Matrix Live

This episode of Open Tech Will Save Us was a special on Moderation. Our guest was Jim from the Matrix.org Foundation's Trust & Safety Team.

Can moderation be automated? Can it be apolitical? How does it scale? Are decentralised systems inherently more insecure than centrlised ones? Let's find out!

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib says

You can now officially join the Matrix Foundation as an organisational or individual member in order to sustainably support core Matrix development, help steer the direction of the protocol and how best to fund it. In order to run the Governing Board and the overall work of the Foundation, we are also hiring an Executive Director.

Read the full blog post here

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3943: Partial joins to nameless rooms should include heroes' memberships

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Spec Updates

A lot of this week was spent on implementation by the SCT, hence little movement in the bullet points above. However, outside of label changes, we've seen lots of progress on Extensible Events work from Travis as we continue to lay the groundwork for the IETF MIMI initiative.

We also continue to receive lots of fixes to the spec text itself via PRs to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec. Shout outs to zecakeh, dylhack, and uhoreg for their contributions!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3890: Remotely silence local notifications!

This MSC aims to provide a solution to remotely toggling do-not-disturb across your various Matrix clients without needing to set it on each device manually. It does so by using account data which is synced to each client. Upon a client seeing data intended for them, they will silence notifications locally until told to do so otherwise (either remotely or by the user interacting with the client directly).

Quite a neat idea, and adds more powerful functionality to the "device manager" of a client. Also handy if your other clients are things like embedded systems!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

Shay announces

As we barrel towards the end of the year, the Synapse team is hard at work making Synapse faster, more stable and filled with features! This week we released v1.73.0rc2. Notable work includes a significant speed-up to the /messages path. In addition you can find:

• Improved DB performance by reducing amount of data that gets read in device_lists_changes_in_room.
• Support for handling avatar in SSO login. Contributed by @ashfame
• Unstable support for an Extensible Events room version (org.matrix.msc1767.10) via MSC1767, MSC3931, MSC3932, and MSC3933.
• A bugfix for a long-standing bug where the List media admin API would fail when processing an image with broken thumbnail information

and a whole host of other bugfixes, features and improvements. Head over to https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases to check it out.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Slack Bridge (website)

A Matrix <-> Slack bridge

Andrew F reports

It's been a while since the last TWIM update, but the Slack bridge has been steadily improving! See https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-slack/releases/ for a slew of updates.

Highlights include:

• DMs are now consistently assigned with the name & avatar of the Slack user you're chatting with.
• Display names of Slack users should be kept up-to-date more reliably.
• Support is added for bridging Slack threads with MSC3440 m.thread relations.
• The usability of bridge bot admin commands (like whoami and link) has been improved.
• Some cases of inbound Slack messages being dropped have been fixed.

matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Half-Shot reports

Hookshot 2.5.0 is now ready for your eyes and your processors!

This week we bring you the very last (all fingers being crossed) hookshot release not to support e2ee encryption. Our resident expert is busy working away on supporting it and is a couple of bugfixes away from providing it to you all (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-hookshot/pull/299#issuecomment-1327124799).

In the meantime, this release was so good we couldn't keep it from you any longer. This release is packed with quality of life improvements, and general bugfixes / stability. Deploy away!

The highlights are:

• GitHub assign command now automatically chooses the top issue and/or authenticated user if not provided.
• The RSS feed connection no longer feels the need to spam you when GitHub fails to respond within 10s. It now waits for 30s.
• Hookshot now supports creating GitLab connections without automatically provisioning a webhook. When this happens, the bot will tell you to talk to your admin to setup the webhook manually.

Checkout the rest here

Dept of Clients 📱

SchildiChat (website)

SchildiChat is a fork of Element that focuses on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list for both direct messages and groups, which is a more familiar approach to users of other popular instant messengers.

SpiritCroc reports

Version 1.5.8.sc62 of SchildiChat-Android got released this week, which adds a few new interesting features on top of Element:

• Reworked reply rendering, to follow the rich replies specification. This improves the following:
  • Update the replied-to message in case the original message gets edited or deleted
  • Fix replies edited on desktop not being shown as replies on Android
  • Fix replies edited on Android being shown on Desktop with the replied-to event twice
  • Fix some weird rendering issues, like lists in a reply being completely broken
  • Nicer design, using the original sender's color, and a maximum height for the replied-to event
  • Render the replied-to event also for media replies, for example when the mautrix-telegram bridge sends an image reply
  • In the future, this will also allow us to render replied-to images instead of just writing "Image" in there, but this one is still on the TODO-list since I didn't want to delay a release further.
• Render captions as per MSC2530.
• We now allow sending all kinds of room-specific or account-specific global custom emotes as per MSC2545 (but you still need to configure them with a different client before sending).

For those about to ask if I'll upstream these changes to Element: I'm currently not planning to do so, but you are free to pick my changes yourself and create a PR. For rich replies, see also here.

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Anthony Hughes reports

Community Testing

Help us test Threads on Wednesday December 7th from 15:00 to 16:30 GMT! We need the most help testing on Android and iOS but if you can help test on Web/Desktop that's cool too! And don't worry if you can't make it, we'll have folks around most of the day so please come out and help us test whenever you can manage. See you in the community testing room at #element-community-testing:matrix.org!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat says

We’ve made improvements to replies, search, notifications, user verification and DM creation over the last week

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

• Voice broadcast is continuing to receive more updates and bug fixes!
• Threads is nearing release, thank you all who have been trying it out! You can still join the Beta testing in Settings -> Labs to give it a spin!
• Also, screensharing in Element Call has had a fix!

Element iOS (website)

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

Doug reports

• 📬 Useful feature time: The spaces button is now badged whenever you have unread messages or invites that aren’t visible in the current space.
• 📝 The Rich Text Editor has seen more bugs and edge cases fixed and support for links and lists is underway.
• 🏗️ On the ElementX side we have been working on a Reactions picker, the timeline rewrite is almost finished, work on a split view layout for iPad continues and we’re finishing up a shiny new Room Details screen.

Element Android (website)

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

benoit announces

• Element Android 1.5.10 has been released for testers on the PlayStore (still in review by Google at this time). It should be pushed to production next week. It includes a new full screen mode for the Rich Text Editor and lots of other changes. The full changelog is here.
• The team is making progress to integrate the Crypto Rust SDK in the main project and generate the application ElementR.
• On Android Element X, which is the new Android app written with Jetpack Compose on top of the Matrix Rust SDK, it is now possible to edit events and to reply to events. Html is also now rendered in the timeline. We will define in the coming weeks what will be the plan for the future regarding this project.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Feline Matrix Assistant (website)

Cat says

Announcing Feline Matrix Assistant. This is a PowerShell 7 cross platform script that aims to gather a few somewhat common matrix tasks in one place with a somewhat user friendly interface.

It was designed to enable users on Windows to easily access things like custom powerlevel rooms and manual room upgrades that normally require using Linux to run bash scripts if one does not want to figure out how to make the web requests using their preferred method themselves.

One of the other reasons i made this is just because i wanted to get more familiar the CS API and because i needed it my self because im currently a Windows user.

Third Room (website)

Matthew reports

The Third Room team have been invited to present Third Room at SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 next week! https://sa2022.siggraph.org/en/presentation/?id=realcur_102&sess=sess143

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Yet Another TypeScript Bot SDK

As named per the author, don't blame Thib for this name!

prefix reports

Why? As an alternative to matrix-bot-sdk, this library will be strongly typed with simplicity in mind to make sure there is no overhead to writing the perfect Matrix bot.

• This library also focuses on having browser support and no dependencies around NodeJS (and least amount of dependencies in general)
• AppService functionality will be shipped in a separate package as an extension of this base package.
• There is plenty of dependency injection for: Logging, how HTTP comms are done, and caching (come ask about the Redis cache layer!)

Come join our Matrix room to help this library grow and give input!

https://github.com/CatEngineer/matrix

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict reports

Trixnity 3.0.0 is released. This release contains all changes of the beta versions. We additionally fixed two bugs regarding encrypted edited messages.

I'm currently working on vodozemac integration. For this I implemented uniffi-kotlin-multiplatform-bindings to bridge Rust and Kotlin Multiplatform.

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

ben says

The last few weeks of Sliding Sync in the various mobile clients is showing its fruits: Sliding Sync offline caching and session recovery was merged this week, giving you the latest state of your sliding sync in milliseconds without ever having touched the network now. You need to activate it via a setting on the SlidingSyncBuilder - FFI is exposed as well. This PR also adds recovery when the server rejected our request upon a failing position, indicating our session was reset. Previously, you needed to reconstruct the entire sliding-sync with all its state yourself, now this does it internally and transparently for the API user. Additionally, we merged a fix for invited rooms, which caused a panic on FFI usage, and have one other fix to the sliding-sync state post cache coming up.

Talking about fixes, the retry code path had a bug, which caused retries even when the API clearly stated we needed to change request, which is fixed now, and the memory store won't continue to keep all media cached anymore. More fixes are being pulled out of the demo branch and coming up as PRs next week.

We can also report amazing news from the Async-UniFFI-front: we have the first async-uniffi-swift code running now. Exciting times!

👉 ️ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synapse Operator for Kubernetes (website)

mgoerens announces

Introducing a new way to run Synapse on top of Kubernetes !

The current capabilities of the Synapse Operator:

• Deploy Synapse: the operator can generate a default homeserver.yaml, or it can work with a custom homeserver.yaml, provided by the user.
• Deploy the Heisenbridge and the mautrix-signal bridge: the operator automatically (re)configures Synapse to add the corresponding app_services.
• Deploy a PostgreSQL database for Synapse (depends on the postgres-operator).

Once the operator is deployed, the Synapse resource becomes available. Deploying a basic instance goes as simple as:

$ cat << EOF > synapse.yaml
apiVersion: synapse.opdev.io/v1alpha1
kind: Synapse
metadata:
  name: my-synapse
spec:
  homeserver:
    values:
      serverName: example.com
      reportStats: true
EOF
$ kubectl apply -f synapse.yaml 
synapse.synapse.opdev.io/my-synapse created
$ kubectl get pods
NAME                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
my-synapse-84d56d54df-c699k   1/1     Running   0          63s

The operator takes care of the deployment and lifecycle management of the Synapse instance. Similarly, the Heisenbridge and MautrixSignal resources can also be deployed alongside Synapse and are managed by the operator.

This operator is written in Go. To know more about the project, please visit https://github.com/opdev/synapse-operator, there are explanations on how to deploy the operator, and examples demonstrating the main features. Or ping me on Matrix if you want to have a chat about it ! I'd love to collect some feedbacks !

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix FOSDEM Devroom

Thib announces

The clock is ticking! We're already in December, only a few days left to submit your talk proposal for our in-person Matrix devroom at FOSDEM. All the details to answer the call are in our FOSDEM 2023 CfP

Matrix User Meetup Berlin

saces announces

Next Matrix user meetup 7.12.2022, 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

jaller94 reports

Matrix Community Summit Berlin 2022 Podcast (English episode)

Meet Charles (cvwright), Project creator and Lead engineer of Circles. He and I spoke about how he got to know about Matrix, how encryption became more common on the Internet and how he started Circles – an app, built with Matrix, to privately connect with family and friends.

Same website and RSS feed as last week.

Mastodon toot: https://mastodontech.de/@jaller94/109445133197729074

I hope you enjoy this week's interview and learn what other people in the community are up to. From next week on we're back to episodes in German – but another English episode is on its way!

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 Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew says

Interesting paper analysing the impact of decentralisation (and particularly Matrix) on legislation around content moderation: https://www.thecgo.org/research/the-decentralized-web-and-the-future-of-section-230/

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://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3939: Account locking
• MSC3938: Remove keyId from /keys endpoints

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Spec Updates

Off the back of the release of Matrix v1.5 last week (see the blog post if you missed it), work on the next release has now begun.

Continued review on MSC3706 (extensions to /send_join for partial state) and MSC3852 (user agent information on /devices) by the SCT was seen. MSC3743 (standard error responses for unknown endpoints) was also merged to the unstable spec!

Special thanks to several contributors of fixes to the spec this week; including zecakeh, HarHarLinks, sumnerevans, johannescpk and DMRobertson!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3896: Appservice media!

This MSC calls out the issue that today application services, especially those that bridge third-party networks, need to re-upload all bridged media to the homeserver in order for users to view it. This can create a large strain on disk resources for homeservers that bridge third-party networks and is a problem that is worth considering.

The approach the MSC takes to solving this is to allow application services to reserve an exclusive namespace for MXC URL's, such as mxc://example.com/_discord_.*. When a user's client attempted to request a media item that falls within the exclusive namespace, the homeserver would request the media from the application service (which in turn could pull it from the third-party network's CDN) rather than the homeserver's local media repo.

Seems like a cool idea! Check out the MSC and leave your thoughts if you're interested or have suggestions.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

dmr announces

It has been a busy week for the Synapse team.

On Tuesday we released Synapse 1.72, including

• experimental support for relation-based redactions,
• A new admin API to lookup users by third-party ID, and
• further progress on the faster joins project,

plus a batch of bugfixes. As ever, we aim to cut the next release candidate for Synapse 1.73 on the coming Tuesday. It should include the work that landed on develop this week. Of note:

• continuing work on faster joins;
• a sprint of work to improve the performance of /messages requests and device list tracking; and
• removing duplicated prometheus metrics, which should save server operators using Prometheus a considerable amount of disk space.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Postmoogle (website)

An Email to Matrix bridge. 1 room = 1 mailbox.

Aine says

Postmoogle v0.9.9 is here!

The biggest release so far. Hmm... let me try again

THE Biggest Release (so far)!

The last few weeks we at etke.cc enhanced and optimized Postmoogle to make it as close to common email services as possible (it's not a full Gmail/Outlook/%You-name-it% replacement for a regular user yet, some features are missing, but we're pushing it towards that goal!)

The most notable changes:

• automatic ban list (can be enabled by postmoogle admin) - no more nasty spammers will ever bother your host and if they will - Postmoogle will cut the wires drop TCP connections before even talking with them
• automatic greylisting (can be configured by postmoogle admin) - good SMTP software must resend emails (and 99.99% of them do), RFC said.
• internal email queue to re-send failed emails (with 45x errors) automatically - because Postmoogle is good SMTP software and it follows RFC
• bridging email threads ⇿ matrix threads/reply-tos (for new emails) - that's a hard one. TL;DR: reply to email in matrix room (either by matrix thread or matrix reply-to) = email reply on email side, works both ways
• multi-domain mode with the ability to select a domain for sending emails per room/per mailbox (all other domains will act as aliases)
• !pm send and thread replies send multipart emails by default (both HTML from formatted markdown and plaintext in the same email)
• lots of other enhancements and fixes under the moogle

Source code and don't forget to say hi in #postmoogle:etke.cc

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

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

Nico says

You may have noticed it has been a bit quiet from our side lately. Partially that is because I was just busy fixing issues in our new features on the Synapse side (or implementing MSCs in Synapse). But we also just have been fixing boring old issues in our project, that have been not annoying enough to get attention. For example there was a warning when configuring the project with CMake, which now shouldn't happen anymore, but also is just really boring to talk about.

So maybe some more exciting stuff, in theory, if your distribution builds curl with the correct flags, Nheko now supports connecting to servers over HTTP/3. This in itself is not that useful, but it might improve how Nheko behaves when switching connections or when using mobile data.

Nheko now also shows a completer for /commands (stuff like /me, /react or /sovietflip).

You can also now invert the Enter setting, so that you can send using Shift+Enter (thanks to LordMZTE) and you can update your status message over D-Bus (thanks LorenDB), which allows you to show what song you are listening to or what project you are working on, if you enable the D-Bus API and implement that as an addon in your music player or IDE.

Also lots of boring cleanups going on behind the scenes still, so expect cool stuff to be slower for the next few weeks.

Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

You might be aware that we, the NeoChat team, are currently working on implementing end-to-end encryption in NeoChat. If you're interested in that work, you should read the blog post i've written about it at https://tobiasfella.de/posts/neochat-e2ee/

Hydrogen (website)

Hydrogen is a lightweight matrix client with legacy and mobile browser support

Bruno says

Back after a bit of a hiatus working on call support (coming soon!) and non-hydrogen things which we're wrapping up now. Today and last Friday we've added sticky date headers to the timeline, which just got released in 0.3.5. Check it out if you haven't already at https://hydrogen.element.io

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle 🦺 announces

• We’ve recently made improvements to the password recovery flow, meaning that you no longer choose your password before verifying your email… We now follow a more conventional approach (and have parity with mobile flows) that will make it easier for those struggling to sign in.
• We’ve also continued to add tests and increase overall test coverage!

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

• Rich text editor: We’ve been working on lists and ‘ctr+backspace’ support
• Threads: Improvements to performance and notifications continue but this week we’ve mostly put our efforts on testing as we’re prepping for the release of Threads out of Labs!

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trinity (website)

Trinity is an experimental bot framework written in Rust and using matrix-rust-sdk, as well as commands / modules compiled to WebAssembly, with convenient developer features like modules hot-reload.

bnjbvr reports

This week, a tritiny update:

• we have experimental support for using Trinity as a library, thanks to @gnunicorn! So experimental that the public API may break at any point without warnings, and it hasn't even been published, but if you feel adventurous, take a look.
• Flaki from Suborbital and Yours Truly have had a small and cozy chat about Trinity, where we talk about WebAssembly and Matrix, try to set up a new instance of the bot (!), find a bug (!!) but at the end it works (!!!). Youtube link if you're teased!

If you're interested to follow the project, feel free to join #trinity:delire.party or get the code on Github.

Matrix-Webhooks (website)

Matrix-Webhooks goal is to provide Rich, Embedded webhooks for Matrix as an alternative to Discord Webhooks, it's compatible with discord payload and API, so very easy to integrate into services like github, gitlab, grafana, uptime kumi etc ...

rednaks reports

• You can find the source code here : https://github.com/rednaks/matrix-webhooks
• Or you can try it or use it here : https://matrix-webhooks.com/
• You can also join our Matrix space where we share announcements, and have general discussions about matrix-webhooks inorder to improve it : https://matrix.to/#/#matrix-webhooks.com: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

ben announces

It's been a busy week for the matrix-sdk team. As the week before, a lot of time was (well) spent on fixes and smaller improvements for mobile integration, during which a few bugs and problems where discovered and squashed. While this is ongoing, some of them already found their way back into mainline or at least have PRs pending for it: Like the bug in the read marker tracking which sometimes caused a crash 1 2, a problem with timeline construction being async or some minor fixes on the new xtask for swift. We've also noticed a significant regression in the automatic retry mechanism, which would just continue to spin for ever if the server gave a fully warranted error code back - if you experienced this, this PR should be solving it for you.

A significant milestone was achieved this week on Async UniFFI. After getting a first PoC ready the week before, Ivan packaged it all up and sent a draft PR upstream with async python code calling an async rust code over FFI and interpreting the rusty result. So cool! Swift and kotlin targets are next.

👉 Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.

libQuotient (website)

A Qt5 library to write cross-platform clients for Matrix

kitsune announces

As that blog post by Tobias mentions, releasing libQuotient 0.7 is the immediate next step - and in line with that, 0.7 RC has been published! Not much has changed since two betas; despite a very big piece of E2EE introduced in 0.7 release cycle, things have been mostly ironed out earlier in the year. Packagers are welcome to try their tools on the new release. Be mindful though that E2EE has just been introduced and wasn't widely tested; besides, a few pieces are still missing (read the blog post!); so while it's probably reasonable to switch E2EE on for packaging libQuotient, it's NOT recommended to do the same in client applications, unless accompanied by warnings and disclaimers all over the place. The release notes are still shallow and boring - the longer text will come with the final release.

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi says

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy has received lots of optimizations to cut down playbook runtime, sponsored by the etke.cc managed Matrix hosting service. The etke.cc Ansible playbook (which is an extension of matrix-docker-ansible-deploy) is growing to support more and more services (besides just Matrix), so the Matrix playbook being leaner prevents runtimes from becoming too slow and improves the customer experience.

The playbook now runs about 2x-5x faster, thanks to:

• various optimizations (using include_tasks instead of import_tasks in all Ansible roles)
• the introduction of additional install-only tags (--tags=install-all or --tags=install-COMPONENT) which skip slow and often unnecessary to run uninstall tasks

To learn more, see this changelog entry

Dept of Bots 🤖

Mjölnir (website)

The moderation bot for Matrix

Gnuxie announces

Hi everyone, we have released Mjolnir v1.6.1 (via v1.6.0)

Which includes:

• Always echo policy list changes. List changes are now always enabled, whereas before they where only shown with config.verboseLogging. Mjolnir now no longer hides changes made by the same mjolnir account, providing the user with feedback for changes they have made to policy lists after using the ban/unban commands.

• Policy lists created by mjolnir will now be done so with support for MSC3784.

• Mjolnir now supports specifying the config file with the argument --mjolnir-config. It is highly recommended that you do this as opposed to relying on the environment variable NODE_ENV. The documentation for running with docker and from source have been updated accordingly.

• Fix the WordList protection which was matching every message.

• Rework the banning and unbanning of entities in PolicyLists.

  • Unbanning no longer searches for rules by state_key but by entity.
  • Users with longer mxids can now be banned.
  • Mjolnir no longer waits for the next client sync before applying server ACL and member bans after using the ban command

• Improve the clarity of the unban command. Users marked as banned by the Flooding and FirstMessageIsMedia protections can now be unbanned with the ban command. Using the unban command without true will now warn the user that room level bans will not be overridden.

• Replaced acceptInvitesFromGroup with acceptInvitesFromSpace.

• Fix config.protectAllJoinedRooms leaking into explicitly protected rooms and mjolnir trying to protect watched lists in some circumstances. You would only have been impacted by this if you ran latest.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix Community Summit Berlin 2022 Podcast (German)

jaller94 reports

The Community Summit 2022 in Berlin was a lot of fun and we've gotten to know a lot of community members and their projects. Some of these people we were able to interview and will release the recordings as a weekly podcast. From now on, each Friday an episode will be released for a total of 8 episodes.

Today (18th November), we're starting with Alex and Valentin. We talked about the summit, what went well and what activities to add next time. Furthermore, the two shared their passion for home server performance. Give it a listen!

Website: https://anchor.fm/matrix-podcast0

RSS feed: https://anchor.fm/s/cdb34188/podcast/rss

If you don't speak German, stay tuned for English episodes in some of the following weeks, Yan and Christian

Chaos communication family

Yan reports

December 27-30 2022

A part of our chaotic decentralized intergalactic community will be a meeting in the rooms of "ETI Schauspielschule Berlin" at Hacking in Parallel//// this year.

There are several units and indiduals who will be there spread (into) the matrix ... You can enter proposals until 2022-11-27 23:42 (Europe/Berlin). https://pretalx.c3voc.de/hip-berlin-2022/cfp

The Matrix space for the event is a good general place to get in touch. https://matrix.to/#/#hip-space:1312.media

We also prepare for having a Matrix Operation Centerhaos at the Chaos Communication Camp in Summer. This will take place from August 15 to 19, 2023 at Ziegeleipark Mildenberg near Berlin, Germany. If you want to join forces of the and need a ticket voucher for the HIP. Drop in at: https://matrix.to/#/#matrix-moc:datanauten.de

If you can / will not make it with you physical body to Berlin. No worries. You should start connecting the dots.

The XRevent.Labs Operation Group invites you to xrelog22. Discussions, lectures, music, art, performance and the joint creation of independent multiverses will take place from December 28 to 30, 2022. We not only want to raise socio-political, ethical and creative questions, but also actively develop own spaces and content for an interactive, cross-reality live experience.

Anyone who is interested in joining or visiting us can do so either with pre-registration for the real stage at FTZ - Digital Reality at HAW in Hamburg or virtually in the digital-twin at XRevent platform, or the Intergalactic-Chaos-Communication-Broadcast-Studio, aka icc|bs. Your contributions can be pre-recorded, streamed live via a conference tool or presented in the real space on site. Either way, get in touch and we’ll find a solution. Please test yourself and wear a mask if you visit us in person.

Furthermore we offer:

• weekly workshops in advance
• recordable LED pixel walls
• Thirdroom Research Lab

Contacts …

• via Mail: [email protected]
• via CfP: https://pretalx.c3voc.de/xrelog-2022/
• via XRevent.Labs Lounge: https://matrix.to/#/#xrevent:matrix.org

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://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3935: Cute Events against social distancing
• MSC3934: Bulk push rules change endpoint
• MSC3933: Core push rules for Extensible Events
• MSC3932: Extensible events room version push rule feature flag
• MSC3931: Push rule condition for room version features
• MSC3930: Polls push rules/notifications
• MSC3927: Extensible Events - Audio

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

Matrix v1.5

Matrix v1.5 was released on November 17th, 2022! 🎉

While not as feature-packed as previous releases (v1.5 was intended as a maintenance release), it's still worth checking out! Included are two new MSCs that have landed, as well as loads of little bugfixes and clarifications to the spec text itself. Thanks to all who helped fix issues since v1.4!

See the Matrix v1.5 blog post for all the juicy details.

Extensible Events are Shaping Up!

As may be apparent from the new MSCs this week, the SCT has been looking at extensible events to iron out some of the finer details of the system. They're not necessarily in the best position to review at the moment, but keep an eye on this space for when review would be most welcome 🙂

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2705: Animated thumbnails for media (and thumbnail content-type requirements)!

This MSC attempts to define a method for clients to indicate to their homeserver that they would like to have animated version if possible when requesting a thumbnail of some media. This would allow clients to provide a toggle to the user for whether media in the timeline should be animated, or whether room and user avatars should be animated, etc. Potentially separate options for each!

Today, there is no way for the client to indicate per-request whether they would like to receive an animated version of a thumbnail. This leaves the choice up to the homeserver, which gives individual users much less control.

The MSC also defines mimetypes that animated thumbnails should return. And it has an implementation in matrix-media-repo!

Check it out if animated avatars/thumbnails peaks your interest.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

Shay says

Another week has gone by and we here at Synapse Inc have been working hard on faster room joins, bugfixes, and other fun items to make Synapse faster and better, in addition to releasing v1.72.0rc1. Just a few highlights of the release are:

• Adding experimental support for MSC3912: Relation-based redactions.

• Adding an Admin API endpoint for user lookup based on third-party ID (3PID).

• Fixing a background database update, introduced in Synapse 1.64.0, which could cause poor database performance.

• Improving the performance of /context in large rooms.

In addition, please note that we now only support PostgreSQL 11+, as PostgreSQL 10 has reached end-of-life. As always, if you'd like to know more about this release, hop on over to the release page (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases) and take a look!

Dept of Clients 📱

Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

It's been a few weeks since the last update on NeoChat and we've been working hard on bringing new features and fixes. Some notable ones include:

• Porting our settings to a nicer style
• Various UI Improvements in the Room list and Timeline
• Added the ability to configure a Proxy
• Creating a significantly nicer UI for switching accounts
• Improved the room search, with a more obvious way of searching on a different server
• Viewing and Answering polls
• The ability to change your display name for a single room
• Correctly escaping HTML characters in various places
• Fixed file sending on android
• Fixed reactions sometimes not showing up
• Fixed some problems with viewing custom emojis
• Fixed the external room window blocking the main client window
• Implemented showing animated images in the timeline

FluffyChat (website)

Krille Fear announces

FluffyChat 1.7.0 has been released. It features a new way to work with spaces via a bottom navigation bar. A lot of work has also been done under the hood to make the app faster and more stable. The main color has slightly changed and the design got some finetuning. Please be aware that it can take some time until it receives all app stores. The Snap Store currently waits for a review, while the arm64 version of Flatpak has recently failed to build. Read the full changelog here: https://gitlab.com/famedly/fluffychat/-/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

Ement.el (website)

Matrix client for Emacs

alphapapa announces

Ement.el, a Matrix client for the GNU Emacs text editor and Lisp environment, has been updated to v0.5. Since the last version announced in TWIM, these improvements have been made:

Additions

• Present "joined-and-left" and "rejoined-and-left" membership event pairs as such.
• Process and show rooms' canonical alias events.

Changes

• The taxy.el-based room list, with programmable, smart grouping, is now the default ement-room-list. (The old, tabulated-list-mode-based room list is available as ement-tabulated-room-list.)

• When selecting a room to view with completion, don't offer spaces.
• When selecting a room with completion, empty aliases and topics are omitted instead of being displayed as nil.

Fixes

• Use of send-message filter when replying.
• Replies may be written in compose buffers.

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

Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan reports

• This week has been exciting for ElementX (our brand new Element iOS client based on the Matrix Rust SDK) which gained a brand new navigation system and a new user notification system, support for displaying file messages in the timeline and playing back video ones, as well as sending states for new messages and an improved bubble layout.
• We have also started working on an iPad specific layout, improved our logging components, improved hardware keyboard handling and fixed a few annoying issues
• In Element land we have a made a handful of bug fixes which will hit the store next week and work has been continuing on threads, the new rich text editor, the device manager and our new crypto stack

Element Android (website)

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

benoit announces

• Element Android 1.5.8 RC is available on the PlayStore for testers.
• The team is working on the device manager, the Rich Text Editor (to add more edition options: links, quote, etc.), and the voice broadcast.
• On the Element Android X side, we are also making progress. We can now change the server (the server has to support sliding sync though). The room list is displayed and the timeline with the Rich Text editor too. We are now working to add more features such as supporting more Event types in the timeline, etc. And the app got a new monochrome icon!

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

Since our last update, Populus viewer has added two features, both a bit overdue:

1. Populus viewer now supports .well-known discovery, so you just need to know your matrix server name, rather than the full subdomain in order to connect.
2. Populus viewer now supports the "restricted" join rule for annotations, so that annotation membership can be restricted to members of the underlying resource space. This will likely be the default for newly created annotations in the future.

Our server (at populus.open-tower.com) has also been rebuilt and reconfigured a bit, and will likely be converted from a test-bed to a stable home for annotation-based discussions in the coming weeks. As always, if you want to give us feedback, keep track of progress, or talk about the future of social annotation on Matrix, join us at #opentower:matrix.org!

Dept of Encryption 🔐

uhoreg announces

As many of you know, we are working on using MLS, an upcoming IETF standard for end-to-end encryption, in Matrix. We've set up a page, Are We MLS Yet to track the progress of this project.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Matrix SDK in Elm (alpha)

Bram reports

Elm is a functional programming language that compiles to JavaScript with the promise that their generated JS code will NEVER raise any runtime errors and show high performance.

Despite the fact that certain implementations like Cactus Chat already use Elm, I could not find an SDK for it. That's why I've started to write one: https://git.noordstar.me/bram/Elm-Matrix

The SDK is currently in early development. The /v3/sync endpoint is functional and there are already a few other ways to interact with the API, so the repository can already be tested by developers who are familiar with Elm. If you aren't that familiar with the language, it is better to wait until I release the first complete version.

libcmatrix

Matthew announces

Purism has been chipping away at libcmatrix for their chat app: https://puri.sm/posts/toward-matrix-support-in-chats/

trinity (website)

bnjbvr reports

Trinity is an experimental bot framework written in Rust and using matrix-rust-sdk, as well as commands / modules compiled to WebAssembly, with convenient developer features like modules hot-reload.

Two weeks of updates, because I've been slightly late last week:

• Trinity now uses WebAssembly components as created with cargo-components and wit-bindgen under the hood for the Matrix modules. This is quite experimental and early stage, but this allows multiple exciting things in some not-so-distant future: switch API implementations at runtime, more security by isolating specific APIs, using source languages for the modules that can be compiled with wit-bindgen, etc.
• In particular, we've made a proof-of-concept for a bot module written in C (!) and compiled to WebAssembly, and we've been very close to having a bot module written in Java using the excellent TeaVM project.
• New APIs have been added for the modules:
  • a simple key-value store, that is backed by the redb pure Rust project, which comes with great performance.
  • modules can now specific help messages as well as admin commands (that will be available only to a predefined admin user).
• Which then allowed to write a shiny new Mastodon module: configure it in a room with a set of credentials, a Mastodon URL instance, define which users are allowed to use it, and then post statuses from the room using !toot message.

If you're interested to follow the project, feel free to join our Matrix room or get the code on Github.

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

ben announces

Major breakthroughs have happened behind the scenes this week: we were able to get a simple python3-asyncio to poll our rust-side future and receive its result via uniffi. While there isn't much to show for the outside world, this is a major step towards having async-uniffi. The team is super excited about this development.

Meanwhile in Sliding-Sync-Land, we have debugged the session reset and added transparent session recovery to the offline-caching PR. Together with the latest PR that hands over the already received timeline events to the new Timeline API, this should visibly speed up things and improve overall performance across all major clients using both of these. Further more, the Timeline API has UTD decryption retry support now. The client interfaces are moving ahead fast.

On the always-on-going-improvement-front, we have upgraded to ruma, merged the component generation for swift in xtask, switched to custom cargo build profiles, have a signaling mutex for crypto now, moved large parts of deserialized_responses to matrix-sdk-base and made the sync_token accessor private.

👉️ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.

Dept of Ops 🛠

ML model for Matrix Spam Detection

MTRNord says

A few weeks ago I started experimenting with extending my moderation tools with a basic ML model that can give me early warnings on common spam.

As a result https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-spam-ml was made. It contains a basic ML model using tensorflow based on telegram spam from matrix and a standard SMS dataset. It provides a HTTP api which can also be found at https://spam.midnightthoughts.space and a Synapse and mjolnir integration for both sampling training data and using it as automated spam reactions and is planned for the future.

Feel free to hop by in #matrix-spam-ml:midnightthoughts.space for any further questions :) also please note that the repo is using LFS and as it contains trained models it is pretty huge when cloning with LFS data.

axon.sh

An interactive command-line administration tool for Synapse written in Bash. Better than typing curl requests!

joe says

axon.sh version 0.22.0 has been released, adding support for retrieving event reports from your homeserver, and looking up local users by third-party ID (requires Synapse 1.72.0rc1 or later). Please try it out and report your experience in #axon:matrix.thisisjoes.site!

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

FOSDEM

Thib reports

This year, the Matrix.org Foundation is excited to host the first ever Matrix.org Foundation and Community devroom in person at FOSDEM. Half a day of talks, demos and workshops around Matrix itself and projects built on top of Matrix.

We have a physical devroom on Sunday 5 morning, and will follow with details for the online devroom as soon as we get them! You can read the CfP for the physical devroom here: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/11/16/call-for-participation-for-the-fosdem-2023-matrix-devroom

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Matrix plays GameBoy games once more

Bram announces

Last week's TWIM presented a GBA emulator that was written and implemented in JavaScript. Due to some obscure Rust dependencies that weren't compatible with my server setup, I decided to rewrite the program in Python.

The Python implementation can be found at bram/pyboy-to-matrix. It only supports GameBoy games (no GBA), but it only needs one process (or Docker container) to run both the emulator and the Matrix bot.

If you're unfamiliar with last week's post, the GameBoy emulator is a program that emulates games and then interacts with you on Matrix. You can send commands and the emulator will show you what happened in the game.

Send me a DM at @bram:noordstar.me if you want to see a live demo.

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 Status of Matrix 🌡️

andybalaam reports

A few Matrix folks went to IETF115 this week, and here is my Trip Report: Can Matrix help messaging standardisation through MIMI?

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://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3926: Disable server-default notifications for bot users by default

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC3030: Jump to date API endpoint

Spec updates

This week the Spec Core Team has been working with the IETF More Instant Messaging Interoperability (MIMI) working group to define a charter. With a charter, the working group is able to start thinking about implementation and design details, which means talking even more about Matrix!

We had the opportunity to discuss Matrix with several interested people at IETF this week, and are extremely excited for the (long) road ahead: even in the event where Matrix doesn't get accepted, we hope the protocol(s) the working group publishes will be fit for purpose and adopted widely (not to mention our own spec will be better as a result).

To find out more about what we're doing in this space or to learn more, check out this week's Matrix Live above!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3381: Polls (mk II)!

Polls! They are useful for quickly gauging whether a group of people agree, or entirely disagree on a topic or choice. This is an MSC with a fairly long history, but has received experimental implementation in a small number of Matrix clients. The concept uses Extensible Events, and there are plans to rewrite it off the back of changes in MSC1767 (extensible events). But for now, it works and is a fun feature.

It's likely worth waiting for the rewrite before commenting on the MSC with detailed changes, but otherwise feel free to have a read to see how it currently works!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Feta (website)

geoffledak announces

Feta is a Matrix server distribution for the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4.

It is a an operating system image, based on Raspberry Pi OS Lite and includes the Matrix Synapse server, a self-hosted Element client, Postgres database, and it generates an SSL certificate for your domain using Certbot. The coturn TURN server is also included so voice and video calls work without any additional configuration.

The provided setup script will have your server up and running in a matter of minutes.

All you need to do is configure your DNS settings for your domain, forward some ports through your router, and boot up your Raspberry Pi. Once setup is complete, enjoy your new Matrix server! Synapse, Element, Postgres, coturn, and federation are all preconfigured for you.

Visit https://www.feta.bz/ to download and get more info.

Head on over to #feta:matrix.org for discussion and updates!

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 says

• Donations: Both recurring and one-time donations are now accepted via LiberaPay and Stripe, respectively—GitHub Sponsors is hopefully coming soon. All funds will go directly to infrastructure and development labor. You can find the donate links on the website, and the GitHub mirror.
• Memory/Network Improvements: Another week brings another round of memory and socket handling improvements.
• Patch Submission: It's now easier than ever to contribute to Telodendria thanks to the new send-patch script. Submitting your changes for review is now only a single command.
• Newsletter: Catch the full-length newsletter in #telodendria-newsletter:bancino.net.

Synapse (website)

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

squah says

Synapse 1.71.0 has been released! It contains the usual round of bugfixes and performance improvements, plus some new features. Notably, Synapse now supports:

• back-channel logouts from OpenID Connect providers.
• Postgres and SQLite full-text search operators in search queries.
• MSC3664, push rules for relations.

Server administrators should be aware that:

• legacy Prometheus metric names are now disabled by default, and will be removed altogether in Synapse 1.73.0. If not already done, server administrators should update their dashboards and alerting rules to avoid using the deprecated metric names.
• Synapse 1.71.0 will be the last release to support PostgreSQL 10. Server administrators are encouraged to upgrade their PostgreSQL servers before the next release, if needed.

You can read more about v1.71.0 here: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases

In the mean time, the team has been working on the remaining parts of faster room joins.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Postmoogle (website)

An Email to Matrix bridge. 1 room = 1 mailbox.

Aine announces

Postmoogle vUnreleased is here!

Yep, no pinned release yet, but there are some exciting features in the main branch (latest docker image):

multi-domain support!

You can have one main email domain (eg: the-etke.cc) and multiple additional domains that will be used as aliases (not-etke.cc, example.com), so you can get more spam to the [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] at the same time!

bridged thread replies!

the last planned feature of the roadmap: send reply (reply-to or thread reply) to an email message in the matrix room and it will automatically set all magic stuff (In-Reply-To header, subject with Re: %original message's subject%, etc) and send email. It's pretty rough implementation, so feedback is appreciated!

Source code and say hi in the #postmoogle:etke.cc room

Dept of Clients 📱

Hydrogen (website)

Hydrogen is a lightweight matrix client with legacy and mobile browser support

Midhun says

Released v0.3.4 (and v0.3.3) with a join room UI and lots of bug fixes! Special thanks to Isaiah Becker-Mayer for his numerous typescript PRs!

Some of the fixes are for:

• an error that can stop sync
• an issue where hydrogen did not verify senders of room keys!
• message verification not working in rooms where we haven't sent a message yet

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat announces

• 1.11.14 is out, with many improvements to threads!
• This week, we fixed some issues, including a bug with media uploads

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

• We’ve added more functionality to the rich text editor, it’s catching up slowly with the basic composer
• Voice broadcast also has a few new tricks up its sleeve, including improvements to pre-recording and message length

Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan says

• We have been working hard on improving the Element experience and to that extend we have fixed some crashes, squashed timeline layout issues, improved the device manager and the new rich text editor
• Work is also continuing on thread notifications and the new crypto frameworks
• ElementX on the other hand received support for offline logins, message editing, video and encrypted messages in the timeline and a brand new underlying navigation mechanism

Element Android (website)

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

benoit reports

• Element Android 1.5.7 has been pushed to production on the PlayStore and should also be available for F-Droid users soon. This version fixes the issue when sharing items to the app, and also fixes the regression observed in 1.5.6 (before it reaches production!) during the first sync with the server.
• We are making progress on ElementX, which is a new client using the Matrix Rust SDK and Jetpack Compose. This app is now able to display a timeline and send messages to a room using the wysiwyg composer.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict announces

We released Trixnity 3.0.0-beta3, which supports the matrix spec 1.4 and new relation types: reply (without fallback), replace, thread (basic support, no separate timelines or client aggregations yet).

simplematrixbotlib (website)

simplematrixbotlib is an easy to use bot library for the Matrix ecosystem written in Python and based on matrix-nio.

imbev reports

Version 2.8.0 released!

This version brings a few improvements.

The sending of video messages has been added. The following handler will send a video after any message from another user:

async def example(room, message):
    match = botlib.MessageMatch(room, message, bot)
    example_video="./videos/example.mp4"
    if match.is_not_from_this_bot():
        await bot.api.send_video_message(
            room_id=room.room_id, 
            video_filepath=example_video)

Thanks to moanos and HarHarLinks, there are improvements to the handling of device ids.

Join us in the Matrix room at https://matrix.to/#/#simplematrixbotlib:matrix.org or the Git repository at https://codeberg.org/imbev/simplematrixbotlib !

Version 3.0 coming soon!

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.

Jonas Platte announces

Since our last update in June (yeah, sorry...), we released Ruma 0.7.0 and a few patch releases including all of the following and more:

• Support for refresh tokens (MSC2918 / Matrix 1.4)
• Unstable support for discovering an OpenID Connect Server (MSC2965)
• Unstable support for private read receipts
• Lots of API refinements, like renaming AnyRoomEvent to AnyTimelineEvent
• Support for Room Version 10
• Unstable support for sliding sync

Since this release was released back in September, a bunch of things have also happened that are not released yet:

• Many features were moved out of unstable feature flags because they were stabilized in Matrix 1.4
• We made message construction easier than ever with improvements to markdown detection and improvements to reply and edit creation
• We refactored and extended the push notification code
• We are about to conclude a massive refactoring that should make our codebase look less strange if you are familiar with Rust, and could help compile times as well

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

ben announces

This week has seen important strives forward on sliding sync, which now has a PR up for offline support and the new timeline API, with some initial unittests and video messages support merged and support for file messages coming up. On the FFI, we now have support for logging in Android and work on moving the iOS binding scripts into our internal xtask cli.

As usual a lot of work is been going in the background without any visible, tangible outcome yet. On one side we are making great progress on getting a first async-prototype for uniffi with python working, on the other we have been profiling the sdk on iOS mobile devices for its memory footprint - which is a major blocker for notification support.

️👉 Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

FOSDEM

Thib announces

There will be a Matrix Devroom at FOSDEM next February 🎉 We will issue a CfP very soon™

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Matrix Plays GameBoy games

jaller94 reports

Using this Lua script and NodeJS bot, you can remotely control any GameBoy (Classic + Color + Advance) game using the mGBA emulator. Invite some friends to the Matrix room and everyone can control the game at once. Yes, the project name is a reference to the famous "Twitch Plays Pokémon" stream which has 1000s of people complete Pokémon games together just by typing into a chat.

This is a bot and does not need an AppService registration.

https://github.com/jaller94/matrix-plays-pokemon

Disclaimer: This is a hobby project of mine. It is neither associated with nor endorsed by my employer or Nintendo. The project does not contain ROMs or other non-free assets.

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://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3925: m.replace aggregation with full event
• MSC3924: Capability-style access control for Matrix media
• MSC3923: Bringing Matrix into the IETF process
• MSC3922: Removing SRV records from homeserver discovery

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3030: Jump to date API endpoint (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC3743: Standardized error response for unknown endpoints

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3910: Content tokens for media
  • Superseded by MSC3911, MSC3916

Spec Updates

This week we've been continuing our mission to define Matrix as the interoperable standard for instant messaging! With many of our discussions expected to happen next week in this area, we've prepared some drafts for the wider community to review (with even more on the way!). With MSC3923, we're asking for feedback on whether people think the approach is something that could work for Matrix, though there is a cautionary note that there's a lot of TODOs to fill still.

We hope to have even more news next week, but as a reminder: The IETF process is fairly slow-moving as it takes a lot of time to get through the different stages. Keep an eye on MSCs tagged "IETF" or "MIMI" - or watch this space - for updates on how it's going 🙂

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3911: Linking media to events!

This MSC attempts to be an addition to authenticated media in matrix (specifically MSC3916) where successful authentication would also be conditioned on whether or not the user was able to view an associated event in a Matrix room. In plain english, that means that if the media was sent in a room, then you'd need to be in that room to be able to see the media (even if you tried to load the media outside of a matrix client). This change helps address some concerns about media leaking outside of the room it was sent. It also opens up possibilities to delete media if all associated events have been redacted.

Check it out if you're interested in advancing media in Matrix!

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

Telodendria is moving along slowly but steadily. Here are a few brief things to note for this week:

• GitHub: There's now a read-only Git mirror of the source code hosted on GitHub, which you can browse online, or clone if you want to do local work with it.
• Network & Memory Improvements: I did a lot of work with my debugger this week and made a number of network and memory improvements that make Telodendria much more stable and efficient.
• Data API: I just have begun writing code for persisting data and caching it. At the current pace, I'd expect to see that done around the end of this year.
• Get Involved: If you want to speed up development, I'm happy to delegate any of the tasks in TODO.txt to you.
• Matrix: As a reminder, Telodendria is organized entirely on Matrix at #telodendria:bancino.net. There you'll find a number of rooms for various purposes, including submitting patches, discussing Telodendria, and digesting the official newsletter. Feel free to stop by, even if it's just to say hi and express your interest in the project.

Synapse (website)

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

Shay reports

Welcome to another Friday! Here in Synapse-land we have been hard at work on this week's release candidate: v1.71.0rc2. It contains bugfixes, a few new features, and continued work on speeding up Synapse. Some notable elements are:

• Legacy Prometheus metric names are now disabled by default, and will be removed altogether in Synapse 1.73.0. If not already done, server administrators should update their dashboards and alerting rules to avoid using the deprecated metric names.

• Synapse now supports back-channel logouts from OpenID Connect providers.

• Synapse now supports use of Postgres and SQLlite full-text search operators in search queries.

• Synapse now implement MSC3664, Pushrules for relations.

You can read more about v1.71.0rc2 here: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases

Swiclops (website)

A Matrix user-interactive authentication (UIA) server

cvwright announces

Announcing the first alpha release of Swiclops, a server that handles authentication, registration, and other user management tasks for a Matrix homeserver like Synapse.

Swiclops can be configured to provide user-interactive authentication (UIA) on the Matrix /login endpoint, similar to MSC2835. This opens up many exciting possibilities for the future, including:

• Requiring acceptance of the latest terms of service at login
• Multi-stage authentication protocols, such as WebAuthn or PassKeys, or various password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocols
• Two-factor authentication

Authentication Modules

• MSC3231 Registration Tokens
• Token-based email validation
• Cryptographic password-based login that does not expose users passwords to the server
• Legacy password auth (ie m.login.password)
• Terms of service
• (Coming soon!) Support for registration with paid subscriptions via the Apple App Store and Google Play Store
• (Coming soon!) Support for Apple FaceID and TouchID

Source Code

Swiclops release v0.1.0

Installation

The easiest way to install Swiclops is by using Ansible and Docker. We have created an Ansible role for it in a fork of the popular matrix-docker-ansible-deploy playbook.

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander says

We wouldn't ordinarily make so many releases in one week, but we've been quite busy! Instead of including the entire set of changelogs, please see the releases below which have more details about what's changed:

• Version 0.10.7 today, which fixes a variety of things in /sync amongst other things
• Version 0.10.6 on Tuesday, which optimises history visibility, improves E2EE and tweaks some state resolution code
• Version 0.10.5 on Monday, which adds hCaptcha support, improves E2EE and a range of other fixes

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.

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Ananace announces

This week has been quite calm, only a single update to my Helm Charts; element-web being bumped to 1.11.13

Dept of Clients 📱

SmallTalk (website)

Minimal Android messenger powered by Matrix

adam says

Quick update from SmallTalk - a tiny native android client, currently in BETA

• Fullscreen zoomable image viewer
• Muting room notifications
• Rich text formatting (very WIP)
• Bug fixes around Android 13 permissions and being unable to login on non synapse homeservers

There's been an effort to make the app chat agnostic through the abstraction of a chat engine, this could allow different chat protocols to be used or simply swap out matrix SDK implementations (like the matrix-rust-sdk!)

More information over at Github & #small-talk

Quadrix (website)

A Minimal, simple, multi-platform chat client for the Matrix protocol.

JFA announces

Quadrix v1.4.5 has been released and is available for mobiles and desktops in the respective app stores (Google Play, App Store, Mac App Store, Microsoft, Snap Store, Flathub).

The main improvement in this release is the added support for the .well-known API call, which allows to register and login on homeservers using a base domain URL.

Also, the displaying of redacted and edited messages has been improved.

I started testing Quadrix on the Conduit server implementation (thanks to @timo:conduit.rs for a test account on conduit.rs) and noticed right away some major issues. A few fixes are already included in this release.

Finally, for PinePhone users, the Ozone/Wayland switch has now been disabled in the flatpak build for Phosh, because of a compatibility issue between Electron and the on-screen keyboard. On Phosh, the app now runs in XWayland mode (it looks blurry) but at least the OSK works.

Please leave feedback/comments at #quadrix:matrix.org or in the issues at https://github.com/alariej/quadrix (stars welcome :-)

Nheko (website)

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

red_sky (nheko.im) reports

You can now respond to notifications on macOS in nheko! These will be sent as a rich reply. No need to open up the main client any more to respond to folks.

Nico says

As already mentioned, the Apple Silicon builds are now properly packaged.

Additionally we fixed the pagination issues in our search and you should now be able to find more messages. As part of that we also optimized a few database queries again to reduce disk load when running Nheko (which became more noticeable after we enabled some durability flags on the database last week).

There have also been more fixes to the pushrules code. Test code now outnumbers the actual implementation by 4:1. As an additional feature, we do highlight messages marked as "highlight" via a pushrule (i.e. when someone mentions you) in the timeline by adding a red outline.

As part of the push work I also implemented and fixed a few things in Synapse related to pushrules. If replies are not highlighted for you currently, it might be this bug. A longer term fix will be MSC3664, which I also implemented. I also fixed some compatibility issues when sending pushrules to clients after the recent Synapse refactoring.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle reports

• This week we’ve released a hotfix - there’s important changes in this one so please update when you can.
• The team is starting to look at improving our Matrix.to links and flow.
• There will be some opportunities to contribute here, so if you’re interested keep your eyes on the Help Wanted tag in GitHub
• Following our recent research into Notifications we’re starting to build a picture of the things that would be useful to change. We need clearer definitions around defaults, and flexibility in notifications.

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

• We’ve been updating Threads for a few weeks now and some great improvements have landed. If you’re not feeling any improvements here’s some tips for checking you’re in the right place

Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan reports

• Version 1.9.10 is ready for release and brings a handful of bug fixes throughout the app
• The rich text editor now has voice message support as well as other updates and performance enhancements
• We’ve been making good progress on ElementX push notification support and we’re getting close to a working solution
• ElementX also gained a new timeline scroll mechanism and improved concurrency
• We have also been working on improving thread notification counts and read receipts
• Work continues on the device manager
• This week we also saw the first build of the ElementR iOS app, introducing Rust side crypto support to the existing codebase

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle announces

• This week's release has a new media picker when you’re choosing to upload something to the timeline.
• We’ve also been working on multi-select in the new device manager
• And… Fixing the share actions in the share dialog
• In Labs; We’re building loading and pagination improvements for Threads.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Circles (website)

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

cvwright says

Circles is a secure, E2E encrypted social network app built on Matrix. We have a new build (v1.0.6) of our Android beta today.

Circles v1.0.6 is now available from our beta F-Droid repo, so F-Droid users' clients should start picking it up over the next day or so. Updates in this release include:

• A new expandable view for long text posts
• Animated .webp support
• Password strength estimation (using zxcvbn)
• Fixed scroll on emoji dialog
• Fixed crash on take photo/video

Adventurous users can also install the latest build by grabbing the APK directly from our repo.

Interested users can also join us in #circles:matrix.org to get the latest news about the app.

Dept of Widgets 🧩

Oliver Sand says

Hello from Nordeck 👋 This week we finally released the first of our widgets as open source: It's the matrix-poll-widget.

The widget allows to conduct polls in Matrix rooms. But unlike MSC3381 it is designed for more complex scenarios, like polls with multiple parties in a council. You have full control over your data, as it's stored in your Matrix room. It is currently in use in the German public sector. The widget is built using TypeScript, React, and the matrix-widget-api. We also extracted a thin layer of code that is shared between our widgets into our matrix-widget-toolkit, another project we made open source recently. Our remaining widgets will follow in the next couple of weeks. We keep you updated here.

If you have any questions, reach out to us at our #nordeck:matrix.org.

Dept of VoIP 🤙

Element Call (website)

Native Decentralised End-to-end Encrypted Group Calls in Matrix, as a standalone web app

Florian Heese says

Hello from the VoIP team,

We've just released Element Call v0.3.2 which has a whole collection of new things. Screen sharing will now work in embedded mode on desktop and it will now show tiles for people it's trying to connect to, so it should make it easier to see what's going wrong in a call. Please continue rageshaking if you see failures: ideally immediately after the failure, from both sides, and please describe what went wrong in as much detail as you can!

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict reports

Trixnity release 3.0.0-beta1

We released Trixnity 3.0.0-beta1. This is a major version with many (breaking) changes. We will wait for the 3.0.0 release until we have implemented the Matrix 1.4 spec changes (m.replace will be really hacky due to a - in my opinion - spec bug).

Support realm database

We now support realm as a database backend. This allows you to use Trixnity on iOS with a persistent database.

Added exchangeable MediaStore

Media is not saved into the database anymore, but in an exchangeable MediaStore. It is also streamed, so you can download and upload large files. There is trixnity-client-media-okio for a multiplatform file based implementation.

Improved StateFlowCache

The StateFlowCache, which basically is a reactive cache on top of an arbitrary database does not need a CoroutineScope parameter for any read or write operation anymore. It was needed to react to the lifecycle of the consumer, so that not used data could be removed from the cache. This was really error prone, because if the consumer passed a wrong CoroutineScope with a too long lifecycle, the cache could grow unlimited. We figured out to solve this with Kotlin Flows, so everything is lazy and the lifecycle can be determined from the Flow consumer!

We also fixed a long standing bug, which could cause to return a Flow, which does not emit updated values.

Power level caluculation support

We implemented some functions to calculate power levels (e. g. canBanUser(...)).

Naming change of classes and interfaces

We changed the naming of all interfaces from IXyz to Xyz and the implementation of it from Xyz to XyzImpl

Server-API improvements

We made some improvements to the various server APIs to allow implementing proxies filtering requests and responses.

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

ben announces

• matrix-sdk-crypto-nodejs 0.1.0-beta.3 has been released to npmjs.com - main change is a fix on the downloader to pick the correct asset from the release and some other smaller fixes

• the new Timeline API now features the ability to show not-decryptable items

• restore tokens passed via FFI are now a proper type not just a string anymore

• we've cleaned up the error types in base

• a fix on sliding sync allows us to create sliding sync when offline (which locked before)

• the sdk now uses the server-supplied retry time when available

  👉️ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Salt reports

SeaGL (the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference) will be holding our tenth annual (third virtual) conference online November 4–5, powered by Matrix and our custom bot, Patch. Join this free—as in freedom and tea—volunteer powered grassroots technical summit, no registration required. This year's theme is "Hang Ten”, in honor of our tenth year!

Keynote speakers include:

• Aeva Black
• Ernie Smith
• Lorena Mesa
• Sumana Harihareswara

We have a packed lineup of free / libre / open source talks. There are also a number of fun social activities providing opportunities to mingle with your fellow participants. Additional information on the conference and how to attend is available on our blog.

As previously mentioned, we've been refining the virtual conference experience for three years and would gladly welcome new wings and beaks to our all-volunteer staff!

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://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3919: Matrix Message Format (IETF/MIMI)
• MSC3918: Matrix Message Transport (IETF/MIMI)
• MSC3917: Cryptographically Constrained Room Membership
• MSC3916: Authentication for media
• MSC3915: Owner power level

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3743: Standardized error response for unknown endpoints (merge)

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3905: Application services should only be interested in local users

Closed MSCs:

• MSC2821: Testing Pushers
• MSC3510: Let users kick/ban/demote each other
  • Superseded by MSC3915: Owner power level

Spec Updates

MSC3917: Cryptographically Constrained Room Membership is rather interesting. It aims to make room membership in a room cryptographically verifiable via a "Master Signing Key" that's controlled by users. This is in addition to the homeserver signatures typically placed on events in Matrix. The purpose is to prevent a homeserver from being able to lie about your membership in a room. While not the end-all-be-all solution to this particular problem, it's certainly a well-reasoned take.

Matrix @ IETF 115

This last week (well, last few months), the Spec Core Team has been working on defining Matrix as the standard for interoperable messaging at the IETF level, under MIMI. The current drafts can be found in these places:

• Matrix as a transport for MIMI: https://turt2live.github.io/ietf-mimi-matrix-transport/draft-ralston-mimi-matrix-transport.html (MSC3918)
• Matrix as a message format for MIMI: https://turt2live.github.io/ietf-mimi-matrix-message-format/draft-ralston-mimi-matrix-message-format.html (MSC3919)

We'll be publishing these as proper Internet-Drafts once submissions open back up at IETF in a week or so. In the meantime, if you have any feedback then please let us know on the MSCs 🙂

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3032: Thoughts on updating presence!

A loose collection of thoughts on how presence (the ability to see whether people are online/office) may be improved at the Matrix protocol level, and how it could be integrated into a profiles-as-rooms feature (MSC1769). Check it out if presence is something you're interested in!

TravisR explains

A soon-to-be working group within the IETF called "More Instant Messaging Interoperability" (MIMI) is aiming to solve, well, messaging interoperability for primarily reasons of the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA). The DMA requires "gatekeepers" to interop with other platforms while maintaining the same level of encryption, and we think Matrix is the perfect fit for this use-case. While we'd likely be saying goodbye to Olm and Megolm in the process, we'd be saying hello to Messaging Layer Security (MLS) and its decentralized counterpart DMLS - a good thing in our books, at the moment.

In terms of what we've done this week in publishing our drafts (and soon to be real Internet-Drafts under the IETF process), we're formally proposing that Matrix's Federation API and event schema be used for messaging interoperability. Our very own Matrix spec process will be impacted by this sort of direction as it makes it (theoretically) "harder" to change details of the spec. To avoid it being extraordinarily difficult, we'll be nailing down some of the edge cases of the Federation API and event format ( 👀 extensible events) naturally as we work closer and closer to an RFC series. We'll also be making some architectural changes to our specification itself to better support half of it being in the IETF domain, like defining room versions more clearly and splitting non-core spec out of the way. It's worth noting that this is a relatively slow process as we work towards the deadline of DMA a few years from now, but the changes might be felt by the ecosystem on a more rapid scale.

At the moment, we're planning to attend IETF 115 to help keep Matrix on the map for MIMI and raise our feedback about the proposed working group charter. Discussions about whether Matrix is the correct fit are already ongoing, but expected to increase as we get closer to IETF 116 next quarter. We were also already at IETF 114 a few months ago where many of these conversations started.

Future work is currently expected to come through under my name, as have the current drafts (both with obvious input from Matthew as project lead). Watching this space and the spec process for updates is best 🙂

Dash User-Contributed Docset

ChristianP says

The Matrix Spec 1.4 is now available as a Docset for the Dash offline documentation reader. You can install this docset from Dash's Preferences > Downloads > User Contributed. This docset will likely be kept up-to-date by me. This is not an official distribution channel of the Matrix Spec team – things may break.

If you're using the open-source reader Zeal, you'll have to install new versions manually: https://gitlab.com/jaller94/dash-matrix-spec#use-with-zeal

Dept of Servers 🏢

Telodendria (website)

Jordan Bancino says

Hi everyone, I'm working on a little Matrix project called Telodendria.

Telodendria is eventually going to be another homeserver implementation. It isn't one yet; I'm still in the very early stages of prototyping it, and writing some boilerplate code, but I've been encouraged to throw the project out there for more exposure, so here we are!

Telodendria is written in ANSI C, will use a custom flat-file database, and relies only on a POSIX system to be built and run. It won't pull in any dependencies; as much as possible will be written from scratch, including the HTTP stack, JSON parser, and any other baseline stuff a Matrix homeserver needs.

Why?

One of the goals is simply to build a useful homeserver, but also just to learn about the inner workings of Matrix and the technology that supports it, as well as to have a bit of fun in the process.

At this point we've got Synapse, Dendrite, Conduit, Construct, and a few other great projects. So you're probably asking, What practical reasons are there to build another homeserver? The best answer to that is in Telodendria's manual, but what it really comes down to is being portable and lightweight. It'd be cool to have a Matrix homeserver server that can run anywhere, but specifically targets the more obscure operating systems like the BSDs. Additionally, it should be light enough to perform well on Raspberry Pis, routers, cheap VPSs, and other low-power and low-storage devices that might not be as capable of running a full database plus a hefty Matrix homeserver.

For me personally, I just want a homeserver that feels like it belongs on OpenBSD and is capable of handling my use case without having to install any third-party packages. I'm a digital minimalist that wants to cut down on his software requirements, and Telodendria is one of the ways I've set out to do that.

Want to get involved?

There's definitely plenty of code and documentation to be written, so if you're looking for a challenge and believe in the project's philosophy, you're highly encouraged to get involved in whatever way you're able.

The development discussion happens entirely on Matrix. If you're unsure where to start, start by joining the project rooms listed in the manual. Do be sure to also check out main project website, which has a list of all the manual pages. The manual should contain much of the information you'll need to get started, but it's far from complete, so if you find the information to be insufficient, don't be afraid to ask questions in the rooms listed above.

Conduit (website)

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

Timo on Conduit ⚡️ announces

Great news! The FUTO organization selected me for a grant to sponsor me working on Conduit. I want to finally work on the big remaining issues like threads, backfilling, spaces and so on. Also keep an eye on the Conduit v0.5 release. It is almost done and contains many bug fixes. You can already try it out by compiling conduit-next.

Synapse (website)

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

dmr announces

A lot of the Synapse team are out at the moment; we have mostly been in maintenance mode, both for the project and the Matrix.org deployment. With that said: we released Synapse 1.70.0 on Tuesday followed by a 1.70.1 patch release today. Highlights include:

• better support for threads,
• full support for Matrix 1.3 and 1.4, and
• small fixes to the experimental faster joins work.

Thank you as ever to our community of contributors, server operators and users who've been involved in this release. We'll be cutting a release candidate for Synapse 1.71 on the upcoming Tuesday (1st November), aiming to release the week after (8th November).

As for this week: we've been testing Synapse against the recent Python 3.11 release, dealing wit h CI deprecations and working through our backlog of old PRs. Lots of small things to juggle!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Ananace announces

Since I happen to have a few free minutes this friday;

My Helm Charts continue to stay up-to-date, with element-web at 1.11.12 and matrix-synapse on 1.70.0 (though refer to #homeowners:matrix.org before updating)

Ananace reports

And another little update on my Helm Charts; matrix-synapse 1.70.1 is now available as well

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

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

Nico announces

I guess the most exciting news is that the macOS M1 builds are now merged to master and will be available for the next release. Seems like those are even faster on macOS that the intel builds! (Time from launch to be able to send a message is about 1 or 2 seconds.) The builds are using the generous cirrus CI open-source offering, so thank you!

Another good news is that a fox fixed the upload widget sometimes breaking Nheko when trying to upload specific files on some platforms. Apart from that there were also minor fixes to room sorting in communities, performance fixes to the parent community links as well as work on enabling more warnings when developing Nheko (to ensure our code is better quality, more secure and less error prone).

If you want to find out more about Nheko, our official community is currently being set up at #community:nheko.im!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle says

• Along with some bug fixes we’ve been adding more updates to some features currently in Labs!

  • Check out a newly improved Threads; with recent updates deployed, threads notifications should be much more reliable these days. We’ve still got more work to do but the improvements are great.
  • Video rooms and Element Call in the desktop version now supports screen sharing.
  • The rich text editor is also getting regular updates and expanded functionality.

• In the pipeline for us over the next few weeks are improvements to notifications and matrix.to links.

Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan announces

• In order to enhance our ability to test before launch we’ve now got Nightly builds on ElementX iOS. Our internal testers are able to use the app for longer before we prep for release to the App Store and that will increase the quality of our product.
  • We’ve also made other improvements to our performance testing.
• The composer has had a few upgrades recently - keep your eyes open for that and let us know what you think!
• Work on voice broadcasting is moving ahead quickly
• We’re working on signing in via QR code and other enhancements in this area.
• And last but not least, ElementX is very close to getting e2e encryption support!

Element Android (website)

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

benoit announces

• The new app layout has been out for a few weeks now and we’re keeping an eye on feedback and numbers. So far it seems like most people like it though we’ve heard great ideas about improvements we can make in the future. Keep it coming!
• We’re working hard on increasing the test coverage in our app so that we have even more confidence in the app we’re pushing to the Play Store.
• Under Labs, there’s some new features. Check out:
  • The new composer. It’s What You See Is What You Get and hopefully a lot more straight-forward to use!
  • There’s also a new way to manage your devices and notifications on different clients.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

nheko-krunner (website)

A KRunner plugin to list joined rooms and possibly other things from nheko.

LorenDB says

I have updated nheko-krunner to work with the latest D-Bus API from nheko. There is no new release out yet, but expect to see a release (possibly with other cool things) after the next nheko release.

Circles (website)

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

cvwright reports

Happy Friday all! Once again we have a new build of the Circles Android app for your beta testing enjoyment.

Updates in this release (v1.0.5)

• Renamed the app back to "Circles". Technically the proper name of the app is "FUTO Circles", but it will show up on your home screen as simply "Circles", similar to how Google Photos is "Photos" and Google Maps is "Maps". The Circuli name was too hard for most English speakers to pronounce, and it didn't solve our other issues with the name. "FUTO Circles" should do the trick.
• We're keeping the Circuli name for our online service.
• Added QR-code-based device verification.
• Made registration tokens optional, i.e. it's up to the server whether to require them or not. Currently we do require registration tokens on our servers, and you can sign up with the token 0000-1111-2222-4444.

Links

• F-Droid repo
• APK
• Source code

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

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

ben announces

Long-awaited and with a bunch of final bug-fixes on the server side, this week eventually saw the merging of the sliding sync extensions, enabling e2ee and to-device message support via sliding-sync on main. With that, and some additional APIs on, a new Element-x with e2ee support was made available. A release that also features the latest work on the timeline API, which, too, has seen its fair share of progress this week - mainly internal fixes and debugging helpers.

As a result of the sliding sync work, just earlier today, an important PR was opened for jack-in, the experimental debugging TUI client based on matrix-rust-sdk (which we use for debugging sliding sync): now allowing you send (encrypted) messages, too.

Following last weeks announcement we also made the Rust-Sec public, indicating why we recommend uprgading to 0.6.1, which we released shortly prior.

Other than that, work has been progressed in the background on the pretty complex problem of async in uniffi and system-specific runners, namely libdispatch on ios rather than tokio, as well as work on uniff proc-macros.

️👉 Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.

libQuotient (website)

A Qt5 library to write cross-platform clients for Matrix

kitsune reports

A new beta for libQuotient 0.7 is out, with a few fixes and improvements across the board but especially in E2EE-related code. This one is still a bit too early for Linux packagers but we're steadily approaching the release. The release notes are available at a usual place: https://github.com/quotient-im/libQuotient/releases/tag/0.7-beta2

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix User Meetup Berlin

saces says

Next Matrix user meetup 2.11.2022, 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.

Also when the bbq is lit you may wish you brought your favorite item :)

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

Matrix room: #mumb:c-base.org

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Chatrix (website)

Matthew announces

Automattic look to be working on a wordpress plugin called Chatrix, forked from Element’s Chatterbox (in turn built on Hydrogen)… https://github.com/Automattic/chatrix-frontend

hg-dashboard (website)

thejhh announces

We published our example dashboard fullstack app at Github. It uses Matrix as one of the database options to save application's stored state -- and also contains sample configurations for multiple Matrix Home servers. The project is complete full stack sample project which can be used to kick start new projects. It has REST backend written in TypeScript using Spring Boot style API implementation, architecture copied from enterprise Java world to TypeScript. The frontend is implemented with ReactJS. It also has docker-compose configurations and a simple testing framework implemented.

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!