

We also fixed lots of issues, including

• Content of redacted events being retained in timeline items
• Room avatar not showing up with new FFI RoomInfo
• matrix-sdk-crypto-ffi crashing on x86_64 Android
• Timeline not getting updated when (un)ignoring a user (not yet merged)
• Timeline sometimes flickering when opening it in EX (not yet merged)

… and improved our logging setup, as well as CI.

Dept of Services 🚀

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi announces

Thanks to Aine of etke.cc, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now set up the SchildiChat client.

See our Configuring SchildiChat documentation to get started.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Maubot-meetings

Gwmngilfen announces

Historically, Ansible has relied on an old IRC bot called Zodbot to run our official chat meetings - take notes, log action items, and so forth, as well as posting the logs to a webhost for people to read later. With the IRC bridge currently down, we decided to dust off a 2-year-old action item to write a Matrix Meeting bot. Since (a) Zodbot is written in Python, and (b) I was already using Maubot for other things, it made sense to write it in the Maubot framework.

If you also have a need to a meeting Matrix, you might have a use for this! If so, you can check out the extremely hacky code on GitHub and deploy it to your own Maubot host in the usual way. By default the bot will post the meeting logs to the room when #endmeeting is called, but optionally (because this is useful to me) you can also post the logs to a Discourse instance instead. More backends for log handling are also planned.

Comments/feature requests/bug reports are of course very welcome!

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix User Meetup Berlin

saces says

This will be the last meetup before the matrix community summit, a good opportunity to test your [m]atrix outfit.

Next Matrix user meetup 6.9.2023, 8 pm @ c-base

Meet other matrix users, chat about Matrix, the rest, and everything else, discuss your Matrix ideas, sign each other in persona, and maybe spice the evening with a good mate or beer.

Also when the bbq is lit you may wish you brougth your favorite item :)

Every first Wednesday of the month in the c-base at 8pm ('til the next pandemic).

Matrix room: #mumb:c-base.org

Matrix Community Summit 2023 (website)

HarHarLinks reports

The Matrix Community Summit 2023 🗻 is taking place September 21st through September 24th at the awesome hacker space station c-base in Berlin!

News: The schedule had a slight adjustment to fix times being shown later than intended. The talks on Friday and Saturday start at 10:00 AM (CEST). The schedule has also been updated to include the breakfast, lunch break, dinner, and social events.

If your talk was accepted and you are participating as a speaker, please do still get a ticket!

The range of available T-Shirts has been extended! There are now 4 variants for you to choose from (or get them all!). If you already bought a ticket that includes a free T-shirt, you should be able to switch your choice to any of the new ones, in case you prefer them.

Summary:

• 📆 We updated the schedule from last week to show sessions in Berlin local time properly and also include breaks and meals. View it online here or import to your schedule consuming apps.
• 🎫 Tickets are available! We are counting on Matrix businesses and professionals to buy our supporter tickets or sponsoring packages so we can provide everyone with food and drinks.
• 👕 T-Shirts available for preordering, including new additional variants!
• 🗨️ Join the event space #matrix-community-summit-berlin-2023:matrix.org for all related rooms including news and general discussion, etc.
  • 🚗🏨 Carpools and Roomshares if you're looking for how to travel or where to sleep.
  • 💪 If you can and want to help out with the event organisation, join the orga room!
• 🗣️ The call for participation ended last Sunday, August 20th, however if you missed it until now and just came up with the greatest new idea, don't hesitate to contact us at Matrix Community Summit Orga and we will see how we can squeeze you in.

See you soon in Berlin!

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	maescool.be	682
2	nerdhouse.io	1225
3	mailstation.de	1805
4	rom4nik.pl	2462
5	cooperteam.net	2541.5
6	aguiarvieira.pt	6261
7	ocean.joedonofry.com	9137
8	littlevortex.net	9705
9	wcore.org	10432
10	balsillie.net	13723

#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	herkinf.de	249
2	dendrite.kootstra.frl	282
3	fellr.net	331.5
4	rustybever.be	407
5	littlevortex.net	441.5
6	777.tf	454
7	shiftsystems.net	722
8	matrix.shutdown.network	1223
9	noisytoot.org	1235
10	inu.is	1665

That's all I know

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