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This Week in Matrix 2022-06-17

17.06.2022 00:00 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Brendan Abolivier

Hey everyone! Thib is away today so I'm taking over TWIM for this week (but don't worry, he should be back next week!)

Let's see what the Matrix community has shared with us this week.

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

In this week's Matrix Live, Thib talks to Ivan from the Matrix Rust SDK development team to ask him about the SDK's bindings for Node.JS and WASM.

πŸ”—Dept of GSoC πŸŽ“οΈ

Marco Melorio says

Hi there! I'm Marco Melorio and I'm participating in this year's Google Summer of Code, under the GNOME Foundation. I'm working on Fractal, the GNOME matrix client, with the help of my mentor Julian Sparber. More specifically I'm working on implementing a media history viewer to the app.

To follow my progress on the project you can check out my blog here. I've already published a small introduction post about me and a first update post which includes a mockup and milestones about the project.

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—Synapse (website)

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

Brendan says

This week the team released Synapse 1.61, which main new feature is media retention. That's right, you can now control how long Synapse keeps media files around, which should help server admins manage Synapse's disk space usage more efficiently. On a different note, this release of Synapse removes support for groups/communities (which was deprecated back in Synapse 1.56), as it has now been replaced by Spaces. Farewell groups, you have served your users well.

See the full Synapse 1.61 release announcement on the matrix.org blog here: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/06/17/synapse-1-61-released

Aside from this, the team is as always hard at work on making Synapse better and more efficient.

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—Quadrix (website)

JFA says

New version of Quadrix (1.0.6) available on desktops and mobiles. Mainly bug fixes, plus the addition of a button to deactivate the account on the server (this apparently will be soon mandatory for iOS and MacOS messaging apps). The new desktop version should offer better support for Wayland (tested on Fedora 36, Ubuntu 22.04 and Mobian/Phosh). Repo at https://github.com/alariej/quadrix, project room at #quadrix:matrix.org :-)

πŸ”—Nheko (website)

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

Nico announces

Since I skipped the last update, this one is a bit longer :3

First of all there have been lots and lots of updates to the translations! Finnish is now at 100% thanks to the tireless work of Aminda and Lurkki.

Nheko now also shows a nice badge on Unity compatible desktops (like KDE) for unread messages (although that doesn't work properly for multiple profiles being open at the same time due to limitations in that desktop protocol. Thank you d42 for contributing this, may you role a natural 42 every dice throw!

Syldra fixed up the paste behaviour (which didn't properly tie into undo in some edge cases), cleaned up how we find some of our dependencies and made cusor movement more consistent across systems.

Finally we fixed our glare resolution when verifying other sessions, which will be especially noticeable when verifying Cinny, since that responds to verification requests in a different way than I tested before! This should get rid of a whole range of verification issues people might have experienced. As part of our stabilization for the next release, we also fixed a crash on logout because I fatfingered and deleted a return statement, we now send an Element Android compatible height attribute on emotes, properly compile when the C++ version is set to 20, we once again support the current version of the hidden read receipts MSC (so that others can't tell what you read), edits now properly update in replies again, you can close the image overlay again by clicking outside, cancelled uploads properly get removed again, logging out and back in now doesn't mess up your configuration anymore and pinned messages now properly refresh once the events are loaded.

Phew, that was a mouthful. And we are not even done yet!

I spent some time on making Nheko compilation a bit faster again as well as improve startup speed. This might order your room list a bit weirdly for a few days after updating, but should normalize when receiving a few messages in some rooms. With this we now don't need to load the last message in all rooms on startup. This makes Nheko startup now only take 7 seconds on my old laptop (when not doing something CPU heavy at the same time). The remaining startup time is 40% building up the font database and 40% loading the powerlevels for each room. So we do have the chance to speedup startup by probably another 60%. It is unlikely that is necessary though.

When I discovered Matrix, Element was still called Riot. At the time some of the big design changes started happening to make it the Element you know today. One of the sideeffects was that the roomlist was consistently taking up 20% of my CPU on my Laptop, which I used at the time (and am forced to use now again, since I broke my newer laptop). It also used a lot more RAM than it does today. So for that reason I started shopping around for what other clients there are and I found Nheko. Clearly because it isn't a webclient, it had to be faster and use less RAM. Well, it did maybe a bit, but frankly the difference wasn't that much. Especially since at the time it loaded and rendered ALL your messages on startup (kinda). It never removed messages from memory, so it would just continuously render more and more parts of your timeline, which clearly increased RAM usage. It did however never resort the full roomlist, which made it not use a lot of CPU.

Since I didn't know any web development at the time, but I knew some C++, I started contributing to Nheko. At some point I made the roomlist constantly resort, which used quite some amount of CPU, but I quickly fixed that. At the time the most noticeable difference was that my fans didn't spin when using Nheko, but Element did (because of the roomlist sorting, iirc). RAM usage was pretty bad though. So that was one of the next projects, removing all events from RAM and only pulling them from the database as needed. While this means some additional load when switching rooms, it did decrease RAM requirements by quite a bit. Some new features made us still require loading data for every room from the database on startup, which causes quite some noticeable startup delay. The latest changes however got rid of most of that. We now don't need to load the messages from the database anymore. The only thing we still load is a small info object with roomname, notification and member count as well as the power levels of the room.

Since I recently broke my new and fast laptop, I decided to checkout how things changed on my old and slow laptop. Nowadays I am not in 15 rooms anymore, but I am in 900 rooms, but Matrix, servers as well as clients, has also gotten a lot more performant. So in the end I decided to do a little benchmark of where things stand. DISCLAIMER: This is completely unscientific and unfair, so please take those numbers with a grain of salt. Almost no one runs such a slow laptop as I do, so likely your measurements will completely different. Even more, I was video recording the benchmark, which makes both clients a lot slower. Nonetheless it does somewhat mirror my personal experience.

I came to the conclusion that with 900 rooms, Nheko takes about 10-20 seconds to load and be ready for use on my system, while Element takes about 3 to 4 minutes. So basically Element handles 60 times as many rooms about 2x slower than it did back in the day, while Nheko got a bit faster or about the same speed on the same hardware (but still 60x as many rooms). I've attached a sped up video to this post, so that you can compare it for yourself. But since a lot of people ask, I guess the reason is that I wanted to see how fast you can make a Matrix client. I think I somewhat achieved that in the startup time department, but switching rooms still has a loooooong way to go. Also it is just fun to implement whatever you want in a client, since you are the maintainer and none can tell you how bad of an idea it is. That's probably the reason a lot of people start their own clients? (Although I didn't start Nheko, I just wrote too much code and people didn't want to review it anymore.)

That's it, I hope your eyes didn't glaze over with me babbling on about things. See you next time! :3

Matrix v1.3 release

16.06.2022 17:16 β€” Releases, Spec β€” Travis Ralston
Last update: 15.06.2022 22:00

Hey all,

It’s another quarter and therefore another spec release! Matrix 1.2 was released back in February, and while a bit late in the quarter this time around we’ve still got some exciting additions coming to you in this release.

Like last time, the speed of these releases might feel a bit quick for developers: fret not if you’re still working on v1.1 or v1.2 implementations. We’re not expecting that implementations update as soon as a new spec release is published, but rather that the ecosystem gradually update over the course of the next few months. Implementations should be aiming for as close to realtime as they can get though, particularly considering v1.4 is expected to have some large features (more on that later on).

Matrix 1.3 sees 14 MSCs get merged, but we can’t possibly go into detail on them all here. We’ve picked some notable highlights and recommend the full changelog at the bottom for a complete idea of what’s been going on.

πŸ”—Aggregations and the relationships made along the way

It’s no secret that MSC1849-style server-side aggregation of related messages have been in the review backlog for a while. We ended up splitting MSC1849 down into more reviewable chunks like MSC2675, allowing us to finally land the first pieces into Matrix 1.3 today.

In the spec there aren’t currently any defined relationships which make use of aggregations or even the rel_type described by MSC2674, but we do expect that v1.4 of the spec will have support for at least threads (MSC3440) and edits (MSC2676), filling the gap. For now, we’ve decided that holding aggregations back until v1.4 doesn’t make a lot of sense, so we have launched them into the world as-is for custom relations or for clients & servers to prepare for what’s expected to be coming in v1.4 of the spec.

To further prepare for threads, we’ve also removed some restrictions of rich replies through MSC3676, thus allowing replies to be constructed with non-text messages like images. Check out the new rich replies module for more information.

πŸ”—Join if you can, or just knock

When we launched restricted rooms in Matrix 1.2 we noted that we forgot to handle a case where someone might want to support both knocking and restricted rooms at the same time. We’ve fixed that with a stop-gap join rule from MSC3787 in room version 10.

The new knock_restricted join rule allows the room to keep its desire to be restricted whilst also allowing members who do not meet the criteria to knock on the room instead. We’ll likely expand on this sort of mixing of join rules in proposals like MSC3386 down the line, however for now this should cover the gap in support. Next up: figuring out how to make encrypted room history available to these new joiners in a safe way.

πŸ”—A thread for next time

Originally planned for this release, MSC3440-style threads are anticipated to be ready for v1.4 (next quarter) with support for notifications and, of course, a whole new way to communicate in a room.

Threads are one of the more complicated features we’ve tried to land in recent history as it has a large impact on a wide variety of the spec: everything from event relationships (fixed in this release) to read receipts to push notifications needs to be worked out to build a system that not only users can understand, but also the developers trying to build it. With this massive surface area we just weren’t comfortable with adding threads to v1.3 as-is, given problems like notifications aren’t yet fully solved.

Alongside threads, we also anticipate that MSC2676-style message editing will be landing in v1.4, finally specifying how to update an event’s contents without having to redact & re-send. Although message editing has been supported for a long time in some clients, we're excited that it will finally become part of the official specification, meaning it can be implemented more widely. Messaging clients are encouraged to give the proposal an early read and possibly even attempt implementation if not already done to help us ensure the system is in a reasonable state for inclusion in the spec, though we do note that feature requests for edits will likely be deferred to a future MSC.

Keep an eye on This Week In Matrix for updates on what v1.4 is expected to include, and how things are progressing.

πŸ”—The full changelog

MSCs are how the spec changes in the way it does - adding, fixing, and maintaining features for the whole ecosystem to use. The blog post can’t cover them all, but that doesn’t make them any less important! Check out the full changelog below, and the Spec Change Proposals page for more information on how these MSCs got merged (hint: they submitted a proposal, which anyone can do - take a look at the Matrix Live episode where Matthew covers the proposal process).

πŸ”—Client-Server API

Deprecations

  • Deprecate the sender_key and device_id on m.megolm.v1.aes-sha2 events, and the sender_key on m.room_key_request to-device messages, as per MSC3700. (#1101)

Backwards Compatible Changes

  • Make from optional on GET /_matrix/client/v3/messages to allow requesting events from the start or end of the room history, as per MSC3567. (#1002)
  • Add refresh tokens, per MSC2918. (#1056, #1113)
  • Relax the restrictions on Rich Replies, as per MSC3676. (#1062)
  • Describe a structured system for event relationships, as per MSC2674. (#1062)
  • Describe how relationships between events can be "aggregated", as per MSC2675 and MSC3666. (#1062)
  • Add support for a new knock_restricted join rule in supported room versions, as per MSC3787. (#1099)

Spec Clarifications

  • Clarify that the url field in m.room.avatar events is not required. (#987)
  • Clarify that the type in user-interactive authentication can be omitted. (#989)
  • Adjust the OpenAPI specification so that the type Flow information is explicitly defined when the client-server API is rendered. (#1003)
  • Correct the default value for invite where it is not specified in an m.room.power_levels event. (#1021)
  • Update various links which pointed to the old matrix-doc github repository. (#1032)
  • Removed m.room.message.feedback per MSC3582. (#1035)
  • Fix various typos throughout the specification. (#1051, #1054, #1059, #1081, #1097, #1110, #1115, #1126, #1127, #1128, #1129, #3681, #3708)
  • Clarify that state keys starting with @ are in fact reserved. Regressed from #3658. (#1100)
  • Remove unenforced size limit on the name field of m.room.name events. (#3669)
  • Remove erroneous room_id field from examples of m.read, m.typing in /sync and m.fully_read in room account data. (#3679)
  • Clarify the behaviour of event_match in push rule conditions. (#3690)
  • Fix incorrectly referenced m.login.appservice login identifier, instead using m.login.application_service. (#3711)
  • Fix membership state transitions to denote that invite->knock and external->leave are valid transitions. (#3730)

πŸ”—Server-Server API

Backwards Compatible Changes

  • Add a destination property to the Authorization header, as per MSC3383. (#1067)

Spec Clarifications

  • Remove largely unused origin field from PDUs. (#998)
  • Update various links which pointed to the old matrix-doc github repository. (#1032)
  • Clarify the format for the Authorization header. (#1038, #1067)
  • Clarify what a "valid event" means when performing checks on a received PDU. (#1045)
  • Clarify that valid_until_ts is in milliseconds, like other timestamps used in Matrix. (#1055)
  • Clarify that checks on PDUs should refer to the state before an event. (#1070)
  • Clarify the historical handling of non-integer power levels. (#1099)
  • Fix various typos throughout the specification. (#1110)
  • Correct misleading text for /send_join response. (#3703)
  • Clarify that the content for X-Matrix signature validation is the parsed JSON body. (#3727)

πŸ”—Application Service API

Backwards Compatible Changes

πŸ”—Identity Service API

No significant changes.

πŸ”—Push Gateway API

No significant changes.

πŸ”—Room Versions

Backwards Compatible Changes

  • Add room version 10 as per MSC3604. (#1099)
  • Enforce integer power levels in room version 10 as per MSC3667. (#1099)
  • Add a knock_restricted join rule supported by room version 10 as per MSC3787. (#1099)
  • Update the default room version to 9 as per MSC3589. (#3739)

Spec Clarifications

  • Improve readability and understanding of the state resolution algorithms. (#1037, #1042, #1043, #1120)
  • Improve readability of the authorization rules. (#1050)
  • For room versions 8, 9, and 10: clarify which homeserver is required to sign the join event. (#1093)
  • Clarify that room versions 1 through 9 accept stringy power levels, as noted by MSC3667. (#1099)
  • For all room versions: Add m.federate to the authorization rules, as originally intended. (#1103)
  • For room versions 2 through 10: More explicitly define the mainline of a power event and the mainline ordering of other events. (#1107)
  • For room versions 7, 8, 9, and 10: fix join membership authorization rules when join_rule is knock. (#3737)

πŸ”—Appendices

No significant changes.

This Week in Matrix 2022-06-10

10.06.2022 18:28 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

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

πŸ”—MSC Status

New MSCs:

  • There were no new MSCs this week.

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

  • No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

πŸ”—Spec Updates

The release date for Matrix v1.3 has been set in stone for Thursday, June 16th 2022! Expect a blog post on the day detailing all of the new additions.

The bot that posts MSC updates in #matrix-spec:matrix.org and elsewhere has been switched from @mscbot:amorgan.xyz to @mscbot:matrix.org. The backend of the bot uses https://github.com/Informo/specs-bot/.

πŸ”—Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2000: Server-side password policies!

This is a proposal that adds a mechanism for homeserver administrators to define a password policy for users. This policy can decide rules such as a minimum password length, whether a digit is required, etc. This policy can be enforced by the homeserver when a user registers an account or changes their account password and is communicated to the client so that it can also be enforced locally.

Astute readers will possibly note that authentication in Matrix will eventually be replaced by OAuth2 (MSC2964). This will move operations like password policy enforcement from the homeserver to a separate authentication service, essentially removing the need to reinvent-the-wheel in a homeserver.

Registration, login and managing passwords and connected third-party IDs is often a complex part of a Matrix homeserver. Moving these out to a separate authentication service will both unlock new features (log in with Matrix!) as well as reduce the resources required to implement a Matrix homeserver.

πŸ”—Dept of GSoC πŸŽ“οΈ

r._.hit announces

Hey there, I am Rohit. I'll be participating in GSoC this summer, under the Matrix organization.

For my project, I'll be working on the desktop client, Nheko. Specifically, I aim to work on its VoIP Library and also on implementing and updating some of the features to concur to specification changes to the Matrix protocol, which include

  • Improved VoIP Signalling
  • VoIP Call Transfers
  • Muting Calls

I plan on starting a blog and hopefully will do so soon. In the meanwhile, if you want to know more about the project you can visit here and join the #nheko:nheko.im to participate in discussions.

Looking forward to learning and interacting with the community.

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—Synapse (website)

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

Shay says

Work continues on speeding up federated room joins, improving testing, and reducing database i/o. In addition, some lovely features have been added:

  • Add new media_retention options to the homeserver config for routinely cleaning up non-recently accessed media.

  • Experimental support for MSC3772: Push rule for mutually related events.

  • Update to the check_event_for_spam module callback: Deprecate the current callback signature, replace it with a new signature that is both less ambiguous (replacing booleans with explicit allow/block) and more powerful (ability to return explicit error codes).

  • Add storage and module API methods to get monthly active users (and their corresponding appservices) within an optionally specified time range.

  • Support the new error code ORG.MATRIX.MSC3823.USER_ACCOUNT_SUSPENDED from MSC3823.

  • Add a configurable background job to delete stale devices.

  • Improve URL previews for pages with empty elements.

  • Allow updating a user's password using the admin API without logging out their devices. Contributed by @jcgruenhage.

This is in addition to quite a number of bugfixes!

πŸ”—Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander says

This week we released Dendrite 0.8.8, which contains the following improvements:

  • The performance of state resolution has been increased significantly for larger rooms
  • A number of changes have been made to rate limiting:
    • Logged in users will now be rate-limited on a per-session basis rather than by remote IP
    • Rate limiting no longer applies to admin or appservice users
    • It is now possible to configure additional users that are exempt from rate limiting using the exempt_user_ids option in the rate_limiting section of the Dendrite config
  • Setting state is now idempotent via the client API state endpoints
  • Room upgrades now properly propagate tombstone events to remote servers
  • Room upgrades will no longer send tombstone events if creating the upgraded room fails
  • A crash has been fixed when evaluating restricted room joins

As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more discussion.

πŸ”—Dept of Bridges πŸŒ‰

πŸ”—MandM-bridge

karl says

For all Mumble users out there, there is a new matrix bridge which works with ZeroC ICE interface to communicate with newer versions of Murmur.

Currently, the most interesting features are:

  • Bridging text messages of specific channels or a whole Murmur to a Matrix room
  • Bridging images posted in the Matrix room to Murmur
  • Representing Murmur clients with puppets in the Matrix room

You can find the bridge here: https://github.com/karlpip/MandM-bridge Also feel free to join #mandm-bridge:og.lushkush.nl for questions or suggestions!

πŸ”—matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Half-Shot says

Security Release

Hello friends. This week we bring you a security release for matrix-hookshot. Please ensure you have upgraded to at least 1.7.2, and have read the security advisory. Thanks!

The changes are as follows:

  • Add support for GitHub enterprise. You can now specify the URL via enterpriseUrl in the config file. (#364)
  • Add ability for bridge admins to remove GitHub connections using the admin room. (#367)

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—FluffyChat (website)

Krille Fear says

FluffyChat 1.5.0 goes Material You

FluffyChat 1.5.0 has been released and will soon be in all stores. This release comes with a bunch of bugfixes and introduces the first iteration of a Material You based design. We also try to support Android 12 accent colors (while this does not seem to work yet). On other platforms, our own purple shape will stay the default.

I like the new Material You design while we needed to tweak it at some points. Also the dropdown menu misses some elevation but this is a known issue in the Flutter repo which will be fixed soon.

This is also the first build with Flutter 3 which should improve the performance a little bit. Unfortunately it brings some regressions. We are forced to ship a little bug with it: Sharing on iPads seems to be broken. I'm very unhappy with this situation but otherwise we would have ended up in different releases for different platforms. As there afaik are not that many iPad users out there, we decided to live with this compromise and ship a bugfix release asap.

Yeah... Flutter has a lot of pros but also a lot of cons. Every new release of this framework leads to the fear of new regressions. Shipping a new major release where basic stuff like "Sharing" is just broken, is totally stupid... but that's the decision of Google. :-P

We didn't want to wait to ship the new design and also we needed a new release to come back to F-Droid where FluffyChat wasn't available in the last weeks because of a ProGuard problem, which should be fixed now.

πŸ”—Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

Happy Friday! πŸš€

Threads

  • Threads is in Beta and progressing. We’re working hard setting up the foundational work needed to improve read receipts and notifications cross-platform.
  • Keep sending feedback and rageshakes as we’re also continuing to improve the UI and fix any bugs that are raised.

Community testing

  • We’re moving closer to getting the new search experience out of beta, thanks for all your help on testing so far.
  • Next up: Big regression testing session on Android, after the removal of communities/groups (Wednesday or Thursday TBC)
  • For more info on our next testing sessions (sync or async), you can join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org!

πŸ”—Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle reports

πŸ”—Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan announces

  • We’re continuing our bug fixing spree and the latest release has fixed some of the more significant problems we had
  • We’re working towards adopting a new notification filtering entitlement and we will soon be able to silence those pesky empty notifications
  • Our β€œEdit Home Screen Layout” experiment is running well and we hope to be sharing the results of the diary study and prototypes soon.
  • The new first time user experience is continuing to make good progress and is quickly approaching finalisation
  • We are now allowing account deactivation for users that signed up through SSO
  • On ElementX we have merged the new crash reporting service and we are starting to see reports come in. We’ve also successfully integrated an initial version of the DesignKit and added room filtering

πŸ”—Element Android (website)

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

Danielle says

  • 1.4.19 is available and fixes some small bugs, including a fix for the regression surrounding space switching performance.
  • Our prototype study is nearly at a close - we’ve received a lot of great feedback on our suggested changes to the home screen and space switching interactions.
  • We’ve been working on integrating UnifiedPush for both Google Play and FDroid versions of our app.
  • The team is finalising the updates to the create account flow. It will be ready for testing soon.

πŸ”—Dept of VoIP πŸ€™

πŸ”—Element Call (website)

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

Florian Heese reports

Element Call Beta 2

This week we landed Element Call beta 2 (https://call.element.io) including a bunch of nice updates. First of all, everything is now end-to-end encrypted by default: not only the WebRTC streams but also the matrix signaling (It was consciously disabled in beta 1 for debugging purposes). Moreover, we have experimental support for spatial audio rendering. Give it a try β€” you can find it in the settings section. It's a lot of fun to play with and really supports immersion during a video call. This release also introduces a whole new experimental way of communicating: Walkie-talkie mode. In that mode, videos are disabled, and everyone is muted by default. To speak, press the β€˜push-to-talk’ (PTT) button β€” takes me back to my childhood πŸ™‚

For further details follow this blog post: https://element.io/blog/element-call-beta-2-encryption-spatial-audio-walkie-talkie-mode-and-more/

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart and maintained by Famedly.

Henri Carnot announces

Version 0.9.12

This week, the team released version 0.9.12. In this version, we updated our Matrix API Lite package, in which we fixed the issue with the room hierarchy endpoint with some improper parsing and wrong type coming from the generation of the spec Open API documentation.

We also did some housekeeping and renamed some methods and getter to make them explicit. For example, the futureSender getter is now an asynchronous method called fetchEventSender() to make it clear that calling this function may trigger an API call.

Possibility to override the supported Matrix spec version but we don't really recommend using it for production.

See you next time ;)

πŸ”—Dept of Internet of Things πŸ’‘

cvwright reports

Here's a fun Matrix-based project for you, sponsored by yours truly and my employer FUTO.

The "Golden Tiger" senior capstone project team at Portland State University just delivered the results of two quarters's design and implementation work on a secure/private, self-hostable, end-to-end encrypted cloud security camera using Raspberry Pi's and Matrix. The idea of this prototype project was to provide similar functionality to commercial services like Ring or Nest, but without letting any nosy third party see inside (or around) your home.

The students' code is available on Github in two repos:

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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.

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1samlord.me335.5
2neko.dev386
3maescool.be403
4plocki.org491
5krutonium.ca516
6synapse1.arsrobotics.org705
7quyo.de986
8ewsandor.com1063
9shortestpath.dev1294.5
10alemann.dev1333

πŸ”—#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.

RankHostnameMedian MS
1flatturtle.xyz325.5
2rcp.tf334
3dendrite.matrix.org349.5
4dendrite.neilalexander.dev384
5kszczot.pl482
6rustybever.be601
7sspaeth.de656

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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

This Week in Matrix 2022-06-03

03.06.2022 19:04 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

TravisR reports

Hey all, it's been a holiday for much of the team this week, so from the plane of Maple trees I present to you the 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://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals

πŸ”—MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

New MSCs:

πŸ”—Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been working on getting Matrix 1.3 out the door and generally working towards a better process for handling releases alongside critical proposals for the protocol. The goal is to be able to ship these major features while reducing the risk of a release falling behind. Watch this space for more details as this should result in MSCs getting through the process a little bit quicker.

For Matrix 1.3, we're targeting Thursday, June 16th, 2022 as our release date, though this comes with a small asterisk: we're looking to land quite a lot of stuff so might have to adjust the date once more as needed. We do feel reasonably confident in the date though - watch for blog posts titled Matrix 1.3 in the coming weeks.

πŸ”—Random MSC of the week

The script has chosen MSC2846 - Decentralizing media through CIDs as your random MSC this week. The MSC raises an interesting question about how to make media more akin to events in Matrix. If you're interested in this area, take a read of it and the related MSCs.

πŸ”—Dept of GSoC πŸŽ“οΈ

πŸ”—Encrypted Search for Matrix

burgers says

Hey there, I'm Aditya Rajput (aka BURG3R5), a sophomore at IIT Roorkee, India. This summer I'll be working on implementing encrypted Search in Matrix rooms. More details about this project can be found here. Once a week, I'll be blogging about my progress (plus some neat stuff I find during research) in this blog. Technical discussion and more frequent updates can be found in the public room #encrypted-search:matrix.org.

While writing my GSoC proposal, I'd already made some progress w.r.t. the actual code required for this project, and my preliminary implementation can be found here.

Looking forward to working in this ecosystem with you all!

πŸ”—Kazv Project

nannanko announces

Hello everyone, my name is nannanko. From today, I will officially participate in GSoC to contribute code to the Kazv Project. I hope I can get along well with you all.

πŸ”—3rd Party Authorised Room Membership

kuries says

Hey there! I'm Binesh Munukurthi, a Computer Science student from India. I'll be working on the 3rd Party Authorised Room Membership project for this year's GSoC.

This project aims to develop an application that has the ability to delegate membership of a room based on a user’s interaction with other third party services. For more details on what I'll be implementing, please refer to the link

I'll be posting my weekly updates here If you are interested in knowing more about the project's progress, feel free to join the public room #matrix-cerberus:cadair.com.

I look forward to spending a wonderful summer with you all! Thanks!

πŸ”—NeoChat

flyingcakes announces

Hi! I'm Snehit Sah. I will be contributing to KDE's Matrix client, NeoChat, during GSoC. I will add Spaces support to the application. My progress can be followed at my blog. Hoping for a fun stay!

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—Synapse (website)

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

Shay says

This week was a short one, but work continues on fast room joins, testing Synapse with workers on Complement, and increasing the efficiency of Synapse with regard to database i/o. In addition, we released v1.60.0 (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases), which includes

  • work to reduce the possibility of database corruption
  • a fix to a bug introduced in Synapse 1.60.0rc1 that would break some imports from synapse.module_api

πŸ”—Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

Till reports

This week we released Dendrite 0.8.7! This is a highly recommended update since it fixes some fairly large bugs:

  • Support added for room version 10
  • A number of state handling bugs have been fixed, which previously resulted in missing state events, unexpected state deletions, reverted memberships and unexpectedly rejected/soft-failed events in some specific cases
  • Fixed destination queue performance issues as a result of missing indexes, which speeds up outbound federation considerably
  • A bug which could cause the /register endpoint to return HTTP 500 has been fixed

As always, please feel free to join us in the #dendrite:matrix.org room for more discussion!

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—Quadrix

JFA announces

Quadrix is a single-codebase, multi-platform project, using the meanwhile deprecated ReactXP framework (Microsoft's answer to Flutter), which compiles to iOS, Android, and web/Electron. The Quadrix apps are available in the main app stores for mobiles and desktops (including Snapcraft and Flathub). Repo is at https://github.com/alariej/quadrix. Would be great to have a few people test the apps and leave feedback in the repo or in the (still empty) #quadrix:matrix.org room!

Important: Quadrix doesn't support E2EE yet, but it's on the TODO.

πŸ”—Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan says

  • Our prototypes for a new app layout are going well. Just a few people have early access in order to give us feedback to ensure we’re building a new layout that works for everyone. Watch this space!
  • We’ve been working on improving our onboarding flow so that users signing up for Matrix and Element find it much easier. This work is making great progress.
  • Live location sharing is also making great progress and is quickly approaching the beta phase
  • On the ElementX front we’ve been busy adopting async/await, introducing state machines, a new design kit component and hooking up crash reporting and sentry.io

πŸ”—Element Android (website)

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

Manu reports

  • We are a bit late on the release candidate. We want to fix a performance regression when switching spaces. It will be available early next week.
  • We have merged the UnifiedPush PR from P1gP1g. We are doing some adjustments but users will be able to choose their push distributor soon.
  • The prototypes that are with a small group of early access tester are going down a storm - we’re getting lots of great feedback that will help to build a new app layout that works for all.
  • Our improvements to the first time user experience are nearly ready for testing and shipping! We’re hoping to make our onboarding experience a lot simpler for folks that are creating an account.

πŸ”—Cinny (website)

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

Lozenge reports

Cinny v2.0.4

πŸ”—What's changed

  • Fix emoji autocomplete in some cases
  • Hide verify button if Cross-Signing is not enabled
  • Add support for building docker image for linux/arm64
  • Fix drag-n-drop not working in desktop app
  • Add dev-tools to production builds of desktop app
  • Fix copy-paste not working on macOS in desktop app
  • Flatpak package for the desktop app

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

πŸ”—Dept of Non Chat Clients πŸŽ›οΈ

πŸ”—Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

The last two weeks have been focused mainly on nuts-and bolts improvements to user experience, rather than any big new pieces of functionality. We've:

  1. Added upload previews for PDFs and audiovisual media, so you can confirm you're uploading the right thing before creating a discussion.
  2. Added a method to precompute PCM data for more accurate waveforms in audiovisual-media-based discussions.
  3. Allowed for join rules and annotation visibility to be modified separately in settings
  4. Added support for URLs linking directly to particular events

As always, if you're interested in social annotation on matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org!

πŸ”—Dept of VoIP πŸ€™

πŸ”—Element Call (website)

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

Matthew reports

We've had breakthroughs this week on implementing a native Matrix SFU (selective forwarding unit) which speaks MSC3401, thanks to Sean DuBois - all round WebRTC superstar, project lead for the Pion WebRTC implementation for Go, and author of WebRTC for the curious.

Sean generously contributed an initial proof of concept to show how you'd build an MSC3401 SFU using Pion at https://github.com/matrix-org/sfu-to-sfu - which (I think?) is the first time that the first implementation of a major core MSC has been contributed from outside the core team. Huge thanks to Sean to setting the ball going on this - the current PoC demonstrates not just SFU capability but also the decentralised cascading architecture which makes MSC3401 unique. The initial PoC speaks a 'test jig' version of MSC3401 hooked up to a simple web client for experimentation, but Matthew's now experimenting with adding genuine Matrix support to it via mautrix-go, and hooking up Element Call to speak to it.

Adding SFU support to Element Call will mean that we can support more than ~7 simultaneous calls - and with MSC3401-style decentralised cascading, we should be able to support hundreds or even thousands. There's lots of work remaining here, but the ball is now rolling. For more info about SFUs and MSC3401, check out Matthew's CommCon 2021 talk (which was what prompted Sean's implementation work here!)

Separately, we've been running Element Call on staging with E2EE enabled for the last few weeks, and should be releasing the first major Element Call update next week. And once SFUs land, then Element Call can exit beta - watch out Zoom!

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—libolm (website)

uhoreg announces

libolm 3.2.12 has been released. The main update in this release is that the olm_sas_calculate_mac_fixed_base64 is now exposed in all the official bindings, so that MSC3783 can be implemented. Aside from that, there have been some minor fixes and improvements. See the changelog for more information.

πŸ”—matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben says

While most of the work in the background continues (Sliding-Sync PoC, Wasm+NodeJS support, UniFFI macros), the first few parts surface through the cracks and show themselves in new PRs: basic wasm web-js and nodejs support has landed with more APIs, tests and documentation on the way; the Sliding Sync PoC has been upgraded to the latest JSON layout and now provides a first set of reactive API via FFI, too. Furthermore this week has seen a bunch of cleanups, simplifications and clarifications around the OlmMachine and crypto types, and we're fixing a bug in the state store, where not all data has been properly encrypted in the past.

πŸ‘‰οΈ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.

πŸ”—Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart and maintained by Famedly

Henri Carnot announces

Dart Matrix SDK : Version 0.9.9

This week, the team released version 0.9.9. In this new version, we added a search function to allow searching for an event in database and on server through several requests to the /messages endpoint.

There was also some work on updating the image size when generating thumbnail, which allow saving a bit of calculation when sending events. If using a custom resizer make sure to update the resize response as here.

We also did some refactor with the event sender getter. The getter result is now a future to allow requesting the member event to the server if we cannot find it in memory, to help fix the issue when the user was not found in memory.

Finally, a quick helper function (client.waitForSync) was added. It allows you to wait for a room to appear in (left, join, invited) section of the sync response.

See you next time ;)

πŸ”—Dept of Bots πŸ€–

πŸ”—Matrix Community Manager (website)

The highly configurable message aggregation and filtering bot for matrix!

Sleuth announces

Only a small update this week. One new feature and some much needed Ansible improvements.

Pipes move messages from one room to an other. Useful if you are in important rooms but only want to monitor a single room. The Ansible role can now manage more aspects of MCM. Mainly in the post setup phase. The major one being if you run into encryption errors for any reason you can run the playbook with the fix tag and it will generate you a new device ID and encryption store.

  • Pipes move all messages from one room to an other.
  • Adding a filter now uses the room the command was sent from by default if the roomid is not specified.
  • Ansible role now has tags for start, stop, configs, fix and all.
  • Ansible role backs up the configuration.toml file to prevent the possibility of data loss.

Gitlab releases Come chat on Matrix

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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.

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1the-apothecary.club450
2envs.net462
3polarbear.army473
4alemann.dev504
5aria-net.org530.5
6conduit.rs618
7tilduke.org643.5
8almum.de662
9keks.club731
10quyo.de879

πŸ”—#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.

RankHostnameMedian MS
1conduit.rs294.5
2dendrite.matrix.org305
3dendrite.neilalexander.dev387
4conduit.grich.sk433
5foxo.me465
6rustybever.be512
7cry.is521
8kszczot.pl527

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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

Welcoming Rocket.Chat to Matrix!

30.05.2022 19:04 β€” General β€” Matthew Hodgson
Last update: 30.05.2022 16:16
Rocket.Chat β™₯️ Matrix

Hi folks,

We just wanted to take a moment to welcome Rocket.Chat to Matrix, given the recent announcement that they are switching to using Matrix for standards-based interoperable federation! This is incredible news: Rocket.Chat is one of the leading open source collaboration platforms with over 12 million users, and they will all shortly have the option to natively interoperate with the wider Matrix network: the feature has already landed (in alpha) in Rocket.Chat 4.7.0!

We’d like to thank the whole Rocket.Chat team for putting their faith in Matrix and joining the network: the whole idea of Matrix is that by banding together, different independent organisations can build an open decentralised network which is far stronger and more vibrant than any closed communication platform. The more organisations that join Matrix, the more useful and valuable the network becomes for everyone, and the more momentum there is to further refine and improve the protocol. Our intention is that Matrix will grow into a massive open ecosystem and industry, akin to the open Web itself… and that every organisation participating, be that Rocket.Chat, Element, Gitter, Beeper, Famedly or anyone else will benefit from being part of it. We are stronger together!

Rocket.Chat’s implementation follows the β€œHow do you make an existing chat system talk Matrix?” approach we published based on our experiences of linking Gitter into Matrix. Looking at the initial pull request, the implementation lets Rocket.Chat act as a Matrix Application Service, effectively acting as a bridge to talk to an appropriate Matrix homeserver. From chatting with the team, it sounds like next steps will involve adding in encryption via our upcoming matrix-sdk-crypto node bindings - and then looking at ways to transparently embed a homeserver like Dendrite, sharing data as much as possible between RC and Matrix, so Rocket.Chat deployments can transparently sprout Matrix interoperability without having to run a separate homeserver. Super exciting!

You can see a quick preview of a Rocket.Chat user chatting away with an Element user on matrix.org via Matrix here:

So, exciting times ahead - needless to say we’ll be doing everything we can to support Rocket.Chat and ensure their Matrix integration is a success. And at this rate, they might be distinctly ahead of the curve if they start shipping Dendrite! Meanwhile, we have to wonder who will be next? Nextcloud? Mattermost? Place your bets… ;)

--Matthew

πŸ”—Update

Aaron from Rocket.Chat just published an excellent guide & video tour for how to actually set up your Rocket.Chat instance with Dendrite to get talking Matrix!

This Week in Matrix 2022-05-27

27.05.2022 00:00 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Brendan Abolivier

Hey everyone! Thib is out today, so I'll be exceptionally hosting TWIM in his stead this week. Let's have a look at what's been going on in Matrix-land!

πŸ”—Open Tech Will Save Us #16 πŸŽ™

The 16th edition of our virtual meetup Open Tech Will Save Us happened this week! This edition featured a few very interesting projects:

  • Quentin and Maximilien from Deuxfleurs are creating Garage, a robust and distributed storage backend that can run on old computers. Who can use it? Why? And when should I not use it? Let's find out!
  • Nathan from the Guardian Project is working with wind, butter, and rasperries to provide applications and messaging to people in low-connectivity areas. A fascinating dive off the grid.

πŸ”—Dept of Status of Matrix 🌑️

andybalaam says

Matrix's Outreachy intern for this summer has been chosen! Usman is starting in early June, and will be working on experiments with Starring Messages! He will be blogging every two weeks, so look out for more updates.

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

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.

πŸ”—MSC Status

New MSCs:

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

Merged MSCs:

  • No MSCs were merged this week.

πŸ”—Spec Updates

The upcoming release of Matrix v1.3 is still in the works, but near! Expect a solid release date to be announced next week.

πŸ”—Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2872: Move the widget title to the top level of the definition!

A bite-size MSC which aims to clean up the definition of a widget state event... by moving the "title" field to the root of the state event, alongside the existing "name" field.

This MSC needs someone to write an implementation in at least one homeserver and client to move forwards. Perhaps that someone could be you?

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—Synapse (website)

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

squah reports

This week we cut two release candidates for Synapse v1.60, which include:

Meanwhile work continues on fast room joins and testing Synapse with workers on Complement. We'd like to remind readers that the fast room joins feature is highly experimental right now and we do not recommend enabling it on production homeservers just yet.

πŸ”—Synapse admin scripts (website)

Pierre announces

Morning, maybe it's useful for someone else, I just published my admin scripts for synapse. It's still WiP but it make some basic stuff that I needed in my organisation :

  • System notify users (all users/users from a list, specific user)
  • delete sessions/devices not seen for X days
  • purge the remote media cache
  • select rooms with various criteria (external/local/empty/created by/encrypted/cleartext)
  • purge history of theses rooms
  • shutdown rooms

https://git.fout.re/pi/matrixadminhelpers

It's my first python project, so the code may not structured as it should, I'm still learning, and it's early alpha :)

πŸ”—Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander says

This week we released Dendrite 0.8.6 which contains a number of fixes and tweaks:

  • Room versions 8 and 9 are now marked as stable
  • Dendrite can now assist remote users to join restricted rooms via /make_join and /send_join
  • The sync API no longer returns immediately on /sync requests unnecessarily if it can be avoided
  • A race condition has been fixed in the sync API when updating presence via /sync
  • A race condition has been fixed sending E2EE keys to remote servers over federation when joining rooms
  • The trusted_private_chat preset should now grant power level 100 to all participant users, which should improve the user experience of direct messages
  • Invited users are now authed correctly in restricted rooms
  • The join_authorised_by_users_server key is now correctly stripped in restricted rooms when updating the membership event
  • Appservices should now receive invite events correctly
  • Device list updates should no longer contain optional fields with null values
  • The /deactivate endpoint has been fixed to no longer confuse Element with incorrect completed flows

As always, please feel free to join us in the #dendrite:matrix.org room for more discussion!

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—Nheko (website)

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

Nico announces

We added a way to edit permissions in Nheko now. It is an unconventional drag and drop dialog, where you drag users and permissions between different roles. We are hoping that this will make powerlevels easier to understand. Be careful when trying it, the wrong powerlevels might make your room unusable. Now... the bad part about that is, that powerlevels add around 50-100 new strings to translate... Help is appreciated! <3

Nheko now also supports fallback keys, which should make E2EE more reliable after long periods of being offline and you can send images by pressing enter again. The privacy screen is also now fixed for separate room windows and our flatpak supports more image formats.

πŸ”—Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle announces

  • On Element Web this week we’ve smashed some bugs including those around Threads.
  • Threads work continues as we’re aiming to improve the notifications and read receipts to improve the experience.
  • Continuing to make improvements to our automated tests.
  • The team is driving to complete the work needed to move our new search experience out of Beta. We think this new search is easier to use and helps folks to find what they’re looking for faster.
  • We’re also making improvements specifically for new users, this will include a new home screen, watch out for those!

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

  • Video rooms; We’re ironing out some of the details to polish the experience

πŸ”—Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan reports

  • This week we’ve fixed a crash, and a few bugs; specifically the bug where some rooms were missing from the room list.
  • On the iOS team generally we’re working towards a Sentry.io integration for better crash reporting to help us with this in the future.
  • Live location sharing and other features are making great progress.
  • Our new first time user experience will be ready for feedback soon!
  • ElementX has been refactored to adopt Swift’s new structured concurrency.

πŸ”—Element Android (website)

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

adam says

  • This week we added emoji14 support so if you want to hide 🫣 , salute 🫑 , or melt 🫠 for your friends, you’ll soon be able to! 🫢 (for Android 12 and above, or devices that support emoji14)
  • We’re getting ever nearer to a new sign up flow for new users. Our flow today can be confusing and complex, especially when all you want to do is chat with friends. We’ve been working on simplifying the flow and we’ll announce a community testing session very soon!
  • Also new this week, we’ve opened up a new layout of the app to a small selection of folks. These 15 people will trial the new layout for us, providing feedback along the way. We’ll be opening it up to more feedback soon.

πŸ”—Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle reports

Hello and happy Friday!

Threads

  • Threads are still in progress as we continue to make progress on the notifications and sort/ordering work that remains.
  • In order for notifications to work better, we need read receipts to be updated. We’ve got several MSCs ongoing, along with a few Proof of Concepts (PoCs) to move us forward.
    • MSC3771: Read receipts for threads
    • MSC3772: Push rule for mutually related events
    • MSC3773: Notifications for threads
  • With that we’ve also updated some layouts and completed some bug fixes, on all platforms.

Community testing

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict says

Trixnity 2.1.0 has been released. It includes support for Server-Server-API endpoints (client and server) and fetching missing TimelineEvents in client. The latter is used for fragmented timelines: If you want to show a timeline starting from any EventId and RoomId (e. g. from unread marker), Trixnity will try to fetch missing TimelineEvents from server. If you reach TimelineEvents, that are already saved in the local database, the timeline fragments are merged magically πŸ§™

πŸ”—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.

KΓ©vin Commaille announces

Since our last update from about a month ago, we had two bugfix releases:

  • Ruma 0.6.2 added methods to get the current room powerlevels from a StrippedPowerLevelsEvent and to get a user's membership whether the state event is redacted or not, and added a missing export to track member changes.
  • Ruma 0.6.3 fixed the serialization and deserialization of events with a dynamic event_type and added convenience constructors for logging in with a UserIdentifier.

We have also landed a bunch of internal work:

And there are of course new fixes and features for our next release:

πŸ”—matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben reports

The majority of changes we've seen over the last week, where minor fixes in style, squashing of bugs and CI improvements as most work is currently happening in the background on Sliding Sync, mobile and UniFFI support. But there have been two additions worth mentioning: first, we've improved on the autojoin example for appservices, and secondly we've merged a community contribution to make resolving of room-alias more handy.

πŸ‘‰οΈ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.

πŸ”—Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart.

Henri Carnot announces

This week, the team released version 0.9.7.

This week, we migrated to Matrix Api Lite 1.0.0, our simple wrapper around the matrix API endpoints and data models. This means we are now using the v1.2 Matrix spec πŸŽ‰.

Also, support for HiveCollections as Database provider was added now that our patches to hive were accepted upstream. And we now provide a way to dump and restore the client local database.

Finally, we fixed a bug with where reactions were not properly discarded from the cache and some bugs in our e2e tests.

See you next time ;)

πŸ”—Dept of Events and Talks πŸ—£οΈ

saces reports

πŸ”—Matrix User Meetup Berlin

Next Matrix user meetup 1.6.2022, 8 pm @ c-base

Meet other matrix users, chat about Matrix, the rest, and everything else, discuss your Matrix ideas, sign each other in persona, and maybe spice the evening with a good mate or beer.

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

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

Matrix room: #mumb:c-base.org

πŸ”—Dept of Rockets πŸš€

uhoreg shared with us a press release from Rocket.Chat announcing their work on interoperability with Matrix. It is super exciting to see another big player join the ecosystem. Watch this space next week for more announcements!

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

Thib is out this week, therefore so are the ping stats in TWIM (don't worry, they'll be back next week!).

You can still go check them out yourself in #ping:maunium.net and #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net!

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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

This Week in Matrix 2022-05-20

20.05.2022 20:03 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

πŸ”—Dept of Social Good πŸ™†

Thib says

Element has signed the open letter of the Global Encryption Coalition, of which we are members of. We are working with them to push back against any intrusive measures that could compromise the privacy of users.

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

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.

πŸ”—MSC Status

New MSCs:

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

  • No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

πŸ”—Spec Updates

Some new MSCs popping up this week around widgets, room types, fixing notifications with threads and room version 11! Though note that the last one currently serves as a means for the Spec Core Team to publicly track what should be included in room version 11, and is by no means is its content considered final.

The Spec Core Team are currently focused on room version 10 and getting Matrix v1.3 out the door soon. There's also been some discussion on MSC2676: Message editing this week, with the intention of finally landing that in the spec. Thanks to richvdh for driving the charge there.

πŸ”—Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC1902: Split the media repo into s2s and c2s parts!

Homeservers currently make use of Client Server Media APIs to pull media from other homeservers over federation. This has worked for a long time, but is a bit of a confusing blur of the lines between client<->server and server<->server traffic. It also makes it difficult to require different authentication rules for clients versus servers.

This MSC aims to help clean that up. Take a look if you're interested!

πŸ”—Dept of GSoC πŸŽ“οΈ

Thib says

It's May 20, and Google has announced the results for its Summer of Code program.

This year the Matrix.org Foundation participated, and we could be granted the five slots we asked for!

  • Jayesh Nirve is going to work on WebRTC support for FluffyChat, mentored by Krille
  • nannako is going help handling multimedia files in kazv, mentored by tusooa
  • Aditya Rajput will implement encrypted search for Matrix, mentored by cvwright
  • Munukurthi Binesh is going to work on 3rd Party Authorised Room Membership, mentored by Cadair
  • r0hit2005 will work on updating the implementation of VoIP support, mentored by Nico

Many thanks to all the candidates, we had some very strong proposals this year.

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier announces

This week we released Synapse 1.59, which features a bunch of niceties including new features, bug fixes and performance improvements. Read all about it, including increased flexibility for workers and improvements on push rules, on the matrix.org blog!

Aside from this, the team is still hard at work and focusing on making Synapse better, among other things by looking at improving performances on room join and decreasing memory usage.

πŸ”—Dept of Bridges πŸŒ‰

πŸ”—matrix-hookshot (website)

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

tadzik says

matrix-hookshot 1.7.0 is out

Last week new version of Hookshot came out starring the following changes:

  • Docker images can now be built cross-platform. Thanks Paul for getting arm64 builds going!
  • Improved GitLab push hook formatting: markdown commit hashes, link "N commits" to the list of commits, if there are more commits than can be shown only link instead, and show committer unless a single person committed and pushed
  • RSS feed support got a configuration widget: now need for using bot commands anymore! (though they are still supported)
  • Added widgets.openIdOverrides option to help developers test configuration widgets locally
  • Fixed regression where GitHubRepo and GitLabRepo connection config options were not being honoured

and more! Visit #hookshot:half-shot.uk to follow the development in real-time.

πŸ”—matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

Last week's testing updates are now in master!

Also included:

  • Better error handling: if the backend hits an error that causes your connection to KT chats to be dropped, the bridge should notify you about it (not that it should ever happen in the first place, but you never know!)
  • Better logging: the Node module can be configured to print the arguments of RPC commands received from / sent to the Python module. The example Node config includes a default set that should be helpful for general debugging.
  • Room metadata bridging: setting an Open Chat title & topic from Matrix should work now!
    • Setting the title of a Direct Chat should work too, but topics remain unbridged (since KT Direct Chats don't have topics/descriptions)
  • Defensive error handling: Attempts to add a non-friend user to a DM will be refused by the bridge, since KT only allows Direct Chats between friends
    • KT does allow "1:1 Open Chats" between non-friends, but those aren't bridged yet

Also, testing adds support for joining KakaoTalk rooms from Matrix, either by joining an existing portal or providing an Open Chat URL to the bot with a join command. ...However, I've been unable to test this, since KT is stingy about whom it allows to join Open Chats! So please give this a try if you can.

In other news, this bridge is now listed on Matrix.org! πŸ₯³ Thanks Thib !

Also, for the time being, I will be taking a hiatus from this bridge & the LINE bridge, as I'll be quite occupied for the foreseeable future on account of having joined Element 🀩!! (The bridges aren't paused forever--I just have to work out the details of their future before making any promises I can't keep πŸ™‚)

Special thanks to all those who have given feedback & advice on these bridges, and to Beeper for having sponsored their development ❀️

πŸ”—matrix-appservice-discord (website)

A bridge between Matrix and Discord.

Half-Shot announces

Hello! Just a notice to say that the `matrix-appservice-discord project has kindly been adopted by the matrix.org foundation, which means that hopefully there will be a lot more time available to maintain it than when it was my personal project! We expect to have a new update for you (the first one in 1.5 years) very soon! If you've got any questions about this, please feel free to ask in the usual spots like #discord:half-shot.uk.

Happy bridging!

πŸ”—Heisenbridge (website)

Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.

hifi says

Release v1.13.0 πŸ₯³

  • Read default port and listen address from config url (@BtbN)
  • Improvements to pillifying IRC nicks, again
  • Fixes for AUTOQUERY not always working correctly
  • Allow anyone to use STATUS command to get their own status
  • Filter control characters only for plumbs so people can send garbage to IRC if they wish from Matrix
  • Support for converting IRC color codes to Matrix (@tjaderxyz)
  • Fixed compose docker Synapse configuration for registration
  • Improved Python 3.10 compatibliy (@BtbN)
  • Hidden room to hide joins using restricted rooms join rule (@BtbN)

Some cool stuff this time around! Aside from many bug fixes this release has two great new features: IRC message colors and hiding invites from channels.

IRC colors are enabled by default and are rendered how your Matrix client sees fit. They can be disabled per network if needed.

Hiding joins works with room v9 restricted join rules feture to allow IRC ghosts to join rooms without an invite from the bridge bot first. This clears some clutter and may even make joining a bit faster in the long run - we will see. This feature is disabled by default and needs to be enabled by the bridge administrator as it is consiered a "labs" feature for now.

Go and get a Dell from GitHub, PyPI or matrix-docker-ansible-deploy!

Thanks!

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

In the last weeks, we've landed a few smaller features and papercut fixes in NeoChat:

  • Urls will now more often be shown as links
  • A couple of input processing bugs have been fixed, which lead, among others, to fewer broken ASCII emojis :)
  • Clicking on a notification will now properly open NeoChat even on wayland πŸ₯³
  • Users can now disable sending typing notifications

We're also making progress on the end-to-end encryption support where we hopefully will soon have news from libQuotient's side.

πŸ”—Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat says

Threads

Community Testing

  • We ran 47 different tests on this week’s RC and found 20 defects/potential improvements
  • We are inviting community testers to take part in the Android and iOS app layout experiments
  • For more info on our next testing sessions (sync or async), you can join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org!

πŸ”—Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat says

  • Improved logging Jitsi errors for video call issues
  • Added option to ignore user when reporting spam
  • Made lots of improvements to our automated tests
  • Show metaspaces even when there are no real spaces joined
  • Add shortcut to get to the explore space page more easily via the space avatar in the left panel
  • Remove invites from breadcrumbs
  • Fall back to untranslated strings rather than showing error for missing translations
  • Improve lightbox (image viewing when you click on an attached file or profile pic)
  • Improve email verification dialog on registration page
  • In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):

πŸ”—Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan says

Element iOS

  • We have a release candidate available that squashes quite a few problematic bugs
  • Mention pills have been improved and are now better than ever
  • Work is continuing on the new authentication flows and live location sharing
  • Launching home layout experiment next week

Element X

  • The iOS FII crate is now being checked on the CI and has been merged into the main RustSDK branch
  • We're making progress on crash reporting tools and rage shakes
  • Starting on adopting Swift's async/await throughout the project

πŸ”—Element Android (website)

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

benoit says

  • Launching spaces layout experiments next week
  • Release 1.4.16 is out. Should be available in production at the beginning of next week. Sadly this release will not be available on F-Droid.
  • FTUE screens are nearly finished. We are implementing the latest ones. For instance Email input and validation.
  • Also still working on the integration of the crypto Rust SDK. We are at a point of fixing the remaining issues.

πŸ”—Cinny (website)

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

Lozenge says

Cinny v2.0.3 - What's changed

  • Add the ability to focus on paste
  • Add allowCustomHomeservers config option
  • Fix crash in a room without m.room.create state event
  • Fix message edit isn't reflected in the reply
  • Fix join room with alias
  • Fix crash on leaving room

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

πŸ”—Dept of Non Chat Clients πŸŽ›οΈ

πŸ”—Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

In the last two weeks, populus-viewer has seen some exciting changes:

Here's a demo video of video annotation, and a screenshot of the new landing page:

πŸ”—Dept of Widgets 🧩

πŸ”—Mjolnir Widget (website)

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

MTRNord (they/them) reports

Hi, just some small update this week:

  • Philantrop πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆ pointed out the widget was missing the room ban type, which is now added to the widget.
  • The ban list view now also shows the room id of the room the ban is from. (it will get extended to be an alias at some point. This is planned)
  • Dependencies have been updated.

Check it out at https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-moderation-widget or join #mjolnir-widget:nordgedanken.dev if you have any questions.

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben says

Post release (we have release 0.5.0 last week) the main focus was on minor fixes and bigger features we had pending but didn't want to merge before. Aside from a few documentation and other minor fixes - among others switching to resolver v2 or more accurate power_level calculation - the biggest merge was around the FFI interface for Apple (iOS and Mac), which we have initial support for now πŸŽ‰.

The main work is currently happening behind the scenes, while we prepare for the upcoming tasks - like WASM and NodeJS support for the crypto-crate and work on UniFFI. We are also hardening our processes for improved security and risk management around our code base, dependencies and the potential to ship binaries.

πŸ‘‰οΈ We are very happy about the influx of people, who joined our developer community questions since the release. We'd like to take this opportunity again to invite anyone else interested in hacking on matrix in rust to check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.

πŸ”—Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart and maintained by famedly.com

Henri Carnot reports

Matrix Dart SDK : Version 0.9.6

This week, the team released version 0.9.6.

This release brings various bug fixes. We fixed cache corruption with fragmented timeline, and we now gracefully handle invalid recent emojis states.

Also, we now properly update the user lastActiveAgo on presence event updates and not when opening a room.

Finally, we moved the MSC2835 support into its own extension.

See you next time ;)

πŸ”—Dept of Services πŸš€

Samuel Philipp says

We are proud to announce that Ossrox is now listed as a hosting provider on matrix.org! 😍 We offer Matrix Home Servers via https://ossrox.org - for the time being only in the German-speaking area. We are dedicated to hosting open-source software and also offer other services in the messaging, groupware and web meeting segments. If you got any questions, just reach out to us at #public:ossrox.org.

πŸ”—Dept of Interesting Projects πŸ›°οΈ

addanno says

Hello Matrix friends. We have recently launched an online learning platform that has Element at its core. We added some great features such as annotations for both course material and web pages. Here is an overview video of what we are doing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY3safwbllQ

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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.

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1envs.net441.5
2thewords.faith482
3almum.de551
4lw1.at661
5matrix.org768
6aria-net.org897
7quyo.de963
8mindlesstux.com970
9shortestpath.dev1205
10phorcys.net1395

πŸ”—#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.

RankHostnameMedian MS
1conduit.grich.sk179
2grin.hu702
3cry.is705
4sspaeth.de1174

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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

Synapse 1.59 released

18.05.2022 00:00 β€” Releases β€” Brendan Abolivier

Synapse 1.59 is out! Let's see what's new in this version.

πŸ”—Generic worker types

When Synapse instances are subject to high load, it can be useful to use workers to balance the load more effectively. Workers are separate processes that can take some of the load off the main Synapse process, and allow the homeserver to scale more effectively.

In the past, Synapse only provided a specific set of types of workers, each capable of handling a specific set of operations. For some time now we have been working on allowing more flexibility around worker configuration, which started all the way back in Synapse 1.12.0 with the introduction of a generic worker application type.

Synapse 1.59 furthers this work by deprecating the synapse.app.appservice and synapse.app.user_dir worker application types. Homeserver administrators should change the configuration of instances using these types to the generic synapse.app.generic_worker application type, and use the notify_appservices_from_worker and update_user_directory_from_worker to delegate application service and user directory work (respectively) to a worker.

See the upgrade notes for more information on this change.

πŸ”—Push rules

Push rules allow Matrix clients to define notification rules on a homeserver. One often reported issue with notification in Matrix is the fact that notifications are sent out when server ACLs, which define which server(s) can and cannot interact in a room, change. This is especially annoying during big waves of abuse, as there might be multiple servers that need to be banned from rooms, thus causing a lot of unneeded notifications.

Synapse 1.59 now supports silencing server ACL updates, by implementing the new push rule documented in MSC3786. However, since this MSC hasn't been incorporated into the spec yet, this behaviour is disabled by default in Synapse: see the implementation pull request for more information on turning it on.

Synapse 1.59 also allows third-party modules to validate and change the actions associated with an existing push rule via the Module API. This is helpful for modules wishing to, for example, configuring specific notification settings when new users register.

πŸ”—Everything else

As of Synapse 1.59, Synapse will not communicate the name of devices over federation (unless configured otherwise), in order to better preserve user privacy. See the upgrade notes for more information.

Also note that we have issued a patch release for 1.59 (1.59.1) which fixes a long-standing bug that started to bite a good amount of server administrators. Server admins that are looking into upgrading their instance to Synapse 1.59 are recommended to upgrade to 1.59.1 rather than 1.59.0.

See the full changelog for a complete list of changes in this release. Also please have a look at the upgrade notes for this version.

Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including (in no particular order) Beeper, Dirk Klimpel, Ε imon Brandner, henryclw and Andrew Do.

Independent public audit of Vodozemac, a native Rust reference implementation of Matrix end-to-end encryption

16.05.2022 17:04 β€” General β€” Matthew Hodgson
Last update: 16.05.2022 16:02

Hi all,

It’s been quite a while since our last independent E2EE review, and so we’re incredibly proud to present an entirely new independent security audit of vodozemac, our next generation native Rust implementation of Matrix’s Olm and Megolm E2EE protocols. The audit has been conducted by Least Authority, who specialise in comprehensive audits of security-sensitive decentralized technologies - and we are very grateful to gematik, who kindly shared the costs of funding the audit as part of their commitment to Matrix for healthcare in Germany.

This audit was a bit of a whirlwind, as while we were clearly overdue an audit of Matrix’s E2EE implementations, we decided quite late in the day to focus on bringing vodozemac to auditable production quality rather than simply doing a refresh of the original libolm audit. However, we got there in time, thanks to a monumental sprint from Damir and Denis over Christmas. The reason we went this route is that vodozemac is an enormous step change forwards in quality over libolm, and vodozemac is now the reference Matrix E2EE implementation going forward. Just as libolm went live with NCC’s security review back in 2016, similarly we’re kicking off the first stable release of vodozemac today with Least Authority’s audit. In fact, vodozemac just shipped as the default E2EE library in matrix-rust-sdk 0.5, released at the end of last week!

The main advantages of vodozemac over libolm include:

  • Native Rust - type, memory and thread safety is preserved both internally, and within the context of larger Rust programs (such as those building on matrix-rust-sdk). This is particularly important given the memory bugs which libolm sprouted, despite our best efforts to the contrary.
  • Performance - vodozemac benchmarks roughly 5-6x faster than libolm on typical hardware
  • Better primitives - vodozemac is built on the best practice cryptographic primitives from the Rust community, rather than the generic Brad Conte primitives used by libolm.

Also, we’ve finally fixed one of the biggest problems with libolm - which was that the hardest bit of implementing E2EE in Matrix wasn’t necessarily the encryption protocol implementation itself, but how you glue it into your Matrix client’s SDK. It turns out ~80% of the code and complexity needed to securely implement encryption ends up being in the SDK rather than the Olm implementation - and each client SDK ended up implementing its own independent state machine and glue for E2EE, leading to a needlessly large attack & bug surface.

To address this problem, vodozemac is designed to plug into matrix-sdk-crypto - an SDK-independent Rust library which abstracts away the complexities and risks of implementing E2EE, designed to plug into existing SDKs in any language. For instance, Element Android already supports delegating its encryption to matrix-sdk-crypto; Element iOS got this working too last week, and we’re hard at work adding it to Element Web too. (This set of projects is codenamed Element R). Meanwhile, Element X (the project to switch Element iOS and Element Android to use matrix-rust-sdk entirely) obviously benefits from it too, as matrix-rust-sdk now leans on matrix-sdk-crypto for its encryption.

Therefore we highly recommend that developers using libolm migrate over to vodozemac - ideally by switching to matrix-sdk-crypto as a way of managing the interface between Matrix and the E2EE implementation. Vodozemac does also provides a similar API to libolm with bindings for JS and Python (and C++ in progress) if you want to link directly against it - e.g. if you’re using libolm for something other than Matrix, for example XMPP, ActivityPub or Jitsi. We’ll continue to support and maintain libolm for now though, at least until the majority of folks have switched to vodozemac.

In terms of the audit itself - we recommend reading it yourself, but the main takeaway is that Least Authority identified 10 valid concerns, of which we addressed 8 during the audit process. The remaining two are valid but lower priority, and we’ll fix them as part of our maintenance backlog. All the issues identified are excellent valid points, and we’re very glad that Least Authority have added huge value here by highlighting some subtle gotchas which we’d missed. (If you write Rust, you’ll particularly want to check out their zeroisation comments).

So: exciting times! Vodozemac should be landing in a Matrix client near you in the near future - we’ll yell about it loudly once Element switches over. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please head over to #e2ee:matrix.org.

Thanks again to gematik for helping fund the audit, and to Least Authority for doing an excellent job - and being patient and accommodating beyond the call of duty when we suddenly switched the scope from libolm to vodozemac at the last minute ;)

Next up: we’re going to get the Rust matrix-sdk-crypto independently audited (once this burndown is complete) so that everyone using the matrix-sdk-crypto state machine for Matrix E2EE can have some independent reassurance too - a huge step forward from the wild west of E2EE SDK implementations today!

– Matthew

This Week in Matrix 2022-05-13

13.05.2022 18:50 β€” This Week in Matrix β€” Thib

πŸ”—Matrix Live πŸŽ™

πŸ”—Dept of Spec πŸ“œ

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

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

πŸ”—MSC Status

New MSCs:

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

  • No MSCs had final comment period proposed this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

Merged MSCs:

  • No MSCs were closed this week.

Closed MSCs:

πŸ”—Spec Updates

The Spec Core Team has decided to not include MSC3440 (threading via m.thread relations) specifically in the upcoming Matrix v1.3 release. We previously stated that it would be in v1.3, but there's a few unproven MSCs (namely MSC3773 (notifications for threads)) which make it feel improper to put threads into the spec at this stage. We're aiming for a future (very near) spec release to contain threads, assuming we can get enough of the feature landed. This is a very similar approach to what we did with Spaces: while the core feature existed as FCP-concluded for a while, we wanted to give some other MSCs a chance to land before writing it up formally.

As a follow-on from this, any implementations that are currently assuming "v1.3" spec support translates to threading support should note the following:

  • Clients which are pre-emptively checking for v1.3 in /versions should stop doing that. Look for org.matrix.msc3440.stable as an "unstable" feature flag instead.
  • Servers which offer MSC3440's behaviour should expose it on stable endpoints and expose org.matrix.msc3440.stable for clients to detect.
  • Optionally, clients and servers can drop support for the org.matrix.msc3440 (truly unstable) flag, given clients & servers should have already upgraded.

At the spec level, we'll still be writing up MSC3440's dependencies (aggregations and friends), but will notably be missing MSC3440 specifically in v1.3. If folks can update their clients urgently, it would be massively appreciated!

πŸ”—Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2596: Proposal to always allow rescinding invites!

A simple change to the auth rules to help prevent an edge case where one is able to invite a user, but not disinvite them as the latter requires a separate permission. The MSC attempts to solve this by always allowing the cancellation of invitations you've sent.

A small MSC, but one with some open threads still. Perhaps a good opportunity to go in and clean it up!

πŸ”—Dept of Servers 🏒

πŸ”—Synapse (website)

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

squah says

Hello everyone. This week the team cut a release candidate for Synapse v1.59, which includes:

Meanwhile, the core team has looking at caches and memory usage: Erik has been looking at ways to reduce the memory usage of small servers, Shay's been adding some exciting new config options to limit the total memory usage of Synapse and David's added the ability to reload the cache factors of a running Synapse instance via SIGHUP.

In parallel, Olivier's been doing groundwork to reduce replication traffic for workerised Synapse deployments, Andrew (anoa) has been looking at media retention policies and work continues on faster room joins.

πŸ”—Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander reports

This week we've actually made two releases β€” Dendrite 0.8.4 and Dendrite 0.8.5 β€” which are both primarily targeting performance and bug fixes.

We've also released our new living documentation, which is available at https://matrix-org.github.io/dendrite/, which features new installation instructions and documents that will be helpful to Dendrite server administrators. We will be writing more documentation and expanding this over time.

Changes include:

  • The built-in NATS Server has been updated to version 2.8.2
  • Monolith deployments will no longer panic at startup if given a config file that does not include the internal_api and external_api options
  • State resolution v2 now correctly identifies other events related to power events, which should fix some event auth issues
  • The latest events updater will no longer implicitly trust the new forward extremities when calculating the current room state, which may help to avoid some state resets
  • The one-time key count is now correctly returned in /sync even if the request otherwise timed out, which should reduce the chance that unnecessary one-time keys will be uploaded by clients
  • The create-account tool should now work properly when the database is configured using the global connection pool
  • Fixes a regression introduced in the previous version where appservices, push and phone-home statistics would not work over plain HTTP
  • Adds missing indexes to the sync API output events table, which should significantly improve /sync performance and reduce database CPU usage
  • Building Dendrite with the bimg thumbnailer should now work again (contributed by database64128)

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

πŸ”—Dept of Bridges πŸŒ‰

πŸ”—matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair reports

Most of this week's fixes are in the testing branch, so try it out!

  • Ability to DM your own KakaoTalk puppet
  • Fix to the problem of needing to DM a puppet twice to start chatting with them
  • Fixes to leaving KakaoTalk chats from Matrix (via the !kt leave bot command)
  • Nicer output of the whoami command, to make it easier to click on your own KakaoTalk puppet to DM it

Coming soon:

  • Proper support for setting an Open Chat title & topic from Matrix
  • Support for joining KakaoTalk rooms from Matrix, either by joining an existing portal or providing an Open Chat URL to the bot with a join command

πŸ”—Dept of Clients πŸ“±

πŸ”—Ement.el (website)

Matrix client for Emacs

alphapapa announces

Ement.el, a Matrix client for [GNU Emacs](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs], received some more updates this week:

Additions

  • New Transient-based command menu for room buffers, bound to ?.
  • New command ement-list-members, which lists all members in a room.
  • Member completion now completes from all members in a room (rather than only those whose messages have been seen).
  • Power-level events are displayed.
  • Grouped membership events have tooltips showing each member's individual event.
  • When usernames are colorized, message bodies may optionally be colorized in a less intense shade of the same color, so they are easily distinguished yet easy on the eyes (and, of course, the shading is customizable).

Changes

  • When displaying usernames in the margin, names that are wider than the margin are abbreviated, with the full name in the tooltip.

Fixes

  • Typing notifications (recently broken--oops!).
  • Sending direct messages marks new direct rooms as direct rooms.
  • Event notifications for rooms not displayed in a buffer.

As always, feel free to join us in #ement.el:matrix.org.

πŸ”—Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

Hello and welcome to another Element TWIM!

Threads

  • We’re still hard at work improving the Threads Beta experience for y’all. Starting with Notifications and UI polish.

Community testing

πŸ”—Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle reports

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

πŸ”—Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan says

  • The newest version of the app (1.8.14) was released on Monday! In this release we’ve made a bunch of improvements and bug fixes, check it out here
  • πŸ’Š We also merged an initial version of mention pills and are working on ironing out edge cases. Exciting!
  • There’s good progress on the new authentication flows and live location sharing, both of which we’re looking forward to sharing and testing with you soon.
  • On the ElementX front we're nearly done with the DevX setup and are working towards using the latest Rust SDK
    • unit and UI test runs on the CI and Codecov.io coverage reports
    • swiftlint, danger-swift and sonarcloud.io checks for code quality
    • automatic generation of PR builds, published on diawi
    • scripts for importing and reusing localizable strings from Android
    • towncrier changelogs and more

πŸ”—Element Android (website)

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

Danielle reports

  • We’ve been working on smashing bugs, improving stability, and reducing crashes.
  • Our first time user flow is progressing - we’re starting to test the new authentication flow internally and will be asking for help testing this soon.

πŸ”—Cinny (website)

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

ajbura says

Cinny v2.0.0: Session verification and other e2ee features

πŸ”—Features

  • Redesign app/user settings
  • Add support to manage cross-signing and key backup
  • Add support to manage sessions
  • Add Session verification by emojis
  • Add recently used section to emoji board
  • Add LaTeX / math input and rendering support
  • Add notification sounds
  • Add sound on incoming invites
  • Sort DM's by activity
  • Sort search results by activity
  • Improve jump to unread button
  • Replace confirm and prompt with custom dialogs
  • Adapt to different device widths
  • Native application using Tauri

πŸ”—Bugs

  • Fix loading on older browsers
  • Fix crash on load and room creation on dendrite
  • Fix can't open spaces from public room list
  • Fix max power level in room permissions
  • Fix incorrect custom html crashing app
  • Fix crash on unable to getContent of tombstoned room
  • Don't enable e2ee for bridged platform

See release at: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny/releases/tag/v2.0.0

πŸ”—Cinny for desktop

Since this release, we are also shipping a desktop app of Cinny for Windows, MacOS and Linux. You can download the app for your platform from https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny-desktop/releases

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

πŸ”—Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

πŸ”—matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben reports

The Rust Matrix team is very excited to announce the next major release Matrix SDK 0.5 "stores and native crypto", now available for everyone by adding matrix-sdk = "0.5.0" to their dependencies in their Cargo.toml. This first major release in about 8 months brings significant changes many have been waiting for:

  • Better, safer, native-er crypto: matrix-sdk 0.5 ditches libolm in favor of Vodozemac, the completely fresh rust-native re-implementation of the crypto crate. It has also been audited, the report of which is scheduled to be released soon.
  • Store revamp: the entire cache storage infrastructure for crypto and state has been restructured to allow for full plug-ability, with even the two default supported backends, sled and indexeddb both being separate crates now. And as a matter of fact, a community-driven sql implementation has already been published as beta (with postgres and sqlite support) by charlotte 🦝.
  • WebAssembly; both of these changes also allow us to finally make WASM a Tier 1 supported target for the SDK. Not only does it build and even use the browser native indexeddb for permanent storage, we also have CI tests ensuring nothing will break this support going forward.
  • Features, Features and Process: there's plenty more features and bug fixes in this release, e.g. native thumbnail generation support, as well as changes on our processes going forward.

For more details, check out the Release Notes.

Sidenote: If you want to contribute, or just learn Rust by actually doing it, we recommend taking a look team at the help wanted issues in our repo.

πŸ”—Dept of Ops πŸ› 

πŸ”—Buscarron (website)

Web forms (HTTP POST) to matrix

Aine announces

Buscarron v1.1.0 is here

Buscarron is the new backoffice of the etke.cc and its main feature is to receive web forms (HTML/HTTP POST) and convert them into (encrypted) matrix messages.

So, what's new?

  • Email confirmation after form submissions with Postmark
  • Templates support for redirect URLs
  • Automatically ban spammers, scanners and bots

Check out the source code and say hi in #buscarron:etke.cc

πŸ”—Dept of Bots πŸ€–

πŸ”—Who's In This Room Matrix Bot

Jake C says

If you use Matrix with the Signal bridge (or any bridge) with relay mode enabled, your guests have probably experienced the confusion where they don't know who else (on Matrix) is in the chat as only Matrix can double-puppet.

When this bot is added to a Matrix room, it will announce:

  • Who the room members are when a new Signal user joins;
  • When a Matrix user joins or leaves, who that Matrix user was.

I built it just this afternoon using the excellent matrix-bot-sdk, but it's in Typescript and has plentyful unit tests!

I don't currently have a public bot, but if anyone is interested please join #whos-in-this-room-bot-discussion:jakecopp.chat and say hello!

PRs for adding support for other chat apps (basically identifying which bridge from the puppeted username) are very welcome! https://github.com/jakecoppinger/whos-in-this-room-matrix-bot

πŸ”—Dept of Events and Talks πŸ—£οΈ

J. Ryan Stinnett says

The videos from the HYTRADBOI conference a few weeks back are now publicly available, in case anyone was curious but couldn't make the conference. I gave a talk about building collaborative, open software on Matrix. The whole conference was great, so I recommend browsing the schedule for videos that may interest you. πŸ˜„

πŸ”—Dept of Interesting Projects πŸ›°οΈ

uhoreg reports

Loomio, an open source collaborative decision making tool, now supports integrating with Matrix rooms using their chatbot. They previously supported other (lesser) chat systems, but have recently added support for Matrix.

πŸ”—Dept of Ping πŸ“

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.

πŸ”—#ping:maunium.net

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

RankHostnameMedian MS
1envs.net451
2loang.net576
3jameskitt616.one842.5
4aria-net.org857
5jeroenhd.nl892
6mindlesstux.com983
7shortestpath.dev1014
8quyo.de1345
9matrix.nicfab.it1571
10halogen.city1599

πŸ”—#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.

RankHostnameMedian MS
1jameskitt616.one171
2loang.net307
3foxo.me540
4cry.is763
5kszczot.pl777.5
6dendrite.matrix.org844.5
7beckmeyer.us851.5
8dendrite.neilalexander.dev1225.5
9schuwi.science1620
10sspaeth.de1978

πŸ”—That's all I know 🏁

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