This Week in Matrix 2023-09-08

Matrix Live

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew announces

Josh joined the Matrix Foundation as its first ever Managing Director!

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:

• MSC4053: Extensible Events - Mentions mixin
• MSC4052: Hiding read receipts UI in certain rooms
• [WIP] MSC4051: Using the create event as the room ID
• MSC4050: MXID verification

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC4026: Allow /versions to optionally accept authentication

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

Spec Updates

IETF continues to tick along with Travis and Matthew continuing to work on the transport and signalling side of things (how messages are shipped around, and how rooms are controlled), while yours truly is focusing on the content format (what is sent inside the encrypted envelope). The MIMI working group continues to hold interim meetings between IETF events in order to speed up the process leading up to the Digital Markets Act deadlines.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3767: Time based notification filtering!

This MSC introduces a new push rule condition, time_and_day, to allow people to control whether they should receive notifications based on their local time. This would allow for "do not disturb"-like functionality at the server level - thus extending to all clients.

Of course the same can be achieved today by manually changing your push rules at different times of the day to disable all notifications - but having the logic directly in the push rules is an elegant solution.

I do imagine that getting the time zones correct will be a right pain.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Telodendria (website)

An open source Matrix homeserver implementation written from scratch in ANSI C and designed to be lightweight and simple, yet functional

Jordan Bancino announces

I'm pleased to announced some much-needed changes around our project management and development process that should make it much easier for new contributors to get involved. The most major change is that all development now happens in Git (no more CVS!) on our new Gitea instance. Registration is open, and everyone is encouraged to create an account and contribute. I'm currently working on updating all the documentation, and will eventually want to re-work the website as well. Right now everything is kind of a mess as we get everything fully migrated, but stay tuned! Join #telodendria-newsletter:bancino.net for a more complete list of changes that are planned for Telodendria, as well as to receive future updates.

We want your help! I'm specifically making infrastructure changes for the purpose of making Telodendria friendlier to new developers and other contributors. This project is still in the very early stages; as such, we need help in pretty much every area, including paying infrastructure and development costs, building a new website, writing documentation, and developing the actual server code. If you want to be involved in building the lightest and most-portable Matrix homeserver—no matter what your skill set—I'm sure we can find a place for you. Feel free to join our room at #telodendria-general:bancino.net or contact me directly at @jordan:bancino.net if you have any questions about what we're doing, how we're doing it, or how you can be a part of it.

Synapse (website)

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

clokep announces

This week we released Synapse 1.91.1 and Synapse 1.91.2, which contain bugfixes for:

• A performance regression with event persistence.
• Revert some of the unstable MSC3861 support that was broken.

Thanks in particular to Tulir Asokan for reporting and testing our fix for the performance regression.

A new release candidate was also created Synapse 1.92.0rc1, some highlights include:

• Suppressing notifications of message edits (stabilizing MSC3958).
• Better support for CAS version 3.
• IPv6 support for SMTP.
• Various performance improvements.

Thanks to our contributors for this release: Aurélien Grimpard (first contribution!), @evilham and Nico Schottelius from ungleich.ch, and Chen Zhang.

Apart from the (many) releases, this week we have been working on supporting multi-device presence and more performance & stability improvements.

matrix-media-repo (website)

Matrix media repository with multi-domain in mind.

TravisR says

matrix-media-repo - v1.3.0

At 31k lines changed, the major refactoring is finally done. This release dramatically improves memory and CPU usage and supports fun features like horizontal scaling.

There is a security fix and a mandatory configuration change in this release as well.

Though tested in production on t2bot.io, not every environment is like t2bot.io - please give it a test in your staging environment before deploying it to production, and report any bugs or anomalies here. If you run into issues running the new version, please visit #media-repo:t2bot.io on Matrix. Check out the changelog for more details.

Also, Profile-Guided Optimization is enabled with this release. If you run a large deployment of MMR, please get in touch (DM @travis:t2l.io) to anonymously submit your CPU profiles.

Dept of Clients 📱

Element X iOS (website)

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

Ștefan says

Another week another TWIM 🍪 This week we focused on:

• Some new and pretty UI
• Message composer formatting actions and a brand new rich text editor mode
• A lot of not-so-simple-after-all bug fixes and tweaks
  • Fixed incorrect app notification badges
  • Fixed the reaction details screen not updating for the selected reaction
  • Fixed iPad split mode breaking the navigation hierarchy
  • Fixed opening links without URL schemes
  • Moved sync indicator management to the Rust side and better integrated it
  • Stopped the sync service blindly retrying to authentication errors
  • And more..
• Support for embedded Element Call links
• And more progress OIDC support and correct flow handling

See you same time same place next week 👋🥠

Element X Android (website)

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

benoit reports

• Element X Android 0.1.6 has reached production on the PlayStore! See our blog post here: https://element.io/blog/element-x-android-preview/
• In the meantime we are fixing issues and are working to improve the performance (again!)
• We are also making progress to integrate Element Call
• The Rich Text Editor is now merged on develop and markdown support is disabled for now, waiting for Rich Text Editor toggle to draft formatted messages.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Johannes Marbach reports

• We’ve continued extending our notification test suite. Several new tests are done and running locally but we’re, sadly, blocked on landing them because of issues with our CI.
• We’re still hoping to unlabs the room header redesign soon but have to take a step back to first fix a few unexpected regressions caused by the work.
• Our quest to transition from Weblate to Localazy continues. All strings in element-web and element-desktop have been re-keyed and migrated. We’ll continue doing the same for the React SDK where the bulk of our strings are.

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 announces

• We made significant progress on OIDC, in particular making it usable on iOS where multiple separate processes have to communicate around token refresh
• We removed the matrix-sdk-appservice crate
  • It hasn't been properly maintained for a while, due to lack of capacity
  • If you are interested in reviving it (as a separate project), come talk to us
• Lots of bugs were fixes, notably:
  • Ignoring/Unignoring a user didn't trigger a timeline refresh
  • Race condition in multi-process setups
  • QR scanning was padding-sensitive for no real reason
  • Timeline items sometimes "losing" replied-to event data

Dept of Ops 🛠

synadm (website)

Command line admin tool for Synapse (Matrix reference homeserver)

jacksonchen666 announces

Due to new features in Synapse 1.91, we made and released synadm v0.43.

Some new stuff that now syandm supports:

• User (un)locking
• Admin/Non-admin user filtering
• Seeing the current version of synadm with --versions

Most of these came from new features in Synapse 1.91, at least for the admin API.

That's the synadm release for today, made today.

(We're also working on trying to fix some issues with the user modify API in synadm (not Synapse). If you have better ideas (after reviewing the initial idea), chime in! See the (draft) PR for more info: https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm/pull/126)

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

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: T-shirt preorder ends at 2023-09-10T23:59:59 CEST to give us enough time to order them, have them produced, and have them shipped to us, so please order your T-shirt in time if you want one! There are 4 versions available, and some of the tickets also include a T-shirt.

Please do also buy your ticket (including free tickets) as soon as possible. Registration at least using the free Community ticket is mandatory, because it enables us to gauge how much food we need to organize in order to feed everyone. If you are participating as a speaker, please do still get a ticket!

Summary:

• 📆 View the schedule 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 (invoicing is possible!) so we can provide everyone with food and drinks.
• 👕 T-Shirts available for preordering, you can choose from 4 designs!
• 🗣️ The call for participation ended on 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.
• 🗨️ 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!

See you soon in Berlin!

Dept of Thib Never Learns

Every single time, Thib forgets starting a message with TWIM… adds a message to the TWIM report.

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	maunium.net	455
2	neko.dev	715
3	btln.de	725.5
4	maescool.be	954
5	halogen.place	1044
6	tcpip.uk	1501.5
7	nerdhouse.io	1520
8	raizo.dev	2531
9	mailstation.de	2935
10	wcore.org	2975.5

#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	777.tf	196
2	dendrite.kootstra.frl	250
3	kanp.ai	251
4	inu.is	252
5	matrix.org	398.5
6	littlevortex.net	404
7	toyli.dev	604
8	noisytoot.org	614
9	feline.support	791
10	herkinf.de	6094

That's all I know

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