Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Open Tech Will Save Us 4

The next Open Tech Will Save Us event will take place on Wednesday, that's 2020-07-08! Line-up is confirmed as:

• Jay Graber (@arcalinea, @arcalinea:matrix.org), creator of Happening and all-around decentralisation fan will summarize an overview of the decentralized social media ecosystem that they're working on.
• Ania M. Piotrowska (@aniampiotrowska), known for her work on Nym, Loopix, and at UCL will present \"Building private future for the internet with the Nym mixnet\".
• Burak Nehbit (@nehbit, @burak:tomesh.net) will give a deep dive into his work on Aether P2P.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa reported:

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

Finished Final Comment Period:

• MSC2604: Accept device information for the login fallback endpoint

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC2659: Application service ping endpoint

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, as last week we are sticking with "implementation" for now. We'll be back soon :)

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

This week was the first evaluations, we'll have results to share next week.

matrix-ircd (GSOC)

karlik offered:

for matrix-ircd:

• Removed futures 0.1 dependency & move all modules to futures 0.3

• Update all tests to use async / await

• Begin merging updated futures to async_await branch

go-neb

From nikofil:

• e2ee merged and some bugs fixed (pr #324)! You should be able to use neb normally in an encrypted room now, if that's not the case please let us know!
• Added integration tests for both encrypted and unencrypted rooms to neb in order to catch things that might break some core functionality in a subtle way (issue #326)
• Similarly, created a PR for mautrix-go for testing the Olm and Megolm session establishment and message encryption / decryption (pr #12)
• Next up, working on a service for neb for testing the crypto functionality of other clients: neb will send messages to a room, rotate keys etc. and your client is supposed to respond!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander said:

This week has seen some new architectural changes and a number of bugs fixed:

• A new Current State Server component has been added, which tracks room state

• The Public Rooms API has been deprecated in favour of the Current State Server

• Event size limits are now honoured with the correct return code

• Invites have seen some refactoring and retiring invites should work better now

• The federation sender now persists unsent PDUs to the database and will automatically retry when Dendrite is restarted, making resend behaviour much more reliable (particularly in the P2P demos)

• Some room checks in /state and /state_ids have been fixed

• Some additional restrictions have been added to /send and we now return the correct error codes

• A bug where current state was incorrectly used when getting missing/backfill events has been fixed

• A bug where you couldn't rejoin a room that you created after wiping your database has been fixed

Spec compliance:

• Client-Server APIs: 45%

• Server-Server APIs: 50%

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo reported:

This week I didn't have much time to work on Conduit, but together with @the0 we could implement both password changing and account deactivation!

With last week's key backup and cross-signing PR landing in master, here's a list of all major features still missing from Conduit:

• All of Federation

• Appservices

• Push Notifications

• Notification settings

• Message Search

• Presence

• Room Tagging

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Synapse

richvdh reported:

Synapse 1.15.2 shipped this week with some important security fixes - if you haven't already upgraded, please do asap! Meanwhile, we're also preparing a 1.16 release with the normal round of bugfixes and incremental improvements.

The big focus in the Synapse team continues to be on performance for larger Synapse instances, which is reflected in the support in 1.16 for running multiple media worker processes. We're working on giving other worker processes the same treatment, so expect more of the same in the weeks to come!

Synapse Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace announced:

Just pushed the 1.15.2 tags for the K8s-optimized Synapse image.

Docker matrix

Mathijs offered:

The avhost image including coturn, jemalloc, and mjolnir for synapse 1.15.2 was released at avhost/docker-matrix:v1.15.2, while the RCs images were released on my personal repo; mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.16.0rc1 and mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.16.0rc2

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Twilio & Maubot based SMS bridge

Jeff Casavant offered:

I wrote a very simple Twilio & Maubot based SMS bridge recently which I've been running for long enough with no delivery errors that I'd consider it stable. It's oriented towards bridging many individuals to single rooms via SMS. You'll need to have a Maubot instance in order to run it.

https://github.com/jeffcasavant/MaubotTwilio

Dept of Clients 📱

Syphon - new client announcement

usbfingers offered:

Hey TWIM ,

Tuesday, I did a soft announcement of open alpha for Syphon - a privacy centric matrix client

Source: https://github.com/syphon-org/syphon

Website: https://syphon.org

Features:

• no analytics.

• no proprietary third party services

  • iOS will have APNS opt-in, but will be made clear to the user

• all data is AES-256 encrypted at rest

• E2EE for direct chats using Olm/Megolm

  • group chats will be supported in the coming weeks

• all indicators of presence are opt-in only (typing indicators, read receipts, etc)

• customize themes and colors throughout the app

Please note there's still a lot of work to do and a lot of features missing that other clients have. It's not ready for everyday use.

Please let me know if you have any questions or would like to contribute!

Riot Web

Ryan told us:

This week we released 1.6.8, and the highlights include:

• Upgraded to Electron 9 for desktop builds, which should fix various Linux tray icon issues

• Jump to first unread message improved to handle reactions and other non-message events

• Desktop now shows a file saved message when downloading a file

• Cross-signing setup flows reworked to simplify choosing a security phrase or key

Fractal

Alexandre Franke announced:

The previous Fractal update was quite a while ago but we’ve kept busy.

There has been a lot of under the hood work that users won’t notice and which we won’t delve into. In addition to them, we have a few nice things:

• Matrix API tokens are redacted in logs for better privacy when submitting bug reports.

• A send button was added next the message entry. This is especially relevant for touch screens.

• We are less noisy with typing notifications that we send out.

• We support SOCKS proxies.

• Notifications for non text messages have been tweaked.

• We gained support for edited message display. They are replaced with the newer content and a little icon is shown next to them. Editing messages is not supported yet though.

NovaChat July 3 update:

eric told us:

• Added icons for each chat network to room list

• Got Twitter DM bridge working again

• Improved search bar UI

• On-boarded 30 new users!

• Launched (accidentally) on Hacker News

• Fixed a ton of reliability bugs in the 7 bridges we support (changelog)

• We are hiring (full-time or part-time) remote React developers to work on our (source available, still TBD on final license) Riot fork Send me a DM if interested.

NovaChat has been getting good coverage lately, on Twitter and Hacker News.

RiotX published in the beta channel of the Riot-Android app

benoit announced:

RiotX is now published in the beta channel of the Riot-Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.app. You can get the last beta version by becoming a tester if you want to. There will be no more update of RiotX on the PlayStore. Current RiotX users should signout from RiotX and signin again on Riot-Android. Riot-Android users do not have to do that. The changelog can be read here https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/releases/tag/v0.91.3-beta. And this week we are working on implementing what's remain on our list, and we are fixing as many bugs as we can before the great release.

Riot-iOS

steve offered:

This week, we made some improvements for the cross-signing UX.

We started to work on the rebranding. And we also made some small improvements in the display of some events in the timeline.

Dept of Ops 🛠

ma1sd release 2.4.0

ma1uta offered:

ma1sd release 2.4.0.

Changes:

• Enabled v2 API by default.

• Added experimental support of the database connection pooling for postgresql

• Added option to bind ma1sd to specified address.

• Added error logging for LDAP authorization.

• Added full request and response logs for debug.

• Avoid including bridged user in directory lookups (https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/pull/45)

• Add experimental multi-platform buillds for amd64 and arm64 platforms.

• remove warning about matrix-synapse-ldap3 (https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/pull/50)

Bugfixes:

• https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/issues/26

• https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/issues/29 (partial)

• https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/issues/22

• https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/issues/27

Downloads:

• https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.4.0

• docker pull ma1uta/ma1sd:latest

• docker pull ma1uta/ma1sd:2.4.0-arm64 (image for arm64)

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

This Ansible playbook is meant to easily let you run your own Matrix homeserver.

Slavi said:

it appears to be puppet week in matrix-docker-ansible-deploy-land!

Thanks to various contributors (Johanna Dorothea Reichmann, Tulir Asokan and Hugues Morisset), the playbook has gained support for 4 new bridges: mx-puppet-instagram (see our docs), mx-puppet-twitter (see our docs), mx-puppet-discord (see our docs) and mx-puppet-steam (see our docs).

This brings the total number of bridges supported by the playbook to 15!

Dept of Bots 🤖

matrix-reminder-bot v0.1.0

anoa offered:

The release, v0.1.0, of matrix-reminder-bot is out! 🎉

I've eliminated most of the bad bugs that were present, so will be doing some feature development for a bit. As of now, the features of the bot are:

• Setting reminders

• Have a reminder ping yourself or the whole room

• Alarms which continue ringing until silenced

• Support for end-to-end encrypted rooms

• Postgres and SQLite support

• Docker support

Find it here: https://github.com/anoadragon453/matrix-reminder-bot/ and join the discussion at #matrix-reminder-bot:matrix.org!

Enjoy! ❤️

IPFS Bot

MTRNord offered:

Did you ever have the issue that a media event sent from someone is too large for your HS and you don't want to fiddle with the link?

IPFS Bot might be a solution. Invite @ipfs:nordgedanken.dev or Check out https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-ipfs-bot/ to use the bot.

If you reply to any media event with !ipfs the bot will send you a link to the media stored on ipfs.

Known issues are:

• E2EE not yet working (It joins but can't yet decrypt the related event)

• Error handling is basically not existent. Therefore crashes might happen until I sort this out.

• It currently does very verbose logging. This will be removed when the bot is more stable

• Images sent from RiotX sometimes seem to not play nice with ruma

(Demo for the IPFS Bot): https://ipfs.nordgedanken.dev/ipfs/QmSfde3V4QL1Lv96Ar62qgnhaEtyi9jzPkKRCBMh4Wqm6F?filename=2020-06-27_16-41-09.mp4

We could include this video here, but it seems me appropriate to link to an actual IPFS location.

cody, REPL for your Matrix chat rooms

carl offered:

Hello, I am announcing my first matrix bot - cody - that will evaluate code snippets in your Matrix rooms and return the result. Here is an example interaction:

user> !py "Hello world!"
cody> 'Hello world!'

user> !py list(range(10))
cody> [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

You can chat with him @cody:bordum.dk and view the source code at https://gitlab.com/carlbordum/matrix-cody

This initial release only supports Python, but the plan is to add support for more languages in the next few weeks. The repo might also be of interest to some of you as it has CI, CD to DockerHub, complete dev environment with cody, pantalaimon, synapse and riot using docker-compose, simple metrics and Grafana-dashboards-as-code.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Matrix Notepad Version v0.2.2

KB1RD told us:

A real-time collaboratie text editor using the Matrix protocol.

matrix-notepad.kb1rd.net

Nope, it's not dead.

• New version of logootish-js with a completely new algorithm

  • In particular, I should note that this new algorithm is tested extensively, so I think the bugs should be out

• Corresponding updates to internal event structure

• Fixed UI & CSS bugs

• Improved UX for room title editor

• Currently, conflicting text will be displayed, but conflicts will not be indicated in any way

• I almost forgot to mention: The room list is now filtered using the typed rooms MSC (event ID org.matrix.msc1840). #test-document0:kb1rd.net is a room with that state event set.

I also made a flame graph of the internal algorithm and I'm surprised by some of the results. The good thing is that I think there's quite a few ways to speed up the algorithm. Here it is:

https://logootish-js.matrix-notepad.kb1rd.net/flamegraph/test/listmodel-nc.perf.js/flamegraph.html#{%22merged%22:false,%22nodeId%22:null,%22excludeTypes%22:[%22cpp%22,%22regexp%22,%22v8%22,%22native%22,%22init%22,%22core%22]}

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

That's all I know 🏁

See you first thing tomorrow morning, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

Matrix Live 🎙

It's demos this week!

• Riot X video calls (valere)
• Room list (TravisR)
• Notifications - (Michael (t3chguy) & richvdh)
• E2E Onboarding (Dave & Nad)
• Modular SAML support (ChristianP)

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Merch Returns!

Yes it's back! For the first time in months we are shipping branded IRL-items featuring Matrix branding. Head to The Shop to stock-up.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa announced:

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

Merged MSCs:

• MSC2631: Add default_payload to PusherData

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2604: Accept device information for the login fallback endpoint (merge)

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC2654: Unread counts

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, unfortunately our three MSCs from last week ( MSC2366 (verification flows), MSC2403 (knocking), and MSC2630 (SAS security)) are still pre-FCP. Most of the team has been quite busy with implementation for the past few weeks. Instead of advertising those 3 MSCs again, we're going to switch the focus to "implementation" for a bit until we're freed up again.

So the focus for this week is: MSC implementation work. However, this should not discourage any MSC authors from responding to MSC feedback in the meantime 🙂

Dept of GSoC 🎓

Ruma GSoC

devinr528 reported:

This week in the ruma/matrix Google Summer of Code project, ruma-events was made ready for use! After adding stripped and sync event generation to the event_enum! macro there were only a few small tweaks needed to try it out in some dependent rust crates. I spent a few days converting matrix-rust-sdk to use the ruma-monorepo. Since ruma is used on both client and server-side, I also opened a PR to update Conduit, a homeserver implementation written in Rust. To test that everything worked together, I updated rumatui, my command-line client written in rust.

Then I could test that Conduit sent, and matrix-rust-sdk received the new ruma events successfully. While updating, I felt the pain of not having accessor methods for the Any*Event enums to get at the event fields held within. I have opened a pull request to add the generation of these methods to the event_enums! macro. Hopefully, the Conduit and matrix-sdk PR's will be merged and the ruma monorepo can be tested in the wild!

matrix-ircd GSOC

karlik told us:

Moved matrix protocol, irc protocol, and bridge module to futures 0.3. Converted some utility functions to new futures, and updated the http implementation to use the standardized Hyper library instead of using a custom http implementation.

go-neb

nikofil said:

• Created PR for enabling e2ee across all services! This required a few changes to how the bot client is initialised, as well as changes to all services to use the new functionality instead of directly sending messages to a room. https://github.com/matrix-org/go-neb/pull/324

• Added code from another of tulir's projects to Mautrix to allow storing the crypto material (olm / megolm sessions, accounts etc.) in a SQL database, adding a second way besides using Gob storage. https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-go/pull/10

• Future plans are to work on the library itself to add any features that might be missing.

HTML embeddable chat rooms

arnav-t told us:

This week I've worked on the following features for the project "HTML embeddable chat rooms" under GSoC '20:

Added support for signing-in

Via sign-in popup

The user can enter their credentials into the modal dialogue box.

Via postMessage interface

iframe.contentWindow.postMessage({
    cmd: 'login',

    args: {
        user: 'username',

        passwd: 'password'
    }

}, origin);

Arguments:

args (object):

• username (string) - Username

• passwd (string) - Password

Response:

{

    status: 'success', 
    message: 'Attempting sign in...'

}

Added support for default avatars

Using the same design as Riot. However, I am just using flexbox and text instead of drawing on an HTML5 canvas. The HSL color is generated by hashing the user ID.

Quoting and replying

Added on-hover buttons and reply popup above message composer similar to Riot web. Quoting prepends the message (quoted) to the message composer similar to Riot web and replying would also work similar to Riot web. It will be fully functional once markdown parsing is added.

Guest access

The client now supports guest access. If no access token or user ID is provided in the configuration file, the client attempts to register a guest account on the home server. Room contents are viewed using peekInRoom.

If the guest attempts to send a message, only then joinRoom is called to avoid spam (each page load would lead to a guest joining the room).

Nheko

Chethan told us:

SAS Verification is completed and works !

Supports both Emoji and Decimal Verification Only uses curve25519-hkdf-sha256 as key_agreement protocol

Brand new UserProfile written entirely in qml. https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/pull/203

Mtxclient

Updated with needed APIs for SAS verification.

https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/mtxclient/pull/32

Opsdroid

tyagdit reported:

Port to Matrix-nio

• The matrix connector is now using matrix-nio!

• Bots can send and receive texts, images, files as before

• No change in configuration required, just update opsdroid and run as before

• Encryption is not yet implemented

• You can check out the PR here

Enabling E2EE

• Sending and receiving encrypted texts, edits, replies works just as normal messages

• Images and files are being worked on

• User shouldn't have to change much about their configuration to use encryption

• Some testing is due

• Check out the progress here

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

kegan reported:

This week has been mainly about testing to ensure that all the progress over the past few months is kept up-to-date and correct. We've also added a few features in order to get certain sytests working. To that end:

• Invites can now be declined over federation and they will be reflected in /sync responses.

• Errors encountered when joining a room over federation are now sent back to the client.

• Errors encountered when accepting an invite over federation are now sent back to the client.

• Dendrite will now check server names meet the server name grammar in the specification.

• A bug which caused client-api-proxy to not actually proxy correctly has been fixed, thanks @fantashley !

• /send now abides by the limits in the specification: 50 PDUs / 100 EDUs.

• The docker-compose scripts now include appservice_api, thanks @fantashley !

• Sending invites over federation will now fall back to v1 if v2 fails with a 404.

• Dendrite now implements room.timeline.limit completely (in both in-line and stored filter formats).

• Dendrite now sets the limited flag on /sync responses correctly.

In addition, we now have support for collecting code coverage output from SyTest. This indicates we are testing roughly 70% of the Dendrite codebase. The remaining 30% are hard to reach via intergration tests (e.g database failures, communication problems between internal APIs).

Spec compliance:

• Client-Server APIs: 45%, up from 40% last week

• Server-Server APIs: 50%, up from 38% last week

In total, we've made an additional 45 sytests pass this week.

Mascarene

Nico reported:

Mascarene v0.2.0 has been released.

This version implements a minimal set of client API endpoints to work with Riot and allow user registration,

room creation, invitation and messages sending on the same running instance (no federation support).

Docker image are also available. See this documentation

for rough installation instructions.

Join us at #mascarene:beerfactory.org

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo told us:

This week I finished the cross-signing PR:

To try it out yourself, open Riot (preferably https://riot.im/develop) and join the <https://conduit.koesters.xyz:14004> homeserver.

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Synapse

Neil told us:

This week we’ve been working on further improvements to event persistence and ironed out a nasty bug where an unusually long state resolution could block the reactor overall and impact send times. We seem to have got to the bottom of this and m.org has improved a lot as of today.

More generally we’ve been trying to characterise matrix.org performance so that we can continue to improve over the coming months.

We are going to focus on:-

• Client send event

• Outbound Federation Latency

• Inbound Federation Latency

• Room joins

As well as tracking the CS API generally.

We are using apdex with a satisfied limit of 250 ms and a tolerating limit of 1000 ms. By the end of the Summer we will aim to hit an apdex score of 0.9 for each area.

For instance here is Federation Send Event Apdex graphed overtime. You can see that we are averaging about ~0.8 currently, so plenty to keeping us busy!

Next up will be to work on Outbound Federation Latency

Aside from that we’ve been working hard on the upcoming Notifications improvements. Mapping the push rules to the demands of the UI has been challenging and we’ve been through several iterations. If you’d like to learn more take a look at Michael and Rich’s explanation in this week’s Matrix Live. Rich’s presentation has Sheltie pictures #justsayin’

Dept of Bridges 🌉

It's a Tulir kind of week.

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir told us:

The WhatsApp bridge got a bunch of improvements this week, such as:

• Matrix -> WhatsApp gif bridging

• Bridge status notices if your phone battery is low

• A command to get group invite links and another command to join groups using invite links

• Matrix <-> WhatsApp bridging of most membership changes

mautrix-facebook

Tulir reported:

The Messenger bridge mostly got bugfixes, but also Matrix->Facebook bridging of all media and location messages

mautrix-telegram

Tulir offered:

The Telegram bridge now supports logging in by scanning a QR code, although it requires using the master branch of Telethon instead of a release. I also fixed bridging captions in file messages, so they're now bridged as separate messages like with images

Half-Shot bridges roundup

Half-Shot offered:

Hey all, I've got several releases to talk about this week!

First, matrix-appservice-slack has been updated to 1.4.0 with several quality of life changes such as automatically setting the bot profile on startup, supporting logging out of slack accounts and adding a health checkpoint. There are also quite a few bugfixes so make sure you update.

matrix-appservice-irc was also bumped to 0.18.0 with the headline features being Node 14.x support.

We've also shipped 0.19.0-rc1 which has stopped support for Node 10.x. Why? Because we're adding worker support to the bridge! This release starts to make use of the new(ish) worker_threads feature so that we can dish out processing to seperate threads (running their own UV event loops, for node enthusiasts). The first thing to be workerized is metrics, so that metrics may still be reported should the bridge become saturated, but we plan to split out more work as things progress.

Finally matrix-appservice-bridge got a few fixes to support our new worker land, as well as being updated to support matrix-js-sdk 6.0.0. You can checkout the changes for 1.13.1 here.

Dept of Clients 📱

Fluffychat

sorunome offered:

Fluffychat Version 0.15.0 is released, and should be available in the Play Store, on F-Droid and in IOS Testflight soon! This makes Fluffychat the first non-Riot matrix client that supports Cross-Signing.

Features:

• New room list app bar design

• Chat app bar transparent

• Implement web file picker

• Minor design and UX improvements

• Implement Cross Signing

• Restore keys from online key backup

• Added translations: Czech, Spanish, Slovakian

Changes:

• Show presences of users sharing a direct chat

• Big refactoring

Fixes:

• Various fixes, including e2ee fixes and olm session recovery

Pattle: version 0.18.0

Wilko said:

A new version has been released and will soon become available on Google Play, TestFlight and F-Droid!

Changes

• You can now play videos!

• The main public address (room alias) of chats are now shown in chat's details

• The time of sending is now always show on the right side for images

• Notifications are grouped nicer, there's now one notification for Pattle, grouped by chat

• Fix sending an image crashing the app

• Fix urls not being accounted for in time placement (#132)

• Fix chat input not scrolling

• Fix multiple issues regarding showing notifications

• F-Droid: All left-over proprietary code is now removed, thanks to Bubu for notifying me!

Get Pattle

• Android

  • F-Droid
  • Google Play

• iOS (TestFlight)

Get involved

• Follow development: #app:pattle.im

• Issues or suggestions: Post them here!

• Donate: If you want to support Pattle, you can donate!

Mirage

miruka* reported:

0.5.2 is now out:

Added

• Sessions/device list: you can now inspect, rename and manually verify

  your devices from the account settings page. The interface is still work in progress, keyboard navigation and signing

  out sessions will be added in a next version.

• Re-add client-side unread/highlight room indicators.

  If your account has push notifications disabled, which precise cross-client counters depend on, the local indicators will be used as fallback.

• Support the MIRAGE_CACHE_DIR environment variable to override where

  files and thumbnails are downloaded

• A bunch of theme additions, check the full log

Changed

• Overhauled account settings to match the design of other tabbed pages.

  The horizontal layout design has been removed due to complicated code and being impossible to extend without breaking it.

• The display name field in account settings is now colored,

  preview your new display name's color as you type

• For rooms without image avatars set, the room settings's avatar color now

  responds to the name field as you type

• Overhauled scrollbars:

  • Now match the Mirage theme and much better visibility

  • No more right margin for the timeline's bar

  • Minimum height to prevent the bar from becoming impossible to grab

• Use brighter text for room names of rooms that have unread messages

• Buttons, tabs, text fields and areas now have animated bottom borders

  to represent keyboard focus instead of being highlighted like when hovered

• Text fields and areas can now have rounded corners, following the theme

• Tabbed pages (Sign In, Add Chat, etc) can now be swiped left and right

• Popups can now be scrolled when their content is bigger than the

  window's height

• Replace most generic checkmark icons for apply buttons in popups

• Pressing escape in forms will consistently trigger corresponding

  cancel buttons

Fixed

• Various fixes, see full changelog

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) offered:

• Most of our time this week was spent trying out device verification with Chethan. It's fun and I could finally file bugs in Nheko against someone else!

• We fixed some issues that should hopefully make text in the timeline less blurry again.

• Fixed a bug which cause some clients like fluffychat to break in E2EE rooms (we accidentaly sent a null relation when not replying...)

• Fixed an issue, where Nheko didn't verify the format of html formatted messages correctly, causing it to render messages in a way which wasn't compliant to the spec.

• Thanks to the work of a Pirate and his friends, current versions of Nheko should be available in backports for Debian Buster once again!

Riot Chat for Nextcloud

Gary Kim announced:

Riot Chat for Nextcloud 0.5.0 The new version updated the Riot.im version to 1.6.6 and added the ability for admins to set their own custom config for Riot rather then using the settings interface in addition to a few bug fixes.

Riot Chat for Nextcloud allows individuals and organizations with a Nextcloud instance to easily set up and configure their own Riot instance with just a few clicks on a web interface without the need to write a config file.

Join the development Matrix room at #riotchatfornextcloud-general:garykim.dev. Check out the source code here.

Riot-iOS

Manu told us:

This week, we completed UX for cross-signing and secure backup. We made associated settings but we still need to polish them.

Sygnal and the new push extension have been updated to match Apple requirement and our privacy concerns. Events content are no more sent anymore. We started to implement the new room notifications settings UI.

RiotX

benoit told us:

This week we were mainly working on cross-signing, room settings, VoIP stabilization and performance improvement.

Riot-Android

benoit reported:

We will publish at the beginning of next week a beta version of the migration to RiotX codebase on the beta channel of the PlayStore, to be able to ensure the migration works fine, before release it to production.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Matrix Dart SDK: v0.33.0

Wilko told us:

• Support custom events using RawRoomEvent and RawStateEvent

  Check the README for details.

• Add ability to register using Homeserver.register

• Add VideoMessageEvent

• Add Room.canonicalAlias and Room.alternativeAliases

• Add format field to TextMessage (thank you Cyril!)

• Remove equatable dependency

Get it on pub!

Net::Matrix::Webhook

joepie91 discovered this project, presented yesterday at Conference in the Cloud:

Net::Matrix::Webhook implements a webhook, so you can easily post messages to your matrix chat rooms via HTTP requests. It uses IO::Async to start a web server and connect as a client to matrix. It will then forward your messages.

matrix_scrape_emoji_translations script project

sorunome announced:

Soru wrote a quick program that scrapes riot-web, riot-x and riot-ios for translations of the emoji names for emoji verification and combines them all into an easily-readable json file, so that other client developers can use it. Since all three riot versions have a different set of translations, it might also be helpful for them. You can find the source code along with the outputted json files here.

Dept of Bots 🤖

"Scandinavia and the World" comic bot

Tulir offered:

To add to my existing xkcd and CommitStrip maubot plugins, there's now a similar plugin for Scandinavia and the World comics: https://github.com/maubot/satwcomic

Like the other bots, you can self-host it, use my instance (@satw:maunium.net) in your own room or simply join #satwcomic:maunium.net to automatically get the latest comics in Matrix.

matrix-webhooker

kinta announced:

A bot that will allow to room administrators and moderators to generate room custom commands (in a similar way how telegram commands are thought).

When they are invoked it will post the message event object data and a predefined context object along with a token to a custom url. More information in: https://gitlab.com/communia/matrix-webhooker

Matrix webhook

kinta told us:

https://www.drupal.org/project/matrix_webhook

Drupal module to receive links shared from a matrix room. Get links provided by a matrix bot in a room. With this module one can get media from a matrix own bot to any drupal site. Once installed and bot is created through matrix-webhooker bot. A blog entry about it (in spanish) in https://planet.communia.org/content/enlaces-desde-matrix

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰

Pollvis - new poll visualiser project

We have a couple of conferences coming up who are planning to use Matrix as part of their offering, much as we do with Open Tech Will Save Us. To help add some more features, I created an MVP "poll visualiser", which watches a room and works in tandem with the poll-bot from Brendan Abolivier . This project is still at the beginning, but might be interesting to some! Find the code at https://github.com/benparsons/pollvis.

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Matrix Merch Store is back

Are you emerging from lockdown? Dazed and wondering what to wear? Need some apparel which says "I'm cool and I have great taste in decentralised communications protocols"? Then you should visit The Matrix Merch Store!

T-Shirts, Hoodies, Zipped Hoodies and Stickers available now!

Matrix Decomposition: Analysis of an Access Control Approach on Transaction-based DAGs without Finality

Florian told us:

We published another scientific paper on Matrix, this time it is called Matrix Decomposition: Analysis of an Access Control Approach on Transaction-based DAGs without Finality! Its main topic is the question of how access control can work based on a structure that only provides a partial order on events and no consensus on the current state, i.e. the Matrix Event Graph. We found some concrete, non-critical security issues related to both incorrect specification as well as divergent homeserver behaviour. While the last remaining mitigations found their way into Synapse 1.14.0, we provide ideas on structural solutions to avoid both problem classes in the future using formal verification.

The paper was published at the ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies(SACMAT) last week. My talk went well (🎉), it was recording and is yet to be published by the conference.

The paper was previously mentioned on the Matrix blog.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa reported:

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

Merged MSCs:

• MSC2399: Reporting that decryption keys are withheld
• MSC1703: encrypting recovery keys for online megolm backups

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC2644: matrix.to URI syntax v2
• MSC2638: Ability for clients to request homeservers to resync device lists

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, the team has been spread a bit thin with other work. As such, we're still on the same three MSCs: MSC2366 (verification flows), MSC2403 (knocking), and MSC2630 (SAS security). We're hoping this week will be more productive in terms of spec.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander announced:

This week has seen a lot of work put into fixing broken tests and refactoring parts of the codebase.

• The media API has had quite a bit of attention this week and now media over federation works properly, as well as much better filename handling

• A new user API component is now responsible for user accounts, devices, access tokens and account data

• The server key API has been updated with more reliable validity checking and new tests

• Logging into Dendrite using Riot iOS is now supported thanks to some minor tweaks/fixes

• URL handling for version 3 rooms has been improved

• A bug in the format of /v1/send_join has been fixed

• The /joined_members response has now been fixed

In addition to that, we've made good progress on embedding the Dendrite-powered Yggdrasil demo into Riot iOS, which we'll hopefully be demoing in a couple of weeks!

Spec compliance has improved:

• Client-Server APIs: 40%, up from 36% last week

• Server-Server APIs: 38%, up from 35% last week

Synapse

Neil offered:

Highlights this week

• We released 1.15.1, this is a bug fix release, sorry if you were bitten.

Changelog in full

Bugfixes

• Fix a bug introduced in v1.15.0 that would crash Synapse on start when using certain password auth providers.

• Fix a bug introduced in v1.15.0 which meant that some 3PID management endpoints were not accessible on the correct URL.

Outside of that

• Implemented unread message counts (MSC 2625) - This is part of the a more general notifications improvement project in conjunction with the Riot teams. The aim being to make Notifications easier to configure. We’ve also been working on push rule definitions for the default behaviour. More on that next week.

• Have the ability to shard the media repository worker. This means we can now run an arbitrary number in parallel, thereby improving upload reliability and performance, we are running this on Matrix.org.

• Re-enabled Jaeger on matrix.org - previously we needed to switch it off due to the performance overhead, we needed a few tweaks but now it is working well and helping us to determine the cause of slow requests. It seems like the HTTP requests between the event creator and event persister workers can sometimes be slow - we are not sure of the cause yet, we are working on it but it will mean further performance improvements to message sending.

• Next up performance wise is working on sharding the federation sender to improve federation lag. We’ll also try replacing simplejson with stdlib json which seems to be much faster at dumps nowadays.

• Finally, we’ve fixed a bug that meant that quarantining media would from time to time include quarantining sticker packs

Other interesting bugs

We fixed a spec compliance bug in fetching remote media raised by our pals in Dendrite-land. We fixed a bug causing federation .well-known requests to fail due to not including the user-agent header. We removed references to six (thanks @ilmari) and finally, fixed a bug that caused stream id to go backwards on the replication stream.

Next week we’ll continue to work on notifications and performance. You can track our progress here https://github.com/orgs/matrix-org/projects/8

Synapse adoption graphs

Chris said:

Wondering how quick this weeks synapse release was adopted by homeserver admins? Head over to https://graph.settgast.org/ and see yourself that it only took a little over 2 days for 1.15.1 to become the most used synapse version. I plot hourly distribution of synapse versions there. (Disclaimer: Only collects stats for homeservers that my homeserver sees in any of its rooms, which are around 2000 at the moment)

This is super cool! I love that this has been created, and also how well it reflects on homeserver admins! /me scurries to update to 1.15.1...

Asked to share the process, Chris sent:

Its a horribly hacky python script, but I can at least share it here: https://gist.github.com/csett86/96190592390b2c3d8c12c020ce312723

What version are you running?

Synapse on a ROCKPro64

How is Synapse performance these days? PINE64 are running their instance on their own ROCKPro64 hardware.

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo announced:

This week I worked on server-side key backups and cross-signing - the second most requested features (federation being the first one). Key backups are already working! Take a look:

Cross-signing should be working, but there is a bug where emoji verification gets stuck. I hope we can find the mistakes and finish the PR next week.

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or (new!) Bitcoin!

Synapse Deployment 📥

Kubernetes

Ananace said:

Just pushed 1.15.1 tags for the K8s-optimized Synapse image.

Docker-matrix

Mathijs announced:

The image for synapse v1.15.1 including jemalloc and mjolnir anti-spam has been released to avhost/docker-matrix:v1.15.1.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-ircd, GSOC project

karlik offered:

For matrix-ircd google summer of code:

• Began moving the codebase to the more modern futures 0.3 (previously futures 0.1)

• Introduced more modern async / await syntax for improved code clarity

• Wrote some additional unit tests, doubling the overall test coverage to 32%

• Updating the 2016 code to use rust 2018 idioms PR # 64

• Swapped repository to use stable rust (previously nightly) PR #65

mautrix bridges

Tulir told us:

To make the bridge info state events a bit more useful, all my bridges now include the room name and avatar URL in them. The events are also updated whenever the name or avatar changes, and there's a new option to re-send the event to all existing portals so old portals would get it too.

Dept of Clients 📱

RiotX: Version 0.22.0

benoit said:

RiotX: Version 0.22.0 has been released on Tuesday, it includes integration manager support, sending stickers, modifying power levels, and lots of other things! See https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/releases/tag/v0.22.0 for a complete list of the changes.

This week we've been working on audio and video calls (The PR is in review). We are also trying to improve the performance of the application. We are adding room settings, and we have started to work on the migration Riot-Android -> RiotX.

PS check out Valere trying the new features:

Arch Linux (AUR) package for Revolution - a Riot fork by ponies.im

Sophie still alive said:

I made an Arch Linux (AUR) package for Revolution - a Riot fork by ponies.im:

• https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/revolution-desktop-git/

• https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/revolution-web-git/

• https://gitlab.eastcoast.hosting/ponies

Daydream

MTRNord told us:

Daydream is getting a new Design and the first page is ready at https://app.daydream.im/

Additional changes are:

• Removed client side js (except what's needed to load wasm stuff)

• Replaced loading animation with css only version

• Replace icons with css only version

• Add e2e tests

• Add Basic Notifications

Currently on top of the TODO list of Daydream is:

• Adding a wasm compatible (indexed db based) state store

• Notifications

Rumatui is basically usable

WIP Command line Matrix client using matrix-rust-sdk

devinr528 told us:

After some slow progress, rumatui, the rust command line chat client, is usable by anyone. You no longer need an account or have previously joined rooms. Registration and room search have been implemented! Using left/right arrow keys from the login screen will toggle to registration. Once registered hitting the left arrow will bring up the room search window. After typing your search term hit Enter and select the room to join by pressing Ctrl-d.

For the brave who would like to give it a try cargo install --git <https://github.com/DevinR528/rumatui> --branch room-search.

Added since last update

• Room search is now available

  • Public rooms can be joined from the room search window

• A user can register from the new register window

  • This features complete User Interactive Authentication by opening a web browser

• Message edits are shown

  • When markdown is part of the message they are properly formatted

• Reactions display under the respective message

• Redaction events are handled for reactions (emoji) and messages

"Basically usable" is a standard we can all aspire to for our projects and endeavours.

Riot-iOS

Manu told us:

This week, we worked on the new UX for cross-signing and secure backup. In parallel, we continued to improve the new push implementation. We are very closed to complete the two features.

gomuks

gomuks is a terminal based Matrix client written in Go. Source on GitHub

Tulir announced:

I added a command to add and remove local aliases for rooms. Changes to alt_aliases are also now rendered properly.

Riot Web

Ryan offered:

This week we had an off-cycle 1.6.5 release to fix registration on some homeservers when email validation is required. After that, we've made a 1.6.6 RC including:

• Added support for new emoji in Unicode 13

• Emoji picker now supports searching by emoji characters (to find related ones) as well as text

• Added a homeserver admin .well-known option to control default E2EE behaviour

• Many more bug fixes and smaller improvements

Riot Web Themes

jo offered:

made a couple riot themes! Dracula and Dracula Flat

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aaronraimist/riot-web-themes/master/Dracula/Non-flat/Dracula.json https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aaronraimist/riot-web-themes/master/Dracula/Flat/DraculaFlat.json

Find images here and here

Go to https://github.com/aaronraimist/riot-web-themes to find out how to use these.

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) offered:

• We released 0.7.2, which was a bit more messy than we would have liked...

• As with every release we are currently working through the new bug reports. :D

• I started working on SSSS and online key backup support. For this I wrote my own base64 and base58 encoders. As a result of this we dropped libsodium as a dependency, which should make Nheko a bit easier to package or build. It's also fun to write base conversions, although 58 is a horrible base!

From the changelog:

• Reactions
  • React to a message with an emoji! 🎉
  • Reactions are shown below a message in a small bubble with a counter.
  • By clicking on that, others can add to the reaction count.
  • It may help you celebrating a new Nheko Release or react with a 👎 to a failed build to express your frustration.
  • This uses a new emoji picker. The picker will be improved in the near future (better scrolling, sections, favorites, recently used or similar) and then probably replace the current picker.
• Support for tagging rooms [tag]
  • Assign custom tags to rooms from the context menu in the room list.
  • This allows filtering rooms via the group list. This puts you in a focus mode showing only the selected tags.
  • You can assign multiple tags to group rooms however you like.
• SSO Login
  • With this you can now login on servers, that only provide SSO.
  • Just enter any mxid on the server. Nheko will figure out that you need to use SSO and redirect your browser to the login page.
  • Complete the login in your browser and Nheko should automatically log you in.
• Presence
  • Shows online status of the people you are talking to.
  • You can define a custom status message to tell others what you are currently up to.
  • The status message appears next to the usernames in the timeline.
  • Your server needs to have presence enabled for this to work.

Wowow that's a lot this time!

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

quotient

kitsune said:

after a couple of setbacks that didn't let us to make the releases earlier, the Quotient project has finally made two new releases:

• GTAD (the piece of code magically producing readable C++ code from a Swagger API description) has achieved version 0.7 (https://github.com/KitsuneRal/gtad/releases/tag/v0.7.0) adding a few tricks in order to make...

• ...libQuotient 0.6 beta2 (https://github.com/quotient-im/libQuotient/releases/tag/0.6-beta2) rely entirely on the upstream matrix-doc specification, rather than a soft fork closely following the main sources! From now on it's "upstream first", in a sense that the original matrix-doc will be used to build Quotient codebase. Let's see how often it breaks ;) In other news from the last few weeks:

• some housekeeping and deprecation work in the API has been done in preparation to getting User Interactive Authentication along the next (post-0.6) release cycle of libQuotient.

• also thanks to the updated code generator, the CS API code has been optimised, consolidating more code in the header files and making data deserialisation lazy; this helped significantly reduce compilation times, and runtime performance also improved a bit.

• the number of configurations tested by CI has been extended, allowing to chase down a few more bugs that managed to go under the radar before.

• when used with new enough Qt, CBOR is used to cache data locally - entirely transparently for clients.

Expect more news in the coming weeks, including continued work on matrix: URI proposal and its implementation in Quotient.

ruma-events' Google Summer of Code project

devinr528 sent us this late entry!

This week in ruma-events' Google Summer of Code project, after trying out the new Any*Event enums matrix-rust-sdk, we found a few big flaws. There was no easy way to go from StateEvent<AnyStateEventContent> to StateEvent<SpecificEventContent>, the other issue was one could create a StateEvent with differing content and prev_content fields using the AnyStateEventContent enum. The 0.22 ruma-events will be similar to the existing API; each event type has a corresponding event enum variant.

pub enum AnyStateEvent {
    RoomMember(StateEvent<MemberEventContent>),
    RoomAliases(StateEvent<RoomAliases>),
    // ...
}

There were a few minor fixes during the week also. Unknown field deserialization is fixed, allowing deserialization of a JSON blob that has extra fields which are ignored. Custom events are now present in the Any*EventContent enums, although now they have to be moved up to be included in Any*Event enums. Benchmarks for deserialization have been added and used to increase performance.

🧙 Polyjuice Client

Polyjuice Client is a Matrix library for Elixir

uhoreg announced:

Polyjuice Client, a Matrix library for Elixir, had a new release. This release fixes syncs, which apparently were completely broken in the last release (whoops). The wizarding community also welcomes a new contributor, Pierre de Lacroix.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Gitea

s7evink reported:

Gitea 1.12.0 was finally released. It's now possible to send notifications (commits, pull requests, etc.) directly to Matrix using webhooks.

Dept of Internet of Things 💡

Mozilla WebThings Matrix Adapter

Christian offered:

I heard that you people like IoT?! With the Mozilla WebThings Matrix Adapter your Raspberry Pi sends you messages about your home. Want a log of when the front door has been opened? Need a low battery alert for your IoT devices? With the Mozilla IoT gateway and this adapter, you can send these events to a Matrix room of your choice!

https://gitlab.com/webthings/matrix-adapter

Dept of Bots 🤖

Alt alias maubot plugin

Tulir announced:

Ever since m.room.aliases was replaced with alt_aliases, there hasn't really been any way to find aliases on other servers, since most room admins don't bother finding and publishing alternate aliases. To help solve that problem, I made a maubot plugin to let users publish alternate aliases in rooms: https://github.com/maubot/altalias

By default it lets users publish aliases with the same localpart as any already published alias. If that behavior is sufficient, you can simply invite it to a room and give it permissions to send m.room.canonical_alias events. Alternatively, it can be configured to allow aliases that match specific regexes.

Once it's set up, users can create a local alias and use !altalias publish <their alias> to publish it. The bot will make sure the alias points to the right room, check that the localpart is allowed and then add it to alt_aliases.

I have it running at @alias:maunium.net and I've added it to all my rooms already. Other rooms are also free to use that instance.

go-neb on NixOS

maralorn offered:

As of https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/89327 a go-neb module was added to nixos and will soon be available on nixos-unstable and in the 20.09 release. You can use it to declaratively install and configure go-neb matrix bots on nixos. I use it for prometheus alertmanager alerts and it works really cool! Thx to hexa- who did most of the work on it.

Opsdroid

Cadair offered:

opsdroid 0.19 has been released, not many matrix specific features in this release, just making it slightly easier to get a connector or database instance by name. However, this release paves the way for the merge of the pull request transitioning opsdroid to use the matrix-nio Python library, so the next release should be packed full of matrix stuff 😀

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

That's all I know 🏁

Thanks to Alexander and Nico for their help editing this edition.

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

Open Tech Will Save Us #3 🎙

If you somehow missed this, please take a look!

• 1:00 Rabble talking about Planetary and SSB
• 31:19 Annie on Ditto
• 1:10:20 Erik on Synapse Perf

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa announced:

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

Merged MSCs:

• MSC2265: Proposal for mandating case folding when processing e-mail address localparts

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2399: Reporting that decryption keys are withheld (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC2631: Add fallback_content to PusherData

• MSC2630: checking public keys in SAS verification

• MSC2625: Add mark_unread push rule action

• MSC2618: Helping others with mandatory implementation guides

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we're sticking with the same three from last week: MSC2366 (verification flows), MSC2403 (knocking), and MSC2630 (SAS security).

In possibly more exciting news, the Spec Core Team has decided to start separating the scattered casual implementation tips and notes in the spec out and putting them in a series of implementation guides! These will take the form of gitbook-style things, and will initially feature front-to-back implementation guides for a generic Matrix client and homeserver. For more details to provide feedback, check out the associated MSC2618!

Dept of GSoC 🎓

This is the second week of the coding phase of GSoC 2020. Find updates from the students below:

GSOC/Opsdroid

tyagdit told us:

• The port from matrix-python-sdk to matrix-nio is almost completed. Sending and receiving most events works properly. Changes are expected be merged in a few days. This PR itself doesn't implement E2EE, that will be a different PR

• Alongside that I've been working on implementing E2EE with nio which is partially done, sending and receiving messages works so far. some changes to the MatrixStore interaction and testing is left.

Nheko

Chethan told us:

Device verification for Nheko

• Done
  • Adding Device List ( Although it already exists it is re-written in qml )
  • Detecting to_device device_verification messages
  • Part of the flow is done
• Yet to Complete
  • Complete the rest of the flow

go-neb

nikofil offered:

• Implementing end-to-end encryption for go-neb turns out to be a lot easier than expected thanks to the https://github.com/tulir/mautrix library, which contains out of the box e2ee support!

• The first week of GSoC was spent switching go-neb's usage of gomatrix for mautrix, which was easy as the latter is a fork of the former. This caused a pretty big PR that touched most of go-neb's files, although the changes were simple and easy to review. The PR was merged shortly after into go-neb.

• During the second week, it was time to add some basic e2ee support to go-neb. This was complicated slightly due to the bot's ability to create multiple clients and its treatment of /sync responses, however in the end e2ee is now working.

• The code is still of course a mess and session keys are often lost in the void. The code will be cleaned up and tested further next week, bugs will be (hopefully) fixed and another PR will be submitted to go-neb then to officially add e2ee support!

• Code can be found at https://github.com/nikofil/go-neb/tree/e2ee until it can be cleaned up

HTML-Embeddable rooms

From arnav-t:

Matrix has enormous potential to be used in many different use cases be it embedded chat rooms, comments section, chat boxes, etc. This project aims to fill that niche by providing an easy to use and easy to deploy client for users to embed on their webpages.
The client would mesh well wherever it is embedded by providing a postMessage interface to allow the parent webpage to interact with the client and dynamically modify it whenever needed (For example:- A comments section that is always the same theme as its parent webpage).

Features

As of now, the following features have been added (with more on the way)

• List of joined rooms that can be selected
• Live room timeline events
• Support for image-based messages
• Message composer and ability to send messages to a room
• Dark and light themes for the client
• Changeable highlight colors
• Toggleable room header, room timeline, and message composer components
• postMessage interface for sending commands from the parent window

Currently, I'm working on adding more options to the postMessage interface as well as adding more interactivity to the client itself.

Find out more on the project page: https://github.com/arnav-t/riot-embedded.

Ruma/Matrix GSoC update

Ruma is a Rust project to create a comprehensive set of APIs for Matrix. Previously there was a Ruma homeserver project.

devinr528 announced:

This week in ruma-events' Google Summer of Code project, I was able to finish the macros needed to generate the event content enums and trait implementations required for events. I started by defining the generic event structs (state, message, etc.) and manually writing the Serialize and Deserialize implementations. Over the next few days, this was moved into a custom derive macro called Event. The derive now implements all necessary traits with appropriate bounds, so a StateEvent<C> can not contain any ephemeral event content and so forth. I have removed the raw mod and related FromRaw and TryFromRaw traits, moving the validation into the deserialization and constructor for the few types that needed it. On the event content side of things, a function like procedural macro was used to allow declaring the enum using Matrix event type identifiers.

event_content_enum! {

    /// Any message event.
    name: AnyMessageEventContent,

    events: [
        "m.call.answer",

        "m.room.message",
        // ...

    ]
}

// Produces
pub enum AnyMessageEventContent {

    CallAnswer(CallAnswerEventContent),
    RoomMessage(MessageEventContent),

}

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander offered:

Much of this week's work has been maintenance-related with refactoring, cleaning up etc.

• Key fetching/expiry behaviour has been fixed, improving the reliability of federation.

• The monolith and component setup has now been refactored.

• A number of unused internal APIs have now been removed.

• Other internal roomserver APIs have been streamlined.

We have also started building an Yggdrasil-powered P2P demo (as opposed to the previous demos built using libp2p) and even includes support for embedding Riot Web in the single binary. It's not very stable/usable yet but there will be more news on that to follow within the next couple of weeks.

We have also started building and releasing Docker images for Dendrite on Docker Hub for those who want to use Docker to test Dendrite deployment.

Spec compliance is unchanged from last week:

• Client-Server APIs: 36%

• Server-Server APIs: 35%

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo reported:

Welcome back! This week I focused my efforts on better error handling. My goal was that every problem would be forwarded to the client (e.g. InternalServerError response) and also be logged. Yesterday I merged the giant PR this resulted in. Hopefully this will make Conduit easier to debug in the future.

Here are some other things I finished this week:

• User-interactive authentication (e.g. you need to type your password again if you want to delete devices)

• Config option to disable registration

I also found the problem with Riot not showing notifications for new messages and created a bug report. With a few tweaks, I managed to solve this on my account and now mentions, DMs and more play the notification sound (it also works on Riot X!).

@gnieto fixed a bug that prevented Riot from loading history when you join a room and @PublicByte implemented the /whoami endpoint.

Thanks to my supporters on Liberapay!

Synapse

Neil said:

This week we shipped 1.15.0, edited highlights include:

Features

• Add admin APIs to allow server admins to manage users' devices. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#7481)

• Add an option to disable autojoining rooms for guest accounts. (#6637)

• For SAML authentication, add the ability to pass email addresses to be added to new users' accounts via SAML attributes. Contributed by Christopher Cooper. (#7385)

• Add support for generating thumbnails for WebP images. Previously, users would see an empty box instead of preview image. Contributed by @WGH-. (#7586)

• Support the standardized m.login.sso user-interactive authentication flow. (#7630)

Bugfixes

• Allow new users to be registered via the admin API even if the monthly active user limit has been reached. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#7263)

• Fix a bug in automatic user creation during first time login with m.login.jwt. Regression in v1.6.0. Contributed by @olof. (#7585)

• Fix a bug causing the cross-signing keys to be ignored when resyncing a device list. (#7594)

• Fix bug where returning rooms for a group would fail if it included a room that the server was not in. (#7599)

• Fix duplicate key violation when persisting read markers. (#7607)

• Prevent an entire iteration of the device list resync loop from failing if one server responds with a malformed result. (#7609)

• Pass device information through to the login endpoint when using the login fallback. (#7629)

• Advertise the m.login.token login flow when OpenID Connect is enabled. (#7631)

• Fix bug in account data replication stream. (#7656)

Internal Changes

• Improve query performance for fetching state from a PostgreSQL database. Contributed by @ilmari. (#7567)

• Speed up processing of federation stream RDATA rows. (#7584)

• Refactor Ratelimiter to limit the amount of expensive config value accesses. (#7595)

• Clean up exception handling in SAML2ResponseResource. (#7614)

• Check if the localpart of a Matrix ID is reserved for guest users earlier in the registration flow, as well as when responding to requests to /register/available. (#7625)

Aside from that we continue out push towards improving performance both in terms of sharding workers but also improving tools to manage disk space usage. Specifically this week and next we are looking at db tuning and sharding the media repo worker. We are also noticing that the typing handler is chewing more CPU than would be expected. It could be a good candidate for moving away from the master process.

More broadly we are changing the defaults for notifications and making changes to support a more general overhaul of notifications.

Finally we are looking at how to not only delete messages after a certain time period, but also how to delete the associated media (which becomes difficult when considering e2e content along side long lived content such as avatars and sticker packs).

For more detail on what is coming next, take a look at our public task board.

Synapse Deployment 📥

Kubernetes

Ananace told us:

Just pushed version 1.15.0 of the K8s-optimized Synapse images

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir told us:

The WhatsApp bridge can now bridge location messages from WhatsApp to m.location on Matrix and contact messages as vCard files (until Matrix gets a native contact message type).

It also now encrypts media properly when bridging messages in encrypted rooms. I had apparently missed that when adding end-to-bridge encryption earlier.

mautrix-facebook

Tulir said:

mautrix-facebook got a few improvements and bugfixes:

• Added timestamp massaging

• Added support for bridging video and file messages to Matrix

• Fixed backfilling with SQLite (it didn't work due to the python timezone mess, fix contributed by erdnaxeli)

• Improved options for automatic reconnecting. The bridge should now work fairly reliably when using all the auto-reconnect options and backfilling, it only breaks if facebook decides you've been hacked

mautrix bridges in general

Tulir said:

Since MSC2190 and the related Synapse PR aren't moving much, all my bridges now generate appservice registration files with the workaround. The workaround is needed to avoid patching synapse or using other hacks, and I decided to enable it by default as many people had problems related to having to apply it manually.

The WhatsApp, Facebook and Hangouts bridges now have an option to use double puppeting to disable notifications when backfilling. It can be useful if you want to copy chat history to Matrix, but don't want to be spammed with hundreds of notifications while it's happening.

Nova-slack

eric offered:

To get things ready for NovaChat launch, we added a bunch of new features to a fork of the mx-puppet-slack client that Sorunome created. You can try it out here. We'll be pushing our changes upstream soon.

New features:

• message backfilling at room creation and reconnect

• syncs read status to/from Slack.com

• adds all users to bridged room during initial creation

• automatically bridges all channels and DMs that you are part of during initial setup, so you don't have to wait for a message to arrive for it to appear in Matrix

• tons of little reliability fixes

matrix-sms-bridge

Benedict announced:

My matrix-sms-bridge got an large update, which introduced an automated way to create and write messages to telephone numbers via commands in a bot room. See the docs for more informations, how to use it.

Dept of Clients 📱

NovaChat v0.1.1

eric reported:

Introducing NovaChat - a desktop chat client that supports 9+ different chat networks, built on top of Matrix. Think of it as a modern Adium/Trillian.

How it works

NovaChat is a system with three parts designed to work together:

• a new desktop client, based on Riot-web

• a federating homeserver (nova.chat)

• a set of Matrix bridges configured to run on a private server called a bridgebox

Matrix bridges are awesome but generally require you to run own homeserver. NovaChat removes that restriction, without sacrificing security and privacy. Your remote chat network credentials never leave your bridgebox, and messages are encrypted* on the bridgebox before being sent to the NovaChat homeserver.

*Encryption is currently enabled on Telegram/FB/Hangouts/Whatsapp bridges, mx-puppet-bridges coming shortly)

Very rough system diagram:

> NovaChat desktop client <> NovaChat homeserver <> bridgebox <> remote chat networks

Features

• Fancy new UI, heavily inspired by Telegram. See photo below or see it in action

• Easy graphical bridge set up (no more fiddling with config files)

• Reliable bridging, with delivery confirmations and bridge disconnect warnings

• Includes 8 pre-configured bridges: Facebook/Whatsapp/Hangouts/Telegram/Slack/Instagram/Twitter/Skype. Planning to add more soon, or submit a PR!

• Works on Mac OS, Linux and Windows

You don't need to be technical to use NovaChat, it's designed to Just WorkTM. If you need help setting up a bridgebox, we are offering hosting and maintenance for USD $5 per month.

The vast majority of this software has been created by the talented tulir and dm0141. I personally am a terrible coder (you can tell which parts I did), but I do have experience building products and teams, and I'm excited to begin working in the Matrix universe. I wrote recently about how I believe Matrix is the Universal Communication Bus! Thanks goes to Sorunome for creating the mx-puppet-bridges!

We're developing the whole project in the open (though not all components are open source), check the issue backlog :)

Want to help? We're hiring Matrix developer to work on the project with us. Send me a message if you're interested! Particularly looking for a React dev to help with frontend on nova-web.

NovaChat chat room: #novachat:nova.chat

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

red_sky announced:

nheko 0.7.2 is ready for release. Here's the summary of changes:

Highlights

• Reactions

  • React to a message with an emoji! 🎉

  • Reactions are shown below a message in a small bubble with a counter.

  • By clicking on that, others can add to the reaction count.

  • It may help you celebrating a new Nheko Release or react with a 👎 to a failed build to express your frustration.

  • This uses a new emoji picker. The picker will be improved in the near future (better scrolling, sections, favorites, recently used or similar) and then probably replace the current picker.

• Support for tagging rooms [tag]

  • Assign custom tags to rooms from the context menu in the room list.

  • This allows filtering rooms via the group list. This puts you in a focus mode showing only the selected tags.

  • You can assign multiple tags to group rooms however you like.

• SSO Login

  • With this you can now login on servers, that only provide SSO.

  • Just enter any mxid on the server. Nheko will figure out that you need to use SSO and redirect your browser to the login page.

  • Complete the login in your browser and Nheko should automatically log you in.

Features

• Support for showing users presence and status message as well as setting your own status message"

• Respect exif rotation of images

• An italian translation (contributed by Lorenzo Ancora)

• Optional alerts in your taskbar (contributed by z33ky)

• Optional bigger emoji only messages in the timeline (contributed by lkito)

• Optional hover feedback on messages (contributed by lkito)

• /roomnick to change your displayname in a single room.

• Preliminary support for showing inline images.

• Warn about unencrypted messages in encrypted rooms.

Improvements

• perf: Use less CPU to sort the room list.

• Limit size of replies. This currently looks a bit rough, but should improve in the future with a gradient or at some other transition.

• perf: Only clean out old messages from the database every 500 syncs. (There is usually more than one sync every second)

• Improve the login and register masks a bit with hints and validation.

• Descriptions for settings (contributed by lkito)

• A visual indicator, that nheko is fetching messages and improved scrolling (contributed by Lasath Fernando)

Bugfixes

• Fix not being able to join rooms

• Fix scale factor setting

• Buildfixes against gcc10 and Qt5.15 (missing includes)

• Settings now apply immediately again after changing them (only exception should be the scale factor)

• Join messages should never have empty texts now

• Timeline should now fail to render less often on platforms with native sibling windows.

• Don't rescale images on every frame on highdpi screens.

Matrix-Static release v0.3.0

Michael (t3chguy) reported:

New Matrix-Static release v0.3.0

With improved support for media and tombstone events and a bunch of bug fixes! https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-static/releases

Should be deployed to view.matrix.org shortly

Arch Linux package of radical-native

Peter Roberts told us:

I've made an Arch Linux package of radical-native.

Riot X

valere announced:

• Several improvements on SSO login flow 🔒

• Support of power levels ⚡️

• Add remove favorites 🌟

• Multiple bugs and glitches fixes 🐛

The team is currently actively working on:

• Voip 1:1 Calls 📞

• Cross Signing bootstrap simplification 🔑

• Performances Improvement 🔥

• More room settings ⚙️

Riot Web

Ryan told us:

There's been lots of work many fronts this week, including:

• Continued work on cross-signing bootstrapping robustness

• New room list implementation in progress

• Upgraded fonts for new emoji

• A refreshed look for matrix.to is underway

• The appearance tab is being tweaked and expanded

• Read marker consistency improvements

Most of this work is still in progress or has only landed on develop so far. Our next RC will happen next week.

Riot-iOS

Manu offered:

This week, we continued to iterate on the implementation of the new push notification service thanks to user feedbacks. Those feedbacks also show that the app uses less battery.

On login, this is now possible to recover your cross-signing and your key backup from your recovery passphrase or key.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

libolm 3.1.5

uhoreg told us:

libolm 3.1.5 has been released. It mainly collects the various build system and documentation fixes that have accumulated since the last release. It also includes a new wasm build target (which apparently is used for running matrix-rust-sdk in the browser), as well as TypeScript definitions for the JavaScript bindings.

Ruma

Ruma is a Rust project to create a comprehensive set of APIs for Matrix. Previously there was a Ruma homeserver project.

jplatte told us:

Most of the work this past week was on ruma-events, for more on that see the GSoC section! Devin got far enough with that so we now know it all works out and can replace the previous ruma-events API. When that was clear, ruma-events was also merged into our new monorepo; now the only remaining crate to be merged is ruma-client (where I'm also waiting for some pending changes).

Dept of Ops 🛠

Matrix Helm chart

Kubernetes Helm chart for easily deploying a Matrix homeserver stack

Typo Kign told us:

Version 2 of my Matrix Helm chart is out! It now allows for running a federating homeserver without needing an external load balancer for the federation service, potentially lowering costs (depending on your cloud provider), and definitely reducing the headache of managing TLS certificates!

dacruz21/matrix-chart is a Kubernetes Helm chart for easily deploying a Matrix homeserver stack, complete with Synapse, Riot, VoIP calls, bridges, and other backing services. It's ideal for anyone looking to run a large homeserver, or for corporate environments where security is paramount!

Dept of Internet of Things 💡

Tuple Weather Station Example

Alexander Eisele announced:

This week I've programmed a small POC for a Matrix weather station.

It's build using a ESP8266 Microcontroller and a BME280 Sensor for temparature, humidity and barometric pressure.

The data is send over the Tuple Matrix <-> MQTT bridge.

Code: https://github.com/derEisele/tuple-weather-example

You can join this project on #tuple:eiselecloud.de.

I'm personally really excited about this project!

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix bot for Redmine

progserega told us:

https://github.com/progserega/matrix_redmine_bot

1. Bot can create, accept (to user) new issues in Redmine from matrix

2. Bot can add comment or/and files to issue by it id

3. Bot can show messages (for user) from Redmine in matrix room

Dept of Guides 🧭

Levans said:

Anyone running a federating instance of Synapse will likely have seen this: Synapse is database-hungry. It tends to take a lot of space. In this post, I'm documenting how I shrunk my homeserver database from 100GB to a little under 8GB, during a long maintenance cleanup. https://levans.fr/shrink-synapse-database.html

Very pleased to see this, I have a feeling I'm going to be running it in the near future...

New Public Rooms 🏟

New room "Matrix Outreach"

JulianF reported:

There's a new room "Matrix Outreach" #matrix-outreach:matrix.org for folks interested in "Helping each other explain and promote Matrix to the public: creating slogans, introduction leaflets, info-graphics, elevator pitch, Wikipedia articles, and so on."

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

That's all I know 🏁

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

Firstly... 🏃‍♀️

Make an entry in your calendar, don't just write it on your hand: Open Tech Will Save Us is back for a third edition!
Next Wednesday, 10th June 2020!

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa reported:

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

Merged MSCs:

• Proposal for storing megolm keys serverside

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2265: Proposal for mandating case folding when processing e-mail address localparts (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC2611: Remove m.login.token User-Interactive Authentication type from the specification

• MSC2610: Remove m.login.oauth2 User-Interactive Authentication type from the specification

• MSC2604: Accept device information for the login fallback endpoint

• MSC2596: Proposal to always allow rescinding invites

• MSC2589: Improve replies

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've still got MSC2366 (verification flows) on our plate, but we're removing MSC2399 (UISI messaging) as it just needs one more final tick. We're adding MSC2403 (knocking) in its place.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Mascarene

Nico said:

Mascarene is a quite new homeserver implementation project started a few months ago. Now it's time to introduce it.

Mascarene is written in Scala, runs on JVM and relies on Akka actor model. Out of the box it provides features like efficient streaming I/O, clustering and live data distribution. Data are backed in a PostgreSQL database.

The project is in early stage but already provides a few endpoints which make Mascarene able to talk to Riot.

You can test it at https://snapshot.mascarene.org. You should be able to register, login, create a room and talk to yourself.

Current work is focused on client API implementation; federation or e2ee will come later.

Contributions are welcome, join us on #mascarene:beerfactory.org

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo told us:

Welcome back! This week I went through the whole Client-Server API and wrote down everything that is still missing from Conduit. You can find issues for all of them in the milestone for Conduit 1.0. This should make it more easy for contributors to find something to work on and gives a lot more structure to the repo (maybe I also did it, because it's so satisfying to close issues and see the milestone percentage go up 😛).

Some of the issues I could already close this week include:

• Implement redaction

• Implement loading the message someone replied to (/context)

• Fix bugs with notifications

• Don't send typing events when nothing happened

• Bundle typing events into one EDU

• Don't send notification counts every /sync

• Implement heroes

As you can tell, a lot of work is starting to go into smaller improvements, which is a good thing, because it means most of the core work is already done!

Thanks to my supporters on Liberapay (Take a look, I improved it 🙂).

Synapse

Neil told us:

This week in Synapse land we have been focusing on bug fixes especially SSO and soft logout.

We also spent some time thinking about how to further improve performance for large scale deployments (like matrix.org). In short this will mean sharding contested workers such as the media repo worker, the federation sender and the federation reader. We also want to remove some more functionality from the master process because it is still sitting at about 80% and we’d like some more head room. We'd also like to fix up the state compressor so it can easily be run as a background progress to save on disk space, this will benefit all installations big and small. Finally we want to speed up joins over federation. Exciting times.

Next week, more of the same and we should start on some of the perf items. Also look out for changes to notification defaults.

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander offered:

Updates:

• Room version 6 support has been added

• Server signing keys which have passed their validity period are now re-requested and updated properly, increasing reliability of federation substantially

• Federated room joins have been significantly sped up by requesting missing auth events inline when verifying room state, rather than repeating the entire verification for each missing event

• Local send-to-device support has been added (federated send-to-device coming soon)

• A lot of code clean-up has taken place (with more to come), including cleaning up the internal APIs and the component bases

• Decoding of room version 3 event IDs in request URLs has been improved

• Inbound federation requests now interrupt backoff intervals on outbound sends

• A new internal API exists now for interrupting backoff intervals on the federation sender

• The federated /devices endpoint now returns in the correct format

• Public rooms are now sorted by their member count

• Only our own aliases are stored in the public rooms directory now

• gomatrixserverlib is now responsible for marking room versions as supported/stable

• Spec-compliant transactions are now sent to the appservice component

• File URIs for SQLite databases are now set up using common functions

• Handling registration for a user that already exists has been fixed (thanks S7evinK!)

• Dendrite can now be configured to use a HTTP proxy server for outbound HTTP (thanks dr-bonez!)

Sytest compliance:

• Client-server APIs: 36%

• Server-server APIs: 35%

In other news, Kegan wrote a post on how p2p.riot.im works, including Dendrite's journey to SQLite and WebAssembly!

Additionally! You may have already read about v0.1.1 of the P2P Matrix demo - this is a big update, with local storage, room alias handling, federation improvements and more!

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Matrix Appservice Minecraft bridge now in beta

Dylan reported:

My Matrix Appservice Minecraft bridge is now in beta

• https://github.com/dhghf/matrix-appservice-minecraft

Here is our Matrix room #minecraft:dhdf.dev

More screenshots: https://github.com/dhghf/matrix-appservice-minecraft#screenshots

Tuple

Alexander Eisele reported:

Tuple is a very early simple matrix <--> mqtt bridge for IOT and other embedded devices.

It's my very first golang project, but it works(TM).

• Repo: https://gitlab.eiselecloud.de/matrix/tuple

• Discussion/Testing: #tuple:eiselecloud.de

This is exciting! I would love to see more IoT-related projects!

mautrix-hangouts

Tulir reported:

mautrix-hangouts can also do backfilling now, both when creating portal and missed messages when connecting

mautrix-facebook

Tulir told us:

mautrix-facebook got support for backfilling history when creating portals and backfilling missed messages when connecting. There's also an option to periodically reconnect to potentially fix the bug where Facebook decides that you don't get messages anymore, but doesn't actually disconnect you.

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir said:

I had apparently forgotten to implement bridge information in the whatsapp bridge when I implemented it in my other bridges, but that mistake is now corrected. I also fixed a bug with encryption where it would generate too many one-time keys and cause messages to be undecryptable. Finally, mautrix-whatsapp had its first release this week since it's working reasonably well now.

Dept of Clients 📱

Radical Native

stoic reported:

Eager to test the keytar feature (pickle key stored in OS secret storage) with Riot Web? Support landed in radical-native v0.1beta13, which uses Rust keytar bindings under the hood. Testing requires the latest and greatest of Riot Web, so riot.im/develop might be the place to see it in action

Keytar support is a very very new feature, uhoreg, who has been working on it in the shadows and wasn't expecting to see it land yet, commented:

😲

Pattle: version 0.17.0

Pattle is a client written for Flutter using Dart

Wilko offered:

A new version has been made available and will become available on Google Play and TestFlight!

⚠️ If you're not logged out, it's recommend that you logout and additionally clear your data after installing the new version! ⚠️

Changes

• Added the ability to reply to messages!

• You can now accept (and reject) invites!

• You can now join and search channels!

• Chat input has been redesigned!

• Chat details has been somewhat redesigned

• The group icon in the chat's details is now blurred and can be shown unblurred by scrolling to the top

• Replies are now a maximum of 3 lines long

• The current version is now shown in settings

• Wait a bit after typing before checking the homeserver when logging in

• Chat name change events are now shown

• Chat icon change events are now shown

• Errors are now reported to Sentry again!

• You won't enter the app with empty chats if the initial load failed

• Show date above chat creation event

• Fix time sometimes being dark and not readable on image messages

• Fix sender's name going outside of bubble

• Sender is now in bold for chat description change event

• More messages are now loaded if initially not enough are displayed

• Show ripple effect on chat app bar when tapping

• And more!

Get Pattle

• Android

  • F-Droid
  • Google Play

• iOS (TestFlight)

Get involved

• Follow development: #app:pattle.im

• Issues or suggestions: Post them here!

• Donate: If you want to support Pattle, you can donate!

RiotX v0.21.0

benoit announced:

RiotX v0.21.0 has been released on May 28th. It adds support to identity server configuration and e-mail/phone binding and unbinding. It's also now possible to switch between languages inside the app and to display the list of attachments (media and file) of a room. A new setting has been also added to hide redacted (deleted) events in the timeline. As Riot-Android SAS v2 is also included in this release. Also formatted_body for m.notice and m.emote are now taken into account.

This week we were still working on implementing VoIP (audio and video call). Support for integration manager, widgets and sending stickers has been merged to develop. Many new features are coming soon, stay tuned!

Riot-Android classic

benoit offered:

Riot-Android: Version 0.9.12 has been released on May 20th. I forgot to mention it the TWIM of last week. It contains a fix for favorite rooms vanishing and also the SAS v2 implementation (new key agreement method).

Mirage

miruka said:

Mirage 0.5.1 has been released today:

• Persistent, cross-client, push rules-aware unread message counters

• Read receipts are now sent to mark rooms as read

• Basic room settings can now be edited and saved

• More control over window alerts, e.g. only enabling them for messages mentioning you

• Lots of bugfixes

Full changelog

Riot-iOS

Manu said:

This week, we finalised our work around the iOS13 SDK. The coming public TestFlight (0.12.2) is the result of this work. It comes with a lot of changes including a full rewrite of the push handling codebase, trying to find solutions to make matrix e2ee compatible with iOS Notification Service Extension. Most of these changes are unfortunately invisible for end users. Please report any issues. Note this is safe to switch between this TF and 0.11.5.

In parallel, we started to implement the cross-signing bootstrap and the recovery management. The UX of this is going to be refined on Riot-Web and RiotX-Android. Riot-iOS will implement the refined UX directly.

Riot Web

A glossy Matrix collaboration client for the web. https://riot.im

Ryan told us:

We had several Riot Web releases this week, first with 1.6.3:

• Security fix for auth handling in SSO deployments, thanks Quentin Gliech for responsible disclosure

• Added more shortcuts to jump to read marker and upload a file

• Fixed notification tray icon stability for desktop on Windows

• Added an IRC style layout (currently available in labs only)

• Added font scaling settings (currently available in labs only)

• Fixed several bugs in the cross-signing bootstrap process

• Converted older banner-style UI for updates etc. to newer toasts

This was quickly followed by 1.6.4 to fix a few regressions with dismissing toasts, compact timeline layout, key backup, and tooltips on scroll.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Matrix Dart SDK: version 0.32.0

Wilko announced:

• Databases are now deleted as a migration strategy

This will be in effect until 1.0 (or a bit before). If needed, make a backup between every minor version bump.

• All members necessary to render the timeline are now loaded from the store

• Room.myMembership has been removed, use Room.me.membership

• Add Rooms.enter and Room.join to join rooms

• Add Room.leave method

• Add PublicRooms

• Add useful getters to Member like isInvited or hasJoined

• Remove AliasesChangeEvent

• Errors in the separate isolate are now added to the updates stream where possible, or thrown in the calling isolate

• Fix profile API not working on servers where authorization is required

• Add MyUser.hasSynced

• Fix count not being nullable in MemberTimeline.load

• More fixes and small changes!

Get it on pub!

Ruma

Ruma is a Rust project to create a comprehensive set of APIs for Matrix. Previously there was a Ruma homeserver project.

jplatte offered:

This week,

• Devin, our GSoC student, started blogging on ruma.io

• We released ruma-identifiers 0.16.2 and ruma-federation-api 0.0.2

• We started updating ruma-events and ruma-client-api with the changes from version r0.6.1 of the client-server specification

• We started moving all of our libraries into one monorepo!

  • As part of this, we introduced a kind of meta-library so you no longer have to keep the versions of the indivual libraries in sync manually

  • We're hoping that this makes experiments across multiple libraries and the overall contribution process easier 🙂

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰

Safe Support Chat

Brendan said:

Safe Support Chat, previously known as OCRCC Chatbox, now has a website with guides on how to set it up for organisations: https://www.safesupport.chat/

For context, Safe Support Chat is an embeddable chatbox built on Matrix with cool features such as end-to-end encryption support to enable individuals to seek support with organisations that provide it. It was initially built for the OCRCC (Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres) in order to allow survivors of sexual violence to communicate and seek help safely with OCRCC facilitators.

Kim Allen of Primal Glow Communications, one of the parties involved in Safe Support Chat's development, also recorded a podcast with Nomadic Labs about this project: https://podcast.nomadiclabs.ca/episodes/the-adventure-of-building-an-open-source-chatbox

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

This Ansible playbook is meant to easily let you run your own Matrix homeserver.

Slavi reported:

Thanks to benkuly's efforts, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports bridging to SMS (with one telephone number only) via matrix-sms-bridge.

To learn more, see our Setting up Matrix SMS bridging docs page.

CLI Federation Tester

Kai reported:

A new version of the terminal-based federation tester has been released. The current version 1.11 should now cover the entire server discovery process including scenarios with a .well-known configuration without a port, but with a DNS SRV entry.

The script relies on bash, curl, jq and openssl. It has been tested on linux but should also work on *bsd and macos.

The script can be downloaded here:

#cli_federation-tester_de:matrix.chat-secure.de

(The message about the latest version will always be pinned)

FLAP

Louis Chmn announced:

Hi, I've build FLAP to help other self-host multiple free softwares. FLAP can currently help you to easily setup Synapse, Riot, Nextcloud, SOGo and Jitsi all with SSO and low maintenance needs. Feel free to give it a try !

• Sources are here: https://gitlab.com/flap-box/flap

• If you need help setting things up, Matrix room is here: #flap-software:matrix.org

For French companies, I am also offering managed paid hosting: https://www.flap.cloud

Dept of Bots 🤖

sparky's Matrix Bot

sparky told us:

Announcing Matrix Bot (name is a work in progress)

The first "official" release of matrix bot has been made and you can find the latest release source at https://github.com/sparky8251/matrix-bot/tree/v1.0.0

It's flagship features are currently

• an imperial <--> metric unit converter for common conversational units

• a configurable search and link for issues/pulls that responds to any message containing something in the format of jf#123 or jf #1234

• a configurable general purpose URL linker that responds to messages containing things such as [email protected] or link @troubleshooting (both sides of the @ are configurable)

There are plans to enable group pings, get a help command that can be limited to function only in a specific room, and more in the works so be sure to check back soon!

matrix-reminder-bot

anoa reported:

matrix-reminder-bot bot to remind you about things. Supports reminding an individual in a room or the whole room itself. Also supports setting alarms, which will continue to sound periodically until silenced.

Built with nio-template and the excellent matrix-nio library.

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

Final Thoughts 💭

There are bounties to be had! AU$500 to support Emoji Reactions in Fractal, for reference this is tracked on the GNOME gitlab.

We didn't hear from Spectral too recently, but there are signs of code being written.

This week I've been chatting with conference organisers making really interesting virtual event plans, and I'm bursting to share some of the Matrix integration plans, hopefully more details coming soon.

elmussol said:

For those who Hubzilla or Zap or ActivityPub or Friendica or Diaspora, there is now a Hubzilla forum for all things Matrix: https://elsmussols.net/channel/matrix

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙 Demos!

This week we have demos from our core team remote sync!

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa announced:

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

Merged MSCs:

• MSC2540: Stricter event validation: JSON compliance

• MSC2240: Room version 6

• MSC2209: Alter auth rules to check notifications in m.room.power_levels

• MSC1466: Soft Logout

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC2582: Remove mimetype from EncryptedFile object
• MSC2579: Improved tagging support

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've still got MSC2366 (verification flows) and MSC2399 (UISI messaging), however they are now joined by a third, secret MSC that we'll be working on internally for now :)

Spec releases: Room Version 6, Client-Server r0.6.1, and Federation r0.1.4

Says TravisR:

It's been a little while since we've done a round of spec releases, so we have a bunch of spec releases to share. If you're implementing something from the spec, please have a look at the news: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/05/27/room-version-6-client-server-r-0-6-1-and-federation-r-0-1-4-spec-releases/

As always, any questions about the spec itself can be answered in #matrix-spec:matrix.org, #matrix-dev:matrix.org, or in the various area-specific rooms floating around the federation.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo said:

Hello again! This week I worked on access control, which means that private rooms are private and invite-only rooms are invite-only. The public room directory only shows rooms marked as such now.

I also made a milestone to track progress on Conduit 1.0. This release marks the point where Conduit is fully usable as a non-federating homeserver. All features of the client server specification should be implemented, unless they can be seen as optional extensions (e.g. alternative registrations methods like email). Conduit should also be free of all known bugs with those features.

Adding federation on top of the 1.0 release will very likely require breaking changes. This means that the release which brings federation will be 2.0 or later and will require a partial or full database deletion.

@TravisR wrote a fix for Riot Web, so you should be able to create accounts on Conduit from <https://riot.im/app> soon.

Thanks to my supporters on Liberapay.

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander said:

Updates:

• The monolith now has a "hybrid" mode that uses the full HTTP APIs instead of short-circuiting

• A number of the internal HTTP APIs are now tested fully and have been fixed as a result, which will also improve running a full polylith component deployment

• Server keys are now managed by a separate server key API component

• Batched sends in the federation sender are now working properly, improving send performance significantly

• Error handling in the federation /send endpoint has been tweaked

• /get_missing_events now returns events that don't fail signature checks

• Federated room joins by room alias now attempt the server specified in the alias much more reliably

• The correct room ID is now returned from the PerformJoin API

• Much of the room server storage code has been deduplicated

• Fixed some bugs in the device database storage code

• Sync streams are now managed per-user-per-device, rather than just per-user

• We no longer incorrectly default to federated joins in response to local invites

Spec compliance:

• Client-Server APIs: 34% (228/672 tests)

• Federation APIs: 34% (35/103 tests)

Synapse

Says Neil:

The main news this week is that we switched event persistence away from the matrix.org master process which has made a big difference to overall performance. The impact is best demonstrated by graphing message send times.

We also shipped 1.14.0 which includes OpenId Connect support and improved cache control granularity. It also contains rooms v6.

Next week will be having a think about what to do next for matrix.org performance. Watch this space.

TARDIS (Time Agnostic Room DAG Inspection Service)

Matthew offered:

I made a TARDIS (Time Agnostic Room DAG Inspection Service) - a simple time-travelling debugger for Room DAGs which plugs into Dendrite's internal APIs to visualise room DAGs. The intention is to provide it as a widget which Riot can use to visualise DAGs for debugging, particularly for P2P Matrix. The time-travel bit is simply that it could let you filter out the newer events to show how the DAG has evolved over time, although that isn't hooked up yet. https://github.com/matrix-org/tardis

Synapse Deployment 📥

Kubernetes

Ananace said:

Just pushed the K8s-optimized images for Synapse 1.14.0 - slight changes have been done to the image to further streamline it a bit.

Docker-matrix

Mathijs said:

With the release of synapse 1.14.0 the avhost image, including jemalloc, mjolnir and coturn has been updated as well, avhost/docker-matrix:v1.14.0, as always the release candidates were uploaded at mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.14.0rc1 and rc2

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma

jplatte offered:

This week,

• iinuwa added some new endpoints to ruma-federation-api

• devinr528 wrote lots of macro code for the next major revision of ruma-events as part of his GSoC project

• Timo (author of the Conduit homeserver) reported lots of small issues with ruma-client-api of which some are now fixed already

Additionally, we released two new bugfix library versions:

• ruma-events 0.21.3 fixes an event serialization issue

• ruma-serde 0.2.2 (an internal dependency) fixed an incomplete part of querystring deserialization, so Conduit (and other future homeservers building on ruma-*-api) can properly handle querystrings in which parameters are repeated (like the server_name in /join/{roomIdOrAlias})

buildbot-matrix v0.0.5

Thanks haywo for this update:

buildbot-matrix v0.0.5 has been released:

• Option to only get notifications on finished builds was added.

buildbot-matrix is a small plugin for the Buildbot CI framework which sends notifications to matrix rooms. It's available an GitHub and PyPi, take a look at https://github.com/HayWo/buildbot-matrix for more informations.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Let's start with the big news of the week

Half-Shot announced:

I, Half-Shot, changed the status of the IRC Bridge on https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bridge/matrix-org-irc-bridge from "Early beta" to "Stable". This does not mean it's feature complete, or even all the way there, but it sure doesn't crash nearly as often as it did when I started, so that's good enough for me.

matrix-appservice-slack 1.4.0-rc1

Half-Shot offered:

Hey folks, we've released the first RC for 1.4.0 of the slack bridge. This change includes a number of bug fixes around puppeting, but includes a few nice to haves like a /ready endpoint for kube/docker deployments and setting profile information on startup. Please test, and feedback in #matrix_appservice_slack:cadair.com :)

Mau-bridge multi-update

Tulir told us:

I've been working on improving the reliability of my bridges, primarily by making sure that the user knows if something went wrong. All my bridges now support delivery receipts (implemented as bridge bot read receipts) and can send delivery error messages if there was an error bridging a message. The Facebook and Hangouts bridges also now send connection status messages to a bridge notice room like WhatsApp already did before.

Minetrix

Certainly not from this week, but we haven't featured it before: Minetrix allows you to bridge a Minecraft server with a Matrix room.

I read recently that Minecraft still has 126 million MAU!

Dept of Clients 📱

Daydream

mtrnord told us:

A Matrix webclient written in (mostly) Rust using the official Matrix-Rust-SDK and Rusts WASM Support.

Daydream is the Idea of a Rust Matrix Client. It is still in a very early state and at the time of writing this supports basic displaying of text, image and bot messages as well as sending plain text and markdown.

Try it at https://daydream.nordgedanken.dev/ or check out the Source Code at https://github.com/MTRNord/Daydream

Feel free to join the Matrix Room: #daydream:nordgedanken.dev

RumaTui

Thanks devinr528 for sharing this WIP Command line Matrix client using matrix-rust-sdk:

• Display read receipts for the last few messages
• Display membership status when updated
• Join a room you have been invited to
• Client sends read receipts to server
• Display when messages have been read
• Leave a room by pressing Delete key (this should probably be a Ctrl-some key deal...)
• Specify homeserver to join on start up (before the login screen)
  • Simply run rumatui [HOMESERVER], defaults to \"http://matrix.org\"
• Displays errors, albeit not very helpful or specific
• Receive and display messages
  • formatted messages display as rendered markdown
• Send messages
  • local echo is removed
  • Send textbox grows as more lines of text are added
• Selectable rooms list
  • change rooms using the arrow keys, making this clickable may be difficult
• Login widget is click/arrow key navigable
  • hides password

A new notification bar under the message window displays notifications such as membership changes, typing, and read notices. I am hoping to have an actual release on crates.io by the end of the day. If you have any thoughts join #rumatui:matrix.org or check it out on github.

Riot-web

Bruno said:

This week on Riot-web, we've been:

• starting work on shifting the UX for the encryption upgrade towards using recovery keys in favor of passphrases.

• starting early work on a redesigned matrix.to website

• starting looking to integrate riot desktop with the native password manager of your platform of choice through keytar

• fixing some issues with the (still experimental) IRC layout

• iterating on the (also still experimental) new room list

• looking into some issues that arose from the cross-signing release

Riot-iOS

Says Manu:

Riot-iOS (and MatrixSDK and MatrixKit) is now fully compatible with iOS13 SDK. A TestFlight 0.12.0 will be available soon.
The work is still on its branches (xcode11). It comes with the new notification service mechanism and we want to run a lot of tests next week before going to production.

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) offered:

• Ikito added options to show larger emoji in the timeline and added tooltips to all settings, that provide additional explanations.

• You can now limit the width of the timeline to make long messages more readable, if you maximise Nheko on a widescreen monitor.

• Lorenzo added a pretty much complete italian translation!

• Settings that apply to the qml parts in Nheko now apply immediately without a restart.

Dept of Bots 🤖

midori jabbot 0.5

Torrey Searle reported:

midori jabbot 0.5 has now been released.

Jabbot is a multi-protocol chat bot that can be taught new commands in-chat

This is the first release of jabbot with support of matrix in it. This release also includes support for DISCORD.

Additionally this release is the first release that can be installed via APT

echo "deb [trusted=yes] <https://dl.bintray.com/midoricorp/deb> unstable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update

apt-get install jabbot-full

See https://github.com/midoricorp/jabbot/blob/master/README.md for details

or goto #midori-dev:hackerspaces.be for support/live-demo

Dept of Guides 🧭

Cross Signing explanation

This is a great resource for helping explain how cross-signing works!

JCG said:

After explaining cross signing to others multiple times in the past and seeing the question again on mastodon, I decided to write a short blog post on the topic, explaining how the keys interact with each other and how Alice's devices then end up trusting Bob's devices. You can read it over on https://jcg.re/blog/quick-overview-matrix-cross-signing/

Cross-signing implementors guide

This one isn't quite merged yet as we're going to give a thorough review, but big thank you to sorunome for taking the time to put this together:

While implementing cross-signing for fluffychat soru decided to write a guide that would help other client developers to implement that, too. So far it is still WIP and doesn't cover too much, yet, but soru might have typed up more once this TWIM goes live. The PR (and thus the markdown of the guide) can be found here: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/pull/740

Dept of Event Videos 📹

Matthew spoke at Rust London meetup earlier in the week, check out the video!

(Matrix at around 29:30)

New Public Rooms 🏟

Ludwig announced:

May I advertise #matrix-design:matrix.org to you.

It's a bunch of people who are passively learning design for their matrix projects. You might pick up a few things if you join :p

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

Final Thoughts

You may have seen that Mastodon is preparing to implement Olm! Read some news in German or why not watch Gargon on Open Tech Will Save Us #2 where the idea was first discussed? It's like you're in the room where it happens... 🎶

That's all I know 🏁

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