Matrix Live

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3984: Sending key queries to appservices
• MSC3983: Sending One-Time Key (OTK) claims to appservices
• MSC3982: Limit maximum number of events sent to an AS
• MSC3981: /relations recursion

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3923: Bringing Matrix into the IETF process (merge)
• MSC2677: Annotations and reactions (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC1796: improved e2e notifications

Spec Updates

The Matrix.org Foundation (mostly Travis) are beavering away preparing for the MIMI meeting at IETF 116 this weekend! This is part of our continual work to contribute to a IETF standard that can be used for interoperable messaging between gatekeepers (large companies in the chat world) under the EU's Digital Markets Act. See our earlier blogpost for more context on this topic.

In terms of our previous proposals on this subject; it turns out that implementing full-scale DAGs is a bit difficult, particularly when aiming to achieve interoperability on a short timeline. So we've been working on building an API surface for Matrix which makes rooms easier to access/implement in chat settings. We unfortunately don't have much to share today, but keep an eye on next week's TWIM for details 👀

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3480: Make device names private!

This MSC proposes hiding device names from any other user, while still allowing your own devices to see the names of the others.

You may question why device names being shown to other users was considered a good idea at all in Matrix. Initially these being public was really useful for verifying the devices of other users! Back in the days before cross-signing (where you only need to verify another user once), you had to verify every one of your friend's devices from every one of your own devices. It was an n * m problem, whereas if you had 4 devices, and your friend had 5, you'd need to do 20 verifications! And 4 more if your friend got a new phone!

So having device names back then were handy, but today any justification is moot and they're just a metadata leak. So we should get rid of them!

This MSC is blocked on a proven implementation. I actually wrote one up for Synapse a little while ago, and I plan to polish and merge it soon. Anyone else is free to do so in the meantime as well (just let me know first if you plan to do so in Synapse :).

Here's to improved privacy by default in Matrix!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Shay announces

The days just keep flying past and it's Friday again (how???). We here at Synapse have released v1.80.0rc2, filled with features and bugfixes. Some notable highlights are:

• Fix a bug introduced in Synapse 1.75.0rc1 where the SQLite port_db script
  would fail to open the SQLite database
• Fix a long-standing bug in which the user directory would assume any remote membership state events represent a profile change.
• Mirror images to the GitHub Container Registry (ghcr.io/matrix-org/synapse)
• Allow loading /register/available endpoint on workers

and much more! If you'd like to take a deep dive you can find the release notes here.

Construct (website)

A performance-oriented homeserver with minimal dependencies.

Jason Volk says

This week Construct introduced Peristalith Mode in an effort to fill the void left by last week's unfortunate demise of Dendrite's Polylith mode. Peristalith allows multiple instances of Construct to scale together in a hub-and-spoke configuration. This is a single-writer/multiple-reader strategy which uses the filesystem to share data between instances. In the long run, we're still working on Construct Cluster which is a homogeneous multiple-reader/multiple-writer design using Matrix itself for communication. For now, this is an improvement over simply not having any solution in case your deployment really needs to shed some load quickly. I'd like to thank Yan Minari for coming up with some Traefik configs for this and we're going to be spending the weekend playing around with it.

Let us know your needs for scaling your homeserver in #construct:zemos.net

Dept of Clients 📱

iamb

ulyssa says

iamb, a terminal-based Matrix client that uses Vim keybindings, had a new release this week. Release v0.0.7 includes:

• Room state events are now lazily loaded in the initial sync to help w/ memory usage and timeout issues
• New configuration options for adjusting log level and HTTP request timeouts
• Several bug fixes and improvements for displaying messages in the scrollback
• An iamb-git package has been added to the Arch User Repository (AUR)
• Release builds now use LTO

Nheko (website)

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

Nico says

0xDEADCADE fixed a few dialog windows, that would get a width of 0 on some window managers. Meanwhile tastytea made the scroll down button automatically refocus the message input.

The other work (apart from some cool work in progress stuff, was mostly minor improvements to communities. LcsTen made unjoinable and unpreviewable rooms in a community now hidden by default. This matches what the /hierarchy API does and as such what other clients show and since you have no way to fix it, why bother you with it? Admins of a community can still see those rooms and are suggested to remove them, since nobody will be able to join them. While the upsides generally outweigh them, there are a few downsides to this approach. Some users will never see some rooms in a community now and will have no way of telling you about the room not being joinable. Note that this only affects rooms added using a m.space.child event. The correct way to add a hidden room to a community, is by only setting a parent in that room. But many clients don't do that or rooms just naturally become unjoinable because of membership changes.

The last one is now properly handled in Nheko. Nheko will regularly update the join information for community rooms now. Each space child or parent event usually includes some routing information to figure out, what servers are in the room. If that server list is outdated, you will not be able to join the room, because none of the servers in the list know about the room anymore. Nheko now checks every 20 minutes if any of your space relation events haven't been updated in more than a week and if that is the case (and you have space edit permissions), it verifies that the routing information would still be the same if Nheko updated it. If it isn't, Nheko will write the new routing information into the state event. This is a bit of a compromise, since you might have more member changes in 7 days and the room can still become unroutable, but this is done to prevent to frequent updates if clients come to different results for the routing information. This should improve the long term experience of communities by a lot, since you won't have them randomly break anymore.

I talked a lot about routing information now. The spec actually has a section for how to calculate that: https://spec.matrix.org/v1.6/appendices/#routing. Nheko now implements that algorithm slightly more correctly, but we still don't implement everything. This should make room links look more reasonable and prevents some of the problems talked about in the previous section. Some parts I haven't implemented yet though. Nheko does not ignore ip address only servers (for now). And we also decided to ignore the powerlevel >= 50 requirement and changed it to users that have a powerlevel >= max(events_default, state_default). This is done, because the spec handwaves away concerns, that rooms might have non-default powerlevels, but I am in a lot of those and it would be annoying to me.

I guess this was a bit of a more technical update this time, but maybe it had some interesting bits. I spent a lot of time the last weeks fixing stuff in Qt, profiling memory usage as well as code size and others are working on cool stuff as well, so stay tuned for next week. :3

FluffyChat (website)

Krille reports

Small update from FluffyChat:

• I'm currently finalizing the long requested "Jump to last read message" feature (see screenshot)
• A workaround for Linux arm64 not building has been applied so we will soon publish arm64 on Flathub again (snap has to wait a little bit longer)
• FluffyChat v1.10.0 is now in all stores
• Next version of FluffyChat will display a read marker in the chat
• FluffyChat will now use a SliverList widget for the chat list page, which means that the search bar will disappear on scroll down and pop up on scroll up like in other Material3 apps
• Some work on cleaning up the huge CI scripts have been done to make contribution Merge Requests more easy

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Ștefan says

• Yet another packed week in iOS land. Starting with ElementX we have made great progress on structured logging, migrating our translations to Localazy, adding support for ignoring users and the DM creation flows. We have also fixed offline mode, UI tests and added form styles to Compound. In the background we’ll still working on tracking down our more complex bugs, adopting async-uniffi and improving our developer experience
• In Element iOS there’s a new release out, with new and improved links for users, rooms and messages and we released a hotfix for a regression which affected a small proportion of users at one point this week.

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

Jorge Martín says

• This week the Element X team for Android have been working on setting up push notifications, permission management, shared localization with iOS and independent releases for the Rust SDK for Android and the Crypto Rust SDK. There have also been work around polishing the session verification and server selection flows and creating a new room details screen.
• On Element Android the way pills are rendered in the timeline has been improved to fix issues with very long pills.
• We are looking for an Android developer to join our team to work on Element X. If you’re interested, you can find more info here or reach out to @johannesm:element.io.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Elm SDK

Bram reports

We're getting closer and closer to a version 1.0.0! Today, I hacked a a quick and ugly demo to show off Elm's capabilities. The website lets you log in using an access token and the homeserver's base url, after which you can send and receive cookies 🍪 to your friends. :)

Since last week, the SDK now supports login functions at all spec versions, and banning users is now supported as well. If you're curious about the last few struggles to build a rigorous SDK in a functional language, join the discussion at #elm-sdk:matrix.org to keep track. :)

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Next-gen crypto-included SDK for developing Clients, Bots and Appservices; written in Rust with bindings for Node, Swift and WASM

Jonas Platte says

• Update account_data when creating a new dm room
• Fix: Remove event contents from (Sync)TimelineEvent Debug impls
• Added an API for ignoring a user
• Support getting push actions of decrypted events
• More improvements around Sliding Sync, with a focus on testing

Dept of Bots 🤖

flip-matrix-bot (website)

A Matrix bot for the Friendly Linux Players community.

HER0 says

Events can now have a game server and password associated with them, and these are displayed in various places. For example, you can see this on the web page for the upcoming Arma 3 event this weekend: https://friendlylinuxplayers.org/events/d0a29709573b0fe7

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Half-Shot reports

The next generation of Integration Managers is finally here!

(with a familiar bridge backing it!)

I am once again happy to report on our latest integrations work at Element. A couple of weeks ago you heard from me and Justin on the new Integration manager that we've been working away on and we're pleased to announce it's now LIVE and has replaced our old IM, Scalar.

Alongside the new IM, we've replaced the old Go-NEB powered bots with their matrix-hookshot equivalents. This means you can now press buttons to migrate yourselves off the old bots. As an aside, all the changes we've made to hookshot to scale up for the big release are of course landing in the open source project, should you wish to spin up your own bots instead. We're hoping that the ability to now embed our all-powerful config widgets directly into the integration manager will make it easier to add new features to these already-powerful bots.

If you encounter any issues, please post an issue in https://github.com/vector-im/element-integration-manager/issues where we will be happy to assist!

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.

#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.

That's all I know

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

Matrix Live

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) 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:

• MSC3980: Dotted Field Consistency
• MSC3979: Revised feature profiles
• MSC3977: Matrix as a Messaging Framework (IETF/MIMI)

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC1796: improved e2e notifications (close)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3978: Deprecate room tagging

Spec Updates

The Spec Core Team has started to publish their weekly list of MSCs to focus on reviewing in the Office of the Spec Core Team room. The list consists of the MSCs that are ready for immediate review, and would most help advance the Matrix protocol on any given week. This used to happen internally (they started out as weekly ping by a bot, and then slowly became curated by our resident human, Travis). But the idea to publish the list both allows people to easily follow along with what they're doing on a weekly basis (much like these posts, but in real time!), as well as helps push subsequent discussion to public channels.

Otherwise, Travis continues to be hard at work integrating Matrix into the IETF process. MSC3923 - initially published in November 2022 - was proposed for FCP this week (and has nearly passed!). Additionally, MSC3977 was published this week and talks about how Matrix is a great fit for the goals of the IETF's MIMI working group.

This is all ahead of the IETF 116 event which starts on March 26th. The Matrix.org Foundation will be attending remotely.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3735: Add device information to m.room_key.withheld message!

This MSC proposes adding a new field, from_device, to m.room_key.withheld messages. This to-device message type is used to inform devices why a megolm session was not sent to them after they requested it.

Devices can request megolm sessions from multiple devices at once, but upon receiving a m.room_key.withheld message from one of them is currently unable to tell which of the devices responded with that message.

The proposed from_device field should not be added to m.room_key.withheld messages that are sent outside of key request flows.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Shay reports

Friday, Friday, Friday, also known as TWIM day. We here at Synapse have another release for you: Synapse v1.79.0. As always it is packed with features and bugfixes. Some notable highlights include:

• Added media information to the command line user data export tool.
• Added an admin API to delete a specific event report
• Added support for knocking to workers
• Fixed a bug introduced in Synapse 1.79.0rc1 where attempting to register a on_remove_user_third_party_identifier module API callback would be a no-op
• Fixed a long-standing bug where a URL preview would break if the discovered oEmbed failed to download

and much more. Feel free to take a deep dive in the release notes and have a happy Friday!

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

Till says

This week we released Dendrite 0.12.0, which marks the end of polylith/HTTP API mode.

Features

• The userapi and keyserver have been merged (no actions needed regarding the database)
• The internal NATS JetStream server is now using logrus for logging (contributed by dvob)
• The roomserver database has been refactored to have separate interfaces when working with rooms and events. Also includes increased usage of the cache to avoid database round trips. (database is unchanged)
• The pinecone demo now shuts down more cleanly
• The Helm chart now has the ability to deploy a Grafana chart as well (contributed by genofire)
• Support for listening on unix sockets has been added (contributed by cyberb)
• The internal NATS server was updated to v2.9.15
• Initial support for runtime/trace has been added to further track down long-running tasks

Fixes

• The session_id is now correctly set when using SQLite
• An issue where device keys could be removed if a device ID is reused has been fixed
• A possible DoS issue related to relations has been fixed (reported by sleroq)
• When backfilling events, errors are now ignored if we still could fetch events

Other

• ⚠️ DEPRECATION: Polylith/HTTP API mode has been removed
• The default endpoint to report usages stats to has been updated

If you have a Dendrite homeserver, staying up-to-date is highly recommended so please upgrade when you can. Otherwise, if you want to play with Dendrite without having to set up your own infrastructure, the dendrite.matrix.org homeserver is open for registration (upon completion of a CAPTCHA, so you may need to register using Element Web).

As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for related discussion.

Construct (website)

A performance-oriented homeserver with minimal dependencies.

Jason Volk says

Construct is inching closer toward public-registration safety for its upcoming 1.0 release. This week I'd like to thank tiix for helping me fix a bug in the registration availability checker, and @dynfox for dropping some documentation for how to launch Construct dockers with certbot.

I'd like to thank @qg:schildi.chat and @bgiovanni for helping me hunt down an elusive auth-rules divergence between Synapse and Construct. This bug affects Synapse users who have been kicked from a room before the summer of 2022 by an admin who runs Construct. After Synapse 1.62, those users are not able to rejoin that room -- ever. This was due to a bug which added unnecessary m.room.join_rules to the auth_events which is no longer accepted by Synapse after that version. This is now fixed on our end going forward, but fixing this retroactively is something I'll be working on over the weekend. I'd like to send my regards to Philantrop 🏳️‍🌈 who first brought this to my attention and is still trying to get back into #construct:zemos.net even at this very moment. Don't worry, we haven't forgotten you! 😁

Construct has over five years of battle-tested experience federating at scale from the very first days of Matrix. If you're looking for an alternative to Synapse to run on a cheap host: less than or equal to 100% CPU usage is our guarantee or your money back. I use it every day at

#construct:zemos.net

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace says

My Helm Charts continue to be updated regularly, now offering an improved first-install experience for Synapse through running the original signing key generation as an install hook. The sliding sync proxy is now also packaged as a Chart for those wanting to spin one up to test with.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Vermicularis (Website)

mijutu says

Vermicularis, the unidirectional Päikky to Matrix bridge, now forwards pictures too.

matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Half-Shot says

Hookshot 3.0.0 storms in and demands attention

Howdy folks, another big release for you coming up. So you remember how last week Justin and Myself came onto Matrix Live to talk about the new bridge widgets and show off how sleek and snappy they are? Well, Hookshot is also getting some updates of a similar flavor. The more observant of you may be starting to notice a pattern of us tarting up our public integrations. Something might well be on the horizon very, very soon :)

In the meantime, here are the latest changes for Hookshot 3.0.0:

• Add support from migrating go-neb services to Hookshot (#647)
• Implement grant system to internally record all approved connections in hookshot. (#655)
• Add support for logging into GitHub via OAuth from bridge widgets. (#661)

and a bunch of other changes too!

You'll notice we're migrating to a grant system for approving connections, which is why this is considered a breaking major release. Please check the notes before updating and give us a quick message if you have any issues or concerns.

And with that, I wish you all a great weekend!

Dept of Clients 📱

Chooj (website)

Farooq reports

In the chooj repository we haven't got any new commit. However, in KaiUIng's which is an important dependency of chooj(not the fattest one, however!) we had several new commits. Mainly, I am trying to use Typescript instead of Javascript for better productivity and catching bugs before production.

Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

As predicted 3 weeks ago, Fractal 4.4.2 has been released and is available on Flathub.

As a reminder, there are no new features, but it makes Fractal compatible with newer versions of our dependencies. Big thanks to everyone who tested the beta version and feel free to uninstall it.

In another news, let's talk a bit about Fractal 5…

We have finally implemented one of the most annoying missing features: sending read receipts and updating the fully-read marker. What is doubly great about this, is that we are now only one feature away from being regression-free compared to our stable release (and a merge request is opened for the last one)!

This means that a beta release is around the corner, but we also have serious performance issues to resolve first. We hope that switching to the new store backend currently developed in the Matrix Rust SDK will fix some of it, but we still need to investigate properly how we can improve the situation.

That's all for this week, don't hesitate to come say hi in #fractal:gnome.org. If you would like to help us, take a look at our newcomers issues (and don't forget to read our CONTRIBUTING.md first).

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Danielle 🪖 announces

• We’re working on the remaining pieces related to sunsetting Gitter.
• Investigations on Stuck Notifications also are continuing and we think we’ve cracked part of the nut - an MSC coming soon!
• Our general work on Notifications is also still progressing with some critical MSCs starting to complete their final comment period

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Manu reports

• On Element X this week we’ve been focussed on creating the UI for new chat, and other improvements to the DM flow.
• We’ve also be adding mentions and slash commands to the new text editor and making improvements to permalinks, so tagging people in the timeline should be even easier!

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

benoit announces

• This week the Element X team for Android have been setting up the foundations for push notification, the room list, and translations
• We’ve also been adding support for mentions and slash commands in the new text editor
• Permalinks and pillifying MXIDs have also been getting improvements too.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

mnotify (website)

stefan announces

mnotify got a few updates:

• there is now a matrix channel: https://matrix.to/#/#mnotify:hackbrettl.de
• it can now also send emote mn send --emote (in element: /me command) and notice mn send --notice (e.g. someone left a room or anything else changed) messages
• information about the current login (e.g. the homeserver url or the token) can be printed with mn homeserver or short mn hs, to ease the development of scripts which use curl for special requests
• typing notifications can be send with mn typing
• currently I am working on joining rooms

Circles (website)

E2E encrypted social networking built on Matrix. Safe, private sharing for your friends, family, and community.

cvwright reports

We just published a new Android beta of Circles, the E2E encrypted social network app.

Updates in the v1.0.10 release include:

• New feature: User profiles as Spaces, with an updated "People" tab showing the people who you're connected with
• New feature: Scan a friend's QR code to connect with them (ie to knock on their profile Space room)
• New feature: Notifications using Sygnal or ntfy
• Bugfix: Better detection of .well-known server information

Interested users can get this latest beta from all the usual sources:

• Our F-Droid beta repo: https://circu.li/fdroid/repo/
• Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.futo.circles
• Source code: https://gitlab.futo.org/circles/circles-android/-/tags/v1.0.10

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Elm SDK (website)

Bram says

The Elm SDK has reached an unofficial alpha version! It can be downloaded and used for testing purposes. Now that the core has been finished, the exposed modules Matrix, Matrix.Room and Matrix.RoomInvite are available with the following features:

• Automated login & sync
• Joining / leaving rooms
• Accepting / rejecting invites
• Receiving the latest events of a room

Before publishing a version 1.0.0, I aim to implement the following features:

• Automated login & sync for spec version v1.1 and legacy versions r.0.0.0 - r0.6.1 using sync v1
• Room membership manipulation (invite, kick, ban, knock users/rooms)
• A few QOL functions to explore a room's state

You may expect these in the next few weeks. On to a version 1.0.0!

Repo: https://github.com/noordstar/elm-matrix-sdk Public room: #elm-sdk:matrix.org

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Next-gen crypto-included SDK for developing Clients, Bots and Appservices; written in Rust with bindings for Node, Swift and WASM

Jonas Platte reports

• This week, a lot of functionality was added to our foreign language bindings for Swift and Kotlin:
  • Creating rooms
  • Updating the room topic and avatar
  • Downloading media files to disk
• We also added a guide for contributing to those bindings
• We added more detailed event verification states
• We added a convenience method for setting the room name (but not for the bindings yet)
• We fixed another set of bugs in Sliding Sync
• We fixed a small bug around OIDC
• We added support for highlighted messages in the timeline (follow-up PR)

Shout-out to Kévin Commaille for contributing many of these improvements in his free time!

Dept of Ops 🛠

GitHub Action (website)

Cadair says

I have pushed a small update to my GitHub Action to send matrix notifications about builds. It now correctly backs off if it's rate limited by the matrix server, and has a new option to combine all successful statuses into a single reaction, which is useful if you have a lot of builds.

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi reports

Thanks to Aine of etke.cc, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now set up rust-synapse-compress-state's synapse_auto_compressor tool to run periodically.

Learn more from our changelog entry.

Dept of Bots 🤖

flip-matrix-bot (website)

A Matrix bot for the Friendly Linux Players community.

HER0 says

flip-matrix-bot (website)

In the past two weeks, there have been a bunch of small improvements. The events page of the community website now lists upcoming events, and the event pages themselves have received some polish. As a result, links to event web pages are now included in the output of several commands. This makes it easier to see the event time in your local time and to share the event with people who are not in the Matrix room.

Looking to the future, improving these web pages brings us a step closer to integrating with Steam and Mastodon. I've started to investigate these further, but there isn't much to report yet.

Besides website-related improvements, I took some time to add unit tests for the lowest-hanging fruit parts of the code. There are more tests to be added, and further testing improvements may be possible in the future after some refactoring, but this is not a high priority for me right now.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

bridged.to project idea handing over

Alexey Murz Korepov reports

Searching for people to hand over a business idea of paid bridges for Matrix users to other messengers, for free!

I have a business idea to make a paid service for bridging Matrix (matrix.org) with other messengers using the Bridges feature (https://matrix.org/bridges/). It's like beeper.com, but which works with any MXID on any homeserver. And like t2bot.io, but commercial one and with more bridges available. Yes, t2bot.io is a great project, but free services usually got occupied by a lot of accounts, especially by spammers, and managing all of them for free sounds not so perspective to me. But bridged.to could also provide some free services for the community.

For that purposes I’ve bought a bridged.to domain several years ago, to make cool identifiers of bridges like @telegram:bridged.to, @whatsapp:bridged.to, etc.

But I still can’t find time to implement this idea at all. So, I’ve decided to stop paying for this domain and want to hand over this domain and the whole idea to someone else, who has the time and energy to implement this project.

The idea was to make the payments flexible, per-bridge, for example, $1 per month for each bridge. So, if a user will use bridges to Telegram + FaceBook + Instagram + WhatsApp, they will pay $4 per month, if they stop using some bridges - they pay less. And give a free trial period of 2 weeks for new users, to give it a try.

From the technical point of view, this should look like a standard Synapse server with a custom python module that just block-unblocks sending of messages by the user’s account balance, and also can gather some usage statistics (number of bridged messages per user, etc), and bridges instances, connected via appservices. And some admin panel with UI to manage and administrate this.

All this sounds easy to implement, but I have a lot of tasks at my main job, so have no time to accomplish this, and have decided to hand over this idea to someone else, who might be interested in it, for free.

So, if you’re interested in this idea or want to know more, or even just want to grab the cool bridged.to domain for free - please feel free to contact me via Matrix - @murz:ru-matrix.org.

The domain annual cost is $41.98, it's on namecheap.com, expires at Mar 28, 2023.

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.

#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.

That's all I know

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

Matrix Live

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

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:

• MSC3975: rel_type for Replies

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC3966: event_property_contains push rule condition
• MSC3873: event_match dotted keys
• MSC3758: Add event_property_is push rule condition kind

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

Spec Updates

Review this week from the SCT focused on the future of OIDC and logging in via a QR code (MSC3906) - a feature other platforms have and one I would love immensely. Fixing notifications (MSC3966, MSC3873, MSC3758, MSC3952, MSC3958) as per last week, as well as trying to finally get MSC2677 (spec'ing the current state of Annotations and Reactions) into FCP.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3972: Lexicographical strings as an ordering mechanism!

While there already is an MSC for a top-level ordering of Spaces in use across some client implementations today (MSC3230), the algorithm recommended for clients to implement apparently has some consistency flaws, leading to edge cases. MSC3972 attempts to address this by providing a different algorithm that does not have these flaws. A real-world implementation of the algorithm is also available today in Kotlin at https://github.com/Dominaezzz/MatrixSort.

Neither of these algorithms have been merged to the spec yet, but this new MSC may finally push this conversation forwards! I recommend client developers give it a read and leave their feedback as Pull Request Review comments on the MSC.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Telodendria (website)

An open source Matrix homeserver implementation written from scratch in ANSI C and designed to be lightweight and simple, yet functional

Jordan Bancino reports

Hey everyone, it's been a while since I've posted an update here, but I'm pleased to report that progress on Telodendria is still steady. Here's a small glimpse into what's happening with the project:

• v0.2.1: The second major release of Telodendria was published earlier this week. Telodendria still isn't much yet, but the user authentication section of the client-server specification is just about complete. This means you can register for accounts, log in and get access tokens, and then log out. All the stuff that goes with that, including the static login fallback page, and user interactive authentication is in place.
• What's Next: I'm hoping to start working on the account management endpoints next. I also want to start building out an HTTP client for federation, and I want to move the configuration file into the database, so that Telodendria is configured via an admin API endpoint instead of a file. The thinking here is that this enables Telodendria to be configured at runtime, without having to restart the process to apply configuration changes.
• Help Wanted: As always, I could use your help. This is a huge project, and I am very busy so I can't dedicate as much time as I'd like to it. If you find Telodendria interesting and want it to continue, feel free to join us over in #telodendria-general:bancino.net, write some code and documentation, donate to the project, or any and all of the above!

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Shay reports

Welcome to another Friday and another edition of the Synapse section of TWIM. This week we've released Synapse v1.79.0rc1.

Some notable highlights include:

• Added two new Third Party Rules module API callbackson_add_user_third_party_identifier and on_remove_user_third_party_identifier

• Added experimental support for MSC3967 to not require UIA for setting up cross-signing on first use.

• Fixed a long-standing bug where an initial sync would not respond to changes to the list of ignored users if there was an initial sync cached.

• Fixed a long-standing bug where the user directory search was not case-insensitive for accented characters

• Documented how to use caches in a module

  Plus much more! You can check out the details here(https://matrix.org/blog/posts) or take a deep dive in the release notes here.

Construct (website)

A performance-oriented homeserver with minimal dependencies.

Jason Volk reports

This week Construct gained support for freshly minted MSC3758 and MSC3966 enriching the pushrules subsystem. I'd like to thank Giovanni Bottaro for contributing a patch which fixes updates to the public rooms directory. I'd like to thank @qg:schildi.chat for reporting two other issues which I've been able to push fixes for this week. I'd also like to thank Yan Minari for refactoring the nix build up to date in preparation for Construct's 1.0 release.

The saga continues over at #construct:zemos.net

Dept of Clients 📱

iamb (Website)

A terminal-based Matrix client that uses Vim keybindings

ulyssa says

iamb had a new release this week. Release v0.0.6 includes:

• Support for tab completion of usernames, aliases, and commands.
• A new command for creating rooms and spaces
• Bug fixes for edits and creating new direct messages
• Improvements to text wrapping in messages
• NetBSD's pkgsrc-current now includes a package for iamb

mnotify (Website)

stefan says

mnotify gained a few features:

• Attachments can now be sent to a room with mn send -r "$ROOM_ID" --attachment CAT.jpg.
• mn sync gained a flag --raw which prints all received events, including e.g. presence or typing.
• mn rooms can list all rooms you are in, including room members and avatars.

chooj (Website)

Farooq says

chooj, the Matrix client for KaiOS feature phones, has seen many changes in the last few weeks. Many bugs were fixed and many others are probably added. We now support many other events other than message events which you can view in the rooms plus an experimental image viewer to better investigate the received images. Other than that, by removing the files KaiOS doesn't use, the production bundle size is half now. A big internal change also happened and still is not finished yet. With the assist of Simon Laux, a big portion of chooj is now a separate library which makes maintenance easier and also lets other KaiOS apps use them. I have written my plans for chooj in my last post in the BananaHackers blog. If you like to see Matrix chat on the KaiOS feature phones, you can donate an amount to help with the development of the project. Or you can donate me a debug enabled KaiOS phone with the mentioned features.

Nheko (website)

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

LorenDB announces

We've had some fun and useful things happening in the past two weeks!

• red_sky (nheko.im) worked on automating the release process to automatically create a release when a tag is pushed. This might not sound like much, but it makes life easier for maintainers who would otherwise have to waste time manually creating releases. After all, why would you want to write release notes when you could be writing code?
• Nico tweaked styling for HTML tables to increase the padding. Thanks to Cadair for the suggestion!
• Nico also fixed a bug that showed avatar changes as somebody joining a room. I seem to recall this also happening when users changed their display names, but I can't reproduce that behavior. Either way, it is nice to have this fix in place!
• I worked on closing some of our issues, and I'm happy to report that there are fewer ways to be unpleasantly surprised by the UI. For example, if you have turned on the setting to make emoji-only messages larger, all other emojis will also get a bit of a size boost to make them easier to read.
• On that note, I recently went through the issue list and closed a number of outdated issues that had already been fixed, because 260+ issues is obviously too many for any self-respecting project... right? ;)
• I also overhauled nheko's behavior when you attempt to use an invalid /command. Originally, nheko would eat any invalid commands (e.g. sending /foo would clear the input box but would not send a message). Now, if you type /foo, you will see a warning informing you that you are about to send a message that says /foo into the chat instead of running a command /foo. If you choose to disregard the warnings and hit Enter, nheko will indeed send a message saying /foo!

But that's not all: this week, mtxclient gained the ability to properly handle m.room.message events that have an unknown msgtype. With that in place, I'm working on implementing that on the nheko side. Once this work is done, you will be able to read messages that others send from Element with fireworks! Furthermore, I'm adding a bonus feature to nheko: as a proof-of-concept for fully implementing this unknown message handling, I've got a working implementation of Element's rainfall effect for those of you who like fancy effects! (All the rest of you can just turn those off in the settings, I guess.)

A note for our Mac users: somebody opened an issue last week notifying us that nheko couldn't be installed on OS X 11.1. Nico has fixed this, but you will need to either wait for the next release or install one of our nightly builds (#nheko-nightlies:neko.dev).

Ement.el (website)

Matrix client for Emacs

alphapapa says

Ement.el, a Matrix client for the GNU Emacs text editor and Lisp environment, has been released at v0.7. Changes in this version include:

Additions

• Command ement-room-override-name sets a local override for a room's display name. (Especially helpful for 1:1 rooms and bridged rooms. See [MSC3015]https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/3015#issuecomment-1451017296).)

Changes

• Improve display of room tombstones (displayed at top and bottom of buffer, and new room ID is linked to join).
• Use descriptive prompts in ement-leave-room and ement-forget-room commands.

Fixes

• Command ement-view-space when called from a room buffer. (Thanks to Richard Brežák for reporting.)
• Don't call display-buffer when reverting room list buffer. (Fixes #121. Thanks to mekeor for reporting.)
• Retry sync for network timeouts. (Accidentally broken in v0.6.)

Internal

• Function ement-put-account-data accepts :room argument to put on a room's account data.

Feel free to join us in ement.el:matrix.org!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

andybalaam announces

• We started the process of wrapping up the remaining smaller – and non-essential – leftovers from the Gitter migration support in Element Web and are hoping to complete them next week
• Work on moving our packaging into the cloud is progressing and we also started to improve our infrastructure for updating the GPG key for our Debian packages
• Further investigation on the remaining stuck notification issues has indicated that spec changes around the handling of relations inside threads will be needed. We're planning to work on these soon.
• The React SDK changes for MSC3952 (intentional mentions) are getting ready to land

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Manu says

• This week we continue to polish Element X. It got a new Rust SDK version that fixed known bugs in the new Sliding Sync API implementation. A new public TestFlight (1.0.24) will be available during the week-end, after Apple approval.
• We resumed the work on push notifications on Element X and experimented the new instant messaging push notification APIs.
• On Element land, a new version, 1.10.4, will be available on Monday. Applications with analytics enabled will gradually use the new crypto stack, coming from the matrix-rust-sdk crypto crate. Anyone can enable it from the LABs settings at any time.

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

benoit announces

• We have just released Element Android 1.5.28, it should be pushed to production next week. Element Android is now mainly in maintenance mode.
• More and more people are working on Element X Android. We are working on updating the design, and refining the architecture of the project. It will soon be possible to verify a session, and create a room from this client. We are also preparing the work to be able to receive Push and display notifications.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict reports

Just another small release of Trixnity (v3.5.0):

improvements:

• expose more device trust level information (breaking change)

bugfixes:

• fix too long open transaction in IndexedDBMediaStore (relevant for larger media files)
• allow cancel device verification before any device answered

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Next-gen crypto-included SDK for developing Clients, Bots and Appservices; written in Rust with bindings for Node, Swift and WASM

Jonas Platte says

• The PR for client user avatar URL caching mentioned last week has been merged
• We fixed a long-standing CI problem where coverage data would frequently fail to upload
• Our state store / cache abstraction was improved (1, 2)
• We fixed some races between /sync and /keys/queries requests
• Plus lots of purely internal improvements!

Dept of Ops 🛠

synadm (website)

Command line admin tool for Synapse (Matrix reference homeserver)

jojo announces

It's been some time since synadm last showed up on TWIM, it was around summer 2022. The biggest news is that Ascurius and me just welcomed a new member to the team: jacksonchen666. We reached out since he seemed to care about synadm. He had submitted a feature but we also caught him tidying up "unloved" issues. He has a good sense for concise solutions and accurate documentation. He runs a website and a blog where he talks about "things".

Here's more we'd like to spread:

• A random list of new commands, read details in the docs to learn what they do: synadm notice send, synadm user 3pid, synadm user auth-provider, synadm room block/unblock synadm room block-status, synadm media unquarantine, synadm user modify --user-type ..., synadm user deactivate-regex.
• A new output mode minified was added and the original json mode was improved to now produce nicely human readable json.
• We finally have a contributing documentation and hope it'll make collaboration with our contributors even better.
• We introduced an auto-linter based on flake8 into our CI pipeline to catch code formatting issues quicker.
• The new Scripting Examples chapter. Please submit your one-liners or other helpful scripting examples via a pull-request or just let us know in #synadm:peek-a-boo.at

By the way, jacksonchen666 searched for synadm occurrences in the TWIM history and we found an article "next to us" about the Matrix Community Summit 2022 that took place in Berlin last summer. It reminded us that it was a blast! Thanks dear organizers, we hope you manage to do it again! Here's some musical memories in the name of our reference homeserver.

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi announces

Thanks to Benjamin Kampmann for getting it started, FSG-Cat for fixing it up and me (Slavi) for polishing it up, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports installing the Sliding Sync Proxy.

Running this additional component allows playbook users to easily test the new (still beta) Element X clients (Element X iOS and Element X Android).

To get started, see our Setting up Sliding Sync Proxy documentation page.

Dept of Bots 🤖

kfatehi announces

This is not a project but an idea nevertheless: Produced a quick and dirty PoC of an OpenAI chat completion tool used from within Element Web/Desktop. Video can be found here https://github.com/matrix-hacks/openai-reply-generator

explored making it shippable via bot, bridge, widget, and puppet-client but i have yet to find an experience that i like completely yet but still worth sharing how easy it is to test ideas in Matrix (which through bridges, can touch all media)

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Effektio is now acter.global 🚀

ben reports

Shortly after releasing our whitepaper end of last year, Effektio was approached by another organization, who has been building a NGO communication platform for a few years called Acter. Acter wanted to move away from their current centralized stack and had found Matrix.org 's Federated Model to be their preferred ideal. Very quickly within the talks that followed it became clear that both organization have the same goals and visions for the future and are perfectly matching in terms of what they already bring and what each lacks: Effektio has the technological stack, expertise and ability to build the product while Acter has existing a network of organizations, partners and even existing users, who are happy to provide feedback. Long story short, we decided to merge both into a newly funded Acter Association, which we established Jan 1st, developing the next (third) generation of the Acter Platform ("A3") on top of the existing effektio tech stack. Since then a major part of our work has been merging all the admin and tech stuff, up to moving the github repo over to acterglobal/a3, where you will find it from now on.

Next to that, we still have continued working on the product itself. Among other things we have merged the first implementation of the Adaptive Layout in A3 this week, implemented the next acter object, Pins, added Rageshake Bug Reporting to the nightly builds, started out with the new Templates infrastructure and improved our quality assurance by reactivate rust integration tests, add widget unit tests and a new cucumber desktop tests infrastructure.

More details on all of these in todays update in our very own news channel: https://matrix.to/#/#news:acter.global

MinesTRIX (website)

A privacy focused social media based on MATRIX

Henri Carnot says

website * repo

Hello hello,

today is a big day for MinesTRIX because it's finally possible to test it as we are now in Flathub! https://flathub.org/apps/details/fr.henri2h.minestrix

In parallel, I have been quite a lot of work in the background. And in last version (v1.6.5), we have:

• Switched to Material3 and redesigned the app navigation. Removed black theme for more simplicity.
• It is now possible to set permissions (room visibility and powers levels) for groups and feeds.
• Role & permissions view for room settings is now more intuitive.
• fine tuned the new feed indexing systems. Should be more stable now.
• The settings page got some love and now display all the sessions and their status (verified or not). It is also possible to logout all 90+ days sessions.
• new message search view for not encrypted conversations.
• fixed notifications count for rooms
• better experience for searching user or rooms.
• new page to list feeds and groups
• it is now possible to unfollow someone
• fixed SSO login on web
• It's now possible to switch account from home page for easier multi account usage.

In master:

• support for video messages
• speed up room media loading for the not encrypted rooms by requesting events directly from server
• allow resizing the settings and chat view

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.

#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.

That's all I know

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

Matrix Live

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) 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:

• MSC3973: Search users in the user directory with the Widget API
• MSC3972: Lexicographical strings as an ordering mechanism
• MSC3971: Sharing image packs

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3966: event_property_contains push rule condition (merge)
• MSC3873: event_match dotted keys (merge)
• MSC3758: Add event_property_is push rule condition kind (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3887: List matching push rules

Spec Updates

Other than spec text fixes in the matrix-spec repo, the Spec Core Team has mainly been focusing on push notifications, push rules and generally improving notifications across Matrix. This includes improving behaviour such as accidentally notifying someone when you mention their name, accidentally notifying people when you reply to a message, accidentally notifying when you edit a message and so on. The relevant MSCs are MSC3958, MSC3873, MSC3966 and MSC3758.

In addition, review of MSC3575 (Sliding Sync) and other sliding sync MSCs saw some in-depth review from Nico.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3013: Encrypted Push!

When you get a push notification for a new message on your phone, you may wonder how that message travels from your homeserver to you. Typically it isn't done directly - instead, when you receive a message that should notify you, your homeserver will generate a push notification specifically for you, and send this off to a Matrix Push Gateway. That Push Gateway is then configured to send your notification off to a service which knows how to route it to your device. This is usually Apple's Push Notification Service in the case of iOS devices, or Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging service in the case of Android devices (though FCM supports iOS devices too!). Your phone's OS will keep a consistent connection to one of these services if an app has registered for push notifications, and thus you can receive notifications from apps even when your Matrix client is not running.

But doesn't that leak all of your message notifications to Apple or Google? 😱 Not quite. While clients can choose to include all contents of a message in a push notification, most instead opt for only including the event's ID. When the push notification containing that event ID reaches your phone, it wakes up a small portion of your Matrix client which goes and fetches the full message content from the homeserver (plus encryption keys if the message needs to be decrypted). This way, you can still get a notification without your Matrix client needing to be open all the time. However, some metadata (such as when you are getting a notification) is still leaked to Apple/Google. Since the third-party service knows the event ID, it can correlate which users are in the same room by cross-referencing event IDs in notifications across multiple users.

It's also a bit of a resource drain that the client needs to go and talk to the homeserver to fetch the full event content. Ideally we'd just include it all in the notification - but then we end up sharing too much information with the push provider!

This MSC proposes a solution; encrypt the message content and send that in the notification! Message contents are encrypted using a public key provided by the client to the homeserver when registering for push notifications. The ciphertext passes through the Push Gateway (which may be run by a separate entity to your homeserver) and the Push Notification service (run by Apple, Google, etc.) and then finally down to your client where it is decrypted without the need for a web request as the private key will just be stored in the client.

And since a separate encryption key is being used per-device, ciphertexts of the same event will differ when encrypted for different users - eliminating the Push Gateway/Push Notification Service from being to correlate notifications across users (timing attacks are still possible, but this can be reduced by introducing a small amount of jitter into when notifications are sent out).

Anyhoo, if you're big on privacy (or security against those running Push Gateway/Notification Services), check out this MSC!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Shay announces

Welcome to another edition of the Synapse section of TWIM. This week we've released Synapse v1.78.0, packed with features and bugfixes.

Some notable highlights include:

• an update to the command line export data tool
• implemented the experimental exact_event_match push rule condition from MSC3758
• implemented MSC3873 to disambiguate push rule keys with dots in them.
• allow Synapse to use a specific Redis logical database in worker-mode deployments.
• fixed a bug introduced in Synapse 1.76 where 5 second delays would occasionally occur in deployments using workers.

Plus much more! You can check out the details here or take a deep dive in the release notes here.

Construct (website)

A performance-oriented homeserver with minimal dependencies.

Jason Volk reports

This week, seven additional endpoints from the synapse admin API have been ported to Construct. These include user room listings, account data, devices, pushers, and forward extremities pruning. This week it also became easier for admins to tune database options to meet their needs through the configuration system. To put things into perspective, the server now has 2184 configurable items which can be set by an environment variable. Construct also has 6177 statistical items which can be reported to a Prometheus metrics daemon.

Lastly I would like to share good news on the compatibility front after taking some time to investigate why Construct and Conduit have trouble federating. I reached out with a patchset to the folks over at Ruma and I would like to take this opportunity to commend their hospitality. Their conduct has been nothing short of diplomatic, giving confidence we can now iron out any kinks in the coming weeks.

Find it at #construct:zemos.net

Dept of Clients 📱

Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Carl Schwan says

This Monday, I attended a workshop from the European Commission in Brussels around interoperability between messaging services under the Digital Market Act. This was quite interesting and I wrote about it on my blog https://carlschwan.eu/2023/03/02/digital-market-act-workshop-in-brussels

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Johannes Marbach reports

• This week we’ve been really doubling down on fixing bugs from our backlog. Included in this are items such as ‘stuck notifications’ and ensuring that messages are sent in the correct order when connectivity is interrupted.
• While we’re looking at stuck notifications issues, we’re also taking the opportunity to redesign our notifications settings screen. We plan on simplifying the options by reducing some noise and improving the copy.
• We have also started a design investigation into how to improve the accessibility of our product with labels and greater contrast.

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Ștefan announces

• This week we’ve been focussed on fixing the bug whereby a message will show as encrypted in the room list, but is actually decrypted when you’re viewing the timeline.
• In labs; Check out our rich text editor, it’s in progress and improving every update! As with all our features, please test them out and leave us feedback.
• The public test flight for Element X is now available. More details in #element-x-ios:matrix.org
  • Work is progressing well and our current focus is joining and creating rooms

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

benoit announces

• Improvements to polls are ongoing; specifically relating to the relationship between notifications and room member votes
• We’ve also added an unread indicator to the spaces icon so that you can see how many unread messages you have in other spaces.
• Also, our rich text editor is in Labs and getting regular updates and improvements. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Somix (Formerly matrix-social)

imbev announces

Social Media app powered by Matrix

matrix-social is now known as Somix.

The git repo has been moved to https://codeberg.org/imbev/Somix

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-js-sdk

Johannes Marbach reports

The team maintaining matrix-js-sdk are currently discussing deprecation of the browserify-based distribution channel. By our current analysis, usage seems fairly low while at the same time it's posing drastic technological challenges to us during the integration of matrix-rust-sdk's cryptography module. If you are a current user of the browserified release of the SDK, we'd like to hear from you in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk/issues/3189.

mautrix-go

tulir announces

mautrix-go has had e2ee support for a few years already, but previously the interface was quite difficult to use for making bots and other small programs, as it required implementing parts of the storage and other things manually. That has changed with the upcoming 0.15 release, which adds a crypto helper that can handle everything for you with just a few extra lines of code. The documentation is unfortunately not great yet, but the example has been updated to use the new helper, so it should be a decent starting point for writing e2ee-capable bots in Go (and if it explodes, you can ask for help in #:maunium.net)

Elm SDK

mr-demo says

I'm excited to share that I've made significant progress on my Elm SDK for Matrix! Last time, I mentioned that a version 1.0.0 release was approaching, and today I have great news - I've got a working MVP! While it's not ready for use yet, it's a significant step forward.

To give you a taste of what the SDK can do, I've written some simple code that demonstrates how to use it to authenticate with a Matrix server and send messages to a room. Take a look:

-- Example code from the MVP of the new Elm SDK for Matrix
-- It's a bit simplified, but it shows the idea of the SDK.
-- Functionality includes handling credentials, syncing rooms, and sending messages

type Msg
    = Cred (Result X.Error CredUpdate)
    | PushButton String

type alias Model =
    Credentials

init : ( Model, Cmd Msg )
init = 
	let
		cred = 
			Matrix.fromAccessToken
				{ baseUrl = "https://matrix.example.org"
				, accessToken = "my-personal-access-token"
				}
	in
		( cred, Matrix.sync cred )

I've built an incredibly basic client that managed to compress to under 36kB (for scale: Hydrogen is around 748kB) of gzipped JavaScript. The final version will be a bit larger, but this SDK might make way for very compact asset sizes.

Feel free to reach out at Bram if you'd like to know more about when the first version is coming out!

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Next-gen crypto-included SDK for developing Clients, Bots and Appservices; written in Rust with bindings for Node, Swift and WASM

Jonas Platte announces

• The sliding sync improvement meta-issue seems really close to being finished off
• Added support for encrypting and uploading files without creating the corresponding m.room.message attachment from it, useful for custom event types (thanks to Sam Wedgwood!)
• We improved our examples to show how to persist a session (thanks to Kévin Commaille!)
• Our FFI layer is close to exposing native async functions to foreign languages, there is just a panic we need to debug before merging this
• A PR for client user avatar URL caching is currently in review

Dept of Ops 🛠

mnotify

stefan reports

The Rust rewrite of mnotify got some updates and starts to get usable. The broken (password) login flow was fixed and the README received some polishing. I run it now to send E2E encrypted notifications from my servers to my phone. The rust-sdk does a very good job!

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi reports

Thanks to Benjamin Kampmann, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now install and configure the Rageshake bug report server.

Additional details are available in our Setting up Rageshake documentation page.

Slavi says

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy continues its migration to Traefik as its main reverse-proxy like we've announced a few weeks ago.

Traces of nginx can still be found and we still keep nginx compatibility for now, but we've already switched the default reverse-proxy to Traefik for new installations and are seriously urging existing users to make the switch as well.

Dept of Bots 🤖

flip-matrix-bot (website)

A Matrix bot for the Friendly Linux Players community.

HER0 reports

Events can now be marked as not requiring ownership of the game in order to attend! For example, there is a Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes event scheduled for later this month. Anyone can participate by joining our Mumble server at the scheduled time and having access to a web browser.

In addition, when listing upcoming events (!f events), they are now sorted by the time that the event takes place at.

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.

#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.

That's all I know

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

Matrix Live

Transcription (Community made): https://en.miki.community/wiki/Matrix_Tutorial_7

Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR 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

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3925: m.replace aggregation with full event

Closed MSCs:

• MSC2000: Server-side password policies

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC3970: Scope transaction IDs to devices
• MSC3969: Size limits
• MSC3968: Poorer features

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been aiming to get the requirements for MSC3952: Intentional Mentions landed as well as discussing MSC3952 itself, in addition to planning out what the next few spec releases are expected to look like.

Watch this space for progress on the Matrix 2.0 MSCs and other critical path items :)

Curated MSC of the week

This week's random chosen MSC is MSC3575: Sliding Sync! It's one of the largest (or is the largest?) MSCs we've ever had, and dramatically changes how clients actually get updates from the server. It's worth the read if you're a client developer, though the team working on it is ironing out some bugs. Let us know what you think on the MSC :)

The Chart

It seemingly was okay with being generated this week again, so here it is:

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Shay says

Howdy, welcome to another week in Synapse-land. We've released v1.78.0rc1 with some cool bugfixes and features. Some notable additions in this version are:

• Fixed a long-standing bug where the room aliases returned could be corrupted.
• Fixed a bug introduced in Synapse 1.76.0 where partially-joined rooms could not be deleted using the purge room API.
• Fixed a long-standing bug where federated joins would fail if the first server in the list of servers to try is not in the room.
• Implement the experimental exact_event_match push rule condition from MSC3758.
• Added account data to the command line user data export tool

and much more! Take a closer look here in the release notes and have a happy Friday.

Construct (website)

A performance-oriented homeserver with minimal dependencies.

Jason Volk reports

There's been progress in several areas for Construct 0.9 this week, cut with 71 new commits. First I'd like to give special thanks for @bgiovanni for continuing to drive the progress this week; they have on several occasions been able to navigate the codebase and the specification to provide concise reports so I can fix anything in mere minutes. I hope we can keep this up.

Construct can now be configured to purge a room from the database after the last local user leaves. This week I also took the plunge on implementing a controversial clause in the specification which requires a server to broadcast a join event on behalf of another server. This is problematic because it's technically an amplification attack, so I've done my best to narrow the conditions for when to actually perform this: only if the counter-party is not already joined, and only if Construct has an alias set for the room being joined.

In other news, I fixed a bug in boost::asio but since that won't land for a while and Construct's io_uring(7) might be susceptible on Arch and Gentoo I hacked a workaround just for us, especially since the old epoll(7) + aio(7) makes my desktop much less responsive (I can't believe I dealt with that for years!).

Next week Yan Minari might have a deeper look at Sytest and Complement integration and maybe mdad, while I plan on implementing local room policies and user management to make Construct safe for public registration.

If you're looking for an alternative to synapse please check us out at #construct:zemos.net

Conduit (website)

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

Timo on Conduit ⚡️ reports

Hey all, in the past weeks I have been working on message backfilling over federation (!), history visibility correctness and a bunch of small bug fixes.

Prepare for a new Conduit release in the near future!

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

Some of you might have already seen it, but for the rest I will just spoil the surprise now: We released 0.11.2 (and 0.11.3, don't ask...) this week! Now you can easily hide spoilers by just enclosing the message with ||, search for users in the user directory and much more. I have included the changelog below so you don't need to look for it!

Highlights

• Improved Markdown input 🗒️
  • You can now enter strike-through and spoilers using ~~ and || respectively.
  • Single line-breaks now also create a line-break in the formatted message.
  • Code tags now preserve whitespace.
• User search in the invite dialog 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 (Malte E)
  • Can search either locally or consult the user directory on your server.

Features

• Allow disabling animations before login.
• Set the window role to "imageoverlay" on X11. (Thulinma)

Improvements

• The Nheko binary should now be slightly smaller.
• You can now build Nheko against a system install of the blurhash and cpp-httplib libraries. (vitaly)
• You can now enable scrollbars for the room and community lists in the settings. (balsof)
• Add a generic video icon when there is no thumbnail. (LorenDB)
• Pause video when switching rooms. (LorenDB)
• Add a fancy delegate when encryption is enabled. (LorenDB)
• Standardise command format messages. (phyto)
• Automatically fetch keys for undecrypted messages after verification.
• Remove all notifications on exit on Linux. (ShootingStarDragons)
• Document markdown features and /cmark command in the man page. (tastytea)
• Speedup the user completer.
• Allow closing menus on Wayland by clicking the window. (ShootingStarDragons)
• Merge Debian/Ubuntu Dependencies in the README. (enigma9o7)
• Update zsh completions. (tastytea)
• Skip empty requests for cross-signing keys when user only has one device. (Jason)
• Hide image overlay when saving a file. (ShootingStarDragons)
• Make it more obvious that the add reaction button is not an emoji.
• Build only the gstreamer qml plugin in flatpak.
• Update Ubuntu dependency list for building from source. (tastytea)

Translations

• Estonian (Priit)
• Ukrainian (NullPointerException)
• Indonesian (Linerly)
• Chinese (Poesty Li)
• Esperanto (Tirifto)
• French (MayeulC, CB, Glandos, Rick)
• Dutch (Thulinma)
• Italian (DynamoFox, Elia Tomasi, Joseph Curto, Quanterxotur)
• Russian (Evgeny, SOT-TECH)
• Finnish (Lurkki)

Bugfixes

• You can now forward stickers again.
• Edits shouldn't "jump" out of threads anymore.
• Focus text input when quick switcher is closed. (LorenDB)
• Fix rare freeze with an empty list in a completer.
• Don't fail the plugins check on GStreamer 1.22 during a video call.
• Allow nested ()/[] brackets in URLs. (mauke)
• Make br tags work properly again.
• Don't double free call devices. (Jason)
• Work around multiple destructor calls on Clang. (Jason)
• Html in sidebar.

You can find most of the downloads either in your favourite distributions repository (even including Arch now!), flathub or on our releases page: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/releases/tag/v0.11.3

Thank you, everyone who contributed!

Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille says

Hello all! Fractal 4.4.2-beta2 is available on Flathub Beta.

You read correctly, it's not Fractal 5 yet. This is a maintenance release that fixes the compilation of Fractal 4.4 with recent libraries and allows to build the Flatpak with the latest GNOME runtime. That means no more warning that the GNOME 41 runtime is outdated!

There are no new features, but since we updated a lot of Rust dependencies we preferred to release a beta version before using it to update our stable release to the latest runtime. So please test it and if no major regression is reported, we will release it as stable in two weeks.

To get it, run the following commands:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub-beta org.gnome.Fractal
flatpak run --branch=beta org.gnome.Fractal

Note that if you always want to use this beta version instead of the stable one, and run it from the icon in your launcher, you will need to change its desktop file to use the command in the last line.

See you soon with some news regarding Fractal 5 hopefully!

Ement.el (website)

Matrix client for Emacs

alphapapa reports

Changes since the last release include:

Additions

• Command ement-view-space to view a space's rooms in a directory buffer.

Changes

• Improve -ement-describe-room- command (formatting, bindings).

Fixes

• Retry sync for HTTP 502 "Bad Gateway" errors.
• Formatting of unban events.
• Update password authentication according to newer Matrix spec. (Fixes compatibility with Conduit servers.)
• Image scaling issues.

Feel free to join us in #ement.el:matrix.org!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Johannes Marbach reports

• This week we got closer to getting our cloud packaging working, a step towards drastically reducing the time we spend on releases and allowing us to do more.
• We also continued to work on stuck notification issues with one bug fix and another close to being resolved, too.

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Ștefan says

This week we were very busy squashing bugs in Element X and we’re happy to announce that we are ready to make it available to the general public as a TestFlight app available for iOS, iPadOS and macOS (on Apple Silicon) soon (pending Apple's review). This is a pre-alpha version of the app which features the new faster sync and basic functionality. There are lots more features coming over the next few weeks! We will share the public link in our new Element X iOS public room over at https://matrix.to/#/#element-x-ios:matrix.org

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

Jorge Martín says

This week our efforts have been split between Element X and Element Android:

• On Element X, we're focused on laying the foundations for the app, improving our tools and processes for distributing the updated Rust SDK as an Android module and refining the initial screens of the app, matching the new designs and UX flows.
• On Element Android, we've released a new version 1.5.26 with more fixes and improvements for the Rich Text Editor, Polls and Location Sharing features, to name a few of them.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

matrix-migrate

ben says

Happy to announce a neat little CLI tool (built with rust, of course) to migrate your matrix rooms from one account to another: matrix-migrate is inspired by the the EMS migrator, but

1. is a nice little CLI tool, based on matrix-rust-sdk
2. allows for restarts (refreshes at the beginning)
3. it runs the operations async in parallel and is thus quite a bit faster

Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

Christian Paul (jaller94) reports

Matrix Wrench 0.11.0

I've continued to develop Matrix Wrench, a webapp for techy Matrix admins to manage rooms and room state. It can be hosted on any static web space, supports multiple logins and has just one direct dependency (htm/preact).

Lots of great new features got released in the last two weeks. Here are the highlights:

• Added: Tables of joined rooms and direct contacts
• Added: New input for identities: Masquerade As Matrix ID (for AppService tokens)
• Fixed: Knocking button didn't work ("Error: Content not JSON.")

Check out the changelog of Matrix Wrench.

Dept of Widgets 🧩

matrix-meetings

Oliver Sand reports

After we had some great time at FOSDEM and where we were able to test our Barcamp widget with a broader group, we are thrilled to announce that we finally made the next widget public:

Entering the matrix-meetings-widget! The widget allows to plan meetings, invite other users, configure meetings rooms, view your calendar, and perform video conferences. All data is stored in Matrix, no external service required. As the Widget API is a bit limited for this use-cases, it's a combination of a widget and a bot.

As a small teaser: We are in the progress of building a whiteboard widget that is fully based on Matrix without an external storage. If you have any questions, reach out to us at #nordeck:matrix.org.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict announces

A new release of Trixnity is out. Among other things, there are some performance improvements regarding reading/saving files and reply fallback support has been added.

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Next-gen crypto-included SDK for developing Clients, Bots and Appservices; written in Rust with bindings for Node, Swift and WASM

Jonas Platte reports

• Yet again, lots of work is happening to increase the robustness of sliding sync and the timeline API
• Support for audio messages in matrix-sdk-ffi was added by an external contributor
• Read receipts are close to landing in the timeline API (contributed by Kévin Commaille, one of the main Fractal developers)
• Some convenience functionality around powerlevels was added by our former colleague Ben

Dept of Bots 🤖

mnotify

stefan announces

Since there are people out there who actually use my tool for writing bots, I revived mnotify and started rewriting it in Rust using the matrix-rust-sdk. As a consequence, E2EE now works out of the box! Thanks to vadozemac builds without external C libraries are possible! If you are familiar with Rust and the matrix-rust-sdk, help is appreciated! 🙂

rust pingbot

cel reports

A new pingbot (echobot) has been implemented as an application service. There is an instance of it operating in #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net currently; and there is some discussion of it there. Source: https://codeberg.org/cel2/pingbot-appservice-rs https://git.scuttlebot.io/%2531GZTczroR1ldeWb0BbZH10MCWh9dd5HQM9qiN734YY%3D.sha256/

flip-matrix-bot (website)

A Matrix bot for the Friendly Linux Players community.

HER0 says

We now have a nice web page for each event! These provide a convenient way to share event details with others, and are already used in the iCalendar feed. If/when updates to Mastodon and Steam are live, they will also use these pages. For an example web page, this corresponds to the event coming up this weekend:

https://friendlylinuxplayers.org/events/70392fec3bc0393e

In addition, there was some refactoring merged, thanks to a community member.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix Salon Podcast (German)

Christian Paul (jaller94) reports

Meet Nico who many might know as the maintainer of the nheko client and a passionate critic. We talked about how he hopes to improve Matrix by voicing concerns on various change proposals and how the similarity of the names Nico and nheko is just a coincidence.

Episode link: https://anchor.fm/matrix-podcast0/episodes/Nico---FOSDEM-2023-e1vf7g1 Mastodon post: https://mastodontech.de/@jaller94/109920366857895607

Matrix User Meetup Berlin

saces says

Next Matrix user meetup 1.3.2023, 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.

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

Matrix room: #mumb:c-base.org

Dept of Guides 🧭

Andreas says

I wrote two blog posts (one, two) about decentralization and its advantages over centralized networks (with some Matrix examples). It's in Swedish, but I hope some find it useful.

Room of the Week 📆

du announces

Tech News in Matrix

Would you like to get your tech news inside of your Matrix client of choice? I've set up a simple room that pulls articles from dozens of quality RSS feeds (including This Week In Matrix) and posts them in the room. You can join the read-only room at: https://matrix.to/#/#tech:uxn.one

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.

#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.

That's all I know

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

Matrix Live

Thib was away this week, Matrix Live is finally coming back next week!

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Gitter

madlittlemods (Eric Eastwood) says

If you didn't already catch it this week, Gitter has fully migrated to Matrix! 😎

We brought over all of the historical Gitter content to the gitter.im homeserver and gave everyone free rein over it via app.gitter.im, a Gitter branded Element instance.

Of course, since it's Matrix, you can use whatever client you want to access your public, private and one to one (now DM) conversations!

You can read about the full details in the blog post: https://blog.gitter.im/2023/02/13/gitter-has-fully-migrated-to-matrix/

Happy chatting! 🤠

Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR 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

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3925: m.replace aggregation with full event (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC3967: Do not require UIA when first uploading cross signing keys

Spec Core Team

The Spec Core Team has been busy working away at Matrix 1.6 (released earlier in the week) and aiming to get MSC3925: m.replace aggregation with full event, MSC3952: Intentional Mentions, and MSC2677: Annotations and reactions and all of their dependencies through the spec process. These are all MSCs the SCT has been asked to help get through the process - if there's an MSC we should be looking at, please let us know in #sct-office:matrix.org.

IETF/MIMI/DMA

With the Extensible Events Core (MSC1767) being accepted last week, the focus now turns to all the other extensible event MSCs for images, files, etc. How does extensible events relate to IETF/MIMI/DMA, you ask? In our mission for having Matrix be the standard for interoperability, we need a content format that works for everyone. Events prior to MSC1767 could work with enough effort, though MSC1767's system makes things a lot easier when representing arbitrarily complex messaging features.

Stay tuned to TWIM for progress in this area. It's a relatively slow process, but we're working through it.

Random MSC of the week

This week's random MSC is MSC2785: Event notification attributes and actions! This is effectively a replacement for the push rules system we have today, and a super interesting one (how do you even design a notifications system?). Focus has shifted a little bit since this MSC was first opened, though its ideas still comes up frequently when aiming to make smaller changes to push rules today.

The Chart

The chart has been giving us a bit of grief when trying to be generated, but today it seems agreeable enough to include - enjoy :)

Dept of Servers 🏢

Jason Volk announces

Construct (website)

Construct 0.9 is out. New commands have been added to manage bridges. I'd like to thank tulir for accepting the associated documentation for mautrix users. I'd like to thank @bgiovanni for driving the features and fixes for this epoch. I'd also like to give special mention to qg of schildichat for helping diagnose issues.

This will be the final minor version. Construct is nearly stable and is on approach to 1.0. Stay tuned for the coming weeks. Don't forget to idle and perform #construct:zemos.net

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-rss-bridge (website)

imbev announces

A bridge for reading RSS feeds in Matrix rooms.

This week matrix-rss-bridge received support for authentication to Matrix homeservers via access token or login (SSO) token. Thank you to SuperEmotes for contributing!

Dept of Clients 📱

Farooq says

chooj, the Matrix client for KaiOS, is back into the game. Most importantly, with upgrade of the JS SDK used in chooj, chooj doesn't have any known security flaws anymore and usable again. There are many features added and bugs removed, too. Including joining public rooms, saving image to gallery and a better login process.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Danielle says

• This week we sunset Gitter; users were migrated over to Element. There’s more info here
  • As part of this work we’re continuing to work on the migration, polish, and other remaining pieces, including; fully supporting archive rooms
• We completed the first draft of automated Linux packaging!
• A bug was reported on room ordering; it’s been fixed
• Also, we’re investigating messages sometimes sending out of order

In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):

• The rich text editor continues to improve!

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Ștefan says

• This week in ElementX land was still mostly about stabilization and bug fixes, but we did manage to sneak a couple of features in too:
  • fixed the integration tests and improved the UI ones
  • a developer menu for supporting features while in development
  • added support for attaching screenshots to feedback reports
  • almost finished with the reporting content flows
  • started on collapsible room state events
  • and more
• Meanwhile there’s a new version of Element available on the AppStore that brings with it the ability to mark rooms as unread and a brand new Poll History screen

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

Danielle says

• Element Android 1.5.24 has been replaced by 1.5.25 just before making it public because an issue was discovered on the audio player. A crash impacted both voice message and voice broadcast playback. 1.5.25 fixes this and should be available to everyone soon.
• We are also continuing to improve polls.
• On Element X, the developer team got a new member! We are working to store the user credentials in a safer way. Also we are getting ready to start developing all the missing features (there are a lot!).

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Dart matrix sdk (website)

td says

We released another breaking change this week :p bump to v0.17.0

Introduced a couple of new features like upgrading voice calls to video calls, some neat helper functions for group calls. Fixes include cleaning group call state events, fixing the searchEvent function, a way to get own profile from server and then fallback to room profile and also fixes to the /markasdm command.

Complete changelog:

• fix: ability to upgrade audio calls to video calls (td)
• chore: add a fetchOwnProfileFromServer method which tries to get ownProfile from server first, disk then (td)
• fix: clean expired member state events in group calls (td)
• fix: hasActiveGroup call now checks all group calls (td)
• fix: Check if argument is valid mxid in /maskasdm command (Christian Pauly)
• fix: Fake User object (Christian Pauly)
• fix: Request key in searchEvent method crashes because of wrong preconditions (Christian Pauly)
• refactor: Check config at file sending after placing fake event and add error handling (Krille)
• chore: bump dart to 2.18 (Nicolas Werner)
• fix: setMicrophoneMuted is now async to match setVideoMuted (td)
• fix: implement activeGroupCallEvents to get all active group call state events in a room (td)
• refactor: (BREAKING CHANGE) move staleCallChecker and expires_Ts stuff to an extension on Room, instead of Voip because it makes much more sense per room rather than on voip, also makes testing easier (td)
• fix: populate local groupCalls list on instantiating VOIP() (td)
• fix: starting stale call checker is now handled by the sdk itself because clients can forget to do so (td)

Ruma (website)

A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.

Kévin Commaille reports

It's been a while since our last update in November, but it just means we have been busier than ever! A lot has happened to follow changes in the Matrix specification as well as fixing bugs in our codebase or making our API easier to use.

We have released Ruma 0.8.0 and 0.8.1 at the beginning of the month. It was long overdue with a lot of improvements, including but not limited to:

• Stabilized support for all the changes and features of Matrix 1.4 and Matrix 1.5
• Making our request types use owned instead of borrowed data
• Replacing ruma_api! with more flexible macros
• Fixing the serialization and deserialization of redacted events
• Reorganizing our *EventContent traits to allow event content types to only implement what is really needed
• Removing sensitive data from the Debug-format representation of our types

And on the 15th we released Ruma 0.8.2 with a few bug fixes but also stabilized support for all the changes and features of Matrix 1.6!

Although it might be less visible in our changelogs, we also regularly add support for MSCs, and try to keep our implementations up-to-date. A few examples:

• Sliding sync (MSC3575 and others, currently used by Element X via the matrix-rust-sdk)
• Extensible events (MSC1767 and others)
• Push rule condition for room version features (MSC3931 and MSC3932)

We also have a bunch of issues opened if you feel like contributing, so come say hi!

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Next-gen crypto-included SDK for developing Clients, Bots and Appservices; written in Rust with bindings for Node, Swift and WASM

Jonas Platte reports

• We're continuing our focus on fixing bugs and refactoring our code to make things more robust, especially around sliding sync and the timeline API, i.e. the critical pieces underpinning Element X
• A few more logging / tracing improvements have landed
• We updated the nodejs bindings for matrix-sdk-crypto to allow the use of sqlite for storage instead of sled (Rust database that is unfortunately not well maintained)

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi announces

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy is progressing toward switching to Traefik as the default reverse-proxy, instead of nginx. As a project running everything in containers, it's only natural to be using a container-native reverse-proxy.

Our changelog entry Reverse-proxy configuration changes and initial Traefik support contains the backstory, current progress and future goals.

Dept of Services 🚀

etke.cc (website)

Your matrix server on your conditions

Slavi says

The FOSS-based etke.cc managed Matrix server hosting service (built on top of matrix-docker-ansible-deploy) has turned 2 years old 🎉

Besides some upstream Ansible playbook feature contributions, a bunch of Matrix-related tools were developed and released as free-software by the etke.cc team over the past year, among which:

• Postmoogle email bridge, which superseded the much more basic email2matrix bridge
• Scheduler - a bot that handles Matrix server maintenance
• Buscarron - a web form to matrix bot

In addition, the etke.cc team has grown and many other service improvements were made.

To learn more about last year's progress, see the full news article.

Dept of Bots 🤖

flip-matrix-bot (website)

HER0 announces

The biggest change to the bot has been the tweaking of event reminders sent in #flip:flip.earth. We now send a lightweight event notification 24 hours before the scheduled time of the event, and don't send one if the event takes place in 19 minutes or less.

Outside of these tweaks, there is a minimally-working branch that can send updates to Mastodon! See the Mastodon issue for details. Before this is completed, several things need to be done, including creating events on our website.

Dept of Guides 🧭

Matrix Wiki / Matrix Live Shownotes and Transcriptions

MTRNord announces

It has been a while since I last wrote about my Matrix Wiki. Mostly because not much happened.

Recently, Whisper.cpp took off and I started to tinker with it. Earlier I did already try to transcribe Matrix Live manually. Today I combined the 2 things.

As a Result, I am trying to better/faster build small pages with Shownotes and a Text Transcription of Matrix Live episodes each week.

The first one can be found at https://en.miki.community/wiki/Matrix_Live_S08E17 for the last episode.

Feel free to raise critique, wishes and other ideas in #matrix-live-transcriptions:midnightthoughts.space :)

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.

#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.

That's all I know

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