🔗Matrix Live 🎙

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

anoa informed us:

We've had a slight lull from people crawling out from winter holiday hibernation caves, but there's likely more to come as everyone gets back into the swing of things.

Merged MSCs

No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period

No MSCs are currently in FCP.

New MSCs

• MSC2403: Add "knock" feature
• MSC2399: Reporting that decryption keys are withheld

The Spec Core Team is continuing to work on implementation of existing MSCs.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse 1.8.0 is out now

Get the latest news here!

Synapse 1.8.0 has arrived, it contains a whole host of bug fixes and tweaks, most notably fixing some long standing problems with search.
More generally we are spending a lot of time improving the e2ee experience ahead of switching on e2ee by default, so watch this space.

🔗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

🔗matrix-media-repo v1.0.0 - repeat, v1.0.0!!

TravisR offered:

matrix-media-repo v1.0.0 has been released! If it is suitable for your environment, please give it a go.

🔗Dendrite federation work!

Neil Alexander announced:

Federation fixes have been pushed to gomatrixserverlib and Dendrite's master branches, that include the following tweaks:

• Using the v2 endpoints for /send_join and /send_leave
• Fixing the resolution of room aliases to room IDs in the Dendrite federation API
• A rewrite of the auth chain functions which should be a bit smoother
• A couple of other minor tweaks to some of the types

In addition, I've spent the last few days working on Dendrite's storage backends, adding somewhat-hacky support for SQLite and investigating ORM modelling for some of the simpler components, as a part of getting Dendrite to run as a "true monolith" for the P2P work.

🔗cortex (synapse worker in Rust) supports e2ee rooms

Black Hat offered:

cortex's federation sender finally supports e2ee rooms! I'm testing its performance on an Intel Atom z8350 and it looks great.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗Matrix App for Zapier

@coppero1237 appeared to us, then announced:

The MVP is now available: https://zapier.com/developer/public-invite/77712/033209ffe96c0c0cdd618c8071355c01/

Use the Zapier App to integrate your Matrix room with any of Zapier's 1500+ apps, including:

• Github
• Trello
• Pagerduty
• Google calendar
• Jira
• Salesforce

Currently the MVP supports sending messages to a room. Reading messages from a room is future work.

If you're interested providing feedback, requesting a feature, future development, or just understanding how it works, please join the matrix room, #zapier:matrix.org

Source code: https://github.com/tyleradams/Zapier-Matrix

🔗matrix-zammad bridge

Half-Shot offered:

matrix-zammad now supports reacting to tickets to close them, provided you've set up your puppeted token in the config. It's useful if you get a lot of spam tickets :p

🔗mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome reported:

Lots of changes in mx-puppet-bridge!

• Allow sending status messages into bridged rooms
• add a bridgeChannel function for protocol implementations
• add config options to set displayname and avatar url of the AS bot
• leave the bridge bot of a bridged room, whenever possible
• auto-leave a puppeted ghost after an hour inactivity (to prevent DMs having three users in them)
• automatically dedupe media when uploading
• matrix group to remote protocol group mapping

🔗mx-puppet-discord

Along with mx-puppet-bridge, things got implemented in mx-puppet-discord!

• allow bridging of single channels in a guild
• display an error if sending a message to discord fails
• add joinentireguild command
• handle webhooks properly
• map discord guilds to matrix groups

If you enjoy this software, please consider to donate, thank you! 🦊

And another mx-puppet-discord update!

• [User Tokens] Proper User-Agent spoofing - friends management now seems mostly safe! Leaving the warning thing in just-in-case, though

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗📽️ Matrix Presents!

I'm adding this to the client section because it behaves like a client, but it's not what we'd normally think of...

Half-Shot reported:

Work has resumed on matrix-presents, newly rewritten in Vue.js! The project was first demoed back in Oggcamp 2018 where I gave a meta presentation on the virtues Matrix for other mediums. This time around, it's being brought back with:

• A user interface for managing, joining and creating slideshows.
• Control over how slides are advanced (pinned to the presenters view, or unlocked)
• Finer control over how slides are laid out, using a fragments system to build slides out of submessages.

This is currently in heavy development and will debut at Fosdem 2020!

A regularly updated version of the app is hosted at https://presents.half-shot.uk/.

(And for those of you expecting a form of table tennis, there is an easter egg in progress 😃)

🔗Continuum, desktop client in Kotlin

yuforia offered:

Continuum, a desktop client in Kotlin:

• Update README to include information on building from source
• Fix: database not updated after leaving a room
• Move user's access token and list of joined rooms from database to more lightweight key-value storage

🔗RiotX v0.12.0

benoit reported:

RiotX v0.12.0 has been released with some performance improvement, especially on initial sync and on timeline loading time. The release also contains bugfixes and a cleanup in the application settings. A new "developer mode" has been added to show advanced features only to power users. We are now working on the room profile screen, and we are making progress on the cross-signing implementation. Besides that, we are working to make RiotX available on the F-Droid store.

I must say RiotX is getting a lot more stable and reliable recently!

🔗Riot iOS

Manu told us:

We are still working on the implementation of cross-signing and verification by DM.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗K8s

In addition to mentioning Synapse 1.8.0 support, Ananace said:

Synapse 1.8.0 Kubernetes-optimized images are pushed, I've also updated the example manifests as part of some work on making it easier to deploy - expect a MVP of a Helm Chart some time Soon™

Also, to add a bit of context/information to this;

Helm is the de-facto standard package manager for Kubernetes clusters, where a Chart is a package for an application that can be installed and configured. The Helm Chart I'm working on won't be a one-click install to begin with, for the Minimum Viable Product it will require manually generating and storing the Synapse signing key - though I have thoughts on how to later delegate that to a small one-time job that Helm can run if necessary

🔗Opsdroid 0.17

Cadair offered:

Opsdroid 0.17 was released in December, it comes with many changes but the main matrix improvements are support for extra event types like Replies, Edits, Reactions, Room Name changes, Room Topic changes, Alias changes, Room avatar changes, Power levels, and support for generic matrix state events. All these events are supported for both sending and implementing skills based on receiving them.

🔗Dept of Ping 🏓

Let's 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.

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

Synapse 1.8.0 has arrived, it contains a whole host of bug fixes and tweaks, most notably fixing some long standing problems with search.

More generally we are spending a lot of time improving the e2ee experience ahead of switching on e2ee by default, so watch this space.

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

🔗Synapse 1.8.0 (2020-01-09)

🔗Bugfixes

• Fix GET request on /_synapse/admin/v2/users endpoint. Contributed by Awesome Technologies Innovationslabor GmbH. (#6563)
• Fix incorrect signing of responses from the key server implementation. (#6657)

🔗Synapse 1.8.0rc1 (2020-01-07)

🔗Features

• Add v2 APIs for the send_join and send_leave federation endpoints (as described in MSC1802). (#6349)
• Add a develop script to generate full SQL schemas. (#6394)
• Add custom SAML username mapping functionality through an external provider plugin. (#6411)
• Automatically delete empty groups/communities. (#6453)
• Add option limit_profile_requests_to_users_who_share_rooms to prevent requirement of a local user sharing a room with another user to query their profile information. (#6523)
• Add an export_signing_key script to extract the public part of signing keys when rotating them. (#6546)
• Add experimental config option to specify multiple databases. (#6580)
• Raise an error if someone tries to use the log_file config option. (#6626)

🔗Bugfixes

• Prevent redacted events from being returned during message search. (#6377, #6522)
• Prevent error on trying to search a upgraded room when the server is not in the predecessor room. (#6385)
• Improve performance of looking up cross-signing keys. (#6486)
• Fix race which occasionally caused deleted devices to reappear. (#6514)
• Fix missing row in device_max_stream_id that could cause unable to decrypt errors after server restart. (#6555)
• Fix a bug which meant that we did not send systemd notifications on startup if acme was enabled. (#6571)
• Fix exception when fetching the matrix.org:ed25519:auto key. (#6625)
• Fix bug where a moderator upgraded a room and became an admin in the new room. (#6633)
• Fix an error which was thrown by the PresenceHandler _on_shutdown handler. (#6640)
• Fix exceptions in the synchrotron worker log when events are rejected. (#6645)
• Ensure that upgraded rooms are removed from the directory. (#6648)
• Fix a bug causing Synapse not to fetch missing events when it believes it has every event in the room. (#6652)

🔗Improved Documentation

• Document the Room Shutdown Admin API. (#6541)
• Reword sections of docs/federate.md that explained delegation at time of Synapse 1.0 transition. (#6601)
• Added the section 'Configuration' in docs/turn-howto.md. (#6614)

🔗Deprecations and Removals

• Remove redundant code from event authorisation implementation. (#6502)
• Remove unused, undocumented /_matrix/content API. (#6628)

🔗Internal Changes

• Add experimental support for multiple physical databases and split out state storage to separate data store. (#6245, #6510, #6511, #6513, #6564, #6565)
• Port sections of code base to async/await. (#6496, #6504, #6505, #6517, #6559, #6647, #6653)
• Remove SnapshotCache in favour of ResponseCache. (#6506)
• Silence mypy errors for files outside those specified. (#6512)
• Clean up some logging when handling incoming events over federation. (#6515)
• Test more folders against mypy. (#6534)
• Update mypy to new version. (#6537)
• Adjust the sytest blacklist for worker mode. (#6538)
• Remove unused get_pagination_rows methods from EventSource classes. (#6557)
• Clean up logs from the push notifier at startup. (#6558)
• Improve diagnostics on database upgrade failure. (#6570)
• Reduce the reconnect time when worker replication fails, to make it easier to catch up. (#6617)
• Simplify http handling by removing redundant SynapseRequestFactory. (#6619)
• Add a workaround for synapse raising exceptions when fetching the notary's own key from the notary. (#6620)
• Automate generation of the sample log config. (#6627)
• Simplify event creation code by removing redundant queries on the event_reference_hashes table. (#6629)
• Fix errors when frozen_dicts are enabled. (#6642)

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

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

🔗Responses to The Ecosystem is Moving

Matthew wrote a response to https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ : https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom/.

This is in response to a talk Moxie Marlinspike gave at 36c3. There is another response here from the XMPP community.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Dendrite and gomatrixserverlib

Neil Alexander announced:

My first TWIM update as a member of NV but I'm happy to announce that with some experimental changes to Dendrite and gomatrixserverlib, I've been able to get Dendrite-to-Dendrite federation working, which is a key component for the P2P work that we are planning!

🔗matrix-media-repo v1.0.0-rc.2

TravisR reported:

matrix-media-repo has received its first ever release candidate (finally): v1.0.0-rc.1. It's complicated to set up, but please do give it a go if it suites your environment and use case, and report any bugs along the way.

v1.0.0-rc.2 was released later in the week to fix a small bug with exports in v1.0.0-rc.1.

🔗Synapse 1.7.3 released

Synapse 1.7.3 includes an important bugfix, hosts are encouraged to upgrade.

Ananace reported that the K8s optimized Synapse 1.7.3 images have been updated, but you should find that all distributors have the latest version now.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome said:

mx-puppet-bridge received some updates!

• Automatic Puppeting, thanks to tulir PR!
• Allow protocol implementations to specify an external_url as per spec
• Double Puppeting: Option to specify a custom homeserver -> URL map for local setups where .well-known resolution isn't possible
• Fix unbridging of rooms (remove alias correctly)
• Set filename of uploaded avatars to circumvent a synapse bug
• Update matrix-bot-sdk dependency to 0.4.0

🔗mx-puppet-discord and mx-puppet-slack

sorunome again:

Both mx-puppet-discord and mx-puppet-slack updated to the newest library version and implemented the setting of an external URL.

If you like these projects, please check out the support chat and consider to donate!

🔗mautrix-telegram

Tulir said:

mautrix-telegram v0.7.0 was released.

Other than bugfixes, there were a few main changes since the first release candidate a month ago:

• Option for automatic custom puppeting using shared secret login
• version command to get the exact bridge version (also coming to my other bridges)
• Config checks to make sure important fields like permissions aren't left unconfigured

Full changelog available on GitHub: https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-telegram/releases/tag/v0.7.0

🔗mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir again:

Sticker bridging works slightly better now and added automatic double puppeting here too.

🔗mautrix-cookiemonster

Tulir again:

To make the mautrix-facebook and mautrix-hangouts login flow simpler, I'm making a browser extension to eat cookies automatically rather than having the user go into the devtools. It's currently in development and should be ready by next week.

🔗maubot

Tulir, busiest fellow in the North, again:

I finally got around to actually making the maubot github plugin, which is now spamming commits and other github things in all my project rooms.

Next up is per-room config options for webhooks and more matrix -> github actions (currently it's mostly just the github -> matrix webhooks). I might also end up making a more advanced plugin configuration system that supports multiple files, since jinja2 templates in a yaml file isn't that nice.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗FluffyChat for Android and iOS in Flutter

@krille:ubports.chat said:

MTRNord and me are working on FluffyChat for Android and iOS based on Flutter. You can already check it out if you like. :-) Install using F-Droid: https://mtrnord.gitlab.io/fluffychat-flutter-fdroid/fdroid/repo/ More info here: https://www.ko-fi.com/post/FluffyChat-for-Android-and-iOS-S6S71BMEY

🔗Continuum

yuforia said:

Continuum, desktop client based in Kotlin, version 0.9.34:

• Perform database operations in an async way on IO dispatcher
• Added loading indicator when loading messages from server

🔗Dept of Ping 🏓

Let's 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.

Tulir:

The ping room was upgraded to v5 last weekend. People who joined early got some nice and low pings before everyone rejoined :D

Also, @lub:imninja.net told us:

I created a #ping:maunium.net compatible bot in PowerShell https://gitea.lubiland.de/lub/pingposh/src/branch/master

Very nice - we don't see a lot of PowerShell in this ecosystem.

🔗Final Thoughts 💭

Work is still happening on Cross Signing, patience will be rewarded sooner than you know.

Half-Shot is working on a fun and genuinely useful non-chat Matrix application, more on this soon.

36c3 was exciting, exhausing and educational. Thanks to everyone who made the Matrix Assembly one of the liveliest places around. :D

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

A few years ago, back when Matrix was originally implementing end-to-end encryption, we asked Moxie (the project lead for Signal) whether he’d ever consider connecting Signal (then TextSecure) to Matrix. After all, one of Matrix’s goals is to be an interoperability layer between other communication silos, and one of the reasons for us using Signal’s Double Ratchet Algorithm for Matrix’s encryption was to increase our chances of one day connecting with other apps using the same algorithm (Signal, WhatsApp, Google Allo, Skype, etc). Moxie politely declined, and then a few months later wrote “The ecosystem is moving” to elaborate his thoughts on why he feels he “no longer believes that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.”

At the time we didn’t respond via a blog post; instead we ended up talking it through a few times in person to see how misaligned we really were. The conclusion was that we agreed to disagree and Moxie said he’d be happy to be proved wrong, and wished us good luck. However, the subject has come up again thanks to Moxie’s talk on the same subject at 36C3 last week, and we keep getting asked to write a formal response on the Matrix side. So, here’s an attempt to do so. (Moxie didn’t want the 36C3 talk recorded, and I haven’t watched it, so this is responding to the original blog post).

From my perspective, the main points proposed in ‘The ecosystem is moving’ boil down to:

• Decentralised systems are harder to design and build than centralised ones, as coordination is harder if you don’t have a single authority to trust.

• Decentralised systems are harder and slower to evolve than centralised ones, as you can’t force participants to rapidly roll out (or even agree on) new features.

• Users in federated systems tend to coalesce around the best/biggest server that the bulk of people use - which means that server typically gets to see a disproportionate amount of communication metadata (who’s talking to who, and when), and has disproportionate power over the network, which could bully others away from running their own deployments.

• If users don’t trust their app provider, they can always go switch apps, which gives them freedom.

• Open systems are less secure because you have no control over the quality of the implementations - if anyone can bring their own client or server to the table, all it takes is one bad implementation to compromise everyone in the vicinity.

Now, all of these points are valid to some extent.

It’s absolutely true that decentralised systems are harder than centralised ones. Prior to Matrix we built centralised comms systems - we literally can do a side-by-side comparison for the same team to see how easily and fast we built our centralised comms system relative to Matrix. Empirically It took us around 6 times longer to get to the same feature-set with Matrix.

It’s also true that decentralised systems are harder to evolve than centralised ones - you can’t just push out a given feature with a single app update, but you have to agree and publish a public spec, support incremental migration, and build governance processes and community dynamics which encourage everyone to implement and upgrade. This is hard, but not impossible: we’ve spent loads of time and money on Matrix’s governance model and spec process to get it right. It’s still not perfect, but we haven’t seen much fragmentation so far, and when we’re pushing out a feature empirically we can and do go just as fast as the centralised alternatives. (E2E by default is a bit of a special case because we’ve had to go and reimplement many features users take for granted today in an E2E-capable manner, but we’re sprinting to get it done in the coming weeks). A bigger problem is that there are hundreds of spec change proposals which folks would like to see in the protocol, and finding a way to manage expectations and parallelise spec progress is hard - something we’re looking to improve in 2020 (although still figuring out how!)

It’s also fair that in a multi-server federated model, users naturally tend to sign up on the most prominent server(s) (e.g. the matrix.org homeserver in the case of Matrix). In practice, the matrix.org homeserver currently makes up about 35% of the visible Matrix network by active users. It’s also true that Matrix servers currently store metadata about who’s talking to who, and when, as a side-effect of storing and relaying messages on behalf of their users. And without an adequate protocol governance system in place, a large server could start pushing around smaller ones in terms of protocol behaviour. In practice, we’re looking into solving metadata protection in Matrix by experimenting with hybrid P2P / Client Server models - letting users store their metadata purely clientside if they so desire, and potentially obfuscating who’s talking to who via mixnets of blinded store & forward servers (more about this coming up at FOSDEM). Combined with nomadic accounts, this would let us eventually turn off the matrix.org server entirely and eliminate the pseudo-centralisation effect - the default ‘server’ would be the one running on your client.

It’s true that if a user doesn’t trust (say) Telegram, they are free to go switch to Signal or WhatsApp or whatever instead… at the massive expense of having to persuade all their friends to install yet another app, and fragmenting their conversation history across multiple apps.

Finally, it’s also true that because anyone can develop a Matrix client or server and connect to the global network, there’s a risk of bad quality implementations in the wild. There are many forks of Riot on the app stores - we simply can’t vouch for whether they are secure. Similarly there are Matrix clients whose E2E encryption is partial, missing, or unreviewed. And there are a wide range of different Matrix servers run by different people with different agendas in different locations, which may be more or less trustworthy.

HOWEVER: all of this completely ignores one critical thing - the value of freedom. Freedom to select which server to use. Freedom to run your own server (perhaps invisibly in your app, in a P2P world). Freedom to pick which country your server runs in. Freedom to select how much metadata and history to keep. Freedom to choose which apps to use - while still having the freedom to talk to anyone you like (without them necessarily installing yet another app). Freedom to connect your own functionality - bots, bridges, integrations etc. Freedom to select which identifiers (if any) to use to register your account. Freedom to extend the protocol. Freedom to write your own client, or build whole new as-yet-unimagined systems on top.

It’s true that if you’re writing a messaging app optimised for privacy at any cost, Moxie’s approach is one way to do it. However, this ends up being a perversely closed world - a closed network, where unofficial clients are banned, with no platform to build on, no open standards, and you end up thoroughly putting all your eggs in one basket, trusting past, present & future Signal to retain its values, stay up and somehow dodge compromise & censorship… despite probably being the single highest value attack target on the ‘net.

Quite simply, that isn’t a world I want to live in.

We owe the entire success of the Internet (let alone the Web) to openness, interoperability and decentralisation. To declare that openness, interoperability and decentralisation is ‘too hard’ and not worth the effort when building a messaging solution is to throw away all the potential of the vibrancy, creativity and innovation that comes from an open network. Sure, you may end up with a super-private messaging app - but one that starts to smell alarmingly like a walled garden like Facebook’s Internet.org initiative, or an AOL keyword, or Google’s AMP.

So, we continue to gladly take up Moxie’s challenge to prove him wrong - to show that it’s both possible and imperative to create an open decentralised messaging platform which (if you use reputable apps and servers) can be as secure and metadata-protecting as Signal… and indeed more so, given you can run your server off the grid, and don’t need to register with a phone number, and in future may not even need a server at all.

--Matthew

(Comments over at HN)

Hi all,

We've just released Synapse 1.7.3 - an important bug fix to address a class of failures due to malformed events. We've seen this in the wild over the last few days, so we'd recommend updating as soon as possible, especially if you are having problems federating.

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

The changelog since 1.7.2 is:

🔗Synapse 1.7.3 (2019-12-31)

This release fixes a long-standing bug in the state resolution algorithm.

🔗Bugfixes

• Fix exceptions caused by state resolution choking on malformed events. (#6608)

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

🔗36c3: Matrix Assembly is the place to be

If you're at 36c3 this weekend, come and find us! Use c3nav app to find our assembly, or just join #chaosevents:matrix.org to come chat

🔗Bundeswehr considering Matrix

Oleg said:

The German Army is considering using Matrix as "secure WhatsApp" for soldiers. (In German) https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Open-Source-Bundeswehr-baut-eigene-verschluesselte-Messenger-App-4623404.html

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗matrix-oauth

TravisR reported:

For those who want to integrate Matrix into their application with OAuth, there's now matrix-oauth ( #oauth:t2bot.io ). Ideally useful for "Login with Matrix" buttons, this is a relatively easy OAuth 2.0 provider to set up in front of your homeserver. In future it'll support more granular scopes to avoid having to give a real access token to the third party application.

A demo of matrix-oauth in action is available at https://demo.oauth.t2host.io/

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗Amazon Alexa skill

TravisR offered:

Yelling at your Amazon Alexa to send a message to your Matrix contacts is now possible with matrix-alexa-skill ( #alexa:t2bot.io ). A hosted version using matrix-oauth is coming soon, assuming I can get the privacy policy and such over to Amazon to review in a timely manner, though you're more than able to self-host in a matter of minutes. Check out the README for more info - some experience with setting up complicated things is required.

🔗mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome offered:

mx-puppet-bridge got a new feature: protocol implementations can now specify custom commands that are invoked via the provisioning room!

🔗mx-puppet-discord

mx-puppet-discord received quite a few bug fixes and new features!

• Fix echo back of edits
• [User Tokens] being friends is enough now to DM each other!
• fix multi-edits
• [User Tokens] support group DMs
• Implement ability to bridge guilds!
• [User Tokens] add friends management

Description on how to use these features are found in the readme!

If you enjoy these projects, please consider to donate. Thank you!

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Spectral gains public room directory

Black Hat reported:

Public room directory and user directory support in Spectral is finally there!

🔗Continuum, plus koma library

yuforia offered:

koma, a Kotlin library. Dominic Fischer (github: Dominaezzz) started working on the project last week and so far:

• In preparation for multiplatform support, converted JVM code to agnostic Kotlin, using the library atomicfu

• Added Github Actions configuration to run builds automatically

Continuum, desktop client based on Koma:

• Generate room name from members when neither name nor aliases are configured

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗ma1sd 2.2.2 released

ma1uta announced:

ma1sd (fork of the mxisd) 2.2.2 released: https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.2.2 Changes:

• bugfix
• added hash lookup for the ldap provider.

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

🔗kapsi.fi has set up a Matrix homeserver

Cos reported:

Finnish non-profit hosting service kapsi.fi has set up a Matrix homeserver for their members. Kapsi has around 5000 members and 20 volunteer administrators. Instructions for use (in FInnish) at https://www.kapsi.fi/palvelut/matrix.html

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗MatrixVideo2oggBot

@progserega:rsprim.ru reported:

Matrix bot for converting youtube video to voice.

Bot https://github.com/progserega/MatrixVideo2oggBot get youtube URL, download video, convert to ogg-vorbis audio and send it to user. Some times my friends give me youtube video-urls, but I do not have time for see it. But I have time when I go home in car. But on road network is not always good and at end of day battery is low and phone may be hot (when I connect to charger and play video) and freeze... Simple way for me - is convert youtube video to small size voice and download it to phone and play it as music in player playlist. Bot help to this. May be it help anybody also. 🙂

🔗Matrix in the News 📰

Andres offered:

Matrix gets a mention alongside other four decentralized protocols in one of the biggest argentinian newspapers (regarding Twitter's iniciative of decentralization). https://www.lanacion.com.ar/tecnologia/cinco-iniciativas-descentralizar-redes-sociales-dejar-depender-nid2317548

🔗Dept of Ping 🏓

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

Hi all,

Every year we do an annual wrap-up and retrospective of all the things happening in the Matrix core team - if you’re feeling particularly curious or bored you can check out the 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 editions for context. The idea is to look at the bigger picture trends in Matrix outside of the weekly TWIM posts to get an idea of the stuff which we made progress on, and the stuff which still remains.

That said, it’s hard to know where to start - Matrix accelerated more than ever before in 2019, and there’s been progress on pretty much all battlefronts. So as a different format, let’s take the stuff we said we had planned for 2019 from the end of last year’s update and see what we actually achieved...

Continue reading…

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

🔗Matrix selected for the public Mozilla community

You may well have read about it by now, but Mozilla (purveyor of popular web browsers and champion of the open web) selected Matrix to replace IRC for their comms! You can read their own announcement here. Please note that this doesn't have to mean the death of Moznet on IRC - if someone wants to pick up matrix-ircd and finish it off, we can keep exposing an IRC listener too! Huge thanks to everyone who participated in the Mozilla trial and placed their trust in Matrix :)

🔗A Glimpse of the Matrix

Florian reported:

Florian presented his poster A Glimpse of the Matrix:Scalability issues of a new message-oriented data synchronizationmiddleware at the 20th International Middleware Conference at UC Davis, California on 2019-12-11. The poster abstract describes measurements of the public Matrix federation and discusses scalability issues of the current message routing mechanism. Additional details can be found in the Extended Tech Report.

Those scientific publications were based on the data gathered by the DSN Traveller in 2018 which was part of Florian's master's thesis. The anonymized raw data was published in conjunction.

All related resources

pic.twitter.com/NYxbYllQ9F

— Middleware2019 (@middleware2019) December 12, 2019

🔗Accessibility in Riot/Matrix

Very thorough article on accessibility in Riot/Matrix, written partly in light of the Mozilla announcement. https://marcozehe.de/2019/12/20/how-to-get-around-matrix-and-riot-with-a-screen-reader/

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse v1.7.2

Neil told us:

We shipped 1.7.2 (and 1.7.1) - all admins are encouraged to upgrade asap, note 1.7.1 is a security release, and 1.7.2 fixes a back pagination bug introduced in 1.7.1. Aside from that we are looking at implementing MSC2260: Update the auth rules for m.room.aliases events and adding a per media quarantine API.

🔗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

🔗Ruma

jplatte reported:

another blog post has appeared on the ruma website: https://ruma.dev/news/these-weeks-in-ruma-2019-12-14/

🔗cortex workers performance

Black Hat has been using his Rust cortex Synapse workers project. He reported:

I flexed on other homeservers by making getflexedon.me the fastest homeserver in the ping room, made possible with cortex.

Black Hat does point out that this is still in a testing phase, but it's great to see workers being created.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗famedly-email-bridge

sorunome said:

Some more work has been done on famedly-email-bridge! Now you can define email routes (e.g. [email protected] -> @bob:example.org) and optionally have conversations create a new thread room, instead of dumping them into the email room.

🔗zammad tickets bot

It might seem like Half-Shot hasn't made a new bridge in a while, but here he is:

I've started another bot project: https://github.com/half-shot/matrix-zammad. This currently splurts zammad tickets into Matrix rooms, and will eventually do a lot more.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Continuum

yuforia said:

Continuum, client for the desktop:

• Start using experimental asynchronous Flow as observable value for UI. Making use of Kotlin's coroutine features, it makes it possible to update values while avoiding switching to the main UI thread. It's also easier to cancel on-going HTTP requests when their values are no longer needed.

🔗Riot-iOS

Manu told us:

This week, we have been still working hard on verification by DM. We have started the implementation of cross-signing.

🔗RiotX v0.11.0 released

benoit said:

RiotX: We've released RiotX v0.11.0 on Thursday. It includes support to open (some of) matrix.to links, soft (and hard) logout, and lots of small UI/UX/crash fixes. For the first release of 2020, we will change the way we handle the initial sync, which can be a long task, by running it in a foreground service. Also the room profile screen should finally arrive.

🔗riot-web

Bruno reported:

this week I've been working on the new verification flow in the right panel. it's nearly there, but likely won't get merged today anymore.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗Matrix Message github action

Nice and simple project for using Matrix messages in Github actions. See the code, or the marketplace page.

🔗Dept of Ping 🏓

🔗Final Thoughts 💭

It being the time of year that it is, some of us will be at 36c3 in a week or so, come chat in #chaosevents:matrix.org if you'd like to say "hi". (You can also say "Guten Tag", which is more fun!)

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

Hi all,

We've just released Synapse 1.7.2 - a minor point release to address two regressions which snuck into 1.7.0 and 1.7.1. Sorry for the upgrade faff; hopefully we will be back to a saner release cadence shortly. Reminder that if you are on 1.7.0 or earlier you should upgrade asap as 1.7.1 contained security fixes.

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

The changelog since 1.7.1 is:

🔗Synapse 1.7.2 (2019-12-20)

This release fixes some regressions introduced in Synapse 1.7.0 and 1.7.1.

🔗Bugfixes

• Fix a regression introduced in Synapse 1.7.1 which caused errors when attempting to backfill rooms over federation. (#6576)
• Fix a bug introduced in Synapse 1.7.0 which caused an error on startup when upgrading from versions before 1.3.0. (#6578)

Hi all,

We’re incredibly excited that Mozilla just announced that they’ve selected Matrix as the successor to IRC as the communication platform for the public Mozilla community!! This comes off the back of a formal 1-month trial in September to evaluate various options side by side, and now New Vector will be helping Mozilla get their homeserver up and running on the Modular.im hosting platform over the coming weeks - and federating openly with the rest of the open global Matrix network! :)

We have always been massive fans of Mozilla: they have been an excellent role model as champions of the open web, open standards, not to mention open source - and it’s fair to say that Mozilla has been a major inspiration to how Matrix has evolved (Riot aspires to be to Matrix what Firefox is to the Web: a flagship open source app which provides an accessible friendly interface into an open standard network). It’s very reassuring to see that Mozillians from the trial recognise the alignment and have converged on Matrix as the way forward - it’s a massive win for the open web and standards-based communication in general.

It’s worth noting that we’ve also always been massive fans of IRC, and Matrix is unashamedly derivative of IRC in capabilities and culture, while broadening the scope to decentralised synchronisation and relaying of any kind of data. For context, the genesis of the team which eventually spawned Matrix was on a student IRC server ~20 years ago - and subsequently everything we’ve worked on (up to Matrix) was coordinated exclusively through IRC. We even used to give conference talks on how to run your project/company off IRC. I can’t really overstate how fundamental IRC is to our history - and we still keep our private IRC network online for old time’s sake (albeit bridged to Matrix). The very first protocol bridge we built for Matrix back in 2015 was for IRC - and Moznet and Freenode were the first public bridges we turned on. As of right now, /stats u on Moznet says that there are 4950 connected users, of which 1724 (so 35%) are actually Matrix users connected via the Moznet bridge - effectively using Matrix as a big decentralised IRC bouncer in the sky.

All of this is to say is that we deeply understand how dependent Mozilla has been on IRC over the years, and that we built Matrix to be a worthy successor which tries to capture all the best bits of IRC while providing much richer primitives (E2E encryption, openly federated decentralised chatrooms, arbitrary data sync, HTTP API, VoIP, etc). It’s also worth noting that even though Moznet is being turned off, matrix-ircd exists as a very promising project that exposes any Matrix homeserver as an ircd - so for all you IRC die-hards, Moznet can absolutely live on in the afterlife! (matrix-ircd is still alpha right now, but it’s a relatively modest amount of Rust and PRs are very welcome - if you grok IRC it should be a really really fun project to contribute to).

In other news, the trial in September was an amazing opportunity to gather feedback first-hand from a wide range of Mozillians as they gave Riot and Matrix a spin, often for the first time - and it was a lot of fun to take that feedback and rapidly act on it to improve the app. For instance, having direct expert feedback on our screenreader support meant that we were able to radically improve our accessibility, and we’ve kept up the momentum on this since the trial (regardless of the outcome) with Mozilla & Riot devs hacking together with the aim of making Riot the most accessible communication app out there without exception. Huge thanks to Marco Zehe for all his guidance (and PRs), as well as the rest of #a11y:matrix.org!

Meanwhile, Riot’s UX continues to mature in general. One of our two primary projects right now is to improve First Time User Experience (FTUE) - i.e. making our UX as smooth and polished and predictable as possible, especially as seen by new users. This project had just kicked off in September as the Mozilla trial began, and some of the major improvements to the Room Directory and Room Creation flow which subsequently landed in Riot/Web 1.5 were prioritised directly based on Mozillian feedback. Since the trial we’ve been focusing more on our other primary project (getting E2E Encryption enabled by default), but we will be back on FTUE asap - particularly to incorporate all the feedback we anticipate as Mozilla goes live! We are absolutely determined for Riot to have as good if not better UX than the likes of Slack or Discord. New Vector is also actively hiring more designers to come work fulltime on Riot’s UI and UX as we shift Riot’s focus from being developer-led to design-led - if this sounds interesting, please get in touch! And finally, everything is of course open source and PRs are genuinely appreciated to keep Riot heading in the right direction (please just check first if they change the UI/UX).

Finally, in case you’re dreading having to use a graphical chat client like Riot, the Mozilla instance will of course be accessible to any Matrix client that floats your boat - for instance, weechat-matrix also got a spurt of development to support Mozilla IAM single-sign-on so that commandline junkies can get their fix too. (It’s worth noting that weechat-matrix really is an incredibly fully featured and usable client - complete with full end-to-end encryption support. If you haven’t tried it, you’re missing out).

So, to conclude: it has been indescribably valuable to have the expertise and enthusiasm of the Mozilla community in contributing feedback and fixes to Riot (and even building new Matrix bots!). Huge thanks to everyone who invested their time and energy participating in the trial and for their trust in concluding that Matrix was the way forward. We see this as a massive responsibility and honour to help power the wider Mozilla community, and we will do everything we can to make it as successful as conceivably possible :)

To the future of an open web, with even more open communications!

Matthew, Amandine & the whole Matrix & Riot team :)

P.S. we’ve come a long way since Matrix was first proposed for Mozilla :D