This Week in Matrix 2024-02-02

Matrix Live

No Matrix Live this week, but there will be plenty of Matrix talks (live!) on Sunday at FOSDEM in the Matrix devroom, and at Matthew's main track talk. The talks are livestreamed, so you can follow even if you aren't at FOSDEM (or if you are in FOSDEM but the room is full). If you are at FOSDEM, you can also find live Matrix people at the matrix.org stand in Building K, level 2.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons announces

Announced today during the EU Open Source Policy Summit in Brussels, the Matrix.org Foundation and Mozilla have joined OpenForum Europe as supporters. OpenForum Europe has proven an effective convener and advocate for open source and open standards in Europe, and we’re glad to help further that work.

Josh Simmons announces

This week the Matrix.org Foundation launched a new fundraiser, shared some high level budget figures, and kicked off a series diving into our emerging roadmap!

We’ve made huge strides over the last year, with the Foundation more robust and independent than ever before, and there’s a lot to be excited about in the future. Critically, we still need more organizations to step up to fund our work before January 2025.

Huge thanks to Beeper, Gematik, Fractal Networks, Fairkom, Thunderbird, and the hundreds of individuals who have already stepped up! Learn more in our blog post and become a member today 🚀

Dept of Spec 📜

uhoreg says

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:

• MSC4095: Bundled URL previews
• [WIP] MSC4094: Sync Server and Client Times with endpoint

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC3981: /relations recursion
• MSC2702: Specifying semantics for Content-Disposition on media
• MSC2701: Clarifying Content-Type usage in the media repo

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

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+.

Mauro Romito announces

• A new release candidate 1.5.5 has been submitted to the store, which will include the advanced setting of turning off read receipts when visiting rooms
• Implemented a tool that downloads the translations for the SAS emojis verification system directly from the matrix spec, to localise the emoji names in the app
• The macOS and iPad OS support now a quick room search feature by using the CMD+K command, that can be opened from anywhere
• Redundant or unnecessary state events will now be filtered and removed from the timeline without the risk of compromising RRs.
• Element Call, will now have its calls automatically start as encrypted based on the room encryption state in which they are started.
• We are working to improve the error message that can be received when selecting invalid homeservers

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Circles (website)

E2E encrypted social networking built on Matrix. Safe, private sharing for your friends, family, and community.

cvwright reports

Circles is a secure social networking app for families and friends, built on Matrix to give users privacy and control. We have new releases on both mobile platforms this week.

Circles for Android is now available in the main F-Droid.org repo: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.futo.circles/

• The current F-Droid version is 1.0.24
• A new update 1.0.25 is in the pipeline, bringing fixes for threaded replies and UnifiedPush

Circles for iOS continues inching ever closer to a 1.0 release, with two new builds this week on TestFlight

• v0.9.3 brings smoother and more reliable signup/login, fixes for decryption bugs in v0.9.2, and better support for brand-new accounts that do not have secret storage already configured
• v0.9.4 makes the app much more usable on the iPad

Source code is available as always at https://gitlab.futo.org/circles and https://github.com/futo-org/

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Elm SDK

Bram says

In the past week, a major refactor has been finalized that only results in a patch change given Elm's semantic versioning: the Elm types can easily be encoded and decoded, as can be found in its documentation. From now on, any Elm update is reflected on its documentation: starting from the new patch update beta 2.1.2!

I am still looking for feedback on how to design a proper immutable timeline data structure - if you have any tips, please help me out at the public #elm-sdk:matrix.org room! Thanks.

Rory&::LibMatrix (.NET 8 matrix bot/client library/SDK)

Emma [it/its] says

Some larger changes this time around, although organisational.

Changes

• FederationClient has been split out from RemoteHomeserver (access is available through rhs.FederationClient, if we were able to find the s2s API)
• Federation API resolution failure no longer causes client initialisation failure (commonly caused by CORS)
• MessageBuilder now has more functionality (eg. adding a HTML tag with attributes)
• Sync filters now get uploaded to /filters and referenced by ID, rather than only being able to pass them in the URL. This also allows uploading them yourself. Utility functions have been provided to store/request them by names, if wanted.
• BIG CHANGE: LibMatrix is no longer a monorepo! All example bots have been split out into separate repositories

New features

• You can now enumerate account data
• You can now call /capabilities

And, as always:

• The code is available at cgit.rory.gay!
  • All contributions are more than welcome, be it documentation, code, anything! Perhaps, example usecases, bots, ...?
• Discussion, suggestions and ideas are welcome in #libmatrix:rory.gay (Space: #mru-space:rory.gay)
• Got a cool project that you're working on and want to share, using LibMatrix? Be sure to let me know, I'd love to hear all about it!

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict announces

New minor version of Trixnity this week:

features/improvements:

• support matrix 1.8 and 1.9
• Add platform (a.k.a. BOM) configuration and tweak some gradle config. Thanks to @daphil19
• remove extensions in SyncApiClient, that are not needed anymore
• add internal concurrent (left right) collections

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

MTRNord reports

Group image from the Matrix Fringe Event at FOSDEM 👋

Dept of Guides 🧭

Matrix client tutorial

uhoreg says

My Matrix client tutorial has had a few new sections added to it: handling m.room.encryption events (and disallowing encryption from being disabled once enabled), detecting replay attacks, and discarding outbound sessions. Next up will be writing a simple bot to demonstrate encryption, and then I'm planning on going through the encryption section again and tidying things up.

Matrix Federation Stats

Aine announces

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

As of today, 8738 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 2463 (28.2%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 166459 rooms.

How to add your server | How to remove your server

That's all I know

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