This Week in Matrix 2023-11-17

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:

• MSC4080: Cryptographic Identities (Client-Owned Identities)
• MSC4079: Server-Defined User Home Pages
• MSC4078: Transparent pusher creation
• MSC4077: Improved process for handling deprecated HTML features
• MSC4076: Let E2EE clients calculate app & E2EE-room badge counts themselves

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC4072: Handling devices with no one-time keys in /keys/claim

Spec Updates

Cross-posting from TravisR's announcement in the Office of the Spec Core Team room...

Matrix 1.9

The next release, Matrix 1.9, is scheduled for release on Wednesday, November 29, 2023. This will largely be a maintenance release, but if there's anything you think we might have missed, please let us know.

Matrix 1.10

The Spec Core Team is now accepting MSC and feature suggestions towards the Matrix 1.10 release, due sometime around FOSDEM in February (unsure if it'll be before or after). So far we've got the following features up for consideration:

• Extensible Events (at least proposing FCP on the majority of the core system; plan to merge for Matrix 1.11)
• Encrypted appservices (like MSC2409)
• Custom emoji/stickers (merge)

If there's specific MSCs, or even vague ideas you'd like the SCT to focus on, let us know in the Office of the Spec Core Team room. The SCT will generally find it harder to actually write the MSCs ourselves, but if you're planning on implementing a feature that will need spec review, let us know so we can ensure bandwidth is made available for that review to happen.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3394: New auth rule that only allows someone to post a message in relation to another message!

This MSC is paving the way towards the use case of a room where, for instance, announcements can be made by admins, while general users can start or participate in a thread branched off from an announcement. But they otherwise would not be able to make "top-level" posts.

This feature is common in services such as Telegram, for announcement or support rooms. And it would be nice to be able to support the same kind of use case in Matrix.

It looks like I dropped the ball on keeping up with the discussion on this one. So excuse me while I go do that!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

clokep reports

Synapse 1.96.1 was released (note that 1.96.0 was skipped due to issues releasing). It includes:

• Support for multiple receipts workers.
• Some new module APIs.
• Performance improvements
• Many bugfixes!

Check it out and let us know of any issues.

Additionally, synapse-s3-storage-provider 1.3.0 was released to fix some incompatibilities with newer dependencies used in Synapse.

This past week has also seen Erik land a bunch more performance improvements, especially when using workers. Support for asynchronous uploads was finally merged, thanks to Sumner Evans from Beeper.

Dept of Clients 📱

Commet (website)

airyz announces

Hello! today we are announcing the latest minor update, v0.1.3! This contains mostly small bug fixes and UI Improvements, as well as a few quality of life features!

What's New?

• Rooms and spaces shared between multiple accounts are visually distinguished
• Improved HTML Rendering
• Implemented lazy loading of room members
• Zoom and pan on images and video
• Background task indicator for downloads
• Direct messages in spaces are now visually distinct from rooms

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where a room shared between multiple logged in accounts wouldn't open correctly
• Fixed notifications being displayed for old messages

Release: https://github.com/commetchat/commet/releases/tag/v0.1.3

Join Our Room Github Twitter Mastodon

FluffyChat (website)

Krille-chan announces

FluffyChat v1.15.1 has been released with a lot of bugfixes and updated translations.This release also finally makes it possible to select text in the chat on web, desktop but also on mobile. Please be aware that the default long press behavior to select events has changed to normal taps because of this.

For the next release you can also expect the return of presences. While this feature is disabled on matrix.org, it seems to work fine on other servers. The app tries to filter out users from servers where presences are disabled to not display them as always-offline. I hope this works fine. As far as I can see, the difference is that on server with presences enabled there is always a „last_active_ago“ field in the presence content. So the app assumes that, if the user is offline and last_active_ago is NOT set, then it is better to just not display the presence status at all.

Element X iOS (website)

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

Ștefan announces

We took this week to work on some polish for Element X and squished a host of bugs, including:

• Tweaked the pin lock screen so it hides the app faster
• Changed a lot of the icons [1], [2] and [3]
• Started displaying which rooms have an active call in the room list
• Added accessibility for read receipts
• .. and much much more

Element X Android (website)

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

benoit says

Element X Android 0.3.1 is available on the PlayStore. We spent the week fixing bugs and improving our codebase. We are also adding the read marker and read receipt rendering to the timeline and are also progressing on the mention epic. Jorge also made a big improvement on the release time for the Rust SDK. It now takes around 20 minutes, previously it was up to 5 hours!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle reports

Element Web/Desktop

• We’ve tightened scope and started reviewing feedback and iterating on the new room header and right panel designs. Keep your feedback coming, we’d love to hear it!
  • If you don’t have the new header already, go ahead and try it out on Element Develop by using the labs flag: “Under active development, new room header & details interface”
• The team’s been working on streamlining the process we use to release Element Web. We’ve simplified it and are working through different testing tools to ensure that we’ve got our automated tests running smoothly.
• Our week has also been focussed on reducing the number of failing notification tests by fixing bugs and working through the test suite.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-nio (website)

Paarth Shah says

Another full release 0.23.0 of is out as of a few minutes ago (right as I'm typing this), with some nice bugfixes, nicer features, and important progress for a whole lot more (I'll give you a hint: 🧵)

Notable changes (full changes here):

• Introduce querying for m.direct
• Propagating asyncio.CancelledError properly, following official asyncio standards
• Allowing custom ToDeviceEvents via UnknownToDeviceEvent (use this wisely, and consult the spec!)
• Allowing arbitrary callable/awaitable objects to be set as a callback (don't limit yourself to functions and coroutines!)

A sincere thank you to everyone who contributed!

Dept of Bots 🤖

MatrixJoinLink (website)

Dominik reports

MatrixJoinLink is bot that allows the creation of invite links to non-public rooms in matrix.

Several months have passed since I initially introduced the bot in TWIM. In the interim, I've seamlessly incorporated the bot into various work related contexts as well as in private contexts. The bot addresses the challenge of being unable to invite individuals via a link to a non-public room or space. Since my last announcement, I further improved UX. The bot is now able to deal with various room identifiers (i.e., matrix.to links, internal room ids, and public room aliases).

How to use JoinLink

MatrixJoinLink simplifies the process of inviting users to non-public spaces. Here's a guide on how to make the most of it:

1. Invite the bot into your room.
2. Once the bot joins, use the command !join help to explore its features. Please note that the bot responds exclusively to users or servers configured by the bot owner.
3. To create a Join Link, kindly type !join link Demonstration_Link, and the bot will promptly generate a join link for you. Ensure that the bot has the necessary permissions to invite users.

Help

Creation of Join Links (with Developer Mode Details)

Entering a Join Link Room

Feel free to test the bot and raise any issue using GitHub or using the development room that is mentioned in the project's README. Also consult the README for technical details.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

FOSDEM 2024

Thib reports

a heads-up that the Matrix.org Foundation & Community Devroom has been accepted at FOSDEM24 You can find the CfP here, and submit your talk propositions before December 4

Centralize the Matrix Community at the Chaos Congress

Nico says

As you may know, the 37th Chaos Congress takes place in Hamburg, 27.-30.12.2023. If you don't know, the Chaos Congress is a collection of cool people mostly from the different Chaos communities to talk about interesting topics ranging from technology all the way to politics. You will however need a ticket, which will only be available in very limited quantities.

Similar to the what we already did at the Chaos camp, we have applied for an assembly at the congress. An assembly basically is a few tables with people centered around a topic, where you can join to chat, participate in workshops or even get someone to fix or setup your Matrix homeserver!

Currently the assembly is not yet approved. However we are announcing it now, so that you can give it some thought if you want to participate and maybe help shape the Matrix Community assembly!

Since the proposal isn't public yet, there is no link to share to find more information about it. But if you are helping to organize the assemblies, you can find it in the backoffice. So for now (and for later), if you want to discuss it, suggest things to do or have other comments, feel free to join us in #chaosevents:matrix.org!

So far we don't have a program yet, but maybe you have a cool workshop you want to do in our small round? Or maybe you just want to hang out and maybe answer questions people have about Matrix? Or maybe you just want to meet some Matrix developers, that you have always looked up to, to complain about how this one button is slightly of center when running their client on your PDP11?

In the end YOU can decide what you want this assembly to be, but now at least you know about it (if it gets approved)! Further updates will follow as we make progress and when we think you may have forgotten about us!

Matrix Federation Stats

Aine reports

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 8251 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 2068 (25.1%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 274767 rooms. Do you know what room isn't one of them? There are no rooms about backpacking among them, so if you're wondering "what an interesting room I can create to find great people to socialize with" - a room about backpacking would be a great choice!

How to add your server | How to remove your server

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	252
2	nerdhouse.io	259
3	tcpip.uk	278.5
4	rom4nik.pl	280
5	shortestpath.dev	330
6	nevarro.space	356
7	pleasemakemeri.ch	450
8	forgedtheir.phd	540
9	badti.me	558
10	matrix.rainer-zufall.tk	598

#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	dendrite.s3cr3t.me	138
2	inet6.in	154
3	kumma.juttu.asia	159
4	dendrite.matrix.org	213
5	kanp.ai	221
6	inu.is	224
7	pleasemakemeri.ch	340
8	herkinf.de	362
9	matrix.amcforum.wiki	414
10	matrix.its-tps.fr	423

That's all I know

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