Well here you are then, the 9th episode in the Synapse 0.33.x series.
Features wise, 0.33.9 contains a change to the way that GDPR consent works under the hood. It is now plumbed in to the login flow (rather than following immediately afterwards) such that it does not inadvertently break on-boarding. This is part of a broader set of changes that span Synapse and Riot to improve initial first impressions of using matrix.
Separately we now have support for room version upgrades which is pre-requisite for rolling out the new state resolution algorithm, come and join us in #teststateresv2:jki.re if you would like to help us test.
Finally we've spent a bunch of time further improving perf especially in and around reducing device ids federation traffic.
I know I say it every time, but full python 3 support is really really close now, matrix.org is now running entirely on py3 and seeing some amazing perf improvements - the remaining blocker is getting py3 deb packages ready and then we'll ship an official python 3 release. There will also be a blog post to explain what we've been up to and what to expect perf wise.
If the typing stream ID goes backwards (as on a worker when the master restarts), the worker's typing handler will no longer erroneously report rooms containing new typing events. (#4127)
Fix table lock of device_lists_remote_cache which could freeze the application (#4132)
Fix exception when using state res v2 algorithm (#4135)
Generating the user consent URI no longer fails on Python 3. (#4140, #4163)
Loading URL previews from the DB cache on Postgres will no longer cause Unicode type errors when responding to the request, and URL previews will no longer fail if the remote server returns a Content-Type header with the chartype in quotes. (#4157)
The hash_password script now works on Python 3. (#4161)
Fix noop checks when updating device keys, reducing spurious device list update notifications. (#4164)
This week we continue Matrix Live Season 3 by talking to community member axx, Axel Simon from La Quadrature du Net, a French advocacy group that promotes digital rights and freedoms of citizens. We talk about the work La Quadrature du Net do, with a focus on the importance of decentralisation and how Matrix helps support this.
Max has been giving updates on the road to mxisd v1.2.0, which was released this week:
A new stable version of mxisd is out: v1.2.0. It comes with:
The ultimate identity store that lets you run any command on the system to fetch info, making it the most generic yet. The sky is now your limit!
The ability to send email notifications about room invites when done using a Matrix ID regardless if their users is already provisioned on synapse, using emails found in an Identity store. Targeted at onboarding/migration to Matrix for any org/corp.
Half-Shot has been working on important work for his final undergrad year. Just kidding! He's been working on bridges as you'd expect:
I've been working on matrix-appservice-purple, and the community immediately rallied around and helped me get it into shape. We've got automated builds for both the bridge and the libpurple binding modules. In features land, group chats are now working at a basic level and I will be working on supporting profiles next. #purple-bridge:half-shot.uk is now a room where you can tell me why your favorite protocol doesn't work with the bridge. (It's also used for updates.)
A couple of SCS (Specs Changes Submissions) have been merged into the Informo specs, notably SCS #2 which introduces a complete technical description of the network's nodes and their expected behaviour, and SCS #4 which changes the duration of the call for public review period, shrinking it from 14 days to 7 days, in order to speed specs work up while letting a decent amount of time for people to give a look at new SCSs and voice their concerns.
This week in Koma, I have been working on a correct implementation of the user registration process. Currently waiting for a small issue with synapse to get fixed For kotlin programmer who might be interested https://github.com/koma-im/koma/pull/6
🔗f-droid.org has set up a new matrix (synapse) server
f-droid.org has set up a new matrix (synapse) server for internal conversation and to chat in #fdroid:matrix.org , which will obviously also get a :f-droid.org alias.
For now the server is private, only allowing core team members to get an account in order to keep the performance manageable.
An implementation for Push-to-Talk for Jitsi calls in Riot has now been completed and is in the review phase. This was a result of multiple weeks of work, with code changes across many different repositories. Will hopefully make a difference with background noise or many participants. Look forward to seeing it land in /develop sometime shortly! Works with both Scalar and Dimension setups.
Half-Shot: "The events API update for Slack was released on riot.im/develop a little while ago, which let you do more than webhooks could let you do. The UI scalar/integration manager bits were left on /develop for testing but got rolled out to /app this week."
This week I attended TADSummit in Lisbon to tell them about the excellent progress Matrix has been making this year. You can see more details of the conference (plus video) here: http://blog.tadsummit.com/2018/11/16/tadsummit-2018-web3/
If you need more, come back here next week, for all the latest from This Week in Matrix! Also, join us in #twim:matrix.org to tell us what you've been doing.
We continue the new format for Matrix Live season 3 by chatting with Francois from New Vector, to get a sneak preview of the work he's doing on a new version of matrix-android-sdk, and how that will impact Riot:
Welcome to Brendan, who has started working on Dendrite as his new day job at New Vector:
There's been some progress on Dendrite (?), with a couple of bug getting fixed along with some progress in the implementation of Matrix endpoints, such as the /backfill federation one (documented here), which has already been merged, and the /messages one from the client-server API (documented here) for which a pull request has been opened and is currently under review.
I have pushed my asyncio wrapper of the Python matrix client api class to pypi, so I can use it in a few different projects while the PR to the Python SDK is in an unmerged state. It exposes all the methods on the MatrixHttpApi class as awaitables. https://github.com/Cadair/matrix_api_async and https://pypi.org/project/matrix-api-async/
These improvements will, in time, be merged back into the main Python SDK.
Half-Shot is working on so many bridges that these days he just casually mentions a huge release like Discord bridge v0.3.0. Some of the many many new features:
#251 Support for Postgresql and a newer SQLite3 backend!
#182 Replace npmlog with winston, for logging to files and better logging overall.
#220 Messages are now deleted by a users puppet rather than the bot.
There are many more features and bugfixes on the release notes. Also:
Shoutout to our new member of the team, Sorunome who did a lot of the review work behind the scenes for this release. Also, thank you to everyone who submitted a PR or an issue!
TWIM (but actually over the last few weeks), thanks to the efforts of a new contributor, matrix-puppet-slack v1.7.0 and v1.8.0 have been released, fixing a number of old and new issues and adding support for new types of Slack events, including bidirectional @-mentions, Slack-to-Matrix typing notifications, fixing Slack-to-Matrix image/file uploads with comments, and more!
The matrix-puppet-bridge projects have gotten relatively quiet over the past year or so, but there's still plenty of bridges with plenty of features to implement and plenty of bugs to fix (and, even more importantly, bugs to report!) for any would-be-contributors who'd like to use a trusted Matrix homeserver as their double-puppetting Slack/iMessage/Facebook/GroupMe/iChat/Skype/Hangouts/Signal/Tox client from which to brag to their friends on the other platforms about how great Matrix is.
tulir has been making big progress on his maubot management UI:
The maubot management UI has progressed well, but isn't quite ready yet. I think it should be usable by Next Week in Matrix.
It can be used to set up and configure a maubot instance and plugins. Once it's ready, it should be possible to do everything except installing maubot itself through the UI: installing and updating plugins, adding matrix clients, configuring plugin instances, viewing logs, etc.
Coffee continues his streak of TWIM mentions by bringing a new bot to combat abuse:
HK Bot is an anti-abuse bot for public Matrix chatrooms.
This is a bot that really shouldn't exist, but since some people just like to make others' lives more difficult, here we are.
The purpose of this bot is twofold. It can automatically oversee rooms and respond to abuse, based on programmable pattern rules, providing a stop-gap measure in case no human moderators are nearby. It can also automate some tedious tasks via its command interface, the primary one being the complete redaction of all of an abuser's messages.
HK Bot is still under construction and contains dangerous features. Use with caution.
Dandellion "made an X-SAMPA to IPA bot based on matrix-bot-sdk and discord's conniebot". This bot essentially lets you use ASCII characters to get an output in IPA. The advantage of this is that you can much more easily type and transmit pronunciation (because you don't need to find the characters).
I'll just have to make it a bit more configurable, but then I'll throw the source up
When making constructed languages and talking about linguistics, it's nice to get an easily readable IPA representation of a word, but it's really hard to write IPA, which is why x-sampa exists as a way to input IPA with a normal keyboard!
vabd, the unknown organiser of Informo provided an update about the spec:
A handful of SCS (Specs Changes Submissions) to the Informo specifications have been happening over the last week and a half, with some of them still open to public review for at least a few days before being merged into the specs. The list of SCS open to review can be found here, and people can track new SCS and status changes to existing ones through our specs bot that's living in #discuss:weu.informo.network ?
I increased message rendering performance in the room history. Also the history doesn't move it's position anymore when older messages are loaded, which results in a much better experience. All the changes are in master, but we didn't make a new release.
I have made a video about Riot which could fit in the Guides on matrix.org. It's for beginners, in French. It's 6 months old, but I just uploaded it on youtube. Also it's available on peertube.
ma1uta introduces a new client built on JavaFX: no code yet, but it's built on the previous Java Matrix work he's been doing. "It will be cross-platform (linux,windows,osx I hope) client with supports of the multi accounts."
Half-Shot also continued work on bridging via libpurple: "I've nearly got group chats working, with invites (and hopefully people joining and leaving them showing up properly) as well as user's having profiles."
Since the last TWIM update, koma is updated to kotlin 1.3, experimental coroutines are replaced with stable ones. The changes are being tested and should be merged soon. A new contributor has joined, so expect development to speed up a bit.
You made it, right to the end! Nice going! Come back here next week to find out what's been happening, or even better, come join us in #twim:matrix.org and tell us what YOU'VE been working on!
This week, the first steps were taken in the creation of the Matrix Foundation! Read our blog post from earlier this week for more:
in preparation for the upcoming Matrix 1.0 release, we've been moving ahead with the rest of the open governance plan – and we're happy to announce that as of a few hours ago, the initial incarnation of The Matrix.org Foundation exists! Watch this space over the coming weeks as we announce the Guardians and finish bootstrapping the Foundation into its final long-term form! Meanwhile, any questions: come ask in #matrix-spec-process:matrix.org
Just wanted to let everyone know that changes are coming to the server list: I've put up a notice on the site that starting Nov 16th I will only show a curated list of servers I would recommend to join. This reduces the workload for me quite a bit and avoids me becoming some kind of arbiter on what encompasses the Matrix universe… I think it is also more useful for users who are looking for a server to join. And there is always matrixstats.org for those who are looking for a more complete-ish list of known homeservers.
However, if you have ideas on how to continue the project, or would like to step up and get involved in maintaining a list using data and tools from Hello Matrix, please contact me. Alex told me:
if you find someone willing to take up the project of a more automated, self-service and complete list at a later date, I am more than willing to hand over all the stuff I currently have and might also lend a helping hand myself (if I have time then).
tulir has continued work on the revamped, now-Pythonic maubot, and has added a management API:
The maubot management API I mentioned last week is now mostly ready. It should be possible to use it to set up a maubot instance and plugins without filling the database manually. There's no UI yet though, so it still means curling manually. The management API also supports the fancy plugin reloading stuff which was the > reason I rewrote maubot in python: You can POST an updated plugin to the API and it'll install it without having to restart. I also made a bunch of plugins while working on the API that I used to test the API: a dice rolling/calculator bot, a bot that replies with the MXC URI of images you send it, a simple echo/ping bot and an xkcd bot
Next steps are making the management UI, a few more plugins and making setup and development instructions so that other people could run it and make plugins
My lightweight bot/client framework, matrix-client-core, received its first tag ever. Version 0.0.1 is relatively stable, and lies on the doorstep of some refactoring work (ongoing) which should keep the master branch backwards compatible for now, but could make things less stable as I add new commits.
It turns out this isn't strictly a new project:
[it has] been there all along, quietly powering FAQBot and all of my bots. ? Maybe I have failed to explicitly indicate it as such up until now. (oops)
Always good news to see more bot-creation tooling!
Max has updates on mxisd, Identity Server for Matrix:
mxisd v1.2.0-rc.1 is out with support of all features for the Exec Identity Store, allowing connectivity to totally custom/arbitrary backends. Feedback is extremely welcome!
It's a job that someone needed to do, and that someone was Half-Shot (who else?)
I've been reviving node-purple (a library for communicating with libpurple) and making a brand new bridge service to make use of it called matrix-appservice-purple. Today I got it to the point where you could link your XMPP account to your matrix user and have it bridge PMs over. Work is ongoing to make it bridge group chats, profiles, contacts lists and support other protocols better in the coming weeks
Black Hat is often found working on Spectral (previously 'Matrique'.) This week, he has been building @nsfw:encom.eu.org, which is a bot designed to give scores for how likely an image should be classified as NSFW. It's a simple mechanism, you give it an image, it gives you a JSON object with the result. For example:
My avatar returned less than 1% probability of being NSFW, which I was actually a little offended by.
To talk more about the bot and it's development, chat in #nsfw:encom.eu.org.
kitsune is forced by his employers to use Viber, so is thinking of creating a Matrix bridge.
I spent some time this week repeatedly installing Synapse, then working with Stefan to create a new, hopefully definitive installation guide (available soon). I can also personally recommend Slavi's matrix-docker-ansible-deploy project, this is a great way to get a Synapse installation (and more!) running.
lately in #twim:matrix.org posters have been providing much clearer and atomic updates, which I like a lot
We continue the new season of Matrix Live. This re-booted season has a slightly different format to previous: in each outing, there will be a single deep-dive topic. This week, Matthew and recent-Matrix-arrival Nad discuss UX for E2E encryption key handling. This is an unsurprisingly complex design question, both in terms of how it should behave and how it should look. Nad shared his latest thinking in a blog post earlier today, and you can watch the video below.
I should also introduce myself—I'm Nad Chishtie (@nadonomy:matrix.org) and I recently joined the Matrix core team (at New Vector) as Lead Designer, most recently focusing on end-to-end encryption.
When using encrypted messages, most existing services fall short in one or all of the following:
They don't allow you to use multiple devices independently. For example, a web session might be locally tethered to a mobile device.
They don't support a way to restore or temporarily access message history. For example, if you don't have physical access to your main device because it's broken or has been stolen.
They don't allow you to verify that devices are controlled by their owners rather than eavesdroppers, and persist that trust across multiple devices, sessions or rooms.
Modern users, even those we talk to at security and privacy-led organisations, expect these features to 'just work' by default out of the box. Before enabling end-to-end encryption by default, we've been hard at work figuring out how we can deliver these features without compromising security or usability.
(For some users, restrictions such as limiting the number of places encryption keys reside, and not having a synchronised message history may be desirable security features. We'll support these cases, but just not as the default behaviour.)
Let's dive in to some of the fundamental concepts we'll be putting forward to deliver a default end-to-end encryption experience that makes sense for most modern users. In this post we'll look at an overview of work-in-progress wireframes, in the spirit of designing in the open and gathering feedback from the wider Matrix community. Please note that these don't represent the actual interface design.
When logging in to a new device, you'll be able to use an existing device to verify your new one. Verification is done by scanning a QR code on whichever device has the most convenient camera to use, or by comparing a short text string. You only have to complete this process once to mutually verify both devices.
Verifying your new device by cross-signing transfers encryption keys, giving it access to your encrypted messages, and also signals to other users that the new device is trustworthy.
To the end user, Secure Message Recovery works a lot like setting up disk encryption or a password manager. A user can optionally secure their message history using a recovery passphrase and/or key. If logged out, or using another device, the user can use the recovery passphrase or key to access their encrypted message history.
We think that in most cases users will cross-sign personal devices, but as a safety net (for example, if a user's devices are broken or lost) Secure Message Recovery is an invaluable tool for users to minimise the chance of them losing their encrypted message history.
With both cross-signing and Secure Message Recovery in place, we think that people should trust people, instead of individual devices. Now, when you verify a device, it'll mark all of that users trusted devices as trusted.
Gone are the days of every person you talk to having to independently verify your new device upgrade. Like cross-signing, you can verify a device by scanning a QR code or comparing a short text string.
In Riot, we're implementing these features with a sensible default experience that strikes a balance between usability and security. We think most people would prefer to trust cross-signed devices, and that user trust shouldn't block encryption. However, if you aren't most people, you'll be free to configure whatever level of security you need.
With all of the above in place, and after resolving any remaining technical issues, users will be able to:
Use end-to-end encryption by default in private rooms.
Use an existing device or Secure Message Recovery to access their encrypted message history on multiple devices, and to signal device trust to other users.
Access their encrypted message history using Secure Message Recovery, by storing encrypted message keys on their homeserver.
Mark a user as trusted by verifying one of their devices, persisting across all rooms and devices.
Keep their encrypted messages out of the hands of eavesdroppers.
Opt out, or further configure if they have more specific security requirements.
Over the coming days we're polishing wireframes, nomenclature, iconography and microcopy as we dig deeper into development and implementation, as well as designing these features for the upcoming Riot redesign. Cryptography needn't be intimidating, and we're excited to iterate on these advanced features to make them work for everyone.
We'd love to hear your feedback! Let us know your thoughts here or in #e2e-dev:matrix.org.
This time we have a bunch of bug fixes and db performance improvements as well as better support for auto-join rooms and the ability for admins to limit who can create rooms aliases.
v0.33.8 also contains more python 3 fixes: we are running most of matrix.org on python 3 as of right now and seeing some pretty impressive performance improvements. Look out for Hawkowl's write up coming soon.
For those interested in what we are working on right now, take a look at our task board.
synctl will use the right python executable to run worker processes (#4057)
Manhole now works again on Python 3, instead of failing with a "couldn't match all kex parts" when connecting. (#4060, #4067)
Fix some metrics being racy and causing exceptions when polled by Prometheus. (#4061)
Fix bug which prevented email notifications from being sent unless an absolute path was given for email_templates. (#4068)
Correctly account for cpu usage by background threads (#4074)
Fix race condition where config defined reserved users were not being added to
the monthly active user list prior to the homeserver reactor firing up (#4081)
Fix bug which prevented backslashes being used in event field filters (#4083)
Back in June we blogged about the plan of action to establish a formal open governance system for the Matrix protocol: introducing both the idea of the Spec Core Team to act as the neutral technical custodian of the Matrix Spec, as well as confirming the plan to incorporate the Matrix.org Foundation to act as a neutral non-profit legal entity which can act as the legal Guardian for Matrix's intellectual property, gather donations to fund Matrix work, and be legally responsible for maintaining and evolving the spec in a manner which benefits the whole ecosystem without privileging any individual commercial concerns. We published a draft proposal for the new governance model at MSC1318: a proposal for open governance of the Matrix.org Spec to gather feedback and to trial during the day-to-day development of the spec. Otherwise, we refocused on getting a 1.0 release of the Spec out the door, given there's not much point in having a fancy legal governance process to safeguard the evolution of the Spec when we don't even have a stable initial release!
We were originally aiming for end of August to publish a stable release of all Matrix APIs (and thus a so-called 1.0 of the overall standard) - and in the end we managed to publish stable releases of 4 of the 5 APIs (Client-Server, Application Service, Identity Service and Push APIs) as well as a major overhaul of the Server-Server (SS) API. However, the SS API work has run on much longer than expected, as we've ended up both redesigning and needing to implement many major changes to to the protocol: the new State Resolution algorithm (State Resolution Reloaded) to fix state resets; versioned rooms (in order to upgrade to the new algorithm); changing event IDs to be hashes; and fixing a myriad federation bugs in Synapse. Now, the remaining work is progressing steadily (you can see the progress over at https://github.com/orgs/matrix-org/projects/2 - although some of the cards are redacted because they refer to non-spec consulting work) - and the end is in sight!
So, in preparation for the upcoming Matrix 1.0 release, we've been moving ahead with the rest of the open governance plan - and we're happy to announce that as of a few hours ago, the initial incarnation of The Matrix.org Foundation exists!
Now, it's important to understand that this process is not finished - what we've done is to set up a solid initial basis for the Foundation in order to finish refining MSC1318 and turning it into the full Articles of Association of the Foundation (i.e. the legal framework which governs the remit of the Foundation), which we'll be working on over the coming weeks.
In practice, what this means is that in the first phase, today's Foundation gives us:
Guardians, whose role is to be legally responsible for ensuring that the Foundation (and by extension the Spec Core Team) keeps on mission and neutrally protects the development of Matrix. Matrix's Guardians form the Board of Directors of the Foundation, and will provide a 'checks and balances' mechanism between each other to ensure that all Guardians act in the best interests of the protocol and ecosystem.
For the purposes of initially setting up the Foundation, the initial Guardians are Matthew & Amandine - but in the coming weeks we're expecting to appoint at least three independent Guardians in order to ensure that the current team form a minority on the board and ensure the neutrality of the Foundation relative to Matthew & Amandine's day jobs at New Vector.The profile we're looking for in Guardians are: folks who are independent of the commercial Matrix ecosystem (and especially independent from New Vector), and may even not be members of today's Matrix community, but who are deeply aligned with the mission of the project, and who are respected and trusted by the wider community to uphold the guiding principles of the Foundation and keep the other Guardians honest.
An immutable asset lock, to protect the intellectual property of the Foundation and prevent it from ever being sold or transferred elsewhere.
An immutable mission lock, which defines the Foundation's mission as a non-profit neutral guardian of the Matrix standard, with an initial formal goal of finalising the open governance process. To quote article 4 from the initial Articles of Association:
4. The objects of the Foundation are for the benefit of the community as a whole to:
4.1.1 empower users to control their communication data and have freedom over their communications infrastructure by creating, maintaining and promoting Matrix as an openly standardised secure decentralised communication protocol and network, open to all, and available to the public for no charge;
4.1.2 build and develop an appropriate governance model for Matrix through the Foundation, in order to drive the adoption of Matrix as a single global federation, an open standard unencumbered from any proprietary intellectual property and/or software patents, minimising fragmentation (whilst encouraging experimentation), maximising speed of development, and prioritising the long-term success and growth of the overall network over the commercial concerns of an individual person or persons.
You can read the initial Articles of Association here (although all the rest of it is fairly generic legal boilerplate for a non-profit company at this point which hasn't yet been tuned; the Matrix-specific stuff is Article 4 as quoted above). You can also see the initial details of the Foundation straight from the horse's mouth over at https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/11648710.
Then, in the next and final phase, what remains is to:
Appoint 3+ more Guardians (see above).
Finalise MSC1318 and incorporate the appropriate bits into the Articles of Associations (AoA). (We might literally edit MSC1318 directly into the final AoA, to incorporate as much input as possible from the full community)
Tune the boilerplate bits of the AoA to incorporate the conclusions of MSC1318.
Register the Foundation as a Community Interest Company, to further anchor the Foundation as being for the benefit of the wider community.
Perform an Asset Transfer of any and all Matrix.org property from New Vector to the Foundation (especially the Matrix.org domain and branding, and donations directed to Matrix.org).
So there you have it! It's been a long time in coming, and huge thanks to everyone for their patience and support in getting to this point, but finally The Matrix.org Foundation exists. Watch this space over the coming weeks as we announce the Guardians and finish bootstrapping the Foundation into its final long-term form! Meanwhile, any questions: come ask in #matrix-spec-process:matrix.org or in the blog comments here.
thanks,
Matthew, Amandine, and the forthcoming Guardians of [the] Matrix!
We've covered the growth of this project several times in TWIM, but I wanted to give a little more attention to the work Slavi has been doing with matrix-docker-ansible-deploy. Synapse is a large Python project with many configurable options, and many optional components, so installing it has sometimes been a challenge. I have seen many reports that using Ansible and Docker, and in particular using these playbooks from Slavi, is a more sane way to install Synapse. The tools get a lot of attention and updates. This week, Slavi reports:
matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now has a self-check command that can help diagnose various configuration problems with the setup (DNS records being misconfigured, firewall ports not being open, etc).
Dimension is an integration manager for Matrix. It's written and maintained by TravisR, and allows you to an a pre-defined selection of widgets, bots and bridges to improve your self-hosted Matrix experience. Check out: https://dimension.t2bot.io/. This week, TravisR reports:
Dimension has received quite a lot of updates over the last week. Here's what's hot off the press:
4 new bridges can be self-hosted and managed in Dimension: Telegram, Webhooks, Slack, and Gitter.
3 new widgets are available: Grafana, TradingView, and Spotify.
Add your own custom bots for people to add to their rooms.
A dark theme has been added and is automatically applied if you use the dark theme in Riot.
The overall UI has been updated to be slightly more modern and less bright orange.
Various bug fixes and improvements (is it even possible to have a changelog without this?)
As per usual, if you find any bugs or have ideas for things to add to Dimension feel free to come by #dimension:t2bot.io
tulir has been working on mautrix-telegram, and has made some massive performance improvements:
mautrix-telegram now uses the non-ORM part of SQLAlchemy for database tables that are used often. That change made the CPU usage on the t2bot.io instance drop from ~100% to ~7%
We have graphs to illustrate the improvements:
TravisR, who hosts the bridge on t2bot.io, reports that the bridge is now effectively instantaneous!
The bottleneck has returned to being synapse instead of the bridge
#164 Bot will now mention name, topic and membership changes on Discord.
#175 Add special discord keys onto m.room.member for ghosts
Go check out the full release notes if you're interested in the Bridge as there are many more changes. Half-Shot also noted:
Shoutout to our new member of the team, @Sorunome who did a lot of the review work behind the scenes for this release. Also, thank you to everyone who submitted a PR or an issue!
We covered progress on the Slack Bridge previously, but Half-Shot has now declared it ready for 0.2.0 final! The bridge is reportedly running and very stable - go try it out now!
We just missed out on this update from Spectral last week. Black Hat says:
Spectral now provides an AppImage along with Flatpak build. Also, thanks to the notification codes from nheko, Spectral can show icons in notifications, and now enters corresponding room when clicking on the notification. It also gains several UI/UX improvements. P.s. I have resubmitted Spectral to Flathub.
swedneck has created a new gaming community on Matrix:
we just bridged the linux-gaming community from discord to matrix, with a matrix community and individually bridged rooms/channels and all
main room is #general_linuxgaming:matrix.org
community is +linux-gaming:matrix.org
i've set up an instance of matrix-appservice-discord, which is bridging some select rooms from the linux-gaming discord server to +linux-gaming:matrix.org
The Linux Gaming community has gotten a proper matrix community (+linux-gaming:matrix.org) with a fair few rooms in it, all of which are bridged to a discord channel via my matrix-appservice-discord instance.
If you are using ansible, jcgruenhage has a useful addition that will allow you to get notifications from matrix:
After over a month of waiting, the matrix notification module has been merged on to ansible devel which will be released as ansible 2.8 early next year. Src: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/45823
mxisd v1.2.0-beta.3 is out with the start of a brand new Identity store based on arbitrary executable, to connect to anything and everything. Authentication is implemented at the moment (see doc). Feedback is very welcome to improve as much as possible for v1.2.0
Discussion of message editing, in particular for how message edits from Bridges are handled has progressed. Nothing is final yet so check out https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1695 for the latest.
🔗Quaternion translations: German and Polish now available
Last week we had an update from kitsune to say that there was a new Lokalise project to allow Quaternion translations. This week, we learn that the first translations are now available:
First couple of translations - German and Polish - have made it to the released Quaternion 0.0.9.3 - thanks to krombel and krkk for their contributions! Swedish and Russian translations are in the works.
The first stable release of the #matrix messenger #fluffychat is out now. ? Get it from: https://www.fluffy.chat Thanks to all who have helped me. Thanks to regionetz for hosting the ubports.chat homeserver, thanks to @matrix for the awesome work, thanks to @Ubports for this awesome platform and to fabiyamada, advocatux, wayneoutthere, lionelb, Diogo, mithgarthsormr, mark, and all the awesome people from the community!! With your help, Ubuntu Touch is still alive and has got a new stable messenger!
Informo is an ambitious project hoping to be a "decentralised news network, making information accessible". The project lives at https://github.com/Informo, but for now you can join #discuss:weu.informo.network to get their latest news.
We made a Matrix bot that shouts about updates to change submissions to Informo's specifications. It basically processes all changes made to the list of labels for each issue and PR of a GitHub repository's, and generates a notice message that it sends to the configured room(s). We made it because we wanted the people that are interested in Informo to know in real time about any change made to the state of proposals, along with the calls for public reviews. We just set it up in #discuss:weu.informo.network, and published its source code along with a built binary here: https://github.com/Informo/specs-bot It might also be worth noticing that, although we designed it to shout about updates to Informo's specifications proposals, we also made it compatible with other projects, e.g. the Matrix specs
anoa has been making improvements to Video Calling on Riot:
I've been working on global push-to-talk functionality with Jitsi on Riot. I've got toggle on/off functionality working, but still trying for walkie-talkie mode. To do so, I need to get this library working with Riot: https://github.com/WilixLead/iohook If anyone has experience with native Node modules and/or Electron, please hit me up! @andrewm:amorgan.xyz
Mozfest is a tech-focused event happening this weekend in London. Neil and I have been along tonight and we've been chatting to a lot of people about Matrix, decentralisation and all those things we love! Check out our very short and sweet video below!
This is the start of Season Three of Matrix Live. Matrix Live seasons are variable in length, based on the data available so far. From this season, Matrix Live with change the format slightly, based on feedback. The videos will try to be a bit more interesting, varied, and deep. With this video being the start of a new season, it was meant to be more substantive with us talking to Mozfest-ites, but I lost track of time, so this shorter but still energetic video will hopefully convey the idea.
mujx contributed support for building olm using CMake. This should allow for easier building on different platforms. Currently the library can be built using either make or CMake. In the future, make support may be removed.
The JavaScript bindings now use WebAssembly by default. WebAssembly is much faster than the previous asm.js build, and is supported by recent versions of the most popular browsers. For compatibility with browsers that do not support WebAssembly, the asm.js version is still provided.
Due to adding support for WebAssembly, the API had to be changed slightly.
There is now an init function that must be called before the library can be used. This function will return a promise that will resolve once the library is ready to be used. The matrix-js-sdk has not yet been updated to do this, so users of matrix-js-sdk should continue using olm 2.x until it has been updated.
The public key API has been updated to support the proposal for server-side key backups. More details on how to use these functions will be published in the future.
Today is one of those pivotal days for the Matrix ecosystem: we're incredibly excited to announce that the world's first ever dedicated homeserver hosting service is now fully available over at https://modular.im! This really is a massive step for Matrix towards being a mature ecosystem, and we look forward to Modular being the first of many hosting providers in the years to come :D
Modular lets anyone spin up a dedicated homeserver and Riot via a super-simple web interface, rather than having to run and admin their own server. It's built by New Vector (the startup who makes Riot and hires many of the Matrix core team), and comes from taking the various custom homeserver deployments for people like Status and TADHack and turning them into a paid service available to everyone. You can even point your own DNS at it to get a fully branded dedicated homeserver for your own domain!
Anyway, for full details, check out the announcement over at the Riot blog. We're particularly excited that Modular helps increase Matrix's decentralisation, and is really forcing us to ensure that the Federation API is getting the attention it deserves. Hopefully it'll also reduce some load from the Matrix.org homeserver! Modular will also help Matrix by directly funding Matrix development by the folks working at New Vector, which should in turn of course benefit the whole ecosystem.
Many people reading this likely already run their own servers, and obviously they aren't the target audience for Modular. But for organisations who don't have a sysadmin or don't want to spend the time to run their own server, hopefully Modular gives a very cost-effective way of running your own dedicated reliable Matrix server without having to pay for a sysadmin :)
We're looking forward to see more of these kind of services popping up in the future from everywhere in the ecosystem, and have started a Matrix Hosting page on the Matrix website so that everyone can advertise their own: don't hesitate to get in touch if you have a service to be featured!
