The Matrix team had a very successful trip to FOSDEM '16 last weekend. Many, many words were exchanged, and at times there was a queue of people just waiting to have a chat! We spoke to a whole lot of interested and interesting people, some of which had heard of Matrix already, and some who hadn't. The nice thing with the crowd at FOSDEM is that they very quickly "get" what we're trying to do with Matrix - and then start thinking aloud about how they might want to use it or extend it - which means we have many great conversations!
At the beginning of FOSDEM, I think we had around 2000 people "currently" in the Matrix HQ room - the next day, that number had increased by a hundred (and now it's even bigger due to a hackernews post where we mentioned Matrix)!
Our talk in the IoT dev room was very popular; unfortunately a lot of people that were queueing to get in never made it due to the limited space. However, the talk was recorded, and it's already been made available:
For now, you can look at the slides from the talk.
Another interesting talk where Matrix ended up being represented, was Daniel Pocock's Improving Telepathy talk. I'll add the video from that too, once it's available.
Finally, thanks to everyone who came to say hello and have a chat - and to everyone who has since set up their own homeserver. Please do join the Matrix HQ room (using any of these clients) and let us know how your Matrix experience is going!
We also have a stand on the 2nd floor of the K building - next to the Real Time lounge (potentially same spot as last year). If you're going to FOSDEM, please come and say hi to us at the stand or at the talks!
Our trip to FOSDEM '15 was very enjoyable; we met a lot of smart people and learnt about a lot of interesting technologies and projects. Hopefully we made a few people enthusiastic about Matrix as well!
To greet the new year, we bring you all new Synapse 0.12. The focus here has been a wide range of polishing, bugfixes, performance improvements and feature tweaks. The biggest news are that the 'v2' sync APIs are now production ready; the search APIs now work much better; 3rd party ID invites now work; and we now mount the whole client-server API under the /_matrix/client/r0 URI prefix, as per the r0.0.0 release of the Client Server API from a few weeks ago. The r0 release unifies what were previously the somewhat confusing mix of 'v1' and 'v2' APIs as a single set of endpoints which play nice together.
Allow filters to include/exclude rooms at the room level rather than just from the components of the sync for each room. (PR #454)
Include urls for room avatars in the response to /publicRooms (PR #453)
Don't set a identicon as the avatar for a user when they register (PR #450)
Add a display_name to third-party invites (PR #449)
Send more information to the identity server for third-party invites so that it can send richer messages to the invitee (PR #446)
Cache the responses to /initialSync for 5 minutes. If a client retries a request to /initialSync before the a response was computed to the first request then the same response is used for both requests (PR #457)
Fix a bug where synapse would always request the signing keys of remote servers even when the key was cached locally (PR #452)
Fix 500 when pagination search results (PR #447)
Fix a bug where synapse was leaking raw email address in third-party invites (PR #448)
Updates the client APIs to match r0 of the matrix specification.
All APIs return events in the new event format, old APIs also include the fields needed to parse the event using the old format for compatibility. (PR #402)
Search results are now given as a JSON array rather than a JSON object (PR #405)
Miscellaneous changes to search (PR #403, PR #406, PR #412)
Filter JSON objects may now be passed as query parameters to /sync (PR #431)
Fix implementation of /admin/whois (PR #418)
Only include the rooms that user has left in /sync if the client requests them in the filter (PR #423)
Don't push for m.room.message by default (PR #411)
Add API for setting per account user data (PR #392)
Allow users to forget rooms (PR #385)
Performance improvements and monitoring:
Add per-request counters for CPU time spent on the main python thread. (PR #421, PR #420)
Add per-request counters for time spent in the database (PR #429)
Make state updates in the C+S API idempotent (PR #416)
Only fire user_joined_room if the user has actually joined. (PR #410)
Reuse a single http client, rather than creating new ones (PR #413)
Fixed a bug upgrading from older versions of synapse on postgresql (PR #417)
We've been pretty bad at updating the blog over the last few months with all the progress that's been happening with Matrix. Whilst Matrix rooms like #matrix:matrix.org and #matrix-dev:matrix.org have been very active (and our twitter account too), in general we've ended up spending way too much time actually writing software and not enough time talking about it, at least here. When a blog goes quiet it normally means that either the authors have got bored, or they're too busy building cool stuff to keep it updated. I'm happy to say that option 2 is the case here!
As a result, there's a huge backlog of really cool stuff we should have talked about. Hopes of writing an Advent Calendar series of blog posts also went out the window as we set Christmas as an arbitrary deadline for loads of work on Synapse, the Matrix Spec and matrix-react-sdk.
So, to try to break the impasse, here's a slightly unorthodox whistle-stop tour of all the amazing blogposts we would have written if we'd had time. And perhaps some of them will actually expand into full write-ups when we have more time to spare in the future :)
Matrix will again be represented at the WebRTC Conference & Expo in Paris. Daniel and myself are catching the Eurostar tomorrow afternoon, and the conference will start early Wednesday morning with a panel about WebRTC for Mobile, where Daniel is one of the participants.
I'm sure we will have three days full of interesting talks and discussions (see the full schedule here). There will be demos as well, and Matrix is (of course!) also joining the demo competition. We hope to see many familiar faces - and hopefully meet some new ones as well!
If you are going to the conference, please come and say hello – we will have a stand at the expo (we're table #6 - see map here). And don't miss Daniel's Matrix One-year Status Report at 11.10am on Friday!
Matrix will be represented at the 32nd Chaos Computer Club, Dec 27th-30th, 2015. We hope to be arranging an assembly, where people can come along to learn about Matrix and our recent work on end-to-end encryption, find out what they can use Matrix for - and also do some hacking at the same time!
UPDATE: We've snagged a table for the assembly at: "hackcenter room with C-base, a table along the pathway". In practice only Mjark is there from Matrix and may be moving around, so may be easiest to coordinate meetups via #32C3:matrix.org
The session is free of charge, although you do need a ticket to the Congress itself.
If you are interested, please register by sending an email to [email protected]. All you need for the session is curiosity - but do bring your own laptop if you want to hack as well!
Anyone is welcome to join - it will basically be a fairly open-ended chat about all things relating to Matrix, and a good chance to do some deep digging into Matrix itself.
In addition to the Android release a couple of days ago, we also released a new version of Matrix Console iOS: v0.5.6!
This release includes a new version of MatrixKit (v0.2.7) that you can take advantage of in your MatrixKit powered app. There are several changes in MatrixKit since the last release, including improved performance, better handling of unrecognized certificates and fixes of reported crash issues. We have also introduced read receipts, improved the chat history display, made room invites more obvious, and fixed a whole lot of JIRA issues.
You can find the full list of changes in the MatrixKit CHANGES.rst and the Matrix Console iOS CHANGES.rst files.
Today, we are releasing Synapse version 0.11.0. In the last week, we have had two release candidates, and this release also includes changes in v0.10.1-rc1 from October.
New features include a new Search API and better options for logging in (CAS and login fallback support) - thanks to Steven for contributing CAS support. We also introduce room tagging and as usual, there are plenty of improvements and fixes. For the full info, see the changelog below.
This weekend, I went to the first Redecentralize Conference. I thought it was a good mix of traditional tech talks and sessions where we discussed how to make people aware of why the net needs to be decentralised. There were a lot of interesting people and we had some really thought-provoking discussions. Sessions in the main room were filmed and can be found here.
I did a talk on Matrix in one of the tutorial rooms, and it was great to see people with lots of questions and comments in the session. If you missed the talk - or have further questions: the FAQ might have the answer, or maybe the Spec itself - and there's always #matrix:matrix.org where you can find me and the whole matrix team.
At the end of day-panel on the first day, the question "are there any projects that are ready for mass adoption" was posed, and Ira picked Matrix as her answer, which was great to hear. We have come a long way in the last year, and I think Matrix now has "enough" features to be a realistic option for your IM/VoIP and group chat needs.
I really enjoyed redecentralize and hope it will be repeated! Thanks to the redecentralize.org gang for arranging it!
