Matrix Live 🎙 (Demos week!)

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Lots of things to talk about! Firstly I'm very happy to say that spaces are happening, you can keep track of them here: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/15930.

Next Open Tech Will Save Us, was great this month, and you can also get a great introduction to Matrix Spaces there too.

Then, Marcus Schopen shared his love for Matrix by showing us the Matrix-branded mugs he has had printed:

If you'd like to buy some OFFICIAL Matrix merch (we don't have mugs just yet), then please go to The Matrix Shop! Marcus also added:

People in Bielefeld can come over to my office at university and get one.

Dept of Spec 📜

wbamberg told us:

New spec platform: we've asked the spec core team to spend some proper time with the new spec so we can decide if it's ready to ship.
You can also file bugs at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/labels/spec-redesign

It's looking really good!

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://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC2895: Proposal to improve /members and /joined_rooms

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've continued to be quite busy with implementation during holiday crunch time. There were some constructive ideas for the team to carve out more time for spec work during this week's Spec Core Team retro, which will hopefully lead to an improved cadence this week and into the new year.

As such, the focus remains at MSC2844 (global versioning), MSC2366 (ready and done in key verification), and MSC2790 (modal widgets).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad offered:

Hello, friends! On Wednesday we released Synapse 1.24.0 and 1.23.1, which include security fixes. Please upgrade! (Also, if you've installed Synapse from source, be sure to pip install 'cryptography>=3.3' in your virtualenv to address the recent OpenSSL CVE).

This is our last full release for the year, as we don't want to do anything that might risk the stability Santa's federated command and control centre at the North Pole, but we're looking forward to lots of new features and improvements in the new year — more details on that next week.

We'd also like to remind you that we're planning on removing support for Python 3.5 early next year (a formal announcement and timeline will accompany the 1.25.0 release), and we'd appreciate and comments or concerns in this GitHub issue.

Strikes me that Santa has a more centralised operation, but who can say?

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

YunoHost

Pierre told us:

YunoHost is an operating system aiming for the simplest administration of a server, and therefore democratize self-hosting.

Synapse integration had been updated to 1.23.0 (1.23.1 available in branch testing)

Element Web integration had been updated to 1.7.14 (1.7.15 available in branch testing)

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

Just updated my Synapse K8s-optimized image and Chart to 1.24.0, planning on deprecating the image at some point soon though, instead pointing people to upstream - or platform-optimized - images as I should be able to move all the Kubernetes-specific things into the chart itself to make it more compatible.

The image in question started off as a plain docker image, before there were official ones. I've since rebased it onto the official Matrix image with just the modified scripts and volume points.

My plan is to move all the Kubernetes-specific scripts into configmaps (which are a K8s way of storing text files/environment variables/etc), and then build my own launch arguments through the chart to get it to run on any image that has a Python interpreter and the Synapse modules available in the Python search path.

With all that done, it means I won't be a bottleneck in pushing updated image tags for people to be able to update, and I won't have to finagle multi-arch images 😃

Docker ARM images for Dendrite

TR_SLimey reported:

As the PR from last TWIM is still awaiting review, I have once again updated the Docker ARM images for Dendrite for version 0.3.3. As always, they can be found in my docker repo at https://hub.docker.com/u/trslimey

Direct links:

Monolith: https://hub.docker.com/r/trslimey/dendrite-monolith

Polylith: https://hub.docker.com/r/trslimey/dendrite-polylith

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Gitter

Eric Eastwood announced:

If you didn't catch it already, we did a full announcement this week for Gitter now speaking Matrix 🎉! If you're curious about how we made it and some more technical details, the blog post is a great read: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/07/gitter-now-speaks-matrix

In terms of bridge progress, we added support for m.emote status messages which means your /me says hi messages will bridge back and forth properly. On the Gitter side, we fixed the browser notifications so they show properly from the virtualUser instead of the generic matrixbot.

mautrix-instagram

Tulir offered:

I made an Instagram DM bridge: https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-instagram / #instagram:maunium.net

It's a bit barebones still, but text bridging and backfilling works. The main advantage over mx-puppet-instagram is that it uses the realtime MQTT API instead of polling.

There was a second update from tulir, he added more features as of today:

After the initial announcement on Monday, I added bridging of reactions, redactions and photos in both directions and also typing notifications, read receipts and all types of messages from Instagram to Matrix.

Dept of Clients 📱

Element Client Work

Compiled by the team

• Spaces

  • We’re making more progress on implementing Spaces.. On Web, we’ve made progress on creating spaces and switching between them. On mobile, we’ve laid down the foundations in the Android SDK. If you missed it, we gave a preview in this weeks Open Tech Will Save Us.

• Social login

  • We’ve been working on server-side support in synapse for picking an MXID during login with SSO, and also implementing support in iOS to gain parity with Android & Web, to launch together in future.

• VoIP

  • We’ve been working on implementing hold & resume (line 1 / 2) support on Web, iOS & Android. Web has something sneak previewable on develop.element.io!

Web

• Element Web 1.7.15 released
  • Improved voice / video call UI
  • Notifications are now ignored from rooms you've been active in recently
  • Login / registration flows redirect inside the app if you are already logged in
• JS SDK browser build steps now only run on release (instead of every install) to save time

Android

• URL Previews are coming in the next release! There will also be a brand new Emoji keyboard accessible from the timeline composer.

iOS

• The new background service has been merged. Messages from notifications will be displayed faster within the app. A TestFlight build for testing will be available tomorrow.

Dept of Ops 🛠

axon

kaiyou announced:

This is a first update regarding a very small project named "axon", aimed at operating the synapse admin API from Python, either as a library or a CLI tool. It is currently in use everyday on our synapse instance for managing users and looking for suspicious rooms, and is being integrated into a prototype Web interface for managing synapse.

Admin API coverage is currently about 50%, mostly focusing on users and rooms management (get, list, update, delete). It is still enough to delete a user, edit an offensive avatar, or run as a cron to periodically purge remote media.

Our main repository: https://forge.tedomum.net/tedomum/axon

Github project mirror for contributing: https://github.com/kaiyou/axon

I asked if there was a GUI:

Not currently, but we are integrating it with another of our tools named "hiboo", which is a general indie hoster user manager (provides SAML & OIDC authentication with config templates for many projects including synapse, and integrates the account workflows and moderation features). Currently it provides room navigation and purging, plus deleting accounts either on moderator decision or when the user deletes her SSO account.

Sounds promising! Synapse Admin would benefit from this kind of tooling...

... so it was a surprise to find another project designed to help in this area!

Announcing synadm

jojo told us:

Well, maybe it's about time for "synadm - a CLI frontend to Matrix-Synapse admin APIs" to be announced more officially. As the name implies it's a CLI tool that eases the usage of admin API commands for Synapse admins. It currently covers everything the room and user API's can do: https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm#implementation-status--commands-list

It can be configured interactively and/or using a config file in yaml format: https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm#configuration

It's configurable whether the responds of the API are shown in pretty printed JSON or in a table format (using Python tabulate).

It's well documented via it's online help and supposed to be quite self-explanatory to the admin.

Any thoughts, ideas, feature-requests are very welcome in #synadm:peek-a-boo.at or as usual by filing PR's or issues in the project repo https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Advent of Code 2020 bot

Asbjørn told us:

This one might be interesting to those participating in Advent of Code 2020:

I made a (quick and dirty) bot that posts whenever somebody on a private leaderboard solves a challenge. https://gitlab.com/AsbjornOlling/aocbot

I imagine that we're not the only private AoC Matrix room around, so I figured I'd share - even though it's not anything particularly remarkable 👨‍💻

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix talk at Open Source Summit EU

Oleg reported:

The recording of the Matrix talk from the annual Open Source Summit EU is online! 🎉

I talked about Matrix 101 and showed different bridging capabilities with Slack and IRC and, of cause, showed some bots. 😉

Thanks benpa and Half-Shot for your support! ❤️

▶️ Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD8xbci4wAY

NLUUG talk from Matthew

Matthew offered:

I gave a talk to NLUUG the other week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY2PCKEaKlM

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	neko.dev	298
2	comsys.rwth-aachen.de	341
3	pc.koesters.xyz:59003	444
4	maescool.be	446
5	bordum.dk	465
6	jauriarts.org	505
7	dendrite.matrix.org	554
8	casavant.org	717
9	matrix.sp-codes.de	758.5
10	envs.net	913

That's all I know 🏁

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

Synapse 1.24.0 is now available!

This release fixes a denial of service vulnerability (GHSA-hxmp-pqch-c8mm / CVE-2020-26257) in which a malicious homeserver could send malformed events into a room which would then break federation of that room.

This follows the disclosure of a denial of service vulnerability in OpenSSL (CVE-2020-1971). If you have installed Synapse from source, please ensure your host is up to date and then execute pip install 'cryptography>=3.3' inside your Synapse virtualenv.

We've also released Synapse 1.23.1 which includes that security fix and a small patch to maintain Python 3.5 compatibility. It is otherwise identical to 1.23.0. Note that Synapse 1.24.0 includes backwards incompatible changes which may affect a small number of users. See the notes on upgrading for more information.

Synapse 1.24.0 brings a pair of new Admin APIs, including a way to log in as users and to forcibly purge rooms when deleting them. We've also made numerous bug fixes and improvements to SSO support, especially around OpenID Connect and SAML providers.

This release includes an optional change to push notification badges: currently, the number in the badge is based on the count of rooms with unread messages. However, in some specialized cases you may want the badge to show the count of all unread messages, even if there are multiple unread messages in the same room. This behavior can now be toggled with a new configuration setting.

Additionally, for server admins, the deprecated /_matrix/client/*/admin Admin API endpoints have been removed. If you have tools which target these endpoints, please update them to use the /_synapse/admin URL prefix instead.

See the full changelog for more.

Installation instructions are available on GitHub, as is the v1.24.0 release tag.

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 @angdraug, @chagai95, @daenney, @dklimpel, @jordanbancino, @localguru, @nchamo, @ShadowJonathan, @TeFiLeDo, @tulir, and @waylon531.

Hi all,

It’s been just over 2 months since we revealed that Gitter was going to join Matrix - and we are incredibly proud to announce that Gitter has officially turned on true native Matrix connectivity: all public Gitter rooms are now available natively via Matrix, and all Gitter users now natively exist on Matrix. So, if you wanted to join the official Node.js language support room at https://gitter.im/nodejs/node from Matrix, just head over to #nodejs_node:gitter.im and *boom*, you’re in!

This means Gitter is now running a Matrix homeserver at gitter.im which exposes all the active public rooms - so if you go to the the room directory in Element (for instance) and select gitter.im as a homeserver, you can jump straight in:

Once you’re in, you can chat back and forth transparently between users on the Gitter side and the Matrix side, and you no longer have the ugly “Matrixbot” user faking the messages back and forth - these are ‘real’ users talking directly to one another, and every public msg in every public room is now automatically exposed into Matrix.

So, suddenly all the developer communities previously living only in Gitter (Scala, Node, Webpack, Angular, Rails and thousands of others) are now available to anyone anywhere on Matrix - alongside communities bridged from Freenode and Slack; the native Matrix communities for Mozilla, KDE, GNOME communities etc. We’re hopeful that glueing everything together via Matrix will usher in a new age of open and defragmented dev collaboration, a bit like we used to have on IRC, back in the day.

This is also great news for mobile Gitter users - as the original mobile Gitter clients have been in a holding pattern for over a year, and native Matrix support for Gitter means they are now officially deprecated in favour of Element (or indeed any other mobile Matrix client).

What features are ready?

Now, this is the first cut of native Matrix support in Gitter: much of the time since Gitter joined Element has been spent migrating stuff over from Gitlab to Element, and it’s only really been a month of work so far in hooking up Matrix. As a result: all the important features work, but there’s also stuff that’s yet to land:

Features ready today:

• Ability to join rooms from Matrix via #org_repo:gitter.im
• Bridging Edits, Replies (mapped to Threads on Gitter), Deletes, File transfer
• Bridging Markdown & Emoji

What remains:

• Ability to send/receive Direct Messages
• Ability to plumb existing Matrix rooms into Gitter natively
• Ability to view past Gitter history from Matrix. This is planned thanks to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/2716
• Synchronising the full Gitter membership list to Matrix. Currently the membership syncs incrementally as people speak
• Turning off the old Gitter bridge
• Bridging emotes (/me support) (almost landed!)
• Bridging read receipts
• Synchronising room avatars
• Bridge LaTeX

Stuff we’re not planning to support:

• Ability to join arbitrary rooms on Matrix from Gitter. This could consume huge resources on Gitter, and we’re not in a rush to mirror all of Matrix into Gitter. This will get addressed when Gitter merges with Element into a pure Matrix client.
• Bridging Reactions. Gitter doesn’t have these natively today, and rather than adding them to Gitter, we’d rather work on merging Gitter & Element together.

For more details, we strongly recommend checking out the native Matrix epic on Gitlab for the unvarnished truth straight from the coal-face!

How do you make an existing chat system talk Matrix?

In terms of the work which has gone into this - Gitter has been an excellent case study of how you can easily plug an existing large established chat system into Matrix.

At high level, the core work needed was as simple as:

• Add ‘virtual users’, so remote Matrix users can be modelled and represented in Gitter correctly: https://gitlab.com/gitterHQ/webapp/-/merge_requests/2027/diffs.
  • This can be accomplished by simply adding a virtualUser property to your chat message/post/tweet schema which holds the mxid, displayName, and avatar as an alternative to your author field. Then display the virtualUser whenever available over the author.
• Add an application service to Gitter to bridge traffic in & out of Matrix: https://gitlab.com/gitterHQ/webapp/-/merge_requests/2041/diffs
  • This "application service" comes pre-packaged for you in many cases, so for example you can simply drop in a library like matrix-appservice-bridge in a Node.js application, and all of the Matrix talking complexity is handled for you.
• Polish it!

In practice, Eric (lead Gitter dev) laid out the waypoints of the full journey:

1. First big step was to add the concept of virtual users to Gitter. We could also have created a new Gitter user for every new matrix ID that appears, but tagging them as virtual users is a bit cleaner.
2. Figuring out how to balance the Matrix traffic coming into/out of Gitter.
   1. Spreading the inbound load comes for free via our existing load-balancer setup (ELB) where we already have 8 webapp servers running the various services of gitter.im. We just run the Matrix bridge on those servers alongside each web and api process, and then the load-balancer’s matrix.gitter.im spreads out to the servers.
   2. Events from Matrix then hit the load balancer and reach one of the servers (no duplication when processing events).
   3. If something on Gitter happens, the action occurs on one server and we just propagate it over to Matrix (no duplication or locking needed).
3. We have realtime websockets and Faye subscriptions already in the app which are backed by Mongoose database hooks whenever something changes. We just tapped into the same thing to be able to bridge across new information to Matrix as we receive it on Gitter.
4. Hooking up the official Matrix bridging matrix-appservice-bridge library to use Gitter’s existing MongoDB for storage instead of nedb.
5. Figuring out how to namespace the mxids of the gitter users:
   1. It’s nice to have the mxid as human readable as possible instead of just the numerical userId in your service.
   2. But if people can change their username in your service, you can’t change your mxid on Matrix. In the future, we’ll have portable accounts in Matrix to support this (MSC2787) but sadly these are still vapourware at this point.
   3. If you naively just switch the user’s mxid when they rename their username, then you could end up leaking conversation history between mxids(!)
   4. So we went with @username-userid:gitter.im for the Matrix ID to make it a bit more human readable but also unique so any renames can happen without affecting anything.
6. For room aliases, we decided to change our community/room URI syntax to underscores for the room aliases, #community_room:gitter.im
7. Figuring out how to bridge features correctly;
   1. Emoji - mapping between :shortcode: and unicode emojis
   2. Mapping between Gitter threaded conversations <-> Matrix replies
   3. Mapping between Matrix mentions and Gitter mentions
8. Keeping users and room data in sync
   1. We haven’t gotten there yet, but the data comes through the same Mongoose hook and we can update the bridged data as they change on the Gitter end.

Meanwhile, the Matrix side of gitter.im is hosted by Element Matrix Services and is a plain old Synapse, talking through to Gitter via the Application Service API. An alternative architecture would be to have got Gitter directly federating with Matrix by embedding a “homeserver library” into it (e.g. embedding Dendrite). However, given Dendrite is still beta and assumes it is storing its data itself (rather than persisting in an existing backend such as Gitter’s mongodb), we went for the simpler option to start with.

It’s been really interesting to see how this has played out week by week in the Gitter updates in This Week in Matrix: you can literally track the progress and see how the integration came to life between Oct 9, Oct 23, Nov 6, Nov 27 and finally Dec 4.

Huge thanks go to Eric Eastwood, the lead dev of Gitter and mastermind behind the project - and also to Half-Shot and Christian who’ve been providing all the support and review from the Matrix bridging team.

What’s next?

First and foremost we’re going to be working through the “What remains” section of the list above: killing off the old bridge, sorting out plumbed rooms, hooking up DMs, importing old Gitter history into Matrix, etc. This should then give us an exceptionally low impedance link between Gitter & Matrix.

Then, as per our original announcement, the plan is:

In the medium/long term, it’s simply not going to be efficient for the combined Element/Gitter team to split our efforts maintaining two high-profile Matrix clients. Our plan is instead to merge Gitter’s features into Element (or next generations of Element) itself and then - if and only if Element has achieved parity with Gitter - we expect to upgrade the deployment on gitter.im to a Gitter-customised version of Element. The inevitable side-effect is that we’ll be adding new features to Element rather than Gitter going forwards.

Now, that means implementing some features in Matrix/Element to match...

• Instant live room peeking (less than a second to load the webapp into a live-view of a massive room with 20K users!!)
• Seamless onboarding thanks to using GitLab & GitHub for accounts
• Curated hierarchical room directory
• Magical creation of rooms on demand for every GitLab and GitHub project ever
• GitLab/GitHub activity as a first-class citizen in a room’s side-panel
• Excellent search-engine-friendly static content and archives
• KaTeX support for Maths communities
• Threads!

...and this work is in full swing:

• We have a proposal for fast peeking (via lazy-loading state over federation) at MSC2775 and the new peek APIs at MSC2753 and MSC2444 (and even implemented by Dendrite)
• Social Login for seamless onboarding via GitLab, GitHub & friends is almost landed in Element: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/5426
• Spaces gives a curated hierarchical room directory: https://github.com/vector-im/roadmap/issues/2
• KaTeX support landed in Element Web a few weeks ago thanks to akissinger and thosgood
• Threads are on the horizon, thanks to MSC2836.

The only bits which aren’t already progressing yet are tighter GL/GH integration, and better search engine optimised static archives.

So, the plan is to get cracking on the rest of the feature parity, then merge Gitter & Element together - and meanwhile continue getting the rest of the world into Matrix :)

We live in exciting times: open standards-based interoperable communication is on the rise again, and we hope Gitter’s new life in Matrix is the beginning of a new age of cross-project developer collaboration, at last escaping the fragmentation we’ve suffered over the last few years.

Finally, please do give feedback via Gitter or Matrix (or mail!) on the integration and where you’d like to see it go next!

Thanks for flying Matrix and Gitter,

-- The Matrix Team

Matrix Live 🎙

In which Nad & Matthew go through the new consolidated Element roadmap at https://github.com/vector-im/roadmap/projects/1

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Open Tech Will Save Us 9

Taking place NEXT WEDNESDAY, the ninth edition of my favourite monthly Open Tech-themed live video broadcast! Subscribe to the calendar on https://matrix.org/open-tech-will-save-us/ and check out the lineup:

• Angie Gaudion, Coordinatrice at CHATONS, presenting Mobilizon: a new libre events management tool https://joinmobilizon.org/en/.
• Ben Francis, Founder at Krellian, presenting the relaunch of WebThings (previously from Mozilla)
• Nad Chishtie, Product Lead at Element, presents Matrix Spaces: a new vision for room groups in Matrix

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://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC2883: [WIP] Matrix-flavoured MLS
• MSC2882: [WIP] Tempered Transitive Trust

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've mostly been focusing on implementation. Thus the same 3 MSCs are in focus: MSC2844 (global versioning), MSC2366 (ready and done in key verification), and MSC2790 (modal widgets).

Anoa also provided a revised, more festive version of the chart, but it's too jolly to render inline, so needed to be linked instead.

New spec platform

wbamberg offered:

Still at https://adoring-einstein-5ea514.netlify.app/

• Dean has started work on design updates for the spec

• We've written replacements for all the templates and updated all template calls

• We've implemented a mechanism for representing different spec versions and changelogs

Seriously progressing! Much more readable than what we have.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander's Dendrite mxid announced:

This week we released version 0.3.2, which contains some bug fixes. Changes this week include:

• Checking if a server is allowed to see an event has been optimised somewhat

• The ability to disable federation has been added

• Application services are now sent correctly formatted client events

• create-account has been simplified so that you can just point it to your Dendrite config

• /unpeek support has been added (for MSC2753)

• Event IDs are now calculated far less often in the roomserver, since this is an expensive operation

• The federation sender now caches events in memory to reduce load on the database

• The "since" parameter is now checked more thoroughly in the sync API, which led to a bug that could cause forgotten rooms to reappear (thanks to kaniini)

• The polylith now proxies signing key requests through the federation sender correctly

Spec compliance is unchanged:

• Client-server APIs: 58%, same as last week

• Server-server APIs: 83%, same as last week

As always, feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for general Dendrite chat or #dendrite-dev:matrix.org for development discussion.

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad offered:

⚠️ The OpenSSL project has pre-announced a high severity issue that will be disclosed on Tuesday. We will be regenerating Docker images and releasing Synapse 1.24.0 and 1.23.1 on Tuesday following that announcement. Note that these releases contain security fixes of their own, and you are encouraged to upgrade.

In other news, Synapse 1.24.0rc2 is out and includes numerous bug fixes and internal improvements, especially around our OpenID Connect (OIDC) and SAML providers. Of note, the OIDC provider can now re-try generating MXIDs when there's a collision, reaching parity with the SAML provider.

We've been talking about MSC2403: Add "knock" feature for a few weeks, but the end is in sight: the PR is reviewed and the tests pass, so we're on track for including it in 1.25.0! We're also on the cusp of a finishing a new algorithm for calculating the auth chain difference in State Resolution v2, which should significantly reduce worst case performance.

Lastly, the deprecated /_matrix/client/*/admin Admin API endpoints have been removed. If you have tools which target these endpoints, please update them to use the /_synapse/admin URL prefix instead.

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Docker ARM images for Dendrite

TR_SLimey offered:

The Docker ARM images for Dendrite have been updated for version 0.3.2. As always, they can be found in my docker repo at https://hub.docker.com/u/trslimey

Direct links:

• Monolith: https://hub.docker.com/r/trslimey/dendrite-monolith
• Polylith: https://hub.docker.com/r/trslimey/dendrite-polylith

I have also submitted a PR for automated multiarch docker builds for Dendrite, so if that gets accepted, no more unofficial images for me :P

YunoHost

Pierre told us:

YunoHost is an operating system aiming for the simplest administration of a server, and therefore democratize self-hosting.

Synapse integration had been updated to 1.21.2 (1.23.0 available in branch testing)

Element Web integration had been updated to 1.7.13 (1.7.14 available in branch testing)

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Gitter

Eric Eastwood reported:

We've soft-launched the new bridge to all public Gitter rooms! You can now find any public room on Gitter checking out the room directory for gitter.im or directly by replacing the forward slash in the URI part of the Gitter room with an underscore and joining #*:gitter.im(replace the *). If you come across any bugs, feel free check the list of known problems and create an issue. There will be a full announcement next week so stay tuned!

We've also added a few more features this week and now transform :emoji: syntax from Gitter to Unicode so they're compatible in Matrix, propagate the room topic/description, and some bug fixes around threaded conversations and replies. You can track our full progress from the GitLab epic for the native Gitter-Matrix bridge.

Massive milestone! Great work Eric, it's been such fast progress!

Dept of Clients 📱

Fractal

Alexandre Franke announced:

After I ran out of ways to break it, we finally merged Our Hugestest Merge Request Ever. This concludes the “Port to matrix-rust-sdk” saga (see these three links for previous episodes).

Just kidding.

This was actually just the beginning, the ground work needed to lay the foundations for A Better Future. We already have a bunch of other merge requests to continue down that path. Hopefully there shouldn’t be such large ones in the (near) future. So what’s next? The work that landed this week was a switch to the SDK for almost all endpoint queries. Now need to handle the syncs with it. Later on, we will use it to handle storage, and then enable E2EE as well, but that will take quite some time.

Big progress from Fractal here! Will be good to hear more from the Fractal club to see what the ETA is for storage and E2EE.

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) reported:

While I've actually not had much time to work on Nheko, I did at least fix most of the UTD (Unable to decrypt) issues, when sending encrypted messages. This has been a long standing annoyance, but it should now finally not be an issue anymore (well... at least it should not be caused by Nheko as often anymore)! With this there are only a few tickets left to finally bring E2EE out of beta in Nheko (SSSS and bootstrapping cross-signing, as well as a general review for potential issues).

And while I have actually not been doing much work, we actually had more Pull Requests (and merged them too) this week than I have ever seen before in Nheko! Thank you very much to everyone who contributed. A short summary:

• Nheko now uses the Nheko icon from your system theme, if available

• You can finally look at avatars in their full resolution!

• Megolm sessions are now lazily loaded from disk.

• The registration page now also has nice inline error messages, hinting at why a specific input is unacceptable.

• Updates to the russian translation

• The README now lists all required GStreamer plugins for voice and video calls.

It feels super great, when you have so many people contributing, I love it! <3

Nheko really seems to be doing something right when it comes to attracting PRs!

Element Update

As compiled by the team:

• Public Roadmap
  • We now have a public roadmap! We’ll be covering more details on it in this week’s Matrix Live, as well as a blog post on element.io soon.
• Spaces
  • Work has started in earnest on the web and android implementations.
    • On the web side T3chguy completed the Spaces creation flows and is now looking at the Space landing page and Space post-creation prompts.
      • We have noticed that prefixing any word with ‘Space’ makes it sounds 20% cooler.
    • The mobile MVP will be read only and Valere will start with the ability to respond to invites and select Spaces.
  • So far it is looking very promising with lots of feedback from user testing informing the design.
• Social login
  • We plan to ship this as a cross client feature this month. This week we completed the implementations for web and android with iOS and Synapse ongoing.
• VoIP
  • Line 1 / 2 support is almost ready on web: ironing out some bugs and cosmetic issues, then PR will be ready for review. VoIP V1 support and hold/resume is getting close on Android & iOS, along with stability fixes.

Web

• Element Web 1.7.15-rc.1 is now available at https://staging.element.io, including
  • Improved voice / video call UI
  • Notifications are now ignored from rooms you've been active in recently
  • Login / registration flows redirect inside the app if you are already logged in
• Supporting tools like CI scripts are now using the correct branding
• React SDK PRs now have experimental preview sites, which makes it easy to try out changes during review

iOS

• We can now use XCode 12.2 to build all projects
• We are still working on 2 big changes:
  • Introducing a background sync service to display notifications quicker in the timeline
  • Introducing XCodeGen to stop having bad merge conflicts in pbxproj files

Android

• Release 1.0.11 in production (roll out to 10% for now)
• Feature Parity / URL preview
• Coming next Social logins
• Bug fixes

Aleks Kissinger added:

LaTeX support will be available under Labs in the next release of Element: https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/blob/develop/docs/labs.md

cryptovoxels client

Matthew offered:

cryptovoxels released a cute little preact matrix client for all your VR needs: https://github.com/cryptovoxels/chat

We don't have much information about this one yet, other than that cryptovoxels have been interested in developing a Matrix client for their world for a while.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Hemppa

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

Cos offered:

Hemppa the Bot is a multipurpose bot for writing modules super easily in Python. Last week Hemppa received a useful feature of printing files! You can set up a room for a specific printer and invite anyone you wish to it to allow printing. Any attachments uploaded to the room will be automatically printed. It's actually one of the easiest way to print from a phone and very useful if you have a printer that does not have drivers for modern Windows or MacOS versions. https://github.com/vranki/hemppa#printing

Matrix-Alertmanager

A bot to receive Alertmanager webhook events and forward them to chosen rooms.

jaywink announced:

Matrix-Alertmanager has a new release v0.4.0 with improved formatting of alert messages and an update of Node to v14. Find more information here.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. 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	tum.de	451
2	nerdsin.space	568.5
3	envs.net	572
4	matrix.sp-codes.de	785
5	mgp.ax.lt	888
6	selea.se	896
7	casavant.org	918
8	nobelium.no	1089.5
9	chatserver.ca	1189
10	mailstation.de	1254

Final Thoughts 💭

This is a pretty cool, Matrix-ish video! Doug shows Element-iOS and Nio running side-by-side, natively (!) on an M1 Mac Mini.

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://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Closed MSCs

• MSC1958: Widget architecture changes
  • Closed in favour of newer widget MSCs

Merged MSCs:

• MSC1544: Key verification using QR codes

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC2881: Message Attachments

• MSC2880: extend event and state API to allow sending to all rooms

• MSC2876: Allowing widgets to read events in a room

• MSC2875: room descriptions

• MSC2874: Single SSSS

• MSC2873: Identifying clients and user settings in widgets

• MSC2872: Move the widget title to the top level of the definition

• MSC2871: Give widgets an indication of which capabilities they were approved for

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we're switching from QR Code verification to key verification additions. Otherwise things remain the same: MSC2844 (global versioning), MSC2366 (ready and done in key verification) and MSC2790 (modal widgets).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

callahad offered:

On behalf of the Americans on the Synapse team: Happy Thanksgiving! This past week saw us land some improvements to the OpenID Connect SSO provider, bringing it closer to parity with the SAML provider. In particular, #8801 made it possible to gracefully handle username collisions when creating a new account over SSO.

We've also merged a pull request (#8785) from @dklimpel which removes deprecated paths for the Synapse Admin APIs. As of the next Synapse release, all Admin APIs will be accessibly only under the /_synapse/admin/v1 path prefix.

Otherwise, much of our time has been spent on getting pull requests like #6739, implementing MSC2403: Add "knock" feature, ready to merge. It's coming to a Synapse release soon!

Speaking of releases, we're looking forward to cutting a first release candidate of 1.24.0 early next week; keep your eyes peeled for that!

I'd be remiss in not mentioning that we started the week by disclosing CVE-2020-26890, which is a denial of service affecting Synapse versions prior to 1.20.0. If you've not upgraded, please do.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Gitter

Eric Eastwood offered:

Lots of features added this week including Gitter threaded conversations and Matrix reply bridging, image/file uploads, transforming mentions so notifications flow, and better looking flairs!

Not everything is available on production yet but you can try out the bridge for yourself at https://gitter.im/gitter/testing-matrix-bridge: #5faa0809d73408ce4ff3ad8e:gitter.im

We'll be working through some of the bridge oddities and hoping to open up the bridge to all public rooms on Gitter soon. You can track our full progress from the GitLab epic for the native Gitter-Matrix bridge.

MX-Puppet-VK (Na Zdorovie!)

Alexey offered:

The MX-Puppet-VK bridge for VK (Vkontakte) social network via this commit have added initial support for User tokens. This means that we now can use it for puppeting the real user account, to automatically bridge all "VK Messenger" private dialogs and groups into Matrix. Previously bridge worked only with VK community tokens as bot, to bridge only conversation with specific communities.

To get the VK User token without registering new app (and waiting approve from admins), users can reuse the "Kate Mobile" app token (or other app, that have access to Messages API) and receive it via https://vkhost.github.io/ service.

Support room: #mx-puppet-vk:inex.rocks

matrix-sms-bridge

Benedict offered:

The matrix-sms-bridge can finally be used with an Android smartphone as SMS-Gateway instead of gammu and a modem. @rebekka:imbitbu.de developed the app android-sms-gateway-server, that the bridge uses to send and receive sms messages. The new bridge version is used in combination with the app in production (medical care centre) for a week now. We have a throughput of 50-100 SMS message a day. The update is also integrated in matrix-docker-ansible-deploy.

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) offered:

The new completer is now on master. Please try it out and report any issues you may find. It now actually inserts a user link, keeps a per room message history and should look quite a bit nicer and be faster, when completing emojis or user names.

There were also quite a few cleanups, most of them done by Kirillpt! Some spacing here and there, saturation changes, the login page should now be less confusing, when you don't enter a valid mxid and toggles should now not get stuck in confusing intermediate states. There is also a russian translation now and some VOIP fixes. Pretty busy week, but I like it!

FluffyChat

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

krille reported:

FluffyChat 0.23.0 is out now with password recovery options and a lot of minor fixes and UX improvements. Now also available on Flathub!! 🙂 Learn more at: https://fluffychat.im

Element

Nad offered:

In development

Improving usability

On mobile, we’re busy adding better suggestions to empty/starting views of screens, improving searching for contacts, improving adding other users by QR code scanning, and improving deep link integrations on Android. Expect releases for iOS & Android soon!

Spaces

Spaces UI designs & user research testing are underway, with initial development for the Element Web client kicked off too. We've been doing research & testing in private to avoid advance bias from the people we're testing with, but hope to share things publicly soon.

Social login

Social login is in review for Element Web, with synapse & mobile support hot on the tails for next week prior to releasing.

VoIP

We’ve been focusing on implementing UI for call holding, and general UI polish across the VoIP experience, to be released soon!

Releases

Element Web

Element Web 1.7.14 was released this week, which includes:

• Several tweaks and improvements to the room list filter

• Improved registration based on user feedback

• Improved invite / create DM flow.

• Future releases will no longer publish element-web to NPM, and the package is marked as deprecated

• Renamed build artifacts from riot-.tar.gz to element-.tar.gz

• Experimental LaTeX maths rendering support is available via a labs flag on develop. Thanks to akissinger, thosgood, uhoreg, and others who have worked on various pieces of this puzzle!

Element iOS

Element iOS 1.1.1 has been released:

• It contains contains several major bug fixes, including end-to-end encryption bug fixes.

• Full history available on GitHub viewing the 1.1.1 & 1.1.0 tags.

Element Android

The Element Android 1.0.11 release is pending:

• We're working through final bug fixes.

• Separately, we’re also working on adding missing features to the client like; managing room aliases, room history visibility, join rules, etc.

• In the SDK, the migration of the services API from MatrixCallback to coroutines is going well, tracked here.

Vtx

CraftedCart offered:

In addition to boring stuff like being able to persist events (hopefully) right, so we don't have to initial-sync every launch, I've been making a start towards multi-account support!

You can sign in as multiple users and switch between the "active" user you want to send messages as - it's a bit flaky for now, esp. when scrolling up to read past messages, but hey it's a start I guess

Asked if they were using an SDK:

Preeetty much doing it from scratch, though I am loosely basing the matrix-api side of it on Ruma

Source is at https://gitlab.com/CraftedCart/vtx

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma

Ruma is a set of Rust library crates around Matrix.

jplatte announced:

We gained a new contributor, kiwidu38, who added the server-default push rules, paving the way to Conduit supporting push notifications.

I improved compatibility with some commonly-broken DAG events and added rudimentary support for message edits to help Fractal finish their move onto matrix-rust-sdk.

Dept of Guides 🧭

Matrix introduction series (German)

Samuel offered:

I published the second part of the Matrix introduction series on my blog (in German). It deals with end-to-end encryption, contact verification and cross signing. https://blog.sp-codes.de/sichere-chats-mit-matrix-matrix-teil-2/.

I have not read this series so I must trust that Samuel is saying nice things! Anyway it seems like a useful resource for telling kameraden about getting started with Matrix.

Matrix in the News 📰

Famedly featured in Gründerszene

Niklas Zender offered:

Today there is a German article about Famedly on Gründerszene -> https://www.gruenderszene.de/health/famedly-kommunikation-app-gesundheitswesen. Famedly is developing a solution based on Matrix to enable healthcare providers to communicate securely with each other and to facilitate intersectoral processes such as patient transfers or the integration of IomT devices. We have also almost completed a successful financing round and hope to support the Matrix ecosystem more and more. It would be so cool to use FluffyChat, Element, or a Matrix Messenger of your choice to start a video consultation with the doctor of your choice, or to be integrated into existing clinical communication flows concerning you!

Congratulations to Famedly on the progress they're making! If you're ready to graduate from TLAs (Three-Letter-Abbreviations) to the next stage, you'll be please to learn "IomT", which means "Internet of medical Things".

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

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	maescool.be	357
2	heitkoetter.net	367
3	matrix.47q.de	445
4	matrix.thedisco.zone	455
5	kif.rocks	477.5
6	matrix.sp-codes.de	605
7	matrix.rubberboat.xyz	713
8	nuclearlemons.uk	732.5
9	casavant.org	754
10	dodsorf.as	764

That's all I know 🏁

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

Today we are disclosing CVE-2020-26890 / GHSA-4mp3-385r-v63f, a denial of service vulnerability affecting Synapse versions prior to 1.20.0. We strongly encourage all Synapse admins to upgrade as soon as possible. If you have not upgraded in a while, please refer to the upgrade notes, especially the latter portion of that document which covers any backwards incompatible changes which you may need to take into consideration.

As a best practice, we encourage Synapse admins to upgrade regularly, and either subscribe on GitHub or join #homeowners:matrix.org for low-traffic notifications of new releases.

We extend our thanks to Denis Kasak for reporting this issue, earning a second entry in the Matrix Security Hall of Fame.

Matrix Live 🎙

Something different this week as we welcomed the community to submit their own demos!

1. Oleg presents his Matrix home-automation setup, which uses Opsdroid, home-assistant and the reminder maubot.
2. Nico gives presents a selection of small-ish new features in Nheko
3. Timo gives a tour of the current state of the Conduit homeserver
4. MTRNord (Marcel) presents the time-tracking bot used by Famedly
5. Sorunome presents bootstrapping (creating cross-signing keys and online keybackup) in Fluffychat.
6. Bala from Noteworthy presents Deploy a Matrix home server in 2 minutes with Noteworthy (set to royalty free music!)

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Bundeswehr deployment and app goes live

Matthew reported:

The Matrix deployment for the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) has gone live - details (in German) at https://messenger.bwi.de/ and https://www.bwi.de/news-blog/news/artikel/open-source-matrix-ist-einheitlicher-messenger-standard-fuer-die-bundeswehr and further coverage at https://www.egovernment-computing.de/bwi-und-bundeswehr-setzen-auf-open-source-a-980033/

Oleg (same fellow from the video - wow!) added:

Heise (German news portal) also quoted the news: https://www.heise.de/news/Matrix-steht-als-Messenger-fuer-Soldaten-und-zivile-Angehoerige-zur-Verfuegung-4963211.html

David Mehren linked to Element's own coverage:

https://element.io/blog/bwmessenger-goes-live-for-bundeswehr/

Dept of Spec 📜

New spec platform

wbamberg said:

• Demo site is at https://adoring-einstein-5ea514.netlify.app/1.1/

• This week we have:

  • Migrated all spec documents into the new platform, updated all template calls to the new toolchain except those for versioning and changelogs.

  • Implemented basic support for representing spec versions in the new site, based on the global versioning MSC.

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://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC1544: Key verification using QR codes
  • This landed right after I wrote the first draft of this entry!

New MSCs:

• MSC2870: Protect server ACLs from redaction
• MSC2867: Marking rooms as unread

Personally I would find that last one quite helpful!

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we're sticking with the same three MSCs: MSC2844 (global versioning), MSC1544 (QR code verification) and MSC2790 (modal widgets). MSC2844 in particular I personally found quite interesting.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander said:

We started out this week by releasing Dendrite 0.3.0 and then ended the week with a bug-fix Dendrite 0.3.1 release.

I'd like to say thank you especially to our community contributors who have been adding new features and filling gaps!

Changes this week include:

• Memory optimisation by reference passing, significantly reducing the number of allocations and duplications in memory

• A concurrency bug has been fixed in the federation API that could cause Dendrite to crash

• A hook API has been added for experimental MSCs, with an early implementation of MSC2836

• Forgetting rooms is now supported (thanks to S7evinK)

• The last seen timestamp and IP address are now updated automatically when calling /sync

• The last seen timestamp and IP address are now reported in /_matrix/client/r0/devices (thanks to alexkursell)

• An optional configuration option sync_api.real_ip_header has been added for specifying which HTTP header contains the real client IP address (for if Dendrite is running behind a reverse HTTP proxy)

• Partial implementation of /_matrix/client/r0/admin/whois (thanks to DavidSpenler)

• The error when registering a username with invalid characters has been corrected (thanks to bodqhrohro)

• The -version command line flag has been added (thanks to S7evinK)

• Backfilling should now work properly on rooms with world-readable history visibility (thanks to MayeulC)

• Some more client event fields have been marked as omit-when-empty (thanks to S7evinK)

• The build.sh script has been updated to work properly on all POSIX platforms (thanks to felix)

Spec compliance is unchanged, although some Synapse-specific tests have been removed and some new tests have been added:

• Client-server APIs: 58%, same as last week

• Server-server APIs: 83%, same as last week

As always, feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for general Dendrite chat or #dendrite-dev:matrix.org for development discussion.

Synapse

callahad offered:

We released Synapse 1.23.0 on Wednesday! Read all about it on the Matrix Blog. Otherwise, we'd like to highlight a few developments over the past week:

• We're discussing a policy for ending support for old versions of Python and PostgreSQL. If you have opinions, please let us know on GitHub.

• Our initial implementation of MSC2403: Add "knock" feature is undergoing review, and will likely land soon.

• We've been looking at ways to improve the efficiency of state resolution, and Erik has managed to devise some algorithmic improvements that yield an order of magnitude speedup for a handful of pathologic cases. We hope to have a better idea of how this might work for real world workloads soon.

Lastly, we'd like to take this opportunity to remind you to please regularly upgrade your Synapse. Especially if you're not yet on 1.20.0, as we'll be disclosing a denial of service issue which affects older versions on Monday.

maunium/synapse

Tulir said:

mewmew wanted to use my fork of Synapse, so I made the changes there configurable (instead of hardcoding to my user ID) and even added a readme to list the features. It might also be useful for other people who want custom room IDs and other fun stuff.

The fork is available at https://mau.dev/maunium/synapse

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

And just to be on time, I just pushed an updated tag and new version of my K8s container image and chart for Synapse 1.23.0

Dendrite

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

TR_SLimey offered:

I've updated the Dendrite ARM docker images to v0.3.0. They can be found at https://hub.docker.com/r/trslimey/dendrite-monolith & https://hub.docker.com/r/trslimey/dendrite-polylith

and later

I have once again updated the Docker ARM Dendrite images for version 0.3.1.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mx-puppet-bridge

mx-puppet-discord is a (double)puppeting and relay bridge for discord, based on mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome told us:

Support for receiving EDUs from matrix (typing, read indicators and presence) has been added. Protocol implementations can start using the new events, if they want to. Version 0.1.0 has been released along with this. You have to enable the de.sorunome.msc2409.push_ephemeral flag in your registration file

mx-puppet-discord

Added support for bridging typing and presence matrix->discord

Gitter

Eric Eastwood offered:

The native Gitter <-> Matrix bridge is in production! 🚀🚀 We're only testing it out in a single room but feel free to come by and send a message 😀

https://gitter.im/gitter/testing-matrix-bridge <-> #5faa0809d73408ce4ff3ad8e:gitter.im

We also have edits from the Gitter side flowing to Matrix and soon to support edits from Matrix. You can track our full progress from the GitLab epic for the native Gitter <-> Matrix bridge.

mx-puppet-vk

Coma Grayce told us:

Hey, our team of colorful ponies proud to introduce you a new Matrix bridge to VK.com chats. It's powered by mx-puppet-bridge and so far supports almost all of core features people want to see, like replies, message edits and file attachments.

Project home: https://github.com/innereq/mx-puppet-vk

Video introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBRBUA9beXs

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) announced:

• Profiles should now open again on older versions of Qt.

• I've been slowly rewriting the message are to be qml, to make it easier to do fancy styling. As a result emojis in the emoji-completer are now colorful and the avatars in the username completer now match the avatars used in the timeline. It also open up a few other improvements, like finally sending mentions as links instead of plain text.

• We have now CI running on our self hosted gitlab instance. We will probably switch of the travis CI, once this is more battle tested. Repositories are now also automatically mirrored between gitlab and github.

• Fixed a bug, where we tried to read the internal world group on your server instead of keeping that to ourself.

Konheko

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) offered:

I released 0.0.3 a few days ago bundling a few smaller improvements like redactions, copying messages and the ability to click on more links as well as some visual cleanups. Nothing radical, but also nothing breaking (I hope).

Element

Neil said:

Delight (Rich vdH, Michael (t3chguy), Valere, Steve, Nique, Nad)

• Improving usability

  • Last week

    • Observed user tests of people trying to use Element for the first time for personal and professional use cases

  • This week:

    • Began work on fixing several of the issues observed, like:

      • adding an invite people button to new rooms, so users can more easily add people;
      • changing copy to help people understand what DMs are

• Spaces

  • Communities are coming back with a bang! Last week we said we renamed them to Spaces, and this week, we’ve started designing what MSC1772 would look like for users on Element, to start user testing next week.

• Social login

  • To make authentication easier, we’ve started initial implementations of SSO in Element, exploring how homeservers & Matrix clients can support multiple SSO providers. Most of the work so far is captured in MSC2858.

VoIP (Dave, Brendan, Ismail, Francois, Simon, Nad)

• Web

  • PR up for new look in-call UI, now looking at line 1 / 2 support

• Mobile

  • Work ongoing to update both platforms to v1 VoIP

• Design

  • Some tweaks as implementation is ongoing

Web Platform (Ryan)

• Element Web 1.7.14-rc.1 is now available at https://staging.element.io, including:

  • Several tweaks and improvements to the room list filter

  • Improved registration based on user feedback

  • Improved invite / create DM flow

iOS Platform (Manu, Gil)

• Last week:

  • The release has been blocked because a bug has been found in the end to end encryption module. It has been fixed but we want to fix damages it created on one time keys before releasing the new app version.

  • The new background sync service mechanism PR has been updated

  • We started to integrate tuist to stop to be annoyed with merge conflicts on the Xcode project file

• This week:

  • Release!
  • Merge the background sync service mechanism PR and make more people test it

Android Platform (Benoit, Onuray)

• Last week:

  • We’ve just merged a lot of PRs, to improve room creation form and fix some bugs.
  • SDK side, Dominaezzz is converting some of the Service API methods to coroutines, for a cleaner code. See for instance https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/pull/2414 . 9 out of about 45 services have been migrated so far. We have about a 45 services in the SDK (!)

• This week:

  • Release including a new way to invite friends to Matrix and to Element.

Hydrogen

Bruno reported:

Released 0.1.30 with image uploads. There is also a new preference in the settings to scale sent images down.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma

Ruma is a Rust project to create a comprehensive set of APIs for Matrix. Previously there was a Ruma homeserver project.

jplatte said:

Since our last update four weeks ago,

• iinuwa created issues for all of the identity service api endpoints (w/ suggested module names!) 🎉

• I updated lots of enumerated types to allow unspecced values, for future compatibility & robustness

• Devin R made sure a custom Content-Type in responses overwrites the default rather than creating a duplicate header. #339

• gnieto fixed a bunch of bugs in ruma-federation-api

• Alejandro Domínguez added support for deserializing string power levels (requires the unstable-synapse-quirks feature because these events are invalid according to the spec but Synapse used to (?) accept them)

Ruby SDK

Ananace reported:

Just released version 2.2.0 of the Matrix Ruby SDK with the help of the community, with this release support for JRuby is improved - though still not perfect, in the higher-level abstraction direct messaging rooms are now exposed for all users - as well as all that the current user has, and the lower-level abstraction sees the addition of the CS API method to get an event context.

And just to reiterate; if you're using the gem - or have questions/comments about it. please do drop into the discussion room at #ruby-matrix-sdk:kittenface.studio.

Dept of Bots 🤖

You can see demos of both bots in this section by watching Matrix Live \o/

home-assistant-bot v2.0.0 released

Oleg told us:

Opsdroid bot for triggering home-assistant automations.

Changes

• ⚠️ Possible breaking change: change behavior how messages are matched

  • Before: messages were matched only if a message starts with !

  • In this version: the whole message is matched. This means in v2.0.0 this will work Hey, please !turnon light1

    • You can override this by using ^ in the config for. For example: regex: "^!turnon"

  • This allows one bot trigger another. See this TWIM video for details. 😉

• Add howto for setting up wakeup-light with home-assistant

• Update Opsdroid to v0.19.0

• Update opsdroid-homeassistant to 0.1.8

• Add debug config parameter to display messages in the chat, that the bot is getting but, maybe, is not processing/matching

Feedback

• Join us at #home-assistant-bot:fiksel.info #opsdroid-general:matrix.org

Famedly Timetracking bot

MTRNord announced:

As seen in the video I am working at famedly on a bot to track our work hours.

Until this happens the video gives you a sneakpeak on the functions of that bot.

Current (implemented) functions

• Tracking of time using !in and !out commands with forced usage of a description as well as ISO 8601 timestamps.

• Verification if a time is logical based on the known data

• Saving the times tracked inside of postgresql

• Tracking durations using a !record command

• Responding to only allowed users. (Including ignoring invites if a user is not allowed to use the bot.)

• Using !delete to remove entries from the database as needed

Planned functions

• Handling of timezones based on users

• !stats command which prints you the tracked durations based on a predefined or custom range of time

• CSV Export based on a defined range

• !break command. Putting a break in between a record or a in/out combination.

• Better handling of multiple !in commands

• Improved responses

• Reminders to call !out and to take breaks

Fell free to join us at #timetracking-bot:famedly.de . As soon as the repo gets opened up to public we will announce it in TWIM. Feel free to give suggestions or wishes in our room :)

Get it at: https://gitlab.com/famedly/bots/timetracking

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. 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	envs.net	297
2	neko.dev	297.5
3	maescool.be	346
4	sorunome.de	396
5	apetre.sc	439.5
6	maunium.net	503
7	midov.moe	520.5
8	matrix.sp-codes.de	603
9	matrix.thedisco.zone	608
10	casavant.org	609

That's all I know 🏁

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

Reminder: On Monday, we will be announcing a denial of service vulnerability which affects Synapse versions prior to 1.20.0. If you have not upgraded recently, please do so.

Synapse 1.23.0 now available!

For Synapse admins, this release support generating structured logs via the standard logging configuration (#8607, #8685). This may require changing your synapse configuration; see the upgrade notes for more information.

We've also added many new Admin APIs, contributed by @dklimpel:

• Add API to get information about uploaded media (#8647)
• Add API for local user media statistics (#8700)
• Make it possible to delete files that were not used for a defined time (#8519)
• Split API for reported events into detail and list endpoints. This is a breaking change to #8217 which was introduced in Synapse v1.21.0. Those who already use this API should check their scripts (#8539)
• Allow server admins to list users' notification pushers (#8610, #8689)

Lastly, Synapse 1.23.0 addresses some significant bugs, including regressions in the SQLite-to-PostgreSQL database porting script (#8729, #8730, #8755) and an issue which could prevent Synapse from recovering after losing its connection to its database (#8726). Synapse will also reject ACL modifications from clients which would otherwise cause a server to ban itself from a room (#8708).

Installation instructions are available on GitHub, as is the v1.23.0 release tag.

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 @chagai95 and @dklimpel.

The full changelog for 1.23.0 is as follows:

Synapse 1.23.0 (2020-11-18)

This release changes the way structured logging is configured. See the upgrade notes for details.

Note: We are aware of a trivially exploitable denial of service vulnerability in versions of Synapse prior to 1.20.0. Complete details will be disclosed on Monday, November 23rd. If you have not upgraded recently, please do so.

Bugfixes

• Fix a dependency versioning bug in the Dockerfile that prevented Synapse from starting. (#8767)

Synapse 1.23.0rc1 (2020-11-13)

Features

• Add a push rule that highlights when a jitsi conference is created in a room. (#8286)
• Add an admin api to delete a single file or files that were not used for a defined time from server. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#8519)
• Split admin API for reported events (GET /_synapse/admin/v1/event_reports) into detail and list endpoints. This is a breaking change to #8217 which was introduced in Synapse v1.21.0. Those who already use this API should check their scripts. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#8539)
• Support generating structured logs via the standard logging configuration. (#8607, #8685)
• Add an admin API to allow server admins to list users' pushers. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#8610, #8689)
• Add an admin API GET /_synapse/admin/v1/users/<user_id>/media to get information about uploaded media. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#8647)
• Add an admin API for local user media statistics. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#8700)
• Add displayname to Shared-Secret Registration for admins. (#8722)

Bugfixes

• Fix fetching of E2E cross signing keys over federation when only one of the master key and device signing key is cached already. (#8455)
• Fix a bug where Synapse would blindly forward bad responses from federation to clients when retrieving profile information. (#8580)
• Fix a bug where the account validity endpoint would silently fail if the user ID did not have an expiration time. It now returns a 400 error. (#8620)
• Fix email notifications for invites without local state. (#8627)
• Fix handling of invalid group IDs to return a 400 rather than log an exception and return a 500. (#8628)
• Fix handling of User-Agent headers that are invalid UTF-8, which caused user agents of users to not get correctly recorded. (#8632)
• Fix a bug in the joined_rooms admin API if the user has never joined any rooms. The bug was introduced, along with the API, in v1.21.0. (#8643)
• Fix exception during handling multiple concurrent requests for remote media when using multiple media repositories. (#8682)
• Fix bug that prevented Synapse from recovering after losing connection to the database. (#8726)
• Fix bug where the /_synapse/admin/v1/send_server_notice API could send notices to non-notice rooms. (#8728)
• Fix PostgreSQL port script fails when DB has no backfilled events. Broke in v1.21.0. (#8729)
• Fix PostgreSQL port script to correctly handle foreign key constraints. Broke in v1.21.0. (#8730)
• Fix PostgreSQL port script so that it can be run again after a failure. Broke in v1.21.0. (#8755)

Improved Documentation

• Instructions for Azure AD in the OpenID Connect documentation. Contributed by peterk. (#8582)
• Improve the sample configuration for single sign-on providers. (#8635)
• Fix the filepath of Dex's example config and the link to Dex's Getting Started guide in the OpenID Connect docs. (#8657)
• Note support for Python 3.9. (#8665)
• Minor updates to docs on running tests. (#8666)
• Interlink prometheus/grafana documentation. (#8667)
• Notes on SSO logins and media_repository worker. (#8701)
• Document experimental support for running multiple event persisters. (#8706)
• Add information regarding the various sources of, and expected contributions to, Synapse's documentation to CONTRIBUTING.md. (#8714)
• Migrate documentation docs/admin_api/event_reports to markdown. (#8742)
• Add some helpful hints to the README for new Synapse developers. Contributed by @chagai95. (#8746)

Internal Changes

• Optimise /createRoom with multiple invited users. (#8559)
• Implement and use an @lru_cache decorator. (#8595)
• Don't instantiate Requester directly. (#8614)
• Type hints for RegistrationStore. (#8615)
• Change schema to support access tokens belonging to one user but granting access to another. (#8616)
• Remove unused OPTIONS handlers. (#8621)
• Run mypy as part of the lint.sh script. (#8633)
• Correct Synapse's PyPI package name in the OpenID Connect installation instructions. (#8634)
• Catch exceptions during initialization of password_providers. Contributed by Nicolai Søborg. (#8636)
• Fix typos and spelling errors in the code. (#8639)
• Reduce number of OpenTracing spans started. (#8640, #8668, #8670)
• Add field total to device list in admin API. (#8644)
• Add more type hints to the application services code. (#8655, #8693)
• Tell Black to format code for Python 3.5. (#8664)
• Don't pull event from DB when handling replication traffic. (#8669)
• Abstract some invite-related code in preparation for landing knocking. (#8671, #8688)
• Clarify representation of events in logfiles. (#8679)
• Don't require hiredis package to be installed to run unit tests. (#8680)
• Fix typing info on cache call signature to accept on_invalidate. (#8684)
• Fail tests if they do not await coroutines. (#8690)
• Improve start time by adding an index to e2e_cross_signing_keys.stream_id. (#8694)
• Re-organize the structured logging code to separate the TCP transport handling from the JSON formatting. (#8697)
• Use Python 3.8 in Docker images by default. (#8698)
• Remove the "draft" status of the Room Details Admin API. (#8702)
• Improve the error returned when a non-string displayname or avatar_url is used when updating a user's profile. (#8705)
• Block attempts by clients to send server ACLs, or redactions of server ACLs, that would result in the local server being blocked from the room. (#8708)
• Add metrics the allow the local sysadmin to track 3PID /requestToken requests. (#8712)
• Consolidate duplicated lists of purged tables that are checked in tests. (#8713)
• Add some mdui:UIInfo element examples for saml2_config in the homeserver config. (#8718)
• Improve the error message returned when a remote server incorrectly sets the Content-Type header in response to a JSON request. (#8719)
• Speed up repeated state resolutions on the same room by caching event ID to auth event ID lookups. (#8752)

Hi all,

Heads up that we just cut another beta release of Dendrite - now at 0.3.0!

This is a really fun release given almost all the changes are contributed from the wider community - so huge thanks to S7evinK, MayeulC and felix!

The main new feature is full Read Receipt support thanks to S7evinK, which makes an enormous perceptual improvement when using Dendrite - so especial thanks are due there :)

So, if you're interested in helping us test, please spin up a copy from https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite and let us know how it goes - and if you're already running one, now is an excellent time to upgrade!

Full changelog (including 0.2.1, which we forgot to blog about) follows:

Dendrite 0.3.0 (2020-11-16)

Features

• Read receipts (both inbound and outbound) are now supported (contributed by S7evinK)
• Forgetting rooms is now supported (contributed by S7evinK)
• The -version command line flag has been added (contributed by S7evinK)

Fixes

• User accounts that contain the = character can now be registered
• Backfilling should now work properly on rooms with world-readable history visibility (contributed by MayeulC)
• The gjson dependency has been updated for correct JSON integer ranges
• Some more client event fields have been marked as omit-when-empty (contributed by S7evinK)
• The build.sh script has been updated to work properly on all POSIX platforms (contributed by felix)

Dendrite 0.2.1 (2020-10-22)

Fixes

• Forward extremities are now calculated using only references from other extremities, rather than including outliers, which should fix cases where state can become corrupted (#1556)
• Old state events will no longer be processed by the sync API as new, which should fix some cases where clients incorrectly believe they have joined or left rooms (#1548)
• More SQLite database locking issues have been resolved in the latest events updater (#1554)
• Internal HTTP API calls are now made using H2C (HTTP/2) in polylith mode, mitigating some potential head-of-line blocking issues (#1541)
• Roomserver output events no longer incorrectly flag state rewrites (#1557)
• Notification levels are now parsed correctly in power level events (gomatrixserverlib#228, contributed by Pestdoktor)
• Invalid UTF-8 is now correctly rejected when making federation requests (gomatrixserverlib#229, contributed by Pestdoktor)

Matrix Live 🎙

This marks the start of Season 6 of Matrix Live (S06E01), a decision M+A apparently made on the fly just now. Incrementing a mostly-arbitrary counter... Imagine wielding that kind of raw power!

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

IETF three-way bridge

Matthew reported:

The IETF have been continuing to experiment with new chat systems, and #xmpp_bridgingmeta_jabber.ietf.org:matrix.org exists as a three-way bridge to discuss the initiative spanning Matrix, XMPP & Zulip. Really fun to see open chat converging like this :)

Dept of Science 🧪

Analysis of the Matrix Event Graph Replicated Data Type

Florian announced:

Fresh off the arXiv presses comes our

“Analysis of the Matrix Event Graph Replicated Data Type” preprint! This time, it is a deep dive into the data structure properties of the event graph:

What type of consistency guarantees does it provide, how many of the other homeservers you share a room with can be faulty or malicious without violating those guarantees (short answer: all of them!),

and how is it possible that a frayed-out event graph ever laces back to just a few current events, while there is a probability larger than zero for growth to arbitrarily high limits?

To shed light on those questions, we had a great cooperation between my Decentralized Systems and Network Services Research Group and Prof. Dr. Norbert Henze from the Institute of Stochastics.

While we are still in search of the right venue for peer-reviewed publication, we went for a preprint this time to share our results with the scientific and the Matrix community in a timely manner.

In this figure, k is the number of participating servers, U_n is the current width of the event graph.

For example, with a current width of U_n = 1000 events and k = 200 servers, we can expect that the width goes below E(U_{n+1}) < 600 events in just one step.*

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://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• MSC2774: Expose the widget ID to the widget
• MSC2765: Widget avatars

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC2858: Multiple SSO Identity Providers
• MSC2855: Server-Initiated Client Clear-Cache & Reload

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, MSC2744 has entered FCP. As such we're switching it out for MSC2844, which aims to define a global versioning system for all spec documents. Note that MSC2844 does not currently have FCP proposed. Its purpose for being in the focus this time around is for asking the team whether ideas proposed are plausible.

Thus this week's focus is MSC1544 (QR Code verification), MSC2790 (modal widgets) and MSC2844 (global versioning).

We've also started making use of a Github board to track the state of an MSC through the currently somewhat ambiguous process of putting up an MSC that is ready for review to starting FCP. You can find the board here: SCT Backlog.

Some explanation of the columns:

• Awaiting SCT Input - These are MSCs that are deemed reviewable by the MSC author, and require review by a subsection of the Spec Core Team (usually one or two people) that are most familiar with the scope of Matrix that the MSC is relevant to.

• Ready for FCP ticks - At least one individual from the Spec Core Team has signed off on the MSC. It is not time for others to give a cursory review - mainly sanity checking from the perspective of the part of Matrix that they work on. Note that fundamental flaws may still be found in this stage, requiring the MSC to be reworked.

• In FCP - The MSC is in Final Comment Period, where everyone has a last chance to get their ideas in. This happens after most of the Spec Core Team have given their ticks from the previous column.

• Done - These MSCs no longer need immediate attention by some portion of the Spec Core Team.

These definitions are all flexible as we continue to see what works for the limited resources we have available for review.

Do not be alarmed if a particular MSC is not on this board, we're placing things on here as deemed necessary, and more will certainly be added in time.

New spec platform

wbamberg reported:

Working on the new spec platform: this week we've been simplifying the toolchain that builds and renders the spec, to make spec authoring easier and faster.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

callahad offered:

Note: We are aware of a trivially exploitable denial of service vulnerability in versions of Synapse prior to 1.20.0. Complete details will be disclosed on Monday, November 23rd. If you have not upgraded recently, please do so.

Happy RC day! The first release candidate of Synapse 1.23 is now available. For Synapse admins, we've added numerous new APIs thanks to contributions by @dklimpel, and we now support generating structured logs in a standard manner. The structured and drains logging options are now deprecated in Synapse's configuration.

Synapse 1.23.0rc1 also includes several significant bugfixes, especially around regressions in the SQLite-to-PostgreSQL database porting script, as well a fix to an issue that would prevent Synapse from recovering after losing its connection to the database. Synapse will also now reject modifications to access control lists which would otherwise result in a server blocking itself from a room. This is a particularly interesting case of unintended consequences in protocol design, and we hope to write more about it soon.

Next week should see the full release of 1.23, followed by a first implementation of MSC2403: Add "knock" feature landing in the development branch for 1.24. Look for more information in next week's edition of TWiM!

Dendrite

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

kegan said:

Neil is still working on P2P routing schemes and I am still working on Cerulean, but that doesn't mean nothing has happened this week! We've been busy reviewing PRs and have landed a big one this week:

• Read receipts are now implemented (thanks @S7evinK!).

• Usernames with = can now be created, in accordance with the spec.

Spec compliance has improved as a result:

• Client-server APIs: 58%, up from 57% last week.

• Server-server APIs: 83%, up from 81% last week.

Synapse Deployment 📥️

YunoHost

Pierre offered:

YunoHost is an operating system aiming for the simplest administration of a server, and therefore democratize self-hosting.

Synapse integration had been updated to 1.21.2 (1.22.1 available in branch testing)

Element Web integration had been updated to 1.7.12 (1.7.13 available in branch testing)

Dept of Clients 📱

Hydrogen

Bruno said:

Hello all. Hydrogen gained emotes (/me) this week, together with file uploads and downloads! Also, encryption keys are setup while typing instead of after sending, so you should see less momentary "the sender hasn't sent the keys yet". Also a good number of bugs were solved. Next up: image uploads!

As expected, /me commands brought a chorus of:

now that you support commands, you must add the single most important command in any decent Matrix client

- tulir

Bruno got the idea pretty quickly:

/rainbow perhaps?

Element

Nad announced:

Hello TWIM! From this week on we're changing how we're reporting updates on the Element clients. Each week, we'll include a section for cross-platform feature work the Element team is working on, and some sections for platform specific work too.

Spaces (previously known as Communities)

Communities are back! They've been renamed to Spaces, and on the Element team we've been busy exploring user experience and critical thinking for MSC1772, to allow users to organise rooms into useful groups.

Social Login

In an effort to reduce friction in authentication, we've been R&Ding how to allow homeservers & Matrix clients to support multiple SSO providers.. Most of the work so far is captured in MSC2858 and we're starting initial implementations in Element web next week.

VoIP: Voice & Video Calls

We've started foundational research, design and engineering to improve both the usability and stability of native matrix VoIP in Element. We've also started to look at how we can improve the continuity of the user experience between native Matrix calls and our current implementation of Jitsi.

Usability

We've been focusing on improving post-registration actions all round to make Element provide better prompts for first actions, and empty states for views on all platforms, with a multitude of fixes having landed on Element Web, iOS & Android in the last week. We've also started paid user testing to better understand specific pain points in the first time user experience, which we're looking to improve significantly in the coming weeks.

Web platform

v1.7.13 is now live! Which includes a bunch of fixes & improvements on VoIP.

Android platform

v1.0.10 is now available on the Play Store. We're also doing ongoing work to catch up with feature parity to Element Web, and Dominaezzz is migrating SDK APIs to suspend functions: no more MatrixCallback!

iOS platform

v1.1.0 is soon to be live on TestFlight for beta testers, and we'll soon be turning our attention to fixing end-to-end encryption regressions.

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) reported:

• You can now see yourself too during a video call.

• You can change the ringtone, as the default can be a bit annoying.

• Avatars should now not look as pixelated in some weird edge cases.

• You can now add text after a /shrug command.

That's all, thank you trilene and MayeulC for the contributions!

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix_app_service.ex (Elixir SDK)

pierre told us:

We've (finally) released a first version of matrix_app_service.ex, an Elixir library for the application service API (hex, GitLab)

uhoreg (known Elixir fan, asked):

that's cool. Do you have any projects that are using it?

Pierre:

I don't want to "sell" it before there's some kind of poc, but with a few friends we're trying to build a bridge for ActivityPub. we're using the library of the same name by the people behind CommonsPub, of which a lot of code comes from Pleroma, so the application service appears as an ActivityPub server. it's still the beginning, and I'm just starting to think about which information a bridge needs to keep (I guess sometime I'll ask Half-Shot a big list of questions 😁)

Today might be our highest-ever Pierre-ratio in TWIM!

matrix-spring-boot-sdk

Benedict announced:

A new release integrates an embedded h2 database into matrix-spring-boot-bot, which makes it a lot easier to write bots with persistency. You only need a few lines of code to write simple bots (e. g. a ping bot). I also changed a lot under the hood (e. g. using type-safe Matrix-Id-classes instead of Strings).

matrix-sms-bridge

The matrix-sms-bridge now uses the h2 database from matrix-spring-boot-bot instead of neo4j, which makes it a lot more stable and fixes some bugs. We are using it in production with hundreds of target telephone numbers without problems. I also added an optional feature to use room aliases (e. g. #sms_4901234567:homeserver) to prevent multiple rooms with one target telephone number (which is still possible).

In a few weeks you can use this bridge with an old Android-Smartphone, which acts as an sms gateway with rest api.

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

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

Slavi announced:

Thanks to Scott Crossen's work, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now manage Dynamic DNS using ddclient.

To learn more, follow our Dynamic DNS docs page.

Dept of Bots 🤖

New Matrix chat bot, Mozilla-focus first

bnjbvr announced:

I've written a small blog post about a Matrix chat bot I've developed with matrix-js-bot-sdk, it was started to address Mozilla specific features first, but then I've added a few other generally useful features too! Hope you'll like it and find it useful!

#botzilla:delire.party is the room for discussion (thanks Davo)

Dept of Built on Matrix 🏗️

gurlic.com, new social network getting Matrix integration

ahq said:

Hello Matrix friends. I've been asked to share this here. I'm currently building a platform for building communities. I'm focused on deeper matrix integration with communities, private messaging built on top of matrix, and custom domain support. Feel free to check out https://gurlic.com. The matrix community is at https://gurlic.com/matrix, but I haven't had the time to post much.

We have communities (https://gurlic.com/space -> https://gurlic.space)

We have galleries (https://gurlic.com/art -> https://gurlic.art) We have publications (https://gurlic.com/classics -> https://classics.wtf)

We have user pages (https://gurlic.com/bob -> https://bob.monster)

The UI is a little confusing now because we have longform articles (https://gurlic.com/homer/the-iliad-book-ii) and short social media posts (https://gurlic.com/privacy/post/324848317844422661).

I pretty much want all resources to have custom domain support, and matrix rooms for all communities, and nested communities. In the near future, I hope to have matrix servers for custom domains too. And of course, the source will also be open if folks want to host.

Right now, users on gurlic get a matrix account, and communities/galleries/publications get a room too, but i'm hoping to take some time to look at much deeper integration. Dendrite and hydrogen are great to build on top off...

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. 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	maunium.net	318
2	neko.dev	363
3	finallycoffee.eu	364
4	chatcloud.net	384
5	envs.net	586.5
6	acmelabs.space	640
7	matrix.sp-codes.de	696.5
8	kernelpanic.cafe	750
9	casavant.org	834
10	matrix.thedisco.zone	904

That's all I know 🏁

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