If you are wondering what the Foundation Safety team get up to, and what we have planned, we have an update for you. Check out the post: Building a Safer Matrix
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.
Lots of MSC implementation and iteration is happening behind the scenes at the moment, leading to not very exciting Spec Core Team (SCT) updates :) As this implementation work progresses, the Matrix 2.0 MSCs in particular will continue to push forwards towards acceptance.
In the meantime, early versions of Extensible Profiles is up for review and today's blog post "Building a Safer Matrix" hints at some T&S spec changes expected soon.
The next spec release is expected in early March 2025 - if there's MSCs you think should be included there, let the team know in the SCT Office!
We could showcase our work, drown in enthusiasm, gather in smaller committee to discuss what works or what should work differently.
According to one of the FOSDEM organizers themselves we have one of the most impressive booth roster they have ever seen. We can be proud to have such a solid community!
And shout out again to our sponsors Famedly, Nordeck and Workadventure for making it possible to have such a great Fringe Event!
A new stable version of Quaternion is out, with the timeline looks getting a bit of a refresh, E2EE being unconditionally on, and a few other nice additions. Note for packagers as well as (command-line) Flatpak users: the application id has changed from com.github.quaternion to io.github.quotient_im.Quaternion. If these words don't mean anything to you, you can most likely just ignore that change. Anyway, all the details are in the release notes and links from it, as usual.
Due to a couple of unfortunate but important regressions in Fractal 10, we are releasing Fractal 10.1 so our users don’t have to wait too long for them to be addressed. This minor version fixes the following issues:
Some rooms were stuck in an unread state, even after reading them or marking them as read.
If you want to help us avoid regressions like that in the future, you could use Fractal Nightly! Or even better, you could pick up one of our issues and become part of the problem solution.
We’re excited to announce the release of Cinny v4.3.0, bringing a host of improvements that make your experience even better. This update introduces a refreshed design, stronger security, and new features to enhance your overall experience.
The App Settings have been revamped with a new look, following our Folds design system. This redesign creates a cleaner, more intuitive interface, making it easier to navigate and find what you need quickly.
In terms of security, we’ve made a major upgrade by replacing the deprecated libolm encryption library with vodozemac. Along with this upgrade, we’ve also fixed various verification-related bugs, ensuring a smoother and more secure experience.
Managing your devices has also been simplified. With improved device verification and simplified terminology (using MSC4161)—like Device Verification and Recovery Key—it’s now easier than ever to keep track of your devices.
We’ve also taken privacy to the next level. Sensitive information, such as your IP address, Recovery Key, and Access token, are now hidden by default, minimizing any potential risks to your security.
For the custom emoji lovers, you’ll be happy to know that personal emojis and stickers can now be imported in bulk, saving you time and hassle when creating personal packs.
Additionally, users can now pin messages in rooms, making it easier to highlight important information and keep key messages front and center.
Lastly, for our more advanced users, we’ve added Developer Tools in the app settings, giving you more control and customization options.
Thank you for being a part of the Cinny community. We’ve got even more updates coming soon! 🎉 Checkout Github release for more technical notes.
The latest update of Tammy (1.1.4) brings a lot of bug fixes for a smoother overall experience, including fixes for device verification, message redactions, and text input issues.
At FOSDEM, the Element VoIP team presented MatrixRTC: Building Real-Time Applications on Matrix 🎙️✨
We showcased the current state of MatrixRTC and how you can start using it today! Plus, we hacked together a simple demo
to show how MatrixRTC can power real-time experiences.
We just published the demo, maybe it can serve as a resource or inspiration for your own projects!
Nothing too major, mostly just UX and performance updates :)
Changes:
The membership history tool has been re-written! You can actually drill down to every single possible transition, while being generally faster.
Moving a window will no longer absolutely break down. Untested with touch screens, but it should work?
Better support for authenticated media - images flicker a lot less now, but is less reliable.
Made the homepage more reliable, hopefully? Misconfigured homeservers should no longer throw internal exceptions.
Logs will no longer be spammed when a tool is fetching the current session.
Added some logic to warn about room versions with low server support (ie. v1-v6), to encourage room admins to upgrade their rooms to maximise server support (/me looks at conduit/+derivatives)
Optimised some uncommon tools that haven't seen updates in ages.
Fixed some long outstanding issues, such as the navigation bar link to git.
The "first party" instance is available at https://mru.rory.gay, and is a clientside-only web app!
Last week, we released Matrix Rust SDK 0.10.0, marking the final version that
includes support for MSC3575.
On the development side, we're making the event cache, including offline
storage, more functional and ready for use. For those unfamiliar, the event
cache plays a crucial role in managing all events received by a room. It
constructs a high-level model of the room, which the timeline then uses to
render an accurate view.
In the past year, we have launched a smaller number of components compared to last year. Most of our effort was spent on improving existing components, keeping up with upstream bridge replacements and polishing our service.
These components can be installed on existing servers upon request through our contact page.
🔄 Replacement: mx-puppet-discord was removed, in favor of the better mautrix-discord bridge we've been offering already
🔄 Replacement: mx-puppet-slack was removed, in favor of the better mautrix-slack bridge we've been offering already
🔄 Replacement: appservice-webhooks was removed, in favor of the better Hookshot bridge we've been offering already
🔄 Replacement: wireguard+dnsmasq was removed, in favor of the better Firezone VPN solution we've been offering already
🗑️ Removal: The following components were removed: mx-puppet-steam, mx-puppet-groupme, dimension. We removed them because they were not maintained upstream. Unfortunately, there's no alternative right now.
✨ Addition: (+$5/mo) [brand new] the PeerTube decentralized video hosting platform
☁️ Upgrade: (free) S3 Object Storage support was added to GoToSocial to make local disk space less of a limiting factor when scaling up
🔄 Replacement: We've replaced the Redis implementation twice, first with KeyDB and then with Valkey (which established itself as the leading and more compatible Redis implementation). Redis is an internal dependency component and only enabled on servers that need it.
✨ Addition: A new monitoring service was created to monitor the health of each server and alert customers when troubles occur.
✨ Addition: Our new demo service allows new and existing customers to test various components and features before ordering a Matrix server.
✨ Addition: A new hosted version of the synapse-admin software is now available at admin.etke.cc. We still install synapse-admin to to each customer's server as well, but the hosted version is a more bleeding-edge alternative that contains yet-unreleased features.
📈 Upgrade: Thanks to our new monitoring service, some customers (those packing too many services on a small VPS) became aware of high RAM utilization. As a result we've adjusted database tuning to lower RAM cap and made SWAP more aggressive.
📨 Upgrade: Overdue payments alerts are now delivered both to Matrix and email, ensuring important notifications are not missed.
📨 Upgrade: DKIM support was added to the mailing service (exim-relay) used by all components, to improve email deliverability when the Matrix server sends outgoing emails. Last year, we added DKIM support to the Postmoogle email bridge so this is a continuation of that effort.
🆘 Upgrade: We've migrated our customer support system from Matrix (powered by Honoroit and Postmoogle) to Freescout (self-hosted via our own mash-playbook). Using a dedicated customer support system has proven to be more manageable compared to dealing with chat threads in Matrix.
🆘 Upgrade: New orders are now followed by an Order Status page that simplifies the completion process. It contains instructions for next steps regarding DNS settings and other configuration requirements.
🆘 Upgrade: The scheduler bot now supports a new price command, which provides an overview of server costs with detailed breakdown by components
🧑 Upgrade: We have finally added an About page to our website. Thankfully, it took us less than 4 years to get to it.
We've continued our work on the free-software (AGPLv3) Ansible mega-playbook - mash-playbook, which has grown to include 110+ components.
As part of our work over the past year, we have also developed and released as free-software (AGPLv3) the following new tools:
✨ Brand New: baibot - a Large-Language-Model (LLM) bot that you can talk to via Matrix, based on OpenAI's ChatGPT or other LLM providers. This new bot is available to etke.cc customers, as mentioned above.
✨ Brand New: Docker Registry Proxy - a caching and authentication proxy for Docker registries
✨ Brand New: Synapse User Auto Eraser - tool for automatically erasing users and their media using Synapse Admin API. This is used internally in our new demo service to keep the server small and clean. See the Other changes section for more details.
🏗️ We've installed 700+ Matrix servers in total, out of which 250 new ones.
🔄 Pushed 391 updates and enhancements to the automation framework used as the service core (this does not count the number of updates to the components and upstream projects themselves).
📢 Posted 56 updates in the announcements room, so you're always up-to-date with what we're working on.
For those interested in previous etke.cc birthday posts:
As of today, 10620 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3155 (29.7%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation.
The published directories contain 162675 rooms.
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.
The Foundation needs you
The Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit and only relies
on donations to operate. Its core mission is to maintain
the Matrix Specification, but it does much more than that.
It maintains the matrix.org homeserver and hosts several
bridges for free. It fights for our collective rights to
digital privacy and dignity.
