This Week in Matrix 2024-10-11

Matrix Live

Dept of Clients 📱

Extera

OfficialDakari reports

Hello, everyone!

During this week, a few things happened in Extera. Here is what changed:

• Animations. Now, Extera has some animations in it. Member drawer opening/closing animation or navigating animation.
• More material design. We made emoji&sticker pack settings use Material Design too.
• A lot better threads! Threads are now really nearly usable. They now have different routes too.
• Message menu in material design. Deleting and reporting messages form has Material Design too.

Our server got some changes too:

• Federation is now happening through Cloudflare WARP.
• We've got Git instance!

Also, we've started actively working on Extera Music (name is subject to change) - our alternative front-end for YouTube with playlists and a lot of cool things.

Nheko (website)

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

Nico announces

Nothing much interesting to say currently, but one thing might be interesting to Nheko users:

We noticed that http/3 increases the CPU usage of Nheko a lot (by 10-20x!) and makes the connection in general unstable. We use libcurl in the backend and depending on your distribution http/3 might get enabled by default. In my case this meant even when idle Nheko was using 10% or more CPU. The next release will disable http/3 by default for this reason. In my case this brings down CPU usage to 0.5% again, which is a noticeable improvement to battery life.

Why the CPU usage increases this much with http/3 has a multitude of reasons (and isn't libcurl's fault, but more related to how http/3 works as well as some crypto library shenanigans). I won't go into the details there, but feel free to discuss this in #nheko:nheko.im. Specifically we were hoping for http/3 to improve the reconnection logic and make roaming between IPs a better experience. So far the opposite seems to be the case, but if you have any suggestions on what we could improve, they are very welcome!

Dept of Widgets 🧩

NeoBoard Widget v1.20.0 (website)

milton announces

Version 1.20.0 of NeoBoard is a small incremental update following 1.19.1 after a short month with a presentation at The Matrix Conference. This version brings the following updates:

Disable Grid During Presentation

We made the Presentation Mode easier to use by disabling the grid automatically when starting to present, and restoring it after presenting. Of course if you need it, you can still toggle it back on during presentation.

Small Screen Improvements

We also tweaked the bottom toolbars a bit: Some of the less important buttons are now hidden automatically so NeoBoard remains usable even when the available screen space is narrow. Enlarge the window, and they will reappear. 🪄

While we were at it, we also fixed an alignment issue in Safari, so we have the same experience on all platforms.

You can get the full release notes here and here's a reminder that you can always try it now: just add NeoBoard as a widget to one of your rooms by following these instructions.

We invite you to try all of this and would love to get some feedback at #nordeck:matrix.org.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Elm SDK (website)

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

Bram announces

Zoooom! 🏎️ The Elm SDK now supports all spec versions, including the new version 1.12!

With this patch update, support now includes version 1.12 - but don't worry, old (even deprecated!) spec versions remain supported. The Elm SDK adapts its communication to whatever your homeserver supports, so you can safely update your Elm library without needing to wait for your homeserver to update. This design makes the SDK nearly trivial to update to the latest spec version - and hence very fast. Zoooom!

Dept of Ops 🛠

etke.cc (website)

Your matrix server on your conditions

Aine [don't DM] says

Synapse-Admin: Bugfixes & Improvements

A while ago, we at etke.cc announced our Synapse-Admin fork, and this week we are here with the fork news again.

No significant changes were made this week (however, MAS users will like the-next-big-thing, even tho it's a workaround), this is more maintenance release with small QoL improvements:

• Better handling of restricted homeservers config
• Better federation page UI - now with icons!
• Fix avatar sorting - apparently, the avatar field's sorting in the user's list was broken after the React-Admin upgrade

Source code

Dept of Bots 🤖

communitybot plugin for maubot (website)

wreck announces

quick reminder for the uninitiated: the communitybot plugin is a maubot plugin to aid administrators of communities on matrix! it supports community management controls to make it easy to add new rooms to your Space, track inactive users, redact files or offensive messages in some or all of your rooms, and keep out the ne'er-do-wells.

with the latest update for the communitybot plugin for maubot, you can now have your bot subscribe to public ban lists by having your bot join their room (like the CME banlist, included in the config by default!). when subscribed, the bot will automatically ban malicious/spam accounts when they join any of your rooms. this is read-only functionality, so if you're interested in publishing or defining your own policy lists, you will still be better served by a project like Draupnir.

which begs the question: who should use this? the answer, as well as suggested community structure, are now in the readme. feel free to join #dev:mssj.me to discuss further or get help!

Matrix Federation Stats

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

Aine [don't DM] reports

As of today, 10152 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3118 (30.7%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 22188 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.

That's all I know

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