πDept of Status of Matrix π‘οΈ
Matthew reports
The 2024 Matrix Holiday Special: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-special-2024/
πDept of Clients π±
πSchildiChat (website)
SchildiChat is a fork of Element for Android and Desktop, that used to focus on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list, but now also provides some additional tweaks and community-driven features that may not be on the roadmap for the upstream clients.
SpiritCroc says
Over the holidays, I added two new (old) features to SchildiChat Next (our Element X Android fork) that I've been missing since switching to the new codebase.
First, inline images and custom emotes are now rendered again, so you don't miss out when users on other clients or certain bridges send these. If you prefer not having images rendered in text message, you can also disable them via a setting, in order to render the fallback text instead - rather than not rendering anything at all as done previously.
Second, I added back the functionality to fetch and render previews for links found in text messages, so you have a better idea what to expect before clicking them. For now, this is an experimental setting, so remember to enable it first if you want to try it out once it lands in the next release.
πNeochat (website)
A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol
Tobias Fella says
This week, Kai Uwe has worked on improving the notifications showing the progress of a file upload or download.
James has continued to bring thread support to neochat, this time by making it possible to reply to an existing thread.
Carl has created new UI for various right-click menus that shows up as a drawer when using NeoChat on a mobile device.
πFractal (website)
Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.
KΓ©vin Commaille announces
πΆ Vive le vent ! Vive le vent ! Vive le vent dβhiver ! π² And vive Fractal 10.beta! While everyone is resting for the holidays, we thought you could use a new release. It focuses on improvements and bug fixes, including:
- Videos were often not playing after loading in the room history, this was fixed, and we also show properly when an error occurred.
- Computing the size of media messages was slightly wrong, which meant that sometimes a grey line would appear below them. We rebooted the code and that problem is gone!
- Our CSS file was a bit too big for our taste, so we decided to make use of SASS and split it.
- We were downloading too many different sizes for avatar images, which would fill the media cache needlessly. We now only download a couple of sizes. This has the extra benefit of fixing blurry or missing thumbnails in notifications.
As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.
It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.
As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!
If you have a little bit of time on your hands, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. Anyone can make Fractal better!
πDept of SDKs and Frameworks π§°
πlibQuotient (website)
A Qt5 library to write cross-platform clients for Matrix
kitsune announces
πlibQuotient 0.9.2
While working on the next Quaternion beta (sorry to those waiting - the holiday present is not coming this year), the number of improvements in libQuotient reached a point where it's worth making a new maintenance release - so here it is. Aside from, also long awaited, initial threads support in the library (thanks to NeoChat's nvrwhere) it's fixes and cleanup over the place. The notes and the Git tag are at the usual place. Happy New Year everyone!
πDept of Events and Talks π£οΈ
πMatrix Salon Podcast: Fabian about Alertrix (German episode)
Christian Paul (jaller94) announces
Meet Fabian, who develops Alertrix. This customised chat is going to help firefighters coordinate their emergency responses. It's currently funded by the German Prototype Fund and Fabian gave a presentation at the Matrix Conference where we also recorded this episode. You can find the community room at https://matrix.to/#/#community:alertrix.net.
- RSS feed: https://anchor.fm/s/cdb34188/podcast/rss
- Episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7GI3ek9chZr3VYhMCC0TIs?si=JUoNg1XjRbCB3SFeLdgmdg
- Mastodon post: https://mastodontech.de/@jaller94/113726065155521630
This marks the 20th episode of the podcast and the end of the current backlog. π₯³ Message me your suggestions for which community members you'd like to see featured in 2025.
π38C3
HarHarLinks announces
Dear TWIM, I'm writing you from the train back home after having visited 38C3 in Hamburg, the 38th edition of Chaos Communication Congress by the German Chaos Computer Club. Like yesteryear, #community-events:matrix.org organised the matrix community assembly there; you can imagine it as a kind of crossover of the Matrix #fosdem-2025-barcamp:matrix.org booth and a workshop area. We offered some "office hours" for people but many also dropped by around the clock with their questions, to get some of the official Matrix.org hoodies or T-shirts we could offer (thanks Thib for making this possible!), or simply to celebrate and socialise. We had a small assembly project driven by Nico who brought the materials to build an LED cube which once set up visitors could control through Matrix chat commands. As a small game, we hid small plastic rabbits around the whole congress center, which attendees could find and bring back to us to receive our wonderful assembly badge designed by Nadine. We also offered 2 workshops, one being another instance of Tune Your Chat, a project to collect all the neat small tips and tricks to tweak your Matrix experience, and for the other we were joined for a discussion by the creators of the "Standardised Messenger Audit β Frontend" catalog from the office of the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, published earlier this year. And of course we also took another group photo! If you are interested in joining us next time or for one of the many events we visit in the meantime, you can join #chaosevents:matrix.org specifically for appearances at CCC events or #community-events:matrix.org for even more.
Happy new year and see you at #fosdem-2025-barcamp:matrix.org!
πDept 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.
π#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 | codestorm.net | 229.5 |
2 | ncat.cafe | 301 |
3 | littlevortex.net | 444.5 |
4 | girlboss.ceo | 452.5 |
5 | beeper.com | 463 |
6 | matrix.org | 493 |
7 | melthecat.dev | 532 |
8 | transgender.ing | 538.5 |
9 | eyer.life | 597.5 |
10 | tomfos.tr | 637 |
πThat's all I know
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
To learn more about how to prepare an entry for TWIM check out the TWIM guide.
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