Next week on Wednesday (2021-04-21), the old Gitter bridge (identified as @gitterbot:matrix.org) will be shut down and any plumbed rooms (bridged connections) remaining will no longer bridge. To replace this, we've already migrated all of the portal rooms and many of the plumbed rooms in preparation so most users will not need to take any further actions. The remaining rooms with the old Gitter bridge are unfortunately not possible to migrate and for those communities a clean break will be needed. The new native Gitter bridge is here to replace this!
Gitter is bridged natively to Matrix on the gitter.im homeserver and all of the public rooms are available there. The new native Gitter bridge has many advantages over the old bridge and is being actively developed to ensure parity and delivers:
Ability to join public Gitter rooms from Matrix via #<community>_<room>:gitter.im
Native feeling virtual users on both sides of the bridge so messages appear from the author itself
Bridging edits, replies (mapped to threads on Gitter), deletes, file transfers
If you still need your existing Matrix room for a public community plumbed to Gitter, we’re happy to help community admins with the setup of a manual plumb. Send an email to [email protected] with the details! Self-service plumbing will be coming in future (meanwhile, please keep it to public community rooms only, if you must!)
We hope that this notice helps make the transition a little smoother and avoid any disruptions 🙇
If you have any questions about the migration path or the new bridge, you can always chat with us in #gitter:matrix.org.
As already mentioned a few times, this year the Matrix organization is taking part in GSoC again. This is an amazing opportunity for students to take part in various Matrix-related projects and helping those projects implement awesome new features. Submission for this closes on April 13 this year (which is Monday on my clock)! If you want to take part in GSoC as a student, submit your final proposals now! You can find some examples here: http://matrix-org.github.io/gsoc. If you want to submit your own ideas, please contact a potential mentor before that. If you have questions, please check out the #gsoc:matrix.org room.
If you have already been writing a proposal, now is the time to put on the final polish and submit your proposal. If you are interested, now is the last opportunity this year to submit your proposal! We are excited to see, who will want to take part this year!
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.
After a lot of work behind the scenes, we've now officially unfrozen the spec! 🧊 🔨
This means spec PRs that change the actual content of the spec can be made again, and madetheycertainlyhavebeen! Huge thanks to TravisR for writing all of those up (and others for reviewing!), and for the last push of removing all of the old spec toolchain from the matrix-doc repo.
With this out of the way, we move forward migrating the old spec pages over to the new site, as well as to the next release of the spec, which will feature a new global versioning scheme!
We released Synapse 1.31 on Tuesday. There are certainly nice things in it (read the release notes), but also, two days after that... WE FINALLY REMOVED SUPPORT FOR PYTHON 3.5!
As part of that, we now have a formal deprecation policy that explicitly states our platform support strategy. Namely: we follow upstream lifecycles. Thus, we can say with confidence that we will drop support for Python 3.6 in December of this year. So when upgrading, please do ensure that your operating system of choice provides modern Python packages.
By the way: if you're looking to contribute to Synapse, now is a good time to start grepping for 3.5 or xenial or stretch and seeing what cobwebs turn up which can finally be swept away. 🕸🧹
We're also experimenting with using GitHub Actions for CI, and would certainly appreciate reviews and pull requests from folks who are more knowledgeable in that area, especially around speeding up workflows and caching.
We'll be back next week with more details on the specific quarterly goals the team is committing itself to, but until then, 👋!
I don't know specific change helped, but 1.31 is a noticeable performance improvement for my Synapse, so thanks team!
There have been a lot of changes to the config file and web api,
please refer to: https://github.com/ZerataX/matrix-registration/releases/tag/v0.9.0
and make sure to check the sample config for other changes you might have missed
Receiving LINE emoji (via [MSC2545: Emotes](https://github.com/Sorunome/matrix-doc/blob/soru/emotes/proposals/2545-emotes.md
))
TODOs:
Rework message syncing so that receiving a message doesn't require "viewing" the LINE chat in the Puppeteer-controlled browser, which will make LINE send a read receipt even though you may not actually have read the message yourself.
Try to conclude whether bridging LINE stickers & emoji breaks copyright and/or would cause any other legal issues...! And look for something more threatening than just the Terms of Use (relevant section is 10.3). Any advice regarding this would be much appreciated 🙂
After finishing push notifications last week, this week I've been getting on top of the bugs that had previously come in, before getting to more feature work. There were 3 releases with 7 bugs fixed, the last release being 0.1.45 just now.
For people that use our Nightlies and Windows at the same time, we fixed our nightly builds for Windows now.
For people often going to the TWIM room, we fixed "TWIM" now actually finding the #thisweekinmatrix:matrix.org room. (We also fixed a lot of other small issues on the side, that are less interesting and hope we can tie a release soonish. :3)
Rather meta, that this fix relates so specifically to TWIM.
In the last weeks, we have landed several smaller features:
Quick reply: Press Ctrl+Up to reply to the last message
Quick edit: Press Up to edit your last message
React with arbitrary texts using /react
We also fixed a lot of smaller issues, including joining rooms from the global room list, emotes, some commands and deletion of images and added lots of visual improvements. We're still investigating a bug that makes NeoChat get stuck on startup, and some fallout from our recent redesign of the timeline.
We’re iterating on private spaces, working towards making them publicly testable first on the Web & Android, with iOS to follow.
MSC3083 (Restricting room membership based on space membership) has more details on spec changes.
If you have Spaces enabled in labs on the Web or Android come join us in the Matrix Test Space
And big thank you to everyone giving feedback in the Spaces feedback room, please keep it coming and as a reminder if you run a public community (on any platform) we’d love to chat to you to get closer to understand your problems and goals.
Element-iOS 1.3.0 is almost ready to be shipped. A public TestFlight will be available over the weekend. It has an entire new text composer with changes in the layout around the room timeline. It contains several fixes in the notification extension to avoid “Unable to decrypt” errors and out of memory crashes.
We made good progress on the new design for VoIP but we preferred to polish it even more. It will be available in another version.
Android
Element Android 1.1.4 has been released to the beta testers. This version includes lots of optimizations. Full changelog: https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/releases/tag/v1.1.4. This release should be available to all users and to F-Droid users next week. The matrix SDK2 v1.1.4 has also been released today.
We are making good progress to implement the Spaces, which will replace the communities (AKA groups). Spaces will be available in the release 1.1.5, behind a lab flag.
Behind the hoods, we are making lots of code cleanup and we are improving the Matrix SDK API.
elmussol let us know that Element Android 1.1.3 is already available on F-droid. I love getting a new Element Android update!
There is a new library in the wizarding world: Polyjuice Server, an Elixir library to help with writing Matrix homeservers. It is still in the very early stages, but it is starting to take form. Please note that this is just a library and not a homeserver implementation, as I don't want anyone to mistake this for something that's actually useful. (And now that I've scratched this itch, I should attend to my secret personal side-project that I've been neglecting...)
In 20 years, will we look at this small comment from uhoreg and say, that's the first hint of the project that would change the world?
I finally started writing some plugin development docs for maubot. It doesn't cover everything yet, but you can find it at https://docs.mau.fi/maubot/dev/getting-started.html. Setup docs were also moved from the GitHub wiki to docs.mau.fi and some of those docs have been improved (e.g. it now has instructions for enabling e2ee)
If anyone understands German and listens to podcasts, Krille Fear and I will be on the LinuxLounge on the 25th of April: https://social.tchncs.de/@theradiocc/106025736391026211
In fact there are dozens of people who understand German, and surely some subset of these listen to podcasts. With these conditions accepted, the LinuxLounge appearance will go ahead.
Synapse 1.31 can now restrict OpenID Connect logins based on userinfo attributes (Thanks, HubbeKing!).
This release fixes a rare infinite loop when fetching cross-signing keys or handling device list updates, and furtherimproves the speed of federation catchup. It also makes Admin APIs around user reactivation behave correctly when account passwords are disabled.
This is the last release of Synapse to support Python 3.5 or PostgreSQL 9.5, and the last release of official packages for Debian 9 (Stretch) and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial).
Future releases of Synapse will follow upstream end-of-life dates for Python and Postgres.
Accordingly, we anticipate ending support for Python 3.6 and PostgreSQL 9.6 in December of this year. We will also cease producing packages for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic) at that time.
MSC3079: Low bandwidth CS API is now up, feedback is welcome! Low bandwidth will increase mobile battery life, allow Matrix to be used over low bitrate links (1-5Kbps) and even allow push notifications to be done natively over Matrix (as /sync is now efficient)! We'll be experimenting with this some more and hopefully even enable it on some servers like dendrite.matrix.org in the near future.
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.
The Spec Core Team had another retro this week. We're happy with the increased amount of MSCs flowing through the pipeline, but there's still a huge amount of work to get through, mainly revolving around prioritisation.
Don't let that keep you from sending in your well-formed MSCs however - the more the merrier!
The unstable version of the spec now lives entirely on https://spec.matrix.org! Redirects have been put in place from the old spec to the new for unstable. Stable versions will be moved over in time (and the redirects will hopefully better preserve url paths!).
We're also planning to unfreeze the spec shortly so that spec PRs can start flowing again. We now just need to clear up the old buildtools from the matrix-doc.
🚪Knock, knock? MSC2403: Add "knock" feature was merged! Now we have a stable target to aim at for implementing knocking support in Synapse. Knocking is part of (well, the entirety of) the forthcoming room version 7.
Not much else to report this week -- it's been a short week, and much of the team is heads down figuring out goals for Q2. With the start of the new quarter, a few Element employees are rotating their responsibilities: richvdh has wrapped up his work on social login and will be focusing more on core platform, with clokep shifting to focus on Spaces. Meanwhile, babolivier will come back into Synapse / Sygnal / Sydent land.
From all of us the Synapse team, we hope you have a great weekend and we'll see you next week!
Big announcement day! It's been a long time cooking in secret, but today Nheko finally got legs!
We are happy to announce, that Nheko got aquired by Google and will now be shipping on Android!
Google already contributed a few important improvements. All your messages are now sent in rainbow colors, because inclusivity is very important and we feel like no color should get excluded in a message. We also merged some crypto code to make indexing messages easier and help governments to protect our users.
With great new things sometimes also come sad things. As such we sadly have to announce, that Windows, macOS and Linux will now be degraded to secondary platforms. Primary development target will just be Android and Haiku. The former is the most widely used operating system nowadays and Haiku is the only actual desktop operating system. We are sure this won't lead to such a degraded experience on those platform, just because they are now effectively unmaintained.
We hope you love this day as much as we do and if you are not reading this at the day of publication, we ask you to please check the date and mark it in your calendar, so that we can celebrate next year!
If you are reading this at a later day, please consider the following changes canonical:
LordMZTE contributed the /rainbow command, which makes Nheko finally a client, that can be taken seriously.
LorenDB has been having some fun building Nheko for Android. This may actually become supported in the future, but so far they are just experiments.
red_sky fixed the certificate errors on macOS.
You can now leave rooms by using the /part or /leave command.
salahmak made the upload widget close, when you press the escape button
We’ve been iterating on our initial implementation of private spaces, including getting the first parts of restricting room membership to space membership in Synapse
We’re also breaking out larger MSCs into smaller ones, like this draft on space membership.
Web
1.7.24 released on Monday
Additional VoIP call connection reliability improvements
Two weeks ago, we held elections in the Netherlands and I went around the bigger political parties to ask them what concrete goals/ideas/plans they had to fight big tech companies.
And the best concrete solution I've heard, I'm not kidding, was that they're happy with the GDPR and that they want to keep that.
Knowledge of the internet is pretty dire in the EU, and I wanted to educate people a little. So I made a video explaining what a decentralized open communication network is: https://youtu.be/v5Y8zCwIxjI
Additionally, I wrote an article for people and politicians to read through, where I share my opinion on how and why the EU should encourage companies to allow for interoperability: https://noordstar.me/b/decentralize.md
However, also note what's written at the end of the page:
Can’t find the right role? Feel free to reach out to Mischa (@mischawalmsley:matrix.org) via https://app.element.io or email your resume to [email protected] to be considered for new positions in the future.
Synapse 1.30.1 is now available. This release is identical to Synapse 1.30.0, with the exception of explicitly setting a minimum version of the Python Cryptography library to ensure that users of Synapse are protected from yesterday's OpenSSL security advisories, especially CVE-2021-3449.
Note that Cryptography defaults to bundling its own statically linked copy of OpenSSL, which means that you may not be protected by your operating system's security updates.
It's also worth noting that Cryptography no longer supports Python 3.5, so admins deploying to older environments like Debian 9 (Stretch) or Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) may not be protected against this or future vulnerabilities.
The next release of Synapse will be the last to support Python 3.5.
Ben is away this week for some well-deserved holidays (don't worry, he'll be back next week), so I'm filling in for him so you don't miss out on your weekly dose of Matrix-related news, let's do this!
It's demos week this week! Enjoy a selection of demos featuring: Spaces, low-bandwidth Matrix, Hydrogen notifications and bridging DMs between Gitter and Matrix!
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.
We're still working on improving our process for day-to-day MSC work, but small individual improvements seem to be adding up! Otherwise some members of the team came together and summarised the team's thoughts on MSC2190.
The 1.30 release focused on improving our resilience to interruptions in federation, both being smarter about what work we do, as well as improving the CPU and DB performance of the state_ids endpoint by at least an order of magnitude. Check the release post for full details.
...but also check out this graph (of that endpoint only) from an EMS host after deploying 1.30.0:
That ain't gonna bother us no more.
In other news, we've decided to try out GitHub Actions for automated testing of Synapse and will report back in a few weeks. Our hope is that this makes our CI more amenable to iterative improvement and outside contributions.
It's also worth flagging that the next release of Synapse, due in early April, will be the last to support Python 3.5.
v1.2.6 is out now with a guest account patch and some added libraries to the Docker image. It's a small one, but worth the upgrade when there's a few spare cycles to use :)
As always, if you run into problems or have questions, visit #media-repo:t2bot.io
Finally did what I've been talking about for a while, and got the Synapse chart I'm doing upgraded to the point where it won't require my own image any more, Version 2.0.0. (In fact, the chart will now deploy the upstream matrixdotorg/synapse image by default)
I also went through and fixed a bunch of things, refactored the worker config some to get it closer to the generic_worker setup, added configuration to include arbitrary values in .well-known (for Jitsi and the like), etc.
They've also added:
And just updated my Kubernetes image and Helm Chart for Synapse to the new 1.30.0 version - note that the image has been deprecated by now though, the chart is the new go-to way to get Synapse on Kubernetes.
And then, following today's 1.30.1 Synapse update:
I've pushed Helm Chart updates for Synapse 1.30.1 and Matrix Media Repo 1.2.6
We're working on bridging DM conversations between Matrix and Gitter. For our first iteration, you will be able to start a DM conversation with a Gitter user from Matrix. In the next iteration, we will allow Gitter users to start a DM conversation with a Matrix user.
The following is a small taste of what it will look like and will also be included in the upcoming Matrix live demo day.
Hydrogen 0.1.40 got released this week with support for push notifications (look to enable it from the settings) and some other smaller fixes.
(Note that because of a sygnal bug, push messages are sometimes failing to be delivered to mobile. This will be fixed in the coming days without any action needed if you already enable it before.)
If you want to know more about Hydrogen's new shiny notifications, check out this week's Matrix live (at the top of this post)!
Spaces are now testable on develop.element.io & matrix.org! Buyer beware: They’re in early beta, using unstable prefixes, so may break at any time. But you can test by enabling the Spaces labs flag while connecting to matrix.org or a Synapse development build
If you’d also like access to a test build for Android, we’re working out a better way to deliver test builds, but in the meanwhile let us know in the new spaces feedback room
There’s lots of rough edges, but we’re first focusing on polishing public spaces, and feedback is welcome in the spaces feedback room, or via GitHub issues
If you run an online community (using any platform), we’d love to talk to learn more about your general pains too, in you guessed it: the spaces feedback room
Watch this week's Matrix Live for a demo of the above!
VoIP
Not too much news this week, but look out for another connectivity fix in next week’s element web release.
Web
Element Web 1.7.24-rc.1 on staging, including:
Additional VoIP call connection reliability improvements
Added invite option to room tile context menu
Improved cross-signing login flow
On develop / nightly:
Improved invite error handling
Search indexing errors now properly state the error, instead of asking you to use desktop (when you already are)
iOS
Element-iOS 1.2.7 is already available from TestFlight and will be available on the App Store on Monday.
Just pushed version 2.3.0 of the Matrix Ruby SDK, headline features include; Ruby 3.0 support (though might still be a few niggles in there, expect a 2.3.1 once it's been more tested), a complete redesign of the room data cache to improve memory usage and code quality, and general request additions that people were interested in.
I've written a simple little script that connects to CalDav servers and sends me a summary of the events for the day over Matrix. https://gitlab.com/uhoreg/matrix_daily_calendar I find it useful as I don't have enough meetings that I'm constantly checking my calendar, so having a message at the beginning of the day helps me remember the meetings that I do have.
krazykirby99999 shared with us their guide for creating simple Matrix bots in Python: https://www.reddit.com/r/matrixdotorg/comments/mdqitp/how_to_create_a_matrix_bot/
Hey everyone 👋 One year ago I started to explore combining CRDTs with end-to-end encryption (Matrix's Olm/Megolm) to allow people to collaborate on the same documents/data. Couple months back I got a first prototype working and then evolved to a production ready app. Think of a simple Google Docs, but end-to-end encrypted and offline-first (iOS & Android for now).
Feedback, ideas and question are very welcome!
Website: https://www.serenity.re/en/notes
The app/client source is available here: https://github.com/SerenityNotes/serenity-notes-clients
This is not a project built directly on Matrix, but I thought it was a very cool use of Matrix's end-to-end encryption library, olm!
That last one turns out to be a pretty big deal: we've seen an order of magnitude improvement in both the CPU and DB cost of the state_ids endpoint. For example, the average CPU usage by that endpoint on matrix.org dropped from few seconds to well under 100ms:
As a reminder, the next release of Synapse (1.31, scheduled for April 5th) will be the last to support Python 3.5 or PostgreSQL 9.5, both of which have reached their upstream end of life.
We will also cease building packages for Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) and Debian 9 (Stretch) at the same time.
Note that Application Services must provide a type parameter with the value "m.login.application_service" when calling POST /_matrix/client/r0/register. Synapse currently allows registration without an explicit type, but this divergence from the spec will be resolved in a future release.
Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including dklimpel, ShadowJonathan, and tlvb.
Hello everyone! I'm excited to announce that Conduit has been accepted by Prototype Fund and will be funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research over the next 6 months: https://prototypefund.de/project/conduit/
The focus lies on federation support and overall improvement and stability, maybe we will even land version 1.0 at the end.
I am surprised how Conduit went from a small hobby project to a very promising Matrix server in just a year. Thank you all for accompanying me on this journey, I really appreciate it.
Now what did we actually do in the last two weeks?
Query signing keys through other servers
Many state resolution updates
Implement /get_missing_events
Implement /state_ids
Many bugfixes
Push notifications on mobile
Fix joining via alias with appservices
Enable zstd for database compression (3.3GB -> 1.6GB on old db!)
Rework state storage to be much more optimized (store a few bytes instead of long strings)
Send proper HOST headers in federation requests (thanks Gabriel!)
Conduit is beginning to run fairly well on the state resolution branch, we will probably merge it after fixing the last few bugs.
This is really excellent news! Congratulations to Timo on this achievement!
The Linux Foundation wants to use BigBlueButton and Matrix for the Linux Plumbers Conference in 2021 and is looking for developers to implement various improvements to BBB and to integrate Matrix as the in-meeting chat.
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.
We're still working to unfreeze the spec, but in the meantime have been working on MSC2516 (voice messages) and MSC1772 (spaces) plus the merged and in FCP MSCs you see above. ⬆️
v1.2.5 is out now with several bug fixes and other improvements. The most notable things being:
Optional support for Sentry (error reporting). This is the same error reporting structure that Synapse uses, so it should fit right in 🙂
Several oEmbed URL previews have been fixed, making them useful again. Rejoice once again with a preview of Tweets, Giphys, and other rich content.
Fixed a bug where after uploading media to a datastore the media repo would then download it again before returning it. This made remote media downloads inefficient (it'd download from the remote server, upload to S3, then download from S3, then return it to the user), sorry.
Sometimes a wobbly database could cause some issues with future requests. While I recommend a not-wobbly database, the media repo should be more resilient to this sort of problem now.
As always, if you have bugs or encounter problems with setup then please pop by #media-repo:t2bot.io
As I mentioned last week, we've been focusing on nailing down some inefficiencies in federation performance. Well, Synapse 1.30.0rc1 is out, and I'm very excited to share one result of that work:
If you look closely, you'll note an order of magnitude improvement in our handling of the /_matrix/federation/v1/state_ids/{roomId} endpoint. On matrix.org, we've seen that endpoint go from averaging a few seconds of CPU time to well under 100ms. Database usage is similarly reduced.
This improvement by @clokep builds on the chain cover index that @erikjohnston implemented in Synapse 1.26.0 to speed up the calculation of auth chain differences during state resolution.
Synapse 1.30 will be released early next week.
We also shipped Sygnal 0.9.0 today, which has a few minor bug fixes as well an initial prototype of Web Push support, per the Hydrogen update in last week's TWiM.
matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.
Updates:
New name! (Previously named matrix-appservice-line)
New home: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line
Group chat support
Syncing of own messages sent from another client (must enable bridge.invite_own_puppet_to_pm)
TODOs:
User/chat avatars
Emoji/sticker support (barring copyright issues??)
LINE->Matrix read receipts
Not requiring the Puppeteer-controlled browser to be visible in order to run (Puppeteer requires it when loading extensions, but will look for a workaround)
I ported the native https://nio.chat iPhone client to macOS Big Sur, and call that "Mio". Nio and Mio share the same SwiftUI code base, with the Mio changes being merged into the Nio upstream repository. Like Nio, Mio is still in very early stages but looks quite nice already.
A preliminary build can be downloaded over here: https://zeezide.de/download/Mio.app-0.2.0-2.zip, and I posted a screenshot in the Nio channel: https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/RpPiQFJytjXboshcUnqnGwrd.
Some time ago we featured Nio running on an M1 Mac via Catalyst, this is being compiled natively for Mac.
Thanks to LorenDB, notifications now omit the reply fallback and show that that message is a reply instead. They also should not break on encrypted rooms anymore (they show that the message was encrypted for now, but they will be decrypted in the future, if that is enabled in the settings). Emotes should now also show up in them properly and if someone sends an unencrypted image, this should show up with a preview in the notification as well.
Jedi18 ported the room switcher, which can be accessed with Ctrl+K to Qml, which fixes a lot of readability issues and should improve how the rooms get filtered.
Jedi18 also fixed a few issues with playing video on Windows. Salahmak made sending media easier by allowing you to send the image by just pressing enter.
Nheko now also stores images outside of the database, which should decrease database size in the future and make it easier to clean out that part of the cache. We also now use native menus where possible and fixed a few crypto and sync issues as well as formatting of mentions sent by Nheko. Nheko should now not randomely fail to /sync anymore, if your network connection dropped out in between. Also the flatpak should now be able to use your webcam in more cases, but this means we also use less sandboxing now. If you don't like that, you can disable access to all devices, but that sadly also includes the webcam.
Yet another beta-approximation of Quaternion at version 0.0.95 arrived, with the main change being fonts finally unified throughout the application. Translators are still very much welcome (French is almost there to be marked as "sufficiently complete", e.g.). Expect 0.0.95 release in the nearest weeks.
Polyjuice Client 0.4.0 has been released. This release features support for more endpoints, mostly contributed by two new contributors, multi prise and Arjan Sherpenisse. This release also has some backward-incompatible changes. See the changelog for more information.
Aligned with the Quaternion beta, stability-focused libQuotient 0.6.6 has been released - packagers already using libQuotient 0.6.x branch are strongly encouraged to update to this version.
Did you get involved with FOSDEM this year? If you hung out on Matrix that weekend and had a great time, then maybe you bought a t-shirt? Oleg did, and he shared this photo!
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.
Now that the new spec platform is out, we're looking to unfreeze the spec so that spec PRs can once again start landing. That process has been written up in an issue. Once again thanks to everyone that's given https://spec.matrix.org a try and reported their feedback. 🙂
Matrix has been accepted, once again, as a GSOC mentoring organisation! See us on Google's page, check out the list of project ideas (more to come!) and join GSOC Matrix to chat.
(💭 If this gets published every Friday evening, shouldn't it be Last Week in Matrix?)
On Monday we released Synapse 1.29.0! The most visible highlights are new configuration settings which can limit disclosure of user profile information and optionally rank local users higher when searching the user directory. However, we've also made quite a few tweaks under the hood, including some initial improvements to presence performance and allowing the media repository to regenerate missing thumbnails on demand.
The next release of Synapse will focus on mitigating several known inefficiencies and problematic behaviors around federation performance; I look forward to telling you more about that when it reaches release.
We're also excited to announce that we've secured funding to participate in the next round of Outreachy internships. Outreachy encourages people from underrepresented or nontraditional backgrounds to participate in F/OSS. We have funding for one intern and are proposing two possible projects focused on either modernizing Sygnal/Sydent, or extending Complement so it can replace more of SyTest.
While applications for this round have closed, we also expect to also participate in the end-of-year internship round, applications for which will open in September.
More updates for the chart gods! I've pushed new versions of my element-web, matrix-synapse, and matrix-media-repo charts. And a new image tag (1.29.0) for the matrix-synapse image I'm still building, still haven't quite found the time to move everything over from it and into the chart proper.
The charts are still available at https://gitlab.com/ananace/charts, and the #matrix-on-kubernetes:fiksel.info room is still a great place to drop in for questions or general thoughts/comments.
On Web, we’ve merged in a bunch of WIP work on develop.element.io
New concept of suggested rooms to help new users in a space discover important rooms - requires compatible homeserver
New experience for previewing spaces before you join them
Warning: The feature is in alpha, any spaces created at this time will need to be re-created later
On Synapse, we’ve started implementing the Space summary API which is teasing out various details in various MSCs
On Android, we’re:
Space first cut on a branch behind lab flag; create Space / switch Space / join by link
In flight | basic hierarchy support in SDK
iOS started SDK foundation work for Spaces
SDK: Support room type (MSC1840)
In flight | Space creation SDK
Web
Issue labels renamed to align with new Synapse style
Element Web 1.7.23-rc.1 on staging
Refreshed UI for file uploads and sent messages
Improved VoIP call connection reliability
Added Edge to the set of supported browsers
Added send message button to the composer
1.7.23 will be released next Monday (Mar 15)
iOS
We released 1.2.6 yesterday. The app is currently in review for the App Store and TestFlight. This release contains a new display for the progress of sending a message or media, a better UX for managing retry and bug fixes.
Android
We are working to improve the performance of the application. We are making progress on the local echo display, the initial sync time, the timeline display and scroll, etc. We have prepared a release candidate 1.1.1, but only 1.1.2 will be pushed to production.
This was the week of internal changes. If you are building from source, the following changes may affect you:
After some distros now ship a newer fork of lmdbxx under the lmdbxx package name, we migrated to that version. While we wanted to do that for some time, if you have been using your distro package and builds now fail for you, you may want to use the bundled version of lmdbxx. Similarly, if there are new database issues, that you experience, please report them!
Similarly, we dropped our dependency on tweeny, since we only used that in one location and the same thing can be done natively, so you can remove that from your package builds.
Furthermore we are now stricter with how we validate tls certificates and bumped the minimum version to tls 1.2. If that causes issues for you, please report them as well. There is a known issue, that if you are using the bundled OpenSSL, it may not load your system certificate chain, so you will get TLS errors. We are still trying to find a proper solution for that.
We also disabled the epoll backend on all ARM builds instead of just our flatpak, since that one just crashes on ARM and until that is fixed in the library we are using, this would lead to a much worse experience on those platforms (and we didn't notice that before, because we disabled it a long time ago in our flatpak while debugging a related issue).
Apart from that, we did also have some cool stuff happening. One thing I want to especially highlight is the push work from tilde. It is one direction that I never thought of Nheko moving in and I think UnifiedPush is a really cool project!
We also switched from inline buttons to a hover overlay for message actions. Please try it out and give us feedback, if that is an improvement or makes the experience worse! It does at least make it clearer, which button belongs to which message, make the interface less messy and scrolling faster.
We also try to suppress the notifications caused by @room mentions, when you reply to such a mention now by inserting a zero width joiner. This seems to work fine for all clients and servers but Element Web... So at least for everyone not using Element Web, if someone replies to an @room as a mod on Nheko, they should not get a notification anymore. (Full disclosure, that was an idea from the FluffyChat team!)
libkazv is a sans-io C++ (gnu++17) client library built upon lager. Along with it there is kazv, a kirigami/qml client, and a forward bot between matrix and tencent qq. Talk to us on #kazv:tusooa.xyz
UnifiedPush is an interface that apps can use to receive push notifications without caring about which service transported those push notifications to the device, and it's an interface that you can implement to deliver push notifications to people's apps, if you've come up with a great new way to transport push notifications from the internet to a device (did someone say push over Matrix?).
UnifiedPush has been specified for Android with some apps implementing it for a few months now, but now I've been working on specifying and implementing it for D-Bus platforms. (This is mostly intended for mobile Linux OSes such as postmarketOS, but any platform with D-Bus will work!) This means I've implemented a Gotify-based distributor that runs on Linux, and also implemented UnifiedPush in nheko to give it the capability to receive push notifications. I've yet to iron out all the details, so push in nheko isn't exactly ready to be released yet, but I can demonstrate with a video!
To you, Matrix client developers who desperately want to receive push notifications and get your app woken up while it is not running (on Linux or Android), this means that you should simply implement UnifiedPush in your app to receive pushes from the user's choice of distributor. (note: D-Bus API is not yet in the spec, but under discussion) How? See https://unifiedpush.org and join #unifiedpush:matrix.org to discuss it further!
Cos shared a nice guide to configuring mx-puppet-discord: https://boilingsteam.com/how-to-bridge-discord-in-matrix/.
Soru, the author of mx-puppet-discord, wanted to add some clarifications for the article:
The section on having to set up your .well-known is slightly incorrect: mx-puppet-discord does normal C-S API discovery, so if your C-S API is not on any subdomain it will already just work, .well-known is just needed in case that differs. Additionally, you can set up a manual mapping in your config.yaml (also helpful if you need http for e.g. local development). This is totally unrelated to setmatrixtoken.
While the guide mentions bridges, it does not mention setispublic <puppetId> 1/0 to make the bridge public / private. If you want your relay to just be usable by anyone, you should do setispublic <puppetId> 1, as then the rooms it creates aren't invite-only.
Brendan Abolivier shared this weeks ago, and we missed it. But, it's really nice content that doesn't go stale.
I did a talk at FOSDEM 2021 two weeks ago titled "Mental health and free software" in which I talk about my experience dealing with mental health issues while working as a full-time Matrix developer and give leads to address some of these issues. I've uploaded the recording of the talk at https://tube.abolivier.bzh/videos/watch/c28a3957-25cb-4519-ad3d-9f8812f88ee2 🙂
This release includes several useful new configuration options for administrators of federated home servers. In all cases, the defaults match Synapse's prior behavior.
AndrewFerr implementedinclude_profile_data_on_invite and allow_profile_lookup_over_federation which can limit disclosure of your users' profile information. These both default to True.
We've also implementeduser_directory.prefer_local_users which weights users on the same homeserver higher in directory searches. This defaults to False.
Synapse is now easier to run in proxied environments, with tzyl implementing support for the NO_PROXY environment variable, as well as recognizing lowercase variants of that and related proxy variables.
Under the hood, we've been steadily improving our type hints, especially in light of the recent release of Twisted 21.2.0 which includes its own type annotations. We've also landed some improvements which reduce the amount of work Synapse does when presence is enabled and you join a room for the first time. Oh, and the media repository now regenerates missing thumbnails on demand.
Lastly, if you deploy Synapse behind a reverse proxy, Synapse now expects to receive an X-Forwarded-Proto header on incoming requests and will log a warning if it is missing. See the upgrade notes for more information. The full changelog has more information on what's 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 aaronraimist, AndrewFerr, dklimpel, ShadowJonathan, and tzyl.
