Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Room of the week

timokoesters said:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

---

This week's room is: #art:matrix.org

"Share your artwork and drawings and chat about it. You don't have to be good!"

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, send an email to

[email protected] or a Matrix message in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

Yep, go ahead and email your suggested Matrix room-of-the-week to Timo!

Dept of Spec 📜

kegan said:

MSC3079: Low Bandwidth CS API now has an experimental implementation containing a proxy server and mobile bindings! In addition, there's a blog post explaining how to use this implementation to add low bandwidth support to your servers/clients! This implementation will use about 22% of the bandwidth that the normal CS API would use. Please be aware that low bandwidth Matrix is in its infancy and is subject to change without notice.

anoa said:

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

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2778: Providing authentication method for appservice users (merge)
• MSC2732: Olm fallback keys (merge)

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3234: Send currently open room in client to bots

Spec Updates

Mostly Spaces and E2EE work this week. New spec release is still in the works.

Graph will return in a future edition!

Dept of P2P 👥

Pinecone

Neil Alexander told us:

I have spent quite a bit of time lately working on Pinecone network convergence for P2P Matrix. There's still quite a bit to do in order to call Pinecone "complete", but a network of 50 nodes now bootstraps entirely from cold much more quickly and converges on full end-to-end reachability in roughly 6 seconds. This is a significant improvement to before! Keep an eye out for future P2P Matrix demo builds using these new protocol changes.

This chart also represents interest in Pinecone over time!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit

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

timokoesters told us:

Hello! The last two weeks I mostly tried to make our database backend swappable so we don't need to rely on the sled database anymore. I was able to try out rocksdb, but there were bugs in the rust bindings which required inefficient and unsafe workarounds.

If you know about other key-value databases that work better with Rust, please comment on the issue:

https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/issues/74

• Feature: Swappable database backend

• Improvement: Don't apply push rules for users of other homeservers

• Fix: is_direct now works for locally invited users

• Fix: Deactivated accounts are now actually deactivated (-> performance improvements for appservice puppets)

synapse-media-proxy

f0x offered:

This week I implemented the remaining API route for URL previewing. Already has some nicer url preview results like showing images with Twitter posts and proper YouTube previews instead of the cookie wall text :)

With this, synapse-media-proxy should be a drop-in overlay for all Synapse's /_matrix/media routes. I don't really recommend using it in prod yet however, but I have a test instance that could use some responsible disclosure pentesting at https://media.pixie.town, please DM me @f0x:pixie.town if you find anything :)

https://git.pixie.town/f0x/synapse-media-proxy
synapse-media-proxy now has a room at #synapse-media-proxy:pixie.town

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad reported:

🚪 Knock, knock... It's Friday!

After over a year of work and over a hundred commits, we're now one major step closer to supporting MSC 2403: Add "Knock" feature, which allows users to request admission to rooms which would otherwise be invite-only. Specifically, last Wednesday we merged (#6739) which is an experimental implementation of the MSC, under an unstable prefix. Knocking is not available in any current room versions — we need to implement room version 7 for that — but the remaining work is minimal¹ compared to what it took to get to this point. 🙂 Major kudos to Sorunome, Anoa, and Clokep for their work on both the spec and implementation.

Otherwise we're looking forward to releasing Synapse 1.36 early next week, and we have some great things in store... but I'll not spoil them today! 🤫

From everyone on the Synapse team, have a great weekend!

¹: Well, on the server-side at least. No clients support knocking, yet...

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace reported:

This week too comes with an update on the Helm Charts I'm maintaining, with an update of element-web to 1.7.30

Docker-based development environment for Matrix

psrpinto wrote:

Hi folks. Some time ago I asked here about any projects that provided a local Matrix "node" through docker, and it seemed not much existed in that space, so I went ahead and created the following repo:

https://github.com/Automattic/matrix-env

Docker-based development environment for Matrix. Provides a local sandbox with the following pre-configured services:

• synapse: the reference homeserver implementation
• synapse-admin: homeserver admin UI
• element: a web-based Matrix client

If this is something that would be useful to you, feel free to give it a try and send some feedback, either here or through GitHub issues. Thanks in advance! I hope this is helpful to some of you 🙇

Thanks uhoreg for passing this on! Looks like a really useful way to get a local env running

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Libera.chat IRC bridge work continues

Half-Shot reported:

Hi folks, just a quick update on the Libera.chat bridge situation. We're still rapidly working on the bridge, the milestone highlights for this week are:

• Nearly 6k Matrix users are now connected to IRC and growing by the minute.

• We're midway though our #matrix* Freenode to Libera channel/bridge migrations.

• FOSDEM has been migrated over

• We're still working through our backlog of migration requests from users, a lot of you phoned in!

We're still continuing to rapidly work on the bridge, with a release expected on Monday 🤞. For any of you who aren't in the know yet, you can start bridging to libera.chat by simply joining a channel like #libera-matrix:libera.chat or by searching the libera.chat room directory.

I'm hoping we'll be nearing the end of our journey on this bridge, and it will settle into a natural stable state over the coming days! Anyway, thanks everyone for your patience and we hope to see you on Matrix or IRC!

IRC Bridge 0.27.0-rc1 leaps out of the gate

Half-Shot offered:

Hi bridge followers, today we've released 0.27.0-rc1 of the IRC bridge containing a huge number of changes following all the work we've been doing on libera.chat. Notable things to call out in this release are:

• We've refactored the node-irc library to be typescripty and modern, rather than the quite old JS that it was.

• SASL support for username/password auth has landed, which hopefully means a smoother login process for many. (We're aware of some issues around setting usernames, watch this space)

• Allowing you to spin up the bridge with complete control over the alias namespace of a host (e.g. #libera:libera.chat links to #libera).

• And finally, a privacy feature to block incoming IRC messages when Matrix users are not all joined which is requested by some IRC networks.

Please report bugs as you see them to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc, and let's all pray this will be a smooth release :)

matrix-puppeteer-line

Fair offered:

matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.

Read receipt improvements are here! They are in temporary branches until they've been tested for stability:

• The better-receipts-dm branch contains some smarts to prevent Puppeteer from having to "view" a LINE DM chat in order to sync it, which would make the contact you're DMing think you've read their messages when it was really Puppeteer that "saw" them. However, this doesn't work for non-text messages (like images) or messages in group chats.

• The better-receipts-msc2409 branch (which extends the above branch) uses MSC2409 to detect when you read a bridged message on Matrix, so it can tell Puppeteer to view it on LINE on your behalf. This will let your LINE contacts know when you've read their messages.

After this, only a few read receipt improvements are left to be made:

• Make Puppeteer check all LINE chats (not just the most recently-used one) to see if messages you sent have been read (in LINE). This will work by cycling through all LINE chats where the final message is posted by you and doesn't have a "Read" marker on it yet.

• Use MSC2409 to avoid having to view a LINE chat when syncing non-text messages (like images). The idea is to send a placeholder message that will get replaced with the real message (which requires Puppeteer to view the LINE chat) only when you actually view the placeholder.

Discussion: #matrix-puppeteer-line:miscworks.net

Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) reported:

I've been slowly refactoring the room and communities list to prepare it for spaces. This work is now mostly complete, changing ~4000 lines of code, of which 1500 just got deleted. All of the sidebars are now expandable and collapsible, so you can see the full name of your tags and communities and the lists should also update more dynamically now. Startup also only takes half as long as before on my system and Nheko uses 100MB less memory for my account. Next week I'll probably add spaces to the communities list as well as the room list.

Apart from that LorenDB has been rewriting the member list as well as the invite dialog in Qml and manu has been making progress on the room directory. All of that seems to be coming along nicely and behave much more reasonably than the old versions. There has also been a lot of progress on the Italian and Esperanto translations as well as a few smaller bug fixes and performance improvements.

I hope we will make it to space next week!

Element Clients

Updates from the teams.

Delight, a team aiming to delight users

• We’re making good progress on the ability to re-order Spaces on Web & Android, expected to land soon!
• We’re also adding aliases to Space creation, to make it easier to share and onboard other users
• On iOS, we recently merged a refactor with a new sidebar design which lays the foundations for iOS joining the Spaces beta
• We’ve also been working on adding pagination to the Space Summary API on Synapse
• Meanwhile, we’re also shepherding various MSCs through the spec process to improve private Spaces in the very near future

Web

• 1.7.30 released on Monday
• On develop
  • Upgraded to React 17
  • First GitHub Actions pipeline for web
• In flight
  • Continuing to improve application performance
  • Adding dashboard for performance benchmarks
  • Working on Apple silicon desktop builds
  • Working on translation mismatch errors

iOS

• 1.4.1 released on Tuesday on the App Store
• The new side menu and voice messages are coming.
• We are setting up Towncrier to avoid merge conflicts on our CHANGES files. Those conflict prevent Github Actions, our CI, from starting
• We fixed several annoying bugs regarding VoIP and app stability

Android

• Element Android 1.1.9 has been pushed to production
• We are working with the design team on the dark and light themes, not forgetting the black theme, to ensure some coherence across the application and also to clean up some legacy code. There were too many shades of grey… We will also do the same work on TextAppearance.

NeoChat

Carl Schwan said:

This week was a busy week for NeoChat. We added tons of cool stuff! We rewrote the setting page to add a bit of organization in the settings. This also pushed us to add new appearance options. You can now add a blur effect as background, change the color scheme of NeoChat and switch between bubbles and a more compact layout as you wish.

Another thing we worked on was spellchecking. NeoChat will now add a small red underline under misspelled words and will suggest corrections. This is using the Sonnet frameworks and will integrates perfectly with your personal dictionary from your other KDE apps.

Finally something we added two weeks ago but forgot to mention, we added a quick room switcher using the Ctrl + K shortcut.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

libQuotient

kitsune reported:

Another small release - libQuotient 0.6.7 is out, fixing an issue causing NeoChat to not add rooms to the roomlist after joining. Thanks to Carl Schwan for hunting the problem down!

Tobias Fella added:

Apparently my work-in-progress end-to-end-encryption implementation for libQuotient was bad enough to cause performance problems on my homeserver (Sorry about that!). This should be fixed now 🙂

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Server_stats

MTRNord announced:

Changes

• Server now uses warp instead of actix-web

• /relations request instead of 10s now takes 2s overall

• Added a /servers api endpoint which returns all servers based on the room_ids. (It splits of the server_name from room_ids and puts them into an array)

Bug Fixes

• Aliases with emoji will now get recognized.

Thanks to jo , Nico , joepie91 🏳️‍🌈 and poljar for helping to archive these improvements and hinting where improvements were possible to be made :)

Dept of Guides 🧭

A guide for creating simple Matrix bots with Python and Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib

krazykirby99999 told us:

https://simple-matrix-bot-lib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart.html

Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib allows anyone who needs a bot in a Matrix Room to do so without having to spend unnecessary time learning a complex framework!

https://i.imgur.com/xL4ZBO3.png https://i.imgur.com/UFsJMzS.png

Dept of Grants 💰️

Code Lutin grant program

numéro6 told us:

If you live in France (or eurozone) and your Matrix-related project need some funds, you may candidate to the 2021 #MécénatCodeLutin grant program for FLOSS by Code Lutin. Candidates may fill the dedicated form before july 8th.

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

#ping:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	kapsi.fi	531
2	maunium.net	678.5
3	trolla.us	881
4	siika.solutions	915
5	matrix.sp-codes.de	991
6	imninja.net	1110
7	aria-net.org	1152.5
8	fosil.eu	1169
9	shortestpath.dev	1918.5
10	kittenface.studio	2221

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite01.fiksel.info	760
2	weber.world	1944.5

That's all I know 🏁

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

Disclaimer: Low bandwidth Matrix is experimental, not yet standardised, and subject to change without notice.

This guide is for Matrix developers who want to support MSC3079: Low Bandwidth CS API in their clients/servers. Please read the experimental MSC if you want to learn more about what is happening at a protocol level. If you want a high level overview of low bandwidth Matrix and why you should care, watch the 12 minute demo on Matrix Live.

Matrix currently uses HTTP APIs with JSON data to communicate from the client to the server. This is widely supported but is not very bandwidth efficient. This means that the protocol is slower, more costly and less able to be used on low bandwidth links (e.g 2G networks) which are common in certain parts of the world. MSC3079 defines a low bandwidth protocol using CoAP and CBOR instead of HTTP and JSON respectively. In the future homeservers will natively support some form of low bandwidth protocol. However, at present, no homeserver natively supports MSC3079. Therefore, this guide will set up a low bandwidth proxy server which can be put in front of any Matrix homeserver (Synapse, Dendrite, Conduit, etc) to make it MSC3079-compatible. This guide will also configure an Android device to speak MSC3079.

Low bandwidth Matrix currently does not support web browsers due to their inability to send UDP traffic. You do not need to be running a homeserver to follow this tutorial.

Setting up a low bandwidth proxy for your homeserver

Prerequisites:

• Go 1.13+
• openssl to generate a self-signed DTLS certificate, or an existing certificate you want to use.
• Linux or Mac user

Steps:

• Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/matrix-org/lb.git
• Build the low bandwidth proxy: go build ./cmd/proxy
• Generate a elliptic curve DTLS key/certificate: (we use curve keys as they are smaller than RSA keys, but both work.)

  openssl ecparam -name prime256v1 -genkey -noout -out private-key.pem
  openssl req -new -x509 -key private-key.pem -out cert.pem -days 365
  # you now have cert.pem and private-key.pem
  

• Run it pointing at matrix.org:

  ./proxy -local 'https://matrix-client.matrix.org' \
  --tls-cert cert.pem --tls-key private-key.pem \
  --advertise "http://127.0.0.1:8008" \
  --dtls-bind-addr :8008
  

• You should see something like this:

  INFO[0000] Listening on :8008/tcp to reverse proxy from http://127.0.0.1:8008 to https://matrix-client.matrix.org - HTTPS enabled: false 
  INFO[0000] Listening for DTLS on :8008 - ACK piggyback period: 5s
  

Mac users: If you are having trouble generating EC certificates, make sure you are using OpenSSL and not LibreSSL which comes by default: openssl version. To use OpenSSL, brew install openssl which then dumps the binary to /usr/local/opt/openssl/bin/openssl.

To test it is working correctly:

# build command line tools we can use to act as a low bandwidth client
go build ./cmd/jc
go build ./cmd/coap

# do a CoAP GET request to matrix.org via the proxy
./coap -X GET -k 'http://localhost:8008/_matrix/client/versions' | ./jc -c2j '-'

{"unstable_features":{"io.element.e2ee_forced.private":false,"io.element.e2ee_forced.public":false,"io.element.e2ee_forced.trusted_private":false,"org.matrix.e2e_cross_signing":true,"org.matrix.label_based_filtering":true,"org.matrix.msc2432":true,"org.matrix.msc3026.busy_presence":false,"uk.half-shot.msc2666":true},"versions":["r0.0.1","r0.1.0","r0.2.0","r0.3.0","r0.4.0","r0.5.0","r0.6.0"]}

If this doesn't work:

• Check the proxy logs for errors (e.g bad hostname)
• Try adding -v to ./coap (e.g bad method or path)
• Run the proxy with SSLKEYLOGFILE=ssl.log and inspect the decrypted traffic using Wireshark.

Otherwise, congratulations! You now have a low bandwidth proxy! You can connect to your proxy just like you would to matrix.org or any other homeserver.

Security considerations

• The proxy acts as a man in the middle and can read all non-E2EE traffic, including login credentials. DO NOT USE UNTRUSTED LOW BANDWIDTH PROXY SERVERS. Only use proxy servers run by yourself or the homeserver admins.

Further reading

• The proxy README
• coap README and jc README

Setting up a custom Element Android

We'll add low bandwidth matrix to Element Android and iOS by default once it's standardised - but while things are still experimental, here's a guide for how to build Element Android to do it yourself if you feel the urge. This can be used as inspiration for other Matrix clients too.

Prerequisites:

• Android Studio

Steps:

• Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/vector-im/element-android.git
• Checkout kegan/lb: git checkout kegan/lb. This branch replaces all HTTP traffic going to /_matrix/client/* with LB traffic. /_matrix/media traffic is left untouched. This branch also disables TLS checks entirely so self-signed certificates will work.
• Clone the low bandwidth repo if you haven't already: git clone https://github.com/matrix-org/lb.git
• In the low bandwidth repo, build the mobile bindings:

  go get golang.org/x/mobile/cmd/gomobile
  cd mobile
  # if gomobile isn't on your path, then ~/go/bin/gomobile
  gomobile bind -target=android
  

• Copy the output files to a directory in the Element Android repo which Gradle will pick up:

  mkdir $PATH_TO_ELEMENT_ANDROID_REPO/matrix-sdk-android/libs
  cp mobile-sources.jar $PATH_TO_ELEMENT_ANDROID_REPO/matrix-sdk-android/libs
  cp mobile.aar $PATH_TO_ELEMENT_ANDROID_REPO/matrix-sdk-android/libs
  

• Open the project in Android Studio.
• Build and run on a device/emulator.
• Configure the proxy's --advertise address. If you are running on a local device, restart the proxy with an --advertise of your machines LAN IP e.g 192.168.1.2 instead of 127.0.0.1. If you are running on an emulator, restart the proxy with an --advertise of the host IP: 10.0.2.2. The URL scheme should be https not http, else image loading won't work as Element Android won't download media over http.
• Login to your matrix.org account via the proxy with the --advertise address as the HS URL e.g https://192.168.1.2:8008 or https://10.0.2.2:8008. The port is important.

To verify it is running via low bandwidth:

• Install Wireshark.
• Restart the proxy with the environment variable SSLKEYLOGFILE=ssl.log.
• Run tcpdump on the right interface e.g: sudo tcpdump -i en0 -s 0 -v port 8008 -w lb.pcap
• Force stop the android app to forcibly close any existing DTLS connections.
• Re-open the app.
• Open lb.pcap in Wireshark and set ssl.log as the Pre-Master Secret log filename via Preferences -> Protocols -> TLS -> Pre-Master Secret log filename.
• Check there is DTLS/CoAP traffic.

Performance

To send a single 'Hello World' message to /room/$room_id/send/m.room.message/$txn_id and receive the response, including connection setup:

Protocol	Num packets	Total bytes
HTTP2+JSON	43	6533
CoAP+CBOR	6	1440

Limitations

• CoAP OBSERVE is not enabled by default. This extension allows the server to push data to the client so the client doesn't need to long-poll. It is not yet enabled because of the risk of state synchronisation issues between the proxy and the client. If the proxy gets restarted, the client will not receive sync updates until it refreshes its subscription, which happens infrequently. During this time the client is not aware that anything is wrong.
• CoAP uses Blockwise Transfer to download large responses. Each block must be ACKed before the next block can be sent. This is less efficient than TCP which has a Receive Window which allows multiple in-flight packets at once. This means CoAP is worse at downloading large responses, requiring more round trips to completely send the data.
• The current version of /sync sends back much more data than is strictly necessary. This means the initial sync can be slower than expected. On a low kbps link this can flood the network with so much data that the sync stream begins to fall behind. Future work will look to optimise the sync API.
• The proxy currently doesn't implement the low bandwidth response in /versions.

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Wired UK feature article

Wired UK have published a feature on Matrix in their print edition this month. We'll be sure to link to it when it's made available online!

German-universities poll

jfkimmes shared:

I just learned that in a poll of 89 universities in Germany, Matrix ranked third place in the chat category already.

The source is in only available in German, unfortunately: https://zenodo.org/record/4817795

However, the conclusion list (first table) may be understandable from context. It lists the top three solutions per category with their respective number of universities using it.

Oleg clarified:

The evaluation was "which solution are you using".

Florian added:

The Instant Messaging part starts at slide 15, the first chart on that slide is "which solution do you use", the second is "How content are you with the solution?", with Matrix having the best average of all solutions, namely ~8.8/10.

also JCG:

What's also noteworthy: Those using matrix are the happiest with the solution

\o/

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa offered:

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://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3231: Token authenticated registration

• MSC3230: Spaces top level order

• MSC3226: Per-room spell check

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

This week the Spec Core Team has been reviewing various Spaces MSCs, most recently MSC3230 (Space ordering). We're also hoping to square away the aggregations MSCs (message editing, reactions, etc) once and for all, though this will likely take a concerted effort from a few members to pull off.

Finally MSC3231 is a (currently draft status) MSC from Callum, one of Matrix.org's GSoC students this year! His project aims to allow native token-based registration to homeservers (the idea is so that you can generate a few tokens from your registration-disabled homeserver and hand them out to a few trusted friends and family members).

And finally, work still continues on finishing up the technical portions of the new release process for the spec. As mentioned last week, we've attempted to split the work up over multiple people in order to get it done quicker. Slowly but surely...

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad said:

Hello from the Synapse team! A short update for a short workweek (thanks, bank holidays!):

• Synapse 1.35 was released this week! The Spaces flag is on by default, a bunch of bugs were fixed, and we've landed many of the prerequisites to eliminating RAM spikes on room joins.

• 📚 We have new docs! 📚 Anoa converted our docs to build with mdbook (#10086), and you can now browse them at https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/! Check it out and let us know what you think. (Note: Not all of the pages have been converted from reStructuredText to Markdown yet, so some might render a bit strangely, but the structure is there!)

Catch you next Friday! 👋

synapse-media-proxy

f0x announced:

Another round of updates on my smart caching media proxy. After refactoring a lot (as always), I implemented thumbnailing! Now the only big feature left to add is url previewing. I also have a test deployment configured on media.pixie.town now, so you can try fetching a bit of remote media through there, or view this submissions screenshot

metrics

Got started implementing a Prometeus /metrics endpoint, with a rudimentary Grafana dashboard for my test installation.

comparison with matrix-media-repo

While they both implement Matrix' media endpoints, they serve rather different niches, where matrix-media-repo fully decouples the media repo aspect, my proxy cooperates with Synapse's filesystem and database, to speed up operation while ultimately making it a seamless drop-in and removal process.

also :P

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

And another weekly installment of Kubernetes Helm Chart (and deprecated Docker image) updates, tracking the Synapse releases this week (1.35.0/1).

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Heisenbridge demo video

hifi shared this great demonstation video of Heisenbridge:

Half-Shot hit us late with a pair of updates:

Security release for the matrix-appservice-irc and matrix-appservice-bridge library

Hello. This week we've released an update to the https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/ library containing a security fix for room upgrade handling. The security report will come later, but for now we advise anyone using the room upgrade handler feature to upgrade to 2.6.1. By the same token, we would also advise all IRC bridge admins to update their bridge to 0.26.1.

The Libera.chat bridge is still ongoing

Howdy folks. As you've likely seen over the last few days, we're still hard at work getting the final pegs in place for the libera.chat bridge. As usual, you can start using the bridge now while it's in beta by going to #<foo>:libera.chat, but we're hoping to have the thing stable by next week. Catch us in #libera-matrix:libera.chat for the juicy gossip about it.

matrix-puppeteer-line

Fair reported:

matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.

• Send a bridge notice when getting unexpectedly logged out of LINE, to warn you to log in again.
• Improve resiliency of LINE user avatar syncing.
• Properly support syncing LINE rooms with participants who aren't in your LINE friends list (This was harder than it sounds...!)

These changes (and ones before it) will be merged to master once I reorganize some messy commits.

The next big task is still to fix outbound read receipts (i.e. to make it so that the bridge syncing a message doesn't make your > LINE contacts think you actually read that message). Once that is done, I'll consider the bridge to be in beta.

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Thunderbird Matrix support

freaktechnik announced:

Thunderbird now has Matrix support based on matrix-js-sdk enabled in the Nightly builds.

The star feature is probably that we support multiple Matrix accounts in the same client. Right now all your unencrypted rooms with text messages should work fine. While we think we won't destroy your account's state, it's still recommended to use a testing account with it. During account setup, it will ask you for a password, even if the homeserver supports SSO. If you intend to log in through SSO, just leave the password field blank.

We're not quite at the point where we support all the things you love about chatting with Matrix. Many of the missing features and polish to make communication successful are tracked in this meta bug. The goal for that milestone is to enable Matrix in our Beta builds.

You can get a Thunderbird Nightly build at the bottom of thunderbird.net by switching from "Beta Channel" to "Nightly Channel". If you run into bugs with the Matrix integration, please report them through this form. When filing a bug, please include debug logs. You can copy the debug logs for the account by going to the "Show Accounts" dialog, right clicking the account and selecting "Copy Debug Log". Note that the debug log may contain information from any of your conversations, so you might want to check the contents before posting it anywhere.

Also, check out Matrix Live!

NeoChat

Carl Schwan announced:

NeoChat 1.2, our third major release, was released this week bringing many improvements to the timeline and text input component. If you missed it, you can read the announcement here: https://carlschwan.eu/2021/06/01/neochat-1.2-bubbles-better-text-editing-and-more/ and we even have a nice release video :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lcH4tm6uTk

Other than that, we started working on an integration with KDE web shortcuts functionality to quickly search selected text on the web: https://invent.kde.org/network/neochat/-/merge_requests/279.

Nheko

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) told us:

Callum, our GSoC student, after spending some time on Synapse, had now his first go at Nheko's codebase. He implemented, that you can now just enter the server name on registration instead of the full URL. This means entering conduit.rs or matrix.org works now nicely, since those servers are actually hosted at a different URL. He's now working on the Token Registration MSC, which he will implement in Synapse and Nheko, so exciting times ahead!

We also had a small contribution from pcworld, who fixed that if you only viewed the room list in the narrow layout, you would not get notifications for the last selected room.

I'll leave you with some words, that you may have heard a few times already: "Watch this space for next weeks update!"

Fractal

Alexandre Franke reported:

A dozen merge requests have been integrated in our fractal-next branch since last week.

Amongst the more trivial changes, Julian made sure rooms are added to the sidebar in batch (!737) to improve performances, added in-app notifications for invite errors (!760), added a menu entry to leave rooms (!769), and implemented display of user and room avatars (!770). We also gained a right-click-menu entry to display event sources thanks to Kévin (!766).

Element Clients

Updates provided by the teams.

Delight team

• We’re continuing progress on implementing Blurhash on Web & Android to improve the image loading experience, especially on low bandwidth
• On Spaces, we’ve started working on the ability to drag and drop to re-order Spaces, along with improving adding aliases to public Spaces

Web

• 1.7.30 RC on staging
  • Improved layout performance in the timeline and room list
  • Refined the message action bar UI
• Continuing to improve application performance
  • Recent focus on minimising browser layout work when things change
  • Reducing DOM size
• Working on Apple silicon desktop builds

iOS

• 1.4.0 is available on the public TestFlight. We expect to make it available on the App Store on Monday. It has:
  • Performance improvements
  • Crash fixes
  • New languages: Esperanto, Portuguese (Brazil), Kabyle, Norwegian, Swedish, Japanese and Welsh.
  • There are some API breaks in MatrixSDK due to those performance improvements.
  • We have now a MXLog module with log levels! It is now possible to disable all logs from MatrixSDK
• We continued to work on performance and stability and will continue to for the coming sprint period: https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/milestone/55

Android

• 1.1.8 has been released to production, and 1.1.9 has been released to beta on the PlayStore
• We are currently working with the design team on the light and dark theme of the application, especially colors and text appearance. Lots of cleanup to do...

Hydrogen

A minimal Matrix chat client, focused on performance, offline functionality, and broad browser support. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/

Bruno announced:

Released Hydrogen 0.1.56 this week, with redactions. In the meantime, I've been making good progress on reactions, which should hopefully get released early next week. Midhun has made good progress on the right panel, ironing out the last bugs.

Here's a sneak preview of reactions (with slow network to show off the local echo animation):

kazv

tusooa reported on kazv:

kazv is a matrix client based on libkazv. Talk to us on #kazv:tusooa.xyz.

Updates

I guess it's a long time from our last twim. Here's what is going on in that time:

• We used fluent for translations. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/kazv/-/merge_requests/1
• We supported read and save client state. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/kazv/-/merge_requests/2
• A work-in-progress, but we are displaying some common event types; there are even chat bubbles (>w<) Check out a screenshot below: (yes, and we got a new logo)

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix @ FrOSCon this year

Oleg said:

On August 21-22 the annual Free and Open Source Conference (short FrOSCon) will take place. Usually the conference takes place in a German University of applied Sciences Bonn Rhine Sieg. This year it will be virtual. On the positive side - we don't need to travel.

As German Matrix community grows this is a great opportunity to meet each other and hack together.

Matrix Dev Room

We are planing to do a virtual Dev Room this year. The idea is to exchange on the latest Matrix development and projects, get to know each other and drink <your_favorite_beverage> (virtually) together. 😉

To make it happen we need your help!

Dev Room is living from talks and workshops - this is your chance to present your Matrix project or to do a workshop!

Language: preferably German, but English is also ok

Submission is until 2021-06-11, but please give us feedback ASAP so we can create a plan now.

If it's your first talk or workshop some free of charge coaching is included. 😉

Also help in organizing the Dev Room (moderation, timekeeping) is needed.

Matrix Open Source booth

It was a great place to chit-chat and to get your in-depth answers regarding Matrix at FOSDEM this year. 👍️

We also planing to have a virtual booth at FrOSCon.

We need your support in answering questions about Matrix or just to have a good time.

Get in touch

If you want to take part please contact @oleg:fiksel.info (or [email protected]) ASAP to add you to the Dev Room participants list.

BTW: we also have a #FrOSCon:fiksel.info room

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Circles

cvwright reported:

• Set up a new (virtual) EU homeserver in Frankfurt, so European folks can join the beta starting next week

• Use StoreKit to detect when a user is in Europe and should therefore use the EU homeserver, both for GDPR and to minimize latency

• Made some progress toward supporting m.video messages

• Experimented with using the new iOS photo picker to better protect users' privacy Homepage: https://kombuchaprivacy.com/circles/ Source code: https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios

You can also support circles on Kickstarter.

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

#ping:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	lama-corp.space	492
2	trolla.us	526
3	int21.dev	569
4	fosil.eu	727
5	d0.ee	728
6	nordgedanken.dev	740.5
7	feneas.org	805.5
8	maescool.be	1073.5
9	matrix.sp-codes.de	1077
10	coffespot.com	1490

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite01.fiksel.info	1152
2	dendrite.s3cr3t.me	1386
3	weber.world	8297.5

That's all I know 🏁

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

Synapse 1.35.0 is out! This release focused on improving internals as we drive toward better memory performance during room joins, but more on that below.

Update: Synapse 1.35.1 was published on Thursday, June 3rd. It resolves a bug (#10109) which mistakenly listed invite-only rooms in the Spaces summary.

We'd also like to call the attention of client developers to a deprecation: The unstable prefixes used during development of MSC2858: Multiple SSO Identity Providers will be removed from Synapse 1.38, due out in August. Please ensure your client supports the stable identifiers for this feature.

Spaces: On by Default

Following the successful release of Synapse 1.34, the experimental Spaces flag is now enabled by default. If you had manually enabled the experimental_features: { spaces_enabled: true } flag in your homeserver configuration, you may now remove it.

Bug Squashing

This release of Synapse fixes an issue which could cause federated room joins to fail when the join response exceeded a size limit which was too low (#10082). We've also improved what Synapse logs when it drops a connection in similar circumstances (#10091), which should aid diagnosis if a similar issue were to arise in the future.

GitHub user thermaq contributed a fix (#10014) for a bug which could cause user presence state to become stale.

Lastly our OpenTracing support now allows for profiling end-to-end performance on a per-user basis (#9978).

An Update on Room Joins

We've been hammering away at shrinking Synapse's memory footprint when joining large / complex rooms, and while we're not there yet, the end is in sight! In particular, this release includes many internal refactorings, including using ijson to parse the JSON response to /send_join (#9958), clearing the way for substantial improvements.

Memory usage still spikes because we're effectively doing the same work with a different library, but ijson's design allows for iterative parsing. This will pay dividends once we modify the code downstream of /send_join to take advantage of it.

Concretely, Erik Johnston has an experimental branch of Synapse which completely eliminates the memory spike:

The remaining work is centered on splitting that branch into self-contained, reviewable pull requests, like a rewrite of the Synapse Keyring class (#10035). After that's merged, we'll need to make one further change to properly batch up work, at which point we should attain the efficiency gains from Erik's experiment.

Everything Else

GitHub user savyajha contributed a security hardened systemd unit file which effectively sandboxes Synapse (#9803). While not enabled by default, we'd encourage security conscious users to review the example file and associated documentation.

Please see the Release Notes for a complete list of changes in this release.

Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including dklimpel, jerinjtitus, junquera, lonyeon, savyajha, and thermaq.

Matrix Live 🎙

A classic "Matthew & Amandine" episode. This week: Spaces, Reputation, Low-Bandwidth, P2P & more!

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa gifted us with:

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://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.

MSC Status

Lots of new MSCs appearing this week!

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3219: Space Flair
• MSC3217: Soft kicks
• MSC3216: Synchronized access control for Spaces
• Draft: MSC3215: Aristotle - Moderation in all things
• MSC3214: Allow overriding m.room.power_levels using initial_state

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

The Spec Core Team is working towards finalising the remaining spec PRs and the new spec release process. Good news is there's only one final spec PR to go! Bad news is it's probably going to be one of the hardest :)

Otherwise the team was pleased to see that noticeable progress is being made on the MSC backlog. But that doesn't mean we get to rest on our laurels!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad said:

We have interns! In addition to Matrix.org's participation in Google Summer of Code, Element has funded two Outreachy interns to work on backend projects, and we're overjoyed to welcome the following folks to Matrix:

• Shay (Outreachy) is focused on modernizing Sydent and Sygnal, our reference implementations of a Matrix Identity Server and a Matrix Push Gateway respectively.
• Meenal (Outreachy) is helping us improve Complement, and modern replacement for SyTest, our homeserver integration test suite.
• Callum (GSoC) is working on adding support for restricting homeserver registration to users with pre-shared invite codes.

Welcome Callum, Meenal, and Shay!

We're also working to unify and standardize the module API which is used to extend Synapse, and your feedback would be very welcome. Similarly, if you have any experience with adding custom modules to Docker images or Debian packages and have thoughts on how we should best support that (or just examples of projects which do that well), please weigh in at #9944.

Lastly, we're looking forward to the release of Synapse 1.35 which will bring significant improvements to memory use during room joins, but that's for next week. 😉

A very warm welcome to all of our Outreachy interns and Google Summer of Code students this year! You can see the full list of GSoC students in our Google Summer of Code 2021 blogpost.

synapse-media-proxy

f0x announced:

I've been working on a smart media worker/proxy, to offload initial spikes in traffic for homeservers behind slower network uplinks.

There's a <remote> component that sits on a small vps, handling the upload and download endpoints (and soon, thumbnails), with an in-memory cache to quickly respond to requests. Media still gets forwarded to the <local> component where it gets stored in Synapse's media folder with an accompanying database entry, so all media is still stored long-term in the way Synapse expects it to be, so the proxy can be removed at any point.

Currently not production ready but you're welcome to snoop around the repo :)

https://git.pixie.town/f0x/synapse-media-proxy

Seems like quite a useful project! Other adventures in splitting out the media server from the homeserver include TravisR's matrix-media-repo project.

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust.

timokoesters reported the latest updates since last week:

• Feature: Implement /claim

• Feature: Handle incoming to-device events

• Feature: Implement /query

• Improvement: Faster signing key storage

• Improvement: Documentation for Appservices

• Fix: State resolution bugs

• Fix: Respond to unauthorized PDUs with FORBIDDEN

• Fix: Forward errors from remote servers (e.g. unsupported room version)

Timo also shared with us a milestone dashboard for Conduit being production-ready: https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/milestones/3. It's exciting to see the multi-implementation Matrix homeserver landscape really beginning to take shape!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace announced:

Another weekly Kubernetes Chart update, this time only for element-web though - which was updated to 1.7.29.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

libera.chat IRC network news

Half-Shot tells us:

Hey folks, some of you (well, frankly most of you) wanted to hear about our plans for libera.chat. I've been hard at work this week building a brand new bridge which is hosted on the libera.chat homeserver and it's nearly ready to go. We're just making a few final preparations before taking it out of beta, but it's currently available as a portaling bridge. You can currently reach any channel on libera.chat by joining #<channel_name>:libera.chat. You can also add the homeserver to your room directory in your Matrix client to search all the bridged rooms.

We're also hanging out in #libera-matrix:libera.chat, if you have any questions. Of course, the bridge is proving to be very popular so please be patient :)

Definitely one of the most sought-after Matrix bridges lately. Props to Half-Shot, Libera.Chat and everyone else for getting it all together in such short notice.

Heisenbridge Updates

hifi told us:

Plumbing IRC channels 🧑‍🔧

Somewhat experimental feature that has landed this week is the ability to use single puppeting in a public Matrix room to bridge IRC channels.

This support comes through a new PLUMB admin command for network rooms that will ask the bridge bot to join a public Matrix room and an IRC channel.

On IRC side there will be only a single user/bot that will relay messages from Matrix users. This is a stop-gap between fully puppeting Matrix users on IRC and doesn't need explicit permission from an IRC network to use by channel operators as long as bots are allowed.

On Matrix side puppets will join and leave based on their presence on the IRC channel. The bridge bot does not need any special permissions in a room as it doesn't do permission synchronization so it can be kept without any power levels.

Unplumbing a room is as simple as kicking the bridge out and it will take the puppets with it.

As this is a fairly new feature it does have some rough edges so feedback is greatly appreciated.

With all this said, if you're in the need to bridge any IRC channel on any network with little friction, Heisenbridge should have you covered!

SASL support 🔒

If you're using Heisenbridge to connect to Libera.Chat from a network block that has SASL enforcement enabled (like some VPS providers) you can now configure SASL credentials to authenticate at connection time to bypass this restriction.

This only implements SASL PLAIN for now. Certificate authentication may be looked at in the future.

But that's not all

• Identd will now always provide a unique ident for everyone

• Improved detection for stalled connections

• IRC user ghosting issues fixed for good 🤞

• Server TLS cert checking fixes, self-signed support

• Initial bridge DM invites should go through more reliably

• QUIT command to leave from all networks in one go

• Automatic Docker Hub images from master (amd64 and arm64)

In addition Heisenbridge is now featured on matrix.org 🥳

matrix-puppeteer-line Updates

matrix-puppeteer-line is a bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.

Fair offered:

This week brings a variety of assorted bugfixes & feature improvements in the testing branch. Included are:

• Support for m.sticker events for LINE stickers (with an option to use m.image if preferred)

• Clear resolution of LINE emojis, and a config option to scale them (since they're tiny by default)

• Less frequent re-downloading of already-seen LINE stickers/emoji (there are limits to this, but it's still an improvement)

• Option to disable syncing LINE stickers/emoji (in case re-hosting LINE imagery is a liability)

• More reliable message syncing (should never get "Decrypting message..." or invisible images/stickers/emoji anymore)

• Fix crashes during inbound message & read receipt syncing of multi-user rooms

Like last time, testing is much appreciated 😀

Remaining big tasks are:

• Rework message syncing so that receiving a message doesn't require "viewing" the LINE chat in the Puppeteer-controlled browser, which will make LINE send a read receipt even though you may not actually have read the message yourself (I mentioned this a while ago; it's still a todo)

• Support for multiple bridge users at once (A public instance of the bridge will only be considered once multi-user support is ready)

Discussion: #matrix-puppeteer-line:miscworks.net

Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

NeoChat Updates

NeoChat is a Matrix client written using KDE technologies, most notably the Kirigami UI framework.

Carl Schwan reported:

The past few weeks have been busy with fixing bugs. As a result, we plan to release NeoChat 1.2 next week. You can help by testing the Flatpak beta version of NeoChat: flatpak install https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/org.kde.neochat.flatpakref.

Aside from bug fixing, Tobias worked a bit on E2EE encryption in Quotient and Noah added a fancy typing indicator.

Nheko Updates

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

AppAraat told us:

• I added mnemonic shortcut keys to the context menu. Now you can react and reply even faster! (Thanks Nico for all the guidance :))

• Nheko is now available on the Chocolatey package manager for Windows, yay!

FluffyChat Updates

FluffyChat is the cutest cross-platform matrix client. It is available for Android, iOS, Web and Desktop.

krille announced:

FluffyChat 0.31.1 has been released with a lot of bug fixes, stability improvements, minor redesigns and a lot of refactoring under the hood.

Feature

• Cute animation for hiding the + button in inputbar

• Improved chat bubble design and splash animations

• Zoom page transition on Android

• SSO is now an option even if the server supports password login

Fixes

• "Pick an image" button in emote settings doesn't do anything

• Emoji picker

• Status bar and system navigation bar theme

• Open URIs and receive sharing intent on iOS

• SSO on iOS

• Workaround for iOS not clearing notifications

• Send read markers

Fractal Updates

Fractal is a Matrix client written in Rust, and one of the first to use the matrix-rust-sdk!

Alexandre Franke offered:

Since last week, a couple things landed in fractal-next. Julian added support for accepting/rejecting invites (!754/#759). Kévin did an internal restructuring of how we handle the SyncResponse in !759. The visible consequence for users is that room categories (also known as tags) are updated directly in Fractal when the user changes it from an other client. He also switched from comrak to ruma’s markdown in !756. It shouldn’t have any impact for users, but should mean less code in the end on our side and more consistent code as well.

Element Client Updates

Crafted by the Element teams.

Delight

• Spaces: We’ve been listening to, investigating, triaging and organising feedback from the beta so far. There’s a lot to get through, but thanks to everyone who has submitted feedback in-app in Element so far! The insight has been invaluable and is instrumental in shaping up our next milestones.
• Papercuts: We’re also organising and fixing small issues throughout Element, biasing for highly visible issues which have the greatest impact and reach, affectionately titled ‘papercuts’. Expect more info on these soon, but for now a fun one to highlight is we’re implementing blurhash on Web & Android (with iOS to follow soon after) to improve previewing and viewing images, especially when on low bandwidth.

Web

• 1.7.29 released
  • Improved startup performance by focusing decryption on recent rooms
  • Fixed reaction duplication
• Sorting out why we sometimes see "missing translations" hopefully for good this time
• Continuing to improve application performance
• Started work on Apple silicon desktop builds

iOS

• We continued to work on technical subjects:
  • Stabilisation and performance improvements
  • New logging system. It will be possible to disable all logs for MatrixSDK, MatrixKit and Element-iOS
  • The code that manages application navigation in Element-iOS has been updated. It will allow us to add a slide menu to display things like user spaces.

Android

• Element Android 1.1.8 has been released on the beta track of the Google PlayStore. It will probably be pushed to production at the beginning of next week. The Android matrix SDK2 has also been released.
• This week, we implemented the ability to change the network when looking in the room directory. Also gitter.im has been added to the default network list. See some screenshots in https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/pull/3419
• Lots of improvements regarding Spaces have also landed to develop.
• Besides that, we are still fixing issues and perform regular maintenance on the project

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

autodiscover-server-configuration

f0x said:

I forked autodiscover-client-configuration to implement the Server-Server counterpart of getting the API endpoint from a server_name.

Package published on NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@f0x52/autodiscover-server-configuration

Repository: https://git.pixie.town/f0x/autodiscover-server-configuration.git

Dept of Services 🚀

GoMatrixHosting is a SaaS Matrix hosting platform.

Michael reported:

We are finally open for business. Start your own Matrix service today with GoMatrixHosting!

https://www.gomatrixhosting.com/2021/05/23/gomatrixhosting-is-here/

And quite soon after:

GoMatrixHosting v0.4.7 has arrived!

• reinvented database purging section, separated final shrinking that causes downtime.
• fixed AWX issue causing rust-synapse-compress-state section to not execute.
• added more reliable script method of generating the total room list.

Check us out on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/GoMatrixHosting/

Or come say hello at: #general:gomatrixhosting.com

Cactus Comments 🌵

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

Asbjørn reported:

Web Client v0.10.0 is out!

• Allow commenting with Markdown.

• Pluralize time units properly.

• Enforce maximum nesting depth of 100 when sanitizing org.matrix.custom.html-formatted messages.

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

Come play with the demo: https://cactus.chat/demo

Join our Matrix room: #cactus:cactus.chat

Beeper Update

Beeper is a Matrix client and service that makes it easy to connect all your digital communications in one place.

Eric Migicovsky told us:

Been a while since our last update! The biggest development is that we've hired some fantastic members of the community including SpiritCroc from SchildiChat to work on Beeper Android and Kilian from Nio to work on Beeper iOS.

• Beeper Desktop reached 2.0.0 with much improved performance and UI. Video Walkthrough

• Released Beeper Android to Play Store

• Switched domains from Beeperhq.com to the shiny new beeper.com

Projects in the works

• Beeper iOS (SoonTM)

• Adding Infinite backfill to all bridges.

• Improvements to iMessage bridge (adding tapbacks and reply support)

We are hiring React, iOS, Android and SRE/Devops engineers. If you're interested, send me a DM! 100% remote, we'll hire you anywhere you are.

Eric's Matrix ID is @eric:beeper.com. Reach out if you're interested in getting involved!

Dept of Bots 🤖

Airlock, the space invite bot

Robin announced:

If you want to use spaces to run an invite-only community, but can't wait for knocking and restricted room membership to make their way into a stable room version, you may be interested in Airlock, a very simple bot that I wrote to automatically invite people to a space's rooms and subspaces when they join.

It requires zero configuration—just invite the bot to your space and all of the rooms and subspaces within it, make sure it has invite permissions, and you're good to go! You're welcome to use my hosted version @airlock:townsendandsmith.ml, or run it yourself.

It's great to see people building useful tools to bridge the gap as Spaces inches closer out of beta.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Host your blog on Matrix

evol told us:

About a month ago I came up with the idea that it would be interesting to use Matrix as an API for a blog. Sometime later it turned out that it's possible, and one thing led to another, and now I have a blog hosted on Matrix 😃

Long story short, the blog is a space and each post is a room within that space. This allows you to read the posts in your Matrix client of choice and also have discussions right underneath the content.

You can read more details on how it's done on the blog itself (incl. links to ugly code on my Github): https://evolved.systems/hosting-a-blog-on-matrix/. If you want to chat about this, join #blog:evolved.systems !

Longtime readers may remember Luke Barnard's take on the concept of Blogs built on Matrix back in 2019 with Journal. It's really exciting to see a modern version of this concept - and using Spaces no less!

Server_Stats Updates

Server_Stats is a project to make statistics about the Matrix network neatly catalogued and browsable.

MTRNord said:

Space List

The tool now has a separate list for rooms that are spaces at https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/spaces this allows you to find Spaces easily and fast :)

Other Updates

• A bug in the sdk combined with appservices did initially have for some rooms the ban not recognized. This is now fixed and those rooms are hidden again from the API. Sorry for the inconvenience.

• Safari should now also work after fixing a setting.

Check out the Source at: https://github.com/MTRNord/server_stats or join the room at #server_stats:nordgedanken.dev for questions :)

Circles

Circles markets itself as a private, end-to-end encrypted social network built on top of Matrix.

farribeiro announced:

Good news folks

The Circles beta is open source

https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios

It's AGPL for now

But automatically transitions to dual-license under AGPL / Apache 2.0 when 'Murica turns 250 years old. (July 4, 2026, for my international friends)

I love seeing Matrix projects dipping into the social networking sphere. It's an untapped market!

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

#ping:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	rollyourown.xyz	534
2	maunium.net	548.5
3	trolla.us	746
4	matrix.sp-codes.de	750
5	xethos.net	760
6	blackline.xyz	952.5
7	fab.network	1010
8	lo.hn	1096
9	dendrite.foxomy.com	1125
10	3icn.net	1220

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite01.fiksel.info	935
2	dendrite.foxomy.com	1154.5
3	dendrite.s3cr3t.me	3392

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa reported:

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3202: Encrypted appservices

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC2876: Allowing widgets to read events in a room

Merged Spec PRs

• Deprecate verifications that don't begin with a request

• Change space's valid order range to 0x7E

Spec Updates

Travis rolled out MSC3202 to aid in the quest for end-to-bridge encryption without having to rely on /sync. Otherwise the Spec Core Team has been reviewing MSCs and focusing on the last remaining spec PRs needed before cutting a new spec release. Watch this space!

Awesome to be able to VISIBLY see the progress in that graph!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad offered:

The big news this week was the launch of Spaces, supported by the release of Synapse 1.34.0.

However, there were quite a few other fixes, improvements, and additions: I'd encourage you to read the release announcement for those.

But more than anything, we're hard at work realizing the room-join memory improvements we talked about in last week's Matrix Live, and we expect to have some exciting news to share next week. Concretely: the pull request to support incremental parsing of join responses was merged, and several pull requests (#10017, #10018, #10035) to simplify and slim down the code for verifying event signatures are in review.

See you next week! 🚀

Conduit

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

timokoesters said:

Here are some Conduit news!

• Feature: Handle incoming read receipts over federation

• Feature: Send read receipts over federation (MVP done)

• Improvement: Make UIAA (user-interactive authentication API) work like in Synapse (this gives us better client support)

• Refactor: Sending code refactored to make EDUs over federation possible

• Fix: Remove old presence events when restarting Conduit

• Fix: Array bounds bug in server_server.rs

• Fix: Power level content override adds to the default event instead of replacing it

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace said:

And this week brings another instance of the regularly scheduled Kubernetes updates, with Element-web going to 1.7.28 and Synapse having been bumped to 1.34.0 on both the deprecated image and the chart.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

libera.chat IRC network news

Half-Shot offered:

Howdy folks! I'm sure many of you read the news about the new libera.chat IRC network starting up, and many of you also reached out (via pretty much every channel available) to ask about a potential bridge. libera.chat are doing a remarkably good job of getting spun up but are hyper busy with all the inbound users and need a bit more time, so in the meantime I would ask that everyone subscribe to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1324 to listen for changes as they happen.

The matrix.org bridge team are on the case! Expect news in the near future :)

Dept of Clients 📱

Element Client Updates

Submitted by the teams

Delight

• Spaces are now live! 🚀 Test them on Element Web, Desktop & Android (iOS is coming soon!)
• In short, Spaces are a new way to group rooms and people together, and are slated to replace legacy groups/communities
• We’d love your feedback! Either submitted in app or in #spaces-feedback:matrix.org
• Read the full blog post

Web

• 1.7.28 released
  • New spaces Beta (new way of grouping rooms and people)
  • Added support for slash commands working in edits
• 1.7.29-rc.1 on staging
  • Improved startup performance by focusing decryption on recent rooms
  • Fixed reaction duplication
• Continuing to pursue application performance generally
• Improving day to day developer experience with more TypeScript conversion

iOS

• 1.3.9 has been published on the app store
• Some performance improvements have been merged on develop:
  • Reduce the number of decryptions. A decryption takes about 5ms on iPhone X. On an account with 500 rooms this allows us to skip thousands of decryptions on an initial sync
  • Those decryptions do not happen anymore on the main thread

Android

• Lots of dependency upgrade following the release with Space (1.1.7).
• Next release candidate, 1.1.8 will also contain improvements on Spaces.
• We have set up towncrier flow to better handle changelog generation.
• Also Element Android project is now using GitHub actions, but it cannot run the integration tests for the moment.

Fractal

Alexandre Franke offered:

As announced in the general Matrix GSoC post, we are lucky to get two interns this year again. Alejandro (whose previous work includes switching to matrix-rust-sdk for syncs) will implement multi-account support, while Kai (also a regular contributor by now) will help bring our application rewrite to the same functionality level as our current nightly and stable versions. Both projects will build on top of Fractal Next.

Julian came back from his vacation and immediately got quite busy reviewing and merging contributions from others. Kevin (also known as zecakeh) and him made good progress on several fronts:

• Room handling was improved. We now keep track of whether the user joined them, left them, or has been invited to them, as well as their categories (favourites, low priority…).

• The sidebar uses these categories and now uses a single list with GtkFilterListModels instead of one list per category. The greatly simplifies code for things like moving a room from one category to another.

• History style has been tweaked, state events and timestamps have been added.

• Markdown can be enabled from the newly implemented popover and the message composer offers syntax highlighting, although a bug currently makes it so that sent messages are still not sent with a formatted_body.

• A persistent state store is used to load rooms on startup while sync is in progress.

Last but not least, new contributor Raatty implemented room name and topic display in the header bar.

Hydrogen

A minimal Matrix chat client, focused on performance, offline functionality, and broad browser support. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/

Bruno announced:

Released 0.1.53 with support for linking to room this week, which should allow to add Hydrogen to matrix.to soon. Also started working on redactions, which is useful in itself and also lays the foundations for reactions and edits coming next.

Nheko reviewed

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Check out this flattering portrait of Nheko on the Brodie Robertson "Linux Tips & Tricks" channel.

https://odysee.com/@BrodieRobertson:5/nheko-reborn-lightweight-native-matrix:8

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma

Ruma is a set of Rust library crates around Matrix

jplatte offered:

We've been quiet in the past weeks, but certainly not due to lack of activity! So many awesome things have happened, I don't even know where to start. I guess I'll go chronologically:

We published so many new crate releases. Most of our crates didn't see non-alpha releases for almost a year and now we've finally reset that counter! Now you can depend on ruma 0.1 and get bug fixes and new functionality through cargo update without having to worry about breaking changes. Huge thanks to @zecakeh for automating our release process, without that this would have taken so much longer.

We got initial spaces support! I'm super excited that we're now enabling client authors to take spaces into account, even if "taking into account" will initially just mean filtering out space rooms from their room lists. Code-wise, this was actually a relatively small change, with ruma-client-api receiving support for room types and ruma-events receiving support for the event types m.space.child and m.space.parent.

We're swapping out ruma-signatures' crypto library. Since ring, which is what we've been using so far, doesn't currently support cross-compilation to WASM, there's long been some interest to exchange it for something else for webbrowser homeserver experiments. A viable alternative library was identified a while ago and now @ShadowJonathan has taken on the task of implementing the switch.

In addition to unblocking the WASM usecase, this work revealed a bug in ring, which generated invalid PKCS#8 documents. We are pretty confident that once the switch away from ring (including a small compatibility shim to convert the invalid documents), a certain class of signature verification failures that Conduit has been getting will be fixed.

We're taking part in GSoC again. As you might have seen in the earlier blog post, two students are working on Ruma as part of GSoC this year: @Frinksy (for the first time) and @DevinR528 (for the second time).

Apart from that,

• @132ikl fixed a bug with unsetting avatar URLs

• @abhikjain360 added email validation endpoints to ruma-identity-service-api

• @132ikl fixed a small bug in our release automation

• @Frinksy added helpers to construct the fallback for rich replies

• @132ikl improved event relation support for encrypted events

• @jplatte (that's me) made ruma-client independent of the underlying HTTP client library

• @abhikjain360 added phone number validation endpoints to ruma-identity-service-api

• @gnieto fixed a small serialization bug in ruma-federation-api

• @DevinR528 cleaned up our crate manifest files

• @zecakeh added a TagName type for m.tag events (+ followup API improvement)

• @DevinR528 enabled a set of lints across the entire project

• @jplatte integrated the state-res crate into our monorepo

• @gnieto improved the error handling for HTTP request construction

• @zecakeh cleaned up our non-room event enums

• @ShadowJonathan improved some code examples in our documentation

• @poljar added support for remaining to-device key verification events

• @jplatte replaced uses of SystemTime with custom timestamp types

• @poljar added support for v1 of the QR verification events and methods

• @DevinR528 added code generation for redaction methods on our event content enums

• @zecakeh improved our markdown to formatted message helper functions

• @timokoesters added (unstable) master_keys and self_signing_keys support to the federation-api get_keys response

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

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

Slavi told us:

Thanks to Aaron Raimist, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports Hydrogen - a new lightweight matrix client with legacy and mobile browser support.

By default, we still install Element, as Hydrogen is still not fully-featured. Still, people who'd like to try Hydrogen out can now install it via the playbook.

Additional details are available in Setting up Hydrogen.

Also...

Thanks to Toni Spets (hifi), matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports bridging to IRC using yet another bridge (besides matrix-appservice-irc), called Heisenbridge.

To get started, see our Setting up Heisenbridge bouncer-style IRC bridging documentation.

Dept of Services 🚀

etke.cc updated

Aine reported:

etke.cc updates

etke.cc is "spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy as a service" and we got some updates:

• New services: miniflux, wireguard, languagetool, email service for you domain (based on awesome Migadu) and consultations

• Website redesign - made with ❤ ourselves instead of old generic template

• announcements room migrated to public room without encryption, but with invites and previews

Dept of Bots 🤖

Community -> Space Bot

TravisR said:

If you're trying out all those cool Spaces (Element Blog) and have some old Communities/Groups hanging around, I have the bot for you.

spacebot makes quick work of the conversion by translating as much as possible to the Space structure. Simply DM the bot and say !convert +group:example.org and it'll go off and make your Space.

The bot doesn't invite everyone from your Community to your Space, giving you a chance to configure the Space further before advertising it within your rooms.

The source can be found on GitHub if you feel like running your own or seeing how simple it is under the hood. #spacebot:t2bot.io is a great place to get help if you're having problems getting it going, and #help:t2bot.io would be glad to assist you if the t2bot.io deployment doesn't do the right thing.

P.S.: Spaces are currently considered Beta in Element, so they might not be perfect just yet. #spaces:riot.ovh is the room to join if you have questions about Spaces.

Hemppa

Hemppa the Bot is a multipurpose bot for writing modules super easily in Python.

Cos offered:

Hemppa the bot is a general purpose Matrix bot written in Python. This week it gained two useful admin tools: Kick by wildcard (for cleaning up zombies after bridge decomission) and making tombstones to point room to a new one. https://github.com/vranki/hemppa

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

raspberry-noaa-v2 matrix support

Cadair said:

A little bit different, but matrix related, this week I added Matrix push support to the raspberry-noaa-v2 project. This is a project which runs on a raspberry pi to automate receiving, decoding and post processing of images over radio from weather satellites. It's easy to build a cheap ground station for this with little more than a USB SDR dongle and a metal coat hanger. If you want to see the pictures I am decoding you can join #weather:cadair.com.

Cadair, living in the north of England, will only see this symbol unfortunately 🌧️

Server_Stats Voyager Project

MTRNord announced:

The Project now has a proper webpage at https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/ !

Newly added Features are:

• A List of all the rooms that are found

• A list to find the links (either outgoing or incoming) for a room. So a 1 level deep view into the graph as a table.

• An FAQ with some information about the project, known data issues and more

• A websocket at wss://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/ws that allows you to get the updates directly pushed as soon as a room lands in the db. Effectively the fastest way to get data updates.

Planned features for the webpage

• AR and VR Graphs

• A Space Finder that allows you to find the discovered spaces

Be aware that this page is very new and therefor might have bugs. It also isn't yet mobile optimized.

For questions, suggestions or fast updates check the #server_stats:nordgedanken.dev Room or for questions regarding issues with the bot in a specific room feel free to write a DM to MTRNord :)

Possible Bug that needs manual fixing

Due to a bug with my homeserver or synapse it happens for some rooms that synapse generates a lot of join events (Lots of "server_stats bot made no change" messages). If you see this please write a message to MTRNord so I can manually prevent my bot from trying to join the room over and over again as I cannot easily detect this kind of issue before joining.

The issue can be followed at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/10021

midnight from cvwright

cvwright offered:

This might be of interest for TWIM. It's a little web app that supports token-based registration in the Matrix UIAA. Sort of like matrix-registration, but aiming for compliance with the UIAA spec

https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/midnight

Dept of Built on Matrix 🏗️

Circles, new social network on top of Matrix

cvwright offered:

Circles is a new project to build an E2E encrypted social network on top of Matrix. https://www.kombuchaprivacy.com/circles/ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cvwright/circles-a-secure-social-app-for-friends-and-family

It's really early days for this project, but please check it out!

Final Thoughts 💭

farribeiro reported:

The fedora project is discussing which domain to take in https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/so-what-domains-should-we-use-for-our-matrix-server/29842

Un-burying the lede: Fedora are making the jump to Matrix!

Dept of Ping 🏓

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

#ping:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	the-apothecary.club	463.5
2	fosil.eu	539
3	helderferreira.io	545.5
4	trolla.us	579
5	zheng.fi	639
6	alra.uk	702
7	feline.support	759.5
8	thomcat.rocks	770
9	jae.fi	777.5
10	roeckx.be	1033

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	lankolol.de	392.5
2	zemos.net	2251

That's all I know 🏁

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

Google Summer of Code 2021 participants have been announced! This year Matrix has been assigned seven students.

Projects

R Midhun Suresh: Right Sidebar for Hydrogen client

R Midhun Suresh from the Mar Baselios College of Engineering & Technology in Trivandrum, India will be working on Hydrogen this summer, mentored by Bruno Windels. He will be working on adding a right panel to the room view, including a member list and room information. He will be blogging at https://midhunsureshr.github.io throughout the project.

Devin Ragotzy: Ruma's Automated Checks

My name is Devin Ragotzy. I am a student at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, studying computer science. I was lucky enough to work last summer on Ruma and have continued to contribute to the project. I was accepted to work on Ruma's automated checks project, mentored by Isaiah Inuwa, Jonas Platte, Timo Kösters. The goal of the project is to create a linter capable of enforcing Ruma-specific style and practices. I hope to get this tool to a working state by the end of this summers GSoC!

Abhinav Krishna C K: First-Class Email Bridge

Abhinav Krishna C K from NSS College of Engineering in Palakkad, India will be working on Building First-Class email bridge for Matrix this summer mentored by Half-Shot and tulir. This will enable Matrix to be connected with Email by translating incoming SMTP traffic to Matrix messages, and then bridging Matrix messages back into emails.

Frinksy: Extend Ruma's API coverage

My name is Adam Blanchet, and I am a student from the University of York in the UK.
I am happy to say that I have quite a few mentors: Isaiah Inuwa, Jonas Platte, Timo Kösters and Nico from Nheko.
My project is to extend Ruma's API coverage. I'll be doing a few things: finishing coverage of the Identity Service API, adding the "knock" feature to Ruma and finishing the implementation of QR code verification. If time allows it I will also work on implementing other MSCs or features such as "Event notification attributes and actions". I hope that my work will help enable other Rust-based Matrix projects, such as Conduit and Fractal, to implement more features.

Timo added:

Hello, I am Timo Kösters. I study Computer Science in Germany and spend most of the remaining time developing Conduit, a Matrix homeserver built on top of Ruma. I use Ruma all the time and will be mentoring Adam Blanchet to make it even better.

Vladyslav Hnatiuk: PyQuotient

My name is Vladyslav Hnatiuk, I'm a student of Vienna University of Technology and my project is PyQuotient.
The aim is to simplify creating of a Matrix Qt-based clients in Python by providing Qt-based SDK and avoid writing a large part of functionality manually. And to not reinvent the wheel PyQuotient will be bindings for the existing library libQuotient that provides SDK for Matrix for C++ applications. I'll be mentored by kitsune, the author of libQuotient and also libQuotient-based Matrix IM client Quaternion. I hope PyQuotient will facilitate the development of Matrix clients in Python with Qt, and it will be a small contribution to the promotion of Matrix, especially in Python world.

kitsune added:

If this experience proves to be successful, there’s a good chance Quaternion will eventually switch to Python.

Callum Brown: Token Authenticated Registration

Hi there, I'm Callum, a Londoner who'll be starting a physics degree in September. For GSoC I'll be working on adding Token Authenticated Registration to Matrix. This will allow homeserver admins to restrict who can sign-up by requiring a token to be submitted during registration. I run a small homeserver for friends and family, but don't have the resources to make registration public, so I have wanted this feature integrated into Matrix servers and clients for quite a while! I'll be working with Nico, anoa, and red_sky to write an MSC, implement the server side in Synapse, and the client side in Nheko. Thanks to the mentors and Matrix.org for the opportunity to work on this!

You can follow along with this project's progress throughout the program at https://calcuode.com/matrix-gsoc/.

Nico, mentor added:

Nico here, one of the Mentors. Personally I am super excited about this project! I have been using Matrix for a while now and I think Nheko is pretty good by now. But there is still a barrier, if I want my friends and family to use Matrix: They can't easily sign up! I have tried creating them accounts and telling them to change their passwords, having a dedicated registration page or just telling them to just use a different server, but nothing of that made me happy and it added friction to the already hard process of getting someone to try a new messenger! As such I am super excited for this, because it will make signing up your friends and family to your personal instance, without it having to be public, sooooo much simpler!

Jaiwanth: Exporting Conversations From Element

Jaiwanth Vemula from the IIT Kharagpur University in India will be working on Exporting Conversations in Element this summer, mentored by Michael (t3chguy). This work will enable users to easily export their conversations for archival or sharing, this is a feature which has been missed in Element for a very long time!

Fractal

There are also two projects under the GNOME organisation with students working on Fractal, a Matrix client for GNOME.

• Alejandro Domínguez: Fractal: Multi account support
• Kai A. Hiller: Fractal NEXT

Students become Mentors

I asked: how many of those who are mentors this year have ever been GSOC students? The answer is that this year four of the mentors were once GSoC students themselves!

• Half-Shot (2016): Bark: Microblogging in Matrix
• Michael Telatynski (2017): Improving Riot (+Analytics) and Matrix Discoverability
• Andrew Morgan (2017): Qubes MIME Handlers
• Julian Sparber (2018): Improve the Fractal UI

EOF

That's all! Seven projects in 2021 is awesome, and we're looking forward to seeing updates from the students!

Last week the UK government published a draft of the proposed Online Safety Bill, after having initially introduced formal proposals for said bill in early 2020. With this post we aim to shed some light on its potential impacts and explain why we think that this bill - despite having great intentions - may actually be setting a dangerous precedent when it comes to our rights to privacy, freedom of expression and self determination.

The proposed bill aims to provide a legal framework to address illegal and harmful content online. This focus on “not illegal, but harmful” content is at the centre of our concerns - it puts responsibility on organisations themselves to arbitrarily decide what might be harmful, without any legal backing. The bill itself does not actually provide a definition of harmful, instead relying on service providers to assess and decide on this. This requirement to identify what is “likely to be harmful” applies to all users, children and adults. Our question here is - would you trust a service provider to decide what might be harmful to you and your children, with zero input from you as a user?

Additionally, the bill incentivises the use of privacy-invasive age verification processes which come with their own set of problems. This complete disregard of people’s right to privacy is a reflection of the privileged perspectives of those in charge of the drafting of this bill, which fails to acknowledge how actually harmful it would be for certain groups of the population to have their real life identity associated with their online identity.

Our view of the world, and of the internet, is largely different from the one presented by this bill. Now, this categorically does not mean we don’t care about online safety (it is quite literally our bread and butter) - we just fundamentally disagree with the approach taken.

Whilst we sympathise with the government’s desire to show action in this space and to do something about children’s safety (everyone’s safety really), we cannot possibly agree with the methods.

Back in October of 2020 we presented our proposed approach to online safety - ironically also in response to a government proposal, albeit about encryption backdoors. In it, we briefly discussed the dangers of absolute determinations of morality from a single cultural perspective:

As uncomfortable as it may be, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and different jurisdictions have different laws - and it’s not up to the Matrix.org Foundation to play God and adjudicate.

We now find ourselves reading a piece of legislation that essentially demands these determinations from tech companies. The beauty of the human experience lies with its diversity and when we force technology companies to make calls about what is right or wrong - or what is “likely to have adverse psychological or physical impacts” on children - we end up in a dangerous place of centralising and regulating relative morals. Worst of all, when the consequence of getting it wrong is criminal liability for senior managers what do we think will happen?

Regardless of how omnipresent it is in our daily lives, technology is still not a solution for human problems. Forcing organisations to be judge and jury of human morals for the sake of “free speech” will, ironically, have severe consequences on free speech, as risk profiles will change for fear of liability.

Forcing a “duty of care” responsibility on organisations which operate online will not only drown small and medium sized companies in administrative tasks and costs, it will further accentuate the existing monopolies by Big Tech. Plainly, Big Tech can afford the regulatory burden - small start-ups can’t. Future creators will have their wings clipped from the offset and we might just miss out on new ideas and projects for fear of legal repercussions. This is a threat to the technology sector, particularly those building on emerging technologies like Matrix. In some ways, it is a threat to democracy and some of the freedoms this bill claims to protect.

These are, quite frankly, steps towards an authoritarian dystopia. If Trust & Safety managers start censoring something as natural as a nipple on the off chance it might cause “adverse psychological impacts” on children, whose freedom of expression are we actually protecting here?

More specifically on the issue of content moderation: the impact assessment provided by the government alongside this bill predicts that the additional costs for companies directly related to the bill will be in the billions, over the course of 10 years. The cost for the government? £400k, in every proposed policy option. Our question is - why are these responsibilities being placed on tech companies, when evidently this is a societal problem?

We are not saying it is up to the government to single-handedly end the existence of Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation (CSAE) or extremist content online. What we are saying is that it takes more than content filtering, risk assessments and (faulty) age verification processes for it to end. More funding for tech literacy organisations and schools, to give children (and parents) the tools to stay safe is the first thing that comes to mind. Further investment in law enforcement cyber units and the judicial system, improving tech companies’ routes for abuse reporting and allowing the actual judges to do the judging seems pretty sensible too. What is absolutely egregious is the degradation of the digital rights of the majority, due to the wrongdoings of a few.

Our goal with this post is not to be dramatic or alarmist. However, we want to add our voices to the countless digital rights campaigners, individuals and organisations that have been raising the alarm since the early days of this bill. Just like with coercive control and abuse, the degradation of our rights does not happen all at once. It is a slippery slope that starts with something as (seemingly) innocuous as mandatory content scanning for CSAE content and ends with authoritarian surveillance infrastructure. It is our duty to put a stop to this before it even begins.

Twitter card image credit from Brazil, which feels all too familiar right now.

Hi all,

As many know, over the years we've experimented with how to let users locate and curate sets of users and rooms in Matrix. Back in Nov 2017 we added 'groups' (aka 'communities') as a custom mechanism for this - introducing identifiers beginning with a + symbol to represent sets of rooms and users, like +matrix:matrix.org.

However, it rapidly became obvious that Communities had some major shortcomings. They ended up being an extensive and entirely new API surface (designed around letting you dynamically bridge the membership of a group through to a single source of truth like LDAP) - while in practice groups have enormous overlap with rooms: managing membership, inviting by email, access control, power levels, names, topics, avatars, etc. Meanwhile the custom groups API re-invented the wheel for things like pushing updates to the client (causing a whole suite of problems). So clients and servers alike ended up reimplementing large chunks of similar functionality for both rooms and groups.

And so almost before Communities were born, we started thinking about whether it would make more sense to model them as a special type of room, rather than being their own custom primitive. MSC1215 had the first thoughts on this in 2017, and then a formal proposal emerged at MSC1772 in Jan 2019. We started working on this in earnest at the end of 2020, and christened the new way of handling groups of rooms and users as... Spaces!

Spaces work as follows:

• You can designate specific rooms as 'spaces', which contain other rooms.
• You can have a nested hierarchy of spaces.
• You can rapidly navigate around that hierarchy using the new 'space summary' (aka space-nav) API - MSC2946.
• Spaces can be shared with other people publicly, or invite-only, or private for your own curation purposes.
• Rooms can appear in multiple places in the hierarchy.
• You can have 'secret' spaces where you group your own personal rooms and spaces into an existing hierarchy.

Today, we're ridiculously excited to be launching Space support as a beta in matrix-react-sdk and matrix-android-sdk2 (and thus Element Web/Desktop and Element Android) and Synapse 1.34.0 - so head over to your nearest Element, make sure it's connected to the latest Synapse (and that Synapse has Spaces enabled in its config) and find some Space to explore! #community:matrix.org might be a good start :)

The beta today gives us the bare essentials: and we haven't yet finished space-based access controls such as setting powerlevels in rooms based on space membership (MSC2962) or limiting who can join a room based on their space membership (MSC3083) - but these will be coming asap. We also need to figure out how to implement Flair on top of Spaces rather than Communities.

This is also a bit of a turning point in Matrix's architecture: we are now using rooms more and more as a generic way of modelling new features in Matrix. For instance, rooms could be used as a structured way of storing files (MSC3089); Reputation data (MSC2313) is stored in rooms; Threads can be stored in rooms (MSC2836); Extensible Profiles are proposed as rooms too (MSC1769). As such, this pushes us towards ensuring rooms are as lightweight as possible in Matrix - and that things like sync and changing profile scale independently of the number of rooms you're in. Spaces effectively gives us a way of creating a global decentralised filesystem hierarchy on top of Matrix - grouping the existing rooms of all flavours into an epic multiplayer tree of realtime data. It's like USENET had a baby with the Web!

For lots more info from the Element perspective, head over to the Element blog. Finally, the point of the beta is to gather feedback and fix bugs - so please go wild in Element reporting your first impressions and help us make Spaces as awesome as they deserve to be!

Thanks for flying Matrix into Space;

Matthew & the whole Spaces (and Matrix) team.

Synapse 1.34.0 is now available, and it's loaded with new features and performance improvements.

Note: This release deprecates and replaces the room_invite_state_types configuration option. If you've customized that for your homeserver, please review the Upgrade Notes.

We've also marked the v1 room deletion Admin API as deprecated. Instead of sending a POST to a path ending in /delete, administrators are encourage to instead send an HTTP DELETE to /_synapse/admin/v1/rooms/<room_id>. Thanks to ThibF for implementing this (#9889).

Spaces

The highlight of this release is support for Spaces, now that MSC1772: Matrix Spaces has merged into the Matrix spec!

Synapse also has support for MSC2946: Spaces Summary and MSC3083: Restricting room membership based on space membership, but these are off by default as they're still under development. To enable these experimental MSCs, set experimental_features: { spaces_enabled: true } in your homeserver configuration. These are enabled on the matrix.org homeserver, and we encourage you to experiment with Spaces there and let us know in the Spaces Feedback Room if you encounter any issues.

Memory and Caching

Memory consumption and caching have been a major focus of the Synapse team this quarter, and we've made significant strides:

• Synapse has a new gc_min_interval configuration option with reasonable defaults to prevent Python's garbage collector from running too frequently and thrashing when a large homeserver has its collection thresholds set too low.
• Synapse will report memory allocation stats to Prometheus when using jemalloc.
• Synapse will also measure Redis cache response times and report those to Prometheus.
• For debugging, Synapse can optionally track the memory use of each LruCache.

We have a few more tricks up our sleeves; to learn more about how we're planning to improve the memory cost of joining large rooms, check out last week's Matrix Live.

Other Fixes and Improvements

We've also landed significant improvements to:

• Sending events when Redis is available (#9905, #9950, #9951)
• Joining large rooms when presence is enabled (#9910, #9916)
• Backfilling history in large rooms (#9935)

...and fixed bugs that:

• Prevented cross-account m.room_key_request messages from being delivered (#9961, #9965)
• Incorrectly applied room creation / invitation rate limits to users and app services which should have been exempt (#9968)

The health check on our Docker images now responds more quickly upon successful startup thanks to improvements by maquis196 (#9913), and for especially privacy-conscious homeservers, device names can now be shielded over federation thanks to a contribution by aaronraimist (#9945).

New Access Token Format

Inspired by GitHub's new token format, we've restructured Synapse's access token format to follow the pattern:

syt_<UnpaddedBase64MXIDLocalPart>_<20RandomLetters>_<CRC32>

So a token for @example:matrix.org might look like:

syt_ZXhhbXBsZQ_KfJetOcLWEKCvYdKnQLV_0i3W80

Existing tokens remain valid; this is just for new tokens. We hope the new format reduces network overhead while also making it easier identify misplaced tokens in logs and repositories.

Everything Else

See the Upgrading Instructions and Release Notes for further information on this release.

Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including aaronraimist, maquis196, and ThibF.