Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Google Summer of Code 2020

Sometimes it seems like existence is a constant loop. Cycles within cycles are replayed, with only minor differences to help us discern the current and the foregoing.
How can we endure it?

It's not all bad though! Google have announced the return of the Summer of Code programme, and have updated their website with the current year (2020) and latest information.

Matrix will be applying to be a Mentoring Organisation, as we have for several years now. This year, we'd like to open the umbrella a little. If you think your (Matrix-related) project could help mentor a student, and that you could offer a meaningful project to that student, please contact me directly. For reference, there were four students under the Matrix heading last year, of which one was assigned to work with Kitsune on encryption support in libQuotient.

FOSDEM 2020

Will you be at FOSDEM this year? Matrix will be very well represented, so please come and see us at our stand, plus attend all of the three talks we'll be conducting. Many more details to follow!

Dept of Services 🚀

New from bit.nl, a public Matrix Homeserver focused on the Dutch market. Read the announcement and sign up here.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa offered:

Here are this week's spec 🐕️ updates!

Merged MSCs:

No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

No MSCs are in Final Comment Period.

New MSCs:

• MSC2413: Remove client_secret
• MSC2409: Proposal to send EDUs to appservices
  • This is a continuation of MSC1888

The Spec Core Team is still working on implementation, and likely will continue to be until after FOSDEM.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / P2P

Neil Alexander reported:

I've spent some time this week experimenting with integrating libp2p into dendrite and gomatrixserverlib to understand if we can get link-local homeserver discovery working along with direct or indirect federation. It's still early at the moment but I have had success with early federation requests working over libp2p—hopefully I'll have something interesting to show soon!

Synapse

Neil reported:

This week we’ve been continuing to work on migrating sydent to py3, improving admin tooling and working on fixing e2ee bugs. We’re also looking to make changes to allow admins the power to remove room aliases (MSCs 2260 2261).

Dept of Built on Matrix 🏗

Matrix Presents 📽️

Half-Shot told us:

What is it? Slideshows in Matrix, basically using the matrix room / event primitives to construct presentable federated slide shows.

What's new this week you ask? Well, it breaks less. It also does other neat things.

• Supports guests for viewing presentations, including the ability to specify a guest HS via the URL.
• Supports code highlighting in the presentation.
• Lots of CSS fixes to make slides line up properly.
• A fullscreen mode, which is actually unobstructive and quite handy.
• Presenter mode, which allows you to switch between following the presenters view of the room, and being able to view at your own leasure.
• Room joins now actually work, so you can be linked to a slide and expect to be able to view it.

Come check us out at #presents:half-shot.uk

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-imposter-bot, interesting relay idea

@mr_johnson22:matrix.org said:

matrix-imposter-bot - A bot that uses your account to repeat other people's messages. This gives relay-bot capabilities to puppet-only bridges. For more details, see https://github.com/mrjohnson22/matrix-imposter-bot

mx-puppet-bridge and other soru adventures

sorunome told us:

Will the development ever stop? Who knows! Here's the latest mx-puppet-bridge updates:

• Fix unbridging of direct chats
• Allow room-specific ghost avatar and name overrides
• Enhanced logging config
• Ability to configure name patterns for users/rooms/groups

mx-puppet-discord

Of course mx-puppet-discord received some updates, too!

• Receive notification on friends request
• Add optional profile syncing
• Implement guild-specific nicknames
• Implement variables for name patterns

mx-puppet-slack

What, mx-puppet-slack updates? Yay!

• Set external_url field
• Implement variables for name patterns

As always, if you have any questions, please drop by the support chat and consider to donate! 🦊🦊🦊

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko replies rendering

@deepbluev7:neko.dev said:

I added pretty rendering of replies to nheko. It uses the same rendering as for normal messages, so you will see an image being replied to and you can even play a replied to video. You can also click on the reply to navigate to that part of the history.

RiotX: Release v0.13.0

benoit said:

RiotX: Release v0.13.0 has been uploaded today to the PlayStore and should follow in F-Droid store. It contains typing notification feature, and new screens for Room profile and room members list, and new screen for Room Member profile. Those new screens are still missing a lots of features, that will be implemented in the next weeks. For F-Droid version, it contains a fix on the broken background sync. We are also making big progress on cross-signing implementation, and we have started to write integration tests on the SDK.

@bubu:bubu1.eu told us:

RiotX is now available via the f-droid.org repository here: https://f-droid.org/packages/im.vector.riotx/

Riot iOS

Manu announced:

We are still working hard on the implementation of cross-signing.

Riot Web Cross-signing update

Thanks to Ryan from the team:

All of this is part of cross-signing:

• Room shield decoration added
• New post-login device verification flow
• Toasts added to verify a new session
• Will begin working on post-login / registration bootstrapping flows

Fractal

Alexandre Franke reported:

In the past month, a few things happened:

• When redacting messages, they get removed from history view.
• Thumbnail for pasted images have been fixed.
• A handful of languages got updated.
• Moar refactoring.

koma + Continuum: kotlin lib and client

yuforia told us:

koma, Kotlin library for building clients:

• Update network library ktor to latest release 1.3.0
• Add option to use authentication with GET /_matrix/client/r0/publicRooms to fix HTTP Unauthorized errors with newer Synapse versions which may have allow_public_rooms_without_auth set to False.

Continuum desktop client based on Koma:

• Fix empty room directory list by always using the authenticated API POST /_matrix/client/r0/publicRooms

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy updates

Slavi told us:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now easily configure automatic Double Puppeting for all of its Mautrix bridges (Facebook, Hangouts, Whatsapp, Telegram). This is possible due to those bridges' integration with matrix-synapse-shared-secret-auth - yet another component that the playbook can install. Our documentation page for each bridge provides relevant information on how to get it enabled.

Also:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now install and configure matrix-appservice-webhooks, thanks to a contribution from Björn Marten from netresearch. Our documentation page about Appservice Webhooks tells you how to get started.

auto-update Riot-Web script

@murz:ru-matrix.org said:

I have created simple Bash script for auto-update Riot-Web to latest version. Because https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web now have no public Wiki, I publish it as Gist here: https://gist.github.com/MurzNN/ee64f98ab2e71b886c41d55594e5dd9e

ruby-grafana-matrix ingress updates

Ananace said:

My Grafana notification ingress gem received the missing piece of functionality for configuring it for posting both m.text as well as the original m.notice messages (as well as defaulting to m.text now as the more common expectation) - for those that want the messages to also provide Matrix notifications instead of just acting as an added history/flow. This can also be configured per-rule, so that you are able to have multiple notification ingresses configured with different message types.

It's always so lovely when people - other than myself - use my projects, especially when providing feedback on them. So many simple-to-implement features that get forgotten just because they weren't part of the original MVP.

Dept of Bots 🤖

TWIM bot updated for opsdroid 0.17

@cadair:cadair.com offered:

TWIM bot has been updates to use all the new features of opsdroid 0.17 it now supports Edits, both in updating it's database and by editing messages which get posted to #twim_updates:cadair.com . Also it supports 'TWIMing' a post by the user who posted it reacting with ⭕️, this is mainly designed as an easy way to mark images as TWIM posts. 🚀

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. 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 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa informed us:

We've had a slight lull from people crawling out from winter holiday hibernation caves, but there's likely more to come as everyone gets back into the swing of things.

Merged MSCs

No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period

No MSCs are currently in FCP.

New MSCs

• MSC2403: Add "knock" feature
• MSC2399: Reporting that decryption keys are withheld

The Spec Core Team is continuing to work on implementation of existing MSCs.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse 1.8.0 is out now

Get the latest news here!

Synapse 1.8.0 has arrived, it contains a whole host of bug fixes and tweaks, most notably fixing some long standing problems with search.
More generally we are spending a lot of time improving the e2ee experience ahead of switching on e2ee by default, so watch this space.

Deploying Synapse

Several packaging projects have been updated to deploy the new version:

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat
• also from the Debian repos thanks to @andrewsh:matrix.org

matrix-media-repo v1.0.0 - repeat, v1.0.0!!

TravisR offered:

matrix-media-repo v1.0.0 has been released! If it is suitable for your environment, please give it a go.

Dendrite federation work!

Neil Alexander announced:

Federation fixes have been pushed to gomatrixserverlib and Dendrite's master branches, that include the following tweaks:

• Using the v2 endpoints for /send_join and /send_leave
• Fixing the resolution of room aliases to room IDs in the Dendrite federation API
• A rewrite of the auth chain functions which should be a bit smoother
• A couple of other minor tweaks to some of the types

In addition, I've spent the last few days working on Dendrite's storage backends, adding somewhat-hacky support for SQLite and investigating ORM modelling for some of the simpler components, as a part of getting Dendrite to run as a "true monolith" for the P2P work.

cortex (synapse worker in Rust) supports e2ee rooms

Black Hat offered:

cortex's federation sender finally supports e2ee rooms! I'm testing its performance on an Intel Atom z8350 and it looks great.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Matrix App for Zapier

@coppero1237 appeared to us, then announced:

The MVP is now available: https://zapier.com/developer/public-invite/77712/033209ffe96c0c0cdd618c8071355c01/

Use the Zapier App to integrate your Matrix room with any of Zapier's 1500+ apps, including:

• Github
• Trello
• Pagerduty
• Google calendar
• Jira
• Salesforce

Currently the MVP supports sending messages to a room. Reading messages from a room is future work.

If you're interested providing feedback, requesting a feature, future development, or just understanding how it works, please join the matrix room, #zapier:matrix.org

Source code: https://github.com/tyleradams/Zapier-Matrix

matrix-zammad bridge

Half-Shot offered:

matrix-zammad now supports reacting to tickets to close them, provided you've set up your puppeted token in the config. It's useful if you get a lot of spam tickets :p

mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome reported:

Lots of changes in mx-puppet-bridge!

• Allow sending status messages into bridged rooms
• add a bridgeChannel function for protocol implementations
• add config options to set displayname and avatar url of the AS bot
• leave the bridge bot of a bridged room, whenever possible
• auto-leave a puppeted ghost after an hour inactivity (to prevent DMs having three users in them)
• automatically dedupe media when uploading
• matrix group to remote protocol group mapping

mx-puppet-discord

Along with mx-puppet-bridge, things got implemented in mx-puppet-discord!

• allow bridging of single channels in a guild
• display an error if sending a message to discord fails
• add joinentireguild command
• handle webhooks properly
• map discord guilds to matrix groups

If you enjoy this software, please consider to donate, thank you! 🦊

And another mx-puppet-discord update!

• [User Tokens] Proper User-Agent spoofing - friends management now seems mostly safe! Leaving the warning thing in just-in-case, though

Dept of Clients 📱

📽️ Matrix Presents!

I'm adding this to the client section because it behaves like a client, but it's not what we'd normally think of...

Half-Shot reported:

Work has resumed on matrix-presents, newly rewritten in Vue.js! The project was first demoed back in Oggcamp 2018 where I gave a meta presentation on the virtues Matrix for other mediums. This time around, it's being brought back with:

• A user interface for managing, joining and creating slideshows.
• Control over how slides are advanced (pinned to the presenters view, or unlocked)
• Finer control over how slides are layed out, using a fragments system to build slides out of submessages.

This is currently in heavy development and will debut at Fosdem 2020!

A regularly updated version of the app is hosted at https://presents.half-shot.uk/.

(And for those of you expecting a form of table tennis, there is an easter egg in progress 😃)

Continuum, desktop client in Kotlin

yuforia offered:

Continuum, a desktop client in Kotlin:

• Update README to include information on building from source
• Fix: database not updated after leaving a room
• Move user's access token and list of joined rooms from database to more lightweight key-value storage

RiotX v0.12.0

benoit reported:

RiotX v0.12.0 has been released with some performance improvement, especially on initial sync and on timeline loading time. The release also contains bugfixes and a cleanup in the application settings. A new "developer mode" has been added to show advanced features only to power users. We are now working on the room profile screen, and we are making progress on the cross-signing implementation. Besides that, we are working to make RiotX available on the F-Droid store.

I must say RiotX is getting a lot more stable and reliable recently!

Riot iOS

Manu told us:

We are still working on the implementation of cross-signing and verification by DM.

Dept of Ops 🛠

K8s

In addition to mentioning Synapse 1.8.0 support, Ananace said:

Synapse 1.8.0 Kubernetes-optimized images are pushed, I've also updated the example manifests as part of some work on making it easier to deploy - expect a MVP of a Helm Chart some time Soon™

Also, to add a bit of context/information to this;

Helm is the de-facto standard package manager for Kubernetes clusters, where a Chart is a package for an application that can be installed and configured. The Helm Chart I'm working on won't be a one-click install to begin with, for the Minimum Viable Product it will require manually generating and storing the Synapse signing key - though I have thoughts on how to later delegate that to a small one-time job that Helm can run if necessary

Opsdroid 0.17

Cadair offered:

Opsdroid 0.17 was released in December, it comes with many changes but the main matrix improvements are support for extra event types like Replies, Edits, Reactions, Room Name changes, Room Topic changes, Alias changes, Room avatar changes, Power levels, and support for generic matrix state events. All these events are supported for both sending and implementing skills based on receiving them.

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.

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 Status of Matrix 🌡

Responses to The Ecosystem is Moving

Matthew wrote a response to https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ : https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom/.

This is in response to a talk Moxie Marlinspike gave at 36c3. There is another response here from the XMPP community.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite and gomatrixserverlib

Neil Alexander announced:

My first TWIM update as a member of NV but I'm happy to announce that with some experimental changes to Dendrite and gomatrixserverlib, I've been able to get Dendrite-to-Dendrite federation working, which is a key component for the P2P work that we are planning!

matrix-media-repo v1.0.0-rc.2

TravisR reported:

matrix-media-repo has received its first ever release candidate (finally): v1.0.0-rc.1. It's complicated to set up, but please do give it a go if it suites your environment and use case, and report any bugs along the way.

v1.0.0-rc.2 was released later in the week to fix a small bug with exports in v1.0.0-rc.1.

Synapse 1.7.3 released

Synapse 1.7.3 includes an important bugfix, hosts are encouraged to upgrade.

Ananace reported that the K8s optimized Synapse 1.7.3 images have been updated, but you should find that all distributors have the latest version now.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome said:

mx-puppet-bridge received some updates!

• Automatic Puppeting, thanks to tulir PR!
• Allow protocol implementations to specify an external_url as per spec
• Double Puppeting: Option to specify a custom homeserver -> URL map for local setups where .well-known resolution isn't possible
• Fix unbridging of rooms (remove alias correctly)
• Set filename of uploaded avatars to circumvent a synapse bug
• Update matrix-bot-sdk dependency to 0.4.0

mx-puppet-discord and mx-puppet-slack

sorunome again:

Both mx-puppet-discord and mx-puppet-slack updated to the newest library version and implemented the setting of an external URL.

If you like these projects, please check out the support chat and consider to donate!

mautrix-telegram

Tulir said:

mautrix-telegram v0.7.0 was released.

Other than bugfixes, there were a few main changes since the first release candidate a month ago:

• Option for automatic custom puppeting using shared secret login
• version command to get the exact bridge version (also coming to my other bridges)
• Config checks to make sure important fields like permissions aren't left unconfigured

Full changelog available on GitHub: https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-telegram/releases/tag/v0.7.0

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir again:

Sticker bridging works slightly better now and added automatic double puppeting here too.

mautrix-cookiemonster

Tulir again:

To make the mautrix-facebook and mautrix-hangouts login flow simpler, I'm making a browser extension to eat cookies automatically rather than having the user go into the devtools. It's currently in development and should be ready by next week.

maubot

Tulir, busiest fellow in the North, again:

I finally got around to actually making the maubot github plugin, which is now spamming commits and other github things in all my project rooms.

Next up is per-room config options for webhooks and more matrix -> github actions (currently it's mostly just the github -> matrix webhooks). I might also end up making a more advanced plugin configuration system that supports multiple files, since jinja2 templates in a yaml file isn't that nice.

Dept of Clients 📱

FluffyChat for Android and iOS in Flutter

@krille:ubports.chat said:

MTRNord and me are working on FluffyChat for Android and iOS based on Flutter. You can already check it out if you like. :-) Install using F-Droid: https://mtrnord.gitlab.io/fluffychat-flutter-fdroid/fdroid/repo/ More info here: https://www.ko-fi.com/post/FluffyChat-for-Android-and-iOS-S6S71BMEY

Continuum

yuforia said:

Continuum, desktop client based in Kotlin, version 0.9.34:

• Perform database operations in an async way on IO dispatcher
• Added loading indicator when loading messages from server

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.

Tulir:

The ping room was upgraded to v5 last weekend. People who joined early got some nice and low pings before everyone rejoined :D

Also, @lub:imninja.net told us:

I created a #ping:maunium.net compatible bot in PowerShell https://gitea.lubiland.de/lub/pingposh/src/branch/master

Very nice - we don't see a lot of PowerShell in this ecosystem.

Final Thoughts 💭

Work is still happening on Cross Signing, patience will be rewarded sooner than you know.

Half-Shot is working on a fun and geniunely useful non-chat Matrix application, more on this soon.

36c3 was exciting, exhausing and educational. Thanks to everyone who made the Matrix Assembly one of the liveliest places around. :D

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 🌡

36c3: Matrix Assembly is the place to be

If you're at 36c3 this weekend, come and find us! Use c3nav app to find our assembly, or just join #chaosevents:matrix.org to come chat

Bundeswehr considering Matrix

Oleg said:

The German Army is considering using Matrix as "secure WhatsApp" for soldiers. (In German) https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Open-Source-Bundeswehr-baut-eigene-verschluesselte-Messenger-App-4623404.html

Dept of Servers 🏢

matrix-oauth

TravisR reported:

For those who want to integrate Matrix into their application with OAuth, there's now matrix-oauth ( #oauth:t2bot.io ). Ideally useful for "Login with Matrix" buttons, this is a relatively easy OAuth 2.0 provider to set up in front of your homeserver. In future it'll support more granular scopes to avoid having to give a real access token to the third party application.

A demo of matrix-oauth in action is available at https://demo.oauth.t2host.io/

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Amazon Alexa skill

TravisR offered:

Yelling at your Amazon Alexa to send a message to your Matrix contacts is now possible with matrix-alexa-skill ( #alexa:t2bot.io ). A hosted version using matrix-oauth is coming soon, assuming I can get the privacy policy and such over to Amazon to review in a timely manner, though you're more than able to self-host in a matter of minutes. Check out the README for more info - some experience with setting up complicated things is required.

mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome offered:

mx-puppet-bridge got a new feature: protocol implementations can now specify custom commands that are invoked via the provisioning room!

mx-puppet-discord

mx-puppet-discord received quite a few bug fixes and new features!

• Fix echo back of edits
• [User Tokens] being friends is enough now to DM each other!
• fix multi-edits
• [User Tokens] support group DMs
• Implement ability to bridge guilds!
• [User Tokens] add friends management

Description on how to use these features are found in the readme!

If you enjoy these projects, please consider to donate. Thank you!

Dept of Clients 📱

Spectral gains public room directory

Black Hat reported:

Public room directory and user directory support in Spectral is finally there!

Continuum, plus koma library

yuforia offered:

koma, a Kotlin library. Dominic Fischer (github: Dominaezzz) started working on the project last week and so far:

• In preparation for multiplatform support, converted JVM code to agnostic Kotlin, using the library atomicfu

• Added Github Actions configuration to run builds automatically

Continuum, desktop client based on Koma:

• Generate room name from members when neither name nor aliases are configured

Dept of Ops 🛠

ma1sd 2.2.2 released

ma1uta announced:

ma1sd (fork of the mxisd) 2.2.2 released: https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.2.2 Changes:

• bugfix
• added hash lookup for the ldap provider.

Dept of Services 🚀

kapsi.fi has set up a Matrix homeserver

Cos reported:

Finnish non-profit hosting service kapsi.fi has set up a Matrix homeserver for their members. Kapsi has around 5000 members and 20 volunteer administrators. Instructions for use (in FInnish) at https://www.kapsi.fi/palvelut/matrix.html

Dept of Bots 🤖

MatrixVideo2oggBot

@progserega:rsprim.ru reported:

Matrix bot for converting youtube video to voice.

Bot https://github.com/progserega/MatrixVideo2oggBot get youtube URL, download video, convert to ogg-vorbis audio and send it to user. Some times my friends give me youtube video-urls, but I do not have time for see it. But I have time when I go home in car. But on road network is not always good and at end of day battery is low and phone may be hot (when I connect to charger and play video) and freeze... Simple way for me - is convert youtube video to small size voice and download it to phone and play it as music in player playlist. Bot help to this. May be it help anybody also. 🙂

Matrix in the News 📰

Andres offered:

Matrix gets a mention alongside other four decentralized protocols in one of the biggest argentinian newspapers (regarding Twitter's iniciative of decentralization). https://www.lanacion.com.ar/tecnologia/cinco-iniciativas-descentralizar-redes-sociales-dejar-depender-nid2317548

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 🌡

Matrix selected for the public Mozilla community

You may well have read about it by now, but Mozilla (purveyor of popular web browsers and champion of the open web) selected Matrix to replace IRC for their comms! You can read their own announcement here. Please note that this doesn't have to mean the death of Moznet on IRC - if someone wants to pick up matrix-ircd and finish it off, we can keep exposing an IRC listener too! Huge thanks to everyone who participated in the Mozilla trial and placed their trust in Matrix :)

A Glimpse of the Matrix

Florian reported:

Florian presented his poster A Glimpse of the Matrix:Scalability issues of a new message-oriented data synchronizationmiddleware at the 20th International Middleware Conference at UC Davis, California on 2019-12-11. The poster abstract describes measurements of the public Matrix federation and discusses scalability issues of the current message routing mechanism. Additional details can be found in the Extended Tech Report.

Those scientific publications were based on the data gathered by the DSN Traveller in 2018 which was part of Florian's master's thesis. The anonymized raw data was published in conjunction.

All related resources

pic.twitter.com/NYxbYllQ9F

— Middleware2019 (@middleware2019) December 12, 2019

Accessibility in Riot/Matrix

Very thorough article on accessibility in Riot/Matrix, written partly in light of the Mozilla announcement. https://marcozehe.de/2019/12/20/how-to-get-around-matrix-and-riot-with-a-screen-reader/

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse v1.7.2

Neil told us:

We shipped 1.7.2 (and 1.7.1) - all admins are encouraged to upgrade asap, note 1.7.1 is a security release, and 1.7.2 fixes a back pagination bug introduced in 1.7.1. Aside from that we are looking at implementing MSC2260: Update the auth rules for m.room.aliases events and adding a per media quarantine API.

Deploying Synapse

Several packaging projects have been updated to deploy the new version:

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat
• also from the Debian repos thanks to @andrewsh:matrix.org

Ruma

jplatte reported:

another blog post has appeared on the ruma website: https://www.ruma.io/news/these-weeks-in-ruma-2019-12-14/

cortex workers performance

Black Hat has been using his Rust cortex Synapse workers project. He reported:

I flexed on other homeservers by making getflexedon.me the fastest homeserver in the ping room, made possible with cortex.

Black Hat does point out that this is still in a testing phase, but it's great to see workers being created.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

famedly-email-bridge

sorunome said:

Some more work has been done on famedly-email-bridge! Now you can define email routes (e.g. [email protected] -> @bob:example.org) and optionally have conversations create a new thread room, instead of dumping them into the email room.

zammad tickets bot

It might seem like Half-Shot hasn't made a new bridge in a while, but here he is:

I've started another bot project: https://github.com/half-shot/matrix-zammad. This currently splurts zammad tickets into Matrix rooms, and will eventually do a lot more.

Dept of Clients 📱

Continuum

yuforia said:

Continuum, client for the desktop:

• Start using experimental asynchronous Flow as observable value for UI. Making use of Kotlin's coroutine features, it makes it possible to update values while avoiding switching to the main UI thread. It's also easier to cancel on-going HTTP requests when their values are no longer needed.

Riot-iOS

Manu told us:

This week, we have been still working hard on verification by DM. We have started the implementation of cross-signing.

RiotX v0.11.0 released

benoit said:

RiotX: We've released RiotX v0.11.0 on Thursday. It includes support to open (some of) matrix.to links, soft (and hard) logout, and lots of small UI/UX/crash fixes. For the first release of 2020, we will change the way we handle the initial sync, which can be a long task, by running it in a foreground service. Also the room profile screen should finally arrive.

riot-web

Bruno reported:

this week I've been working on the new verification flow in the right panel. it's nearly there, but likely won't get merged today anymore.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Matrix Message github action

Nice and simple project for using Matrix messages in Github actions. See the code, or the marketplace page.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Final Thoughts 💭

It being the time of year that it is, some of us will be at 36c3 in a week or so, come chat in #chaosevents:matrix.org if you'd like to say "hi". (You can also say "Guten Tag", which is more fun!)

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 Status of Matrix 🌡

Matthew notes:

We'd like to welcome Twitter to the world of decentralised communication protocols after Jack Dorsey's announcement this week that Twitter is building a decentralised social media team. It seems that the constraints they're working with are to focus on decentralised reputation (supporting different content filtering algorithms), incentive models (presumably some kind of token) and avoiding consensus-based standards processes. It's worth noting that we've been working on decentralised reputation stuff in Matrix for a while now - of which MSC2313 - Moderation policies as rooms is the most concrete result so far, and it's great to see Twitter thinking about how to adopted different filtering mechanisms for their content. It sounds as if they're approaching this from a blockchain/incentives angle however, so it remains to be seen whether they'll be interested in our work - especially as Matrix doesn't have a microblogging client yet (but only because nobody has made one yet). We'll be trying to talk to them whatever to see if we can be of use, eitherway :)

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa said:

Here's your weekly update for what happened in spec land!

While it may look quiet from the state changes list, there's actually been a flurry of activity on MSC2376 and MSC2385 (for disabling URL previews on a per-message basis), MSC2380 (for a method of querying the metadata of a piece of media without downloading it) and MSC2346 (for showing metadata about the bridges that are currently active in the room)! Now's the time to jump in if you want to have your say!

Updates:

Merged MSCs

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period

• No MSCs in FCP.

New MSCs

• MSC2385: Disable URL Previews, alternative method

Spec Core Team:

The Spec Core Team is on the same track as last week with no specific 3 MSC focus, but working on bringing up a lot of MSCs across the board.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil announced:

Synapse 1.7.0 is out, check out all the details here, admins can now specify message retention policies at a server and room level. We also changed the defaults for the room directory to be privacy preserving by default.

Next up we’re taking a look at support for redacting room alias events 1, 2 as well as porting Sydent to python 3.

Deploying Synapse

Several packaging projects have been updated to deploy the new version:

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat
• also from the Debian repos thanks to @andrewsh:matrix.org

Dept of Clients 📱

Fractal

Alexandre Franke told us:

We gained the ability to save spellcheck language per room, which makes me quite happy as I keep switching between English speaking and French speaking ones and was growing tired of those red underlines and having to switch manually every time.

Data is stored in /user/{}/rooms/{}/account_data/org.gnome.fractal.language.

Continuum updates

yuforia said:

Continuum, Kotlin client for the desktop:

• Updated to Kotlin Json and HTTP libraries, removed Moshi and Retrofit from dependencies

• When there is an error when loading notifications, one can click to retry or view the cause

nheko

Nico said:

nheko mostly fixed bugs regarding the new file encryption this week and did some organizational stuff:

• We fixed a compliance issue, where Riot couldn't decrypt our media
• You can now actually see your encrypted images, when you sent them
• We fixed some tests regarding our session key export
• We fixed our coverage of our automated tests
• We did some prepwork for device verification
• A few minor usability fixes and code cleanups

RiotX v0.10.0

benoit told us:

RiotX v0.10.0 has been released on Tuesday, with some bug fixes and a new Breadcrumbs drawer to switch between rooms super super fast. Give it a try! Now we are implementing workflow when the access token get invalidated, with SoftLogout support. Also, we are still working on improving the initial sync management, which can be a long task on big account, and that causes some problem with the current implementation. Among various other subjects: matrix.to support, room profile screen, verification in DM, cleanup dependencies to reach the F-Droid store, we are quite busy!

Riot-iOS 0.10.4

Manu reported:

This week, we released Riot-iOS 0.10.4 with a couple of hot fixes on device verification. In parallel, we have been still working on verification by DM both on UI and SDK sides. As a collateral effect, the aggregation of m.reference has been implemented in the SDK. This means the SDK is now ready for message threading !

Riot Web + Cross-Signing

Ryan said:

Cross-signing keys and secret storage can be created in Settings for advanced users with the cross-signing feature flag enabled in labs, though please keep in mind that these features are still in development. More work is still needed to change to verifying users instead of devices. More accessibility fixes have landed as well.

Matthew added:

as part of all the work around cross-signing, we're shifting device verification to happen in the context of DMs so verification is done per-user rather than per-device, and so you can track your verification history and generally massively improve the UX. valere made a great video of how this is shaping up between RiotX and Riot/Web...

Check out the video here

Dept of Ops 🛠

ma1sd 2.2.1 released

ma1uta said:

Release 2.2.0 of the ma1sd (fork mxisd) https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.2.0 Changes:

• support of the MSC2140 (hash lookup)
• support of the MSC2134 (API v2)

and then...

ma1sd hotfix 2.2.1 released with a lot of bugfixes. Also the v2 API (MSC2140) was disabled by default because it breaks backward compatibility in lookup behaviour.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix bot functionality in Python

Cos reported:

I have created a modular bot for writing Matrix bot functionality in Python easily. It already has bunch of modules ranging from weather to calendar integration and more will come. Even the location bot from last week's TWIM is now implemented as a module. I hope you find it useful. PR's of new modules are always welcome. https://github.com/vranki/hemppa

Mlrdb, LDAP sync bot, announced

@dalang:mc.kircheneuenburg.de offered:

A Bot to sync LDAP groups to matrix rooms. Rooms will be created automatically and group member changes are reflected in the matrix rooms. The bot is currently in beta and documentation will be added in the next weeks. New features for simple integration will be added soon. Have a look at the repo: https://git.sr.ht/~davidlang/mlrbd

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰

mautrixfs - Matrix client as a FUSE filesystem

Tulir offered:

I've started a new project: mautrixfs is a Matrix client as a FUSE filesystem. It's very WIP and currently only supports reading events by ID. I'm hoping to have something more useful in a week or two.

tulir later added:

for media uploads, I just realized that my asynchronous uploads MSC would make it significantly easier to implement. It could have a file you read to allocate a mxc uri and then you could simply write the data to the file corresponding to that mxc uri

Matrix in the News 📰

Matrix featured in Skrolli

Cos offered:

Finnish computer culture paper magazine Skrolli published two articles spanning 5 pages about Matrix in latest edition. For non-subscribers the digital edition readable with mobile app is free for limited time. Read more (in Finnish) at https://skrolli.fi/

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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