Community Guides Index

As part of an overhaul of the documentation surrounding Matrix, I'm planning to launch a "Community Guides Index". This will be a page or section on Matrix.org with links to useful and informative documentation hosted elsewhere. If you have or know of informative articles, please let me know, or share them in #TWIM:matrix.org.

Clients

Seaglass

Seaglass now supports E2E rooms, leveraging matrix-ios-sdk! Additionally, maintainer neilalexander has had a productive week:

Seaglass has had many updates, including:

• message coalescing
• room settings (history/join rules and changing aliases/addresses)
• loading member list in rooms
• some starting work on loading avatars
• various UI and stability tweaks!

Quaternion: new redacted message handling options

Many of you will have seen the incredible volumes of spam plaguing Freenode over the last few weeks. Kitsune has added new features to Quaternion to help:

In response to the recent spam deluge from Freenode Quaternion has got an option to tidy up your timeline after all the spam-cleaning: you can hide all redacted messages or just those that came from recently joined users (along with the join message). So as long as the spammer gets moderated, it can become inexistent for you. The experimental code doing that will eventually be moved to libQMatrixClient for the benefit of Matrique, uMatriks and other clients based on the library.

This is especially cool: moving functionality to the lib for the benefit of other projects makes me very happy. :D

Fractal GSOC write-ups

Eisha and Julian finished their GSOC 2018 Fractal involvements this week, and Eisha has a blog post recounting her experience: My Final Report for GSOC 2018. Julian will have his ready too.

Riot

Big updates are on the horizon for both iOS and Android, with 0.7.0 of iOS headed to TestFlight today with a release due once it's through beta & AppStore review.  More details once the releases are out!

Meanwhile on Riot/Web, Lazy Loading members is pretty much complete - just writing end-to-end tests to ensure that encryption still works well when lazy loading is enabled.  Next up is actually progressing the redesign at last!

Spec status

• MSC1425/MSC1501 richvdh has been thinking about Room Versioning
  • A summary in his words: "room upgrades are implemented by creating a new room, shutting down the old one, and linking between the two"
• MSC1497 thorough discussion happening against Matthew's proposal for Capabilities support in the CS API
• MSC1442 though you may have seen it previously, I recommend anyone who is able to take a look at Erik's "State Resolution: Reloaded" proposal. This documents his "thoughts on the next iteration of the state resolution algorithm that aims to mitigate currently known attacks". It very clearly explains the current problem, and the proposed solution. While heavy, I found it really useful for helping to understand State Res and everything it affects.
• MSC1485 tulir proposes "Hint buttons in messages", which effectively provide pre-defined responses for users. This is especially valuable for Bots which can only accept a certain range of replies. I'd love to see this implemented, having long ago built a "choose your own adventure" engine using similar features from another messaging platform.

APIs and SDKs

Gene, minimalistic client-server api for Matrix

Not strictly this week, but we missed it before. ma1uta has been working away on his Java-based Matrix suite. Gene is a more lightweight API implementation than Jeon, covering all of the current C2S spec. A big motivation is to be able to use Gene on Android, which is not possible for Jeon due to it having more dependencies.

Ruby Matrix SDK

The Ruby Matrix SDK now has auto-generated, proper documentation, thanks to Ananace. v0.0.2 is the current release, but it's under active development and v0.0.3 is expected presently.

Telegram Puppeting on t2bot.io with mautrix-telegram

TravisR has rolled out tulir's mautrix-telegram bridge for everyone on t2bot.io's bridge.

This is a public trial to see how the bridge copes with multiple people puppeting their accounts. Of course, you don't need to puppet your account unless you want to. For more information on how to set this up, please visit https://t2bot.io/telegram

As part of this project, mautrix-telegram 0.3.0 release candidate was released.

Informo project releases SaltStack states

vabd, from the Informo project, arrived to say they have produced "a set of SaltStack states that includes deploying fully working Synapse homeservers: https://github.com/Informo/salt-states"

They introduce the Informo project:

Informo's a project (still a work in progress, currently) that aims at bypassing censorship of information on the Internet, by basically having news items go through a decentralised and federated network made of Matrix homeservers. Since we need to host nodes to this network (at least for testing purposes), we've worked on a working and automated infrastructure using SaltStack, which involved hand-writing a few SaltStack states, including states handling the installation and configuration of working Synapse homeservers. In the spirit of giving back to the community, we're publishing all of those hand-written states (available at the GH link above) under the GPLv3 license. If you want to discuss with us about what we're doing, or this topic specifically, please join us in #discuss:weu.informo.network ? The project is still pretty much a WIP and the technical specifics (even the ones we already implemented in our projects) are still under discussion and subject to changes (as mentioned in the GH repo's readme). All I can add for sure to what we already say is that we'll be working in partnership with NGOs to promote the project in countries where the press is heavily censored, and we're planning on implementing a cryptographic verification chain of some sort to reduce the risk of intentional disinformation.

Synapse 0.33.2

Synapse 0.33.2 is out now:

The release focuses on performance, notable highlights include reducing CPU consumption through speeding up state delta calculations and reducing I/O through lazily loading state on the master process Separately work continues on our python 3 port and we hope to have something concrete to trial very soon – we're really excited about this and expect step change improvements in CPU and memory use.

Latest synapse is now available on Debian thanks to andrewsh.

Room Tagging

This is not from this week at all, other than that it was new information to me. Actually it's ancient, matrix-wise, but I think it's interesting for those who don't know! Although Riot doesn't have an interface for adding custom room tags ("Favourites" and "Low Priority" come by default), Matrix supports arbitrary strings as room tags, and will display them if you add them via another CS API call. To facilitate this TravisR created a small script, tag_room.sh, which makes it very simple to set your own room tags.

FIN

That's all folks! Remember, lots of progress is happening with the Spec, if you want to be involved or follow along the best place to start is by joining #matrix-spec:matrix.org.

No Matrix Live this week due to vacation and general scheduling fun; sorry!

If you have documentation or articles related to matrix, let me know!

We'll meet again!

Folks, it's release time, Synapse 0.33.2 has landed.

The release focuses on performance, notable highlights include reducing CPU consumption through speeding up state delta calculations (#3592) and reducing I/O through lazily loading state on the master process (#3579, #3581, #3582, #3584)

Separately work continues on our python 3 port and we hope to have something concrete to trial very soon - we're really excited about this and expect step change improvements in CPU and memory use.

Finally we have some ground work for upcoming room membership lazy loading, there is nothing to see here as yet, but rest assured we will make a lot of noise as soon as it is ready. Stay tuned.

 or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse.

Synapse 0.33.2 (2018-08-09)

No significant changes.

Synapse 0.33.2rc1 (2018-08-07)

Features

• add support for the lazy_loaded_members filter as per MSC1227 (#2970)
• add support for the include_redundant_members filter param as per MSC1227 (#3331)
• Add metrics to track resource usage by background processes (#3553, #3556, #3604, #3610)
• Add code label to synapse_http_server_response_time_seconds prometheus metric (#3554)
• Add support for client_reader to handle more APIs (#3555, #3597)
• make the /context API filter & lazy-load aware as per MSC1227 (#3567)
• Add ability to limit number of monthly active users on the server (#3630)
• When we fail to join a room over federation, pass the error code back to the client. (#3639)
• Add a new /admin/register API for non-interactively creating users. (#3415)

Bugfixes

• Make /directory/list API return 404 for room not found instead of 400 (#2952)
• Default inviter_display_name to mxid for email invites (#3391)
• Don't generate TURN credentials if no TURN config options are set (#3514)
• Correctly announce deleted devices over federation (#3520)
• Catch failures saving metrics captured by Measure, and instead log the faulty metrics information for further analysis. (#3548)
• Unicode passwords are now normalised before hashing, preventing the instance where two different devices or browsers might send a different UTF-8 sequence for the password. (#3569)
• Fix potential stack overflow and deadlock under heavy load (#3570)
• Respond with M_NOT_FOUND when profiles are not found locally or over federation. Fixes #3585 (#3585)
• Fix failure to persist events over federation under load (#3601)
• Fix updating of cached remote profiles (#3605)
• Fix 'tuple index out of range' error (#3607)
• Only import secrets when available (fix for py < 3.6) (#3626)

Internal Changes

• Remove redundant checks on who_forgot_in_room (#3350)
• Remove unnecessary event re-signing hacks (#3367)
• Rewrite cache list decorator (#3384)
• Move v1-only REST APIs into their own module. (#3460)
• Replace more instances of Python 2-only iteritems and itervalues uses. (#3562)
• Refactor EventContext to accept state during init (#3577)
• Improve Dockerfile and docker-compose instructions (#3543)
• Release notes are now in the Markdown format. (#3552)
• add config for pep8 (#3559)
• Merge Linearizer and Limiter (#3571, #3572)
• Lazily load state on master process when using workers to reduce DB consumption (#3579, #3581, #3582, #3584)
• Fixes and optimisations for resolve_state_groups (#3586)
• Improve logging for exceptions when handling PDUs (#3587)
• Add some measure blocks to persist_events (#3590)
• Fix some random logcontext leaks. (#3591, #3606)
• Speed up calculating state deltas in persist_event loop (#3592)
• Attempt to reduce amount of state pulled out of DB during persist_events (#3595)
• Fix a documentation typo in on_make_leave_request (#3609)
• Make EventStore inherit from EventFederationStore (#3612)
• Remove some redundant joins on event_edges.room_id (#3613)
• Stop populating events.content (#3614)
• Update the /send_leave path registration to use event_id rather than a transaction ID. (#3616)
• Refactor FederationHandler to move DB writes into separate functions (#3621)
• Remove unused field "pdu_failures" from transactions. (#3628)
• rename replication_layer to federation_client (#3634)
• Factor out exception handling in federation_client (#3638)
• Refactor location of docker build script. (#3644)
• Update CONTRIBUTING to mention newsfragments. (#3645)

Spec Progress

Progress on the spec has been motoring since TravisR dived (dove?) into it full time a few weeks ago - the Federation API r0 megathread bug that tracks progress on filling in the gaps on the S2S API is clearing its checkboxes at an impressive rate.

Lining up spec PRs for @matrixdotorg sure does look pretty. pic.twitter.com/YHQ00ZgzYl

— Travis Ralston (@turt2live) August 3, 2018

Some points of note regarding current proposals:

• MSC1466 Erik proposes a soft_logout field to be added to the body of 401 responses, to better help handling of encryption keys. Check the proposal notes
• MSC1452 agreement has been reached on Homeserver Warning Messages

We're going with pinned messages (option 2) and room tags (option 5) as that seems to be where the consensus is: it re-uses existing bits of the spec and room tags also help clients that don't know about this specific room tag to handle the room the right way

• MSC1426/MSC1421 Discussion about the review process itself

• MSC1425 Room Versioning It's likely that in the immediate future we'll want to change the properties of rooms in a way that will not be compatible with existing servers - for example, changing the rules for event auth or state resolution, or changing the format of an event id.

• MSC1318 Documentation describing the anticipated Open Governance of Matrix.org (aka, Matrix.org Foundation)

Python SDK -> Python 3 ?

The maintainers of the Matrix Python SDK are mulling some major changes to the library. In particular, the desire to use await / async syntax means they are considering making Python 3.5 the minimum supported version. Go chat about this change and comment on the proposal issue.

Clients

Riot/Web 0.16

Big congratulations to the Riot/Web team on the release of 0.16. You can read all about it here, but I'll give you the headlines now:

• Replies are now available, there is UX for them and they look great
• Jitsi is now the default video conferencing provider across Web, iOS and Android, with new widget integrations for Riot Web
• New composer (text box) using Slate.js rather than Draft.js, which fixes many existing bugs and improves performance

Meanwhile, Lazy Loading implementation is approaching completion, promising several factors of improved resource utilisation!

nheko 0.5.2

Also now available on flathub!

Go download nheko and check out the 0.5.2 release notes.

New features just in the last week or so:

• Mark own read messages with a double checkmark
• Add option to specify the scale factor
• Add input field to specify the device name on login.
• Add option to ignore key requests altogether.
• Show device list in user profile & add option to create 1-1 chat.

Plus lots of improvements and bug fixes.

libQMatrixClient and Quaternion

kitsune has been working on resend functionality:

libQMatrixClient and Quaternion have gained ability to resend and discard unsent messages. this means if Quaternion could not, after several attempts, deliver a message, a user can click "Resend" and it will try again

On the subject of libQMatrixClient, it's exciting that Konversation, the KDE IRC client, may in future start to use libQMatrixClient for Matrix support!

Matrique

Black Hat announces a Flatpak repo for Matrique:

Matrique now has a Flatpak repo. It is the nightly build of the master branch. You can add the repo by typing flatpak remote-add matrique https://b0.gitlab.io/matrique-repo/matrique.flatpakrepo and install it by flatpak install matrique org.eu.encom.matrique As it is still Alpha quality, bugs are expected. Feel free to open an issue if anything goes wrong!

Fractal 3.29.6

New release of Fractal to 3.29.6. Notes from the changelog:

• Add German translation
• Message right click menu with: view source, reply, copy text and delete
• Styles for quotes in messages
• Initial sync speed up

Neo

Incremental improvements to Neo from fox:

Neo now has inline youtube and image url previews, and handles room state changes such as name, avatar and topic as they occur.

Riot/Mobile

• Android: a lot of bug fixes and small UI improvements
• iOS: Lazy Loading is coming to life, showing huge improvements in bandwidth usage and performance in the app

Updates on IRC bridges from Half-Shot

Half-Shot has been working tirelessly on the IRC bridge lately, so I wanted to update on his recent successes:

I've recently been working on mitigating the effects of a netsplit on the IRC bridge, and optimising it to start and run faster. This week I trimmed down the heap usage (where the memory usually goes) to just under a gigabyte on my 10,000 matrix user test bridge. Previously it could spike to as much as 3.5GB. This optimisation is still in a testing phase but results are looking positive.

For reference here is the memory usage of the Freenode process during startup:

And here are the results of my local test bridge before and after the change:

Before:

After:

We also made some internal changes to the appservice-bridge to cache the joined state of all the bridge users and therefore avoiding joining rooms which saves us some time on startup.

Matrix for Grafana, and more from Ananace

In his regular spot, Ananace has made progress on his Matrix sysadmin/ruby suite:

• Grafana alerting ingester supports images, plus more per-task configuration options.
• The K8s-optimized docker image for Synapse has been updated to 0.33.1
• The release tracker has gotten multiple performance improvements.
• the Ruby SDK continues to be slowly worked on.

Synapse

Synapse 0.33.1 is out now as a security update release. Please update if you haven't already - it fixes two issues concerning event visibility where if you knew the event ID of an event you could read it even if you didn't have access to it; we don't believe these have been exploited in the wild, but you will definitely want to upgrade now.

Meanwhile the Python 3 port is progressing well (all sytests now pass in Python 3, i think!), and intrepid folks are starting to experiment with running it in production.

Decentralised Web Summit & Matrix Live

Meanwhile, Matthew & Amandine have been in San Francisco for the 2018 Decentralised Web Summit - so this week's Matrix Live is live from SFO and gives a quick overview of the sort of things we got up to!  Some of the sessions are already online thanks to the (somewhat unreliable) live stream (e.g. here's Muneeb (Blockstack), Amandine, Danielle (Dat), and Zooko (Zcash) talking about their respective governance models & growing pains over the last 2 years: https://youtu.be/tsz3ffrJDpw?t=12133).  The summit was a massive success, with lots of discussions about decentralised reputation, UI/UX for decentralised apps, metadata-resistance, the balance of P2P versus decentralised-servers, etc.  Hopefully some of the conversations we had will result in some major improvements to Matrix in the future!

Edit: Here are the slides for our "Diving into Decentralised Communication" workshop, for those interested in a comparison between Matrix/SSB/Mastodon/Status/Vuvuzela/Briar.  They're pretty minimal, as they just formed a framework for discussion, but might still be of interest.

Hi All,

We have patched two securities vulnerabilities (details follow), we do not believe either have been exploited in the wild, but recommend upgrading asap.

As always you can get the new update from https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases/tag/v0.33.1 or from any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/

Thanks

Changes in Synapse v0.33.1 (2018-08-2)

• Fix a potential issue where servers could request events for rooms they have not joined. (#3641)
• Fix a potential issue where users could see events in private rooms before they joined. (#3642)

Following on from the previous post, we have an update from zil0 on his GSoC project, which entailed implementing E2E support in the Matrix Python SDK.

---

The goal of my project is to implement Matrix's end-to-end encryption protocol in Python, as part of matrix-python-sdk. My mentors are Richard van der Hoff (richvdh) and Hubert Chathi (uhoreg).

It was easy to get started on the project, since the simple parts came first (adding API calls), and then the whole process to follow is documented in an implementation guide, while there is also the reference implementation in JavaScript. And most importantly, the community is nice. :)

Some parts of the work consist in wrapping around the cryptographic primitives implemented in libolm (via Python bindings), in order to handle encrypted events. Others are less straightforward, such as tracking device lists of users, or finding the right way to persist keys and related data between startups.

An interesting aspect of this project is that I am working on a new part of the Python SDK, while also having to integrate with existing code, which is a cool balance between freedom and guidelines.

As the encryption documentation is a bit outdated and incomplete, one (fun) difficulty is to look for information across old issues, Gdocs and source code (and asking my mentor when in doubt). For anyone trying to implement E2E, it should be better by the end of the project, as I am currently working on documenting the missing bits.

I have had a great experience so far. Working on an open source project differs from my previous coding experiences, as people are actually going to use what I write! I have learnt to think about the best design from a usability point of view, discuss different approaches, and I had to write tests and document my code, which sadly is not something I do on personal projects. I enjoyed reviews, and the discussions they led to. And of course I have learnt quite an interesting lot about the E2E voodoo, along with some new Python tricks.

Currently, the implementation is in a working state. Some of the code is merged, and some is awaiting review. It is possible to try it here before everything is merged. The project will be finished in about one week, after some tidying up and when I release device verification and key sharing, which should be the last missing features compared to Riot.

As you may know, for the last few months anoa (Andrew) and APWhiteHat have been working on Dendrite, the next generation Matrix homeserver, written in Go. We asked for an update on their progress, and Andrew provided the blog post below. Serious progress has been made on Dendrite this summer!

---

Hey everyone, my name is Andrew Morgan and I've been working full-time over the summer on Dendrite, our next-generation Matrix homeserver. Over the last two months, I've seen the project transform from a somewhat functioning toy server to a near-production-ready homeserver that is working towards complete feature support. I've appreciated the thought put into the project since day one, and enjoy the elegance of the multi-component design. Documentation is fairly decent at the moment, but comments are plentiful throughout the codebase, while the code itself tends towards simple and maintainable rather than complex and unmanageable.

Application Service Integration

The main focus of my time here has been on the implementation of application service support for Dendrite. Application services are external programs that act as privileged extensions to a homeserver, allowing such functionality as bots in rooms and bridges to third-party networks. Supporting application services requires a few different bits and pieces to be set up. Currently all planned features have a PR for them, with the bold items already merged:

• Sending events to application services
• Support user masquerading for events
• Support editing event timestamps
• Support room alias querying
• Support user ID querying
• Support third party lookup proxying

As you can see a decent portion of the functionality is already in master! The rest will hopefully follow after some further back and forth.

Google Summer of Code

I certainly haven't been going at this all on my own. Alongside extensive help from Erik, who's been mentoring me, our resident Google Summer of Code student, APWhiteHat, has been tackling feature after feature in Dendrite wherever he can find them. Application services received a good deal of help on client-server endpoint authentication side, however, APWhiteHat has mostly been focusing on federation and some other very useful pieces. While his GSoC period still has a week or so before its conclusion, he has so far implemented:

• Idempotency to roomserver event processing to prevent duplication
• Username auto generation
• Tokens library based on macaroons
• Lots of left-over federation stuff: state API & get missing events being the major ones
• AS support to clientapi auth
• Typing server: handling of PUT /typing by clientapi
• More typing server stuff on its way

From my perspective, APWhiteHat was an excellent developer to work with. He asked good questions and was quick to answer any myself or the community had as well. His code reviews were also very comprehensive. I learned a lot from working with him and everyone else :)

OpenTracing and Prometheus Monitoring

Placing any large server into a production environment requires extensive monitoring capabilities in order to ensure operations are running smoothly. To that effect, Dendrite has been both the addition of OpenTracing and Prometheus support. Prometheus, also used heavily in Synapse, allows a homeserver operator to track a wide range of data including endpoint usage, resource management as well as user statistics over any given range of time.

In Dendrite, we are taking this one step further by introducing OpenTracing, a language and platform-agnostic framework for tracking the journey of an endpoint call from incoming request to outgoing response, with every method, hierarchy change and database call in between. It will be immensely useful in tracking down performance issues, as well as providing insight into the most critical paths throughout the codebase and where we should focus most of our optimization efforts on. It also comes with a lovely dashboard courtesy of Jaeger:

Community

We've also seen some encouraging interest and development work from the community in the past couple months. While PR review from our own side is admittedly slow due to our focus on getting the foundational work in place, that hasn't stopped both old and new developers from sending in PRs and performing code reviews. A huge thank you to everyone involved! From this we've gotten API implementations and application service fixes from @turt2live, an end-to-end encryption implementation from @fadeAce, filtering support from @CromFr, and some PRs and numerous helpful review comments from @krombel.

We've also started to see some people running Dendrite in live environments, which is incredibly exciting for us to see! While Dendrite is not considered production-ready yet (though it moves closer every day), if you are interested in giving it a go please consult the quickstart installation guide. We look forward to any feedback you may have!

mautrix-telegram now supports double puppeting

tulir has been working away on mautrix-telegram, and has a major breakthrough:

It means you can log in to the bridge with your Matrix account to make messages you send from other Telegram clients appear from your Matrix account.

It can also be used to enable bridging of ephemeral events, which synapse doesn't send to appservices (read receipts, typing notifications, presence).

Also, the bridge has a new HTML parser which should be much better than the old one. It might have caused some new bugs though (like m.emote bridging breaking)

Coffee and the FAQBot

I've been slowly working on matrix.org the last couple of months, updating the FAQ, updating content and UI/appearance of try-matrix-now. As you may know, the FAQBot, created and maintained by Coffee, uses try-matrix-now for it's data, so Coffee updated the bot to start to use some of the new fields.

The final puzzle piece needed for FAQBot has been put into place: https://gitlab.com/Matrixcoffee/extract-web-to-org
This is the bit that grabs "Try Matrix Now!" and turns it into questions that FAQBot can use.
While I was working on that bit of code anyway, I also added support for the new 'home', 'repo', 'room' and 'language' fields. FAQBot will now give more and better information accordingly. For example, it is now possible to ask, "where is the Riot Android source code?" although it is generally better to just ask "where can I find Riot Android?" which combines several fields into a single answer.
4 of 7 items are now completed: https://gitlab.com/Matrixcoffee/FAQBot/issues/2
and the remaining 3 items before FAQBot's release are just the final review and integration tests.

New Discord Bridge Maintainer

Half-Shot has been working stridently on the Discord Bridge lately, and the project has now attracted a second maintainer:

We've got a new member of the maintainer crew in discord bridge land (bringing the total count to 2.) I'd like to welcome Sorunome :). They are going to be helping review the influx of PRs, chew some issues and be a point of contact in the community. They've already filled my PR queue up and it's going to help us move even faster!

In other Bridge news, matrix-appservice-bridge 1.5.0 is out now, uses the latest matrix-js-sdk and matrix-appservice-node, and contains a lot of changes.

Bruno unit tests

Bruno, the latest and greatest addition to the [riot-web] team, has been working on configuring end to end unit tests. His scripts now install synapse from the metal, install riot and then run a test suite. Take a look at the animation below to get the idea!

Fractal 3.29.5

Alexandre Franke tells us about new features in Fractal 3.29.5, and how the project has benefited from GSOC 2018 contributors:

Fractal got a big new release 3.29.5, which includes Eisha's multi-line input (with markdown syntax highlighting) and Julian's room details redesign, as well as his refactor on avatar code which leads to a perf boost.

Ananace: Grafana webhook for Matrix notifications

Ananace, always working on sysadmin tooling with matrix, comes back with a new tool: Grafana webhook for Matrix notifications. This release is described as "the very first 'It doesn't crash instantly' version", but this is surely a useful project.

Quaternion / libQMatrixClient support local echo

kitsune had a surprising week while working on his QMatrix projects:

/me accidentally found a year-old feature branch in his Git and thought of rebasing it in order to eventually continue working on it. As a result, libQMatrixClient and Quaternion master branches support local echo from today. Too bad the same trick doesn't work for E2EE.

Too bad indeed!

Riot/Web

• Cut the release candidate for 0.16-RC1
• Lots of final polishing on Jitsi; all bugs fixed now
• Likewise all Slate bugs fixed - many thanks to t3chguy for finishing them off
• Lazy Loading Members implementation progressing well
• Release due on Monday
• On crypto: uhoreg has also been progressing on hooking up incremental key backup

Riot/Mobile

• Room version upgrade support!
• Replies UI implemented on iOS and working well
• Lazy Loading Members is done and working on iOS - speeds up launch by a minimum of 3x

Synapse

• Hawkowl is running the first ever Python 3.6 synapse! RAM usage looks to be 2-3x less than on Python 2.7. Still work to be done to merge all the PRs though.
• Landing all the Lazy Loading patches; 3 down, 3 to go
• Gathering feedback on the state res prop - thanks to uhoreg for wading through it!
• Catching up Lots and lots of PRs
• Implementing room versioning and gathering feedback on the MSC
• Perf fixes - optimising current state res a bit & fixing sync performance
• => End-to-end message latency on matrix.org has been improved by 3-5x over the last few days(!!!)

Dendrite

• Super-exciting to see E2E working thanks to fadeAce's PR: https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1022887733931520001

Super-exciting to see end-to-end encryption working with Dendrite thanks to a massive PR from first-time contributor fadeAce!! https://t.co/SLIPvgYGAm pic.twitter.com/s47SWjY46o

— Matrix (@matrixdotorg) July 27, 2018

• OpenTracing support has been dusted off and is working again cross-service
• See the community update for much more!

Spec

• Travis continues to blitz through the S2S spec, PRs are flying around everywhere (and even landing!)
• Uhoreg continues to work on the E2E spec merges with Zil0

We'll meet again…

See you next week, and don't forget to watch Matrix Live below!

Spec Updates!

First of all: we've just released the first draft of the proposal for our next generation State Resolution algorithm as MSC1442 (State Resolution: Reloaded).  This is the result of a massive amount of work from Erik - if you are at all interested in the problems that state resets have plagued us with, then you will want to read the proposal and please comment on it!

The next step on State Resolution: Reloaded (once approved) is to be able to actually roll it out - and to this end, richvdh has proposed MSC1425 (Room Versioning proposal). This was published at the beginning of the week but we haven't had any feedback yet - again, please read & give feedback as the intention is to start working on this as soon as possible!  Matthew's also been updating the Lazy Loading proposal (MSC1227).

Meanwhile, the Matrix Spec is now awash with activity, lots of work from TravisR, Cadair and others to accelerate progress. Take a look at the proposals list to stay up to date, or straight to the matrix-doc repo and #matrix-spec:matrix.org room to get the raw activity.

Finally, discussions relating to the spec proposal process itself have attracted attention: MSC1426 and MSC1421, and we're already trialling the new process (using Github PRs rather than Google Docs) in MSC1442 (State Resolution: Reloaded) already.

nheko 0.5.x

nheko 0.5.1 is out, and it's great! Get a version for your platform from bintray.com. I've been using it for the last week or so (on macOS) and found it very stable and usable. mujx commented that "highlights were encryption support & desktop notifications on all platforms", but you can get much more thorough notes from the release notes.

Plasma

It's been several weeks since we mentioned Plasma, but work on the C2S parts of the spec implementation have been happening quietly behind the scenes. Project lead Nico said recently:

I've updated the CI test server with the latest snapshot version of plasma. createRoom and invite C2S endpoints are fully implemented and should work as expected.

You can find the full list of implemented endpoints in the readme, and also read the architecture overview.

kitsune, live on stage

kitsune presented an introduction to Matrix (for a technical audience) at the Tokyo Linux Users Group - you'll need to skip to 1h41m16s into the video.

GTAD pulls in description and summary fields from the API

kitsune continues working on GTAD, and this week has started automatically including docs in libQMatrixClient:

GTAD is now aware of description and summary fields in API descriptions so you can use them with Javadoc/Doxygen. As a result, libQMatrixClient master branch now enjoys doc-comments throughout its CS API layer - the rest of the library builds in envy.

SimpleMatrix

MTRNord introduced us to SimpleMatrix:

SimpleMatrix is my approach on making an Android App that is more easy to use than the official one in Terms of UX and UI. Planned is also a Android Wear App within this App for mostly Notifications.

SimpleMatrix is planning to use matrix-java-sdk, but for now is a visual mockup, it doesn't currently connect to Matrix.

Room: #SimpleMatrix:matrix.ffslfl.net Git: https://git.nordgedanken.de/Nordgedanken/SimpleMatrix

Tales of Half-Shot and his many Bridges

Arrival of the Discord DMs

After lots of begging, frustration and eventually an offer of a free lunch (thanks Anoa): I give you Discord DMs.
This first cut bridges over existing regular and group DMs to Matrix. In the future we will also allow you to create DMs from Matrix so that you can contact users without even logging into Discord. With thanks to the #discord:half-shot.uk community for helping shape this feature!

Currently this is in PR form but is very likely to make it into the 0.3 release of matrix-appservice-discord.

Half-Shot fixes the Foonetic IRC bridge

For those who (want to) use Foonetic IRC channels, Half-Shot is here for you! Previously this bridge had been down due to invalid certificates, but this is now resolved.

Synapse

Synapse 0.33 landed on Thursday, boasting 2x speed-ups for /sync and (briefly) meaning that the matrix.org homeserver felt impressively snappy and fast!  Ironically traffic levels promptly grew again such that the synapse master process is now the bottleneck once more, but between incremental state res, python 3 and upcoming room-sharding work we should see the performance fixes continuing to come!  Meanwhile, lots of PRs in the queue for Synapse 0.34 - including Lazy Loading support as per (MSC1227), and a whole new set of stats functionality for tracking per-room and per-user stats.

Riot

Lots of activity in the build up to Riot/Web 0.16 - merging the new Slate rich text editor to /develop (try it now!), upgrading Jitsi and turning it on by default (at last!! - again, try it on /develop, although you'll have to enable it in Labs).  We'd be particularly interested in how Jitsi is behaving, as so far for us it's been unrecognisably improved over the previous deployment.

Meanwhile, lots of work on Lazy Loading members on Riot/Web and Riot/iOS, and lots of stability perf work in general across mobile.

State Resolution Special... Matrix Live!

And finally, all you could ever want to hear about the new State Resolution algorithm on a special edition of Matrix Live, starring Erik & Matthew!

Hi all,

We've just released Synapse 0.33.0!  This is a major performance upgrade which speeds up /sync (i.e. receiving messages) by a factor of almost 2x!  This has already made a massive difference to the CPU usage and snappiness of the matrix.org homeserver since we rolled it out a few days ago - you can see the drop in sync worker CPU just before midday on July 17th; previously we were regularly hitting the CPU ceiling (at which point everything grinds to a halt) - now we're back down hovering between 40% and 60% CPU (at the current load).  This is actually fixing a bug which crept in around Synapse 0.31, so please upgrade - especially if Synapse has been feeling slower than usual recently, and especially if you are still on Synapse 0.31.

Meanwhile we have a lot of new stuff coming on the horizon - a whole new algorithm for state resolution (watch this space for details); incremental state resolution (at last!) to massively speed up state resolution and mitigate extremities build up (and speed up the synapse master process, which is now the bottleneck again on the matrix.org homeserver); better admin tools for managing resource usage, and all the Python3 porting work (with associated speedups and RAM & GC improvements).  Fun times ahead!

The full changelog follows below; as always you can grab Synapse from https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse.   Thanks for flying Matrix!

Synapse 0.33.0 (2018-07-19)

Bugfixes

• Disable a noisy warning about logcontexts. (#3561)

Synapse 0.33.0rc1 (2018-07-18)

Features

• Enforce the specified API for report_event. (#3316)
• Include CPU time from database threads in request/block metrics. (#3496, #3501)
• Add CPU metrics for _fetch_event_list. (#3497)
• Optimisation to make handling incoming federation requests more efficient. (#3541)

Bugfixes

• Fix a significant performance regression in /sync. (#3505, #3521, #3530, #3544)
• Use more portable syntax in our use of the attrs package, widening the supported versions. (#3498)
• Fix queued federation requests being processed in the wrong order. (#3533)
• Ensure that erasure requests are correctly honoured for publicly accessible rooms when accessed over federation. (#3546)

Misc

• Refactoring to improve testability. (#3351, #3499)
• Use isort to sort imports. (#3463, #3464, #3540)
• Use parse and asserts from http.servlet. (#3534, #3535).

Welcome to TWIM for Friday the 13th! Nothing too scary, but lots of client updates and news.

Quaternion

kitsune:

Quaternion has gained a new /html command that allows one to send raw HTML. Note that an actually displayed HTML subset entirely depends on the receiving client; no HTML validation or sanitation is done; a plaintext version is automatically created by stripping all the HTML tags.

neo

f0x is working on Neo again:

added emotes, working localecho and /rainbow

rainbows :D

matrix-logger

A useful tool from CromFr for anyone who wants to archive logs of rooms.

I wrote a small matrix "client" for logging messages in joined rooms, and store them in a format very similar to Weechat logs. Source code (Rust) Binary release (x86_64 windows & linux) Please open issues if encounter any bug or need specific features.\nAlso I'm new to rust, so any review / advice would be appreciated :)

Matrique client progress

Black Hat has been working on Matrique, and it's looking really good! Screenshot below.

Matrique now has support for sending/receiving messages (plaintext, markdown, HTML, rainbow), emotes and notices. It also supports receiving images, videos, files and states. I am still working on file receiving functions.

I love that all clients include rainbow messages.

fluffychat for Ubuntu Touch

New to me, fluffychat is a "Simple Matrix Messenger for Ubuntu Touch". The design philosophy for this app is focused on simplicity, and the hope is for it to complement uMatriks, another Ubuntu Touch client.

Why are you not just contributing to uMatriks? uMatriks is great and it's superb, that someone has created a Matrix Client for Ubuntu Touch. But sometimes you have a so detailed vision of a user interface, which you want to implement, that you can not just contribute to an existing project. However, I would like to work with the uMatriks developers together. We could use the same push gateway for example.

Riot/Web

• Welcomed Bruno onto the Riot/Web team! (and said farewell to Luke)
• Lots of bug blitzing
• Riot 0.16 due next week, with Jitsi-everywhere (at last) and Slate for composer.
• We now have an end-to-end test harness (via puppeteer!) at last - being applied at first to fix onboarding bugs.
• Lazy loading members in progress

Riot/Mobile

• Major perf work ongoing
• Decoupling members from state…
• …and then lazyloading members.

Synapse 0.32.2 available

v0.32.2 is now available, which includes the m.room.server_acl security feature discussed in a previous blog post.

• If you're not running 0.32, please upgrade!!
• Python 3 progresses!
• Quite a lot of ops work to keep matrix.org alive. Status page coming soon! (We promise!!)
• Looking at metrics and quotas for better experiences on limited-resource homeservers.

Spec

• State res fix
• Version bump
• Lots of omission PRs landing
• TravisR S2S work
• Work on both IS & AS API too
• Uhoreg work - .well-known, and 3pid logins
• Some internal discussions about improving the proposal process; particularly having a 5 day 'final comment period' similar to Rust's. Once we've got alignment within the core spec team we'll MSC it.

Dendrite

• Anoa & APwhitehat continue to blitz onwards on AS and federation
• thirdparty protocol support for application services in the works.
• continued progress on getting the AS query APIs supported. PR for /alias still being reviewed, PR for /users happened this week and now being reviewed
• Timestamp massaging for application services ready and in review
• APWhiteHat did a good chunk on federation, now migrating to supporting the various EDUs, starting with m.typing events.
• …running out of low hanging fruit…

AS

• matrix-appservice-irc 0.9.1 is here with perf improvements!
• Lots of work on trying to make it start up sooner

E2E

• UISI stats
• Device list syncing
• Encrypted backup

Debian Packages

andrewsh has packaged synapse 0.32.2 for Debian

uhoreg has packaged quaternion 0.0.9.2 for Debian

That's all folks

Watch Matrix Live below, and see you next week!