This Week in Matrix 2024-02-09

Matrix Live

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew says

Very happy to announce that the Spec Core Team has been reviewing how to make more progress on MSCs and get more organisational diversity into the SCT, and we've decided to expand the team - unanimously voting to add both tulir and clokep to the team effective today. Huge thanks to both tulir and clokep for being up for joining and donating their time... and looking forwards to their contributions in helping get MSCs to and through their Final Comment Period and merged into the spec!

Josh Simmons says

We’re excited to be forging stronger ties with other open source foundations, so that we can work together and lean on one another’s areas of expertise. Last week we announced that the Matrix.org Foundation joined OpenForum Europe as a supporter alongside Mozilla and many others.

Adding to that, we’re pleased to share that we have become an affiliate of the Open Source Initiative and joined their Open Policy Alliance, and we’ve also joined the Eclipse Foundation as an associate member.

We look forward to going further, faster, together! 🚀

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:

• MSC4098: Use the SCIM protocol for provisioning
• [WIP] MSC4097: Interactions between media redirection and authentication
• MSC4096: Proposal to make forceTurn option configurable server-side

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2705: Animated thumbnails for media (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3924: Capability-style access control for Matrix media - closed in favour of MSC3911: Linking media to events

Dept of Clients 📱

SchildiChat (website)

SchildiChat is a fork of Element that focuses on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list for both direct messages and groups, which is a more familiar approach to users of other popular instant messengers.

SpiritCroc announces

SchildiChat Next, our SchildiChat Android rewrite based on Element X, has received a couple of updates since our last report.

First, spaces support has matured. We now properly integrate the space filter with sliding sync, which means that when you filter for spaces, you're less likely to encounter missing room previews. Additionally, aggregated space unread counts and swipe gesture to switch spaces are back, and user-chosen space sort order is now respected.

Independent of spaces but also related to features that our old Android app had, you can now mark rooms as unread again, following MSC2867. Similarly, incoming HTML details-tags in formatted messages as sent by some bots are now collapsed by default again, allowing you to expand them on demand by touching the message.

Since Element X has added support for UnifiedPush, we naturally have that back now too. However, I changed our implementation a bit to use UnifiedPush's FOSS FCM distributor, which means that ideally we can avoid having to maintain two separate app flavors for the Play Store and F-Droid releases in the future (once we do stable releases), and those who install it from F-Droid can still use FCM for push notifications if their device supports it, while not having any closed-source Google library bundled with the app. I'm curious how well this works, so let us know if you have any issues with FCM that you cannot reproduce on Element X! Custom user-installed push distributors are given precedence over FCM, of course.

On the infrastructure side, translations of our SchildiChat-specific strings added on top of Element are now open for contributions at our weblate. Thank you to everyone who has already contributed!

FluffyChat (website)

Krille-chan announces

FluffyChat v1.17.3 has been released 🎉 with a bunch of bugfixes and the return of the wallpaper feature. This time it works on all platforms and is synchronized between your sessions.

Full changelog:

• feat: New account data based wallpaper feature (Krille)

• build: Update dependencies (Krille)

• build: Update flutter to 3.16.9 (Krille)

• build: Update matrix dart sdk to 0.25.7 (Krille)

• build: Update minor versions (Krille)

• chore: Adjust status msg design (krille-chan)

• chore: Improved error handling for recovery key (Krille)

• chore: Make stickers smaller (Krille)

• chore: Wait for device keys before ask bootstrap (Krille)

• fix: Missing null check in public room bottom sheet (Krille)

• fix: onDragDone crashes when no files found (Krille)

• fix: Render tg-forward html tags (Krille)

• fix: Use HapticFeedback.selectionClick() for long press on message (Krille)

• fix: whitespaces sometimes encoded in html message (Krille)

• fix: Share invite links of public rooms (Krille)

Element X iOS (website)

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

Ștefan reports

• Element X v1.5.5 is now available on the AppStore. release notes
• Manually marking rooms as unread has made it to develop
• and so has an initial version of the room list filters
• we have moved member details loading to the member detail page and are not no longer blocking the whole application while that's happening
• fixed a crash when receiving thumbnails with zero widths or heights
• various other improvements to the rich text editor, compound and out testing stack

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Circles (website)

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

cvwright says

This week we fixed a particularly bad bug that had appeared in recent Circles iOS beta releases, where the app would fail to resume syncing with the server under certain conditions. We released v0.9.5 which (we think!) finally resolved the last of the sync issues. Then we also released a further update v0.9.6 to address a corner case where users could not decrypt messages posted between the time when they were initially invited and when they finally joined the room. With these two beta releases, we believe we have resolved all known decryption issues. It should be smoother sailing from here! The latest Circles iOS build is available for beta testers on Apple's TestFlight.

On Android, Circles v1.0.25 is now available on F-Droid.org and in beta release on the Play Store.

Source code for both platforms is available as always from the FUTO Gitlab and from our Github mirrors.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

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

Emma [it/its] says

This week has some minor changes and cleanup

Changes

• room.GetNameOrFallbackAsync() now returns alias before building from member list
• Cleaned up the EventTypes sub-library to consistently have EventId constants defined, for easy access
• room.GetManyMessagesAsync(...) now has an optional chunkSize property, in order to cap the limit= sent on the API.
• Applied syntax style across all of LibMatrix

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!

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

HarHarLinks announces

Hello TWIM! The Matrix Foundation and Community were at FOSDEM last weekend (#fosdem2024-foundation-community-meetup:matrix.org) so we want to share this quick look back:

Thank you everyone for joining us at FOSDEM 2024! We had a great time and hope everyone arrived back home well and healthy, and wish anyone still on the road for other conferences or travelling reaaaally far a safe journey!

The Matrix Foundation and Community would like to thank Hackerspace Brussels (on Matrix: #hsbxl:matrix.org) for hosting the meetup on Friday on their premises again, and particular everyone involved with opening the gate for new arrivals, tending the bar, helping with pizza orders, and all the small odd things that need to get handled during such an event. We wish you the best for your move to the new location in the coming weeks and look forward to visiting you there next year! 🧑‍💻

We also want to express our gratitude to the sponsors of the Fringe event: Thanks to Nordeck (#nordeck:matrix.org) and Famedly covering the cost, the Foundation was able to provide drinks and pizzas for everyone at the Fringe event! 🍻

Speaking of pizza, special thanks to Adrian and Pommodoro Brussels for the excellent pizza and for fulfilling all our requests for vegetarian and vegan pizza! 🍕

Finally on behalf of the Community group co-organizing the fringe event, I'd like to thank the Foundation for the great support with planning and also covering the administrative tasks such as the financials! 🤝

On Saturday and Sunday there was the Matrix stand on the first second upper level of building K. I must say it was incredibly busy. We had so many visitors come by - we distributed thousands of Matrix stickers and 100 T-shirts! Thanks to everyone helping at and around the stand, answering questions, collecting donations, helping with the T-shirts sales! And thanks to everyone visiting the stand to say hi and chat, to ask your question, learn about Matrix, or give your feedback! 👕

On Sunday afternoon there was the Matrix devroom in H.1309 (Van Rijn)! Thanks to everyone presenting their project, thanks to the devroom hosts and helpers, and thanks to the FOSDEM and VOC crew for helping out and recording the sessions! The recordings should be available through the FOSDEM website and are also mirrored on YouTube by the Foundation. 🗣️

Thank you to all the individuals and organisations who signed up to support the Matrix Foundation, be it during FOSDEM or before! If you haven't yet, learn more here! 🫂

Finally, thanks to YOU for attending! Be it in person at the Fringe event, the stand, the main track talk, the devroom, or online in the chat room and stream! It was great to meet everyone and now as we are arriving back home, we can already not wait to see you again next time! 👋

Find the FOSDEM 2024 Wrap Up blog post on the Matrix.org blog for a summary, some photos, and links to the video recordings of the Matrix talks!

Thib announces

Whether you could make it to FOSDEM or not, here's our wrap-up from the conference. If you missed some talks, you can catch up with the YouTube Playlist of all the talks (or find the original recordings on https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/matrix/ but those have audio/video sync issues)

Matrix Federation Stats

Aine announces

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

As of today, 8777 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 2497 (28.4%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 20591 rooms. unpublished and offline rooms were removed

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	245.5
2	aguiarvieira.pt	246.5
3	ari.lt	259
4	nerdhouse.io	261
5	fostered.uk	268
6	plocki.org	336
7	lama-corp.space	391
8	sulian.eu	518
9	2345781.xyz	676.5
10	matrix.its-tps.fr	707.5

#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	ari.lt	113
2	fostered.uk	124
3	aguiarvieira.pt	143
4	nerdhouse.io	145
5	frai.se	165.5
6	matrix.its-tps.fr	170
7	daedric.net	281
8	inu.is	313

That's all I know

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