This Week in Matrix 2023-09-22

Matrix Live

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib announces

Let me start right away with no less than a sneak peek at Matrix 2.0. Matthew walks us through the most exciting MSCs currently in flight with working implementations, that will be drastically changing the experience on Matrix.

One of those MSCs makes Matrix support OIDC. But Synapse already supports OIDC, right? If you want to learn more about the difference between OIDC and OIDC (sic) and how it's going to impact you, the auth team and I wrote a post for you.

Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR 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:

• No new MSCs this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

Spec Updates

This last week has been business as usual for us: working on furthering MIMI and other MSCs. Most notably though, thank you to Kévin Commaille for improving the OpenAPI definitions even further! We're still working through a couple of the PRs, but expect that all the improvements will land in Matrix 1.9 in November.

Matrix in the News 📰

HarHarLinks announces

Media coverage from summit! https://www.heise.de/news/Matrix-2-0-Echtzeit-Kommunikationsprotokoll-verspricht-mehr-Leistung-9313769.html

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

clokep announces

This week we released Synapse 1.92.3 in response to CVE-2023-4863,, a critical vulnerability in libwebp. Server administrators are encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible.

Synapse 1.93.0rc1 was released, some highlights include:

• Automatic purging of forgotten rooms. (Note that this is disabled by default and does not include rooms that were previously forgotten.)
• Restoring room purging across restarts.
• Support for MSC4040, updated SRV service name.
• Improved support for presence with multiple devices.
• Some performance improvements around server key & device fetching.

Thanks go out to all our contributors and testers. If you see any problems using Synapse, please file an issue.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Postmoogle (website)

An Email to Matrix bridge. 1 room = 1 mailbox.

Aine announces

Postmoogle 0.9.15 is here!

The hugest update of the etke.cc's email bridge is here!

The most notable changes are:

• More mailbox customization options (noinlines, noreplies were added)
• Fixes for edge cases, including synapse retention policy
• Support forwarded mailboxes (forwarded to postmoogle)
• Better mailbox spam control (spam:list, spam:add, spam:remove, spam:reset were added)
• SMTP Relay mode support (contributed by @n.bouma
• Shared Secret Auth support (contributed by @JeWe37)

Source code and don't forget to say hi in #postmoogle:etke.cc

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 announces

Happy Friday everybody! Element X 1.3.0 Ignition is now officially out, with even more improvements on what you came to expect and love about our next generation client:

• A new and shiny app icon
• An improved welcome screen
• Faster than ever app startup
• A lot of performance tweaks 1, 2, 3, 4
• Design polish on our rich text editor
• Better indicators for room notification settings
• And last but not least a massive 12% bump in code coverage

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Johannes Marbach announces

• Progress on extending our test suite for stuck notifications has carried on. We’re now at about 100 of 150 test cases being implemented. We’ve already identified multiple failures and are considering patching them up before completing the full suite.
• You may have spotted one or the other visual regression that made it into the wild as part of our Compound adoption. Thanks to everyone who reported issues and many apologies for the inconvenience. We’re in the process of fixing the fallout. Afterwards we’ll continue finishing up the UI refresh of the room header and details.
• Our strings are still being moved to the new Localazy instance but we’re past the midpoint now fortunately.

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

• Performance optimizations for the room list
• Add support for poll edits from old Element clients
• Fixed the autojoin example which was broken since a previous refactoring
• and lots of small FFI improvements!

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synatainer (website)

Synapse Maintenance Container – Docker container with tools for synapse & postgres database maintenance

saces says

Synatainer v0.4.3

Synapse Maintenance Container – Docker container with tools for synapse & postgres database maintenance

New in v0.4.3

• new tools container with synapse_auto_compressor/synapse_compress_state and find-unreferenced-state-groups, build for amd64 & arm64
• fresh builds, updates & fixes

Source: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

Department of Community Initiatives 👪️

For everything impulsed by the community that is not an Foundation initiative.

Matrix Community Forum

MTRNord announces

After some talks with some community people at summit I decided it may or may not (I am not sure, it depends on people using it!) make sense to extend the d4all forum to matrix in general :)

So tldr: https://forum.miki.community/categories can be used as a general Matrix place.

Obviously, please respect the official existing channels. Not all devs will be on the Forum. Please respect that. I am not trying to kill the existing places, but I am hoping to bring a less technical place for information that's able to last and be more easily searchable by non matrix users. Since I am not sure who wants to use it and who doesn't I didn't yet create categories. If there are projects interested in a category, feel free to open a topic in general with the "new-category" tag, or just ping me. :)

Any feedback is appreciated. This is somewhat of an experiment and is very much inspired by https://forum.ansible.com (Also thanks to Gwmngilfen for talking about it with me!)

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	dawsontalk.ca	529
2	tcpip.uk	576
3	maunium.net	620
4	nerdhouse.io	691
5	halogen.place	764
6	maescool.be	865
7	fosil.eu	1071
8	rom4nik.pl	1686
9	mailstation.de	2651
10	gly.one	3135

#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	kanp.ai	206
2	inu.is	262.5
3	matrix.org	300.5
4	777.tf	352
5	herkinf.de	553
6	noisytoot.org	579
7	matrix.its-tps.fr	679
8	littlevortex.net	903.5
9	chat.eutampieri.eu	1373
10	shiftsystems.net	1437

That's all I know

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