It's that time again: there's a new Synapse release, fresh out of the oven!
Let's take a look at what's inside Synapse
1.64.
Delegating email verification is now deprecated
Synapse 1.4.0
introduced a configuration option (account_threepid_delegates.email) to allow
homeservers to delegate validating the ownership of email addresses to an
external identity server. This validation is used by Synapse when adding an
email address to a Matrix account, or before performing a password reset.
As of Synapse 1.64, this option is deprecated, and Synapse will print a warning
if it is used. This is because this option relies on old API endpoints that have
since been
removed from the
Matrix specification.
Synapse can do this validation internally provided it is configured with details
of an SMTP server. Administrators currently relying on
account_threepid_delegates.email should therefore ensure that an SMTP server
is correctly configured, and remove the account_threepid_delegates.email
option. See the configuration
guide
for more information.
We plan to fully remove this configuration option in Synapse 1.66, which is
expected to be released on August 30th.
Note that the equivalent option to validate the ownership of phone numbers
(account_threepid_delegates.msisdn) can still be used, though we expect to
deprecate it in a future release of Synapse.
Improved TLS support for sending emails
When configuring an SMTP server to use to send out emails to users, server
administrators can configure Synapse to use TLS to communicate to that server.
Until now, only STARTTLS was
supported in this case.
Synapse 1.64 introduces a new force_tls configuration option in the email
section of the configuration file. If this new setting is set to true Synapse
will use TLS for the initial connection rather than upgrading via STARTTLS.
A couple of weeks ago, we
identified a
memory leak within frozendict, which is
a library that Synapse relies on. This would in turn cause Synapse instances to
slowly leak memory when processing /sync requests.
We highly encourage server administrators who installed Synapse via pip to
upgrade their local version of frozendict to version 2.3.3 or later, which
includes a fix to this issue. The Docker image matrixdotorg/synapse and the
Debian packages from packages.matrix.org already include the updated library.
Everything else
This version of Synapse introduces support for room version 10! This new room
version enables support for the new knock_restricted join rule, to allow
knocking into rooms which are otherwise restricted to members of a specific room
(or space). See the Matrix specification about room version
10 for more information.
Additionally, Synapse 1.64 features a new rate limiter to limit the rate of joins to the same
room. It is intended as a mitigation against abuse scenarios involving joining a
lot of users from different homeservers to a room to then send spam across it.
See the configuration
guide
for more information.
This release of Synapse also extends the List
Rooms
and Room
Details
admin APIs to include the type of a room in responses, allowing server
administrators to differentiate spaces from other rooms.
See the full
changelog for a
complete list of changes in this release. Also please have a look at the
upgrade
notes
for this version.
Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our
thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including (in no particular
order) Beeper,
andrewdoh, Thomas
Weston, jejo86,
villepeh, Jörg
Behrmann and Jacek
Kuśnierz, as well as anyone helping us make Synapse
better by sharing their feedback and reporting issues.
Hello everyone! For this week's spec update you get me, Travis, instead of anoa (sorry). The heart of Matrix is the specification, modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals - learn more at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals/
Be sure to read the Spec Core Team (SCT) section in today's update for some exciting news about Matrix though - this has a good chance of affecting how the MSC process works in the future.
The SCT has been powering through MSCs for the second week in a row, using a new internal process to encourage activity and hopefully keep momentum going. If there's an MSC you think should be on the agenda, please visit the #sct-office:matrix.org and raise it for consideration 🙂
We've also been at IETF 114 to talk about MIMI - an initiative to define a standard for messaging interoperability inspired by the DMA. Matrix appears to fit perfectly into this use-case, so we've been talking with various folks involved to ensure Matrix is on the radar, including preparing our own Internet-Draft to demonstrate how it could work. MIMI is not currently a working group within the IETF, but the expectation is that it will be soon - we look forward to this happening, and are eager to contribute to the process here - or proposing Matrix itself to IETF as an initiative in its own right.
This MSC covers an Extensible Events (MSC1767) schema definition for translatable text! This would allow a client to send a message in multiple languages, with the receiver able to choose which language they're prefer to see the message in (ideally falling back to a default or machine translation if their preferred language was not available).
Like other MSCs that rely on Extensible Events, MSC1767 will need to land before this MSC can. But until then, it's great to see all of the wonderful things this feature will allow Matrix to do!
Greetings! We have been hard at work on Synapse this week. Work on faster room joins continues. In addition, Synapse 1.64.0rc2 was released. Notable features include:
support for room version 10
per-room rate limiting for room joins
support for Implicit TLS for sending emails
and much more, as well as a number of bugfixes, improvements to the documentation, and other changes to make Synapse leaner, faster, and generally more awesome.
This week The Construct server runs on Alpine Linux using freshly cut docker images building on the 0.7 release announced last week. A few images are available for preview while a more complete matrix is filled out. I am proud to announce to TWIM that Construct offers the most compact docker image for a Matrix server at just under 15 MiB; the only caveat is that media
thumbnailing won't be available.
There's still a lot of room for optimization and docker experts to critique! Feel free to join the discussion at #construct:zemos.net and check out https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct today!
It’s holiday season but that won’t slow us down! We’ve been hard at work fixing defects and improving features.
Our recently released new search experience is continuing to be improved. This week we’ve added more accessibility, so it can be helpful to all.
We’ve completely finished the migration of our tests.
There’s a new “use case” screen for users who sign up, it asks folks who they'll talk to the most on Element and, in the future, that will help us to tailor the experience.
In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
It’s an exciting week for both our mobile teams as we’re ready to release our new authentication flow! If you’ve been reading TWIM for a while you’ll know that we’ve been working hard, across all Element teams, to improve our onboarding experience. Part of this work on iOS was a new Create Account flow.
We’re rolling the changes out slowly, so don’t panic if you don’t see the new experience yet!
In even more exciting news, our test coverage has increased with a big bump. We’ve gone from 12% to 51%!
We’ve also continued to make updates and improvements to our location sharing feature.
On the ElementX front we have our first proof of concept for sliding sync (sync v3) working and we’ve almost finished setting up snapshot and integration testing. We also have Rust logs, a new authentication service and performance tests incoming.
Finally, the account deactivation button has had a change of copy - this keeps us inline with Apple guidelines around deleting and deactivating accounts.
Our new Nightly releases are now available and allowing us to catch any bugs or regressions even faster - exciting!
It will soon be easier than ever to create an account on Element, so if you’ve been waiting for an update before you recommend us to others, it’s nearly time! We’ll be rolling these changes out slowly over the next week or so.
Alongside the new create account flow will be an updated sign in and reset password experience. Check it out and let us know what you think.
Also in this release we’ve added a “match system settings” to the Font size screen.
Mac builds are enabled, which means, that olm is bundled into macOS and iOS builds too. So no need to build olm yourself anymore.
trixnity-crypto has been introduced, which contains the matrix e2e-encryption stuff and was previously located in trixnity-client. The relocation allows you to possibly use this in e. g. appservices. Key trust level calculation, key backup, key verification will be moved into it too.
client: basic event relation support has been added to be prepared for the next matrix spec
It's been a week of quite, constant progress on many fronts, most not that visible to the outside observer. For once, the progress on integration sliding sync into element-x for iOS has taken up speed, with many smaller bug fixes and additional features exposed through the FFI being added and performance optimisations. After the internal jack-in testing tool, this is the first actual trial of sliding sync for rust (and after the js-implementation, only the second client to actually use sliding sync overall)—and it has been tremendous. Latest tests put the loading time to first view on the first 20-ish rooms at a 150ms range 🎉.
Note: this is a new Discord bridge. The playbook still retains Discord bridging via matrix-appservice-discord and mx-puppet-discord. You're free too use the bridge that serves you better, or even all three of them (for different users and use-cases).
By the end of last week we received a bunch of proposal for talks and workshops for the conference.
It were all together 32 proposals and we accepted almost all of them.
We released already multiple versions of our schedule. The current version is 0.5 htmljson
There is even some space left for late comers. In case you decide spontaneously to come and want to talk let us know, we will find a way.
Tickets
You now get tickets for the summit for the fantastic price of 0 euro. We like to know in advance how many people will come.
If you have already a ticket and can’t come please let us know. So we can give them to people on the waiting list.
Sharing is caring
I case you have a room or ride to share or you are looking for transport or accommodation please visit our #matrix-summit-sharing:c-base.org.
If you'd rather listen to Yan and me talking about the Matrix Summit and its schedule, we recorded a podcast episode for you to get informed on the go.
The team of effektio, the mobile-first organizing app build on matrix, is happy to announce the new website. Aside from the revamped team section, we are particularly excited about the new product progress page, as the questions "what are you building exactly, and how far are you with the progress" are commonplace. With the product page we hope to provide more clarity what we mean, in actual features, when we say "organize yourself, your friends, family, clubs and all other communities from the palm of your hand". Each feature also links right into the specific section of the Github project, so you can get an unobstructed view of the actual progress happening—and contribute, if you like.
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.
An episode with the maintainers of Threematrix, the 100% Rust bridge between Matrix and Threema!
In addition to that, Open Tech Will Save Us will be back on Wednesday 27 at 16:00 UTC! The topic will be "what makes a platform", or more specifically: "are Linux or the web platforms". There are many fascinating topics to discuss, such as "is it possible to create an app for Linux" (it's not as simple as it sounds), "why are some people against theming?", or "why do developers want to use platforms".
And to answer that, who other than the Linux desktop most advanced projects GNOME and KDE, and people working on Matrix, the protocol that wants to become as unmissable as the web itself, and more specifically on a deeper integration of widgets with Matrix clients?
You can join #otwsu:matrix.org to ask your questions on July 27 during the live show, and bookmark either https://stream.matrix.org or the YouTube stream.
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.
Lots of MSCs moving through the pipeline in the last couple weeks! As always, be sure to take a look at those in Final Comment Period above - only a few days left to comment on them before they merge/close!
Otherwise the Spec Core Team is looking to try and get a handle on the current MSC backlog - this means taking a look at all of the open MSCs, triaging them and organising them into a loose priority queue. This is likely to take quite a while to do and may not ever be complete - but should give us and everyone else an idea of what's expected to land in upcoming Matrix spec versions.
The idea this MSC proposes is to add a possible m.softkick field to room membership events of type "leave", which if present will inform clients that the user has only been kicked temporarily, and they are welcome to rejoin.
This helps with the IRC bridging use case laid out in the MSC.
I use Zeal – an offline documentation browser using the same docsets as Dash for MacOS.
It allows me to browse MDN, ExpressJS docs, NodeJS docs and other languages and formats while not relying on the Internet when traveling.
They have "208 awesome docsets", and I guess you know which one I'm missing – or used to miss, until I packaged it myself.
If you use Dash or Zeal, give it a try. Let me know, if you find pages that are not working.
I hope that Matrix will be included in their list of user-contributed docsets.
Note, this is not an official release distribution of the Matrix Spec. Enjoy at your own risk of this breaking or not getting updated.
Construct server has been refurbished to support the Ubuntu 22.04+ platform. I am happy to
report that Construct performs faster and more reliably than ever before. It's been
a long time since the last update due to COVID-related health problems, but development
has picked up again. I'd like to thank @manu_kamath:matrix.org and @uis246 for their
contributions, and of course Yan Minari for keeping things together over the past year.
Additional work implementing the latest MSC's will continue in the coming weeks so I
encourage everyone to show support in #construct:zemos.net and contribute if possible.
Several enhancements have taken place this release, so I'd just like to highlight one
here: The media database has been eliminated and has been integrated into the main
events database. Construct did always store media in rooms by splitting files
into blocks, but it offloaded the content block to separate storage leaving just a
hash of the content in the matrix event. Construct now stores blocks directly in event
content via hardware-accelerated base64 encoding. The result performs better because
there's only one database query instead of two, and the room can be shared between
servers in a Construct Cluster.
Construct is a performant and robust Matrix Server and Natural Language Processor.
Please be mindful of any laws in your country which require registering your instance
for commercial use.
This week we've released Synapse 1.63! This release includes a few features such as better rate limiting for invites, as well as experimental support for MSC3827 which allows filtering public room search results by room type. The latter will, once stabilised, allow for better discoverability of public spaces since it will allow clients to specifically look for them. Read all about this new release on the matrix.org blog: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/07/20/synapse-1-63-released
We've also spent some time clarifying documentation and prompts about the usage statistics Synapse automatically reports if configured with report_stats set to true. The new documentation page lists exactly what is reported and how this reporting works. This clarification work included removing the use of "anonymised" when referring to this feature to make it clearer that, even though Synapse does not report identifiable information about users and rooms, it does report the homeserver's name (i.e. the value of the server_name configuration setting).
Since people seemed to like seeing updates on my Helm Charts; matrix-synapse got bumped to 1.63.0 and then 1.63.1, as well as receiving some expanded handling of workers - all worker instances now come with both startup- and liveness probes attached by default.
Say hello to a new bridge in Matrix universe (or rather fediverse): Threematrix. As you might've guessed from the name: It's a bridge between the Threema messenger and Matrix. Threema is a very popular messenger in europe, especially in German speaking countries (it's a swiss company). We've just released our very first alpha version – it's a very simple bot bridge for now, but we have quite a lot of improvements on our todo list. Currently, it only works with the (paid) Threema Gateway API product, but we're trying to talk to Threema to come up with a more affordable hobbyist pricing model for bridge use. Feel free to follow our releases in the GitHub repo, follow our Mastodon account and join our Matrix room to stay up to date or ask any questions.
P.S.: We're two freelance developers and we're being funded by the German Prototype Fund program. If you're an OSS developer in Germany, check them out!
Hello all -- since our last TWIM announcement, Hookshot has been updated from 1.7.2 to 1.8.1. Aside from usability fixes and documentation improvements, there have been some notable changes to generic webhook support:
XML webhook payloads are now decoded instead of being treated as blobs of text. This means they render more nicely as room messages, and more importantly, it allows them to work with custom JavaScript transformations. (#410)
GET requests for generic webhooks are no longer supported by default. For details, refer to the documentation. (#397)
Quadrix v1.2.2 is now available for Linux (https://snapcraft.io/quadrix, https://flathub.org/apps/details/chat.quadrix.Quadrix) and Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=chat.quadrix.android). Other platforms will soon follow.
New in this release:
Spanish translation!!!
Fix for the Jitsi Meet link displayed to non-Quadrix users (thanks to @alpabrz:matrix.org)
Please leave feedback/comments at #quadrix:matrix.org or in the issues at https://github.com/alariej/quadrix (stars welcome :-)
I got a fantastic release for you to day and it won't fit inside a normal sized update so without further ado, here are the highlights:
Notification counts 💯 (LorenDB, d42)
You can now see notification counts in more spaces, like your task bar or in
the community sidebar.
For better work-life balance you can hide the notification counts on a per
space basis.
For notification counts in the task bar your desktop environment needs to
support the Unity protocol.
Notifications are also preserved across restarts now.
Moderation 👮♀️
You can now change the permissions and aliases of a room.
Permissions are shown in the Memberlist
A new /redact command to redact an event or all messages by a user.
You can now provide a reason when inviting, knocking, kicking and banning
users.
Faster startup ⚡
On at least some systems startup should now be instant even with thousands
of rooms.
Encryption improvements 🛡️
Support for the most recent changes to Matrix E2EE including fallback keys,
no longer relying on the sender_key.
Compatibility and stability improvements when dealing with different base64
encodings and when verifying users and devices.
Fetch the whole online key backup at the click of a button.
Integration with external apps 🗺️ (LorenDB)
Nheko now has a D-Bus API, which you can enable in the settings menu.
This allows applications like KRunner or Rofi to list and switch between
rooms.
If you are reading this a bit early, the release builds might still be cooking, but they should be available in the next few hours. There about 40 more features and at least 30 bugfixes waiting for you, so checkout the release here: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/releases/tag/v0.10.0 . I'd like to thank as always everyone who contributed to this release, it has been a pleasure to work with you folks and I hope I will see a few of you in the next release as well.
As you might be able to tell, moderation features were a big topic this release. But they are clearly not done yet and I expect more of those to land in the future now that Nheko is fairly mature. There are also a few other cool features planned, so while this release is exciting, there will always be more! Same bad client, same bad... wait, this is not my outro!
Please give this release a whirl and tell us how you like it in #nheko:nheko.im!
Release 1.4.28 has been dropped, to give us time to fix the regression and performance issue added when key share history was worked on. The next RC 1.4.30 will be done next week as usual.
We have started to work on using the new Realm Kotlin SDK (we are using the legacy Java SDK at the moment): it should improve the stability of the app (and so the crash free session) and improve devX. Nearly all the possible blocking points have been handled. This will force us to use suspend methods, which will be useful for ElementX.
Latest tweaks on FTUE have been merged on develop. We will iterate on a few things, but we are close to releasing the feature! New wordings for FTUE are waiting for translations on Weblate. Thanks to all the contributors!
We have set up a nightly build using Firebase app distribution. We keep it internal for the moment, we will see in the future if we want to open it to the community.
New project! open-super-dapp-android is a fully open source, open standard, decentralized "super app" including a secure, encrypted Matrix compatible messenger based off of the Element Messenger, and an Ethereum crypto wallet and web3 browser based off of Alpha Wallet. Our mission is to foster, and provide access to, a decentralized and secure digital commons for all. Github repo: https://github.com/2gatherproject/open-super-dapp-android
OSD is a downstream project of Element, aiming to provide the functionalities of a "super app" like WeChat, just as an open, distributed and not-for-profit app instead of a proprietary, closed and for-profit one.
This software is pre-alpha, actively seeking contributors, donors and maintainers/leaders. Get in on the ground floor and help build something amazing!
Currently, Open Super dApp builds and runs with full functionality of the Element messenger and Alpha Wallet in the same Android app, with all existing tests passing. Efforts to further integrate their functionalities are just beginning.
Next steps include:
Demonstrate easy to use person to person Ethereum payment functionality between Matrix users.
Provide a powerful and easy to use messaging and payment javascript API for use by web3 applications accessed through the Open Super dApp. Produce sample web dApps using this API.
Centralize cryptographic secrets between the wallet and the messenger.
Build a parallel iOS version for iPhones using Element iOS and Alpha Wallet iOS.
This week has seen an merges of many minor, partially longer-pending PRs into the mainline code base: among them a fix for a longer pending CI problem with Apply builds, an update to latest ruma and many minor fixes and style improvements. We've also gotten the Crypto-bindings for the JS in web using WASM a lot further, the only thing remaining for a release are some last minute PRs and fixes in the release infrastructure. But the most changes to the code base this week have been coming from the appservice department, who've submitted, reviewed and merged a whopping seven PRs this week, fixing various problems and adding a bunch of appservice specific features.
Beyond purely code changes this week has seen a lot of project starts, too: For ones, with the help of the rust team, the iOS Team has started integrating the Sliding-Sync/Sync V3 into the upcoming Element-X-Series; the team has put up the first PR to add integration tests against an actual synapse server (some issues pending); a workshop set out the first ideas for the new upcoming timeline API; and a very interesting draft PR was brought in from community member docweirdo proposing a new API on top of the existing SDK to have futures wait for actual completion - no more sending a message and observing sync for the appropriate response yourself.
Synapse Maintenance Container – Docker container with tools for synapse & postgres database maintenance
A lot of things added and changed, and I'm sure I missed something, so I will go with a release candidate this time
New in v0.4.1-RC1
enable PGPASSFILE support for better database password handling
add tools to detect and maybe fix synapse issue 12507 and 13026 (No state group for unknown or outlier event)
internal: added an extension for mautrix-go to serve synapse admin api requests
lots of iternal changes
stui is a typical golang binary, it's also available as stand alone version from the release page
Tools for No state group for unknown or outlier event
[docker run -it --rm registry.gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer:0.4.1-RC1] stui 12507 --help
[docker run -it --rm registry.gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer:0.4.1-RC1] stui 13026 --help
The tools scan the database for the issues and tells you which rooms are affected. Adding the --fix option, it ~~destroys your database~~deletes the bogus extremeties. Use at your own risc. And make a backup.
The doc have still a lot of space for improvements…
Start the container without command and let do its magic :)
What it does by default:
daily:
purge all rooms without local members
run the state autocompressor (500/100)
weekly:
delete old remote media (>90 days)
delete old message history from public joinable rooms (>180 days)
Because I don't like having to change my display name to tell coworkers when I'm away, I've written a maubot plugin for an auto-responder bot.
It allows me to signal when I'm away, at which point anyone who sends a message in an existing DM will be sent an automated reply so they know that I'm away, when I'll be back, and how to reach out to me in case of emergencies (it does this once per DM until I come back). When I'm back, I just need to tell the bot and it will automatically turn off the auto-responder and give me a summary of the DMs in which I've missed messages while I was away.
The source code and package for this plugin are available right here: https://github.com/babolivier/maubot-autoreply 🙂
I just created a simple bot that generates a MSC url from the specified MSC id.
The source code for the project can be found at https://mau.dev/minecraftchest1/mscbot/. And example instance can be found at @maubottest1:synapse1.arsrobotics.org Demo and use the bot in #msc-bot:synapse1.arsrobotics.org
My release tracking bot received a bunch more work since the last update. It now supports tracking repos, groups, and user stars on GitHub, GitLab (both .com and self-hosted), as well as Gitea (though Gitea requires a token for reading stars). And also tracking "releases" - a.k.a. tags - on bare Git repos, at least as long as they don't require SSH key authorization. Things are getting ever closer to a 1.0 release, with only really some missing bang commands and error reporting being the remaining pieces.
The Matrix Summit 2022 is a community event taking place Thu, 25th to Sun, 28th Aug
at c-base in Berlin. Today's the last day to propose presentations and workshop. The exact deadline is 22:22 (Europe/Berlin).
Will you be in Berlin and have a Matrix project to talk about? Can you organise a workshop about how to use Matrix? How does your community or workplace use Matrix?
Submit your proposal now!
FrOSCon is a conference that takes place in Siegburg/Bonn, Germany on 21st and 22nd August. Most presentations will be German, but there are some in English as well. It's all about free, open source software.
And, best of all, we'll have an entire DevRoom track for a day – full of Matrix. Furthermore, you can come by the Matrix stand for that famous hallway track. ✨ I know I'll be there. 👋
Hey all, it's time for another Synapse release! That's right, Synapse
1.63 is out,
let's have a look at it.
Clarifications on "anonymised" server statistics
Synapse has the ability to report usage statistics to the Matrix.org Foundation
(or to another location, if configured to do so). These statistics, such as
number of users, number of rooms joined by the server, etc. (they don't feature
any identifiable information about users and rooms) help us monitor the health
of the public federation.
In this release of Synapse, we have updated our public documentation about this
feature to clarify how it works and what exactly is being reported. This
documentation can be found right
here.
Note that previous documentation and prompts surrounding this feature called it
"anonymised" server statistics. This could easily be misinterpreted, as while
per-user statistics are not reported, homeserver server names are. We have
therefore changed said documentation and prompts to be clearer about
what is actually reported.
Note that your homeserver will never report any statistics if the report_stats
configuration option is set to false. Server admins who are curious about
which software is used by the Matrix.org Foundation to record server statistics
can check out panopticon.
Improved filtering for public room search
This version of Synapse ships with an experimental implementation of
MSC3827 which
allows filtering public room search results by room type. This feature will
enable better discoverability for Matrix Spaces (which are rooms with a specific
type, under the hood), as it will enable clients to search specifically for
public spaces.
This feature is still experimental as its
MSC hasn't
completed the MSC process yet, though it is in its final comment period at the
time this post is being written. This means a stable implementation will be
coming to Synapse very soon, so watch this space!
Everything else
Synapse 1.63 also includes a new rate limiter to limit invites per issuer. This
rate limiter can be configured using the new rc_invites.per_issuer
configuration setting, see the
documentation
for more information.
See the full
changelog for a
complete list of changes in this release.
Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our
thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including (in no particular
order) Beeper,
villepeh and Petr
Vaněk, as well as anyone helping us make Synapse
better by sharing their feedback and reporting issues.
This week Matthew gives us a general update on everything Matrix and Element. What is going on with Sliding Sync, OpenID Connect or P2P Matrix? Let's find out!
We're also pleased to announce the next episode of Open Tech Will Save Us has been scheduled. We will be talking live and interacting with you on July 27, 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST) on the subject of platforms with people from GNOME, KDE and Element.
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.
The Spec Core Team took a concentrated effort to work through our priority backlog of MSCs, resulting in the decent amount of MSCs hitting FCP this week!
Thankfully the community has nearly matched this number by adding quite a few more MSCs into the fray. But we're still up by 1!
Perhaps one of the most exciting MSCs to move forwards is MSC2676: Message editing, which allows users to edit events (including messages) that they've previously sent. Part of the aggregations work, this functionality has been used extensively throughout the ecosystem. But only now is it making its way into the spec proper. I'm also personally excited about MSC2285: Private read receipts, which allows users to read a room's contents without advertising it.
Of course the above MSCs are still in Final Comment Period; a 5 day period where anyone can raise their concerns about an MSC before it is accepted. So if you have any last-minute comments, be sure to get them in now!
Another MSC I'm personally excited about! This MSC provides an endpoint on the homeserver to request the rooms (or spaces) you have in common with another user. I would find this useful for incoming DMs from users I may or may not know. Note that the client may not already have this information if it is making use of lazy loading room members, so it needs a way to ask the server for this information.
Looks like the MSC is currently sitting in the Spec Core Team's review backlog. We'll get to it soon!
The Synapse team has been hard at work! This week we published Synapse 1.63.0rc1. Among the notable features are support for MSC3827: filtering /publicRooms by room type, allowing for better discovery of Spaces. You can read more about that here. In addition, the release contains a number of bugfixes, updates to the documentation, and internal changes focused on reducing memory usage and increasing performance, as well as supporting the long-standing goal of faster room joins. More on these next week in the official release announcement!
Good news, as you might have noticed, conduit.rs is back online and better than ever! Matrix.org is so kind and donates this Linux server to me. I already host a discord appservice and handle 23k messages per day and, most importantly, now I'm at the top of both #ping rooms ;)
On the development side, I'm currently working on a big refactor, see https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/merge_requests/365 and please give feedback if you have experience this is your chance to have a lasting impact.
rofi is a application launcher and dmenu replacement. https://github.com/davatorium/rofi. I made a little plugin for it to switch channels on the nheko matrix client https://mzte.de/git/LordMZTE/rofi-nheko
You can now edit aliases in Nheko! This means you can publish your own aliases in the room directory as well as in the room. If an alias can't be used by people (because it isn't listed in the room directory), that alias is highlighted in red with an easy option to fix it (if you have permissions to do so). You can also easily switch the primary (canonical) alias of the room.
With this the feature set I wanted to have for the next release is complete. I wanted to focus on improving moderation and room management capabilities in Nheko and it does now have a very basic sets of capabilities to do so. I do already have plans to expand on them though!
So instead of working on new features, I will be focusing on bug fixes. For a start if someone has the username room, Nheko will now omit the reply fallback to prevent pinging the whole room. The verification window now also should always be big enough to show its contents and we now properly explain to users, why emojis might look different on different devices fixing an issue reported via Twitter... There is also a new icon for the room directory (it is now a building, very punny, huh?).
Tobias has done some internal refactoring, which will allow us to create more automated tests and prepare for the eventual Qt6 migration
Nvrwhere has improved NeoChat's Timeline layout: On a wide window, the bubbles will now be centered in the window, in order to better use the space while not stretching the timeline out too far
He's also fixed several papercut issues around the UI, for example editing and replying using the keyboard shortcuts
The browser will now properly open when clicking on a link when using wayland
The first part of Snehit's GSoC project is almost ready to land: The room list is gaining a list of spaces, which can be used to filter for the rooms included in that space
We're also moving forward on the E2EE support, with NeoChat now allowing a user to send an encrypted message into a matrix room - provided libQuotient supports it 🙂
Tobias is also working on improved Reaction & Emoji pickers, which will allow users to select different variants like skin tones and which will behave better on mobile devices
After some successful testing on current registration flows, we are running testing sessions on the new and improved registration flows over the next week.
We are also moving away from spreadsheets over to TestRail, a test case management tool which will help us track regressions and issues. We’ll be offering our community testers a change to try it out over the next few weeks.
Started experimenting with matrix-react-sdk for an improved crypto(graphy) experience
The share screen button in video rooms on desktop has been temporarily removed until the underlying issues can be resolved
We have removed most of unused code in the Element Web repositories and are working on setting up tools to avoid forgetting to remove unused code in the future
The new search experience and DM flow have received some bug fixes and polish in addition to more polish to CSS
Final commenting period expected to start next week
We’ve been tackling our process around reviewing PRs to reduce review time, taking a two pronged approach at focusing on reviewing new PRs quickly and resolving our oldest non-draft PRs every week
Did you know that some of our issues in GitHub are labelled with “Help wanted” and “good first issue” if they’re especially suited for community contributions?
In the works (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
Version 1.8.22 RC was released to TestFlight and comes with the following changes:
In-app notifications are now available.
A shiny new offline indicator that's visible in more parts of the app.
A handful of fixes for issues when making calls.
Unfortunately this build was rejected following the latest requirements for account deletion in the App Store Review Guidelines. We’re looking into ways we can resolve this problem.
We have started to use Sentry to provide more insights into technical issues encountered whilst using the app.
Work continues on implementing the new app layout.
1.4.28 is being prepared with the following changes:
Makes the build process compatible with F-Droid again!
Fixes for voice messages not playing and some characters showing in their escaped html form - such as quotes showing as "
Nightly builds are on the way, these builds will be under a separate Application ID allowing them to be installed alongside the production Element app. Expect more information to come soon.
We’re investigating general performance regressions across the app, with some improvements already in the pipeline.
In the last two weeks or so, we've made some UX improvements:
unified SSO and ordinary login cards
unified media and regular file-uploads, and improved drag-and-drop support
improved feedback while validating login and registration input
We also added one feature that friends of mine were requesting 😃: annotations can now be equipped with a "motivation" (part of the w3c web annotation data model, mentioned in MSC3574), and filtered by motivation. This makes it easy to, for example, mark some discussions as "questions" about the text, which is pretty useful when managing a class.
And I've now finally managed to cut a long-overdue new 2.6.0 release of the Ruby SDK, which includes better support for concurrent multi-threaded usage as well as improvements on Ruby 3.0+. (The tests are currently green for Ruby 2.6 to 3.1)
The team is proud to announce the first release of @matrix-org/matrix-sdk-crypto-nodejs to npmjs.com (0.1.0-beta.1) for all the best npm user friendliness you can get. This marks the first release of the crypto ffi for nodejs from the rust team supreseeding the previously existing project. It is also the very first release for nodejs featuring the great new vodozemac core (replacement of libolm). We've marked this as a beta release while we work out any remaining minor hickups or problems, so if you see something, say something! However, the main point of contact to it for most people is probably TravisR |s Nodejs Bot SDK, which is already consuming that beta in its latest release.
After a year of working on different ways to support encryption, the bot-sdk has finally stabilized on the rust-sdk crypto crate for crypto bindings internally. Tutorials on how to get your bot/appservice set up and working with the new crypto code are here (note that for appservices you'll need to turn on EDUs and MSC3202 in Synapse). If you run into problems, please report bugs or pop by #matrix-bot-sdk:t2bot.io on Matrix for help.
Alongside support for encryption, v0.6.0 brings a whole lot of other functionality for appservices, Synapse Admin API users, and bots wanting to make use of real DMs. Check out the full changelog here.
axon.sh v0.17.0 has been released which adds support for managing per-user ratelimits, and includes a fix for a bug related to server discovery. Please try it out and report your experience in #axon:matrix.thisisjoes.site, I'd appreciate feedback!
A whole heaping of work has landed for my release tracker project, with it now supporting tracking releases for projects (loose projects, all users stars, or all projects under a namespace) on both GitHub and GitLab (for .com as well as self-hosted instances).
Documentation is currently still a bit lacking, but hoping to have more information both on setting it up as well as using it Soon™.
my conference talk at ACCU this year is now out on YouTube: Matrix is a Distributed Real-time Database. I explain what Matrix is, and show how to use curl to send and receive messages, and why it's "interesting" to write a server, and, as the title hints, I introduce the idea that Matrix can be for a lot more than messaging.
Reminder: Matrix Summit Conference Berlin call for participation ends next week
As announced earlier, there will be a conference all about matrix. (See TWIM 2022-07-01)
We encourage everyone with matrix-related projects, products and ideas to come around and give a talk: From the past to the future, from the moment of the idea, the story of the creation or the vision of the future. We’d like to understand the principles as well as the technology. The conference is from people for people, so if you’d like to talk about yourself, your community, your organization, please do. Showcase yourself and your relation to the Matrix world. Let's get to know each other!
We aim to compile a versatile program. We are open to contributions of any length, from 5 minutes (lightning talks) to presentations and talks to workshops and hacksessions up to 5 hours. We’ll come together to discover, celebrate and enjoy the world of matrix. Also, if you have any arty, cultural or playful contribution in mind, please offer it.
➡️ Proposals for the Matrix Summit in Berlin can be submitted until next Friday (2022-07-22 22:22, TZ=Europe/Berlin) via pretalx. 📝
Rick and I talk about the the brand new Chatterbox. Is it Riot Embedded rebranded? Did the world need yet another embedded chat solution? Can I host mine? Can I make it clever? Let's find out!
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.
While the name may not make much sense to the layperson, the idea of a "canonical" Direct Messaging room (DM) is one that would always be referenced whenever a DM between two people is requested. That is, instead of potentially having a few different DM rooms with someone, both you and the other person would always know which room to use when DM'ing each other.
We don't really have this today. DM rooms are just group rooms with only you and someone else in them. If you attempt to DM another user, your client will try to guess the best room to use for this through some clever heuristics. What's lacking is a defined way to always arrive at the same room for this action.
This MSC attempts to define one, and would allow other functionality to be built on top of it, such as definitively knowing which room to send user-to-user data into, and to read from.
This week the Synapse team released Synapse 1.62! It features a lot of changes, including a fairly big update of spam checker callbacks, performance improvements around syncing and device management, improved customisation of .well-known client files, and much more. Read all about it on the Matrix.org blog: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/07/06/synapse-1-62-released
Apart from this, we've been working on refining and fine-tuning our processes as a team over the past few weeks, which, among other things, resulted in the creation of this documentation that gives contributors some insight on how we review pull requests on Synapse. Olivier has also landed his work on running Complement (our next-gen integration test suite) against instances of Synapse using workers, which is a massive improvement for our CI.
Hello again TWIM, updates to my Kubernetes charts have been rolling along as usual, though I've been a bit more silent about them. This week sees the addition of a synatainer chart though, for those who want it for maintaining their K8s Synapse. (And the Synapse chart was also updated to 1.62.0, and element-web to 1.11.0)
If you have any questions, comments, requests for assistance, etc with them then #matrix-on-kubernetes:fiksel.info is where you want to go.
The k8s-at-home dendrite helm chart now optionally configures ingress resources for dendrite in polylith mode. It has also had some bugs fixed and been updated to support the most recent version of dendrite.
Check out the chart here: https://github.com/k8s-at-home/charts/blob/master/charts/incubator/dendrite/README.md
Quadrix v1.2.0 has now been released. It's already available for Linux (https://snapcraft.io/quadrix, https://flathub.org/apps/details/chat.quadrix.Quadrix) and Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=chat.quadrix.android). The Windows, MacOS and iOS versions are awaiting approval from the respective stores.
New in this release:
Brand new icons from Remix Icons (https://github.com/Remix-Design/RemixIcon)
Messages can be redacted (for now only by the message owner)
Users with admin power can kick other users from rooms
Users can start a DM room directly from the member list in a group room
Please leave feedback/comments at #quadrix:matrix.org or in the issues at https://github.com/alariej/quadrix (stars welcome :-)
Note: The PR (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/pull/1348) to publish Quadrix on the matrix.org client list has been submitted more than a month ago, but still awaiting approval. Anyone here can help?
You can now edit aliases in Nheko! This means you can publish your own aliases in the room directory as well as in the room. If an alias can't be used by people (because it isn't listed in the room directory), that alias is highlighted in red with an easy option to fix it (if you have permissions to do so). You can also easily switch the primary (canonical) alias of the room.
With this the feature set I wanted to have for the next release is complete. I wanted to focus on improving moderation and room management capabilities in Nheko and it does now have a very basic sets of capabilities to do so. I do already have plans to expand on them though!
So instead of working on new features, I will be focusing on bug fixes. For a start if someone has the username room, Nheko will now omit the reply fallback to prevent pinging the whole room. The verification window now also should always be big enough to show its contents and we now properly explain to users, why emojis might look different on different devices fixing an issue reported via Twitter... There is also a new icon for the room directory (it is now a building, very punny, huh?).
You have probably seen it, this week Element released Chatterbox, an embedded chat client you can use to build chat assistants, chatbots… or probably other use cases we didn't even think of. It's OSS and really just a lightweight Matrix client. Rick talks about it in greater length with me in today's Matrix Live.
Fix for missing end tokens in sync responses from Synapse >= v1.61.0 (Thanks to Tom Price for !20).
A prettier animation while loading comments.
/ipns/latest.cactus.chat is updated to point to the latest release, so sites linking there should already be using the new version.
Also, while we're here: we're surprised and delighted to so many people using Cactus Comments!
We just crossed 300k guest users registered on cactus.chat (roughly equivalent to 300k unique anonymous users). 🎉
An unfortunate side-effect is that we're having to up our hosting game to keep up with you all - and it's getting a bit expensive on our student budgets.
We set up a donations page on Open Collective, in case any of you would want to help out. ✨🫂
After a long hunt, we've eventually found a significant problem with napi-rs, the layer we use in between Rust and Node.js for the crypto-nodejs, in the way it manages the memory coming from async functions in rust. With that out of the way and the last remaining features implemented, we are on the final stretch into in putting out the first prerelease of crypto-nodejs-bindings—brace for it to come near your next npmjs.com early next week 🤞🤞.
<matrix-room-element/> is a web component (vanilla JS/HTML/CSS & distributed un-minified) that can be imported and inserted in any web page, to display the content of a (public, soon with authentication, and private room support) matrix room.
It is still heavy in development, and still looking for the right patterns (web components, and matrix).
We're trying to make composable components that can be inserted in any web page, and maybe help users use Matrix as a CMS, embedable anywhere (web). Our first use case is on https://libli.org (that now comes with a /login endpoint - alpha) (this event in libli, loading a matrix-room-element with correct room-id/event-id, https://libli.org/thisweekinmatrix:matrix.org/$KsbQ0JsqAXN9g-57M-aXyVohZYM3SZkKKkuUb9dW928).
To explain what it's for: Using the UnifiedPush standard, ntfy enables self-hosted (Google-free) push notifications from Matrix (and other) servers. Especially useful for users of Google-free Android (such as from f-droid).
If you try it, please report any feedback or problems or improvements in #matrix-docker-ansible-deploy:devture.com . Any updates to the scripts or docs may appear first on my branch before being merged into the playbook.
The option for reports to be polled via the synapse admin API (rather than configuring proxy pass-through)
The option to disable the displaying new reports in moderation room (so that you can use the TrustedReporters protection without the abuse reports features)
A !mjolnir rules matching <entity> command to search watched lists.
Glob support to the kick command.
A background queue for kicking (to reduce the load of large glob kicks)
A slight improvement to the performance of the redact command
An improvement to documentation (including dedicated setup documentation)
A new mute action for the since command !mjolnir since 1day mute 100
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.
Hey all, Synapse
1.62 is out! Let's
have a look inside.
Spam checker improvements
In the past few weeks, the Synapse team has been working with the Matrix.org
Trust & Safety team to help module developers build more efficient protections
against spam. As a consequence of this work, Synapse 1.62 introduces new ways
for modules to communicate the result of actions taken against a specific
message or operation through the spam checker module
callbacks.
Previously, most spam checker callbacks would be expected to return a boolean
indicating whether a specific operation should be qualified as spam. Starting
from Synapse 1.62, modules are now expected to return either
synapse.module_api.NOT_SPAM (to indicate an action is not spammy), or an error
code that is part of synapse.module_api.errors.Codes.
Note that the previous behaviour is still supported but is now deprecated, and
will be removed in a future version of Synapse.
See the upgrade
notes
for a list of the affected callbacks and an example of this change. Note that on
top of the list described there, the check_event_for_spam callback was also
updated with a similar
change
in Synapse 1.61.
Everything else
This release of Synapse includes important performance improvements around
syncing, specifically around handling device lists and notifications.
Synapse 1.62 also introduce a changes of its optional dependency on the LDAP3
authentication provider
module to
v0.2.1
in order to fix an issue with usernames that include uppercase characters.
See the full
changelog for a
complete list of changes in this release. Also please have a look at the
upgrade
notes
for this version.
Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our
thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including (in no particular
order) Beeper, Sami
Olmari, Daniel
Aloni,
Thumbscrew and Hannes
Lerchl.
I had the chance to have Ryan with me for a special edition of Open Tech Will Save Us on Thunderbird to celebrate their 102 release, which includes Matrix support for the first time in a stable release.
We covered many interesting topics, such as the importance of specifying the expected behaviour of clients and servers in a protocol to deliver the best experience to end users (wink, wink, reminds you of something?), why Thunderbird was more dormant and is now vibrant as ever, what they plan for the future. I had good fun and I hope attendees did too! Next episode is going to be at the end of July, but you can already join the
Open Tech Will Save Us room
Audrey Tang, Digital Minister for Taiwan is offering sponsorship for full localisation of Element and other leading Matrix clients into zh_Hant_TW - see https://twitter.com/audreyt/status/1542296087310258176. If you're interested in helping out, please get in touch with Thib and we'll coordinate.
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.
This MSC is a relatively simple it. Currently widgets are only allowed to specify their capabilities (what the widget is allowed to do, like reading the logged-in user's display name) when the widget is loaded. This MSC attempts to allow that model to be extended to let widgets ask for additional (or fewer) permissions over time.
I can't help but be reminded of the shift in permissions on iOS and Android here in how they shifted from "ask all permissions up front" to "ask for permission for each thing when it's used in the app" :)
New Matrix Intern Usman has just started on his project to prototype Favourite messages in Element Web. He's written a blog post introducing himself and the project: https://yaya-usman.hashnode.dev/outreachy-blog-introducing-myself
This week the Synapse team released Synapse 1.61.1! This is a security release which addresses a high severity vulnerability in URL preview feature. Server administrators are encouraged to update as soon as possible! We have published a blog post explaining the vulnerability and detailing a few workarounds that can be implemented on homeservers which can't be updated right away: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/06/28/security-release-synapse-1-61-1
Other than that we have published the first RC for Synapse 1.62.0 (which was followed today by a second bugfix RC). Synapse 1.62 will feature an improved spam checker API for modules, performance improvements around device lists, more customisation for .well-known client files and much more. Watch this space next week for the full rundown 🙂
This week we released Dendrite 0.8.9 which contains a number of improvements around backfilling room history, amongst other things.
Features
Incoming device list updates over federation are now queued in JetStream for processing so that they will no longer block incoming federation transactions and should never end up dropped, which will hopefully help E2EE reliability
The /context endpoint now returns "start" and "end" parameters to allow pagination from a context call
The /messages endpoint will no longer return "end" when there are no more messages remaining
Deactivated user accounts will now leave all rooms automatically
New admin endpoint /_dendrite/admin/evacuateUser/{userID} has been added for forcing a local user to leave all joined rooms
Dendrite will now automatically attempt to raise the file descriptor limit at startup if it is too low
Fixes
A rare crash when retrieving remote device lists has been fixed
Fixes a bug where events were not redacted properly over federation
The /invite endpoints will now return an error instead of silently proceeding if the user ID is obviously malformed
As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more Dendrite discussion.
Thunderbird 102 with Matrix support is now available for download at https://thunderbird.net/. The Matrix implementation reflects what's been previously discussed in TWIM with some additional bug fixes. You can read more about what's new in our blog post.
Ryan discussed the Thunderbird 102 release as well as the project in general in this week's Open Tech Will Save Us, give it a listen for the latest inside scoop.
Have you ever noticed that some people are just plain @*%&!§%"+? Well, to quickly deal with what they wrote, Nheko now has a /redact @userid:server.name command, so you can redact everything they wrote (as long as it is in the currently cached section of the timeline). Note that you will run into rate limits when using that and Nheko is not yet applying an appropriate backoff in that case.
Similarly, q234rty fixed a lot of cases where icons in Nheko were either blurry or the wrong size. We fixed a few crashes, the room list should now not sometimes store the wrong order of rooms, brausepulver made large avatars cropped locally (since servers don't guarantee any size over 96x96 when cropped and synapse doesn't properly save the full image size in that case) and added a menu entry to copy a roomlink. You can also now define new powerlevels for users instead of using the existing levels in the room and Jason fixed some compiler warnings when a private member struct doesn't have an explicit constructor on some compilers. Nheko also now downloads the full online key backup when you explicitly toggle the switch.
A more noticeable topic might be, that Nheko now requires servers which support the v1.1 API or later and will not allow you to login or register otherwise. At the same time we also enabled support for the shiny and new knock_restricted rule and all remaining groups code was removed (you know, the feature from before spaces were cool).
I also updated Nheko on my work laptop now and since I was quite surprised by how fast it starts now (while my room count is over 900 !), I attached a video of that below for your pleasure.
This week is an exciting time in Element land! We have one feature coming out of beta and another going in: the new search experience is going live with the next release, while video rooms will become available for testing. You can already preview them in the release candidate!
Threads
After investigating ranged read receipts, we are looking at per thread read receipts again as a more practical approach.
Community testing
RC testing done:
Web - MD/HTML support in Space/Room topics
iOS - regression testing of messages, reactions and rooms
Because sometimes you just have to do something else and it might be interesting to some people:
I fixed calls not working when trying to use Element Web with a Conduit server: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/8931
I fixed Element Android still using the unstable endpoint (i.e. the one from the MSC, that proposed it) to list aliases: https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/pull/6288
Sometimes fixing something that annoys you isn't even that hard, and since it annoys you, you have some motivation to fix it. I call this Anger Driven Development (ADD). If you have some things that annoy you, I encourage to try fixing them for a bit. It might help out some other people too. If that makes you want to contribute to Nheko, don't hesitate to join #nheko:nheko.im and ask me to help you out with whatever fix you are trying to contribute.
This time I just decided to clean out some issues, that came up in the Conduit development channel and that weren't fixed yet. Turns out it was just a few lines to change and it hopefully makes the Matrix experience better for everyone in the long run. The changes were also quickly reviewed and are merged now. Do you have any such little fixes that no one hears about, but you are proud of them? Please post about them, I'd love to see them!
Are you enjoying Location Sharing but have tired thumbs from tapping every time you need to update your location? Then fret no more! Element 1.8.20 features our new Live Location Sharing feature, now available in Labs.
Live Location Sharing: Now in Labs, we’ve added the ability to send your location in real time to the people and rooms of your choice!
Mark as Read: Quickly mark a single room as read by long-pressing it on the home screen.
Annoying bugs fixed: It’s much easier to tap the names and avatars of room members, voice messages now work better with VoiceOver enabled and it is significantly faster to create a new room.
Over the last few weeks, a significant push on rust-crypto-support for Nodejs has taken place, e.g. this PR. Major parts are available, the infrastructure to create releases ready, however, a pretty rare huge memory allocation that causes a crash in Nodejs on the CI has blocked progress of the team recently. Debugging this costs a lot of time and it is yet unclear, how much of a problem this really is (as the cause stays mysterious), however it has also been seen in the wild on Windows now-- a concerning development.
This week, the team released version 0.10.2. In this version, we added experimental support for native group call signaling MSC3401. We have been playing with it in our internal clients, and we have to say that we are pretty happy with the result! There are still some bugs, as sometimes a new call is creating instead of joining the existing one. But it's looking great!
We also took the opportunity to fix some bugs in call handling. Now the ringtone is properly properly when rejecting a call. Also, when opening the client, we don't trigger a call event anymore if the call end event is in the sync response.
We also did some refactoring for the sync handler, reducing the usage of JSON objects and adding some try catch to handle issues when handling event room updates. We switched to custom CachedStreamController so even if the stream has already been listened to, you can still access the last sent value.
Finally, when sending messages when under unreliable connection, messages could be sent out of order. This is now fixed thanks to the implementation of a message sending queue.
This week's release completed support for resolving, creating, and deleting room aliases. Get the code and contribute at https://git.thisisjoes.site/joe/axon.sh (supports GitHub and GitLab login) and join #axon:matrix.thisisjoes.site for discussion and updates!
Two is better than one! Ascurius joined the synadm team and helps maintain the github repo, code new features and support users on github and #synadm:peek-a-boo.at.
Thanks to all synadm users, feature requesters and contributors, issue submitters and #synadm:peek-a-boo.at members. It's fun to maintain a project and see its community grow each day!
Some features from the latest releases we'd like to highlight:
The local part of an MXID can now be used as the <user_id> argument in various synadm commands. Of course, there is still the possibility to use the full MXID if desired.
We have added a shadow-ban command so that admins now can more easily deal with abusive users: synadm room shadow-ban
The room state API is now supported, try synadm room state
And with the help of that API we created a command to easily generate a list of rooms and corresponding admins and mods: synadm room power-levels
The synadm room search command was adapted to make better use of current Synapse versions possibilities.
Documentation chapter around using synadm together with Synapse instances deployed with matrix-docker-ansible-deploy.
The magic around "retrieval of the own homeserver name" got a massive overhaul. This affects several user and media subcommands.
Have a look at the releases list for more details: https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm/releases
Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️
Matrix Summit Conference Berlin calls for your participation.
With the first Matrix Summit Conference we try to showcase the matrix-eco-system in its whole width and depth.
We are looking for talks and workshops around matrix-related projects and products. We are interested in all aspects of those: From the past to the future, from the moment of the idea, the story of the creation or the vision of the future.
We’d like to understand the principles as well as the technology.
The conference is from people for people, so if you’d like to talk about yourself, your community, your organization, please do.
Showcase yourself and your relation to the Matrix world.
We try to compile a versatile program. We are open to contributions of any length, from 5 minutes(lightning talks) to presentations and talks to workshops and hacksessions up to 5 hours.
We’ll come together to discover, celebrate and enjoy the world of matrix. Also, if you have any arty, cultural or playful contribution in mind, please offer it.
You can enter proposals until 2022-07-22 22:22 (Europe/Berlin), 3 weeks from now in our pretalx
Matrix-summit-berlin-2022 matrix summit space
The #matrix-summit-berlin-2022 space will contain all rooms and subspaces related to the event.
For the organization of the summit we have orga-room. Just come by if you like to know something or help with the summit.
There is a gitlab organisation which contains our codebase and issuetrackers.
Sponsors?
We try to make everything low cost. But we need some money for food, drinks, merch, travel, accommodation. Please contact Yan or write mail, when you can sponsor the event.
Note this is a community event that is not organised by the Matrix.org Foundation.
Meet other matrix users, chat about Matrix, the rest, and everything else, discuss your Matrix ideas, sign each other in persona, and maybe spice the evening with a good mate or beer.
Also when the bbq is lit you may wish you brougth your favorite item :)
Every first Wednesday of the month in the c-base at 8pm ('til the next pandemic).
An oversimplified, easy to implement, embedded live chat widget that allows your website's visitors to send messages seamlessly to your Matrix account.
The widget is Built using Svelte, so everything goes in one nice bundle, its fast and awesome to embed. No need for external libraries or big framework.js files. Just import into your website's structure one JS and one CSS files.
The server uses Golang, the Binary is only 3.2MB in size. Make sure you configure the .env file.
A demo and more information about livematrix can be found here:
https://github.com/osousa/livematrix
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.
Today we're exceptionally releasing Synapse
1.61.1, which comes
as a security release. Server administrators are encouraged to update as soon as
possible.
This release fixes a vulnerability with Synapse's URL preview feature. URL
previews of some web pages can lead to unbounded recursion, causing the request
to either fail, or in some cases crash the running Synapse process.
Homeservers with the url_preview_enabled configuration option set to false
(the default value) are unaffected. Instances with the enable_media_repo
configuration option set to false are also unaffected, as this also disables
the URL preview functionality.
Server administrators who are unable to update Synapse should disable URL
previews by setting url_preview_enabled: false in their configuration file.
They can also delegate URL preview to a separate, dedicated worker to ensure the
process crashing does not impact other functionality of Synapse.
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.
The big news from the spec this last week is the release of Matrix v1.3 🎉 (read the blog post if you haven't already)! Roughly three months since the release of Matrix v1.2, this release brings improvements such as knocking on rooms, room version 10, reduced metadata in encrypted messages and the first pieces of aggregations finally landing in the spec proper. And more! See the blog post for the full changelog.
Most of the Spec Core Team has been away this week, thus there has not been much moving forwards. But we do have two new MSCs from @duxovni and @Johennes, which you can view above.
This MSC allows for differentiating between different incoming streams of media coming from a single user by adding a sdp_stream_metadata dictionary to Voice over IP (VoIP)-related events. This is a relatively simply addition with useful functionality, such as allowing a single user to share both their camera feed and screen share at the same time!
1.4.24 released to beta testers which includes support for UnifiedPush and fixes for voice recordings and duplicated messages in the timeline
We're making it easier to opt in to Live Location Sharing by displaying the labs setting within the location sharing flow, no need to hunt down the setting anymore!
We have also fixed some outstanding crashes around opening large images in the timeline and signing out
added previews of room name and topic in tooltips for room icons
added handling for an eventId component of annotation URLs
Along with a number of other minor bugfixes and UX improvements. And, we've added one neat new user-facing feature: inline previews of video and audio annotations. This one is a little hard to explain, but a video is worth ten thousand words:
A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.
Released Ruma 0.6.4 with a bug fix for rich reply fallback generation
Added support for pretty much everything from Matrix 1.3, which was to a large extent just the removal of feature flags for previously-unstable functionality
Thanks to @zecakeh for both implementing most of these features and now stabilizing them in Ruma!
