This Week in Matrix 2024-06-21

Matrix Live

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib (m.org) announces

Heads up that The Matrix Conference Call for Proposals is open until Wednesday 26 June, 10am Anywhere on Earth (23:59 CEST)!

Make some room in your schedule today, in the weekend or early next week to send your best proposals. We're interested in various types of talks: why your Matrix project is exciting, the (technical or non-technical) problems it solves, how Matrix fits in your organisation or community, exciting topics you want to tackle but need to find partners for, and more.

Whether you want to submit a short or long talk, or a workshop idea, head to http://2024.matrix.org to get all the conference details, or https://cfp.matrix.org to submit a proposal!

Dept of Social Good 🙆

Matthew reports

The EU council has withdrawn the vote on Chat Control, due to not having enough governments willing/able to gather to vote on it: https://stackdiary.com/eu-council-has-withdrawn-the-vote-on-chat-control/. Hopefully some of the severe pushback also has helped stave it off again (but it will likely resurface as a risk again in future)

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) {he/him} 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:

• MSC4159: Remove the deprecated name attribute on HTML anchor elements
• MSC4158: MatrixRTC focus information in .well-known
• MSC4157: Futures (widget api)
• MSC4156: Migrate server_name to via

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC4151: Reporting rooms (Client-Server API) (merge)
• MSC2867: Marking rooms as unread (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

Spec Updates

Matrix v1.11 was released! 🎉

See the blog post for all the juicy details. The post calls out MSC3916 - Authenticated Media specifically as both homeserver and client authors are heavily encouraged to implement it in the next few months.

See the blog post for implementation guidance for both camps. And look out for a post next week on the same blog from matrix.org, detailing their timeline for enforcing client authentication on new media in the near future.

Otherwise the v1.11 release featured many new spec clarifications and fixes. A big thank you to everyone who's gotten involved in the spec recently!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the Element

Devon Dmytro says

This week Synapse v1.109.0 was released. With it came early support for MSC3916, work towards native sliding sync support, alongside a number of bugfixes and other internal changes.

Thank you to all our contributors and those who test our release candidates! 🙂

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot (website)

A multi purpose multi platform bridge, formerly known as matrix-github

Andrew F reports

Hookshot 5.4.0 goes out

Hello, it's time for another Hookshot release. The major new feature this time around is Outbound Webhooks, which allows for sending outgoing HTTP requests to external services whenever a message appears in a Matrix room. Instructions on how to set that up are in the documentation.

There have also been numerous bugfixes to GitLab support, courtesy of Kévin Commaille!

5.4.1 on the way

In less-exciting news, we've seen issues when deploying 5.4.0 via Docker on arm64 environments. A patch release is coming up to work around that, so if you're running Hookshot in an affected environment, hold tight for the new release before upgrading.

As usual, please share your feedback in #hookshot:half-shot.uk!

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

Desktop client for Matrix using Qt and C++17.

Nico says

Since last week we had a release, this week was mostly spent tying up loose ends.

Our flathub build is out now: https://flathub.org/apps/im.nheko.Nheko It has a new appid, so you might see it in the store twice (until we build the old package as eol-rebase), but the new one finally has a shiny verification badge (which was one of the reasons we had to switch appids)!

We've also been fixing plenty of bugs, that nobody found in a year of release candidate testing, but only immediately after a release. Things like if you left a DM in some specific client, Nheko would crash when opening the invite dialog. Things you really only find with wider testing.

Nheko now also prompts you twice when exporting a password (thanks to Integral), so you won't typo your encryption key backup password as often and then be unable to access your backup.

All in all lots of nice and small improvements, that probably deserve a 0.12.1 rather soon.

Apart from that, Nheko now also is one of the featured clients on https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/. We didn't really ask for that and we don't know yet if we are ready for that kind of attention, but it also feels like a weirdly big step. Only time will tell, so... until next time!

FluffyChat (website)

The cutest instant messenger in the [matrix].

Krille-chan reports

FluffyChat v1.21.1 has been released with a hotfix for the app lock on iOS. It turned out that on some iOS devices there was no "Enter" button on the on screen keyboard anymore and the auto unlock on textfield update wasn't working after a Flutter upgrade. This fixes it by adding an additional button in the GUI which can be used in any case now. Furthermore FluffyChat v1.21.1 updates some translations and updates the Matrix Dart SDK.

See the full changelog here: https://github.com/krille-chan/fluffychat/releases/tag/v1.21.1

Element X iOS (website)

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

Doug says

• The Message Composer now supports saving and restoring draft messages when you close a room and come back to it later (this is incorrectly highlighted as enabled in the release notes for 1.6.11, however it will be in 1.6.12).
• Aside from that this week has been all about the bug fixes:
  • Show display names in more state events.
  • Handle URL detection better when there’s a trailing :.
  • Handle failures in the message sending queue better.
  • Room list timestamps are more consistent.

Element X Android (website)

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

Jorge announces

This past week we have been focusing our efforts in tweaking existing features and building some new ones!

• EX Android v0.4.14 has been made publicly available in Play Store! You can take a look at the changes here.
• Version 0.4.15 is now on open beta in Play Store too: it contains ringing call notifications for DMs, being able to customise your Element Call Widget base URL using a new element.json config file in your HS and some improvements to the rageshake and error debugging flow on debug and release versions of the app. You can see the whole changelog here.
• We've been improving how ringing call notifications work, they should be more reliable now and users on Android 14+ will see a banner to enable full screen intents, needed for displaying the ringing screen when the device is locked.
• The sending queue feature was merged, which should improve how the app behaves when a message can't be sent due to poor connectivity.
• A fix for wrongly creating two clients when the app is opened from a notification. We hope this will make OIDC related logouts fixed for good.
• You can now cancel jumping to a message in the timeline when a back pagination is needed.

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

Circles is a secure social network for families and friends, built on Matrix for E2E encryption and the freedom for anyone to run their own server.

This week we released Circles iOS v1.0.5 in the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Silicon Mac. This brings the iOS app up to speed with changes released last week in Circles Android v1.0.31, including:

• Hide the Photos tab by default, in preparation for it being removed in a future release
• Remove the notion of "connections" or "connecting" in order to focus on the core "following" relationship similar to FB/Twitter/X/etc
• Add support for dehydrated devices (MSC3814) to improve reliability of E2E encryption especially for users who log out or lose their device

Source code and a detailed changelog for this release are available in the FUTO Gitlab.

To learn more about the project, visit circles.futo.org or chat with us in #circles:futo.org .

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Matrix Search

MTRNord (they/them) reports

I'm excited to announce a new project: Matrix Search!

One of the limitations of the element-web client is the lack of end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) search capabilities. To address this, I've created an opinionated search tool that aims to fill this gap.

Matrix Search enables you to index your Matrix rooms, including backfill, into a Meilisearch instance. With this setup, you can use a script to render the results of your search queries across all your messages into a PDF. While the PDF output is tailored to my specific use case, I'm open to suggestions and contributions to expand its functionality.

Check it out on GitHub: Matrix Search

I look forward to your feedback and contributions!

Matrix in the News 📰

Luilegeant says

Josh & Matthew discussing at FLOSS Weekly. Links:

• hackaday
• youtube (video)
• libsyn (audio)

Matrix Federation Stats

Aine reports

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

As of today, 9677 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 2969 (30.7%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 161004 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	awawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawaw.gay	239.5
2	maunium.net	250.5
3	doctoruwu.uk	252
4	h.hackclub.app	314.5
5	d3v0.me	339
6	matrix.sp-codes.de	360
7	plocki.org	383.5
8	matrix.alirezagsm.com	463
9	awawi.nexus	532
10	codestorm.net	665.5

#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	conduwu.it	96.5
2	doctoruwu.uk	113
3	awawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawawaw.gay	117
4	uwu.sulian.eu	198.5
5	h.hackclub.app	214
6	sulian.eu	229
7	littlevortex.net	263
8	spritsail.io	312
9	transfem.dev	409
10	craftingcomrades.net	818

That's all I know

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