Matrix Live 🎙

This week I spoke to Annie from the Ditto project.

Find out more:

#ditto:elequin.io
Testflight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/9M0ERlKd
Feedback: https://ditto.upvoty.com

Dept of Spec 📜

MSC2354: Device to device streaming file transfers

Mathijs offered:

I opened my first MSC, to use webrtc for streaming file transfers from device to device (rather than account to account)

Spec

anoa said:

New MSCs

• MSC2354: Device to device streaming file transfers
• MSC2356: Bulk /joined_members endpoint

In Final Comment Period

• MSC2284: Making the identity server optional during discovery

Merged MSCs

• MSC1946: Secure Secret Storage and Sharing
• MSC2244: Mass redactions

The Spec Core Team's focused MSC's continue to be MSC1756 (cross-signing), MSC2324 (new spec process), and MSC2313 (ban lists).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

anoa said:

This week saw work on implementing message retention policies, the continuation of migrating matrix.org to new hardware and some other little fixes.

The public rooms directory is also set to private by default now. Please read the accompanying blog post for the reasoning behind it.

Ruma updates

We missed it at the time, but the Ruma project has some updates to share, focused on the ruma-events projects.

https://www.ruma.io/news/new-releases-2019-11-05/

Known Matrix Server Selector Websites

Over in #matrixservers:raim.ist, grin provided this list-of-lists of Matrix public home servers:

• https://www.hello-matrix.net/
• https://matrix.grin.hu/stat/
• https://the-federation.info/matrix%7Csynapse
• https://www.anchel.nl/matrix-publiclist/

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir reported:

mautrix-whatsapp now has basic relaybot support. Since WhatsApp doesn't have usable bots, relaybot in this case means using a normal account as a relay. To enable the relaybot in your bridge instance, copy this config block into your config, update is as needed, and simply log in normally in the configured relaybot management room.

matrix-appservice-slack 1.0.2

Half-Shot announced:

Hey all, matrix-appservice-slack 1.0.2 has been released. This contains a small number of bug fixes and doc changes.

Dept of Clients 📱

Pattle: version 0.14.0

Wilko announced:

A new version has been made available and should soon be on Google Play!

Note that this version will not be on TestFlight (yet) because notifications are currently only implemented on Android (using Firebase, so same goes for F-Droid for the time being).

Changes

• Show notifications when receiving a new message!
• Username is not checked whether it's available anymore

This was done for a future feature (registration), however, a different approach will probably be taken.

Get Pattle

• Android
  • F-Droid
  • Google Play
• iOS (TestFlight)

Issues or suggestions

If you stumble upon any issues or would like to suggest features, please do so here! You can login via GitHub and Gitlab.com!

Follow development

Follow development in #app:pattle.im!

Kotlin projects: koma and Continuum

yuforia told us:

koma, Kotlin library:

• Implement timeout in coroutines instead of waiting for timeout errors from HTTP library, which makes it easier to change the timeout on demand and may improve performance to some degree
• Make use of experimental feature contracts in Kotlin 1.3 to avoid cast errors when inline class is used in non-local returns
• Add API for getting thumbnails

Continuum, desktop client based on koma, version 0.9.28:

• Use thumbnails of images and avatars to reduce data usage

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

Riot web

Bruno said:

Riot web should gain a new design for the member panel, with a UX more suited for a world where cross-signing is a thing. Will land today or early next week behind a feature flag on /develop.

There are some screenshots on the PR: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3620

Riot-Android

benoit offered:

Riot-Android: we are working on widget permission: new widget permission UX and use integration manager defined on the homeserver by default.

Riot iOS

Manu offered:

Riot iOS: We have fixed the display of terms for integrations. Riot iOS 0.10.2 is on his way to the App Store

RiotX

benoit offered:

RiotX: We are working on registration and login flow. Also spoiler are rendered and can even be sent using /spoiler command. It's also possible to block (ignore) and unblock users. Performance have been improved, and we are now using the new FragmentFactory. We are working on room detail screen, sticker rendering, and lots of other fun features. We schedule a release at the beginning of next week.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-bot-sdk v0.4.0-beta.15

TravisR reported:

v0.4.0-beta.15 of the matrix-bot-sdk has been released. v0.4.0 final is a themed release for lightweight bridges, and so far much of the common functionality is there. Some of the more niche and large features have yet to land, but the final release is still on the horizon (see what's left here). Please give it a test (npm install [email protected]) and report any issues to #matrix-bot-sdk:t2bot.io.

BETA FIFTEEN

Seshat new release

@poljar:matrix.org offered:

Seshat got a new release 🎉. Seshat now supports transparent index encryption. The PRs for Riot-desktop have been updated and encryption has been enabled for the index. The PRs are currently awaiting review, encrypted search will come to a place near you really soon™.

Dept of Ops 🛠

New guide about installing Synapse using only free resources

@ptman:feneas.org offered:

I (and hopefully others) feel that matrix needs more home servers. That's why I wrote a guide for setting one up using free resources and @benpa was kind enough to include it on matrix.org: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/free-small-matrix-server/

Room Directory defaults in matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Regarding the recent discussions about room security, Slavi has been thinking about default settings for his ansible playbooks:

I wasn't entirely convinced what we should do about it. For my own personal (family & friends) homeserver, I have a few rooms published (this room being one of them), which are all public and OK to be published publicly. I was okay with the old defaults. Still, I can see how people may expect stricter defaults though. I've leaned on following this advice and making it not publish by default. I've made that change here.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix-Alertmanager v0.1.0

@jaywink:federator.dev reported:

Matrix-Alertmanager, a bot that relays Prometheus Alertmanager alerts to Matrix rooms, gets a new release v0.1.0. Thanks to "daniego" the messages are now HTML formatted. Also dependencies have been bumped, Matrix JS SDK by "Lyr" and all the other deps by me. For more info: https://git.feneas.org/jaywink/matrix-alertmanager

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣

aa13q offered:

I've made a presentation about Matrix at the local 2600 meetup at Saint Petersburg, Russia recently. And now translated the text retelling into English too. It's an introduction presentation in general but (thanks to kitsune! :) it also contains good comments about the parts I've missed :) Would be happy to get feedback about the typos/etc. I hope it could be helpful to somebody who is willing to tell about Matrix in other local places :) https://aa13q.ru/#!posts/2019-11-01-matrix-2600/meta.md

@jaywink:federator.dev reported:

Not a part of the organizers, but syncing here for wider reach. There is a "FediConf 2020" conference being planned to happen in Barcelona sometime between May and September next year. It will be a conference for a wide audience of federated folk, so Matrix people might be interested in joining up. There is a poll for dates, a forum and also a Matrix room: #fediconf:matrix.libertalia.world

kitsune said:

in a complete coincidence with aa13q, I also talked about Matrix at Tokyo LUG. Plenty of good discussion. TLUG folks are extremely interested in decentralised identities and data retention as next most important frontiers in Matrix evolution.

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Sorry folks, no matrix live this week, your regular programming will continue next week.

Dept of Spec

A big week in spec land.

Client-server r0.6.0 and Identity r0.3.0 spec releases

TravisR offered:

If you've been waiting all this time to start implementing some of the privacy improvements the team has been making over the last few months, now's the best time to do it. Clients interacting with identity servers or 3rd party identifiers (3PIDs) have some changes to make, and identity servers themselves have a whole new authed API so they can expose terms of service requirements to users.

Check out the specs at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/client_server/r0.6.0 and https://matrix.org/docs/spec/identity_service/r0.3.0

You can read all about it here

anoa announced:

Approved MSCs

• MSC2334 - Change default room version to v5
  • Our fastest FCP ever - less than 24hrs!

Final Comment Period

• MSC2244: Mass redactions
• MSC1946: Secure Secret Storage and Sharing

New MSCs

• [WIP] MSC2346: Bridge information state event

The Spec Core Team have chosen MSC1756 (cross-signing), MSC2324 (new spec process), and MSC2313 (ban lists) to focus on this week :)

Dept of Clients 📱

Riot-iOS

Manu offered:

• 0.10.1 has been released on the app store. It includes minor improvements and bug fixes like the call issue. Full release descriptions can be found on respective repos: Riot, matrix-ios-kit and matrix-ios-sdk.
• This release includes better logging to track app kills in background but it seems that iOS13.2.2 released by Apple yesterday fixes the issue. We are looking for more feedbacks on that topic.
• On develop, the app can now use the integrations manager advertised by the homeserver.

RiotX

benoit reported:

We have finished implementing long click on a Room item, to configure notification settings of the room and to be able to leave the room. We can now ignore user (after a report of content only for the moment). The list of ignored users is displayed in the setting. Users can be un-ignored. We are also working on improving performance and improving code structure. As usual, we have also fixed some bugs. A release will be done at the beginning of next week, then we will try to work on the login flow and account creation flow.

Riot Android

benoit offered:

We are working on the Integration Manager management.

Riot Web

Neil had this to say:

The Riot gang landed 1.5.1 which contained the emoji picker (thanks Tulir!).

Additionally they have been working furiously to make some progress against e2ee device cross signing and have just merged the ability to authenticate via DMs. It's behind a labs flag and will only work if both parties are enabled, but this is big step towards our cross signing dreams. Watch this space for more cross signing features over the coming weeks.

Fractal

Alexandre Franke offered:

We did a couple bugfixes including one for a long standing crasher and another more recent crasher.

Seshat

@poljar:matrix.org said:

Seshat gained the ability to encrypt the event database and index. A PR has landed and is awaiting review. Now your Matrix client can securely store and index your E2EE messages.

Quarternion

kitsune said:

I took time to port Quaternion from Qt Quick Controls 1 (deprecated upstream) to Qt Quick Controls 2, the lighter UI widgets kit that Spectral also uses. Most of regressions are fixed and the result is likely to land in the master branch sometime next week. The overall looks will remain the same, just a minor refresh of visuals. Aside from improving performance the porting should help to solve widget scaling issues on multi-monitor configurations.

Matrix Notepad

@kb1rd:kb1rd.net reported:

• Released version 0.1.4, which fixes a number of bugs and cleans up a lot of the code
• I'm considering converting the algorithm code only to TypeScript (it's a mess rn)
• I said this last week, but I think I finally got all the bugs out of the internal algorithm 🤞
• I'm also working on a proper explanation of how the algorithm works (An explanation of just the events is here)

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil said:

This week we shipped 1.5.1 which contains a small bug fix to prevent a potential DoS vector.

Separately we merged support for label based filtering into develop and are now working on allowing admins to configure message retention policies.

Aside from that we’ve continued to work on sharding out the database which we’ll put live once we have migrated matrix.org onto new hardware (woo!) and finally we’ve been fixing some bugs affecting event auth rules.

Coming up on the horizon are ephemeral messages (the ability to send messages with a specific ttl), more io perf work and a bit further down the line we’ll dust off our attempts to shard out room processing from the master process, meaning Synapses running in worker mode will have much more CPU headroom.

Rust Workers

Black Hat told us:

I'm working on writing Synapse workers in Rust. Only a few things are working, but the performance seems good.

Department of Ops

Kubernetes

Ananace announced:

Just pushed the K8s-optimized Synapse 1.5.1 image

Docker - improved LDAP

JCG reported:

another Synapse container image, but this one is new: If you had problems with LDAP in the official Synapse image, try this image: https://gitlab.com/famedly/container/synapse-ldap/container_registry. It's based on the official images, but updates the LDAP auth provider to the latest commit of the master branch. The official image comes with the latest version released to pypi.org, which is a bit older. Aside of that change, it's exactly the same, so you can use it as a drop in replacement.

Docker - multi-arch

Black Hat told us:

my multi-arch synapse docker image is updated to synapse 1.5.1

Docker

Mathijs said:

The images for synapse v1.5.1 were pushed to docker hub for avhost and my personal repo.

Server Tombola

@mj:nltrix.net offered:

It gets a tombola of versions at the list of Public Synapse Homeservers https://www.anchel.nl/matrix-publiclist/

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Half-Shot announced:

Hey folks, I've released matrix-appservice-irc 0.13.1 which fixes a critical bug in 0.13.0 where messages from matrix would crash the bridge. Users brave enough to be running develop do not need to do anything. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.13.1. This would only have affected you if you tried to install or update the 0.13 bridge in the last two weeks.

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec Updates

anoa reported:

Merged MSCs

• Proposal for storing megolm keys serverside

Final Comment Period

• MSC2334 - Change default room version to v5
  • This one rushed right from new into FCP! Mostly due to it being very non-contentious.

New MSCs

No other new MSCs appeared this week.

MSCs the Spec Core Team are focusing on next week are: MSC2244 (mass redactions), MSC1946 (SSSS), and MSC2313 (ban lists).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse 1.5.0 released

Various updates including a security fix, check the announcement.

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

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs

Like always the mvgorcum/docker-matrix repo also includes the release candidates, as they were released.

Install Party

Brendan announced:

A couple of weeks ago I shouted here about a project I've been working on named Install Party, which provides tools for provisioning and managing servers for Matrix homeserver install workshops/parties.

Since then, I've been working on improving it, and today it's finally reached v1.0! This version includes configurable DNS and infrastructure providers, the ability to create multiple server in one run, user-defined post-install scripts, as well as codebase cleanups and a better documentation.

You can find more details about the project and this release at https://brendan.abolivier.bzh/install-party-1.0/, and in #install-party:abolivier.bzh 🙂

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-telegram

Tulir told us:

• Parallelized file transfer: The bridge now has an option to use multiple telegram connections and a streaming connection to the Matrix media repo when copying files. This should make it much faster and use less ram for big files.
• Matrix doesn't have native captions, so !tg caption <text> now exists to send the next image or file to telegram with <text> as the caption.
• Animated sticker bridging and helm charts were merged into master.

matrix-appservice-node 0.4.1 released

Half-Shot reported:

Bridges-in-nodejs-fans, today we have released 0.4.1 of the matrix-appservice-node library. For those not aware (presumably most), this library is a barebones piece of kit that helps you to listen over the AS api for transactions, in a more barebones manner than matrix-appservice-bridge. The changes in this release are a total transformation of the library into Typescript, and updating dependency packages which had gotten out of date.

EDIT: I cocked up the release, so have a 0.4.1

matrix-appservice-bridge 1.11.1 released

Half-Shot offered:

Also, https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/releases/tag/1.11.1

Dept of Clients 📱

Ditto Chat project announcement

Annie said:

Officially announcing a new mobile client project: Ditto Chat

• Project Status

  • Minimum Viable Product is on TestFlight
  • Can: login, send / receive messages

• Tech Stack

  • Bare React Native - no Expo
  • matrix-js-sdk

• Vision

• I want Ditto to be a chat app that is user-friendly and performant for the average user, rivaling apps like GroupMe, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

• Later on, I want Ditto to have a desktop / browser version and be stable enough for regular use.

CONTRIBUTORS: I would love to have some help on Ditto if anybody is looking for a side project! Join #ditto:elequin.io for updates.

More photos: http://dittochat.org

Check out the room at #ditto:elequin.io.

miitrix

sorunome offered:

Miitrix has received some updates!

• Save state and resume when starting up - no need for an initial sync each time anymore!
• Send read receipts
• Send typing notifications
• Remove HTTPC and only use CURL to add support for servers that don't have TLS1.1 anymore! And way faster!

Support room: #miitrix:sorunome.de Donate: https://liberapay.com/Sorunome

Miitrix was featured as a star attraction at MozFest last weekend, thanks Soru!

Good morning #mozfest! We're here for the final day, come and see us on the 6th floor and see Matrix running on a Nintendo 3DS 🎮 #matrix #mozfest19 pic.twitter.com/cZqcAn2tcZ

— Matrix (@matrixdotorg) October 27, 2019

Continuum 0.9.27

yuforia reported:

Continuum, desktop client in Kotlin, version 0.9.27:

Added notification viewer.

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

Fractal

Alexandre Franke told us:

We fixed redaction, it’s working again. We still don’t remove the messages from view but there is a WIP merge request to do just that.

#matrix-client-developers:matrix.org

f0x announced:

#matrix-client-developers:matrix.org has been revived, intended for discussion between developers of different Matrix clients.

This is the room to head to for Matrix Client developer chat.

Matrix Notepad

KB1RD announced:

Version 0.1.2 update brings a major overhaul of the user interface. The main features are:

• A new sign in dialog (with password authentication. No access tokens!)
  • Those who are already signed in will stay signed in
  • Also created a Matrix Notepad logo
• Technically, a single Matrix client is used instead of re-creating it each time a new document is opened
  • This makes document loading faster
• Added a document list and an add button
• Added the document room ID to the URL
• Fixed various bugs that have been encountered. Maybe I can finally say that it's bug-free!

Riot v1.5.1-rc.1

Riot v1.5.1-rc.1 is up on https://riot.im/staging with a collection of bugfixes, some further a11y fixes and... a new reaction picker from tulir!

Dept of Bots 🤖

matrix-episode-bot

anoa told us:

I made a bot that can give you links to TV show episodes that get mentioned in rooms: https://github.com/anoadragon453/matrix-episode-bot

It's not as cool as it sounds. Basically you put all the titles and links in a config file and whenever someone says e.g "I really like S05E09", it'll give you the name of that episode and a link to it. You can also just mention an episode title and it'll give you the link.

Made with nio-template.

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Matrix.org

Public service notice from vdh:

It won't have escaped many peoples' notice that the matrix.org homeserver has been struggling over the last few weeks. The main problem is poor disk I/O performance on our database server: for various reasons, it seems that the server can no longer keep up with the demands we're putting on it.

The good news is that we have a plan to sort it out, and we're working on setting up alternative hosting which will be able to handle our traffic for the forseeable future! Please bear with us over the next couple of weeks while we get new servers set up.

Matrix Notepad

@kb1rd:kb1rd.net told us:

Just released the first version of the Matrix Notepad, a small webapp designed to allow people to collaborate on text files over Matrix. There are a bunch of bugs that I'm still working on fixing, but if you'd like to check it out it's here! I will be adding incremental fixes for various issues, but feel free to add to the issues. :) If you'd like to chat, I'll be checking #matrix-collaboration:kb1rd.net.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

@richvdh:sw1v.org told us:

This week much of the team's focus has been on performance, both in terms of dealing with matrix.org's immediate woes and some more strategic work on helping Synapse to scale. On the latter front, Erik has been making great progress in supporting multiple Postgres databases.

We've also put out a release candidate for Synapse 1.5.0 with lots of bugfixes and changes under the hood. As ever, help with testing the RC is much appreciated!

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-discord v0.5.2 released

Half-Shot reported:

matrix-appservice-discord has had a new release (v0.5.2) to fix some out of date packages.

matrix-appservice-bridge v0.11.0

Half-Shot announced:

matrix-appservice-bridge has had a new release (v0.11.0) which allows developers to disable usage of the stores entirely. This should solve problems facing some bridges which no longer use them.

mautrix-hangouts image bridging

Tulir offered:

Cadair's pull request to add Hangouts->Matrix image bridging to mautrix-hangouts was merged.

Dept of Clients 📱

miitrix

From sorunome, this crazy 3DS project!

Miitrix is a client for the Nintendo 3DS, using the matrix-3ds-sdk! Here is an early demonstration video. The current featureset includes:

• Sorting room list by last messages
• Room name fallbacks (canonical alias, joined members)
• sending messages
• receiving messages
• receiving edits & redactions
• receiving join, leave, ban events
• lazy-loading extra information in the background

Support room: #miitrix:sorunome.de Donate: https://liberapay.com/Sorunome

Riot web

Tulir announced:

Two of the Riot pull requests that I twimmed last week, the reaction emoji picker and edit html parser improvements, have been merged into develop. The remaining one (reply rendering improvements) still needs some code and design work.

Ruby Matrix SDK version 1.5.0 released

Ananace said:

The Ruby SDK is out with another new version, 1.5.0 this time. Adding an event and a check to let applications track and handle errors that occur in the background listener thread of the client abstraction. This version also exposes a setter for the open_timeout value on the lower-level API client (and the client abstraction through it), for users that are plagued by slow-to-open TCP connections to their relevant HSes.

As always, feel free to drop by #ruby-matrix-sdk:kittenface.studio if you have questions, comments, corrections, or just want to discuss the project - or use cases - in general.

Fractal

Alexandre Franke reported:

Since the 4.2.1 release a month ago, there’s been a slow but steady stream of commits including code cleanups, translation updates and minor bugfixes. The highlights are issues solved around settings not being reloaded after verification dialog was closed, account settings not loading, connections to http only servers failing, and a regression that prevented users from sending messages to newly created rooms.

Riot iOS

Manu reported:

We are still working on 2 fronts:

• fixing most important issues in our stabilisation sprint
• privacy project: Adding an email or phone number is now protected by a password (if your homeserver requests this authentication)

Riot Android

Manu offered:

• privacy project: Adding an email or phone number is now protected by a password (if your homeserver requires it)

RiotX Android

Manu offered:

• We released 0.7.0 this week. You now have read markers and can share content to Riot. You should also find the app even faster.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-3ds-sdk

sorunome offered:

A lot has happened on the side of matrix-3ds-sdk. So much so, that it is possible now to write clients out of it! The changelog includes:

• fetching member info
• fetching room info
• proper sync loop
• agressive filters to reduce data (initial sync would crash on large accs otherwise)
• room leave and invite callbacks
• room info callback

Support room: #matrix-3ds-sdk:sorunome.de

Dept of Ops 🛠

Helm charts for mautrix-telegram, mautrix-twilio and maubot

Tulir offered:

mautrix-telegram and mautrix-twilio now have experimental Helm charts: https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-telegram/tree/helm/helm/mautrix-telegram. There's no replication/horizontal scaling stuff, but they should be useful if you're already using Helm for other stuff.

To make managing maubot plugins possible with Helm, I added a simple standalone plugin executor to maubot. It's basically just a simple script that sets up all the things plugins want (matrix client, config, database, webserver) and passes them to the plugin.

The standalone executor can be used to run any maubot plugin without any changes to the plugin itself, but building good docker images needs to be done separately for each plugin. The supportportal plugin has a standalone docker image and a helm chart using that image.

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

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

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

— Matrix (@matrixdotorg) October 12, 2019

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

Matrix will ALSO be at:

• Re­decentra­lize Conference 2019
• MozFest 2019

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa:

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

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

Dept of Servers 🏢

install-party, nice result from UbuCon Europe

Brendan said:

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

Synapse

Neil reported:

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

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

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Matrix-Slack Bridge on NixOS

@christian:kampka.net said:

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

Dept of Clients 📱

riots.im available via IPFS

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

@swedneck:permaweb.io said:

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

Riot-iOS 0.10.0

Manu offered:

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

RiotX release next week

benoit announced:

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

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-3ds-sdk

sorunome said:

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

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

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

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

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

koma

yuforia offered:

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

Dept of Ops 🛠

mvgorcum/docker-matrix

Mathijs announced:

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

docker image of synapse-develop

Mathijs announced:

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

Matrix Synapse for Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

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

Synapse 1.4.1 multi-arch docker image

Black Hat told us:

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

Dept of Tulir 🇫🇮

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

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

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

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

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

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

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

Further reading:

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

Mozilla IM trial ended

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

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil told us:

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

multi-arch docker image of Synapse

Black Hat said:

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

Dendrite

anoa offered:

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

Dept of Bridges 🌉

slack bridge 1.0.1

Half-Shot told us:

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

IRC bridge

Half-Shot offered:

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

Dept of Encryption 🔐

Search inside E2EE rooms

Update from poljar:

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Riot iOS

Manu told us:

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

every version of Riot Web released on GitHub

toml offered:

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

Comes with free Wikipedia hole.

Riot Android

benoit announced:

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

RiotX

benoit offered:

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

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Elixir projects from uhoreg, Polyjuice and Igor

uhoreg told us:

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

Then:

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

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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