Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Last week Matrix had a presence at UbuCon Europe and PyCon Ireland. We gave workshops on using Matrix to create bots, and also a session on installing Synapse (see also: Brendan's entry below!)

Hey #PyConIE! We hope you enjoyed the Matrix workshop, find the slides and code samples at https://t.co/aT1dDuEcm1 and make sure to ask any more questions! pic.twitter.com/C2qwV5R3gl

— Matrix (@matrixdotorg) October 12, 2019

Tomorrow I'm off to sunny Manchester with Michael from the Ops team. We'll visit OggCamp, where we'll show off Matrix with a fun demo I previewed on Matrix Live a few weeks ago.

Matrix will ALSO be at:

• Re­decentra­lize Conference 2019
• MozFest 2019

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa:

Last week we set MSC1219 (key backups), MSC2241 (verification over DMs), and MSC2313 (ban lists) for the spec core team to focus on. Those 3 are rolling on into this week as we didn't get a lot of work done last week :)

In other Spec news, Matthew uncovered a stone tablet describing what would in future be known as "MSC2324":

Dept of Servers 🏢

install-party, nice result from UbuCon Europe

Brendan said:

For a workshop anoa and I did at Ubucon Europe last Sunday on how to install Synapse, I worked on a side project that creates a server, attaches a domain name to it and installs Riot and Caddy on it. Attendees can then SSH into it, follow the instructions to install a Matrix homeserver, and use Riot to register an account on it, log in, and join a federated room with all of the other attendees' homeservers in it. We tried it out last week-end for the actual workshop and it worked quite well 🙂 The project is called Install Party, and lives at https://github.com/babolivier/install-party, and if you want to chat about it I've just created #install-party:abolivier.bzh 😉

Synapse

Neil reported:

This week we've been thinking about the future and brainstorming on ideas to improve perf for small instances and sparing some cycles for MSC1228. Next week we'll return to improving IO usage on matrix.org.

Synapse 1.4.1 was released, which fixes a small regression in 1.4.0.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Matrix-Slack Bridge on NixOS

@christian:kampka.net said:

Just FYI, the matrix slack bridge is now available via NixOS: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/70753

Dept of Clients 📱

riots.im available via IPFS

Remember https://riots.im from last week? Now available on IPFS!

@swedneck:permaweb.io said:

toml's riots.im is also available via IPFS: ipfs get riots.im or visit localhost:8080/ipns/riots.im with ipfs installed and running.

Riot-iOS 0.10.0

Manu offered:

On Riot-iOS land, Riot-iOS 0.10.0 has been released on the App Store. We have started a stabilisation sprint. In parallel, we are still polishing the privacy work

RiotX release next week

benoit announced:

RiotX: we are merging waiting PRs and have postponed the release to ensure a maximum of stability and polishing. The release will be done at the beginning of next week and will contains: read marker, camera picker and improved file picker, share to RiotX capability and many bugfixes.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-3ds-sdk

sorunome said:

Heya, matrix-3ds-sdk is a new matrix sdk - for the Nintendo 3DS! It is still deep in development, so expect bugs, some things not working properly etc. Current features include:

• logging in
• sending text messages to rooms
• redacting events from rooms
• resolving aliases to room ids
• basic framework to get a /sync loop working

If you are into 3DS homebrew development or are interested in helping out making a full client based on this, please contact soru (@sorunome:sorunome.de)! 3ds homebrew dev is pretty new to her, so there are plenty of open questions / debugging help would be great!

Support room: #matrix-3ds-sdk:sorunome.de Donate: https://liberapay.com/Sorunome

This is really impressive, I'm looking forward to playing with it. (I'm sure someone at the office must own a 3DS!)

koma

yuforia offered:

koma, Kotlin library for building clients: Added API for retrieving notifications.

Dept of Ops 🛠

mvgorcum/docker-matrix

Mathijs announced:

I uploaded the synapse 1.4.1 image to mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.4.1 within about half an hour after the release

docker image of synapse-develop

Mathijs announced:

I've made a docker image of the develop branch of synapse, and automated it to build daily. It's on my docker hub as mvgorcum/docker-matrix:develop, based on the avhost dockerfile. Note that there are no checks, the image is simply built from the develop branch of the synapse git repo every night.

Matrix Synapse for Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

just pushed Version 1.4.1 of the Matrix Synapse for Kubernetes packaging. A bit fiddly to do on a phone 🙂

Synapse 1.4.1 multi-arch docker image

Black Hat told us:

I'm building the Synapse 1.4.1 multi-arch docker image. It will be pushed to Docker Hub in a couple of hours.

Dept of Tulir 🇫🇮

A special section this week from the guy with one editor open for everything, tulir:

I haven't done anything on my own projects this week, but I did contribute to a bunch of other projects:

• Updated SmsMatrix to the latest matrix-android-sdk to fix outgoing sms duplication bug (https://github.com/tijder/SmsMatrix/pull/60)
• Fixed Riot web sending reply fallbacks in edited message content (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3551)
• Fixed some things in the Riot web edit html -> markdown parsing (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3552)
• Made Riot web reply rendering much nicer and more compact (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3553)
• Added full emoji picker for reactions to Riot web (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3554)

The first two are already merged (and SmsMatrix even got a new release on f-droid), the html parsing is waiting for code review and the emoji picker and reply rendering are waiting for design review.

Also, I made a read-only status.matrix.org rss feed room since some people wanted one: #matrix.org-status:maunium.net. I don't remember if I TWIMed these before, but #xkcd:maunium.net and #commitstrip:maunium.net are similar read-only rooms, new xkcds and commitstrips are posted there whenever they come out.

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

As you may have heard, New Vector, a major entity in the Matrix world, recently completed a series A funding round.

Further reading:

• $8.5M to accelerate Matrix, polish Riot and expand Modular! (from New Vector)
• Why I invested in New Vector (from Notion Capital)
• Communications of the future will be open and secure: why we are partnering with New Vector (from Dawn Capital)
• Why we invested in New Vector — the team building an open and secure communication platform (Sam Endacott from firstminute capital)

Mozilla IM trial ended

Mozilla have been trialing different IM solutions to replace IRC, including Matrix. This trial ended this week, and we hope to hear the results this month. (C'mon, Matrix!)

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil told us:

Matrix.org hit some IO problems earlier this week, while largely a problem with our hosting provider, we’re spending a bit of time to make Synapse more resilient if the same thing were to happen again. This will mean the ability to shard the DB (by table) and spread the load so we are not so dependent on high performance from a given db box. Outside of that we’ve been working on the final polishing of the room directory and getting the sqlite -> Postgres port script into better shape.

multi-arch docker image of Synapse

Black Hat said:

My multi-arch docker image of Synapse has been updated to v1.4.0.

Dendrite

anoa offered:

Not much for Dendrite this week as anoa is off at Ubucon 2019. But we had a few valuable bugs reported by the community, and a pressing reminder to get Dendrite's Monolith mode in as part of its CI.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

slack bridge 1.0.1

Half-Shot told us:

Hey folks, The slack bridge 1.0.1 release is out https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-slack/releases/tag/1.0.1 containing a few bug fixes found since the original release.

IRC bridge

Half-Shot offered:

I've not got much for this week, but the IRC bridge has been undergoing some serious refactors and changes for a larger release. Should be quite a big one when it lands :)

Dept of Encryption 🔐

Search inside E2EE rooms

Update from poljar:

A PR for riot-web has emerged that adds support for search in E2E encrypted rooms. The PR is utilizing Seshat to perform event indexing and search on riot-desktop. While the PR is missing any sort of UI, it is in a usable state.

Dept of Clients 📱

Riot iOS

Manu told us:

phase:1 of privacy work is done. Riot -iOS 0.10.0 will be available soon

every version of Riot Web released on GitHub

toml offered:

Take a trip down memory lane with the Riots of yesteryear at https://riots.im (note the 's'). Hosting every version of Riot Web released on GitHub 😁

Comes with free Wikipedia hole.

Riot Android

benoit announced:

Valere has done a release and is doing some maintenance. He has started to work on integration manager

RiotX

benoit offered:

RiotX: We have fixed quite a lot of issues during the stabilization sprint. We are now working on Sprint 4: read marker, report content, mark all room read, etc. François is changing the media/file picker and we will also be able to share elements from other apps to RiotX. We will schedule a release soon (tm) (should have happen this week, but has been delayed due to stabilization)

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Elixir projects from uhoreg, Polyjuice and Igor

uhoreg told us:

Polyjuice Client, a Matrix client library for Elixir, has a new release. There is now a short tutorial that will teach you how to make a simple echo bot with it.

Then:

Igor, a bot framework for Elixir, has had its first release.

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

• Ubucon https://sintra2019.ubucon.org/
• PyCon Ireland https://python.ie/pycon-2019/
• OggCamp https://oggcamp.org/
• MozFest https://www.mozillafestival.org/en/
• and more, watch the vid

Dept of Spec 📜

Two MSCs have reached final comment period this week:

• MSC 2176: Update the redaction rules
• MSC 2290: Separate Endpoints for Threepid Binding

Last week the spec core team said they'd start focusing on 3 MSCs per week. Those were MSC2290, MSC2176 and MSC1219. The first two have entered FCP, and MSC1219 will roll over into this week.

Thus, the 3 MSCs the spec core team will be focusing on this week will be MSC2199, MSC1219 and an up and coming security-related MSC. Join us in #matrix-spec:matrix.org for related spec discussions :)

There is also a new MSC, MSC2312 describing the proposed Matrix URI scheme. This is a remake of a much older proposal. The general idea is to make a standard for Matrix URIs: matrix:.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse 1.4.0 released

Neil offered:

Synapse This week we shipped our privacy release 1.4.0 which is a huge deal in improving user data privacy. Additionally we also included a significant perf improvement which will help anyone suffering from a build up in forward extremities.

Coming up, improved room directory perf, ironing out wrinkles in the room upgrade UX as well as a major reliability boost in the sqlite -> Postgres db porting script.

Dendrite dev recommences

anoa said:

Dendrite's latest hiatus has come to a close after the privacy work had taken so much of my time. Thankfully although PR review is blocked on the dendrite team, the community have continued to submit PRs and even review each other's PRs (thanks cnly !).

Fixes this week have mostly focused around the CI. We finally got Dendrite's CI unborked (t'was borked in a half-way transition between CircleCI and Buildkite), but it's now working and faster than ever. We're also working to add the Sytest test failure results to the top of the CI window such that people can see which tests failed and the associated Dendrite logs.

Additionally we had some new and merged PRs this week! A federation fix from cnly, a change to allow Dendrite to better work in kubernetes setups by aditsachde, and a codebase fix from @manasseh:matrix.org, who's also working on another fix involving updating gomatrixserverlib to support more recent spec versions.

Some things people were asking about:

• Progress of dendrite is tracked in Dendrite's milestones. We're currently aiming for #1 (Client-Side) Bot Hosting.
• CI not running for community PRs - Buildkite hosts currently run multiple PRs from many different projects, so we can't trust arbitrary code to run on them quite yet. There's a project in progress to run the code in a sandboxed environment (think VM or container) to lift this restriction :)

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-slack 1.0 released

Half-Shot offered:

Aaaaaaaaaaand shipped 🥳 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-slack (1.0 is out!)

Check out the announcement post, big congrats to Half-Shot for getting this out.

Bridging animated stickers to mautrix-telegram

tulir said:

mautrix-telegram will soon be able to bridge animated stickers to matrix as images or videos, thanks to a pull request by @Eramde

Dept of Clients 📱

Riot Web 1.4.0

Big release for riot-web, check out their release: https://medium.com/@RiotChat/new-privacy-controls-for-riot-dc3661888563

Riot Android and RiotX

From Benoit:

Riot-Android: 2 main things have landed on develop, to be released early next week:

• Catching up on riot-web new Privacy Controls (choose identity server, stun server, securely compare contacts)
• [fdroid only] A new background sync mode for notifications. You can now choose between 'optimized for battery' and 'optimize for realtime'
  • build available on buildkite

RiotX:

• Read Markers have landed on develop (jump to last read) Focus on stabilization and bug fixes

Continuum

yuforia offered:

Continuum, desktop client written in Kotlin, version 0.9.26:

• Width of columns can be adjusted by dragging, this is a screenshot showing the mouse cursor placed between the first two colomns.

• Fix occasional out-of-bounds array access errors while calculating bounds during layout passes.

FluffyWeb: Matrix client with Flutter for Web

@krille:ubports.chat offered:

As a proof of concept, I have created a little Matrix client with Flutter for Web, named FluffyWeb. This client has only basic features but it shows the possibilities of Flutter for Web and it seems to work fine so far. The client has a responsive design and should work on mobile fine too. Check it out at: https://christianpauly.gitlab.io/fluffyweb/ (Not working in Internet Explorer - I recommend the AOL Messenger in this case)

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruby SDK 1.4.0

Ananace said:

Just released version 1.4.0 of the Ruby SDK, the main change in this release is the addition of a naïve set of methods to replace the logger implementation. This should allow the gem to slot more easily into projects where existing logging configuration is already in place.

Dept of Ops 🛠

1.4.0.Mania

With the release of Synapse 1.4.0, there was a rush to get packages and containers updated, the community are always fast, but we should acknowledge Anance for having his k8s images updated within a few minutes!

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi announced:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy has also been updated to support Synapse v1.4.0 and riot-web v1.4.0.

As always, referring to the project's changelog before upgrading is a good idea.

KUDOS to this this project! I love that I can git pull, ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts setup.yml --tags=setup-all without really checking and my toy homeserver is automagically updated.

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

Just pushed the Kubernetes-optimized images for Synapse version 1.4.0

mathijs's docker images

@mathijs:matrix.vgorcum.com reported:

I set up my own docker-hub account to push images of RC's of synapse at mvgorcum/docker-matrix that aren't built for the avhost/docker-matrix repo

Dept of Bots 🤖

msc name linker bot

anoa said:

I made a bot that gives the link for msc names. Code is here: https://github.com/anoadragon453/msc-chatbot

Dept of Welcomes 👐

Welcome to the JRuby team who announced they will be moving their official chat to Matrix.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Let's reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Final thoughts 💭

Mastodon released v3.0.0 - check it out.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Matrix AMA on /r/privacy happening this weekend

Go check out https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/da219t/im_project_lead_for_matrixorg_the_open_protocol/ and join in asking questions!

First Librem 5 Smartphones are Shipping

Might be interesting to readers: the phone with Matrix at its core is starting to ship: https://puri.sm/posts/first-librem-5-smartphones-are-shipping/.

Fork Awesome includes Matrix icon

Fork Awesome now include the [ m ] as an icon! View it at https://forkaweso.me/Fork-Awesome/icon/matrix-org/

Dept of Spec 📜

Following on from last week, the 3 MSCs the spec core team have chosen to focus on this week are: 2290 (3pid binding endpoints), 2176 (redaction rules), and 1219 (key backups), spurred on by finishing off the spec work for the privacy sprint, and cross signing.

MSC Updates:

News from 2019-09-20 09:00:00 until 2019-09-27 20:07:55.

Merged MSCs

No MSCs have been merged this week.

Final Comment Period

No MSCs have entered FCP this week.

New MSCs

• [WIP] MSC2306: Removing MSISDN password resets
• MSC2299: Proposal to add m.textfile msgtype
• MSC2300: /ping endpoint
• MSC2301: server info endpoint

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse v1.4.0rc1

Neil told us:

This week we put out a release candidate for 1.4.0 which support a whole host of privacy features including greater control over interactions with identity servers, cleaning up redacted events and user meta data (like IPs and user agents) and warning users when they are using the default trusted key server (matrix.org).

Aside from privacy, the thing that is most exciting is switching on our solution for mitigating forward extremities build up by default. It should make a big difference for the CPU of servers in fragmented rooms.

matrix-corporal v1.6.0

Slavi reported:

matrix-corporal v1.6.0 was recently released to address an issue when used in conjunction with Synapse Single-Sign-On login flows (CAS or SAML).

Until now, matrix-corporal used to interfere with /login requests and demand that users always authenticate with a username/password. Since v1.6.0, you can use matrix-corporal for automatic management of users/rooms/communities, while letting authentication happen through SSO (as provided by Synapse).

Dept of Bridges 🌉

famedly-email-bridge

sorunome offered:

famedly-email-bridge should be fully working now! Not only is there a readme now, but also a share of other changes:

• whitelist/blacklist who may use the bridge
• threaded conversation: rooms in which you just send messages as if to chat and the bridge bundles them into emails and sends them off
• invite ghosts to a room to start a threaded conversation
• incoming emails in email rooms have a link to reply to, starting a threaded conversation
• email templates for sending emails: add a header or footer, if you want
• sanitize incoming HTML to make sure it is only matrix' subset

New Twilio bridge: mautrix-twilio

Tulir told us:

https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-twilio / #twilio:maunium.net is now a thing. Message (+formatting) and media bridging works. Unlike all my other bridges, this one is a relaybot-style bridge.

I'm also working on a maubot that accepts invites, announces them in a control room and then invites people from that control room when requested. That bot should be ready NWIM.

matrix-appservice-slack 1.0.0-rc3

Half-Shot reported:

The slack bridge got an RC3 today and it is now LIVE on matrix.org!! This brings in a whole host of new changes like speedups for message processing, typing notifications and more reliable edits/reactions/replies. Since the 1.0 release required a migration of data files, we have made every effort to migrate integrations across. If you find that your slack bridge (hosted on matrix.org) is no longer working, please contact me

matrix-appservice-irc 0.13.0

Half-Shot told us:

Hi folks, the IRC bridge has finally gotten its 0.13.0 release this morning. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases contains all the juicy details

Bifrost resumed

Half-Shot offered:

Work on Bifrost has resumed! We're doing our best to refactor and replace bits that were hacked together at the start of the year and really improve on reliability and documentation. The official matrix.org bridge awaiting our work on PostgreSQL before we can move it further, but the project is accelerating :) https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost/tree/develop

Dept of Clients 📱

"riot-vim"

maze reported:

Hello. I made a thing for using the Vim text editor for sending messages in Riot, and a friend suggested I share it here. Here it is: https://gitlab.com/MRAAGH/riot-vim#riot-vim

This thing is bananas - take a look at the gif.

New client library for Elixir: polyjuice_client

uhoreg said:

I have extracted Igor's guts, and have distilled them into a new client library for Elixir: polyjuice_client. I've also started working on a library of Matrix utility functions for Elixir that would be relevant to multiple components (clients, application services, homeservers, identity servers): polyjuice_util.

Continuum 0.9.25

yuforia told us:

Continuum, desktop client written in Kotlin, version 0.9.25:

• Change text color of selected item in room list for higher contrast.

https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/ubsrqTgTUzbzklPGnTbRfqQr

koma, the library behind Continuum:

• Force new TCP connection when a SocketTimeoutException occurs in a pooled connection to fix recurrent timeout errors caused by connection reuse.

Fractal 4.2.1

Alexandre Franke reported:

Fractal 4.2.1 got released, with a bunch of updated translations, a crasher fix and a couple of other bug fixes.

Riot Android

benoit told us:

the privacy work is in review. The release will be done soon

RiotX

benoit announced:

RiotX: A big work to stabilize the application and to implement little missing feature has been done. Also Two releases has been done this week. Please refer the the changelog for a (rather) complete list of what has been done (https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/blob/develop/CHANGES.md) Also the read marker feature is in review. There are still remaining bugs which will be fixed before the merge.

RiotX is really coming along, please try it out.

Dept of Ops 🛠

New Synapse Docker Image

Black Hat reported:

I made a docker image for Synapse (again). However, this time it uses PyPy3. It is a drop-in replacement for matrixdotorg/synapse. Anyone is welcomed to test the impact of it on CPU utilization.

OpenSAPS

Stanislav told us:

OpenSAPS (Open Slack APi Server, https://gitlab.com/pztrn/opensaps) is now provides Docker container for ease of use. Just mount /app/opensaps.yaml and you're set. Registry is reachable at https://gitlab.com/pztrn/opensaps/container_registry

Dept of Bots 🤖

matrix-nio project template

anoa offered:

I made a template repository for creating Matrix bots with poljar's matrix-nio: https://github.com/anoadragon453/nio-template! It also has a room: #nio-template:amorgan.xyz.

If you've ever wanted to make a Matrix bot with python, this repository can help you get started.

matrix-fly-paper is now "matrix-fly-swatter", has new scope

serra-allgood offered:

The matrix-fly-paper bot has been renamed to matrix-fly-swatter. On reflection, I realized the original goals for the bot were too ambitious and the project has become an exercise in becoming familiar with the client<->server api. The planned features have been cut back to simply automating sending m.room.server_acl events to several rooms at once. At a later date, planned features may be expanded, but there are other projects I'd have more fun working on in the meantime.

Dept of Ping 🏓

It's the section where 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. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

I spoke to Half-Shot about LOTS of topics in bridging, well worth a watch if you're interested in using Slack, IRC and other platforms with Matrix.

Dept of Spec 📜

Approved MSCs

No MSCs have cleared FCP this week.

Final Comment Period

No MSCs have entered FCP this week

In Progress MSCs

• MSC2291: Configuration to Control Crawling

The Spec Core Team is going to try and select 3 MSCs to prioritise per week to work on, in order to not stretch resources too thin and to communicate clearly what it is we're actually up to. More details to follow.

Otherwise this week has been continuing to iterate on existing MSCs, as well as updating the MSC template to rename the "Tradeoffs" section to "Alternatives", and to get rid of "Conclusion" which was always just an unnecessary repeat of the introduction.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Construct

Notes from Jason:

Construct did a round of performance work and pursued some of the easier opportunities with the most effective returns. At present, the biggest performance bottleneck Construct experiences is with I/O, specifically latency from accessing disks in a random pattern. This week a few open opportunities for prefetch pipelines were taken, allowing the server to stream data directly from the disk to the client with minimal buffering. This was implemented in several places, mostly for the /media/ system, and also for the /members lists, improving the performance of requesting the members of a room like #whalepool:ericmartindale.com .

There is one area though that requires a special mention for being an order of magnitude more impactful than any other area where a pipelined stream was placed. We have analyzed the way Riot conducts a room change, and by the simple placement of a prefetch operation when the server receives an im.vector.breadcrumb_rooms, which comes early during the room change, Construct is able to populate the room's timeline significantly faster. That has a compounding effect, as the browser initiates several requests based on (and after) the received timeline data- meaning those responses come significantly faster.

Construct is the community driven Matrix server written in C++ for maximum performance. Swing by #test:zemos.net or https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct/ for more.

Synapse

Neil said:

Synapse This week, lots of hacking but not much in the way of news. We’ve been focusing on more privacy improvements as well as polishing up the SAML integration. Next week, expect a wodge of privacy related features to land.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Matrix Slack bridge 1.0 RC2

Half-Shot said:

The Matrix Slack bridge has had another release candidate this week. 1.0 RC2 is out now. We've rewritten the codebase in Typescript and made many changes, and need your feedback before release so please do not hold back on testing it! The 1.0 release is slated to arrive sometime next week :)

famedly-email-bridge - new email bridge!!

sorunome told us:

Presenting famedly-email-bridge, a new email bridge! It is still early in development but can already send and receive emails.

Features so far:

• Receive emails by a prefix (e.g. [email protected], [email protected])
• Send emails with said prefix
• Receiving emails parses plain body, html body and attachments
• Sending emails collects all messages for a given amount of time. After that it creates an email based on that! Supports edits, redactions and files (image, video, audio, file)!

Things planned for the future:

• Route emails to channels based on threading (reply-chain)
• Send emails by making a new channel and inviting an email ghost and just sending messages!

IRC bridge progress: postgres

Half-Shot told us:

My other news that I forgot to mention is that I have a branch of the IRC bridge that runs off postgres, rather than flat file storage. It's much less memory/cpu intensive and might even offer a bit of a speedup :)

For ref: The current room/user store files for the freenode bridge take up 250MB when stored to disk. The existing storage system works on the principle of loading the whole datastore into memory and periodically saving to disk. Hopefully by not requiring the bridge to load all the state into memory, there are savings to be made.

mautrix-telegram v0.6.1

Tulir told us:

mautrix-telegram v0.6.1 has been released, no changes since the release candidates two weeks ago. mautrix-telegram v0.7.0 is scheduled to be released within 6 weeks.

Also, there's a WhatsApp business API bridge using Twilio in development, though I'm guessing most people won't have any use for that.

Dept of Clients 📱

Continuum progres

yuforia said:

Continuum desktop client written in pure Kotlin, version 0.9.24:

• Non-square avatar images are scaled up and cropped to fit a square, instead of being scaled down and put into a square.
• Scale avatar images when font size is increased/decreased with Ctrl and +/-. Below is a screenshot of Continuum with UI scaled to be 67% larger.
• After signing-in, open the messaging view each time it's launched instead of showing the login view and requiring one extra click.
• Shutdown background threads and close database so it won't be busy if Continuum is closed and immediately re-launched.

https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/yLOmalevIOxrKATqZVjsmfvr

Riot Web

Ryan offered:

Riot Web worked on the last remaining bits of the current privacy sprint. We are planning to do a release soon that includes this privacy work from the last few months. We are also working on a few improvements for first time users around the create room dialog. We also shipped several patch releases (1.3.5 and 1.3.6) to fix high priority bugs.

Riot-iOS

Manu said:

Riot-iOS has made some progress on the privacy sprint. We fixed some major issues with VoiceOver. Those fixes will be released soon in a hot fix release: 0.9.5.

Riot Android

Benoit:

Riot Android: Still working on privacy

RiotX

Benoit reported:

A release has been done (0.5.0) with login with SSO support. There is also a new "no network" indicator, which is a bit bugged, we will fix that. Stabilization sprint is still ongoing. We already have fixed quite a lot of issues. François is still working on the read marker and is also fixing issues related to the permalinks.

krombel reported:

It might be interesting to some of you that the F-Droid repo for RiotX is finally working again. There was an issue with buildkite which in the end led to the situation that the built apk had a lower versionCode as the apps already in the repo. The repo was then "intelligent enough" to no offer it as update. benoit was able to resolve that so the repos are updating again.

Dept of Ping 🏓

New!! A new section where we will reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Final thoughts 💭

Slack have invented bridging, very creative of them.

Nico has reappeared, on the tropical island Reunion and is looking again at his Elixir Homeserver project: Plasma.

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 📜

Approved MSCs

• MSC1802: Remove the '200' value from some federation responses

Final Comment Period

No MSCs have entered FCP

In Progress MSCs

• MSC2290: Separate Endpoints for Threepid Binding
• MSC2260: Update the auth rules for m.room.aliases events

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Mozilla trialling Matrix as an IRC replacement

In fact they're having a standoff between Matrix, Mattermost, Rocket.chat and Slack.

We're eager to see the results of this trial, the feedback will be very valuable for everyone regardless of the final outcome. (Though of course, we are optimistic..!)

Keep up with the discussion in various places.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

This week sees us complete the last items on the privacy sprint and we expect a release to land early next week. Aside from that OpenTracing is now live, the configuration tool is ready to go (modulo the new Synapse release) and we’ve been trialling out room directory improvements.

Next week expect Synapse 1.4 to land which will contain privacy sprint support as well as a host of bug fixes and perf improvements.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-slack 1.0.0-rc1

MAJOR milestone for Half-Shot this week!

Hello Twimians! After many weeks of creativity, pain, and slack, the bridge team are proud to present our first release candidate for the slack bridge. This release brings in a ton of new changes that should massively improve the slack<->matrix experience. The headline features are Postgres support, Puppeting, RTM (websocket) support as well as an entirely refactored codebase written in Typescript.

This release has made heavy changes to the schema of the slack bridge and as such we are not recommending that anyone upgrade their existing slack bridge instances to 1.0.0-rc1. A migration script is currently being worked on, but for the time being existing installs should not be upgraded to 1.0.0 release candidates.

matrix-appservice-irc 0.13.0-rc2

Half-Shot announced:

HELLO IRC FANS. Or possibly not irc fans, if you are running a Matrix bridge.. After a long period of not-being-ready the IRC bridge has a new RC, https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.13.0-rc2. Hopefully the last, but time will tell.

Keybase bridge, mega-pre-alpha

Half-Shot reported:

There is also now a keybase bridge

This is ready for testing, room here: #keybase:half-shot.uk

Dept of Clients 📱

Scylla

@daniel:riot.danilafe.com reported:

Hi all! I haven't been around much because our homeserver chugs a little when federation is enabled, but I've got a few updates to share about Scylla, the Elm-based web client for Matrix:

1. There have been a few optimization changes. The naive Elm approach leads to recomputing room names and usernames on every keystroke, which causes huge performance issues in rooms with many users (like #freenode_#haskell!). The new versions of Scylla avoid recomputing room names and message HTML, leading to much better performance in large rooms and rooms where a lot of history is loaded.
2. The recommended fixes in the spec regarding flickering have been implemented, and messages should no longer flicker.
3. "m.notice" and "m.emote" events are now supported
4. There has been a minor visual update to make the interface look a little more consistent and professional.

FluffyChat 11.16

@krille:ubports.chat offered:

We have released FluffyChat 11.16 with minor bug fixes and updated translations. A nice new feature: Messages which contains emojis only are now displayed with a much bigger font. 💕

Continuum 0.9.23

yuforia reported:

Continuum desktop client written in pure Kotlin, version 0.9.23:

• Include Elliptic Curve module to be able to connect to HTTPS servers using ECDSA

• Removed dependency on kotlin-reflect and tornadofx completely and make packaged size about 5 MB smaller, which is a 10% to 20% reduction, depending on the target platform and package format

• In addition to automatic scaling when HiDPI is detected, font size scaling is added. Press Ctrl and + or - to increase or decrease the font size. Font size scaling is not limited to texts, components with their size defined relative to the font size also gets scaled.

• When a image message is clicked, a viewer is opened to provide a closer look. Now the updated viewer is opened in new windows, multiple images can be viewed at once, and interaction with the main window is not blocked. Images also gets scaled when the viewer window is resized.

• Removed borders and backgrounds from 3 buttons and give them a flat appearance.

Fractal

Alexandre Franke told us:

Since last time, Fractal got many translation updates. Current coverage can be seen here. We’re also now disabling the message entry if the user is not allowed to send messages to the room and fixed a crashed when logging out or logging in with the wrong password.

Brawl, new web client from Bruno the Riot dev

Bruno told us:

I've been working occasionally for the past months on a basic matrix web client called Brawl, focusing on performance, offline usage and working on my old phone. I recently got it in still limited, but somewhat useful state. Unsure how much time I'll have to keep working on this regularily, but wanted to share it here anyways. Check it out on https://github.com/bwindels/brawl-chat, there's a GIF of it in action 🙂

Riot Web

From the team:

We’ve made good progress on our first FTUE (First Time User Experience) project: “Improve add & create room”, with only the makeover of the create room dialog remaining. Next week more FTUE projects, and we hope to get some progress on cross-signing, barring any other distractions.

Riot iOS

From the team:

• Finalising privacy
• Release 0.9.4 with support of the new Riot configuration link to quickly customise servers on the authentication screen.

Riot Android

From the team:

• Two minor releases have been made (0.9.5 and 0.9.6), to allow auto configuration of the homeserver in the login screen with a configuration link, and to fix an issue with SSO using Google account.
• Still working on privacy

RiotX (Android)

From the team:

• Working on stabilization. We already have fixed some issues.
• François is still working on ReadMarker
• Benoit is working on saving draft (storing unsent messages)
• Also implementing SSO login and M_CONSENT_NOT_GIVEN error

ALSO: "bashtrix"

Matthew reported:

i wrote a toy client in ~8 lines of bash (thanks to anoa for fixing it up): https://github.com/ara4n/random/blob/master/bashtrix.sh; context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20948530

Dept of Ops 🛠

synapse-simple-antispam now available in matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi offered:

due to the large number of invite-spam attacks and increased interest in the synapse-simple-antispam spam checker module, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now has support for installing and configuring it.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Release Tracking Bot from Ananace

Ananace reported:

Had some free time and ideas this week, so I've improved my release tracking bot to now correctly handle repos mixing full releases as well as tags (lightweight and/or annotated). GitHub's API really sucks in the tags department, so this required a rework to GraphQL queries instead, and it's looking good on that so far. The bot currently still only handles tracking all starred repos of a given account on GitHub, but I'm working on GitLab support, as well as support for tracking arbitrary repos. And a provisioning API is also somewhere on the roadmap,

That's all I know 🏁

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