We’re incredibly excited to officially announce that the national agency for
the digitalisation of the healthcare system in Germany (gematik)
has selected Matrix as the open standard on which to base all its
interoperable instant messaging standard - the TI-Messenger.
gematik has released a concept paper
that explains the initiative in full.
TL;DR
With the TI-Messenger, gematik is creating a nationwide decentralised private
communication network - based on Matrix - to support potentially more than
150,000 healthcare organisations within Germany’s national healthcare system.
It will provide end-to-end encrypted VoIP/Video and messaging for the whole
healthcare system, as well as the ability to share healthcare based data,
images and files.
Initially every healthcare provider (HCP) with an HBA (HPC ID card) will be
able to choose their own TI-Messenger provider. The homesever for HCP
accounts will be hosted by the provider’s datacentre. The homeserver for
institutions can be hosted by TI-Messenger providers, or on-premise.
Each organisation and individual will therefore retain complete ownership and
control of their communication data - while being able to share it securely
within the healthcare system with end-to-end encryption by default. All
servers in the Matrix-based private federation will be hosted within
Germany.
Needless to say, security is key when underpinning the entire nation’s
healthcare infrastructure and safeguarding sensitive patient data. As such,
the entire implementation will be accredited by BSI
(Federal Office for Information Security) and BfDI
(Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information).
The full context...
Germany’s digital care modernisation law (“Digitale Versorgung und Pflege
Modernisierungs Gesetz” or DVPMG), which came into force in June 2021, spells
out the need for an instant messaging solution.
The urgency has increased by a significant rise in the use of instant
messaging and video conferencing within the healthcare system - for instance,
the amount of medical practices using messenger services doubled in 2020
compared to 2018 (much of this using insecure messaging solutions).
gematik, majority-owned by Germany’s
Federal Ministry of Health,
is responsible for the standardised digital transformation of Germany’s
healthcare sector. It focuses on improving efficiency and introducing new
ways of working by setting, testing and certifying healthcare technology
including electronic health cards, electronic patient records and
e-prescriptions.
TI-Messenger is gematik’s
technical specification for an interoperable secure instant messaging
standard. The healthcare industry will be able to build a wide range of apps
based on TI-Messenger specifications knowing that, being built on Matrix, all
those apps will interoperate.
More than 150,000 organisations - ranging from local doctors to clinics,
hospitals, and insurance companies - can potentially standardise on instant
messaging thanks to gematik’s TI-Messenger initiative.
The road to interoperability
By 1 October 2021, TI-Messenger will initially specify how communication
should work in practice between healthcare professionals (HCPs). Physicians
will be able to find and communicate with each other via TI-Messenger
approved apps - specifications include secure authentication mechanisms with
electronic health professional cards (eHBAs), electronic institution cards
(SMC-B) and a central FHIR directory. The first
compliant apps for HCPs are expected to be licensed by Q2 2022.
Eric Grey (product manager for TI-Messenger at gematik), reckons there will
initially be around 10-15 TI-Messenger compliant Matrix-based apps for HCP
communications available from different vendors.
Healthcare professionals will be able to choose a TI-Messenger provider, who
will be hosting their personal accounts and provide the messenger-client.
Healthcare organisations will choose a TI-Messenger provider to build the
dedicated homeserver infrastructure (on prem or in a data center), provide
the client and ongoing support.
What does this mean for the Matrix community?
Matrix is already integral to huge parts of the public sector; from the French
government’s Tchap platform, to Bundeswehr’s use of BwMessenger and adoption
by universities and schools across Europe.
Germany’s healthcare system standardising on Matrix takes this to entirely the
next level - and we can’t wait to see the rest of Europe (and the world!)
converge on Matrix for healthcare!
We'll have more info about TI-Messenger on this week's Matrix Live, out on
Friday - stay tuned!
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.
Several members of the Spec Core Team reviewed MSC2674 (Event relationships) this week in order to help push along the efforts to finally ship aggregations in the spec. Otherwise MSC3245 (voice messages via extensible events) is moving along with final comment period proposed this week. The implementation in Element Web in reportedly working well, helping to prove the spec in practice. And finally, MSC3277 (scheduled messages) which appeared over the weekend to try and allow for scheduling events to send later in Matrix (and all the fun edge cases that come with it).
Thanks to everyone who submitted, read and reviewed MSCs this week. It takes people to move this stuff forward!
Dept of GSoC 🎓️
Google Summer of Code 2021: first evaluations complete!
We heard from Callum last week, and will have more reports in future, but for now just know that all seven GSoC projects are progressing well. To remind yourself of this year's projects, see the list provided by Google or our welcome blog post.
In case you missed it, we released Dendrite 0.4.0 on Monday and wrote a blog post about it! It's taken us a little while to get to this release, but it includes a number of quality-of-life improvements and changes that will significantly reduce the amount of resources needed to run a Dendrite server. The full changelog is available on GitHub and many juicy details in the aforementioned blog post, but at a high level this release includes:
All-new state storage, designed to reduce the amount of disk space that the roomserver takes up to store room state by aggressively deduplicating state blocks and snapshots
Improved appservice support, with a number of bridges now working with Dendrite
Shared secret registration (using the same API shape as Synapse)
Optimisations in the federation API /send and /get_missing_events endpoints to reduce memory usage
Improved state resolution v2 performance when dealing with power level events
Per-room queuing to reduce head-of-line blocking on the roomserver input API
Lots of bug fixes around invites, registration, sync and media, and 5 panics fixed
Since the release, we've been working on:
Completing key notary support
Fixing state_default for power levels in gomatrixserverlib
Resolving some issues around rejecting invites, particularly when the remote server is not available
Reducing the cost of checking if the local server is in a given room
Since our last update, our Sytest compliance numbers have been on the rise again, taking us ever closer to our goals:
The big news of the week is the release of Synapse 1.38, which converts several integer columns to bigint, allowing Synapse to process more than 2 billion (231) events. Which, incidentally, matrix.org did last week 📈:
But that's not the only thing new in Synapse 1.38. We also landed the ability to set an expiry time on cache entries, allowing you to reclaim memory from infrequently accessed caches. Configuring this to "1h" on matrix.org has already yielded a noticeable reduction in overall memory use 📉:
We'd encourage you to read the full announcement for more — See you next week 👋!
Registration management for Token Authenticated Registration
Another short update about my GSoC project, this time about the Synapse admin API for managing tokens. https://calcuode.com/matrix-gsoc/2021-07-16_admin-api.html
A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.
Docker is now supported, via Dockerfiles that actually work now! But for the time being, Docker images must be built manually, as I am yet to deploy a Docker registry for prebuilt images.
Also, sample systemd service unit configuration files are now available, courtesy of @lecris:lecris.me 🙂
What I'm working on next is a bot command to list all of your LINE contacts & groups (similar to mautrix-whatsapp's list <contacts|groups>), and the ability to sync a LINE DM by inviting a contact to a Matrix DM. This will allow messaging LINE contacts that the bridge didn't yet create a portal for.
And please, feel free to try out this bridge! It should be serviceable for day-to-day usage now. I still won't be able to host a public instance of it for a while, though (as it is fairly hefty due to having to run Chrome), so you'll have to self-host if you want to try it.
This week we fixed bugs. Switching room should now be quite a bit faster again and once Qt 6.3 is released with some important bugfixes, scrolling in Nheko should be super smooth. (We can't enable that flag yet, because of 3 bugs in the item pooling code in Qt.)
Other bugfixes:
Inline images sometimes wouldn't show, but now inline emotes and images should render once they are loaded! (This took me a year to figure out)
You can now send edits in encryted rooms again, if they are a reply to an event.
No more reply fallback in the room list.
At some point timed out verification requests started showing up on startup. That regression is fixed now.
Fix rooms not showing up after login because we were off by one.
Fix some cases where the loading spinner wouldn't stop animating and as such consistently use CPU, when a room is open.
Cache db transactions to reduce allocations and memory zeroing when loading a room or scrolling.
Fix some edge cases in the blurhash decoding, that could lead to brownish image previews.
Fix accepting an invite not placing you in the joined room.
Element Clients
With updates supplied by the teams
Delight team
We’ve been shepherding through MSCs to improve private spaces, namely MSC3083 (Restricting room membership based on space membership)
Meanwhile, we’re also implementing outstanding polish, planning steps for Spaces to exit beta
Web
v1.7.33-rc.1 now up for testing on https://staging.element.io/ with support for blurhash, draggable picture-in-picture view for calls
Contributing to element web? There are new labels and magic keywords for pull requests to show better information in the changelogs. See the contributor guide for more detail.
Do you use the master branch of element web or any of the web projects? Please let us know - it may go away soon.
Android
Still polishing the voice message feature: add support for Android 5, improve timeline rendering, improve animation in the composer, support for RTL language
Work on the account notification settings
Hydrogen
A minimal Matrix chat client, focused on performance, offline functionality, and broad browser support. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/
First news about Python bindings for libQuotient, C++ Qt-based Matrix SDK
After a month of hard work, we(I as GSoC student and kitsune as mentor) have bindings with tests for almost all core classes and also initial version of the demo client, in which you can log in with a password or SSO, the server you enter is resolved automatically and also after successful login data is being synchronized. There is also a possibility to log out. So this part is on the same level as in Quotient.
Also, a small video with the client in action.
Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️
Hack'n'Sun, the partially-Matrix-based summer tinkering camp
Over the first weeks of July, Teckids e.V. held their annual summer camp for kids between 9 and 15 years. This year, after we started introducing Matrix and Element as a chat platform from September 2020 onwards, the camp was heavily relying on the platform for various parts.
Before the camp started, we invited all 90 participants to a chat room to get together, share a bit about what they expect, already did with coding and technical stuff, talk about what food they'd like to have for the barbecue, and stuff like that. Many of them engaged in the discussion, and started exploring Element (before you ask, yes, we hat a lot of snow and party poppers 😛!). Some got really excited that they could even change or add features to Element, or ask for such changes – we had to promise to hold a session where we find out how to add one new animation to Element. Unfortunately, Element is developed on GitHub, so the potential young contributors are locked out by the exclusive Terms of Use there. We are trying to reach out to Element HQ to find a solution.
During the camp, verifying crypto sessions using emojis again made for a good party game to get to know each other (like, find the kid a nickname belongs to on the camp site, start verification, and compare emojis – a lot of fun that we, again, did not even have to start, because someone always finds out about it and asks what it is about).
Now that everyone got to know Matrix for chatting, in one of our workshops, the participants discovered that not only people, but also devices can send messages, and react to replies – in that workshop, the kids built a chat-ops IoT door beel (for their tent on site, or room at home). They soldered a circuit board to fit an ESP (MicroPython) micro controller on, and coded a small program (using templates with differing complexity levels), defining what the door bell should send when a button is pressed, on what messages to react, and the like. We produced a fun video about the project (German audio, English subtitles): https://eduvid.org/videos/watch/20a50c25-ecb4-48c0-9b13-de2548f290d4?subtitle=en . The (minimal and somewhat buggy) MicroPython client library is published as µtrix.
Now, sadly, the event is over, and we slowly see (as expected, only a part of the) participants moving over to our long-term project chatrooms; we will start clearing the virtual camp site chatroom during the weekend to make room for a new group.
Asked about the regularity of these events, Nik replied:
We are still experimenting with our new camp formats. As bad as it all is, COVID caused a lot of innovation here because we were forced to leave the known roads we normally travelled, and now we are starting to integrate all that new stuff (like really embracing Matrix) into outdoor and presence events. I think we are on a really good way with it, and surely I will keep posting updates that might be of interest for the greater community.
Reidel Law Firm remains committed to providing top notch legal services in Franchise Law, International Trade Law, and Business Law while maintaining accessibility, (one of our Firm’s core values) to our clients, colleagues, and friends of the firm. Utilizing our own secured chat platform allows us to be in communication with our clients around the world while maintaining the utmost in data security and client privacy.
I believe in Matrix+Element and encourage my clients and law firms to get ahead of the curve or get left behind and become irrelevant. Email has to die, its just the worst. Also, I forgot to note earlier that the guide is copyright free. I hope other business owners will use and revise it for their own uses.
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.
"The pinnacle of motorsport! We're in an exciting time in Formula 1 with a close championship and exciting battles. Come hang out and chat about the upcoming race in Silverstone on July 18th!"
NOTE: We released Synapse 1.38.1 on Thursday, July 22nd. It mitigates a client bug with Synapse 1.38.0's smaller sync responses which prevented new Element Android sessions from successfully participating in encrypted conversations. Server administrators are strongly encouraged to upgrade.
(Big) Integers
Synapse's database schema used integer columns in a few places where values could potentially overflow a maximum value of 231. One such column is events.stream_ordering, which surpassed 231 on matrix.org last week.
To prevent overflows, Synapse 1.38 will automatically convert several integer columns to bigint as a background update. While homeservers will function normally during this task, it could result in increased disk I/O for several hours or days. Note that homeservers may need several gigabytes of free space to successfully rebuild associated database indexes and complete the upgrade.
Synapse has a new configuration option, caches.expiry_time, which can be set to enable evicting items from caches if they go too long without being accessed. This helps servers reclaim memory used by large yet infrequently used caches.
Smaller Sync Responses
The response to /sync now omits optional keys when they would otherwise be empty. This can significantly reduce the size of incremental syncs, as demonstrated in #6579. Thanks to deepbluev7 for initially submitting this in #9919, which made it into this release via #10214.
Everything Else
A few other items worth calling out:
This release includes an experimental implementation of MSC2918: Refresh tokens, which adds initial support for complementary access / refresh tokens in line with OAuth best practices (#9450).
Synapse now ships a script to review recently registered accounts, which can be useful in cleaning up servers in the wake of malicious, automated registrations like we witnessed during last month's spam attack.
We've also fixed a few rough edges (#10263, #10303, #10336) in the spam mitigations from 1.37.1, and would encourage you to update.
These are just the highlights; please see the Upgrade Notes and 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 deepbluev7, dklimpel, fkr, and sideshowbarker
After quite a significant gap between releases — version 0.3.11 was released at the beginning of March — we're happy to finally announce the release of Dendrite 0.4.0 today!
The full changelog for the release is available on GitHub, but we wanted to take the opportunity to talk a little about some of the changes that have gone into this release.
Recently our release cadence for Dendrite has slowed as we have spent more time within the team working on Pinecone and Low Bandwidth Matrix. These are major areas of research for us which we hope will unlock a number of new opportunities within the Matrix ecosystem, allowing us to build on Matrix anywhere and to reduce the protocol-level footprint. However, Dendrite has not been forgotten amidst the excitement and we will be spending more time working on Dendrite again in the coming months.
State storage
One of the major features in v0.4.0 is that we've introduced newly-refactored state storage in the roomserver database. The goal here is to make state storage significantly more efficient by ensuring that we deduplicate state blocks and snapshots wherever we can. By ensuring that all state blocks and snapshots are ordered strictly, and by enforcing uniqueness constraints on the hashes of the blocks/snapshots, we've been able to achieve this.
This was largely spurred on by watching dendrite.matrix.org consuming a rather alarming amount of disk space on a daily basis. In this particular instance, moving to the new state storage resulted in a 15x improvement on disk utilisation for state blocks and a further 2x improvement for state snapshot references immediately after the migration, and the growth rate of the database has slowed substantially since.
Ensuring that we don't waste disk space is one of the most important factors in ensuring that Dendrite operates well at any scale — future datacentre deployments supporting many users will find storage overheads decreased and small/embedded single-user deployments (such as P2P, on mobile devices or in the browser) will fit much more effectively onto resource-constrained targets.
After upgrading to v0.4.0, Dendrite will run an automatic migration to update your homeserver to the new state storage format. This might take a while on larger databases so please expect some downtime.
Optimisations
We've continued to squeeze further optimisations into the federation and state resolution code, aiming to reduce the amount of CPU burn and memory utilisation. Some of the feedback that we receive most often from those that have been experimenting with the Dendrite betas is around the sudden spikes in resource usage, especially when joined to large rooms.
The bulk of this resource usage comes either from attempting to reconcile missing events or running state resolution in rooms with lots of members, as potentially large state sets of events need to be brought into memory in order to do so. We've introduced some transaction-level caches for dealing with missing auth/prev events to reduce the memory pressure and we've also tweaked the caching around around /get_missing_events to ensure we don't duplicate any state events in memory.
Resource spikes aren't completely eliminated but this should smooth out CPU and memory utilisation significantly. In the case of dendrite.matrix.org, which is joined to some 6500 rooms at present, memory utilisation of the Dendrite process typically sits around 1.5GB at present.
State Resolution v2 has also seen further optimisations in the power-level checking, which should reduce CPU usage even more.
Bridges
Thanks to Half-Shot's perseverance and contributions, we've merged a couple PRs and worked on some further fixes for getting Application Services working correctly in Dendrite. Whilst not entirely feature-complete and with a number of features still to go, enough support is now present to support basic bridging functionality.
We've done quite a bit of preliminary testing with matrix-appservice-irc and have also heard a number of success stories from the community with mautrix-whatsapp and mautrix-telegram. Others may work too — let us know what you find!
Bug-hunting
A number of bugs in various places (including the roomserver, federation API and media API) which could cause Dendrite to crash have also been fixed. Some of these have been contributed by the community in pull requests, so we extend our thanks to anyone who has submitted a fix to the project.
A special mention also goes to Jakob Varmose Bentzen for reporting a security issue to us around the legacy /v1/register endpoint, where a flaw in the legacy shared secret registration allowed malicious users to create accounts. We've since removed this legacy endpoint and the vulnerability is now fixed.
What's next
There are still a number of missing user-facing features which we will be working on over the coming months, as well as some architectural issues that we will look to address.
A notable area of work involves attempting to remove the dependency on Kafka for polylith deployments. Kafka is very resource-heavy in operation and somewhat limits us to the types of interactions that we can perform between components. It's also very difficult to manage retention correctly, in the interests of not endlessly consuming disk space here either.
As usual, Dendrite is still considered beta so you may not want to rely on it for production systems, although it should be stable enough to experiment with. If you find any bugs or anything that doesn't look right, please let us know:
I'm the Principal Data Scientist for the Ansible Community. We're hoping to switch to Matrix as our primary platform in the near future, and I've just written up my thoughts on why that's a good idea, what the consequences might be, and where we go from here. Find it at https://ansible.github.io/community/posts/matrix_and_ansible.html
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.
A concrete plan has been drafted for publishing the new spec release, and is currently undergoing execution. This release will include many changes that have built up since the last release (back before the new spec redesign even), as well as the new Matrix Global Version Number scheme. Look forward to it dropping soon!
Otherwise Bruno has been hard at work continuing to push forward the various aggregation MSCs (1234). MSC3083 (restricted room memberships) is being updated as part of finalising the new Spaces feature as well as MSC2716 (history import).
As well as lots of new MSCs as listed above. Busy times!
Dept of Servers 🏢
Conduit
Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs
The last two weeks I worked on a few very big optimizations. We also almost finished sqlite support for Conduit, which is slower than sled in benchmarks, but has much better RAM usage characteristics.
Batch up and cache /sync responses for when clients time out
LRU cache for deserialized PDUs
More efficient state res by only fetching events it needs
Big(int) news! This week Matrix.org processed its 2^31st event, exceeding the range of a PostgreSQL integer column for the first time. This caused a bit of a scramble in the aftermath of last week's spam attack, as we had a few integer columns in our schema which we needed to convert to bigint. Fortunately, we were able to complete the change sufficiently in advance (#8255), and also took the opportunity to audit other columns and sequences in the database which could conceivably overflow. Synapse 1.38, due out next week, will automatically migrate homeservers when they upgrade. We run the migration as a background task, so homeservers should continue functioning as normal throughout, though they may use a bit more disk and memory, especially when rebuilding indexes for the new bigint column.
We're also starting to hone in on our team's goals for this quarter, and it's looking like our primary focus will be on improving room join speeds. Wish us luck!
Lastly, we're overjoyed to announce that @reivilibre, a former intern on the backend team, joined Element this week! We can't wait to see where he helps us take Synapse!
matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.
This week was spent on adding proper support for LINE user joins/leaves (though invites/kicks are still a TODO), bug fixes, and ease of deployment. Docker and systemd setups will be ready shortly.
And this bridge should soon be listed on https://matrix.org/bridges/, if it isn't already 🙂 Thanks madlittlemods (Eric Eastwood) for accepting the PR!
SchildiChat is a fork of Element that focuses on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list for both direct messages and groups, which is a more familiar approach to users of other popular instant messengers.
There are two announcements that we can share with you this week:
SchildiChat for Android is back in the Google Play Store! Users who have previously installed the release using our own F-Droid repo will be able to update without the need to re-install. All previous ways to install the app will remain available as well.
You can now help us translate SchildiChat using Weblate! Note that this only contains SchildiChat-specific translations, we continue to use Element's translations where possible.
Apart from that, we have mainly been focusing on smaller improvements and fixes, while staying up-to-date with new Element releases.
For more information about SchildiChat, feel free to visit our website or check out our source code!
Also, feel free to join our Matrix rooms, which you can find in the new SchildiChat space: #schildichat:matrix.org
Nheko
Nheko is a desktop client using Qt and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at
Spaces work is making progress. Some rooms can now be previewed. To improve that situation, I wrote an MSC to preview specific rooms. Alternatively we will try to get the previews for the few rooms you aren't joined to from the space summary API, currently we are just fetching the existing state. You can also now join previewed rooms and the design of joining invites was adapted to match it.
red_sky☄️ went through the pain of fixing the Windows builds after we changed our http backend last week. So if you want to try it out, you can test it on Windows. We also replaced the old, boring spinner with an animated Nheko logo. If you see that a lot and think it is Nheko's fault, don't hesitate to open an issue! But in most cases it will probably be your server. Sadly no screenshot of how the spinner looks like, my server is too fast and taking a proper screenshot is too much effort because of that. ;p
We also fixed an issue with updating device lists in the develop version of Nheko. If you were using the nightlies, now is a good time to update! In more E2EE news, symmetric megolm backup fixes the issues I had with the online key backup, so looking forward to implementing that.
The latest release of opsdroid is out with various fixes which can be seen in the changelog. The main point to note for matrix users is that older versions of matrix-nio (the matrix client library used by opsdroid) did not support the synapse change to omit optional fields from sync. Therefore if you are using our docker images you will need to update to 0.23 to get a container with the newest matrix-nio included.
The other change which is relevant to matrix users is that Oleg has added support for version 2 of the Rasa NLU framework, so you can once again do open source, self hosted natural language bots.
Thanks to Gwmngilfen I touched RStudio and toyed a little with some data as well.
You can find some graphs over at https://github.com/MTRNord/server_stats_r_statistics/blob/main/scripts/rooms_members.md
For the first graph the credit fully goes to Gwmngilfen :)
The second one is in log scale for both axis but essentially the same :)
This is obviously currently very spare but I hope to add more statistics when I understand R lang :) This is in fact my first time doing something with R so my skillset is limited :)
Run Matrix Python bots inside of Docker Containers with Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib and Docker!
This is a guide for isolating and running your Matrix bot within a Docker container. It is also applicable to bots written using other libraries and languages.
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.
In meta twim news, the twim updates bot (which posts in #twim_updates:cadair.com) has been upgraded to opsdroid 0.23 and now correctly keeps the formatted body when an event is edited.
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.
This is a long read, but a detailed argument. Also please note that this is was produced for the purpose of an MSc course of study, it was not commissioned for any other purpose, as the preamble makes clear.
Next, a high billing for Beeper this week, who have been working hard and getting product out!
It's been a month since our last update. A lot of the work since then has been on making everything more reliable, but we've also added new features to our clients and started making some new bridges.
Desktop
Added thread UI for Slack-bridged rooms. Internally they're just replies like before, but the client will intelligently collapse replies in Slack rooms into threads.
Merged upstream Element additions like voice messages.
Also merged some features that aren't in Element yet, like Giphy integration.
iOS
Released Beeper iOS to Testflight.
Android
Added grouping rooms by chat network based on the m.bridge state event. The UI is similar to spaces, but they're not actual Matrix spaces (yet).
Added support for Android 11's "conversation" notifications.
Bridges
Android Messages is turning out difficult to reverse-engineer to a sufficiently reliable level, so we're building a new SMS bridge into our Android app. It'll also be available as a standalone open-source app, which already exists at https://gitlab.com/beeper/android-sms (but doesn't have any setup instructions yet).
We've funded development of a LinkedIn bridge. sumner will post a more detailed update about that.
We're hiring React, iOS, Android and SRE/Devops engineers. If you're interested, check out https://angel.co/company/beeperhq or DM Eric Migicovsky.
Bruno has been working on aggregations as part of his work for Hydrogen. He reported:
I've been cleaning up the relations MSCs, finding a balance between documenting the current state and not losing track of community concerns. I've started with MSC 2674 which is the very basic format of relations, and will move on to annotations/reactions (MSC 2677) next week.
Dept of Servers 🏢
Synapse
Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.
We're pleased to announce the release of Synapse 1.37.1 this week, which includes mitigations for the recent distributed spam attack across the public Matrix network. We advise upgrading as soon as possible.
Got another week of Helm Chart updates, with the Synapse chart getting a bunch of worker improvements and additional configurability, as well as being updated to first 1.37.0 and then 1.37.1
I'm excited to announce that I started working on a new bridge for bringing LinkedIn messages to Matrix! It's currently in the early stages of development and not production-ready. The current feature set includes: backfill from LinkedIn, user name and profile picture sync, message sending from Matrix -> LinkedIn, and real-time message puppetting from LinkedIn -> Matrix. There's much more to come, and you can join #linkedin-matrix:nevarro.space for updates. Development is being funded by Beeper, and is being designed with integration into Beeper as it's primary goal. However, the bridge is open source (Apache 2.0) and will be available to self-host. The source code is here: https://github.com/sumnerevans/linkedin-matrix.
Great work from Sumner! Glad to see people have the option to bridge their LinkedIn messages!
matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.
Better LINE->Matrix read receipt bridging is now supported in the testing branch! The bridge now checks all LINE chats (not just the most recently-used one) to see if messages you sent have been read (in LINE). This works by cycling through all LINE chats where the final message is posted by you and doesn't have a "Read" marker on it yet (or for multi-user chats, if your last message hasn't been read by everyone in the room).
With that, I'll consider the bridge to be in Early Beta! 🎉 I'm now testing the bridge for myself to iron out a few kinks, and am preparing a PR to the matrix.org webpage to have this listed on https://matrix.org/bridges/.
This addon for the WebThings gateway lets you send Matrix messages when your IoT fridge is empty – or whatever you have connected to your gateway.
The update fixes predefined messages getting sent to the default room and is the first to be tested against gateway version 1.0.0.
https://gitlab.com/webthings/matrix-adapter or in the addon list of your WebThings gateway
This week, NeoChat gained support for a Global Menu on Plasma and macOS. Aside from that, we fixed a few crashes.
But the biggest news of the week is that we will get funding from NLNet to implement E2EE support in Quotient and NeoChat as part of their grants to improve the internet. We will report on our progress on that front here!
This is terrific news, big thanks to NLNet for making this choice!
FluffyChat
FluffyChat is the cutest cross-platform matrix client. It is available for Android, iOS, Web and Desktop.
We merged the Spaces branch, which means Nheko master can now show some spaces. Peeking unjoined rooms, nesting spaces and creating them should be coming soon. We are also looking into how to fit knocking into the UI (we already rendered incoming knocks in the timeline for a while).
You can also now edit still pending messages, which should help if your server is slow and you notice a typo. The edit will then get queued and be sent as soon as the server acknowledges they received the original message. Apart from that there have been some improvements to the readability of the room list and some other UI elements.
Last but not least, we switched out our entire http backend from Boost to Curl. For that I wrote a simple wrapper around Curl. This fixes about 10 issues around connection shutdown, brings proxy support, http/2 and http/3 support and in general makes Nheko crash less and reduces latency a LOT! This will obviously cause some pain for packagers, but I hope it isn't too bad. Some of the issues this fixes only had 2 digits in our bugtracker and one was even filed by benpa!
Chris tweaked the UI in various places. It’s a lot of small details that together make for a smoother experience. I encourage you to read the details in the description of !782. This is the only MR that landed since last week, but our people have been hard at work nonetheless. Kai blogged about his journey working on the search bar of doom and Alejandro shared his own struggle. In the meantime, Julian’s work has mostly happened upstream in matrix-rust-sdk.
Element Clients
Updates sent by the teams
Delight team
Spaces:
Research: We’ve been reaching out to people to walk us through how they use Spaces now and what they’d like to see different to help us learn and iterate;
Restricted room access: Some good progress towards shipping improved team spaces
Some major progress on conversion to TypeScript, finding some bugs along the way. The main source of the element-desktop project is now fully converted to TypeScript!
A styled player component for the audio messages feature, available in the labs section.
v0.5.19 of the matrix-bot-sdk is out now with fixed power level checking (with an added utility function), improved default error logging, and a typo fix in reply creation. Check it out, and visit #matrix-bot-sdk:t2bot.io for help & support.
Exciting new update, we can now wireguard an on-premises server from just about anywhere and make it work with the AWX system. This is useful when your server doesn't have a static or public IP address, or when some other networking issue prevents you from running a Matrix service on it.
Follow of on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/GoMatrixHosting
* Add '00 - Create Wireguard Server' template for AWX admin to provision Wireguard servers that on-premises servers can use to connect.
* Subscription involved can view an additional '0 - {{ subscription_id }} - Provision Wireguard Server' template.
* Add /docs/Setup_Wireguard_Server.md guide.
* Add onboarding script for Windows 10 users.
* Raise maximum download size to 200MB.
Mjolnir is a moderation bot for communities on Matrix. It helps with a lot of the actions covered by the moderation guide, including capabilities to apply bans from other trusted communities. It's still a bit terse in its documentation, but if you're looking for a featureful moderation bot then it's worth a go.
In related news, Mjolnir v0.1.18 is out with a couple quality of life fixes - if you've been bothered by the log spam, it's now fixed :)
I started a tiny repo to collect various limits and related factoids about the Matrix specification and implementations. I hope that distilling and summarising such things at glance will make it easier to see what is and is not possible.
If you know of more that should be listed, please contribute! 🙂
Self hosting your own Matrix server on a Raspberry Pi
@ed:selfhostingblog.com of theselfhostingblog.com has written a guide on getting started with Synapse on a Raspberry Pi using Docker Compose. You can read it here.
Together with J. Ryan Stinnett, I created the 🔖 #matrix-science-reading-group:dsn.tm.kit.edu for exchange of and on scientific papers, books and related resources on all things Matrix: Topics ranging from peer-to-peer broadcast overlay networks over conflict-free replicated data types to end-to-end encryption. Investigating security, performance, deployability, or whatever else is interesting, by methods from observation over simulation to formal verification. 🎓️ Please join if you want to read about papers that might not be Matrix-related enough to make it into TWIM, or want to engage in the discussion. 😊 The resulting papers are collected at: https://github.com/jryans/awesome-matrix#research
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.
"A public space for Free/Open Source Software maintainers to swap notes and discuss their craft. Inspired by https://github.com/github/maintainerweek, all maintainers welcome!"
Over the last few days we've seen a distributed spam attack across the public Matrix network, where large numbers of spambots have been registered across servers with open registration and then used to flood abusive traffic into rooms such as Matrix HQ.
The spam itself has been handled by temporarily banning the abused servers. However, on Monday and Tuesday the volume of traffic triggered performance problems for the homeservers participating in targeted rooms (e.g. memory explosions, or very delayed federation). This was due to a combination of factors, but one of the most important ones was Synapse issue #9490: that one busy room could cause head-of-line blocking, starving your server from processing events in other rooms, causing all traffic to fall behind.
We're happy to say that Synapse 1.37.1 fixes this and we now process inbound federation traffic asynchronously, ensuring that one busy room won't impact others. First impressions are that this has significantly improved federation performance and end-to-end encryption stability — for instance, new E2EE keys from remote users for a given conversation should arrive immediately rather than being blocked behind other traffic.
Please upgrade to Synapse 1.37.1 as soon as possible, in order to increase resilience to any other traffic spikes.
Also, we highly recommend that you disable open registration or, if you keep it enabled, use SSO or require email validation to avoid abusive signups. Empirically adding a CAPTCHA is not enough. Otherwise you may find your server blocked all over the place if it is hosting spambots.
Finally, if your server has open registration, PLEASE check whether spambots have been registered on your server, and deactivate them. Once deactivated, you will need to contact [email protected] to request that blocks on your server are removed.
Your best bet for spotting and neutralising dormant spambots is to review signups on your homeserver over the past 3-5 days and deactivate suspicious users. We do not recommend relying solely on lists of suspicious IP addresses for this task, as the distributed nature of the attack means any such list is likely to be incomplete or include shared proxies which may also catch legitimate users.
To ease review, we're working on an auditing script in #10290; feedback on whether this is useful would be appreciated. Problematic accounts can then be dealt with using the Deactivate Account Admin API.
Meanwhile, over to Dan for the Synapse 1.37 release notes.
Synapse 1.37 Release Announcement
Synapse 1.37 is now available!
**Note: ** The legacy APIs for Spam Checker extension modules are now considered deprecated and targeted for removal in August. Please see the module docs for information on updating.
This release also removes Synapse's built-in support for the obsolete ACMEv1 protocol for automatically obtaining TLS certificates. Server administrators should place Synapse behind a reverse proxy for TLS termination, or switch to a standalone ACMEv2 client like certbot.
Knock, knock?
After nearly 18 months and 129 commits, Synapse now includes support for MSC2403: Add "knock" feature and Room Version 7! This feature allows users to directly request admittance to private rooms, without having to track down an invitation out-of-band. One caveat: Though the server-side foundation is there, knocking is not yet implemented in clients.
A Unified Interface for Extension Modules
Third party modules can customize Synapse's behavior, implementing things like bespoke media storage providers or user event filters. However, Synapse previously lacked a unified means of enumerating and configuring third-party modules. That changes with Synapse 1.37, which introduces a new, generic interface for extensions.
This new interface consolidates configuration into one place, allowing for more flexibility and granularity by explicitly registering callbacks with specific hooks. You can learn more about the new module API in the docs linked above, or in Matrix Live S6E29, due out this Friday, July 2nd.
Safer Reauthentication
User-interactive authentication ("UIA") is required for potentially dangerous actions like removing devices or uploading cross-signing keys. However, Synapse can optionally be configured to provide a brief grace period such that users are not prompted to re-authenticate on actions taken shortly after logging in or otherwise authenticating.
This improves user experience, but also creates risks for clients which rely on UIA as a guard against actions like account deactivation. Synapse 1.37 protects users by exempting especially risky actions from the grace period. See #10184 for details.
Smaller Improvements
We've landed a number of smaller improvements which, together, make Synapse more responsive and reliable. We now:
More efficiently respond to key requests, preventing excessive load (#10221, #10144)
Render docs for each vX.Y Synapse release, starting with v1.37 (#10198)
Ensure that log entries from failures during early startup are not lost (#10191)
Have a notion of database schema "compatibility versions", allowing for more graceful upgrades and downgrades of Synapse (docs)
We've also resolved two bugs which could cause sync requests to immediately return with empty payloads (#8518), producing a tight loop of repeated network requests.
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.
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.
Spaces work continues with MSC3083 (Restricted room memberships), which will include a new room version due to the new join_rule of `restricted. On the other side of things, MSC3245 (voice messages) and by extension extensible events, is moving as the implementation work is pushed forward. Lots of activity on MSC3215 (improved moderation tooling) as well which will no doubt prove to be invaluable as the Matrix network continues to grow.
Dept of Servers 🏢
Conduit
Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs
Among those exciting updates, we also have the usual churn of bug fixes and improvements across the board. Many updates to the documentation as well as we lean into using the new Synapse documentation site more and more. Please help us test the RC if you can!
This week too sees some Kubernetes chart updates, with element-web being updated to 1.7.31 and matrix-synapse getting some fixes for envvars and mounts, as well as some improvements to the ingress support.
It has been several months since we last updated you on MSC2716 for backfilling historical messages into existing rooms but we made some big progress this week and merged an experimental Synapse implementation taking us one step closer to importing the massive archive of messages on Gitter over to Matrix! This iteration will only make the historical messages visible on the local homeserver but we have plans to make them federate in the next. It's still early days on this before we can actually use it on Gitter. Here is a proof of concept to get your juices flowing:
Dept of Clients 📱
Hydrogen
A minimal Matrix chat client, focused on performance, offline functionality, and broad browser support. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/
In terms of code, this week we didn't get much activity. The only noteworthy news is that we can now send spoilers, and use two new commands: /tableflip and /unflip thanks to Smitty van Bodegom.
Aside from that, we had 2 productive BoFs during Akademy 2021. The first one was about creating a library with shared chat visual components for KDE's chat apps: NeoChat for Matrix, Tok for Telegram and Kaidan for XMPP, KDE Connect and Spacebar for SMS, ... The second BoF was more about NeoChat and Quotient and we discussed how to move forwards with some problems (e.g. non-hacky text input auto-completion) but also the roadmap around E2EE, Spaces and Widgets support. Speaking about E2EE, we will have some very good news to announce next week, stay tuned!
/me only learned about /tableflip and /unflip this today... and looking forward to this E2EE news!
In the past couple of weeks, Alejandro and Kai started the coding period of their GSoC internship and explained on their blogs what they will be working on. Their projects are respectively to add support for multiple accounts, and to bring Fractal Next to feature parity with current stable. Read more details on their blogs, and subscribe to them to keep informed as they go!
Julian managed to land the “Explore” view, our room directory. There may be some changes down the road, but it looks good for now:
Newcomer Giuseppe De Palma removed bashisms from our git hook because they were preventing him from contributing. They then went on to tweak the history style to remove the grey background around it. They also got rid of a papercut from the login form: before his intervention, users needed to provide the full homeserver URL with the http:// or https:// scheme prefix. It will now default to HTTPS.
We also did some housekeeping work that should improve the experience for people joining us on the Fractal Next fun. After being away for a while, Christopher Davis came back with a patch to add a couple more build related directories to our .gitignore. Julian cleaned up the pseudo-milestone description that we had in the README, now that we have a proper Gitlab milestone. And finally, I added a warning on the login screen to better reflect on the Work In Progress state of the branch.
Element Clients
Updates from the teams! Android will return next week.
Delight team
Spaces:
Drag and drop for reordering Spaces is now live on Android! And testable on develop for Web
We’ve also added labs flags to Web & Android to test a few different things, in particular
Toggling ‘Home’ to show all rooms, or only rooms which don’t belong to Spaces
Toggling to not show People in Spaces
Please try them out! After living with a different config for a few days, we’d love to hear your feedback!
Web
1.7.31 released on Monday
Nightly builds of Element Desktop optimised for Apple silicon are now available for testing! Please give it a try and report any issues.
Added libera.chat to room directory on develop, staging, and app. It will appear in desktop builds as well next time they update.
On develop
Various CI tweaks and performance improvements
In flight
Adding large account performance tests
iOS
1.4.2 released on Monday. 1.4.3 with the fix on wellknown on Thursday
0.0.95 RC is out, available from the usual place at GitHub, and also as Flatpak from Flathub. The usual stabilisaton/bug fixing work, no new features compared to betas. This version is considerably better, and more stable, than 0.0.9.4 - packagers are welcome to push it as if it were the final release. Translators, please help to complete more languages: Polish is at 90%, Spanish almost 80%, and French just below 60% - you can make a difference!
Dept of Encryption 🔐
New paper: “Key Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees”
Here is a scientific paper for all interested in decentralized end-to-end encryption cryptography protocols, like Matrix' Megolm, or the MLS future of Matrix: The preprint “Key Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees” by Weidner, Kleppmann et al., which will appear in the ACM CCS 2021 Conference, surveys existing centralized and decentralized end-to-end cryptography protocols, Olm/Megolm (labeled as “Matrix”) among them, and discusses why the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) IETF draft has its problems with decentralization. Following that, they come up with their own decentralized protocol, including a security and performance analysis. They improve asymptotic complexity when compared to Olm/Megolm, and the assumptions on the underlying communication layer are easily fulfilled by Matrix. They also discuss that the very good asympotic complexity of MLS cannot be reached for a decentralized end-to-end cryptography protocol.
Last week's news actually, but libQuotient master branch can built with Qt 6 now, laying ground for the GSoC works on PyQuotient - Python bindings for libQuotient. The library has also been updated to follow the latest CS API specification, which means basic low-level support for knocking, with higher-level library API for it coming later.
Polyjuice Util is a library of Matrix functions for Elixir that can be used for both client-side and server-side applications. Polyjuice Util 0.2.0 has been released, which includes functions for common errors, handling identifiers, and for checking room permissions. Thanks to Nico for his contributions to this release. This release also contains some backward-incompatible changes. See the changelog for more information.
Polyjuice Client 0.4.1 has also been released, which uses the new Polyjuice Util release, and adds support for the whoami endpoint (thanks to multiprise).
Hello dear Synapse Admins, synadm v0.30 is out. lt seems I was in "story telling mode" already when I wrote the release notes yesterday. That should perfectly suit a TWIM article as well 🙂 So there you go, copy/pasted from https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm/releases/tag/v0.30 with love:
New
synadm finally got some nicely rendered documentation pages hosted at https://synadm.readthedocs.io.
Note that this is meant to be a convenience function in case a Synapse homeserver admin wants to quickly help users e.g set specific settings available via regular Matrix calls and not the Synapse admin API directly. Also note that it is not meant to replace the awesome Matrix CLI tools that are already out there. matrix-commander, matrixcli to mention just a few.
It implements a plain login on a Matrix server using username and password. It can even be used to retrieve a token for an admin user, e.g helpful for setting up fresh synadm installations. Read about it here
Improved
The README has been updated to point to the nicely rendered docs recently published at https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/develop/usage/administration/admin_api/index.html
Notes
Update via PyPI or git as described in the update chapter: https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm#update
Thanks to the friendly people in #synadm:peek-a-boo.at for reviewing, testing, discussing functionality and giving advice. And for this release, a special thanks to @hpd:hpdeifel.de https://github.com/hpdeifel
with the change of policy we deployed on GNOME's Matrix instance, it occurred to me that we had overlooked an important aspect in our relationship with Matrix: do we own our Matrix account? And the answer is... maybe! In this post I cover the differences between personal account, organisation-owned account, the importance of segregating activities on Matrix... and why this may change with Portable Identities in the future
the French government deployed Tchap, an instant messaging based on Matrix. They are looking for tech and processes oriented people to improve the service.
I know this isn't TWIM-worthy, but I figured people in this room would find it interesting: yesterday there was a very popular post on reddit about how we don't appreciate email enough, and in the comments there were some mentions of matrix as the counterpart for messaging:
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.
Finally MSC3173: Expose stripped state events to potential joiners reached FCP this week, which is a step towards informing clients about the state of a room before they attempt to join or knock on it, which allows for nicer client UX when deciding whether you want to join a room or not.
This week's big news is the release of Synapse 1.36 which completely eliminates memory spikes when joining rooms! I'll let the "Joining Matrix HQ" graph speak for itself:
We also fixed a few bugs with presence (especially over federation or on a worker process), and would strongly encourage you to upgrade.
We'll spend the next few weeks on smaller changes as we prepare our Q3 goals, but we look forward to sharing those with you when we have them.
Happy weekend, TWiM!
Happy weekend to you too! Let's upgrade to 1.36 this weekend!
Actively deployed to pixie.town's Synapse now, and running very smoothly. Happy graphs show 91% of requests are handled without Synapse involved.
Also demonstrated the very seamless drop-in enable and disable, just changing the reverse proxy url back and forth from Synapse, and with this you could cautiously try this out for your own server, but stay in touch with #synapse-media-proxy:pixie.town
https://git.pixie.town/f0x/synapse-media-proxy
autodiscover-server-configuration
Got an update after realizing that maunium.net's horrible but technically correct server discovery didn't get handled correctly yet
https://www.npmjs.com/package/@f0x52/autodiscover-server-configuration
Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.
Plumbing private/invite-only rooms is possible
IRC quit messages are visible as leave reasons
Nick changes are now displayed in leave reason instead of a notice
Prioritized Matrix->IRC queue for improved responsiveness while sending out a lot of messages
Improved AUTOCMD with multi-command support
Improved ZNC support with display of external messages by yourself
Improved plumbing message formatting: ZWSP in sender names, smarter truncation
IRC user displayname cases update if PRIVMSG source differs from current
New rooms respect cases of IRC nicks and channels
Conduit related fixes, thanks Peetz0r!
Channels with keys on IRCnet now rejoin correctly
Finally 100% working identd so it works on all tested networks
Cleaned up SASL support which makes server messages during authentication visible
Proper cleanup when leaving Heisenbridge rooms
Tiny bugfixes everywhere!
Currently working towards 1.0 release so mostly bug hunting and improving existing code and features.
Call for mutual help! The plumb feature needs more testing on busy IRC channels. If you need to plumb public Matrix rooms and IRC channels on any IRC network that does not have a public bridge available or just want to use a relaybot on IRC side for some reason hit me up on #heisenbridge:vi.fi and we can setup a test plumb, free of charge! Only requirements are that I can lurk around to monitor how it works and there's nothing offensive on-topic.
In other news @warthog9 submitted an article to opensource.com how to use ZNC and Heisenbridge together to keep using your existing IRC bouncer with Heisenbridge as a client for it. Pretty cool stuff!
Thanks!
matrix-appservice-irc weights in at release 0.27.0
Hola everyone! Today we're releasing the latest in bridge greatness, matrix-appservice-irc 0.27.0. This release contains the bulk of our work done for libera.chat. As always, thanks to the community for testing, writing up issues and creating PRs so that we can build better bridges to our friends on other networks.
The highlights are:
Username/password SASL authentication support. The bridge now lets you set a !username.
Bridge operators can now choose to block messages in the I->M direction while Matrix users are not joined to IRC as a privacy preservation technique.
You can now configure the bridge to publish rooms to the public room directory (rather than the appservice directory). The bridge can now also use the whole alias namespace (e.g. #foo:libera.chat -> #foo).
Numerous bug fixes and quality of life fixes!
This is now live on libera.chat, and will be live on the other bridges very soon!
matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.
Even more read receipt improvements are here! In summary, with the magic of MSC2409, the bridge shouldn't ever "view" a LINE chat on your behalf in order to sync a message (which would send a read receipt to your chat contacts, even though you didn't read the chat yourself). For LINE messages that require viewing its chat in order to be bridged, like images/stickers (to get the image) and messages in multi-user chats (to know who sent them), the bridge instead sends a "placeholder" message that gets updated with the real LINE message content when you view the placeholder. That way, the bridge will only view a LINE chat when you view its Matrix portal.
A few stability fixes have been pushed as well. Namely, sync should be less likely to accidentally skip chats.
Only one final read receipt improvement remains, for LINE->Matrix read receipt bridging (which I mentioned last week): to make the bridge 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.
Once that is taken care of, I'll consider the bridge to be in beta! 🎉
Starting work on message bubbles, building on existing work from the community
Fuzzy matching for the room list filter in progress
Coming soon
Voice messages: we're in the testing stages and looking for feedback before they go live. Give it a go and let us know!
iOS
The new side menu and the new UI to join a room by alias are on develop.
The security settings screen has been updated to match the UX of element-web. The iOS app now uses the same wording for “Security Phrase” and “Security Key”
Device dehydration now works in the SDK. We need to polish the work before merging the PR
Voice message is still progressing well. We need to figure out how we will deal with the ogg format on iOS. We also need to add a cache to improve performance in the audio (and encryption) processing
Android
Theme changes are now merged on develop and will be included in release 1.1.10. All the themes and styles have been moved to a dedicated gradle module. This is the first step to be able to develop new app features using dedicated modules. Other steps are required for us to be able to do that though (create a core module, etc.).
All the PlayStore descriptions have been pushed to the PlayStore using Fastlane, should be live soon. F-Droid already has the up to date translations for the store assets. Thanks to all the contributors on Weblate!
Release 1.1.10 will be prepared today. Expect it to be in production next week if everything is fine.
Last week was another busy week in NeoChat. Carl made the room list sidebar resizable and improved the responsive design of the settings pages.
Janet Blackquill implemented custom emojis using the im.ponies.user_emotes extension. For now auto-completion works, the custom emojis will be displayed in the emoji picker and lastly there is also an UI to add new emojis. We plan to implement more of the im.ponies MSC (custom stickers, sticker pack) soon :)
Smitty van Bodegom implemented spoilers and added /j and /leave alias for /join and /part. He also fixed the spellchecker trying to spellcheck commands like /rainbowme.
Oh and finally NeoChat was also featured on last week's "This Week in Linux" podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaPWx_z_50s Don't forget to follow us on Twitter @NeoChatKDE or Mastodon @[email protected], to get your latest news about NeoChat.
Akademy is also happening this weekend and next week. KDE is using Matrix and BigBlueButton for the conference. There will be a lot of talk, training and bofs. We have a bof the 22th June at 16th. It's virtual and everyone is welcome to join and discuss with us NeoChat development.
FluffyChat
FluffyChat is the cutest cross-platform matrix client. It is available for Android, iOS, Web and Desktop.
FluffyChat 0.32.0 is out now 💪 and targets improved stability and a new onboarding flow where single sign on is now the more prominent way to get new users into the app.
This release also introduces a complete rewritten database under the hood based on the key value store Hive instead of sqlite.
This should improve the overall stability and the performance of the web version.
Here's the FluffyChat subreddit, in order to provide more structured way of discussions, keep questions asked again and again in one place, and refer to older answers whenever the need is, as well as just to hang out https://www.reddit.com/r/fluffychat/
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
We've slowly been adding spaces support. Nheko can now show your spaces in the sidebar, filter on them and show a (very basic) overview page for a space. We are still playing around with what to actually put there, allow you to expand and collapse subspaces in the sidebar and allowing you to peek into rooms in a space, which you haven't joined yet. Creating and modifying spaces is also still work in progress until we figure out a proper design for it.
The Dart language now has a new SDK for Matrix developed and maintained by famedly.com and published here:
https://pub.dev/packages/matrix
It provides a fully featured base for Dart and Flutter applications including E2EE, and Cross Signing. After more than 2 years of development we now declared it as stable. The Matrix Dart SDK (formerly known as famedly SDK) was initially a rewrite of the FluffyChat backend which was written in JavaScript. It came a long way since then and is now the base for the Famedly App and for the Flutter version of FluffyChat.
Hyper-targeted callback: Hey Naren, Famedly are the Matrix-using folk I was telling you about. This is the latest version of their Dart work and will be a great place to start building from.
Hi, I started a small, static webapp last weekend for viewing and modifying room states.
It can locally store multiple access tokens and helps debug and maintain room permissions.
It's not looking fancy yet but already proved useful for many of the matrix.org IRC support requests.
The GitLab maubot plugin recently received major improvements to webhook handling. The Matrix messages now look much nicer (similar to the GitHub maubot plugin) and it also sends fancy reactions for CI status.
It's already in use in #nheko:nheko.im and Beeper's internal commit log room. It's unfortunately not yet available on t2bot.io, because I'm too lazy to write a migration script to copy data from the very old standalone gitlab bot written in Go.
In the future I might figure out some interoperability between the github and gitlab plugins so that I can also get CI reactions for my repos (which are primarily on github, but have CI on gitlab)
Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️
Interoperability event hosted by, and featuring, Matrix
Tomorrow Element will host an event alongside Protonmail, Open-Xchange and Open Forum Europe on the DMA and the topic of interoperability. This will be hosted on Matrix, based on the infrastructure first used during FOSDEM. The event will be livestreamed over on #interop-sme:matrix.org
Registration is free here: https://openforumeurope.org/event/a-new-business-model-for-the-internet-how-a-strong-digital-markets-act-can-enable-smes-to-deliver-a-better-internet/
NB this event took place earlier in the week, but we still wanted to honour it!
I've been invited to appear in the latest episode of Clever Cloud's tech podcast Message à Caractère Informatique, where we talked mostly about Matrix and decentralisation, but also about a bunch of other interesting things ranging from timbl minting his source code as an NFT to how to hack autonomous car with sound. It was loads of fun, thanks to them for the invite!
The episode, which is in French (sorry non-French speakers!), is available here: https://www.clever-cloud.com/fr/podcast/episode48/
Perhaps to pique (French word?) our interest Brendan Abolivier added:
(if anyone's curious about the autonomous car hacking, which I found particularly interesting, the paper we were discussing is in english https://spqrlab1.github.io/papers/ji-poltergeist-oakland21.pdf 😛)
After some fixes the bot is now back in shape. This means that all Rooms should again have the correct names from now on and accept invites again. Be aware the bot currently doesnt support encrypted rooms.
As a side effect also https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/spaces now found 3x the rooms as before.
Also the webpage got a big overhaul which brings a lot more mobile phone friendliness :) So you can finally properly use it on your phone as well.
Another change is that tombstoned rooms now get filtered from the list to keep it clean.
For developers a API reference is now available at https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/api
Also if you use the apis please note that the content is gzip encoded. The server currently doesnt respect the Accept-Encoding Header.
On the side of internal changes is now that the retries are limited to 5 times instead the previously buggy amount. This should reduce join requests from my server drastically.
For people usings the /servers api endpoint there is also now a include_members option. This means https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/servers?include_members=true
now also gives unique servers based on known members.
After having tried to convince several people to join the Matrix, my main conclusion is that it's too difficult for people. Apps that big tech companies produce are so simple that having to choose a client, choose (or set up) a homeserver and building bridges is too much of a push factor from the Matrix.
To help those people, I've written a quick guide that should help people without a programming background join the Matrix. I'm using this as a reference when people ask how they could join the Matrix, feel free to do this yourself as well: https://noordstar.me/b/how-to-join-matrix.md
Remember the Wired article we spotted in the print edition and got a blurry picture of? It has now made it onto their website. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/matrix-encrypted-messaging-app-governments
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.
"People reading eBooks usually know Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/), one of the most prominent ebook management solutions by Kovid Goyal. We've had an "unofficial" (as in: Kovid doesn't like real-time communications :) ) channel on what used to be freenode that I've moved to Libera and which is - of course! - bridged to #calibre" ~Philantrop
We did it! Synapse no longer experiences a memory spike when joining large / complex rooms.
These improvements mainly arise from processing join responses incrementally, rather than trying to load everything into memory at once. However, realizing these gains involved a fair bit of rewriting, as the entire processing pipeline had to work incrementally, and with appropriately sized batches, to avoid downstream bottlenecks. You can hear more about our original plans for this work in last month's Matrix Live: S6E23 — Dan and Erik talk about Synapse.
Presence Improvements
Running presence on a single worker process is now expected to work correctly. This feature first debuted in Synapse 1.33, but a few bugs cropped up which could lead to presence state becoming outdated. With #10149 merged, we believe the last of these issues to be resolved.
We had also noticed a recent increase in presence load on federation workers; this was ultimately tracked to two bugs, both fixed in this release: We were processing local presence via federation workers (#10163) and we were occasionally sending duplicate presence updates (#10165).
With both issues fixed, outgoing federation load has returned to normal levels:
(Thank you to David Mehren for this graph from issue #10153)
Everything Else
Synapse now has two new Admin APIs for unprotecting and removing media from quarantine, thanks to contributions by dklimpel.
Synapse now implements the stable /_matrix/client/r0/rooms/{roomId}/aliases endpoint originally introduced by MSC2432, and, thanks to contributions by govynnus, makes the reason and score fields of event reports optional per MSC2414.
These are just the highlights; please see the Release Notes for a complete list of changes in this release.
