Matrix Live 🎙

This week my guest is Adam who created the minimalistic Android client your family wants… by accident. And Adam has more ideas for the future.

Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR says

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC3754: Removing profile information

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've mostly been working on our existing projects. Unfortunately this means little to report this week, but if there's something that needs out attention then please mention it in #sct-office:matrix.org 🙂

Dept of P2P 👥

Pinecone (website)

Peer-to-peer overlay routing for the Matrix ecosystem

neilalexander reports

Things have been relatively quiet on the P2P front recently as we have been working on fixing bugs in Dendrite, but we will be releasing build 94 of the P2P demos for iOS and for Android soon, which feature new fair queuing in Pinecone. This should help to reduce congestion from single nodes. It also includes all of the latest Dendrite updates.

• Android: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uK_BcHGiAYHkN6OAA7P73obAquwShRg5
• iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/Tgh2MEk6

The demos are still very rough around the edges — join us in #p2p:matrix.org for discussion!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

dmr says

Hello everyone. It's been a quieter week for the Synapse team---many of us are away this week.

We released Synapse 1.55.0rc1 yesterday, a little later than usual. A full release is still planned for the coming Tuesday (22nd March). Please note that this release breaks compatibility with Mjolnir 1.3.1 and earlier. Administrators using Mjolnir should ensure it is upgraded before upgrading Synapse to 1.55.0rc1.

Otherwise, the release candidate includes:

• New tools in the module API enabling modules to prevent administrators from deleting rooms and deactivating users. Half-Shot explains the movtivation here.
• Experimental support for using Twisted's asyncio reactor. If this is feasible, it might allow us to leverage tools and libraries for Python's growing asyncio ecosystem.
• A performance fix for logging in on large accounts.
• A variety of other bugfixes and internal tweaks.

Please feel free to try it out and let us know how you get on: either in the #synapse:matrix.org or on GitHub if you encounter any unexplained problems. As ever, many thanks to all contributors involved.

Behind the scenes we've been working on a few longer-term projects:

• Continued support for threading (MSC3440) and the mechanism which supports it, relations (MSC2674).
• Managing Synapse's dependencies using poetry to formally lock requirements across all our debian and docker releases.
• Performance investigations: we're looking at getting better profiling information; and seeing if we can reclaim CPU cycles by cancelling processing when a requester terminates their request early.

Hopefully we'll see these plans come to fruition over the coming weeks.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair says

This week brings some bugfixes to DMs, and general improvements to the way channels are synced on startup.

I've also written some setup instructions to assist anyone wanting to try this bridge out for themselves!

As for bugs, I just stumbled upon a big one just now: if a KakaoTalk channel hasn't had activity for a few days, sending a message in its Matrix portal may crash. This happens because of the KakaoTalk API's apparent eagerness in forgetting about inactive channels (IIRC content that's a few weeks old is deleted from their servers, for privacy reasons), and the likely fix is for the bridge to use the right API calls to trigger those channels back into an active state before trying to interact with them.

Once that's fixed, the next thing I'll get out of the way (for the sake of completeness) is the web-based login interface, which all of the other mautrix-python bridges support (and is quite nice for privacy-conscious users that would rather send their KakaoTalk passwords directly to the bridge, instead of through a Matrix homeserver).

After that, I'll work on contact searching & inviting contacts to group chats or DMs.

---

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

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

Nico announces

After our release last week, of course all the bugreports came out of the woodworks. As such we fixed issues with device ids being set incorrectly after SSO, screensharing, overlapping in the reply popup and UIA flows without fallback support like https://github.com/devture/matrix-synapse-shared-secret-auth showing up as UIA stages. Key backup is also now enabled by default (if it has the correct signatures and everything), various layouting fixes and more.

We'll probably make a bugfix release in the next few days.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Kegan announces

I have been working on integrating MSC3575: Sliding Sync into Element-Web. This is a pretty large endeavour but there has been a lot of progress on it already!

There now exists a JS-SDK PR to add the core bits of Sliding Sync (along with E2EE/to-device extensions), and a React-SDK branch which adds the Labs flag, config.json section for the proxy URL, and sets up room subscriptions when you select a room. The net result?

This is still early days: you cannot scroll the room list yet and there's still many outstanding issues to fix before it can land on mainline, but it's at the stage where it's almost ready for people to try out. Watch this space...

Thib reports

• Continuing with the removal of the skinning layer, instead recommending module replacement - please talk to us in #element-dev:matrix.org if this is a surprise.

• Continued removal of Groups/Communities - we’re expecting it to land this week (for release on about April 11th).

• Continuing development of live location sharing.

• We’ve reduced tsc errors by 70% in react-sdk unit tests!

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

  • We're working on a prototype for voice rooms, which are persistent voice chats similar to Discord's voice channel feature. Expect this to receive more attention and polish over the coming weeks
  • Threads are now using the stable prefix m.thread and are currently undergoing acceptance testing. We’re hoping to launch it out of labs in the next few weeks.

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu says

• The release on the App Store is still blocked on the review. We continue to work hard to solve this issue.
• The threads feature received a lot of polish and bug fixes. We are not far from making them out of the LABS setting.
• The timeline got several bug fixes.
• We fixed memory leaks in the share extension.
• The name and avatar customization after account creation is almost done.

Thib says

• We’re currently at the last mile of testing for space creation & space management on iOS. Thanks to everyone who helped with community testing last week!
• We’re currently on track to merge and ship these changes at the end of this month.
• Once released, Element on all platforms will have parity across the core spaces feature set!

Element Android (website)

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

adam announces

• 1.4.4 has dropped across all channels, we've had some promising early feedback that the storage/RAM usage is starting to decrease, as always thanks for the reports and keep them coming! Full release notes available in the usual place

• Threads are levelling up and becoming driven by MSC3440, increasing their reliability and cross device consistency. If you're already using threads we'll automatically migrate them for you in the next release 1.4.6

• Live location sharing work has started! Soon you'll be able to share and receive location updates in real time

Cinny (website)

Cinny is a Matrix client focused on simplicity, elegance and security

Lozenge reports

v1.8.1 & v1.8.2

Bug fixes:

• Fix new messages don't appear
• Fix pressing a key with an active highlight jumps in history
• Fix not all emoji-only messages being detected as Jumbo-emoji
• Fix muted room show unread indicator
• Fix view source shows original event for an edited message
• Fix wrong notification count and NaN notification
• Fix ⌘ CMD + k hotkey not working MacOS
• Fix sending message not mark room as read

Release: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny/releases/tag/v1.8.2

Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in Join our channel at: #cinny:matrix.org Github: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny Twitter: https://twitter.com/@cinnyapp

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Thirdroom (website)

A browser-based open metaverse client

Robert Long says

Our metaverse-on-matrix project is progressing quickly!

• Robert and Nate have been working on updating the Third Room demo to use the latest bitECS and threecs work as well as moving rendering and game update loops off the main thread!
• Bruno has been porting Native Group VoIP to Hydrogen SDK which Third Room will use for both spatial voice chat and DataChannels
• Ajay has a working scaffold of the early UI concepts paired with Hydrogen SDK to incorporate the room list and chat views.

More design work is happening as well, here's our latest from Rian

Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP says

v0.6.0 & v0.6.1

Want to purge a space recursively? Matrix Wrench now has a button for that. It will try to fetch a list of all sub spaces and rooms and offer you to delete them via the Synapse Admin API.

Also, you can now knock on rooms and the room lists allow to navigate to a room page by clicking on a room ID.

Next up will likely be searchable lists for rooms and users as well as other usability and layout improvements. The goal is to have a nice-looking, stable v1.0 release for its anniversary on 13th June. I'm looking for help with design and documentation.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma (website)

A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.

Jonas Platte says

Nothing user-facing changed last week, but this week:

• @timokoesters fixed some bugs in the state resolution code around knocking (room version 7) and restricted rooms (room version 8 / 9)
• @zecakeh added loads of primary extensible event types:
  • m.image
  • m.video
  • m.audio
  • m.location
  • m.voice
• @ShadowJonathan added support for the server-version endpoints for the server-server API (MSC3723) and the identity-service API (MSC2320)
• [@zecekeh] added support for threads and translatable text messages
• I (@jplatte) moved the prev_content state event field into unsigned as per Matrix v1.2
• @zecakeh cleaned up the module structure for discovery-related endpoints

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

Jonas Platte reports

In the last few weeks,

• @gnunicorn created separate crates for the different storage backends
• @zecakeh made it easier to initialize those storage backends
• I (@jplatte) created a ClientBuilder to simplify client initialization
• @zecakeh moved some functionality into a new Encryption type to improve the API structure
• I updated the SDK to make use of Ruma's support for the v3 endpoint paths on servers that support it
• I improved the quality of the SDKs logs as part of some profiling experiments

Additionally, these things have been in progress for a while and deserve a mention as well even though they're not finished yet:

• @gnunicorn is working on sliding sync (MSC3575)
• @poljar is working on integrating vodozemac, a libolm reimplementation in Rust

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	aria-net.org	512.5
2	pavot.ca	784
3	matrix.optoutpod.com	836
4	alemann.dev	1532
5	nevarro.space	1560
6	matrix.cirk2.de	1729.5
7	gottliebtfreitag.de	2029
8	mtrx.fail	2116
9	matrix.infra.reflect-media.de	2408.5
10	roeckx.be	2577.5

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	nognu.de	375.5
2	rustybever.be	386.5
3	cry.is	396.5
4	matrix.sum7.eu	504
5	dendrite.matrix.org	587.5
6	beckmeyer.us	741
7	sspaeth.de	1024
8	conduit.cyberdi.sk	1078
9	dyoxide.online	1339.5

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) reports

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3751: Allowing widgets to read account data

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs had FCP proposed this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered FCP this week.

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3440: Threading via m.thread relation
• MSC3316: Add timestamp massaging to the spec

Spec Updates

Keeping in step with our quarterly spec releases, the release of Matrix v1.3 is expected to land sometime early Q2 2022. This release will include Threads (as defined by MSC3440), as well as a number of other MSCs which land in the meantime.

Speaking of other MSCs, client developers should be aware of upcoming work to support live and static location sharing in the ecosystem. A notice on the subject has been posted today in the Matrix Client Developers room.

A reminder that the matrix-doc GitHub repository has been split into two new repositories: matrix-spec and matrix-spec-proposals. Read more about this in the last edition of TWIM.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2398: proposal to allow mxc:// in the "a" tag within messages!

This MSC makes the case for allowing linking to MXC content by using of an <a> tag in the HTML-formatted formatted_body field of a m.room.message. As MXC urls could contain HTML files, it could be rather useful to link directly to them, as you would any other webpage. Your client would then translate this to an http/s URL which can be used to view/navigate to the file.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

Brendan Abolivier reports

We've released Synapse 1.54! It includes quite a lot of nice improvements, including around URL previewing, and new callbacks for third-party modules. Check out the release announcement for more info on all this goodness.

We've also landed more of the ground work to improve the time it takes for new servers to join big rooms, which Rich was talking about last week. Aside from this, we're continuing the effort towards switching Synapse to use Poetry, which will enable reproducible builds for Synapse. These are some very exciting projects which will be maturing in the coming weeks, so watch this space!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace says

Missed last weeks update, but my charts rolled along regardless. Currently serving; element-web 1.10.6 and matrix-synapse 1.54.0 (and matrix-media-repo 1.2.10)

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

The basics of the bridge are now ready! Backfilling, message sending, and message receiving are now implemented...albeit quite buggy and untested.

For anyone curious to try it out, installation follows the same general steps as tulir's Python-based mautrix bridges, plus a backend Node module that must be launched before the Python component of the bridge. I'll write a README with proper setup instructions soon!

Just note that for the time being, updates to the bridge may invalidate its database!!. I won't guarantee stable DB upgrades until the bridge's early growing pains have settled down.

Reminder that my KakaoTalk ID is fair-mw if anyone wants to help me test things out 🙂

---

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

SmallTalk (website)

Minimal Android messenger powered by Matrix

adam reports

👋 I'm happy to finally reveal the side project I've been working on - SmallTalk, a tiny native android matrix client focused on chatting with family and friends!

I've been wondering, how small can you make a functional native android matrix client? So far 1.7mb! (*when served from an app bundle)

Features

• E2E encryption (including importing Element E2E keys)
• Merged room and DM list
• Message bubbles
• Push notifications

Currently in closed beta whilst ironing bugs, improving error handling and adding basic features like accepting invites, however apks are available on github for eager testers!

Nheko (website)

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

Nico says

I am happy to present you a new release with the cute name 0.9.2!

Apart from losts of bugfixes, expect the following:

Highlights

• Message bubbles (Malte E) 💬
  • Give a colorful and space saving background to messages.
  • Optionally shrink the usernames to save even more space.
  • Your messages are on the opposite side of messages sent by other users.
• Basic widgets 🗔
  • Widgets in a room are shown below the topic.
  • Open them in your browser to view them.

Features

• Autocompleter for custom emotes using ~. Note that this currently inserts raw html into the message input.
• Support running Nheko without a secrets service using a hidden setting.
• Add zooming and panning to the image overlay.
• Add a manpage. (tastytea)
• Offline indicator. (LorenDB)
• Proper previews for unjoined rooms in spaces (on supported servers).
• /reset-state /command to reset the state of a single room.
• Allow hiding some events from the timeline. (tastytea)
• Hidden read receipts. (Symphorien)
• Open room members dialog when clicking the encryption indicator.
• Click to copy room id. (Malte E)
• Allow specifying a reason for message removal, bans and kicks. (tastytea)

Improvements

• Speed up blurhash and jdenticon rendering.
• Use fewer threads for image decoding reducing memory use.
• Document secret service installation on Arch. (Marshall Lochbaum)
• Make edits replace previous notifications for the same message on Linux.
• Add alternatives for Alt-A as a shortcut on systems where that is already used.
• Apply clang-tidy suggestions. (MTRNord)
• Make custom emotes twice as high as the text to improve legibility. (tastytea)
• Ensure high quality scaling is used for custom emotes. (tastytea)
• Reduce allocations for the timeline by around a factor of 2.
• Render messages half as often, when displaying them for the first time.
• Increase maximum number of items in completers to 30.
• Run the gstreamer event loop also on macOS and Windows.
• Make presence update dynamically.
• Cleanup the raw message dialog.
• Make settings responsive.
• Improve Login and Registration pages.
• Add custom stickers & emotes to Q&A.
• Improve scrolling on touch screens. (Malte E)
• Reduce size of state events.
• Update OpenSUSE install instructions. (LorenDB)
• Use newer flatpak runtime.
• Fallback to using the shortcode in custom emotes, when there is no title set. (Ivan Pavluk)
• Improve a lot of hovering behaviours.
• Make spinboxes in scrollable pages unscrollable. (Malte E)
• Fix deprecation warnings in gstreamer code. (Scow)
• Make room directory fit mobile screens. (Malte E)
• Make room search accessible on mobile. (Malte E)
• Fix calls on mobile.
• Add arch binary repo. (digital-mystik)
• Improve long topics in the room settings. (Malte E)
• Fix typos. (ISSOtm)
• Improve the message input on mobile devices. (Malte E)

I hope this one works for you and we didn't break too much stuff and thanks a lot to everyone who contributed!

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

Welcome back to another week at Element!

Message Threads

• Our MSC 3440 completed its final comment period this week which is a super exciting move forwards for our team! We are now using a stable prefix and server-side support for Threads so the whole experience should be much better.
• The team is hard at work fixing bugs so that we can launch with as much confidence in our solution as possible.
• If you’ve been using Threads whilst in Labs, please keep giving feedback and raising any issues you may find.

Community testing

• Join #element-community-testing:matrix.org to help out with the testing
• Coming up this week:
  • Spaces on iOS: Tuesday, 15th Mar at 16:00 UTC / 17:00 CET

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle says

• On Web we’re focussed on improving the app and fighting bugs;
  • This week we are seeing fewer reports of decryption errors!
  • On Develop, you should no longer find that editing messages messes with their formatting.

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

• Pinned messages are getting some attention in Labs. Keep providing feedback for us!

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu announces

• The next app store release is delayed due to some flows that do not match Apple guidelines - we’ll be updating the Apple SSO default values and introducing “Decline & Block” to invitations.
• This week we checked-in on our language status and updated some things; We now support Ukrainian.
• We’re working hard at updating the activity indicators in the app. While we work on the performance and load times in general we want to enable users to go about their tasks without being blocked by the activity indicator. The new indicator sits towards the top of the screen and should be out of the way for most tasks, whilst still informative. Let us know what you think!
• The iOS team are also improving the onboarding experience for new users; aiming to make Matrix account creation as simple as possible.

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle announces

• We’re continuing on our path to increase the quality and usability of the app; the next release is v1.4.4 (already available for beta testers!) includes things like moving the typing indicator from the top bar to the bottom of the timeline.
• We are also improving our PR process. In particular we want to reduce the time the submitters have to wait to get a review.
• Our onboarding flow is being updated. We want new users to have a simple and straight-forward experience when they’re creating an account.

Cinny (website)

Cinny is a Matrix client focused on simplicity, elegance and security

Lozenge reports

Namaste 🙏,

We are happy to announce that Cinny now support all the features of Spaces — a way to group rooms in Matrix. This means that you can now create new spaces from client, add rooms or subspaces inside them or manage the added rooms. We have also made our unique feature of Pinning spaces to sidebar more easy and organized. With this option all the spaces and subspaces will be visible at one place and you can select the one you want to pin or remove. One more unique feature we added with update is the Categorized subspaces, what this do is make all the subspaces inside a space appear as categories. This is helpful when there are deep nested spaces inside a space and breadcrumb is pain to navigate back and fourth. Keep in mind that this ignore the nesting of subspaces and all of them will appear under mainspace, but nice thing is that you can select which subspace you want to categorized and which not. Another exciting update related to spaces is the Drag-and-Drop. Earlier there was no option to reorder pinned spaces but now with DnD you can reorder them as you like.

Apart from spaces this update also include option to drag and drop files, ||sending spoiler||, desktop notification and viewing event source. (Thanks to @ginnyTheCat for these amazing additions.)

Full changelog is available at: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny/releases/tag/v1.8.0

Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in Join our channel at: https://matrix.to/#/#cinny:matrix.org Github: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny Twitter: https://twitter.com/@cinnyapp

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr announces

In the last two weeks we've made some UX improvements:

1. The PDF viewer now has nicer tooltips
2. The width of sidepanels is now adjustable
3. Searchbars now have hints to help find the keyboard shortcut
4. Error messages are now displayed more uniformly
5. Populus-viewer now has an icon
6. Failed messages are now indicated, with the option to resend

Fixed some bugs:

1. room avatars should now update more quickly
2. highlights should always display immediately after joining a new discussion

And added a service worker, for a better offline experience.

Finally, we've opened a new draft MSC (just a stub at the moment) to create a format for annotations on text documents. So... matrix annotations as a vim plugin? The future is bright 😎

As always, if you're interested in this work, or in the future of annotation and scholarship on matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.

matrix-streamchat (website)

Matrix powered stream overlay for OBS, to integrate live chat in your favorite (selfhosted) streaming setups.

f0x announces

Matrix Streamchat got it's first alpha release, and was successfully set up + used by someone else this week Recorded a little demo video on the setup with OBS: https://youtu.be/HmJ3XwJXB7I, and implemented the GUI for configuring the chat's settings and looks, to then copy the link into an iframe (embedded chat) or OBS (overlay).

Gatho (website)

Invite friends to your event with a one-click RSVP link - no matter which chat/social app they use!

Jake C reports

Gatho.party is a replacement for Facebook Events for small social gatherings. I've used it for a number of parties and received great feedback, and I'm seeing others are starting to use it too 🎉

To receive confirmations of attendance you can either:

• Use the included Matrix bot to automatically sync RSVP emoji reactions in a linked Matrix room (great for your friends on Matrix or in a bridged Signal chat)
• Send a unique one-click RSVP links to you friends without Matrix (eg. Instagram DMs, SMS)
• And as of this week, guests can "self serve" and add their own RSVP via the unique event link, so you can just drop the event link in a Facebook Messenger chat or iMessage group (without email or phone verification at the moment, so hosts will need to moderate if their guests go rogue and add multiple fake names!)

Other recent improvements are:

• Ability to delete guests
• Improved call to action and copy text for when a guest with a "magic" link is prompted to RSVP
• Confetti animations when your guests RSVP via the Gatho website as "Going"

I'm currently testing an experimental chat embed using Matrix Live so your guests not on Matrix can optionally see your linked Matrix room - I've found some of my friends join Matrix after seeing this so they can join the action!

I'm keen to eventually use Cactus Comments once I figure out a bit of Elm and have more spare time so that non-Matrix guests can post too.

The Gatho website and bot is open source (AGPL-3.0) on Github, PRs and Github issues are very welcome! It's built using Next.js in Typescript.

I'd love to hear your feedback! Join the Matrix room at https://matrix.to/#/#gatho-events:matrix.gatho.party

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Polyjuice (website)

Elixir libraries related to the Matrix communications protocol.

uhoreg says

Polyjuice Client Test is a tool for testing Matrix clients by creating a predefined environment for each test. Since the last time it was mentioned in TWIM,

• more tests have been added: a test for basic end-to-end encryption message sending and receiving, symmetric key backup (MSC3270), and key withheld codes (MSC2399). More tests (and improvements to existing tests) to come.
• the UI has improved a bit. Sorry, it's still ugly, but slightly less so. Also, now you can search through the tests.
• I am now running a publicly-accessible instance of it at https://test.uhoreg.ca/ so you can test your clients without having to set it up yourself. This instance is stable-ish, in that it should always be available, but may be restarted randomly, in which case you may need to re-start your tests.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synatainer (website)

Synapse Maintenance Container – Docker container with tools for synapse & postgres database maintenance

saces announces

Synapse Maintenance Container – Docker container with tools for synapse & postgres database maintenance

New since v0.1.0:

• added arm64 support
• improved output of purge_history.sh

Start it without command and let it do its magic :)

What it does by default:

• daily:
  • purge all rooms without local members
  • run the state autocompressor (small setting 500/100)
• weekly:
  • delete old remote media (>90 days)
  • delete old message history from public joinable rooms (>180 days)
• monthly:
  • run the state autocompressor (big setting 1500/300)
  • vacuum the database

Source: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

Compose example: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer/-/snippets/2264828

---

If you are looking for a docker container with just the auto compressor for linux amd64/arm64 in it, her you go: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/rust-synapse-compress-state

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

libli

unonde says

hello! wanted to show a small matrix web client made with unminified js/html/css & web components (wip++) https://libli.org/ https://gitlab.com/sctlib/libli + https://gitlab.com/sctlib/matrix-room-element looking forward feedback comments or anything, cheers & viva la matrix!

for now it only uses default matrix messages, and it is read only, so users have to login/register/CRUD through element (or any other client) the idea would be to give back users control on their data, allow them to "collect" (individually or as group), any type of content, gathered into matrix room

For now, the client is making HTTP requests to matrix API, to fetch the data of a (public) room, all message & state events. it also give a "clean URL" libli.org/room:server.tld so users can access their "profile" (chat room) easily (just like a twitter, instagram, medium) page

Dept of Guides 🧭

Self-Host a Matrix Map Server

JulianF reports

Following Element's recent announcement of location sharing with support for self-hosted map tile server, I went ahead and set up one, and have written a blog post about it, explaining how to go a little further than the currently published guide, and with Ansible scripts included. *> https://wrily.foad.me.uk/self-host-a-matrix-map-server

Extensible Events

andybalaam reports

Andy Balaam wrote a blog post explaining extensible events - it shows simple examples of what message events look like now, and how they change with extensible events. It also covers the abbreviated forms of m.message: m.text and m.html, which can make it somewhat more confusing to understand.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	neko.dev	308
2	envs.net	380
3	maescool.be	406
4	tedomum.net	450
5	matrix.uni-marburg.de	548
6	catgirl.cloud	610
7	synod.im	754
8	settgast.org	841.5
9	jeroenhd.nl	1052
10	matrix.infra.reflect-media.de	1160

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	rcp.tf	225
2	nognu.de	301
3	rustybever.be	306
4	cry.is	460.5
5	beckmeyer.us	636
6	sspaeth.de	665.5
7	xethos.net	817.5
8	grin.hu	1003.5
9	kwolek.io	1107
10	dendrite.beckmeyer.us	1554.5

That's all I know 🏁

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

Synapse 1.54 is out! Let's see what goodness is coming your way with this new release.

Improving URL previews

As part of the Matrix specification, Matrix clients have the option to rely on the homeserver to generate URL previews. This means the homeserver (in this case Synapse) needs to have a look at the content at that URL and extract data to send back to the client.

In the past, Synapse has had issues with generating complete URL previews, and some metadata (e.g. image, description) would be missing from the data that Synapse sends to clients. Synapse 1.54 includes improvements to the generation of URL previews, and while testing it we've been able to observe improvements to previews generated for Twitter and Reddit.

New module callbacks

Synapse modules allow third-party developers to write extra features for Synapse, that wouldn't necessarily be generic enough to fit within the Matrix specification. This includes custom behaviours such as smarter event filters, bespoke media storage providers, or spam checkers. Since we rewrote Synapse's module system in Synapse 1.37, we have been improving it by adding new callback functions that module can implement, allowing them to interface better with Synapse.

Synapse 1.54 includes three new module callbacks. One of them, get_displayname_for_registration, allows modules to define the display name for newly registered users. Together with the existing get_username_for_registration introduced in Synapse 1.52, they allow modules a better control over the user registration process.

The two other module callbacks introduced in Synapse 1.54, on_profile_update and on_user_deactivation_status_changed, allow modules to react to profile changes, as well as the deactivation (or reactivation) of users.

Everything else

This release of Synapse also includes more work to make joining large Matrix rooms faster (I was telling you about that in the Synapse 1.53 release announcement). While it's still very experimental and not yet ready for show time, it's still very exciting to see this work happening!

Synapse 1.54 also includes a change to the client-side versions endpoint to advertise Matrix 1.1 and 1.2. See the Matrix 1.2 release announcement to read all about the changes this latest version of the specification brings to the ecosystem.

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) Dirk Klimpel, Andrew Ryan, and lukasdenk.

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

TravisR says

t2bot.io - a public integrations network for Matrix - has passed 1 Million known rooms and 8.3 Million bridged users. 10,000 of these rooms are attributed to Voyager (a bot which actively goes out to find rooms to map Matrix, with the map currently down for maintenance), leaving the remaining ones either bridged, previously bridged, or using a different integration offered by t2bot.io for free.

The 8.3 Million users are mainly Discord and Telegram users which have been brought over to Matrix through bridges. The stats say "excluding Twitter-bridged" because there's 424,832 old accounts from back in the day when t2bot.io had a free Twitter bridge available. To further break this down, about 6.8M are Telegram users (12% of Telegram) and 1.3M are Discord (<1% of Discord).

For perspective, t2bot.io has about 569 Million events stored in its database and sees approximately 30 thousand people bridged daily from the wider world into Matrix through its bridges.

This post is just a milestone update, but it also serves as a reminder that running your own server/bridges is also possible. In fact, it's even recommended to have better control over your own data and avoid latency issues that large providers, like t2bot.io, can unintentionally introduce. Synapse is relatively easy to set up with minimal sysadmin knowledge (guide), and there's always paid offerings like Element Matrix Services (for home and also for fun) and Beeper for a richer bridging experience than t2bot.io can feasibly provide.

TravisR adds

in the eternal battle of "t2bot.io should be successful" and "please oh god self-host", the above^

Thib reports

It is to be noted that eQualitie has set-up public Matrix and Element instances for Ukrainian people who are struggling right now. If you are in Ukraine or are in touch with Ukrainian people who need secure communications, you can show them https://kyiv.dcomm.net.ua, https://odessa.dcomm.net.ua, or https://kharkiv.dcomm.net.ua depending on their location so they get instructions on how to create an account on Matrix and stay in touch

Dept of Spec 📜

Kegan reports

MSC3575 Sliding Sync work is progressing, and a number of new features have been added to the MSC with implementations in the built-in web client in the proxy. A list of changes include:

• spec/proxy: the ability to filter the room list by room name.
• spec/proxy: Aninitial flag on the room to distinguish between updates and the initial sync for a given room. This can be used as a hint to clients to determine if they should update/replace their local data for that room.
• proxy: more efficient algorithm for determining overlapping sets of ranges, resulting in fewer bytes over the wire when scrolling.
• proxy: the client implementation now supports sending basic text messages as well as issuing/join,/invite,/leave commands.
• proxy: the client implementation now has a developer HUD which tracks the Tx/Rx bytes as well as a visual representation of the sliding window.

The net result is a basic but incredibly low bandwidth syncing client: 60.79KB to download an entire initial sync on matrix.org. Further improvements will be done on the client to make sure it doesn't scale with the number of rooms on the user's account (it currently does because it naively adds a placeholder for each room in the list) to ensure it remains extremely snappy and a vision for what Sliding Sync can do in practice, right now. Please continue giving feedback on MSC3575 or in #sliding-sync:matrix.org as the API is still in development and will change depending on what clients require.

Andrew Morgan (Element) announces

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Created MSCs:

• MSC3746: Render image data in reactions

MSCs with newly proposed Final Comment Period:

• No FCPs were proposed this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3440: Threading via m.thread relation (merge)
• MSC3316: Add timestamp massaging to the spec (merge)

Closed MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3710: User groups

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

Heads up! You may have noticed some changes to the matrix-org/matrix-doc github repository this week. The first major one being that it no longer exists!

We have separated it out into two repositories:

• matrix-org/matrix-spec - the source text of the spec. Issues and pull requests filed here should relate to the source of the spec.
• matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals - all Matrix Spec Change proposals. New MSCs should be filed against this repository as pull requests. Issues should not be filed against this repository (and no, the issue tracker cannot be disabled, as it would cause transferred issue link redirects to 404).

The primary motivation for this was to separate concerns of interacting with matrix-org/matrix-doc. Those interacting with the spec's source would have to wade through long-lived spec proposals, while those only interested in spec proposals would need to filter out spec source files and other issues and PRs related to them. This also helps writing tooling against the repo either as it no longer needs to filter MSCs via issue labels.

Existing links to matrix-doc should be automatically redirected by github to the right place. MSC authors and developers should update their git remote settings to point to the new repos.

What happened in detail to achieve this was:

• matrix-doc was renamed tomatrix-spec-proposals
• matrix-spec was created
• All files other than the "proposals" folder were transferred frommatrix-spec-proposals tomatrix-spec
• All open issues frommatrix-spec-proposals were transferred tomatrix-spec

Further details are available here: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/927

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3383: Include destination in X-Matrix Auth Header!

This MSC asks for the simple change of adding a "destination" field to the Authorization header of federation requests. This would have the benefit of allowing reverse proxies - potentially handling traffic for multiple homeservers - to know where requests should be sent. Or for forward proxies, which could validate outgoing requests from a homeserver before they're sent.

There is currently some discussion on the fundamental idea of the MSCs, which will need to be resolved first before it can move forwards.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

richvdh announces

Quite a varied bag this week! Firstly we cut a release candidate for Synapse 1.54.0, which we hope to release next week. As ever, testing and feedback is much appreciated.

Our switch to Poetry for dependency management has come a few steps closer, by removing tox from our Continuous Integration, and converting some of our ad-hoc scripts to proper Python entry points.

Meanwhile we've been continuing to knock out blockers to improving room join speeds, including better exception handling and logging, and some exciting work to reduce wasted work when a client disconnects while we're still processing a request.

We've also been taking a wider look at performance problems, such as slow /sync and /login times.

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

Kegan reports

I have been asked by numerous people over months if there are any kind of graphs comparing Synapse and Dendrite. Up until now, my answer has been "as far as I know, no". However, this got me thinking whether I can use Complement to engineer some kind of performance testing infrastructure. After hacking on it for a day or two, I can now share some of the work I've done in this area. There now exists two new binaries in the Complement repo: perftest and perfgraph. The former will run some tests and output a .json file. The latter will consume these files to generate .svg graphs. The tests performed include:

• Creating a bunch of rooms with different users. (currently 10 users and 50 rooms)
• Joining a bunch of rooms with different users.
• Sending messages into rooms with different users. (currently 100 messages)
• Doing an initial sync for all users.
• Updating the display name of all users.
• Doing an incremental sync for all users.

The metrics are collected using docker stats. This means the entire container is measured, not just the homeserver binary (e.g any daemons or assistive processes are included in the metrics) and includes:

• CPU time consumed
• Memory consumed
• Bytes transmitted/received
• Disk read/writes
• Time taken

Here are some results:

This was a surprising find and probably indicates that Dendrite has a memory leak somewhere when creating events. However, the fun doesn't stop there. We can also use this tool to compare different versions of the same homeserver:

This allows us to quantify any performance improvements we've been working on, and you can clearly see how we're being more efficient with CPU in newer versions. But the fun doesn't stop there either. We can also compare different flavours of the same version of a homeserver:

You can quantify the cost of running sqlite or postgres for your particular installation.

Care must be taken when interpreting results. Lower doesn't always mean better. For example, a low readout on "create_users" may be a cause for concern as it might indicate that the server is not hashing passwords correctly (e.g using bcrypt/scrypt which are designed to consume CPU/memory). Servers which don't implement all of the specification will also be abnormally low on CPU/memory (e.g not having to calculate unread counts or handle push notifications naturally means less work to do so less resources consumed). Furthermore, these tests do not yet test federation, so expensive remote joins are not measured (remote joins require the joining server to check signatures, hashes, etc of a lot of events which doesn't happen for local servers). That being said, I have hopefully illustrated how useful this tool can be for both server developers trying to improve their software and server admins who want to use the right server for their hardware. The graphs are still a work-in-progress and there's a lot more that can be done in this area beyond a few days work, but it's a start.

neilalexander says

Today we've released Dendrite 0.6.5 which contains early push notification support as well as a number of fixes and improvements. This release includes the following changes:

• Early support for push notifications has been added, with support for push rules, pushers, HTTP push gateways and the /notifications endpoint (contributions by danpe, PiotrKozimor and tommie)
• Spaces Summary (MSC2946) is now correctly supported (when msc2946 is enabled in the config)
• All media API endpoints are now available under the /v3 namespace
• Profile updates (display name and avatar) are now sent asynchronously so they shouldn't block the client for a very long time
• State resolution v2 has been optimised further to considerably reduce the number of memory allocations
• State resolution v2 will no longer duplicate events unnecessarily when calculating the auth difference
• The create-account tool now has a -reset-password option for resetting the passwords of existing accounts
• The /sync endpoint now calculates device list changes much more quickly with less RAM used
• The /messages endpoint now lazy-loads members correctly
• Read receipts now work correctly by correcting bugs in the stream positions and receipt coalescing
• Topological sorting of state and join responses has been corrected, which should help to reduce the number of auth problems when joining new federated rooms
• Media thumbnails should now work properly after having unnecessarily strict rate limiting removed
• The roomserver no longer holds transactions for as long when processing input events
• Uploading device keys and cross-signing keys will now correctly no-op if there were no changes
• Parameters are now remembered correctly during registration
• Devices can now only be deleted within the appropriate UIA flow
• The /context endpoint now returns 404 instead of 500 if the event was not found
• SQLite mode will no longer leak memory as a result of not closing prepared statements

Spec compliance, as measured by Sytest, currently sits at:

• Client-server APIs: 76%, up from 65% last time
• Server-server APIs: 95%, up from 94% last time

As always, you can join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite discussion and announcements.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Half-Shot reports

matrix-hookshot reaches 1.2.0

Hey folks, I'm back from holidays and I'm proud to say that hookshot is kicking out release after release. This release is especially large and contains a bounty of new features and fixes. Of note are:

• JIRA Datacenter (On Premise) is now supported.
• You can now configure fine grained permissions for users on the bridge by userId, homeserver domain or room membership (think spaces).
• Generic webhooks has sprouted a versioned API, with v2 allowing for finer control over the output.
• GitHub connections now include the closing comment when issues and PRs are closed.
• GitHub connections will also notify a room when an existing issue has been relabled to one filtered by that room.
• Figma now uses MSC3440 for comment threads.

But seriously go check out the release, there is way more there than I can include in this TWIM post. Happy webhookin, matrix gang!

In case you did not know, Hookshot can be installed via spantaleev's Ansible playbook. In addition to updates for this new release, the role has recently gotten some improvements and fixes by the community, so in case you had issues before, now is the time to try again!

P.S oh and I almost forgot, we rehomed to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-hookshot. This doesn't change much, other than some redirects in your browsers cache.

Half-Shot adds

permissions:
* actor: '*'
  services:
  - level: commands
    service: github
* actor: '!the-internal-element-room:matrix.org'
  services:
  - level: manageConnections
    service: '*'
* actor: '@random-on-the-side-user:homeserver.org'
  services:
  - level: manageConnections
    service: '*'

Allows anyone to run github commands in rooms. User part of the room listed can actually go and create connections to anywhere (we use it internally at $work), and then there is a final random user who gets those permissions because they refuse to join that room :p

matrix-appservice-irc (website)

Node.js IRC bridge for Matrix

Half-Shot reports

matrix-appservice-irc 0.33.0

Two bridge updates from matrix.org in one week? You would be forgiven for thinking it was FOSDEM Christmas.

The highlights are:

• Support splitting users from different homeservers into different IPv6 blocks. We used this at FOSDEM to split attendeeds into a different ILINE.
• Added a new metric clientpool_by_homeserver which lists the states of IRC clients, by the top 25 homeservers. Useful to know who is using your bridge.
• Add support for subscribing to moderation policies. This allows a bridge admin to subscribe to Matrix "ban lists" and filter who can use their bridge.

This release also now requires Node 14.x as Node 12.x will be out of support very soon.

See the changelog for yourself over at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.33.0

Dept of Clients 📱

Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

This week, we've fixed a few annoying issues in NeoChat:

• On platforms with a system tray, NeoChat no quits correctly when the system tray integration is disabled
• Similar state events are now aggregated into a single message (so no more scrolling through "Moderation has changed the access control lists" 🙂)
• Sending messages starting with a ':' works correctly again

We've also improved NeoChat's startup time from cache by a factor of several hundred, depending on the situation

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat says

• Released v1.10.5 and also v1.10.6 as a hotfix for a crash
• Surveyed users and collated feedback from search result ordering for improvements to the new search experience (enable it in Settings -> Labs in production)
• In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
  • Pin drop location sharing has been added
  • Fixed message ordering issues in threads
  • Fixed threads discovery when scrolling back in a room
  • Added a couple of new ways to access pinned messages, in the room header and info panel
  • Improved the reliability of pinned messages with edits

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu announces

• New release, v1.8.3, is out
• Still improving the activity indicator
• Working on missing messages bugs
• Making progress on the registration flow by setting name and avatar
• In development:
  • We will be trying out Spaces on iOS at 16:00 UTC / 17:00 CET on Tuesday, 8th of March. Head over to #element-community-testing:matrix.org to hear the latest on all testing sessions!
  • Live location sharing has started
• In labs:
  • An option to use the last member avatar and name in the timeline

Element Android (website)

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

adam reports

• Our newest release, v1.4.2, is out!
• Progress is being made on fixing “unable to decrypt” errors (UISI) - re-architected legacy code.
• Our language capabilities have expanded with improved Japanese translations (special thanks to the contributor for this!)
• The team is working on process improvements to reduce incoming PR backlog and getting to those faster.
• We’re actively looking into the reported increased memory usage.
  • As always, thank you for feedback and reports, it helps a lot.
• For those using the SDK, we’ve deprecated the main Matrix entrypoints, more information here

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

matrix-streamchat (website)

Matrix powered stream overlay for OBS, to integrate live chat in your favorite (selfhosted) streaming setups.

f0x says

a very simple invite-accepting bot as part of matrix-streamchat to more easily facilitate peeking into rooms over federation. You run one on your guest-access enabled homeserver, invite it to your remote room, and now all guest accounts from your server know they are in fact allowed to publicly read the room over federation without joining themselves. https://git.pixie.town/f0x/matrix-streamchat/src/branch/main/autojoin-bot

Dept of Widgets 🧩

Mjolnir Widget (website)

A widget for moderating with mjolnir. Highly WIP. Use at your own risk!

MTRNord (they/them) reports

Mjölnir Moderation Widget

There have been a few changes to the widget:

• Ability to kick people was added
• Inter font was added to improve readability
• Work on having a setup page for the bot was added which allows to easily add the bot to your room (sets up permissions and invites the bot as required)
• Added support for a state event which tells the widget about "who is the bot?" and "which lists does this bot monitor?" Which also allows you to use the widget without being in the banlist room yourself. (See https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-moderation-widget#use-a-state-event-to-allow-showing-relevant-lists-only-in-the-dropdown for more information)

Dept of VoIP 🤙

Element Call (website)

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

Matthew reports

Element Call has entered beta! Head over to https://call.element.io (formerly matrixvoip.dev) to play with in-browser native Matrix voice/video calling powered by MSC3401, supporting all webrtc-capable mobile & desktop browsers. See all the details over at https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-element-call/

• Offers high quality video calls with around 6 or 7 participants as a small & simple, standalone app that allows anyone to drop into a video conference easily.
• This is beta - please file bugs at https://github.com/vector-im/element-call/issues and be aware that currently all participants need good bandwidth
• This is the first implementation of MSC3401: a spec for secure, federated voice and video conferences.
• Integrations into other clients are coming soon, Hydrogen is working on it right now
• We’ll also be developing a server to mix media streams so calls can scale up to much larger number of participants. The server will only ever see your encrypted media, so calls will stay secure and confidential.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma (website)

A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.

Jonas Platte reports

We're back (to TWIM)! Here's some highlights from the past few months:

• Stronger types for some things:
  • Base64 which ensures you always decode / encode with the appropriate base64 dictionary [@jplatte]
  • TransactionId which is simply a little more explicit than String and easier to generate a random instance of [@jplatte]
• Stable support for lots of previously-unstable functionality that got stabilized upstream as part of the Matrix specification releases v1.1 and v1.2 [@zecakeh]
• Support for versioned endpoints in the client-server API [@ShadowJonathan]
• Rehaul of our module structure to match the client-server API's new versioned endpoints (before: r0::foo::get_bar, after: foo::get_bar::v3) [@ShadowJonathan]
• More fine-grained feature flags for MSC implementations (before: everything behind unstable-pre-spec, after: most things behind dedicated unstable-mscXXXX features) [@zecakeh]
• matrix.to URI parsing [@zecakeh]
• MatrixUri type [@zecakeh]

All of these changes are available in version 0.5.0 which was released about two weeks ago.

Additionally, @zecakeh recently started implementing extensible events and doing some pretty heavy internal refactoring that will make our release process faster and hopefully make contributing to Ruma easier as well.

With all these changes we're very close to supporting all of Matrix v1.1 (and Matrix v1.2 too!), with the only major omission being Secure Secret Storage and Sharing (SSSS). Some work on that was done as far back as last year's GSoC but it was blocked on a medium-sized refactoring of how we handle account data. I'm planning to get that over the finish line over the next weeks.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synatainer (website)

Synapse Maintenance Container – Docker container with tools for synapse & postgres database maintenance

saces announces

Start it without command and let it do its magic :)

What it does by default:

• daily:
  • purge all rooms without local members
  • run the state autocompressor (small setting 500/100)
• weekly:
  • delete old remote media (>90 days)
  • delete old message history from public joinable rooms (>180 days)
• monthly:
  • run the state autocompressor (big setting 1500/300)
  • vacuum the database

Source: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

Compose example: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer/-/snippets/2264828

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix Scribe

JulianF announces

I'm working on a little hobby project, The Matrix Scribe.

The Matrix Scribe helps us re-post or transcribe messages into matrix that we received from somewhere else, posing as different ghost users to represent the original authors.

Scribe will post this:

Ann I'm Ann.

Bob Hello! I'm Bob.

when I write this to @scribe-bot:

@julian /scribe as Ann

@julian I'm Ann.

@julian /scribe as Bob

@julian Hello! I'm Bob.

That is an illustration of the goal. The output part works already; the bot part isn't implemented yet.

Why?

• I want to encourage people to experiment and play with extending Matrix in creative ways.
• As a building block for myself towards building more usual matrix bridges. Scribe is the input half of the matrix half of a bridge, so literally one quarter of a typical matrix bridge.
• I hope that I myself and maybe some other people will find Scribe fun or useful in itself.

If you find this interesting...

• Come and say hello in the matrix room: #matrix-scribe:foad.me.uk
• See the blog post or the project README (similar content in both)

Scribe is not intended to mislead users. It should be deployed in such a way that its use is clear, and require appropriate permissions.

maubot_azuracast

boris reports

a simple bot https://github.com/borisrunakov/maubot_azuracast built with maubot, that you can use to request data from your azuracast self hosted instance. It's not much but ok...

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

J. Ryan Stinnett says

I'll be speaking at the new HYTRADBOI conference (29 Apr) about building collaborative, open software on Matrix. All of the talks sound super interesting, highly recommended! 😄 The talks will be public after the conference as well.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	converser.eu	347
2	envs.net	377
3	aria-net.org	466
4	maescool.be	573
5	pavot.ca	742
6	rollyourown.xyz	1294.5
7	canchat.org	1473
8	targodan.de	1658
9	2808.nl	1949
10	mtrx.fail	2093.5

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	cry.is	288
2	nognu.de	319
3	rustybever.be	383.5
4	conduit.grich.sk	465
5	bogus.ee	568
6	matrix.sum7.eu	650.5
7	matrix.awesomesheep48.me	653
8	dendrite.matrix.org	1544
9	xethos.net	1756

That's all I know 🏁

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

OTWSU 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (Element) reports

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:

• MSC3589: Room version 9 as the default room version
• MSC3582: Remove m.room.message.feedback

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC3744: Support for flexible authentication
• MSC3743: Standardized error response for unknown endpoints
• MSC3741: Revealing the useful login flows to clients after a soft logout
• MSC3735: Add device information to m.room_key.withheld message

Spec Updates

MSC3440 continues to be the focus on much review as the proposal inches towards entering final comment period.

Otherwise both MSC3589 (room version 9 as the default room version) and MSC3582 (remove m.room.message.feedback) merged this week. The former brings with it updated versions for rooms as they continue to be created across the federation, whereas the latter is simply a nice clean up to the existing spec :)

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3593: Safety Controls through a generic Administration API!

This MSC aims to introduce a set of generic administrative APIs for Matrix homeservers, starting with those that could potentially be useful for user moderation.

There has long been talk of adding administration APIs akin to Synapse's Admin API to the spec, in part to reduce the number of tools that are specifically created for it, and thus can only be used with Synapse.

Feedback welcome!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

Shay announces

This week we released Synapse 1.53.0! This release adds support for sending to-device messages to application services, adds a background database update to purge account data for deactivated users, and adds more features to improve performance and stability, as well as bugfixes and improved documentation. Check out the release notes here.

In addition to the release, work continues on improving the performance of room joins-progress is being made! Finally, we began the process of switching over Synapse to use Poetry for dependency management-keep your eyes peeled for more information on that project as it develops.

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander says

This week we released Dendrite v0.6.4 which contains a significant number of improvements and fixes. It includes the following:

• All Client-Server API endpoints are now available under the /v3 namespace
• The /whoami response format now matches the latest Matrix spec version
• Support added for the /context endpoint, which should help clients to render quote-replies correctly
• Accounts now have an optional account type field, allowing admin accounts to be created
• Server notices are now supported
• Refactored the user API storage to deduplicate a significant amount of code, as well as merging both user API databases into a single database
• Guest registration can now be separately disabled with the new client_api.guests_disabled configuration option
• Outbound connections now obey proxy settings from the environment, deprecating the federation_api.proxy_outbound configuration options
• The roomserver input API will now strictly consume only one database transaction per room, which should prevent situations where the roomserver can deadlock waiting for database connections to become available
• Room joins will now fall back to federation if the local room state is insufficient to create a membership event
• Create events are now correctly filtered from federation /send transactions
• Excessive logging when federation is disabled should now be fixed
• Dendrite will no longer panic if trying to retire an invite event that has not been seen yet
• The device list updater will now wait for longer after a connection issue, rather than flooding the logs with errors
• The device list updater will no longer produce unnecessary output events for federated key updates with no changes, which should help to reduce CPU usage
• Local device name changes will now generate key change events correctly
• The sync API will now try to share device list update notifications even if all state key NIDs cannot be fetched
• An off-by-one error in the sync stream token handling which could result in a crash has been fixed
• State events will no longer be re-sent unnecessary by the roomserver to other components if they have already been sent, which should help to reduce the NATS message sizes on the roomserver output topic in some cases
• The roomserver input API now uses the process context and should handle graceful shutdowns better
• Guest registration is now correctly disabled when the client_api.registration_disabled configuration option is set
• One-time encryption keys are now cleaned up correctly when a device is logged out or removed
• Invalid state snapshots in the state storage refactoring migration are now reset rather than causing a panic at startup

Sytest compliance is up slightly:

• Client-server APIs: 67%, up from 65%
• Server-server APIs: 95%, same as before

As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite-related chat!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace reports

And my Helm Chart updates continue as they do, with matrix-synapse being updated to 1.53.0

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair reports

Here are the first steps for a bridge to KakaoTalk! The bridge is based on mautrix-python (having used mautrix-facebook as a starting point--there's still plenty of Facebook-specific code in there), with the backend handled by node-kakao (connected via RPC, as there seems to be no Python API for KakaoTalk!).

The bridge doesn't do much yet; all it can do is log in & sync your list of chats (if that). But it's under rapid development & decent momentum, so hopefully it will be usable soon!

For anyone brave enough to try it out, its setup steps are very similar to that of any of the Python-based mautrix bridges (though Docker is currently unsupported).

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

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

Nico announces

We made a small release that just is compiled against the new mtxclient version to fix an issue with servers announcing support for Matrix v1.1 or higher. We strongly recommend you update before the next Synapse stable release is out.

Apart from that Nheko now has support for hidden read receipts (thanks to symphorien, see MSC2285). ZenWalker updated our usage of deprecated gstreamer APIs. Malte has been spending a lot of effort on improving the scrolling experience on the PinePhone as well as allowing to search on mobile. Forwarding should now work properly again as well as calling on mobile and we fixed a small memory leak when opening some dialogs.

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

“Twosday” wasn’t the only exciting thing happening this week. Take a peek at everything else we had going on…

Coming to a Poll near you…

• From next week’s releases, you’ll discover two new updates on polls! First off, you’ll be able to edit a poll as long as no one has yet voted on it - which is great if you create a poll and realise you’ve made a small mistake. Even better, there’s now a new type of poll: ‘closed polls’ don’t show any results until the poll has ended, to keep the surprise.

Location Sharing

• Location Sharing is now available by default for users on all platforms, except desktop (where you can receive but not send locations). Check it out!
• The next stage is live location sharing and ‘pin dropping’, expect more soon.

Threaded Messaging

• Designed to make catching up on rooms easier, and to keep the main timeline as clutter free as possible, Threads are nearly here.
• You can try Threads out on all platforms - you’ll find them in Labs. This feature is experimental; let us know your feedback, and report any bugs as we continue to improve.

Community testing

• We will be looking at search result ordering on Web as part of the new search experience at 17:30 UTC / 18:30 CET on Tuesday, 1st of March
• We’re also hoping to test Threads on mobile devices towards the end of the week, join the testing room to get involved!
• Head over to #element-community-testing:matrix.org to hear the latest on all testing sessions!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle announces

• The EleWeb team has been working on Spaces, Threads, and defects this week.
• We are starting to look at batched updates, which could be bringing performance improvements to us.
• On the process improvement side, we are looking at test coverage and process improvements around PR submission. Don’t be surprised if our developers start a conversation around tests when you submit your next PR 🙂
• V1.10.5 release candidate is available and release is expected to go out on Monday, 28th February.
• And don’t forget; the new and improved search experience is available. It’s in Beta so turn it on, try it out, and send us your feedback!
  • We will be talking to the community about planned improvements in the next Community Testing Session on Tuesday over in#element-community-testing:matrix.org

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

• Improvements to Threads reliability are happening everyday. We’re also making some tweaks to the user experience details, like dragging and dropping files into the Thread panel.

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu reports

• Next week’s release (1.8.3) includes changes and improvements we’ve made to our overall app experience by closing some pesky UI defects.
• This week we’ve also been working on improving the reliability of our Labs features. If you’ve turned on Threads or Bubbles in Labs you may have experienced app slow downs or crashes. In the next version, these will be minimised.
• Spaces on iOS are also getting some attention at the moment and we’re hoping to improve the user experience of Spaces on Mobile.

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle announces

• The next release of Android (1.4.2) includes support for “@ room” and other usability defects you might have seen before… Fixes include steadying the notification badge in the room list, adding the correct interactions on bottom sheets, and opening a DM from the Space member list.
• We’ve also been working on upgrading the voice message experience, adding improvements like scrubbing! Keep sending voice notes and let us know what other improvements we should make.
• Our onboarding flow is also getting a new lick of paint. We want new users to our platform to have a simple and straight-forward experience when they’re creating an account.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

Populus-Viewer

Over at Populus-Viewer, we're continuing to refine the UX, for maximum focus, efficiency and enjoyment. Since last time we've:

1. Reworked the mobile view controls into a sidebar design.
2. Improved the generation of highlight rectangles.
3. Made sure that LaTeX and code listings are always displayed nicely
4. Made it possible to modify text selections within a PDF using the keyboard
5. Added "one-click" links for onboarding new users into a particular server, SSO flow and PDF collection.

We've also had some bug fixes related to federation, and had some of our first ever (maybe the first on matrix - first in the history of the universe?) federated social annotation sessions.

Populus-Philarchive

Populus-Philarchive, our proof-of-concept discussion overlay for preprint archives, now incorporates an OAI-PMH harvester, so it can aggregate OAI bibliographic metadata, and use that data for room creation and discovery. The implementation is pretty general, so it should be easy to tweak for any archive that supports OAI-PMH.

MSC3574

MSC3574 - marking up resources got some love this week, as we added a proposal for serializing annotations on matrix that ought to be compatible with the w3c web annotation data model. This paves the way for interoperability between the matrix annotation ecosystem and services like hypothes.is, and hopefully will make matrix a compelling option even for institutions where compliance with existing web standards is a must.

As always, if you'd like to chat about any of these developments, come visit us at #opentower:matrix.org !

Circles (website)

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

cvwright reports

The Circles beta on iOS continues inching toward a public release later this Spring.

• This week I added support for infinite scrolling on timelines. (Previously, scrolling the timelines was very clunky -- the user had to manually tap a button to "Load More" every 10-15 posts.)
• Also added a confirmation dialog when the user attempts to leave a group.

On Android, the prototype is coming along nicely, thanks to the efforts of our new developer Taras:

• The login screen works
• Currently working on implementing the timeline of social posts for groups

Dept of Widgets 🧩

Mjolnir Widget (website)

A widget for moderating with mjolnir. Highly WIP. Use at your own risk!

MTRNord (they/them) reports

In the last 2 weeks, I increasingly had to learn how to moderate rooms properly, which brought up a lack of nice Mjölnir gui for me. Due to that, I just started to write one. It is at the time of writing still fairly young.

The current features are:

• An overview of the ban list data the user is in (Not for the specific Mjölnir currently. Also requires a user to have joined the list room)
• A quick form to ban a person
• A form to redact someone or a message

Planned features are:

• Support for showing MSC1929 information if available
• Writing a patch for Mjölnir, so the widget can know which banlist the bot watches, so only relevant lists show up.
• Editing the banlist (aka unbanning)
• Adding support for more advanced features like deactivation of users and removal of media on the matrix-media-repo.
• Covering most of Mjölnir's commands
• Redact on ban and similar utilities you might want while banning.

Small getting started (it is simple :D)

To use it, you simply can add it to your Mjölnir Admin room by putting /addwidget https://moderation_widget.nordgedanken.dev?room_id=$matrix_room_id (the variable will get replaced automatically) in the message bar and pressing enter. The widget runs entirely client side, so this is not sending any events to my server. If you still are concerned due to the big amount of permissions asked, you can just build it yourself and host it.

Code and Room

Code is at https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-moderation-widget Room is at: #mjolnir-widget:nordgedanken.dev

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

mtxclient (website)

Client API library for Matrix, built on top of libcurl

Nico reports

You know what would be embarrassing? If changing the version number of something broke Nheko... Well, completely unrelated, mtxclient 0.6.2 is out now which fixes an issue where it would aggressively validate that version numbers started with an 'r'. Otherwise that release is API and ABI compatible, so if packagers could pick that up as a bugfix release into stable releases, that would be great!

Matrix-Rust-SDK-Bot-Framework-Helper (website)

A toolkit for writing commandbots more efficient in rust for matrix.

MTRNord (they/them) says

0.3.1

A small update was released, merging 2 month old PRs.

The changes are mainly features being now deactivated because we did not actually use them and fixing the example in one case. No updates to dependencies.

0.4.0

Dependencies have been updated to the newest versions.

Dept of Ops 🛠

andrewsh reports

The distribution-provided Debian packages for Synapse will only be provided for Bookworm (in testing/unstable) and Bullseye (in bullseye-backports). If you’re still using Buster (through buster-backports-sloppy), consider switching to Bullseye or, alternatively, to packages provided by the Synapse upstream. 1.52.0 is the last version to be provided for Buster through the backports repository.

saces reports

I did not find a docker container to ease/automate synapse and postgres maintenance, so I started one: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer

Dept of Bots 🤖

reMarkable

Paul announces

I saw an interesting (to me) reMarkable telegram bot somewhere. But I prefer matrix and node.js was more difficult to deploy on embedded. So I wrote a reMarkable matrix bot in Go. https://gitlab.com/ptman/remarkable-matrix

matrix-ukraine-donation-bot

krazykirby99999 says

A Matrix chat bot to send donation links to aid Ukraine in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Setup

Install Python 3.8 or higher

Install python-poetry

python -m pip install poetry

Clone Repository

git clone https://github.com/KrazyKirby99999/matrix-ukraine-donation-bot.git

Install Dependencies

cd matrix-ukraine-donation-bot
python -m poetry install

Usage:

Set environment variables

HOMESERVER=https://matrix.org
USERNAME=matrix-ukraine-donation-bot
PASSWORD=password # or ACCESS_TOKEN=syt_...

Run main.py

python -m poetry run python main.py

Example:

Matrix Community Manager (website)

Looking for a bot to manage events and feedback from your community?

Sleuth reports

Looking for a bot to manage events and feedback from your community?

MCM an information bot. It manages the flow of information between community leaders and their community.

It aggregates messages from community members in several ways.

• A @ mention. You can mention the bot with a message.
• A Direct Message. Members of your community can message this bot privately.
• hash tags. Using hash tags members of your community can send messages tagged to go to a specific back room.

You as an administrator of the bot can send timed announcements to any room using the built in matrix administration interface. You can also manage tags, add and remove admin of the bot, add automatic replies and more. All from the comforts of your Matrix client.

If you have any questions or want help please join #Matrix-Community-Manager:matrix.org Docs and installation guide can be found here

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	maescool.be	346
2	2808.nl	387.5
3	envs.net	394
4	converser.eu	405
5	carnot.cc	518
6	reactos.org	519.5
7	plocki.ddns.net	556
8	mozilla.org	590
9	matrix.fomin.site	660.5
10	adminctrl.com	699

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	conduit.cyberdi.sk	197
2	rcp.tf	224.5
3	conduit.grich.sk	234
4	nognu.de	261
5	cry.is	319.5
6	sspaeth.de	466
7	matrix.sum7.eu	485
8	dendrite.neilalexander.dev	565
9	rustybever.be	614
10	matrix.awesomesheep48.me	720.5

That's all I know 🏁

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

Rejoice everyone, Synapse 1.53 is out! Let's have a look at what's new with this release.

Stabilisation of registration tokens

Registration tokens is a feature introduced in Synapse 1.42.0, which allows homeserver administrators to force their users to use specific tokens when registering. This is similar to Synapse's registration shared secret support, but with added features, such as the possibility to limit how users can be registered with the same token, or to make a token expire. See the admin API documentation for more information on how to manage registration tokens on your homeserver.

Registration tokens were initially proposed to the Matrix specification in MSC3231 by Callum Brown during their Google Summer of Code internship last summer. The MSC has since been accepted, and released in the stable Matrix specification as of Matrix v1.2. As a result, its Synapse implementation has been updated to remove support for unstable identifiers. Administrators of homeservers on which the reverse proxy rules explicitly allow the unstable route for this feature need to update their configuration. Same goes for developers of Matrix clients that support this feature. See the upgrade notes for more information.

Time-based cache expiry now enabled by default

To avoid being overly intensive on resources by making too many queries to the database, Synapse maintains several in-memory caches to store data it needs to use frequently. However, this comes with the inconvenience that, if Synapse needs to store too much data, these caches can become fairly big and occupy too much space in the host's memory.

Historically, Synapse has dealt with this issue by having set sizes for each cache, either hardcoded or set in the configuration, and evicting the oldest items when exceeding this size. Synapse 1.38 introduced the possibility for homeserver administrators to configure Synapse to evict cache entries based on the time they were last accessed on. This mechanism acts on top of the aforementioned eviction policy, and allows automatically evicting entries that haven't been accessed for some time, leaving more room in the caches to store data that needs to be accessed more often.

Synapse 1.53 enables this behaviour by default. Without specific configuration, Synapse will automatically evict cache entries that haven't been accessed for more than 30 minutes. Server administrators that were already using this feature might need to update their configuration, as this change deprecates the expiry_time configuration setting, which will be removed in a future version of Synapse. See the upgrade notes for more information.

Everything else

You might have heard that we're working on improving the time it takes to join big Matrix rooms with Synapse. If not, then you definitely want to have a look at the demos Matrix live that was published earlier this month and includes more details and a demo of the work we've been doing in this area.

This release of Synapse includes an implementation of MSC3706, which is part of this work. It's still very experimental and definitely not production-ready, but it's a huge stepping stone towards making room joins snappier than ever.

We've also been continuing our work towards enabling end-to-end encryption for application services (see the Synapse 1.50 release blogpost for more context on that). Synapse 1.53 includes support for sending to-device messages to application services. This is also still very experimental, watch this space for future updates.

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) Dirk Klimpel, Brad Jones, and Alexander Mnich.

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR announces

Hello everyone! It's me, not-anoa, here with your weekly spec update. I finally got the scripts to run which means you get a proper update once again (yay).

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

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3589: Room version 9 as the default room version (merge)
• MSC3582: Remove m.room.message.feedback (merge)

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3726: Safer Password-based Authentication with BS-SPEKE
• MSC3725: Content warnings
• MSC3723: Federation /versions

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3286: Media spoilers

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been looking at unblocking MSC3440: Threads so it can make a smooth journey into acceptance. This involves quite a lot of work to ensure that the features we're concerned about are addressed, but so far the FCP progress on it is looking good.

We're also spending a bunch of time working out what room version 10 looks like to try and fix some usability issues with join rules and general maintenance of things like power levels. The hope is that in time for Matrix 1.3 we'll have v10 out (but not made default) for folks to experiment with.

Random MSC of the week

Your random MSC is MSC2974: Widgets: Capabilities re-exchange. I swear it was actually random and only after running the script exactly once. The MSC is interesting because it allows widgets (a feature working its way into the general spec, slowly) to ask for more permissions when they need them. This ensures the widget doesn't need to ask for everything at startup (which is more likely to mean that it gets rejected), and that it can maintain a clean security state during normal operation.

One day it'll probably make it into the spec as part of the larger widget movement, but first we need to get widgets into the spec properly.

The Graph

Numbers only mean so much, and graphs show progress. Here's the breakdown of MSCs over time:

Of note

If you look carefully at the OpenAPI viewer, you might notice a dropdown for not-client-server APIs 👀. There's still work to be done to bring on the missing APIs, but this is in a place where it can be experimented with. Thanks to Alexandre Franke for getting this over the line :)

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

Brendan Abolivier reports

This week we've released Synapse 1.53.0rc1, which includes a bunch of new features, improvements, and other niceties... But more on that next week when we release Synapse 1.53.0 🙂 As usual, we're super grateful for anyone that helps us test release candidates by running them with their homeservers! Please report any breakage or feedback in #synapse:matrix.org

Apart from this we have been continuing our experimentations with Poetry to better manage our dependencies in our Python projects after we switched Sydent to it last week. We're already starting to see improvements off the back of this work, such as automated security PRs and an opportunity to centralise our automated workflows to better reuse them in our projects (see https://github.com/matrix-org/backend-meta). We look forward to bringing all this goodness to Synapse soon!

See you next week! 😀

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace says

And my Helm Chart updates are still happening, also now listed on Artifact Hub for easier discovery. This week saw several element-web updates, finally ending on 1.10.4

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

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

Nico says

Is using Nheko a bit of a pain on your PinePhone? Do you just want bubbles in your chat app, not raw lines of text? Does Nheko waste too much space on timestamps and other metadata for messages?

Well, I am assuming Malte was annoyed by that or similar reasons. But in the end, they did spend a lot of effort reorganizing the way Nheko layouts messages so that people can have bubbles. This should make Nheko feel much more at home on the PinePhone and it seems like they are doing even more to make Nheko a great experience on mobile devices! But just look at it yourself:

If you are scared now and you think: "This is not the Nheko I came to love!", don't worry, all of this is optional. You can play around with the different avatar sizes as well as the bubbles themselves. You can even make Nheko look like it always looked!

There will be some regressions though. If you want to contribute, it would help a lot if you test those changes and report issues that you find! <3

Apart from that, there were also a lot of other bugfixes and cleanups by various contributors. You can also hide events by type now. If you don't want to see stickers or when someone joins a room, just disable that in the room settings! Tastytea implemented that. Long usernames should now also no longer overflow the profile pages and you can reset the state for a single room using the /reset-state /command. This is helpful when updating Nheko to use widgets, but Nheko just threw those events away (or pinned messages or other state events).

That's all, have a wonderful bubbly day!

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat reports

Hello and welcome back to another week at Element!

Location Sharing

• As of this week, Location Sharing is now available by default for users on all platforms, except desktop where you can receive but not send locations.
• We’re starting work on the next stage, which is to enable live location sharing, and ‘pin dropping’ where you can pick any location on a map to share.

Threads

• Threads are now live in Labs on all Element platforms!
  • Please remember this feature is experimental; let us know your feedback and report any bugs as we continue to improve.
• The teams on all platforms are working hard on improving the stability and performance of Threads.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat says

• The new search experience came out this week, you can enable it in Beta to try it out! We are collecting feedback from users to inform upcoming improvements.
• We’re working hard on smashing bugs and reducing the number of defects.

Element iOS (website)

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

kittykat announces

• Along with closing bugs, we’re working hard on adding finesse to our app and removing some of those “papercut” issues that users experience.
  • Keep your eyes peeled for updates and let us know what you think!
• Our first time user experience is being updated also. We’ve introduced new splash screens to help introduce Element. Don’t panic! You can skip straight to “sign-in” if this isn’t for you.
• A new spinner is here… While we work on the speed and performance of the app we’ve introduced a new spinner that does not get in your way while you work.

Element Android (website)

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

kittykat says

• Bugs and Papercuts… Our app is getting some love from our developer team as we try to reduce confusion and simplify flows throughout the app.
  • Keep an eye out for any small changes and let us know what you think!
• Creating a new account in Element can be intimidating for new users, especially those who aren’t familiar with Matrix. We’re introducing new screens and simplifying our questions so that users can sign up with confidence!
  • If you have any feedback, or want to share your thoughts on our first time user experience, get in touch.
• A new layout option hit our app this week: Message Bubbles! If you’re used to seeing inbound messages on the right, and outgoing messages on the left this might be for you. You can access the new appearance option from Settings.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Beeper media viewer

tulir says

I wrote a small web app thing that can download, decrypt and display Matrix media in a browser. The goal is to use it in the Android SMS bridge for sending attachments that are too big for MMS, but it might be useful for other things too.

Currently it consists of the web frontend, a maubot plugin to generate links, and a small server that stores file metadata (so the URLs just contain the decryption key and a short ID to find the metadata on the server). I'll probably continue working on the exact URL format to make it shorter and to encrypt the metadata, and maybe also add an alternative mode where all info is included in the URL to make the server component optional.

You can try it out by sending files in an encrypted room with @media:maunium.net. It'll reply with a link like https://media.mau.chat/AGIPyjtJQAU#KHBwuZFrv1ffCd4ZUylo8MV03P9N4sz2T75zLi1Urcw

The code can be found at https://gitlab.com/beeper/media-viewer

Cactus Comments (website)

Cactus Comments is a federated comment system for the web, based on the Matrix protocol.

Asbjørn says

Cactus Comments is a comment system for the open web, built on Matrix.

Another small-ish release for the client: v0.12.0

This update introduces a new UI for the login form.

Here's the changelog:

• Re-structure login form to more clearly separate matrix.to links from direct login.
• Require user id (e.g. @alice:example.com) instead of username. Only show homeserver url field if .well-known lookup fails.
• Add top-right "X" button to close login modal.
• Login modal now closes when you press outside it.
• Fix some CSS bugs related to positioning the login form in viewport center.
• Make LoginForm a stateful component.

/ipns/latest.cactus.chat is updated to point to the latest release, so sites linking there should already be using the new version.

Try out a live demo: cactus.chat/demo

Join our Matrix room: #cactus:cactus.chat

Dept of Ops 🛠

f0x says

I worked on adapting the NixOS module for Synapse to support worker deployments. It's a great reproducible deployment method, and super easy to configure. My module is perhaps less quality than the rest of the chain, but it's pretty neat to define your whole Matrix deployment like this: https://git.pixie.town/f0x/nixos/src/branch/synapse-workers/nodes/cosmos/containers/synapse-workers.nix#L60 and have Nix figure out all the systemd units and nginx routes that have to be added

Full Nix code for the module is at https://git.pixie.town/f0x/nixos/src/branch/synapse-workers/common/modules/synapse pictured is the ping stat for a little test deployment with 8 federation senders :P

Dandellion dares

do tell your about publishing my NixOS module for workers in a git repository as well then 👀? https://github.com/dali99/nixos-matrix-modules

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi says

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports installing the matrix_encryption_disabler Synapse module (details here), which homeserver admins can use to prevent End-to-End-Encryption from being enabled by users on their homeserver. The popular opinion is that this is dangerous and shouldn't be done, but there are valid use cases for disabling encryption discussed in this Synapse issue.

Dept of Services 🚀

etke.cc (website)

Your matrix server on your conditions

Aine reports

🎉 Today marks 1 year of the etke.cc! 🎉

During that year, we did:

• Pushed 234 updates and enhancements to the automation framework used as the service core
• Integrated 17 additional components to the matrix stack
• Developed 5 bots and tools to extend matrix capabilities
• Installed 92 new matrix servers
• Helped 172 people and organizations to achieve their goals in the matrix
• Posted 74 updates in the announcements room

Some history:

• the project (not service yet) started on February 12, 2021
• the first installed server was etke.cc itself (yes, etke.cc homeserver is a customer of etke.cc service from the day 1)
• the second installed server was a chatbot, that uses matrix as a platform to interact with users across different chat networks (Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, etc.) - one API to rule them all.
• In May 2021 the service was published globally

#news:etke.cc | #discussion:etke.cc

Dept of Bots 🤖

matrix-wordle (website)

An implementation of the popular Wordle game for the Matrix Protocol.

krazykirby99999 reports

An implementation of the popular Wordle game for the Matrix Protocol.

Source: Github Repository

Made with simplematrixbotlib

Setup

Install Python 3.8 or higher

Install python-poetry

python -m pip install poetry

Clone Repository

git clone https://github.com/KrazyKirby99999/matrix-wordle.git

Install Dependencies

cd matrix-wordle
python -m poetry install

Usage:

Set environment variables

HOMESERVER=https://matrix.org
USERNAME=wordle-bot
PASSWORD=password # or ACCESS_TOKEN=syt_...

Run main.py

python -m poetry run python main.py

Example:

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

TravisR reports

After a few years, matrix-room-directory-server has finally gotten an upgrade to modern times. Intended to eventually be a standalone directory server (making vanity aliases possible, but otherwise not functional as a homeserver), it currently only supports overriding the federation /publicRooms endpoint.

The changes made today are to replace the old, broken, appservice-backed approach with a space-backed approach. You can see this in action on t2bot.io: querying the room directory over federation will hit the room directory server, which is watching #directory:t2bot.io in the background to determine which rooms to serve.

Dept of Guides 🧭

minecraftchest1 says

Hay y'all. I created a blog post about how to host element and matrix .well-known files using cloudflare pages that I thought might be worth sharing. Have a few kinks to work out regarding CORS (might need to clean my browsers cache) though. https://minecraftchest1.wordpress.com/2022/02/17/hosting-element-and-matrix-well-known-files-with-cloudflare-pages/ https://matrix.to/#/#minecraftchest1-blog-matrix-elemet-cloudflare:matrix.org

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	workers2.pixie.town	270.5
2	matrix.org	320
3	neko.dev	345
4	magdeburg.jetzt	427
5	koyax.org	491
6	jae.fi	565
7	wuks.space	664
8	fachschaften.org	703
9	balsillie.net	704
10	matrix.sp-codes.de	743.5

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	nognu.de	210
2	rustybever.be	262.5
3	cry.is	299
4	matrix.org	322.5
5	conduit.grich.sk	331
6	dendrite.grin.hu	568
7	conduit.rs	613.5
8	matrix.sum7.eu	635.5
9	dendrite.s3cr3t.me	896
10	dendrite.matrix.org	1430

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa announces

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3720: Account status
• MSC3715: /relations parity with /messages
• MSC3713: Alleviating ACL exhaustion with ACL Slots
• [WIP] MSC3710: User groups

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

MSCs with newly proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC3440: Threading via m.thread relation
• MSC3613: Combinatorial join rules
• MSC3667: Enforce integer power levels

Closed MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3348: Server-Server Room based extensible communication

Spec Updates

MSC3440 (threading) continues to move forward with a proposed final comment period this week. As a really useful feature in Matrix, it's great to see it getting closer to landing in the spec.

In a similar vein, MSC3613 (combinatorial join rules) had a proposed final comment period. The intention of this is to be a simple mechanism for resolving the "it's not possible to have both a restricted and knock room" situation - as both introduced mutually exclusive join rules. This MSC will likely serve as the basis of a new room version whenever it lands.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3144: Allow Widgets By Default in Private Rooms!

This MSC makes the case for allowing widgets to be created in private rooms by default. The actual spec for it is blocked behind having widgets in the spec (see this tracking PR if you're interested).

As noted in the PR though, this MSC could build on the existing im.vector.modular.widgets unstable prefix for widgets in order to create an implementation for this feature. It does not appear to have happened yet though.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

callahad announces

Hello, TWIM! This week we released Synapse 1.52, which includes new Admin APIs for monitoring federation status and immediately retrying failed connections, as well as for reporting on rooms shared between two homeservers. We've also fixed / improved media previews for sites like Reddit. Plus lots more fixes / refactors / improvements under the hood.

This is a smaller release as it's coming off of our FOSDEM sprint, but we look forward to getting back to more regularly-sized and featureful Synapses this month.

Notably, we've been experimenting with Poetry to better manage Python dependencies in our applications (Synapse, Sygnal, and Sydent). We just switched Sydent over this week and are working out the kinks in our CI and build pipelines. We're looking forward to bringing this consistency to Synapse next month!

See you next week!

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander reports

Yesterday we released Dendrite 0.6.3 which is a primarily bug fix release. It contains the following changes:

• Initial support for m.login.token
• A number of regressions from earlier v0.6.x versions should now be corrected
• Missing state is now correctly retrieved in cases where a gap in the timeline was closed but some of those events were missing state snapshots, which should help to unstick slow or broken rooms
• Fixed a transaction issue where inserting events into the database could deadlock, which should stop rooms from getting stuck
• Fixed a problem where rejected events could result in rolled back database transactions
• Avoided a potential race condition on fetching latest events by using the room updater instead
• Processing events from /get_missing_events will no longer result in potential recursion
• Federation events are now correctly generated for updated self-signing keys and signed devices
• Rejected events can now be un-rejected if they are reprocessed and all of the correct conditions are met
• Fetching missing auth events will no longer error as long as all needed events for auth were satisfied
• Users can now correctly forget rooms if they were not a member of the room

As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more Dendrite-related discussions!

Conduit (website)

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

Timo ⚡️ says

Conduit v0.3.0 released last week and over 50 servers already upgraded! This week we looked into some bugs that still happen with this version:

• Element Android doesn't show notifications: A bug where we send 'null' instead of leaving out a field https://github.com/matrix-org/sygnal/issues/295
• Missing profiles when scrolling up: Bug in multiple clients: https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/issues/233

These bugs will be fixed in the coming days.

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace announces

This week saw more updates to my Helm Charts as usual; matrix-synapse is now at 1.52.0

Dendrite Helm Chart (website)

Helm Chart to deploy Dendrite on Kubernetes

jonnobrow reports

I am pleased to share that both v2 and v3 of the Dendrite Helm Chart have now been released.

Dendrite Helm Chart v2

Version 2 included a bump in app version up to v0.6.0 and the necessary switch from Kafka to NATS.

Dendrite Helm Chart v3

Version 3 includes the addition of polylith support as well as some general improvements and fixes.

You can find the latest version of the chart and documentation on GitHub

Thanks to @anthr76:mozilla.org and @s7evink:matrix.org for their support throughout the development of polylith mode.

Dept of Clients 📱

Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Carl Schwan announces

NeoChat 22.02 is out with the possibility of sharing files directly from NeoChat to other apps and services (Nextcloud, Imgur, email, ...). We also added support for minimizing the application to the system tray on startup and you can now label accounts to better organize them if you are using the multi-account feature. Aside from that, we spend some time fixing many small bugs and paper cuts reducing the total amount of open bug reports by 20%.

https://plasma-mobile.org/2022/02/09/plasma-mobile-gear-22-02/#neochat

Hydrogen (website)

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

Bruno announces

We've release 0.2.26. You can now create rooms and direct messages with Hydrogen. There's also a bug fix in this release for replies not loading in e2ee rooms under certain conditions.

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

Welcome to another week of TWIM at Element! Here’s our updates:

Polls and Location Sharing

• Polls is now out of labs, and available in the composer for all users with the latest app versions.
• Location sharing is available on the mobile apps. For now you will need to enable it in settings in order to see the composer icon and send your location. As of next week’s releases it will be enabled by default on all platforms.

Threads

• Threads aims to reduce cross-talk on the timeline by moving side-convo’s to the right panel. If you want to try it out, it's available in Labs on Web today and in Labs on Mobile from next week!
• We’ve been working on improving the stability and speed of threads across platforms.

Community Testing

• Join#element-community-testing:matrix.org to join us for future testing sessions!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle announces

• Metaspaces have landed! Giving users a new way to display favourites, DMs and rooms outside of other spaces. Switch these on in Quick Settings at the bottom left of your app.
• New and improved Search! We’re pleased to move the new search experience into Beta. Head to Settings > Labs to access it.
  • Those of you using Nightly or Develop will see the new experience by default.
  • Provide feedback on your experience directly from the Search window.
• On Web we’ve also been chasing away some bugs, specifically desynced memberlist and stale display names.

In Labs (Enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or Nightly)

• Threads: The MSC is available here MSC3440

J. Ryan Stinnett announces

Thanks to everyone who tested the maximised widgets feature which was recently added to Element Web. It received a sudden burst of attention as part of the FOSDEM conference. 😄 This week we've been fine tuning the feature to ensure it works for more workflows, and we've also cleaned up various associated widget bugs. In particular, in the develop version of Element Web, the pin and maximise actions are more consistent accessible, so you can toggle between pinned and maximised if e.g. you're in a conference room and temporarily want the stream widget to be larger while still having access to the chat timeline.

Next week we'll be focusing more on our Matrix-native collaborative document plans.

Element iOS (website)

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

Doug says

• The next update of iOS (1.8.0) will have improved emoji reactions and location sharing will be on by default!
  • We will also be releasing fixes to the incorrect scrolling on the timeline and home screen sorting.
• Work on a Rust prototype is also underway. We’re excited to learn about the opportunities and advantages of this approach as we start to learn and experiment.

In Labs

• From next week Threads will be available in Labs on Mobile. Switch it on and try it out!

Element Android (website)

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

adam reports

• This version of the Android app (1.4.0) includes message bubbles and location sharing!
• Also, notifications are back online! Some of our users were experiencing intermittent notifications when connected to wifi, but ‘tis no more.
• We’ve also squashed a bunch of other bugs, our favourites include:
  • Welcoming back some font weights that had disappeared
  • Fixing statuses in the timeline for missed or rejected calls
  • Closing the “Invited to Space” dialog after you invited someone to the Space…

In Labs

• Threads have landed in Labs. Switch it on and try it out!

Beeper (website)

All you chats in one app.

Brad Murray says

Beeper is a universal chat app built on top of Matrix. We've created 12+ open source Matrix bridges and integrated them into an easy to use all-in-one service which does not require setting up your own homeserver.

We’re excited to announce that as of today we are now out of Beta! We have been hard at work and we’re now ready to be sharing Beeper with a lot more people, starting first with the people we’ve built up on our waitlist.

For more details and demos on the current state of Beeper, including our recently rebuilt and relaunched iOS app, check out the update on our blog: https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-update-4-out-of-beta or watch the video below.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP announces

The new version contains two new features around the Synapse Admin API, making someone a room admin and listing all unencrypted media URLs.

I've had some good ideas on how to make Matrix Wrench cover more use cases while staying simple for both users and me as a developer. New components allow me to add new API endpoints in as little as 7 lines. So far this only applies to simple endpoints without parameters, like joining and leaving a room, but it can be expanded to more endpoints because of how similar all Matrix endpoints are. Props to the Spec! 🙌

Stay tuned for an editable UI coming soon™️.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict says

Trixnity is now on version 1.1.7. Since 1.1.0 we have fixed many bugs and added some improvements and features. Our reference client runs amazingly reliable and fast thanks to Trixnity 🚀

Features and improvements:

• support presence
• support read receipts
• support push notifications API
• add Unknown to UserTrustLevel
• basic support for relates_to field

Halcyon (website)

Halcyon is an easy to use matrix library inspired by discord.py

gen3 says

Version 1.1.1 released This was a quick bugfix release for a finding by jeffcasavant, in which joining a room with a predecessor, the bot could crash. Thanks Jeff!

If you missed it last week, I published a template / demo stock reporting bot you can find here: https://github.com/WesR/Halcyon-stock-bot . Short and sweet, this little bot should be a great starting point if your looking into making a bot. Make sure to also checkout the library itself for more examples, and usage information https://github.com/WesR/Halcyon.

I'm always looking for more feedback, and love to see what people are working on. Come hangout with us in the Halcyon room: https://matrix.to/#/#halcyon:blackline.xyz

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Pretix Matrix Plugin

Felix says

We have been using Matrix as a chat solution for the attendees of our biannual conference (KIF) and for new students during the introduction week, as well as Pretix to register attendants. Up until now the process to invite attendees to the corresponding Matrix Rooms and Spaces involved some curl and jq magic as well as manual intervention to connect both.

We have now replaced said manual process with a Pretix plugin that invites registered attendees to a configurable Matrix Room or Space. This plugin is now available on the Pretix marketplace or directly from its repository.

Gatho

Jake C announces

I'm excited to share a side-project I've been working on for the last ~3 months: Gatho (http://gatho.party) - a web app for hosting small gatherings.

Gatho is perfect as a replacement for Facebook Events for small social gatherings. I'm a 24 year old Australian who recently deleted Facebook - I've used Gatho for a few parties now and the guests have loved it!

Gatho includes a Matrix bot which, when added to a room, can synchronise RSVP emoji reactions to a linked Gatho event! See gatho.party/getting-started to hear how the Matrix synchronization works.

You can also create one-click RSVP links to send to your friends - no matter which chat/social app they use!

It's fully GDPR compliant and multi-region with an EU server and database, and uses NextAuth.js for passwordless authentication.

The Gatho website and bot is open source (AGPL-3.0) on Github, PRs and Github issues are very welcome! It's built using Next.js in Typescript.

I'd love to hear your feedback! Join the Matrix room at #gatho-events:matrix.gatho.party

Dept of Ping 🏓

Ping Room

tulir reports

The ping room has been upgraded to room v9. During the 452 days the previous (v6) ping room was alive, it received a total of 735997 org.matrix.dummy_events and 604459 m.room.message events.

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	neko.dev	300
2	catvibers.me	325
3	deuteronomiumcloud.com	375.5
4	thomcat.rocks	396.5
5	asra.gr	400.5
6	maunium.net	408
7	matrix.infra.reflect-media.de	461
8	matrix.ring-0.net	480.5
9	stefanberger.net	487
10	zehka.net	650.5

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	conduit.supercable.onl	101
2	schuwi.science	292
3	dendrite.grin.hu	361
4	cry.is	522.5
5	nognu.de	631.5
6	conduit.cyberdi.sk	730
7	conduit.beckmeyer.us	858
8	matrix.awesomesheep48.me	1164.5
9	dendrite.matrix.org	1216.5
10	grin.hu	3054

That's all I know 🏁

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

Synapse 1.52 is out! Here's what's new with this week's release.

Twisted security release

The team behind Twisted, which is the main framework Synapse uses under the hood, recently released Twisted 22.1. This version fixes a security vulnerability within the Twisted library.

While preparing the release of Synapse 1.52, we have investigated the impact of this vulnerability on Synapse. We came to the conclusion that it does not affect Synapse. We however advise server administrators to ensure they use an up-to-date version of the library as a matter of good practice.

For instances installed with pip, the library can be updated with pip install --upgrade Twisted treq. For instances installed with the matrixdotorg/synapse Docker image or Debian packages from packages.matrix.org, updating to Synapse 1.52.0 is sufficient, as these images and packages include up-to-date versions of all dependencies.

It is also worth noting that a release candidate for Twisted 22.2 has been published, with a fix for a potential denial of service vulnerability with SSH. Administrators of Synapse homeservers that have the manhole feature enabled (which is the only feature of Synapse using SSH) are encouraged to ensure access to the manhole is correctly restricted (e.g. by preventing access from external locations).

Federation admin APIs

This release of Synapse introduces a few admin APIs to help server administrators monitor and handle how their Synapse homeserver interacts with other federated homeservers. One of these APIs offers server administrators a way to visualise which rooms are shared between the local homeserver and a given remote one.

Another API allows server administrators to reset federation timeouts. If Synapse fails to connect to a remote homeserver, it will make note of the failure and will not retry the connection after a certain amount of time. This can happen if the remote homeserver goes offline or experiences connectivity issues. Synapse has a few ways of figuring out whether a remote homeserver has come back online, but this new admin API adds a way for administrators to manually tell Synapse a destination should be available.

Everything else

This release also improves Synapse's deactivation behaviour by deleting account data when deactivating a user. "Account data" refers to private arbitrary data that is specific to an account. It is used among other things for secure server-side storage (SSSS) which allows securely backing up end-to-end encryption keys.

Please see the Synapse release notes 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) Dirk Klimpel, Vaishnav Nair, SequentialRead Software and Nick Barrett from Beeper.

Last year was the first time FOSDEM was hosted on Matrix, and it was generally a huge success - and so the FOSDEM team trusted us again this year and we’re happy to say that it seems to have gone really well! This year’s FOSDEM was massive once again, featuring 654 speakers, 731 events, and 103 tracks.

This year hosting the event went smoother than last year, the only significant issue was some of the Q&A Jitsis not being broadcast to the devrooms on Saturday before 10:15 UTC, for which we offer our apologies to the speakers impacted. This turned out to be a problem with the Matrix<->Jitsi access control sync system which hadn’t showed up during earlier testing, but we patched around it rapidly on the day.

The most notable difference between this year and the previous year has been the usage of a “attendees.fosdem.org” instance in addition to the original “fosdem.org” one, specifically for attendees. The graphs speak for themselves: Synapse could handle the load of the 23K users (13K joined users and 10K lurkers) spread across a total number of 941 rooms. The real eye-opener however is that of the 13K joined users, only 4K came came from the FOSDEM attendee server, and 1K from Libera Chat, meaning that ~70% of the Matrix participants were already on Matrix and came in from existing servers! 🤯 That means the vast majority of people attended over federation. Decentralisation at work, people! It works! We didn’t host the conference… you did!!

But not only did the backend handle the load smoothly: the general user experience felt tightly integrated. People were welcomed by a tailor-made home page in Element to help them navigate through all the tracks and stands:.

One of the great things is it doesn’t require heavy modifications to Element: anyone who installs their own instance of Element can use a simple html file to display relevant information to their audience.

New this year, we also generated a space hierarchy for the whole conference at #fosdem2022:fosdem.org to help navigate the maze of rooms, making it even easier for users on their own servers to jump in:

Another greatly appreciated feature was the famous “maximised widgets” I (Thib) keep telling you about in Matrix Live episodes. Attendees and speakers could give the conference the central attention it deserved while simultaneously keeping an eye on what was happening in the chat.

From the speaker's perspective, we tried to streamline the user journey as much as possible: a bot invited them to a backstage room, in which they joined a Jitsi widget while their talk was being played in the track or devroom. They could see the most upvoted questions by the audience in a dedicated widget. A few minutes before their pre-recorded talk was over, a countdown (new this year!) could be displayed to tell them and the host they were about to go live. At the end of the countdown, the backstage Jitsi was broadcasted to the track so the speaker could answer the questions.

If you want to have an in-depth look at the backend’s architecture, it didn’t change much from last year. You can have a look at last year’s blog post for the details on the setup. Most of the heavy lifting was around the conference bot used to set rooms up, create the spaces, populate them with widgets, arrange layouts and trigger countdowns before going live…

Finally we are immensely proud that we had our first ever Matrix Devroom! Not only does it mean the staff of a large international open source conference thinks it’s worth having a track of our own, it also means our community has grown to the point where we could have 8 hours of back to back Matrix content! Here’s a link to the YouTube playlists to which we are going to add the videos of FOSDEM as they’re being published.

Huge thanks to the FOSDEM team for trusting us, massive shout-out to Element Matrix Services and Element’s Ops and infrastructure team for their fantastic job in setting everything up and making sure everything was ready in time, a sincere thank you to all the fantastic speakers who shared awesome content, and finally to all the attendees. What a weekend!