This Week in Matrix 2024-04-26

Matrix Live

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons says

We’re positively glowing as we see all the people who are being nominated for our first ever Governing Board elections! The nomination period closes April 26 end of day (AOE time) and we’ll be posting all the nominees on our new election information center within 24 hours after the period closes.

Further, we’re pleased to welcome our 12th Ecosystem Member this week: Fractal 🎉

Does your project or community use Matrix? Does your business benefit from Matrix? Join the Matrix.org Foundation as a member to make your voice heard and secure the future of Matrix.

Dept of Spec 📜

uhoreg reports

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:

• MSC4136: Shared retry hints

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC4126: Deprecation of query string auth

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit (website)

Conduit is a simple, fast and reliable chat server powered by Matrix

Timo ⚡️ announces

We did it! Finally, Conduit version v0.7.0 released, bringing features, improvements, but also some security fixes, so it's advised you upgrade as soon as possible.

It took some time, but I find it very important to do extensive code reviews, which finds both minor and major problems more often than not.

• BREAKING: The docker container changed. You need to explicitly set CONDUIT_CONFIG="" now to reproduce the previous behavior. You might also have to add expose: - 6167 to your docker compose config.
• BREAKING: Require explicit database backend, you need to explicitly set it to sqlite or rocksdb now !636
• Feature: Add support for room v11 !562
• Feature: Bump default room version to v10 !628
• Feature: Use _matrix-fed._tcp SRV record, fallback to _matrix._tcp !616
• Feature: Add argument parser for the conduit executable !385
• Docs: Add registration_token in default cfg and DEPLOY !557
• Docs: Build docs using mdBook and copy all markdown files !604
• Docs: Document all configuration options !635
• Improvement: Sliding Sync Improvements !549
• Improvement: Improvements to /sync performance and db size !590
• Improvement: Declare matrix v1.5 support !568
• Improvement: Use upstream reqwest instead of vendored one !527
• Improvement: do not save typing edus in db !597
• Improvement: Remove log config modification !553
• Improvement: use simpler rocksdb config !602
• Fix: Unrejectable invites !623
• Fix: ACL error shouldn't break the whole request !542
• Fix: Avoid panic when client is confused about rooms !588
• Fix: Send push notification on invite to invited user and etc !559
• Fix: Don't give guests admin !591
• Fix: Do not allow administration of remote users !614
• Fix: Remove join_authorized_via_users_server field on state update !619 !385
• Fix: Do not expect that all http requests are valid reqwest requests !611

conduwuit (website)

strawberry (it/pup/she/they) 🏳️‍⚧️ 🦴💜🩷 reports

a very cool, featureful fork of Conduit

conduwuit is a well-maintained, hard-fork of Conduit with tons of new features, many bug fixes, huge performance improvements, quality of life enhancements, moderation tools, and much more! I have been working on this since January and progress has been outstanding. It's time to share my joy with all of you too. The best part: conduwuit is a full drop-in replacement for Conduit. It's fully database compatible, with no migration necessary. You can even go back if you don't like it.

Check out the full list of differences here. There is so much. I can only highlight some of the big stuff:

• 👁️ Read-receipts federated in real-time.
• ⌨️ Typing indicators over federation.
• 🙋‍♀️ Complete presence support.

All of these features are fast. Your client will feel snappy. Conduwuit has been the leading server in both #ping:maunium.net and #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net for many weeks in a row.

I encourage you to give it a try and join #conduwuit:puppygock.gay 💜. The public homeserver I host running conduwuit is available for use by entering transfem.dev as the server-name in your client of choice.

I'd like to personally thank various contributors for helping me get conduwuit going: @jason:075-141-169-120.res.spectrum.com:8447 for everything, from performance and optimisation, to the core Matrix things and some features. @tom:doctoruwu.uk for the Docker CI and other Docker related work. @morguldir:sulian.eu for Docker and Nix-CI work. @charles:computer.surgery for the initial GitHub Actions CI port and help with various Nix-related things. @benjamin:computer.surgery for getting tokio-console working to optimise and test this release. @qubic:qubicfluff.pl for Complement with Nix, misc Nix work for macOS, and working on a load tester written in Rust for conduwuit. @jason:littlevortex.net for finding critical bugs inherited from upstream, providing watcherbot: the essential toolbox for homeserver development, and Complement testing suite help. @raizo:raizo.dev for integrating loole to replace tokio channels which increased federation performance.

Special thanks to the various folks helping with development testing, code spot checks, and/or current donors not listed above: @aranjedeath:explodie.org, @efscher:matrix.nyc.what.if.ua, @frebib:spritsail.io, @k900:0upti.me, and everyone else who helps out.

• GitHub
• GitHub Releases
• DockerHub
• NixOS

Chat with us in #conduwuit:puppygock.gay

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the Element

anoa says

This week Element released Synapse v1.105.1, which is a security release that fixes a denial of service attack. If you haven't upgraded already, please do!

Otherwise, a new release candidate went out yesterday! Synapse v1.106.0rc1 contains new features that are available for testing ahead of next week's full release. This release candidate contains the security fix from v1.105.1. Please test this release candidate and file bugs if you're able to. Thanks!

Dept of Clients 📱

Element X Android (website)

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

benoit reports

• We have focused on 2 main topics this week:
  • permalink navigation: this will land very soon, thanks to new APIs provided by the SDK, which allow you to navigate to any event of a timeline. Room and user navigation is already available on the nightly version. Once this is done, we will handle navigating to a replied event, and also external link navigation, to let Element X open matrix.to links.
  • Login with QR code: while there were very positive tests on login using a QR code, the last tweaks and tests are being added and it'll need some time to be fully stable.
• We have also improved the verification screen to help users if they need to create a new recovery key.
• And the bug around re-verifying verified sessions has been fixed.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for developing Clients, Bots, Appservices and Servers

Benedict reports

Another Trixnity release this week:

features:

• added thread_id to SetReceipt

bugfixes:

• fix deserialzation of redacted m.room.encrypted events
• always handle unencrypted content

Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart.

td announces

meep quick update, matrix 0.28.0 released, here's a summary:

v0.28.0

This release introduces the new famedly calls, it brings 1:1, mesh and livekit calls support to the matrix dart sdk, read more at: voip docs

Here's the generated changelog:

• feat: famedly calls (td)
• chore: create_gh_release job (td)
• feat: lcov and tag olm tests (td)
• fix: Make room.setPower more type safe and avoid change powerlevel in RAM before sending request to server (krille-chan)
• refactor: Use prevBatch from server for pagination in event search (krille-chan)
• fix: canChangePowerLevel should return true for own user (krille-chan)

That's it, see you soon bye byee

Elm SDK (website)

A more consistent alternative to the matrix-js-sdk, written in Elm.

Bram reports

Today, version 3.1.0 is out! It exposes a Matrix.Room module that allows users to view and manipulate Matrix rooms.

With the main functionality (rooms) being implemented, the Elm SDK is soon arriving at one of its first versions where a basic client can be built in beta. Soon, the first Elm client since Scylla and the chess client will be able to emerge. 🌱

Dept of Bots 🤖

Pok'em (website)

Patrick announces

A notification helper bot. It lets you send messages to a Matrix room using an HTTP request, website, or CLI. The name is a shortening of "Poke Them"

If you're familiar with ntfy.sh, this is similar but will work only for Matrix.

I consider this to be mostly feature complete already.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix Conference 2024

Thib announces

TWIM And let me start with a small yet huge announcement. THE MATRIX CONFERENCE IS HAPPENING!!

Building on the success of the volunteer-led Matrix Community Summit of last year, the Foundation is going big this year and organising the Matrix Conference in Berlin from September 19th to 22nd!

Stay tuned on the Matrix.org blog and look out for a Call for Papers!

Matrix User Meetup Berlin

saces announces

Next Matrix user meetup 1.5.2024, 8 pm @ c-base

Meet other matrix users, chat about Matrix, the rest, and everything else, discuss your Matrix ideas, sign each other in persona, and maybe spice the evening with a good mate or beer.

Also when the bbq is lit you may wish you brougth your favorite item :)

Every first Wednesday of the month in the c-base at 8pm ('til the next pandemic).

Matrix room: #mumb:c-base.org

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Chaz (website)

Patrick says

It's an AI model frontend in Matrix, that connects to many different backends. There is a blog post introducing it as well.

Chaz is a Matrix bot that uses your AIChat config to connect to ChatGPT, local ollama instance, Claude, or other LLM APIs and provide a chat experience from within Matrix. If you're familiar with things like "Open WebUI", "SillyTavern", etc, this is similar but more limited.

There is a demo instance, but right now this is something that you'll need to run yourself so that you can use your own API keys to access the backends.

Fractal Networks HomeServer

Mo announces

TWIM: Fractal Networks announces Fractal HomeServer, a Matrix powered self-hosting platform and reference implementation of the Fractal Network architecture: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1catzwg/introducing_fractal_homeserver/

Matrix Federation Stats

Aine says

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

As of today, 9514 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 2853 (30.0%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 161741 rooms.

Stats timeline is available on MatrixRooms.info/stats

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	doctoruwu.uk	229
2	uwu.sulian.eu	296
3	nerdhouse.io	304
4	synapse.rntpts.de	327
5	spritsail.io	338.5
6	girlboss.ceo	394
7	aguiarvieira.pt	444
8	lewd.social	449
9	craftingcomrades.net	454
10	littlevortex.net	537.5

#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	doctoruwu.uk	93
2	uwu.sulian.eu	110
3	spritsail.io	149
4	girlboss.ceo	215.5
5	aguiarvieira.pt	231
6	frai.se	259
7	feline.support	264
8	matrix.its-tps.fr	274.5
9	puppygock.gay	288.5
10	craftingcomrades.net	306

That's all I know

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