🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

🔗Meetup Event in London

This week Matrix held a Meetup Event in London! There were presentations demonstrating E2E Cross-Signing (including the next, sleeker QR codes), P2P in the browser with Dendrite, Message retention, and Github bridging. There was also plenty of P2E* and B2D**.

You can catch up on what was missed by watching this week's Matrix Live (below), or check out the full event playlist, particularly the P2P with Dendrite demo.

* Pizza to eat
** Beer to drink

🔗version1 podcast featured Matrix!

Éibhear told us:

Hi TWIM, I don't know if you've noted this yet, but I got my company to interview Matthew and Amandine on their podcast: https://www.version1.com/one-zero-one/matrix-org/. Éibhear

🔗Matrix Live now available as an audio podcast

Reminder that Matrix Live is also available as an audio-only podcast. You can find the it:

• On Apple Podcasts
• On Spotify
• On Pocket Casts
• or by hitting the RSS feed directly

🔗Google Summer of Code

Last week we announced that Google had selected Matrix for the Google Summer of Code progamme, and requested projects get involved under the Matrix banner. We had a great response to this call: Ditto, Ruma, opsdroid and Nheko are all offering projects this year, as well as projects under the core Matrix team.

We updated suggested projects list (more to come), so if you're a student please take a look. Think about what you'd like to work on, get involved with suggested projects, and join #gsoc:matrix.org to discuss.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

🔗Spec

anoa offered:

Here's your weekly spec update!

🔗MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs have been merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No FCPs have entered Final Comment Period this week.

New MSCs:

• MSC2444: peeking over federation via /peek
• MSC2448: Using Blurhash in Media Events

🔗Spec Core Team

Next week the Spec Core Team is focusing on MSC implementation.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Neil Alexander told us:

• Experimental support for state res v2 (and, by extension, room version 2) is now in a PR and undergoing testing
• The hashing algorithm has been fixed which improves federation reliability with Synapse
• A significant number of SQLite bugs have been fixed and we now have the ability to run Sytest against Dendrite in SQLite mode
• Kegan has been doing great work on building Dendrite for WASM and running it in the browser as a Service Worker!
• Sending EDUs in transactions with no PDUs has been fixed, which also seems to fix sending outbound typing notifications

🔗Sydent

Brendan announced:

Sydent v2.0.0 has just been released! 🎉

The biggest changes in this release are the privacy improvements we've worked on last year, along with Python 3 support and improved documentation.

More details can be found in the full changelog, and folks can get their hands on this new version from PyPI or from GitHub 🙂

🔗matrix-media-repo v1.0.1 patch

TravisR reported:

matrix-media-repo got a v1.0.1 patch release to fix a memory leak. Downloads and the very small changelog available at https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-media-repo/releases/tag/v1.0.1

🔗Matrixmon v0.5.0

jaywink said:

Matrixmon, the perl based c2s probe with metrics to track your Synapse server client API responses is now at v0.5.0 and now allows using an access_token for the probe user.

🔗Synapse

anoa reported:

This week Erik been tackling the work on sharding the master process in Synapse, Patrick has been working on the new room alias semantics while richvdh has been doing some background preparation to allow us to change the way events are redacted in future room versions.

Next week: SSO/User Interactive auth is still in the pipeline, alongside an option to allow users to change their password without logging out their other devices, and of course, more sharding.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗arm64 support for all Tulir-projects:

The docker images of my projects (specifically mautrix-{telegram,whatsapp,facebook,hangouts} bridges, maubot and mautrix-manager) now support arm64 in addition to amd64. They're multiarch images, so the same tag will work with both architectures.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Nheko

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) offered:

• adasauce fixed the settings page to properly display on narrow screens, like the PinePhone or Librem5
• We fixed rooms being stuck on unread. This only applies for rooms, where you receive an event after you updated.
• Avatars should now render in high res on high dpi screen with display scaling enabled.
• We fixed some smaller annoyances regarding what happens, when clicking elements of replies and the reply button now only shows on hover (or tap on the right side, like the timestamp, on mobile)
• We fixed the logic around user interactive authentication needed for registration, which means you should be able to register on servers using recaptcha and other registration requirements again! Note that this currently doesn't seem to work on servers, that use workers. This may be because of a synapse bug, but the jury is still out, it may still be our fault ;-)
• We wrote some proposals for GSoC, which Nheko was invited to participate in under the matrix.org umbrella.
• Someone packaged Nheko for Guix!

🔗Nheko in Guix

That "someone" was nixo:

nheko-reborn is now available on the guix package manager! Guix feature reproducible builds, allowing users to verify the binary cache correctness, and the possibility to create tarball/docker images to easily share the build results with all dependencies to systems without guix package manager.

Guix also aims at reducing bootstrap binaries to a minimum (see this blog post for example), reducing the effect of trusting trust attacks. Those properties led guix to be the package manager of choice for bitcoin development.

🔗Riot Themes

Last week Aaron said:

I made a place where you can post Riot Web themes https://github.com/aaronraimist/riot-web-themes

Which like the flap of a butterfly wing has caused a series of events:

🔗A Nord Theme for Riot!

Dylan announced:

If you have your own build of riot-web you can simply modify the config.json and add this theme to it!

• GitHub: https://github.com/aaronraimist/riot-web-themes#nord-theme

🔗A wild Discord themed Riot has appeared!

Dylan reported:

If you have your own build of riot-web you can simply modify the config.json and add this theme to it!

• GitHub: https://github.com/aaronraimist/riot-web-themes#discord-dark-theme

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy support

Slavi reported:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now makes it easy to install custom riot-web themes, either by having you manually define them or by automatically pulling whatever themes are available in aaronraimist/riot-web-themes. To learn more, take a look at our riot-web documentation on Themes.

🔗Fractal

Alexandre Franke announced:

Our current Outreachy intern implemented many nice media related things. Videos now have a preview playing directly in the room history and clicking on them opens a player view with the usual controls.

Audio messages have a nicer presentation too. The audio player downloads the whole file to make seeking possible.

The narrow view (used e.g. on the Pinephone and Librem 5) gained a new swipe-back gesture to go back from room to room list

🔗gomuks

Tulir said:

gomuks now has support for lazy-loading room members, which might mean that small servers won't explode when gomuks does an initial sync.

🔗RiotX 0.17.0

benoit reported:

RiotX: We have released version 0.17.0: new attachment management, with media preview and edition. This release also contains a lot of bug fixes. We are also still working on cross-signing implementation.

🔗Riot iOS

steve told us:

This week we continued to implement verification by QR code at application and SDK level.

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰

🔗Matrix Notepad

KB1RD offered:

Finally, version 0.2.0 is here, which...

• Introduces the new version of logootish-js
• Gets ready for conflict resolution systems
• Fixes some (but not all) bugs encountered (thanks to the new algo)
• Removes the debug panel in favor of native browser console based debug

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗nio template

anoa told us:

...is a template repo based on the matrix-nio library that you can use to get quickly up and running with making simple, yet powerful matrix bots in Python!

🔒️ Encryption Support is now built-in 🎉! This does shift the login model from access token to username/password. Note that by entering a device id however, you won't be creating a new device every time you start up the bot!

Other notable fixes:

• /sync is no longer spammed! This should take some load off of your homeserver.
• Config file parsing is a lot simpler now by way of a _get_cfg method, which allows you to easily device down into yaml dictionaries, set default values, mark whether a config value is required etc.

Thanks to alturiak for motivating me to make these changes :)

The repo is https://github.com/anoadragon453/nio-template, and room is #nio-template:amorgan.xyz.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome told us:

mx-puppet-bridge received a few additions:

• tulir made a PR to add a provisioning API - said PR is already merged. Thanks a lot!
• Way better relay mode: You can now configure individual puppets to be a relay rather than a puppet. Additionally you can configure default room visibility and autoinvite.
• Don't unbridge a room on leaving anymore - it will remain bridged. You can get invites to rooms via the new invite command. With the knock MSC it will also be possible to get an invite via a knock.

If you have any questions, please join our support chat and maybe consider to donate. Thank you!

🔗mx-puppet-slack

tulir made a PR for custom provisioning API endpoints. It is already merged. Thanks a lot!

🔗mx-puppet-tox

mx-puppet-tox is finally functional again! It is updated to the latest mx-puppet-bridge library, giving it all the new features. Yay!

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗Hemppa the bot

Cos reported:

Hemppa the bot gained ability to run shell commands via Matrix. It's a small feature but enables a lot of possibilities in system management and monitoring, home automation, and whatever you can do in linux shell. As an example project I plan to use it for running a script to open hackerspace door with Raspberry Pi's GPIO if sender is a member. https://github.com/vranki/hemppa

🔗remindbot the bot

stefan announced:

remindbot got support for reacting when mentioned. This allows the bot to be used in rooms with more than 2 participants. The timespec got a minor update, supporting now the variant tomorrow HH:MM. Furthermore, the bot now sends a reaction when a notification has been scheduled instead of a noisy message.

🔗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	gottliebtfreitag.de	334
2	envs.net	349.5
3	imninja.net	425.5
4	swag.industries	427
5	maunium.net	431
6	maescool.be	594
7	shortestpath.dev	632
8	matrix.vgorcum.com	657
9	utzutzutz.net	688
10	matrix.m31.zone	712

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

Hi all,

Synapse 1.11 landed on Friday (sorry for running late on blogging the release notes!)

The main change is to introduce an experimental API MSC2432 for managing aliases for rooms on your local server. In Synapse 1.10 we removed support for m.room.aliases events, which were a way to try to track which aliases a room had on the room itself (but were vulnerable to abuse). In this release we've re-added the ability to query which aliases a given server has for the room, giving visibility for managing aliases, without having them spray all over the room state itself. Riot/Web 1.5.10 supports the new API, giving a way to manage aliases on your local server while we finish off the remaining work to improve alias safety & maintenance.

We've also changed the default power levels for new rooms so that room upgrades and ACLs require you to be an Admin (PL100), and invites in public rooms now require you to be a moderator (PL50).

Get the new release from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

🔗Synapse 1.11.0 (2020-02-21)

🔗Improved Documentation

• Small grammatical fixes to the ACME v1 deprecation notice. (#6944)

🔗Synapse 1.11.0rc1 (2020-02-19)

🔗Features

• Admin API to add or modify threepids of user accounts. (#6769)
• Limit the number of events that can be requested by the backfill federation API to 100. (#6864)
• Add ability to run some group APIs on workers. (#6866)
• Reject device display names over 100 characters in length to prevent abuse. (#6882)
• Add ability to route federation user device queries to workers. (#6873)
• The result of a user directory search can now be filtered via the spam checker. (#6888)
• Implement new GET /_matrix/client/unstable/org.matrix.msc2432/rooms/{roomId}/aliases endpoint as per MSC2432. (#6939, #6948, #6949)
• Stop sending m.room.aliases events when adding / removing aliases. Check alt_aliases in the latest m.room.canonical_alias event when deleting an alias. (#6904)
• Change the default power levels of invites, tombstones and server ACLs for new rooms. (#6834)

🔗Bugfixes

• Fixed third party event rules function on_create_room's return value being ignored. (#6781)
• Allow URL-encoded User IDs on /_synapse/admin/v2/users/<user_id>[/admin] endpoints. Thanks to @NHAS for reporting. (#6825)
• Fix Synapse refusing to start if federation_certificate_verification_whitelist option is blank. (#6849)
• Fix errors from logging in the purge jobs related to the message retention policies support. (#6945)
• Return a 404 instead of 200 for querying information of a non-existent user through the admin API. (#6901)

🔗Updates to the Docker image

• The deprecated "generate-config-on-the-fly" mode is no longer supported. (#6918)

🔗Improved Documentation

• Add details of PR merge strategy to contributing docs. (#6846)
• Spell out that the last event sent to a room won't be deleted by a purge. (#6891)
• Update Synapse's documentation to warn about the deprecation of ACME v1. (#6905, #6907, #6909)
• Add documentation for the spam checker. (#6906)
• Fix worker docs to point /publicised_groups API correctly. (#6938)
• Clean up and update docs on setting up federation. (#6940)
• Add a warning about indentation to generated configuration files. (#6920)
• Databases created using the compose file in contrib/docker will now always have correct encoding and locale settings. Contributed by Fridtjof Mund. (#6921)
• Update pip install directions in readme to avoid error when using zsh. (#6855)

🔗Deprecations and Removals

• Remove m.lazy_load_members from unstable_features since lazy loading is in the stable Client-Server API version r0.5.0. (#6877)

🔗Internal Changes

• Add type hints to SyncHandler. (#6821)
• Refactoring work in preparation for changing the event redaction algorithm. (#6823, #6827, #6854, #6856, #6857, #6858)
• Fix stacktraces when using ObservableDeferred and async/await. (#6836)
• Port much of synapse.handlers.federation to async/await. (#6837, #6840)
• Populate rooms.room_version database column at startup, rather than in a background update. (#6847)
• Reduce amount we log at INFO level. (#6833, #6862)
• Remove unused get_room_stats_state method. (#6869)
• Add typing to synapse.federation.sender and port to async/await. (#6871)
• Refactor _EventInternalMetadata object to improve type safety. (#6872)
• Add an additional entry to the SyTest blacklist for worker mode. (#6883)
• Fix the use of sed in the linting scripts when using BSD sed. (#6887)
• Add type hints to the spam checker module. (#6915)
• Convert the directory handler tests to use HomeserverTestCase. (#6919)
• Increase DB/CPU perf of _is_server_still_joined check. (#6936)
• Tiny optimisation for incoming HTTP request dispatch. (#6950)

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

🔗Google Summer of Code 2020

Wise Google have again selected Matrix as a GSOC Mentor Organisation. Matrix has been successful with GSOC for several years now, so please think about what you'd like to work on, get involved with suggested projects, and join #gsoc:matrix.org for more insights.

If you have a Matrix project of your own, and think that you would benefit from mentoring a GSOC student, then let me know. We are very happy to have Matrix-related students working on your project under the Matrix umbrella. (Just like we did with kitsune last year.)

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣

It's happening Next Week!!

Are you interested in a real-life, real-time Matrix-related meetup? Can you make it to London? Join us on the 26th February at Second Home in Spitalfields! Check out the agenda and register at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/matrix-london-meetup-26th-february-2020-tickets-93320354693.

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

🔗Spec

anoa offered:

Here's your weekly spec update!

🔗MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs have been merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No FCPs have entered Final Comment Period this week.

New MSCs:

• MSC2438: Local and Federated User Erasure Requests
• MSC2437: Store tagged events in Room Account Data

🔗The section where I talk about mscbot

Hey look, I finished.

🔗Spec Core Team

Next week the Spec Core Team is focusing on MSC implementation.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse

Neil announced:

This week we’ve been working on managing alias abuse, and also improved performance for state res v2. The perf work massively improved average send times on matrix.org. Here’s the heat map.

More excitingly we’re working on sharding out the master process in Synapse, so that worker based installations can scale more efficiently.

Next week it’s all about more alias abuse mitigations, fixing some SSO/User Interactive Auth bugs and continuing with our performance work.

🔗Synapse Deployment

Mathijs reported:

The image for synapse 1.11.0 is now available as avhost/docker-matrix:v1.11.0 and mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.11.0. As always these images use jemalloc, and mjolnir anti-spam got added to the images.

Ananace told us:

Just pushed the K8s-optimized Synapse images for 1.10.1

and:

Just pushed version 1.11.0 of the K8s-optimized Synapse images, find them on dockerhub as ananace/matrix-synapse

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗matrix-github

Half-Shot offered:

Hola. I wrote the matrix-github bridge a while back to support bridging issues and pullrequests into Matrix as rooms, so that the history of an issue can be tracked within a room, and users can comment on them within Matrix. As of today, you can now bridge in your own notifications into Matrix. It's early days, but is actually proving to be useful.

🔗matrix-appservice-slack 1.1.0

Half-Shot offered:

More news! This week matrix-appservice-slack has reached 1.1.0-rc1 and included is a whole bunch of puppeting and membership sync features. The headline features are:

• Add ability to sync Slack channels and users automatically to Matrix
• Sync Slack membership changes to Matrix
• Add whoami user command.
• Create private rooms on demand if they do not exist

...and then...

has reached 1.1.0. Nothing has changed. It's just not called 1.1.0-rc1 anymore.

🔗matrix-xmpp-filter

mijutu offered:

matrix-xmpp-filter can now handle multiple XMPP clients per process and multiple Matrix accounts per XMPP client. It's like matrix-ircd, but with XMPP instead of IRC. Made with libQuotient and libqxmpp. Available at https://k2c42.dy.fi/matrix-xmpp-filter.git Feedback to #matrix-xmpp-filter:ellipsis.fi

🔗mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome said:

mx-puppet-bridge now automatically stops typing indicators for a specific ghost if the remote protocol sends out a message as it.

🔗matrix-discord-parser

sorunome offered:

matrix-discord-parser now utilizes https://mau.lu/ to neatly bridge inline matrix images / custom matrix emojis over to discord! mx-puppet-discord already includes the new version.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗gomuks: SSO and more

tulir (Mozilla) offered:

gomuks now does single sign-on, which means you can log into mozilla matrix accounts with it.

Check the docs for information on how to add SSO to your Matrix client.

Later:

In addition to the SSO support mentioned earlier, gomuks now has initial support for rendering reactions and full support for edits (both sending and rendering). Some bugs have also been added and/or fixed.

🔗Radical

stoic offered:

Formerly known as Riot WebExtension.

• Released version 1.5.10 on AMO, which bundles Riot Web v1.5.10
• Support for Radical Native, which allows searching in encrypted rooms
• Renamed to Radical

anoa asked:

I'm curious how you got seshat working in a browser, considering wasm doesn't have support for multi-threading?

stoic responded:

it's not actually running in the browser, it uses native messaging to spawn a local rust binary and talk to it over stdio poljar did a great job with seshat, so it wasn't much left for me to do 👌

🔗Radical Native

stoic announced:

Formerly known as Riot Booster Pack.

• Support for traditional Riot Web over HTTP landed in v0.1beta7, so you can use Radical Native with every Riot instance on the web. We're still in early beta, so no official Firefox AMO install available yet, if you want to give it a try you can follow these install instructions

🔗Riot Web themes repository

Aaron reported:

I made a place where you can post Riot Web themes https://github.com/aaronraimist/riot-web-themes

See also: Riot theming docs

🔗RiotX

benoit told us:

RiotX: this has been a good week on RiotX. We are making progress on cross-signing and SSSS implementation. We are fixing many small annoying issues and also starting to implement little missing features to improve users' life! The big next coming feature is improvement of attachment and share to RiotX flow, already merged in the develop branch, so available in the next release.

Regarding "SSSS", uhoreg helpfully links us to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1946, and also added:

(I usually expand SSSS to "Secure Storage Something Something")

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Matrix Dart SDK (Pattle)

MatMaul told us:

This week a pull request has been pushed to integrate directly the SQL persistence backend inside the SDK, using Moor instead of sqflite. The code is smaller and a lot more readable, and it opens some nice perspectives: Moor has a web backend using sql.js, and now uses FFI by default instead of iOS/Android bindings, which should be faster (untested). https://git.pattle.im/MatMaul/matrix-dart-sdk/tree/moor

🔗Riot iOS

steve announced:

This week is still about cross-signing. We added support of self key verification by to_device and we are currently implementing verification by QR code at SDK level.

🔗simplematrixlib updated

swedneck offered:

I just updated my python library, simplematrixlib, as well as py-matrix-utils, adding the ability to upload files.

🔗ruma

jplatte offered:

Another set of new crates have been released:

• ruma-events 0.16.0, with a few minor improvements
• ruma-api 0.14.0 (and ruma-api-macros 0.11.0) has been released, fixing a bug where it would fail to deserialize most matrix requests if used server-side (bug found by timokoesters while experimenting with a new Rust homeserver implementation)

ruma-client-api is also continually being worked on to bring us up to date with r0.6.0 (thanks iinuwa!), but no new release was made this week.

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗auto-invite-matrix-bot

MTRNord offered:

I made a small utility Bot which allows you to redirect people that send messages to one of your "wrong" accounts to your "real" account.

https://github.com/MTRNord/auto-invite-matrix-bot

It currently does join on invite, invites your "real" account and sends a customizable message.

It does also support listening to multiple accounts or Homeservers.

🔗Dad Bot, the saga

If you were in #twim:matrix.org this week you may have seen that the most popular bot was "Dad Bot"...

Dylan reported:

I made Dad Bot for Matrix which mocks users who use "i'm" or "im" in their sentences.

• GitHub: https://github.com/dhghf/dad-bot-matrix
• Current instance: @dadbot:m.dhdf.dev

...and then...

Quick update about Dad Bot:

• I added edits
• Dad Bot now sends m.notice instead of m.text and doesn't respond to other m.notices

Thanks Dandellion, and KB1RD

...but suddenly...

DadBot 2.0.0 is already here! With the quick feedback given by the community I added all the features

• Dad Bot will now edit the response message if the original message was edited
• Dad Bot won't respond to other Dad Bots (lol)
• Dad Bot won't respond to old messages on the first time syncing

What's in the works:

• Responding with images in the message
• Jokes! (because it's not a full dad bot without jokes)

...and finally...

I opened a room for discussions about dad bot if you want to send feedback there. #dadbot:m.dhdf.dev

🔗lightweight reminder bot

stefan said:

I got my first silly matrix bot running last evening. It is a lightweight reminder bot. The source is over there: https://git.sr.ht/~rumpelsepp/remindbot

🔗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	imninja.net	365
2	shortestpath.dev	384
3	maescool.be	405
4	envs.net	421
5	matrix.vgorcum.com	535
6	gottliebtfreitag.de	535.5
7	maunium.net	545.5
8	queersin.space	657
9	asra.gr	672
10	saces.de	795

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

🔗Matrix Live now available as an audio podcast

You will know Matrix Live as a weekly video produced by the Matrix team and shared on YouTube. We are now offering the same content as an audio-only podcast, as a way of reaching more people. You can find the podcast:

• On Apple Podcasts
• On Spotify
• On Pocket Casts
• or by hitting the RSS feed directly

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣

Are you interested in a real-life, real-time Matrix-related meetup? Can you make it to London? Join us on the 26th February at Second Home in Spitalfields! More details to follow, for now please register your interest at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/matrix-london-meetup-26th-february-2020-tickets-93320354693.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Here's your weekly spec update from anoa!

🔗MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs have been merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

No FCPs have entered Final Comment Period this week.

New MSCs:

• MSC2432: Updated semantics for publishing room aliases

🔗Random happenings

I (anoa) am still working on the re-write of mscbot. Only needs a few more touches (concern parsing [in comment threads!] and review commands) before it's ready for use.

🔗Spec Core Team

Next week the Spec Core Team is focusing on MSC implementation.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Dendrite

Neil Alexander told us:

• A big chunk of early SQLite work has been merged into master this week, providing support in the client API, room server, sync API, account/device/key databases, federation APIs, appservice API, public room APIs and media API. Much of this is experimental at this stage.
• Some missing device management features have been merged (#835)
• Configuration is now passed by reference rather than by copy (#819)
• A number of defer-closes have been added to SQL queries (#844)
• Some gomatrixserverlib types have been updated (#808)
• Some initial work on retrying failed federation requests has been done, although not merged yet
• Made it through quite a few PR reviews finally, and will be continuing to do so!

🔗Synapse

Neil told us:

In Synapse land this week we shipped 1.10.0. Which contains a temporary hack to mitigate room alias abuse and an important bug fix for anyone trialling cross signing.

Aside from that we’re working on fixing alias abuse properly. Improving User Interactive Auth for SSO customers and rolled out our new py3 compatible sydent version.

Coming up, more e2ee UX bug fixing, and we’ll start hacking on sharding out event persistence on Synapse’s master process, which basically accounts for 40% of the CPU. The idea is to scale this function horizontally such that Matrix.org is no longer CPU bound after which point much rejoicing can occur.

🔗Synapse Deployment

Ananace announced:

Just pushed the 1.10.0 K8s-optimized images for Synapse, this release contains the necessary scripts to also run signing key generation and upload as a step towards one-click install support for Synapse without any requirements on storage classes.

Mathijs told us:

The docker image for synapse v1.10.0 is now on mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.10.0 the avhost/docker-matrix:v1.10.0 will follow shortly.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗matrix-appservce-irc

Half-Shot told us:

Hey! This week we have a minor release for the IRC bridge, 0.15.2. It contains a few fixes that have been plaguing the matrix.org instances, and will hopefully smooth out some of the reconnection troubles.

Notes from the changelog:

• The bridge will now notify you if a DM recipient is offline. (#978)
• Fix "User did not rejoin" error when bridge debounces QUITs (#977)
• Fix an issue where users were not rejoined to channels on netsplit/password change. (#979)

🔗🌈 matrix-bifrost

Half-Shot told us:

Fresh off the heels of FOSDEM, we've been working on making Bifrost a smoother experience for our XMPP friends.

This week we released 0.1.5-0.1.8 which

contains quite the bundle of features and fixes. The bridge is now running on matrix.org, if you didn't hear the

news so give it a spin by following the instructions on the wiki

🔗Matrix EmailBridge

Jojii reported:

Iam happy to announce some of the new features the Matrix-EmailBridge got recently. It's been some time since the last update came out because I had some other projects to do first.

• A Docker image is available for the bridge which gets updated instantly.
• Blocklist of email addresses (prevent displaying emails from certain email addresses)
• Bugfixes

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗RiotX news

benoit said:

A new Android developer joined the RiotX team! Onuray has started working on Monday on issues and features to get used to the codebase and the process in place.
We are currently preparing a release (v0.16.0) which contains a first implementation of poll (here is a demo), and some bugfixes.
We are still working on stabilizing the cross-signing feature, and optimizing the overall performance and stability of the application.

Read more: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/travis/msc/inline-widgets/proposals/2192-inline-widgets.md

🔗seshat+riot-powered WebExtension

If you're looking forward to using seshat to index and search your encrypted message history, you may be interested in this work from stoic. The working title is "Riot Booster Pack" - but we're looking out for a better name!

stoic said:

Searching in encrypted rooms in the browser would be nice? I agree, so that's something I'm working on (powered by seshat). If you want to give it an early experimental spin, beware of the dragons and follow these secret steps (Riot Firefox Add-on + Linux & MacOS only, for now):

1. Install the latest Riot Add-on Prerelease for Firefox (and don't mind the huge red warning page from Riot, skipping that is fine, it'll be gone in the next release)
2. Adjust the Riot config.json in the Add-on preferences to include the feature_event_indexing labs feature
3. Follow the instructions to install the Riot Booster Pack
4. Report bugs 🐛

🔗Riot iOS

Manu offered:

We have been spending most of our time on cross-signing to manage the m.verification.ready event and the verification by QR code. In parallel, we have fixed some issues and merged some PRs from the community.

🔗Riot Web

Ryan said:

• v1.5.9-rc.1 is now available at https://riot.im/staging. This includes some security improvements (adding a CSP) for self-hosted installs, options to hide typing notifications, a redesigned invite experience, as well as various bug fixes.
• The team's main focus continues to be getting cross-signing ready for release, including polishing the verification experience, building Riot with Seshat for desktop platforms, and improving QR codes

🔗new docker container for riot-desktop

Mathijs told us:

Cadair and me (the Matrix Doctors) have been working to make it easy to build the development version of riot-desktop. This resulted in a docker container and an azure pipeline. The latter also builds riot-desktop versions with seshat included for both linux and macOS though currently this requires manually installing sqlcipher (use brew on macOS).

🔗Nheko

Nico announced:

• sorairolake contributed a complete japanese translation! (#116)
• adasauce fixed an issue, where the image overlay opened always on your primary screen instead of your current screen (#114)
• Multiple people have been trying out nheko on their PinePhone or Librem 5. There were some successes, but part of the UI was never intended for that size and there is a nasty crash in the recent nightly, probably related to the networking code/library. We've been working on fixing those issues.
• There are now nightly flatpak bundles. Stable releases will still be on Flathub, but if you want to try out the development builds, you can download and install those bundles manually.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Famedly Dart SDK E2E Preview

Krille reported:

I'm going to finish the implementation of end to end encryption in our new Famedly Dart SDK. Here is a little preview:

Check it out: https://github.com/famedly/matrix-dart-sdk/

🔗matrix-bot-sdk v0.5.0 released!

TravisR announced:

matrix-bot-sdk has just released v0.5.0 which includes some new helper functions, async storage providers, and a new SynchronousMatrixClient for when you really need things to happen in a specific order. Check out the diff here: https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk/compare/v0.4.1...v0.5.0

🔗ruma

jplatte offered:

• We released ruma-client-api 0.6.0, with lots of updated API revisions (and also lots of breaking changes). The changelog can be found here
• ruma-client 0.3.0 is out of beta! This release contains
  • access to the raw http response for non-success responses
  • async/await support 🎉

🔗Ruby SDK

Ananace told us:

Just pushed version 2.0(.0) of the Ruby SDK, coming with a few backwards-incompatible changes as well as a whole bunch more endpoints exposed as methods on the low-level API client. Docs have been improved tremendously, some internal methods have been properly exposed to make it easier to use in a bot context, and another example's now provided which shows a different way to use the higher-level Client abstraction.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗matrix ansible modules

JCG said:

After entirely too much time, I finally present my 5 new and improved matrix ansible modules.

• matrix-notification: This is a port of my upstream matrix module over to matrix-nio and async/await syntax
• matrix-login: New module to log in and create an access token
• matrix-logout: New module to log out and invalidate an access token
• matrix-room: New module to idempotently join or create a room based on an alias
• matrix-state: New module to idempotently set state in a room

The work on this also included sending a few patches upstream to matrix-nio, so if you want to use the last two modules, you will need to install nio from source from my PR there.

Get the modules now from https://gitlab.com/famedly/ansible/modules/matrix!

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗twim-o-matic ranks by score

This one is a little meta: I've made some improvements to twim-o-matic, the tooling I use to generate TWIM. One of the improvements is that the bot will now sort the output per-section, in descending order of how many reactions the entry received when posted in #twim:matrix.org. So, if you see something you think should be at the top, made sure to react to it!

Even as I'm typing right now I can't think this will lead to any unforeseen consequences at all.

🔗httpdog

Aaron said:

I coded up this real complicated bot... very different from the cat one. HTTP dogs!

(actually just changed two lines in a config file 🐶)

@httpdog:raim.ist replied:

🔗Matrix in the News 📰

🔗German Blog comparing Matrix to WhatsApp

Oleg offered:

German Blog basicthinking.de posted the article, which compares Riot to WhatsApp completely missing the point of the [matrix] network.

• https://www.basicthinking.de/blog/2020/02/12/whatsapp-alternativen-riot/ I couldn't resist to comment on it describing the unbeatable features of [matrix] like bridges and multiple clients. (Let's see if my comment will be posted. 😉)

Spoiler: it was.

🔗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	imninja.net	394
2	gottliebtfreitag.de	408.5
3	shortestpath.dev	470
4	maunium.net	491
5	matrix.vgorcum.com	557
6	finallycoffee.eu	561
7	queersin.space	585
8	envs.net	624
9	andresco.de	633.5
10	kittenface.studio	687

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

The whole Matrix project is racing towards enabling e2ee by default. Synapse is no different and v1.10.0 contains multiple e2ee UX improvements, as well as a bug fix that prevented cross signing requests over federation to work reliably.

If any of your users are on the bleeding edge and have already started using cross signing (by enabling labs flags in Riot), then it will be necessary for them to force Synapse to re-send device updates by renaming all of their devices.

We've also included a temporary fix to address alias abuse. The idea is that until #6898 lands, servers will refrain from sharing events of type m.room.aliases with clients. Most admins will not be affected, but if you are present in rooms subject to alias abuse, then upgrading provides a pragmatic short term solution.

Finally, as of this release Synapse validates client_secret parameters in the Client-Server API as per the spec. See #6766 for details.

Get the new release from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

Changelog since Synapse 1.9.0

🔗Synapse 1.10.0 (2020-02-12)

WARNING to client developers: As of this release Synapse validates client_secret parameters in the Client-Server API as per the spec. See #6766 for details.

🔗Updates to the Docker image

• Update the docker images to Alpine Linux 3.11. (#6897)

🔗Synapse 1.10.0rc5 (2020-02-11)

🔗Bugfixes

• Fix the filtering introduced in 1.10.0rc3 to also apply to the state blocks returned by /sync. (#6884)

🔗Synapse 1.10.0rc4 (2020-02-11)

This release candidate was built incorrectly and is superseded by 1.10.0rc5.

🔗Synapse 1.10.0rc3 (2020-02-10)

🔗Features

• Filter out m.room.aliases from the CS API to mitigate abuse while a better solution is specced. (#6878)

🔗Internal Changes

• Fix continuous integration failures with old versions of pip, which were introduced by a release of the zipp library. (#6880)

🔗Synapse 1.10.0rc2 (2020-02-06)

🔗Bugfixes

• Fix an issue with cross-signing where device signatures were not sent to remote servers. (#6844)
• Fix to the unknown remote device detection which was introduced in 1.10.rc1. (#6848)

🔗Internal Changes

• Detect unexpected sender keys on remote encrypted events and resync device lists. (#6850)

🔗Synapse 1.10.0rc1 (2020-01-31)

🔗Features

• Add experimental support for updated authorization rules for aliases events, from MSC2260. (#6787, #6790, #6794)

🔗Bugfixes

• Warn if postgres database has a non-C locale, as that can cause issues when upgrading locales (e.g. due to upgrading OS). (#6734)
• Minor fixes to PUT /_synapse/admin/v2/users admin api. (#6761)
• Validate client_secret parameter using the regex provided by the Client-Server API, temporarily allowing : characters for older clients. The : character will be removed in a future release. (#6767)
• Fix persisting redaction events that have been redacted (or otherwise don't have a redacts key). (#6771)
• Fix outbound federation request metrics. (#6795)
• Fix bug where querying a remote user's device keys that weren't cached resulted in only returning a single device. (#6796)
• Fix race in federation sender worker that delayed sending of device updates. (#6799, #6800)
• Fix bug where Synapse didn't invalidate cache of remote users' devices when Synapse left a room. (#6801)
• Fix waking up other workers when remote server is detected to have come back online. (#6811)

🔗Improved Documentation

• Clarify documentation related to user_dir and federation_reader workers. (#6775)

🔗Internal Changes

• Record room versions in the rooms table. (#6729, #6788, #6810)
• Propagate cache invalidates from workers to other workers. (#6748)
• Remove some unnecessary admin handler abstraction methods. (#6751)
• Add some debugging for media storage providers. (#6757)
• Detect unknown remote devices and mark cache as stale. (#6776, #6819)
• Attempt to resync remote users' devices when detected as stale. (#6786)
• Delete current state from the database when server leaves a room. (#6792)
• When a client asks for a remote user's device keys check if the local cache for that user has been marked as potentially stale. (#6797)
• Add background update to clean out left rooms from current state. (#6802, #6816)
• Refactoring work in preparation for changing the event redaction algorithm. (#6803, #6805, #6806, #6807, #6820)

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

Every month (in theory), we do an in-office wrap-up of some interesting project work from the team. This Matrix Live was recorded this afternoon in the Matrix Office, and features Valere explaining Cross-Signing, and Matthew demonstrating P2P/dendrite. (Apologies for the incorrect recorded screen at times! Video came straight from a live demo!)

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Here's your weekly spec update!

🔗MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

No MSCs entered FCP this week.

New MSCs:

No new MSCs have been created.

🔗Random happenings

I (anoa) have been re-writing mscbot as it hasn't gotten much development love in the past year and there's lots of features we'd like to implement. Expect to see some of that next week. First feature the new implementation has is being able to track who is in the Spec Core Team via github teams instead of a config file.

🔗Spec Core Team update

The Spec Core Team is working on MSC2260, MSC2261, and a QR-via-SAS thing which uhoreg is currently working on (this means less complicated, easier-to-scan QR codes for verification, which may have the side effect of FOSDEM demos being slightly less hilarious).

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣

🔗FOSDEM 2020

FOSDEM happened, Matrix had a great time! Was awesome to see so many people at the stand, and the talks, and even at our social on Saturday night.
Congratulations to everyone who was able to buy a limited edition Matrix FOSDEM 2020 t-shirt! Check out our round-up here.

@florian:dsn.tm.kit.edu said:

Reporting from FOSDEM: Currently sitting in the Fixing healthcare data exchange with decentralized FOSS: Building a decentralized Infrastructure to fix medical data exchange in The Netherlands talk, and was pleasantly surprised to learn that they also want to integrate Matrix for decentralized messaging between healthcare providers themselves and patients.

Mathijs announced:

last week was FOSDEM and it was great!

Yes we covered that.

🔗Matrix Meetup: London, 26th February 2020

Are you interested in a real-life, real-time Matrix-related meetup? Can you make it to London? Join us on the 26th February at Second Home in Spitalfields! More details to follow, for now please register your interest at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/matrix-london-meetup-26th-february-2020-tickets-93320354693.

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

🔗ungleich.ch offering paid Matrix hosting

@nico:ungleich.ch told us:

I was just pointed to here by evilham because of https://twitter.com/ungleich/status/1224375895995113474 - maybe it's of interest for anyone

This is quite exciting - a new provider is offering Hosted Matrix solutions, based in Switzerland. Go check out their offering: https://ungleich.ch/u/products/hosted-matrix-chat/.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Dendrite

Neil Alexander reported:

Quite a lot has been happening in the Dendrite space, both in terms of general development, usability improvements and also further P2P experimentation post-FOSDEM. The main highlights are:

• We have decided to require Go 1.13 for Dendrite going forward (our CI and tools have been updated to reflect this requirement)
• Some federation testing has taken place between Dendrite and Synapse and it's looking reasonably good bar a few bugs
• Initial support for distinguishing room versions has been added - this is the foundation work for being able to implement state resolution v2 and later room versions soon
• The /capabilities endpoint has been implemented and now contains information about m.room_versions
• Account data GET endpoints have been implemented
• Guest registration should now be working - thanks to prateek2211 for the contribution!
• The public rooms API is now wired up for roomserver events and (mostly) works for local rooms
• Some more /sync fixes are in now
• SQLite work is continuing thanks to Kegan's on-going efforts

We've also been really encouraged by the number of people at FOSDEM who came to speak to us about Dendrite and P2P. We're hoping to strategise further about the P2P work further in the coming weeks once Dendrite is in better shape, so watch this space!

🔗Synapse

This week we’ve been working on alias auth rules, acme v2 support and moving groups apis onto a worker to aid performance. Sorry matrix.org has been a bit slow these past few days, we’re working on it and shipped some fixes earlier today.

Coming up are more perf improvements, more alias rules, getting sydent running in production on python 3. We’ll also ship v1.10.0 which contains some cross signing bug fixes.

🔗Docker-matrix

Mathijs told us:

A docker image for synapse 1.10.0rc2 is available on mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.10.0rc2

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗matrix-appservice-irc 1.15.0

Half-Shot announced:

Good people, 0.15.0 is out!. Please go ahead and read the changes and see if there is something you like :). We will be shipping this out to all the other bridges in due course :)

🔗mautrix-telegram

Tulir said:

I released v0.7.1 that includes some minor bugfixes, then added a !tg backfill command to backfill all history since the last bridged message. Future improvements may include more control over how many messages to backfill, automatically backfilling for new portals and freezing incoming message handling when a backfill is in progress.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗maubot

There's a new maubot plugin to post http.cat pictures to a room. It's installed into Cat Disruptor 6000 and can of course be self-hosted too. It has one command: !http \<status\>, that gets https://http.cat/<status>.jpg and posts it to the room.

🔗mautrix-manager

Some time ago I also made this thing: https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-manager. It might theoretically do something useful in the future, such as allowing users to log into bridges from a single website instead of by talking to many bots. Currently it only does telegram and maybe facebook, but at least it has a fancy login UI. It could also support being embedded into Riot as a widget and/or integration manager at some point, since I made the auth thing with Matrix's OpenID feature and MSC1961.

🔗Quotient project revived

kitsune told us:

The Quotient project is back from hibernation now that its lead developer settled in another half of the globe; commits and PRs start moving around again. Thanks to all those patiently waiting!

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Nheko

Nico said:

• You can now select more emojis in the emoji picker. (your font may not support them yet)
• The timeline should scroll a lot faster and room switching should be a lot faster.
• Fixed some alignment and sharpness issues in the logo
• You can now mute rooms (or set them to mentions only)!
• Some fixes around all kind of weird html escaping in usernames and messages.
• Move the reply popup into the timeline to fix some alignment issues and improve the look and feel.
• Fix an issue, where on windows the maximum database size was set to only a few bytes because of integer overflow.
• Fix a regression when importing key backups from Riot.
• Nheko now only sends the file name of a file as its name instead of the full path, fixing a privacy leak.

🔗Riot WebExtension 🧩

stoic reported:

Version 1.5.8.5 is out

• SSO Login is now supported (so mozilla.modular.im logins work 🎉)
• Updated Riot Web to stable version 1.5.8
• Firefox-only:
  • Now correctly reopens riot tabs that were in containers when the Add-on updates
  • General tips on how to use containers to have multiple accounts can be found on the AMO description
• Get the Firefox Add-on here
• Get the Chrome Extension here

🔗Riot iOS

Manu reported:

This week, we polished the E2E by default and cross-signing features we have implemented so far.

🔗Riot Web

Ryan offered:

• Continuing focus on cross-signing post-FOSDEM to get everything ready for release
• QR codes and key sharing improvements planned for delivery in the near future
• Improved Seshat integration in Riot Desktop with more status info

🔗Riot-Android

benoit reported:

Riot-Android (yes, the legacy app!): We have fixed the issue with SSO login with Firefox accounts, and issue with Video Call. Expect a release at the beginning of next week.

🔗RiotX

benoit announced:

RiotX: we are still stabilizing the cross-signing implementation. Many other fixes are coming. Also SSO issue with Firefox accounts has been fixed, and we will also release a new version of the application next week.

🔗matrix-presents

...is a matrix presentation client. The room of interest is #presents:half-shot.uk

It's also had a fair few changes since last time:

• QR codes now render if you are the presenter, for easy joining.
• You can react to slides as a guest, and they show up on the presenters screen :).
• Slides and their contents are cached in indexedeb (browser storage), to lessen the load on homeservers.
• Add UI to create rooms in the client, albeit without an editor just yet.
• Various CSS tweaks to try and make life better.

🔗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	imninja.net	435
2	helsinki-systems.de	449
3	lyseo.edu.ouka.fi	450.5
4	encom.eu.org	463.5
5	matrix.vgorcum.com	525
6	maunium.net	547
7	gottliebtfreitag.de	563
8	neko.dev	716
9	openastronomy.org	736
10	t2bot.io	755

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

Hi all,

We're just back from an incredible time at FOSDEM 2020 - Europe's biggest Free & Open Source Software conference. Huge huge thanks to everyone who came to our talks (sorry if you couldn't get in :/), came to talk to us at the stand, or flagged us down to give feedback, chase PRs, file bugs, or just say thanks. Thanks also to FOSDEM to accepting all of our talks this year, and to the FOSDEM organisers for pulling together yet another amazing event :)

We ended up with three talks:

• Making and Breaking Matrix's E2E Encryption
• The Path to Peer-to-Peer Matrix
• Crossing the Bifröst - Bridging All The Things with Matrix

We'll do a proper blog write-up on enabling E2E encryption by default, cross-signing, and all the other E2E encryption work that's been going on once we ship the stable release - but as of Saturday(!) it has landed on Riot/Web Develop, RiotX/Android (0.14.2) and Riot/iOS develop TestFlight, but we're still debugging and we need a bit longer before cutting the final releases.

So, until then, please take a look at the videos if you missed the livestream or weren't at the event!

The FOSDEM video recording lost the slides for the bridging talk - but luckily the presentation itself is a Matrix client and so you can view the slides yourself right here!.

Here's to FOSDEM 2021!

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

This weekend Matrix will be well represented at FOSDEM! We'll have a stand (come visit!), but also note that we have THREE speaking slots (all on Sunday):

• Half-Shot will discuss Bridging All The Things with Matrix in UD2.208 (Decroly) at 11:15
• Matthew will present The Path to Peer-to-Peer Matrix in UA2.220 (Guillissen) at 14:30
• Matthew again will give a talk titled Making & Breaking Matrix's E2E encryption in K.1.105 (La Fontaine) at 16:00

No Matrix Live today - look out for a special edition this weekend!

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

🔗Spec

anoa told us:

Here's your weekly spec update!

🔗MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

No MSCs entered FCP this week.

New MSCs:

• MSC2427: Proposal for JSON-based message formatting
• MSC2425: Remove Authentication on /submitToken Identity Service API

🔗Random happenings

MSC2260: Update the auth rules for m.room.aliases events and MSC2261: Allow m.room.aliases events to be redacted by room admins are being progressed to help address ongoing alias spam, while [WIP] MSC1543: Key verification using QR codes has been updated as the feature is being implemented for cross-signing - to be demoed as FOSDEM this weekend! Sorunome's MSC2403: Add "knock" feature

🔗Spec Core Team update

The Spec Core Team is still working on implementation. Expect things to ramp up again after FOSDEM! (Looking forward to seeing some of you there!)

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse

Neil offered:

This week we’ve been continuing our E2EE UX bug hunt, getting Sydent ready for python 3, working on alias rules (MSC2260, 2261) and fixing some bugs in our ACME support.

Next week, we’ll ship the new improved Sydent, keep going with alias rules and dust off our master process sharding plans.

🔗Synapse Deployment

Many projects updated:

Ananace announced:

Just pushed updated 1.9.1 tags for the K8s-optimized Synapse images, including support - and example config - for running with securityContext features enabled. With a separate media repo, it's now fully possible to run these images without root, and in completely read-only environment.

Mathijs announced:

The synapse 1.9.1 release images are available on avhost/docker-matrix:v1.9.1 and mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.9.1 The latter image also contains simple-antispam

and then

A docker image for synapse 1.10.0rc1 is available on mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.10.0rc1

🔗ma1sd 2.3.0 released

ma1uta announced:

ma1sd 2.3.0 https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.3.0 Changes:

• Load DNS overwrite config on startup (from https://github.com/NullIsNot0)
• Remove duplicates from identity store before email notifications (from https://github.com/NullIsNot0)
• Fix room name retrieval after Synapse dropped table room_names (from https://github.com/NullIsNot0)
• Add logging configuration. Add --dump and --dump-and-exit options to just print the full configuration.
• Add the postgresql backend for internal storage.
• Improve logging configuration. Introduce the root and the app log levels.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome offered:

mx-puppet-bridge got some updates!

• way more tests (still not good enough test coverage, though!)
• enhanced reaction support (reaction deletions/redactions are now properly bridged from and to matrix)
• presence status now sets im.vector.user_status event to be in line with riots status labs feature (why doesn't riot just use the spec on presence status here?!)
• add a message deduplicator class that protocol implementations with echo back can easily implement
• fix various small bugs

As always, if you have any questions check out the support channel and please consider to donate! (Thanks sooooo much to everyone who donated so far!) 🦊

🔗matrix-slack-parser

matrix-slack-parser is, similar to matrix-discord-parser, a parser for slack->matrix and matrix->slack messages. It has been created over this week and does proper parsing (meaning HTML parsing and slack blocks, etc.). mx-puppet-slack already implements this, which leaves matrix-appservice-slack to follow suit! (cadair expressed interest, so looking forward to that!)

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Nheko

@deepbluev7:neko.dev offered:

Nheko has added support kicking, inviting and banning/unbanning via the commands /kick, /invite, /ban and /unban with an optional reason specified after the userid. Kick and Ban buttons were also enabled for the userprofile. Furthermore some shortcuts for switching rooms (Ctrl+Up/Down) and paginating the timeline (PgUp/PgDown) were added. The shortcuts may change in the future though, so if those don't work for you, please give us feedback in #nheko-reborn:matrix.org or via the issue!

🔗RiotX cross-signing implementation

benoit said:

RiotX: the team is mainly working on cross-signing implementation and device verification with QR code. It's nearly there https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1223205391531683845 !

🔗FluffyChat Flutter is getting a Dark Mode

MTRNord said:

Sneak Peak of the next FluffyChat Flutter Update :)

FluffyChat Flutter is getting a Dark Mode for both mobile and web. Including a AMOLED compatible color version.

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗New Project: Pluggable Chatbot (PCB) written in Go

@sava:chat.zorbiro.com announced:

I started a new Pluggable Chatbot (PCB) written in Go. Still early development, but working hard on it. Bot is pluggable, meaning more functionality can be easily added to it. Check it out at https://github.com/srados/pcb.
Currently there are two examples available: echo and uppercase.

🔗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	matrix.jhell.org	335
2	server.matrix4ulm.de	357.5
3	remi.im	383
4	gottliebtfreitag.de	386
5	dodsorf.as	443
6	maunium.net	453.5
7	rcel.li	470
8	miniwa.space	509.5
9	aegiszero.is	521
10	geekbundle.org	526

🔗Final Thoughts 💭

Half-Shot offered:

I know it's a bit naughty to post rooms in here, but for developers looking to play around with Vue.js (with matrix), we've created a support room over at #vue:half-shot.uk

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

A quick bug fix release that affects admins making use of monthly active user limits. You will know if you are affected because 1.9.0 will not start up. Apologies if you were bitten by this one!

Get the new release from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

Changelog since Synapse 1.9.1

🔗Synapse 1.9.1 (2020-01-28)

🔗Bugfixes

• Fix bug where setting mau_limit_reserved_threepids config would cause Synapse to refuse to start. (#6793)

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

Half-Shot talks to Neil about his new(ish) project, matrix-presents

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

anoa reported:

Here are your spec updates for this week!

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs currently in Final Comment Period

New MSCs:

• MSC2422: Allow color on font tag
• MSC2416: Enhance m.login.token authentication type
• MSC2414: Make reason optional for reporting content
• MSC2413: Remove client_secret
• MSC2425: Remove Authentication on /submitToken Identity Service API

The Spec Core Team is still working on implementation, and likely will continue to be until after FOSDEM.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Dendrite / P2P

Neil Alexander announced:

A fairly big PR was merged into Dendrite yesterday (and some more fixes today) which gets /sync working better and adds the /messages endpoint, so it's now actually possible to paginate around in channels and to see room history. This massively improves the user experience when logging into a Dendrite homeserver.

In addition, another small PR was merged to fix Riot user login in the normal login workflow (not registration) and the public rooms API has been wired up for roomserver events.

A couple of changes have also been merged into gomatrixserverlib, mostly fixing the creation of /backfill requests and allowing the use of custom http.Transports for federation traffic.

P2P work is continuing - stay tuned!

🔗Synapse 1.9.0

Neil said:

This week we shipped 1.9.0 which contained new admin API endpoints as well as bug fixes for existing ones. Aside from that, we’ve been continuing on our E2EE UX bug hunt and python3ing sydent.

Next week, we’ll keep going on the e2ee ux bug hunt and sydent work. As well as dusting off MSCs 2260 2261 to improve room aliases management.

🔗Deploying Synapse

Several packaging projects have been updated to deploy the new version:

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat
• also from the Debian repos thanks to @andrewsh:matrix.org

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗matrix-appservice-IRC hits 0.14.1

Half-Shot said:

Hello wannabe IRC and Matrix users! Today the bridge team bring you the 0.14.X series of the irc bridge. This is the mammoth release featuring all the Typescript changes and postgres stuff. The Postgres changes aren't as essential as they are for Synapse, but useful if you run a ~20k Freenode bridge.

The highlights are:

• Typescript is now used everywhere across the project, bringing a range of refactors.
• Postgresql support has landed, while still retaining NeDB support for the present.
• Storing your password will now cause a seamless reconnect to the IRC network, allowing you to set a password without having to bother NickServ.
• Sentry.io support has landed, to trace errors in the bridge.
• Added a reapUsers API endpoint, which allows the bridge to automatically prune users who have not interacted with the bridge for a long time.

Some of these features are still more experimental than others, so the next release hopes to clean up a lot of the outstanding bugs. That's all from us for now :)

🔗mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome said:

A lot happened on the mx-puppet-bridge front! Mostly documentation and code cleanup to make future development easier.

• Introduce better documentation and a sample config
• Introduce a demonstration protocol implementation, mx-puppet-echo, meant to help those out who want to write their own protocol implementation
• Eliminate triple-usage of room/channel/chan, it's just called "room" everywhere now
• Split matrix event handling and remote event handling into their own files/classes
• Eliminate all usage of the any keyword, with the help of matrix-bot-sdk's event models
• Start writing tests to, well, auto-test the library
• Various small bugfixes

As always, feel free to drop by the support room and please consider to donate!

🔗matrix-discord-parser

sorunome also added:

matrix-discord-parser is the joint matrix->discord and discord->matrix parser that both mx-puppet-discord and matrix-appservice-discord use. For sending messages matrix->discord optional auto-detection of code language for code blocks using highlight.js has been implemented.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Riot WebExt 🧩

stoic announced this pretty cool project:

Always wanted to host your own version of Riot Web locally but never came around doing it? Meet Riot WebExt, an unofficial proof of concept Browser Extension that bundles Riot Web, so everything is locally served with the click of a button. Available for Firefox and Chrome!

Firefox AMO: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/riot Chrome Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lgpdpggoahhnlmaiompkgghldllldcjh GitHub: https://github.com/stoically/riot-webext Room: #riot-webext:matrix.org

🔗Ditto Chat [v0.2.0] released!

Annie announced Ditto Chat v0.2.0!

Ditto Chat is a Matrix Client in React Native.

🔗Added

• Ability to Create a New Room & Search for Users
• Notifications for Android
• Improved Timeline Rendering (support for m.notice)

🔗Changed

• Color scheme is darker / night mode
• Improved Direct Message vs Group Detection
• Settings Screen Design (smaller, scrolls now)
• Loads fewer events, thus initial sync is faster

🔗Fixed

• Various Visual Bugs

Download Links: https://dittochat.org
Room: #ditto:elequin.io

🔗koma and Continuum, Kotlin Matrix projects

yuforia said:

koma, Kotlin library for building clients:

• Responses of the sync API can be received continuously using Flow (async lazy sequence) now. Compared to previous method which used Channel, Flow can be transformed and combined in a much more flexible way, and Flow stops when it's no longer being consumed, so no coroutine will be left running accidentally.

Continuum desktop client based on Koma:

• Improve startup speed a bit more (Render more UI widgets without waiting for IO operations to finish).

🔗FluffyChat-Flutter is now available as a web app!

MTRNord reported:

Check it out at: https://christianpauly.gitlab.io/fluffychat-flutter/

It includes everything that the Android App does except for currently notifications and file sharing.

🔗Riot iOS

Manu told us:

This week, in the cross-signing side, we updated e2e decoration, replacing padlocks with shields. We started working on the new device list in the room member screen.

🔗RiotX, rainbows and other new features

benoit said:

RiotX: We are making progress on cross-signing and verification by QRCode. Also we are working to improve the network detection and paused sync thread issue. But the most important is: "/rainbow" command will be available soon 🌈 !

🔗Riot Web

TravisR told us:

We've done a lot this week, and probably even more next week:

• Continuing on the cross-signing front with support for QR code verification, verification in the right panel, a bunch of shields to indicate trust, some bootstrapping in the secret store, and more!
• A release candidate for 1.5.8-rc.2 (please give this a test on riot.im/staging)
• An all-new invite dialog for creating DMs and bringing people into rooms.

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰

🔗Tampere Hacklab information display powered by Matrix

Cos reported:

tsw from Tampere Hacklab has made a read-only client for information displays. It's still in early development but can already be tried out. https://github.com/tswfi/matrix-viewer/

🔗Dept of Jobs 💰

Neil announced:

Are there any French speaking Sys Admins reading this? If that's you then I want you to know that https://apply.workable.com/new-vector/j/766008FB0D/ exists and if you are interested to know more you should DM me. Remote is fine - though full time only.

🔗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	375
2	server.matrix4ulm.de	453
3	matrix.vgorcum.com	481
4	nerdsin.space	492
5	calamari.space	538.5
6	gottliebtfreitag.de	579.5
7	schwifty.net	669
8	neko.dev	679
9	matrix.kiwifarms.net	687
10	finallycoffee.eu	693

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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