Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Automattic invests in New Vector

Huge news, read more detail here! Check out Matrix Live with Matt Mullenweg above, too.

Matthew announced:

Automattic invested in New Vector in order to support Matrix, and are also hiring Matrix Integration Engineers! https://automattic.com/work-with-us/matrix-integrations-engineer/

Do check out the job description - this is a really fascinating role! If only I didn't have a job already...

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa reported:

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• MSC2526: Add ability to delete key backups
• MSC2472: Symmetric SSSS

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2540: Stricter event validation: JSON compliance (merge)

• MSC2240: Room version 6 (merge)

• MSC2209: Alter auth rules to check notifications in m.room.power_levels (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC2557: Proposal to clarify spoilers

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, the room v6 MSCs from last week's focus have all reached FCP 🎉 So we're continuing on with the E2E MSCs; MSC2366 (verification flows) and MSC2399 (UISI messaging).

We'll soon be releasing Federation API r0.1.3 and Client-Server API r0.6.1, which brings room v6.

Interestingly, this was produced with some new automation.

As if this wasn't enough, sorunome reported:

heya twimers who were excited about the emotes msc thing, soru added a few more things and it'd be cool if someone could cross-check it https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/2545

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo offered:

This week I finished support for end to end encryption and also implemented media uploading, downloading and thumbnail generation! See it in action here:

If you want to see it with your own eyes, create an account via https://riot.conduit.rs. We hope to push our changes to Riot upstream soon, so you can use your own Riot to connect.

Finally, I want to thank my kind supporters on Liberapay.

P2P/Dendrite

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

kegan told us:

Dendrite has seen a number of improvements this week, including:

• Backfill will now backfill more messages than before, resulting in a snappier experience when scrolling back in a room.

• Dendrite is now compliant with Synapse on backfill behaviour.

• Inline CS API filters will now honour the timeline limit value.

• Making more Sytests pass.

• Modifications to how Dendrite tracks memberships.

• Addition of an -api flag to expose internal HTTP APIs.

• Clearer separation of internal/external HTTP APIs.

This has culminated in the following values for Are We Synapse Yet:

Client-Server APIs: 34% (227/672 tests) - up from 33%
Federation APIs: 34% (35/103 tests) - up from 27%

As for P2P....

p2p.riot.im v0.1.0 released!

This is a significant milestone because we now persist Dendrite databases to IndexedDB, greatly improving UX and giving users a consistent identity on the P2P network. In addition to this, the following changes have been made:

• We now bake in the Dendrite commit SHA into the logs on startup.

• Dendrite will now restart itself in case of panics/segfaults.

Known issues with this release:

• Databases are only flushed to IndexedDB every 30 seconds, making it possible to lose the most recent messages. This has a variety of effects on the Dendrite instance, but in testing it has been able to mostly gracefully recover. Messages that you have sent will be backfilled but will be redacted. Rooms you have joined will be forgotten, and you need to be kicked/re-invited/re-join for communication to be re-established. We're looking into a better flushing mechanism going forwards.

• If you have previously visited p2p.riot.im, you MUST manually clear your service worker via chrome:serviceworker-internals or about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox or else you might get errors such as "LinkError: WebAssembly.instantiate(): memory import 37 has no maximum limit, expected at most 4294967295".

Please do not rely on p2p.riot.im to have any form of stability. Patch version bumps (0.1.0 -> 0.1.1) will not remove databases but minor version bumps will (0.1.1 -> 0.2.0) so we can continue to progress with Dendrite development at speed.

Synapse

anoa announced:

Synapse v1.13.0 has landed with SSO fixes and support in User-Interactive Authentication sessions, the ability to run in worker mode using redis as an experimental backend (which will soon be considered the default transport for Synapse workers), the ability for server admins to define password policies, some alias bugfixes, some cross-signing fixes as well as many more continuous improvements.

v1.14.0 in now in development, which will feature room v6 support.

Be sure to read the upgrade notes before upgrading.

And btw, upgrade notes != release notes

Synapse Deployment 📥

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

1.13.0 tags for the K8s-optimized docker image have been pushed

Docker-matrix

Mathijs announced:

The synapse 1.13.0 image including coturn and jemalloc is available as avhost/docker-matrix:v1.13.0, as always the RCs were (and are) available under mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.13.0rcX

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-sms-bridge

Benedict told us:

I released a new matrix bridge called matrix-sms-bridge, which allows you to bridge matrix rooms to SMS with one telephone number only. It is build on top of matrix-spring-boot-sdk and written in kotlin. Currently, only modems via Gammu are supported, but new Providers (e.g. some REST API) can be added very easily.

I'm going to integrate it into matrix-docker-ansible-deploy to use it in my corporate-environment.

mautrix-telegram

Tulir said:

mautrix-telegram v0.8.0-rc2 was released with some bugfixes and a basic implementation of Half-Shot's bridge information state event MSC. There will probably be at least one more RC with some more bugfixes in a week or two.

mautrix-facebook

Tulir said:

Last week I updated the messenger library mautrix-facebook uses to the latest upstream version, which might have made things work a bit better. This week mautrix-facebook got some more bugfixes and also a new feature to bridge animated stickers on Messenger into gifs on Matrix.

Dept of Clients 📱

Fluffychat

sorunome reported:

Fluffychat Version 0.14.0 is out now and this is new:

• Implement image viewer

• Implement room pills

• New chat appBar showing presences and room avatars

• Implement well-known support

• Minor fixes, refactoring and performance improvements

F-Droid is already published here: https://christianpauly.gitlab.io/fluffychat-website/en/fdroid.html

PlayStore and TestFlight will follow in the next few days.

Radical

stoic said:

Riot Web as Firefox Add-on? Yep, it's (still) a thing, now available as version 1.6.1 and supports search in encrypted rooms (via Radical Native)

Mirage

miruka offered:

Mirage 0.5.0 has been released today:

• Major performance improvements. Although there is still work to be done, such has persisting client state between restarts to avoid initial syncs everytime, accounts will hundreds of rooms should now be able to finish loading and no longer take your entire RAM and CPU until everything freezes

• Rooms with unread messages or mentions for your user (currently only those received while the client is running) will be highlighted and sorted first

• New UI component allowing you to quickly jump between accounts in the room list, and always keep an eye how many total unread messages or mentions you have

• Messages can now be replied to

• Room members can now be kicked and banned

• New keybinds for jumping between accounts, cycling through unread rooms, replying to messages and opening links in a message

• Kinetic scrolling can now be disabled, this should fix scrolling for some trackpads incorrectly handled by Qt

• The order in which accounts are shown in the side pane can now be customized

• And a lot more, see full changelog

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) announced:

• lkito has been contributing this week to Nheko as part of his homework for university or so? Anyway, he added an option to highlight whatever message you are currently hovering over, so that you have an easier time locating the proper timestamps and buttons for that specific message. He's now working through a few other issues to improve his coding skills, like optionally having big emojis in the timeline or showing tooltips to explain the settings Nheko has.

• You can now set a /roomnick

• You can now tag rooms using the room context menu. You can assign multiple tags and create new tags as you like. This helps organizing your rooms, since Nheko supported filtering you room list using tags for a few years already, but until now you couldn't assign them.

• red_sky has been tying up the loose ends for reaction support. Once that is done, we'll release 0.7.2

RiotX Android

valere offered:

The team is working on getting feature parity with old-riot

• Identity server support has been merged to develop
• Switch language

1:1 Voip calls, Widgets, and room attachement list screen (media, files) are work in progress, and coming next

Matrix Android SDK

v0.9.35 has been released

• Fixes Favs bug (no more favs after update)

=> Riot android release coming soon with SDK update

Riot-iOS

From Manu:

This week, we released Riot-iOS 0.11.5 with the support of the new version of SAS (emoji) verification. This release contains also a fix for share and Siri extensions to make them compatible with cross-signing.
We continued to make progress on the full support of the iOS13 SDK. The new push extension is almost here but it is tricky to make it work as VoIP pushes we abused for years.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruby

Ananace told us:

Just released version 2.1.0 of the Ruby SDK, headlines changes are the addition of request IDs (and timing) to the debug output to make request/response tracking easier, as well as finalized support for extending both the low-level and higher-level clients with MSCs - along with a much improved implementation for MSC2108 (Sync over SSE). Also included are some bug fixes, as usual, as well as many improvements to the provided example bot.

You can still find it on rubygems as matrix_sdk, and feel free to drop by #ruby-matrix-sdk:kittenface.studio for questions, comments, or just general discussion.

Ruma

Ruma is a Rust project to create a comprehensive set of APIs for Matrix. Previously there was a Ruma homeserver project.

jplatte told us:

Rust bits

This week, we worked on support for endpoints with multiple values for one query parameter (in a livestream), federation endpoints for joining rooms and the next revision of ruma-events [1, 2] (that will, once finished, allow us to finally support redacted events properly, amongst other things). We also fixed two small bugs in ruma-client-api. Just today, we released ruma-client-api 0.9.0 and ruma-client 0.4.0 (sorry, no change log ☹︎).

www.ruma.io

Our website has been revamped! It has been ported from Middleman to Zola and has received some style improvements. RSS support has temporarily been removed, but you can expect it to be restored along with some content updates soon.

Dept of Guides 🧭

New documentation from Nataraj

Nataraj offered:

I have written a guide about configuring bridge to FreeNode: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/wiki/Setting-Up-Bridge-To-FreeNode

And wrote a HowTo for installation matrix-appservice-irc on Debian: https://wiki.debian.org/matrix-appservice-irc

Dept of Tulir 🇫🇮

A rather infrequent section.

Tulir offered:

Since multiple people have asked me about it, I now have a GitHub sponsor thing where you can get a fancy flair in my rooms and access to a highly exclusive sponsor room.

I didn't have any public donation things earlier due to the Finnish money collection act, but I realized that I can bypass that by selling things (like access to a Matrix room) instead of it only being a donation.

Completely unrelated to that: Following the bridge info state event implementation in my bridges, I've made a PR to Riot web to fix some bugs related to showing the bridge info there: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/4621

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Final thoughts 💭

Last week we featured some Sytest output and compared the results between homeservers, which was fun! We'll bring this back as an occasional feature.

I didn't feature this last month: GNU Radio are now using Matrix.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Hi all,

We’re very excited indeed to announce that Automattic, the creators of WordPress.com, are jumping head first into the Matrix ecosystem with a strategic investment of almost $5M into New Vector (the company which makes Riot and Modular.im, founded by the core Matrix team in 2017). More importantly, Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic) and the Automattic gang are committing to make the most of Matrix in their work going forwards!

This is huge news, not least because WordPress literally runs over 36% of the websites on today’s web - and the potential of bringing Matrix to all those users is incredible. Imagine if every WP site automatically came with its own Matrix room or community? Imagine if all content in WP automatically was published into Matrix as well as the Web? (This isn’t so far fetched an idea - turns out that Automattic already runs a XMPP bridge for wordpress.com over at im.wordpress.com!). Imagine there was an excellent Matrix client available as a WordPress plugin for embedding realtime chat into your site? Imagine if Tumblr (which is part of Automattic these days) became decentralised!?

In fact, if you’re a developer in either the Matrix or WordPress communities, now might be a good time to think about how to cross the streams.... not least because Automattic just opened up a role for a Matrix.org/WordPress Integrations Engineer! Quite aside from the investment, this shows Automattic is serious about Matrix - and we’d like to thank them for opening up jobs in these challenging times to further accelerate Matrix. Perhaps some day Matrix Engineer will be as common a career choice as Web Developer ;)

That said, it’s super early days for integration work, and there isn’t a concrete project to announce yet beyond the investment in New Vector (which is effectively an extension of the funding NV raised in October) and Automattic’s Job opening - but these are the sort of ideas we’ve been kicking around. And at the very least, we should expect to see Automattic’s communities migrating over to Matrix in the coming months.

It’s been loads of fun working with Matt and the team on this: we see a huge overlap in terms of a genuine love for the open web, open source and open standards. It’s also no coincidence that Matt (independently of Automattic) donated substantially to Matrix via Patreon back in 2017 when we needed it the most. We’re also looking forward to benefiting from Automattic’s experience in sustainably and responsibly funding and growing open source projects in general - WordPress.com is an excellent example of how one can support development of a project like WordPress without compromising its open source nature.

So, we’d like to formally welcome WordPress and the rest of the Automattic family into Matrix. It’s incredibly exciting times, and we can’t wait to see what will come of the partnership! And meanwhile, if any other massive open source organisations want to join Automattic and Mozilla in leaping into Matrix, you know where to find us… :D

Huge thanks go to Matt for believing in Matrix - watch this space for updates.

• Matthew, Amandine & the Matrix Team.

Synapse 1.13.0 is here and it's a whopper!

Highlights include new support for User Interactive Authentication (UIA) for Single Sign-on (SSO) installations. This means that for the first time features that require the user to re-authenticate are available for servers that authenticate by SSO. Notably this means that these servers now support cross signing!

SSO admins should take a look at the SSO notes in the changelog.

We have been working hard on performance for large scale installations. Anyone supporting more than a few thousand users is probably running Synapse in worker mode. This means splitting out functionality from the master process and making use of multiple cores (or machines) to spread the load. Cross process communication was previously handled by a home grown TCP based replication protocol. As part of our ongoing efforts to improve performance we have replaced this replication system with Redis and have been running Redis in production on matrix.org for the past 2 weeks.

Redis itself does not provide a significant performance win directly but it means that it is much less expensive to add new workers to a cluster. The topology of the old system meant that every additional worker carried a small but not insignificant overhead to the master process. Since moving to Redis we have doubled the number of workers backing matrix.org.

We still consider Redis to be experimental and admins should not feel obliged to upgrade. However it looks very promising and we are likely to deprecate the old replication system in future. So watch this space - Redis is the future.

Finally we've seen lots of improvements to our documentation and many thanks for those in the community making contributions in this area.

It is also worth noting for those of you contributing to Synapse that the develop branch is now the default. More details in the changelog, so take a look.

Get 1.13.0 from github or any of the sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md.

Changelog since v1.12.4

Synapse 1.13.0 (2020-05-19)

This release brings some potential changes necessary for certain configurations of Synapse:

• If your Synapse is configured to use SSO and have a custom sso_redirect_confirm_template_dir configuration option set, you will need to duplicate the new sso_auth_confirm.html, sso_auth_success.html and sso_account_deactivated.html templates into that directory.
• Synapse plugins using the complete_sso_login method of synapse.module_api.ModuleApi should instead switch to the async/await version, complete_sso_login_async, which includes additional checks. The former version is now deprecated.
• A bug was introduced in Synapse 1.4.0 which could cause the room directory to be incomplete or empty if Synapse was upgraded directly from v1.2.1 or earlier, to versions between v1.4.0 and v1.12.x.

Please review UPGRADE.rst for more details on these changes and for general upgrade guidance.

Notice of change to the default git branch for Synapse

With the release of Synapse 1.13.0, the default git branch for Synapse has changed to develop, which is the development tip. This is more consistent with common practice and modern git usage.

The master branch, which tracks the latest release, is still available. It is recommended that developers and distributors who have scripts which run builds using the default branch of Synapse should therefore consider pinning their scripts to master.

Features

• Extend the web_client_location option to accept an absolute URL to use as a redirect. Adds a warning when running the web client on the same hostname as homeserver. Contributed by Martin Milata. (#7006)
• Set Referrer-Policy header to no-referrer on media downloads. (#7009)
• Add support for running replication over Redis when using workers. (#7040, #7325, #7352, #7401, #7427, #7439, #7446, #7450, #7454)
• Admin API POST /_synapse/admin/v1/join/<roomIdOrAlias> to join users to a room like auto_join_rooms for creation of users. (#7051)
• Add options to prevent users from changing their profile or associated 3PIDs. (#7096)
• Support SSO in the user interactive authentication workflow. (#7102, #7186, #7279, #7343)
• Allow server admins to define and enforce a password policy (MSC2000). (#7118)
• Improve the support for SSO authentication on the login fallback page. (#7152, #7235)
• Always whitelist the login fallback in the SSO configuration if public_baseurl is set. (#7153)
• Admin users are no longer required to be in a room to create an alias for it. (#7191)
• Require admin privileges to enable room encryption by default. This does not affect existing rooms. (#7230)
• Add a config option for specifying the value of the Accept-Language HTTP header when generating URL previews. (#7265)
• Allow /requestToken endpoints to hide the existence (or lack thereof) of 3PID associations on the homeserver. (#7315)
• Add a configuration setting to tweak the threshold for dummy events. (#7422)

Bugfixes

• Don't attempt to use an invalid sqlite config if no database configuration is provided. Contributed by @nekatak. (#6573)
• Fix single-sign on with CAS systems: pass the same service URL when requesting the CAS ticket and when calling the proxyValidate URL. Contributed by @Naugrimm. (#6634)
• Fix missing field default when fetching user-defined push rules. (#6639)
• Improve error responses when accessing remote public room lists. (#6899, #7368)
• Transfer alias mappings on room upgrade. (#6946)
• Ensure that a user interactive authentication session is tied to a single request. (#7068, #7455)
• Fix a bug in the federation API which could cause occasional "Failed to get PDU" errors. (#7089)
• Return the proper error (M_BAD_ALIAS) when a non-existant canonical alias is provided. (#7109)
• Fix a bug which meant that groups updates were not correctly replicated between workers. (#7117)
• Fix starting workers when federation sending not split out. (#7133)
• Ensure is_verified is a boolean in responses to GET /_matrix/client/r0/room_keys/keys. Also warn the user if they forgot the version query param. (#7150)
• Fix error page being shown when a custom SAML handler attempted to redirect when processing an auth response. (#7151)
• Avoid importing sqlite3 when using the postgres backend. Contributed by David Vo. (#7155)
• Fix excessive CPU usage by prune_old_outbound_device_pokes job. (#7159)
• Fix a bug which could cause outbound federation traffic to stop working if a client uploaded an incorrect e2e device signature. (#7177)
• Fix a bug which could cause incorrect 'cyclic dependency' error. (#7178)
• Fix a bug that could cause a user to be invited to a server notices (aka System Alerts) room without any notice being sent. (#7199)
• Fix some worker-mode replication handling not being correctly recorded in CPU usage stats. (#7203)
• Do not allow a deactivated user to login via SSO. (#7240, #7259)
• Fix --help command-line argument. (#7249)
• Fix room publish permissions not being checked on room creation. (#7260)
• Reject unknown session IDs during user interactive authentication instead of silently creating a new session. (#7268)
• Fix a SQL query introduced in Synapse 1.12.0 which could cause large amounts of logging to the postgres slow-query log. (#7274)
• Persist user interactive authentication sessions across workers and Synapse restarts. (#7302)
• Fixed backwards compatibility logic of the first value of trusted_third_party_id_servers being used for account_threepid_delegates.email, which occurs when the former, deprecated option is set and the latter is not. (#7316)
• Fix a bug where event updates might not be sent over replication to worker processes after the stream falls behind. (#7337, #7358)
• Fix bad error handling that would cause Synapse to crash if it's provided with a YAML configuration file that's either empty or doesn't parse into a key-value map. (#7341)
• Fix incorrect metrics reporting for renew_attestations background task. (#7344)
• Prevent non-federating rooms from appearing in responses to federated POST /publicRoom requests when a filter was included. (#7367)
• Fix a bug which would cause the room durectory to be incorrectly populated if Synapse was upgraded directly from v1.2.1 or earlier to v1.4.0 or later. Note that this fix does not apply retrospectively; see the upgrade notes for more information. (#7387)
• Fix bug in EventContext.deserialize. (#7393)
• Fix a long-standing bug which could cause messages not to be sent over federation, when state events with state keys matching user IDs (such as custom user statuses) were received. (#7376)
• Restore compatibility with non-compliant clients during the user interactive authentication process, fixing a problem introduced in v1.13.0rc1. (#7483)
• Hash passwords as early as possible during registration. (#7523)

Improved Documentation

• Update Debian installation instructions to recommend installing the virtualenv package instead of python3-virtualenv. (#6892)
• Improve the documentation for database configuration. (#6988)
• Improve the documentation of application service configuration files. (#7091)
• Update pre-built package name for FreeBSD. (#7107)
• Update postgres docs with login troubleshooting information. (#7119)
• Clean up INSTALL.md a bit. (#7141)
• Add documentation for running a local CAS server for testing. (#7147)
• Improve README.md by being explicit about public IP recommendation for TURN relaying. (#7167)
• Fix a small typo in the metrics_flags config option. (#7171)
• Update the contributed documentation on managing synapse workers with systemd, and bring it into the core distribution. (#7234)
• Add documentation to the password_providers config option. Add known password provider implementations to docs. (#7238, #7248)
• Modify suggested nginx reverse proxy configuration to match Synapse's default file upload size. Contributed by @ProCycleDev. (#7251)
• Documentation of media_storage_providers options updated to avoid misunderstandings. Contributed by Tristan Lins. (#7272)
• Add documentation on monitoring workers with Prometheus. (#7357)
• Clarify endpoint usage in the users admin api documentation. (#7361)

Deprecations and Removals

• Remove nonfunctional captcha_bypass_secret option from homeserver.yaml. (#7137)

Internal Changes

• Add benchmarks for LruCache. (#6446)
• Return total number of users and profile attributes in admin users endpoint. Contributed by Awesome Technologies Innovationslabor GmbH. (#6881)
• Change device list streams to have one row per ID. (#7010)
• Remove concept of a non-limited stream. (#7011)
• Move catchup of replication streams logic to worker. (#7024, #7195, #7226, #7239, #7286, #7290, #7318, #7326, #7378, #7421)
• Convert some of synapse.rest.media to async/await. (#7110, #7184, #7241)
• De-duplicate / remove unused REST code for login and auth. (#7115)
• Convert *StreamRow classes to inner classes. (#7116)
• Clean up some LoggingContext code. (#7120, #7181, #7183, #7408, #7426)
• Add explicit instance_id for USER_SYNC commands and remove implicit conn_id usage. (#7128)
• Refactored the CAS authentication logic to a separate class. (#7136)
• Run replication streamers on workers. (#7146)
• Add tests for outbound device pokes. (#7157)
• Fix device list update stream ids going backward. (#7158)
• Use stream.current_token() and remove stream_positions(). (#7172)
• Move client command handling out of TCP protocol. (#7185)
• Move server command handling out of TCP protocol. (#7187)
• Fix consistency of HTTP status codes reported in log lines. (#7188)
• Only run one background database update at a time. (#7190)
• Remove sent outbound device list pokes from the database. (#7192)
• Add a background database update job to clear out duplicate device_lists_outbound_pokes. (#7193)
• Remove some extraneous debugging log lines. (#7207)
• Add explicit Python build tooling as dependencies for the snapcraft build. (#7213)
• Add typing information to federation server code. (#7219)
• Extend room admin api (GET /_synapse/admin/v1/rooms) with additional attributes. (#7225)
• Unblacklist '/upgrade creates a new room' sytest for workers. (#7228)
• Remove redundant checks on daemonize from synctl. (#7233)
• Upgrade jQuery to v3.4.1 on fallback login/registration pages. (#7236)
• Change log line that told user to implement onLogin/onRegister fallback js functions to a warning, instead of an info, so it's more visible. (#7237)
• Correct the parameters of a test fixture. Contributed by Isaiah Singletary. (#7243)
• Convert auth handler to async/await. (#7261)
• Add some unit tests for replication. (#7278)
• Improve typing annotations in synapse.replication.tcp.streams.Stream. (#7291)
• Reduce log verbosity of url cache cleanup tasks. (#7295)
• Fix sample SAML Service Provider configuration. Contributed by @frcl. (#7300)
• Fix StreamChangeCache to work with multiple entities changing on the same stream id. (#7303)
• Fix an incorrect import in IdentityHandler. (#7319)
• Reduce logging verbosity for successful federation requests. (#7321)
• Convert some federation handler code to async/await. (#7338)
• Fix collation for postgres for unit tests. (#7359)
• Convert RegistrationWorkerStore.is_server_admin and dependent code to async/await. (#7363)
• Add an instance_name to RDATA and POSITION replication commands. (#7364)
• Thread through instance name to replication client. (#7369)
• Convert synapse.server_notices to async/await. (#7394)
• Convert synapse.notifier to async/await. (#7395)
• Fix issues with the Python package manifest. (#7404)
• Prevent methods in synapse.handlers.auth from polling the homeserver config every request. (#7420)
• Speed up fetching device lists changes when handling /sync requests. (#7423)
• Run group attestation renewal in series rather than parallel for performance. (#7442)
• Fix linting errors in new version of Flake8. (#7470)
• Update the version of dh-virtualenv we use to build debs, and add focal to the list of target distributions. (#7526)

Open Tech Will Save Us 🎙

Second edition of OTWSU took place this week! Chance to watch it if you haven't already, or (pro-tip), watch it again.

• Mike Hoye from Mozilla talks about "Verbs in the fediverse"
• Eugen (@[email protected]) discusses "how we keep mastodon.social running at scale" as a Q&A
• ... and a new VIP tour of Dendrite, the next-gen Matrix Homeserver, from our own neilalexander and Kegan!

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Bundeswehr switching to Matrix

Oleg said:

German army reported in December 2019 their intentions for Matrix.

Now they decided to replace Stashcat with Matrix in this autumn.

Around 50'000 account are planned.

Riot will be used as a Matrix client. The E2EE by default and device Cross-Signing will be extensively used.

Full article (in German): https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Bundeswehr-setzt-kuenftig-auf-Matrix-als-Messenger-4719474.html

Mozilla are happy with their deployment!

About a year after this tweet, four months after deployment of our open source @matrixdotorg instance, community participation in the Mozilla project has increased from 4x to 10x across all the projects that previously relied on IRC.https://t.co/E5HRsfHkzk

— mhoye (@mhoye) May 12, 2020

For more from Mike check out the OTSWU recording above, he's on first.

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa announced:

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2526: Add ability to delete key backups

• MSC2390: On the EDU-to-PDU transition.

• MSC2389: Toward the EDU-to-PDU transition: Typing.

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC2545: Emotes
• MSC2540: Stricter event validation: JSON compliance

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, MSC2526 has entered FCP. We'd like to keep the E2E MSCs in flight in focus, but are also concious that room v6 is coming up. We're sticking the MSCs for the latter alongside the existing E2E ones in the focus queue, for a total of 5. Those MSCs are: MSC2366 (verification flows), MSC2399 (UISI messaging), MSC2540 (canonical JSON validation), MSC2209 (notifications auth rules), and MSC2240 (room version 6).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander announced:

• Dendrite now implements /get_missing_events, which improves inbound federation reliability significantly

• State resolution v2 implementation in gomatrixserverlib now uses significantly less overall memory and performs far fewer allocations

• A skeleton keyserver component has been added - it returns no keys for now but that is enough to satisfy Riot when creating DMs

• Canonical alias is now set if needed when the room is created

• Reduced the number of HTTP 500s returned by the media API

• Sync API topology logic and tokens have been reworked

• Server keys are now cached in memory using an LRU cache, regardless of database or fetchers used

• Federated joins now attempt all listed servers more reliably

• Federated joins in response to an incoming invite should now work, particularly in cases where the room had previously been joined and left

• Some Prometheus statistics are now available for the LRU caches

• Sync API storage layer has been deduplicated quite a bit

• Display name and avatar URL are now sent in join content again after a regression

• Fixed a bug in the membership updater when matching added and removed state

• Fixed a bug where a response to a federated device query would not contain all required fields

• Fixed a bug where /sync could panic after joining a room

Get a real demo of Dendrite from Open Tech Will Save Us #2

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo said:

This week I worked on presence and end to end encryption, but they are not working yet.

Meanwhile, Valkum got sytest integration working! This means each time a new commit is pushed to a branch, CI automatically picks up on that and lets a lot of tests run on the homeserver - the same tests that synapse uses. Currently we have 8% of all tests positive on Conduit.

Client-Server APIs: 8% (56/667 tests)

*------------------

  Registration             :  53% (17/32 tests)
  Login                    :  26% (5/19 tests)

  V1 CS APIs               :  10% (3/30 tests)
  Misc CS APIs             : 100% (1/1 tests)

  Profile                  :  33% (2/6 tests)
  Devices                  :  17% (2/12 tests)

  Presence                 :   0% (0/10 tests)
  Create Room              :  31% (4/13 tests)

  Sync API                 :   1% (1/85 tests)
  Room Membership          :   0% (0/15 tests)

  Room State APIs          :   0% (0/14 tests)
  Public Room APIs         :   0% (0/7 tests)

  Room Aliases             :   0% (0/15 tests)

At the same time, MTRNord tried to integrate opentracing into Conduit and Paul worked on a docker file to make installation easier.

Thanks to my supporters on Liberapay.

See the bottom of this post for some more interesting numbers!

Synapse

anoa offered:

Synapse v1.13.0rc2 shipped this week with the following notable improvements:

• SSO support in User-Interactive Authentication sessions

• Cross-signing device list bug fixes

• The ability to run in worker mode using redis as a backend (which will soon be considered the default transport for Synapse workers)

• Some admin api improvements and additions

...as well as all the usual bug fixes and especially performance improvements. See the changelog for the full details and please test if you can! A full release is expected early next week.

Speaking of next week: work will involve getting room version 6 ready to ship, alongside even more performance work - especially moving event processing off the master process (the code for which is already running successfully on Half-Shot's own homeserver)!

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mx-puppet-steam

Icewind told us:

I've been working on a new puppet bridge for steam chat mx-puppet-steam, while I would still consider it to be in alpha state, most of the things needed for day to day chatting are functional.

It bridges both one on one and group messages, shows the proper name, avatar and online status of your frends and handles embeded images in one on one chats.

I have a docker image for it if that helps: https://hub.docker.com/r/icewind1991/mx-puppet-steam

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir reported:

As promised last week, mautrix-whatsapp now has end-to-bridge encryption (currently on the e2be branch, will be merged to master soon™). It works mostly the same way as the other bridges.

Dept of Clients 📱

It's a big, big week for client news! We must take a deeper look at some of these projects soon!

Ditto v0.4.1 Released!

Annie offered:

What is Ditto?

Ditto is a mobile client for iOS and Android! It's available on TestFlight and Google Play (beta) - download link available on the website below.

What's New?

Added

• Reactions support! 😄🎉

• Add a visual hint if a message is sending or could not be sent

• Send pending messages when the connection to the homeserver is back

Changed

• Update to React Native 0.62.2

• Major performance improvements!

Fixed

• Redacted events have a proper message

• Switched push gateway to https

Links

• Matrix Room (#ditto:ditto.chat)
• Website (https://dittochat.org)

Matrix-TV

Half-Shot said:

Link: https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-tv

I got really bored in lockdown, as we all have. I stared at my TV, and it stared back at me. While it's definitely a privacy nightmare to start developing apps for these things, I couldn't help myself. I got stuck in, and secured myself a LG Developer Account.

The LG set of smart TVs use WebOS, as like the name suggests, runs apps in it's special variant of Chromium. I was lucky to be running a recent OS and had access to Chromium 53! And NodeJS 0.12!! Sarcasm aside, there are some very troubling versions of WebOS with much older versions of the browser, so I was happy to be developing against something with strong ES6 support. Despite the absolutely awful onboarding experience, the WebOS SDK itself was pretty good. matrix-tv was written to be a general large screen matrix client, so it talks to the TV's own libraries through an abstraction layer :)

Anyway, this client is the culmination of a lazy Sunday afternoon's work. It features very basic support for viewing a room, but I hope to expand it at some point. It supports running in a web browser and the aformentioned OS, but support for more variants is easy to add. I'm looking into how to design for the large screen beyond making fonts bigger, because the unique constraints on memory and UI are fun challenge.

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) announced:

• Nheko now supports SSO. If your server uses SSO, you may want to test that, if it works for you, but I did successfully sign into the Mozilla homeserver.

• We improved hinting on the login and registration pages, so it should be easier to enter correct credentials.

• Replies now have a max height by default. If you want to see the full reply, you need to click on it to navigate to the reply.

• Nheko now has a red unlocked padlock, when an unencrypted message is sent in an encrypted room.

• red_sky has been hacking along on reactions. Displaying them is now in master, for sending he is currently reworking the emoji picker, so that it can be attached to the timeline more easily and it is easier to search, etc.

Nheko has it's own weblate btw, if anyone feels like translating a bit of stuff: https://weblate.nheko.im/engage/nheko/?utm_source=widget

Pattle: version 0.16.0

Pattle is a client written for Flutter using Dart

Wilko said:

A new version has been made available and will become available on Google Play and TestFlight!

Because of corona this might take longer than usual.

Changes

• Huge performance improvements! All SDK processing now happens in a different isolate (comparable to a thread)!

• Also huge start up time improvement! When opening the app you should see your chats in less than or equal to a second! (will vary per device)

• You'll now see two checkmarks when a message is read!

• Add Dutch translations! (thanks to Louis!)

• You can logout now!

• An error along with a strack trace is now shown when the initial sync fails. You can use it to inform me and make an issue!

• For the launcher icons vectors are now used on Android when it's supported

• Contributing is now easier, you don't have to sign a CLA anymore!

Get Pattle

• Android
  • F-Droid
  • Google Play
• iOS (TestFlight)

Issues or suggestions

If you stumble upon any issues or would like to suggest features, please do so here!

You can login via GitHub and Gitlab.com!

Follow development

Follow development in #app:pattle.im!

RiotX

benoit reported:

We are making progress on Identity server feature implementation (PR in review). Also we are working to integrated call with WebRTC, integration manager (widget, Jitsi, sticker) and we are stabilizing the application, especially on the cross-signing part.

Expect a new corrective release at the end of the day!

gomuks

gomuks is a terminal based Matrix client written in Go. Source on GitHub

Tulir offered:

I was able to solve a few annoying bugs like message history disappearing and switching rooms taking time (it turned out that read receipts were being sent synchronously), so I decided to release gomuks v0.1.0.

fluffychat

krille said:

FluffyChat 0.13.1 is out with:

• New status feature

• HTML rendering of messages

• Markdown support

• Enhanced chat list design

• New translations (Polish, Hungarian)

• Lots of minor fixes and refactoring

Nio

Nio is a client written with SwiftUI

kilian told us:

Since the last updates, there's been a few cool new features and changes added to Nio:

• message text field supports multiple lines of input

• edit badges instead of "(edited)"

• markdown message rendering

• spanish translation

• blurhash support for incoming images (so find some Nheko-using friends! 😄)

• sending images

• and a few minor and internal fixes

Join us in #niochat:matrix.org for discussion and more fun 😊

Riot-Android 0.9.11

benoit reported:

Riot-Android: Version 0.9.11 (with Matrix SDK 0.9.34) has been released on the PlayStore, and should be available for all during the week-end. It contains fixes on the identity server feature (the "missing token" thing), and also support Jitsi call with configured domain.

Riot-iOS

Manu offered:

On the cross-signing side, we have been working on the implementation of SSSS (to recover all private keys from the HS) and on UI polishments.

On the maintenance side, the new push mechanism from Apple has been implemented but it needs more work to work properly.

Riot integration with NextCloud

Riot-web integration with NextCloud exists! Source at https://github.com/gary-kim/riotchat.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-spring-boot-sdk

Benedict offered:

This SDK is now on maven central. I also introduced support for implementing Application Services. The project can be found here: https://github.com/benkuly/matrix-spring-boot-sdk . It will be used by Matrix-SMS-Bridge, which only needs one telephone number. The latter will be released next week, when everything works fine (https://github.com/benkuly/matrix-sms-bridge).

Matrix Dart SDK: v0.31.0

Wilko said:

• Add the ability to defer all processing to a different isolate

  When you use isolated: true on Homeserver.login or MyUser.fromStore, everything will be handled for you and the SDK works the same.

  This only works on platforms with the Dart VM (not web).

• Updaters are now globally registered per MyUser id.

  This means for now only one Updater per MyUser is allowed. Updaters are created when a MyUser instance is retrieved via Homeserver.login or MyUser.fromStore

• Add ability to specify what rooms to load from store when retrieving user

• The previousBatch param from Room.copyWith is removed (wasn't used)

• Add ability to override context in MyUser.copyWith and MyUser.merge

• Updater and Homeserver are less coupled now

• When a Context is changed with copyWith, all child objects' contexts are also changed

• Fix bug in read receipt parsing (thanks to MatMaul!)

• Sync errors are now pushed to the updates stream

• Fix access token not being passed to logout API

• Add type to RequestUpdate, so you can see which type of call

  the update was caused by

• Moor has been updated

• And other minor fixes!

Get it on pub, and see the source here!

Dept of Bots 🤖

JupyBot - First proof of concept

rdi said:

What is JupyBot

The purpose of the bot is to provide a link with Jupyter kernels running either on your local computer or somewhere else on a server. You can access your kernels through the bot with the chat interface. The kernels will answer to your commands through the same interface.

Since this is still a proof of concepts, the number of features is limited (command line text, string and pictures are the only output formats supported. No widget, no funny javascript) and they are few safeguards against infinite loops and other entertaining bugs.

TODO

This is right now just a proof of concept. We want to see if such a bot can be useful for people and how. What features would be interesting, what can be integrated in the present clients,... Therefore, in the short term, we want to focus on the possibility of easy testing for users and easy contributions for people who want to add their ideas. On the mid- and long term, a lot of ideas can be realized; it will depend on the feedback. These are just some examples. Short term:

• proper error catching

• fallback for non supported Jupyter formats on riot.im (i.e. a lot)

• testing on termux on a tablet or smartphone

• solve the problem with nio-matrix and upload in chunks of images.

• Dockerized version

Middle term:

• use of opsdroid as a framework

Longer term:

• local server integrated to locally command the bot service.

• make full use of jupyter capabilities with a client suited for it (for instance a Jupyterlab plugin)

Links

• room for testing: #jupybot1:matrix.alkemata.com

• room for discussing: #jupybot:matrix.alkemata.com

• github repository: https://github.com/albanatita/JupyBot

snowstorm-matrix

lub reported:

I made a little bot that scrapes https://news.blizzard.com/en-us , because they've disabled their RSS feeds for some time now. It regularly scrapes all posts of a configured category and sends messages for new articles to all rooms the bot is a member of. It works like a RSS bot, except the source is a website instead of a RSS feed.

In the readme there are also some public instances, which you can just invite instead of hosting your own bot.

https://gitea.lubiland.de/lub/snowstorm-matrix

midori jabbot matrix.org

Torrey Searle told us:

I've added matrix support into a chat bot, you can see the chat bot in action at #midori-dev:hackerspaces.be and it's project page is here https://github.com/midoricorp/jabbot.
it's main highlight is anybody can add new commands to it in chat using its scripting language
any any existing bot command can be used as a function in new scripts you write
The scripting language to add new commands can be found here https://github.com/midoricorp/script
you can do things like
!script print "HELLO world";
or make a new command
!script sub hello { print "HELLO World"; }
that would result in a new command !hello being made
print also has 2 output stream, one for rich format and one for basic formatting
!script print "Hello World!"; print HTML "Hello <b>World</b>";

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣

Matrix will be featured in a Rust London meetup on the 27th May 2020.

New Public Rooms 🏟

Ludwig offered:

Hey, I have created a room for designers workin on matrix stuff to join: #matrix-design:disko.media

The goal is to improve cohesion and collaboration for all things design (UI, UX, interaction...) Over time, it should become a place for people to

• ask design-specific questions

• share cool stuff and be praised for all the good work you're doing

• develop and document a common understanding of the semantics of matrix

• make sure the user experience is amazing, even as we all figure out how to federate. Probably most designers work on single clients right now, but there are important UX questions that can only be answered ecosystem-wide. Maybe we'll end up with a design guide for people to use alongside the spec.

Final Thoughts 💭

Let's test homeservers against sytest, then unfairly pit them against one another! This week we're comparing Conduit and Dendrite - let's see the results!

That's all I know 🏁

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

Google Summer of Code participants were announced last week. This year Matrix was assigned SIX students!

This is the most students we've have taken on in a single year, made possible by Matrix now acting as an umbrella organisation for multiple projects - this year that's Ruma, Nheko and OpsDroid. There are also students working on projects from the core team: go-neb, matrix-js-sdk and matrix-ircd.

We recieved dozens of applications this year, which made narrowing our focus to six students difficult, but we are proud to announce:

Devin Ragotzy, who has been involved with the Ruma project in the past, will work on Ruma procedural macro refactoring and more

Arnav Tiwari will work with Travis and myself to create HTML Embeddable Matrix Chat Rooms

Nikolaos Filippakis will work to support E2E encryption for go-neb. Kegan, one of the original go-neb authors is particularly excited about this one

Brooks Karlik will update matrix-ircd: Move matrix-ircd to async/await. This will be a welcome upgrade for anyone using that project!

Tyagdit will work with Cadair and the OpsDroid team on Enabling E2EE in Opsdroid Matrix Connector

Chethan Reddy, last but not least, will work with Nico and the Nheko gang on Adding Features in End-to-End encryption for Nheko-Reborn

Congratulations all, and also congratulations and thank you to the projects the students will be working on!

Find out all about Matrix @ GSoC on Google's dedicated site, and keep reading the Matrix blog where we'll have updates from the students.

PS Alejandro Domínguez has a Matrix related project too: they'll be working under the GNOME organisation to add Multi account support to Fractal.

Matrix Live 🎙

Matthew and Amandine discuss the week, including E2EE by default!

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

What a week!!

Lots happening this week! Cross-signing landed - this is a massive achievement for the team, and will go a long way to helping the user experience for new users especially. Read more in the major Riot blog post here. Time to start getting less-technical friends on Matrix!

Google announced their Summer of Code programme acceptees: Matrix have six students this year, our most ever! We'll make a new blog post next week welcoming the students!

Last month we hosted Open Tech Will Save Us meetup 1, so hold on to your keyboard as we announce Open Tech Will Save Us meetup 2!

Meetup 2 will feature:

• Mike Hoye from Mozilla talking about "Verbs in the fediverse"
• Eugen (@[email protected]) will talk about "how we keep mastodon.social running at scale" as a Q&A
• +MORE

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa offered:

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• MSC2454: Support UI auth for SSO
• MSC2457: Invalidating devices during password modification

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2472: Symmetric SSSS

New MSCs:

• MSC2529: Proposal to use existing events as captions for images (sounds great! - bp)
• MSC2526: Add ability to delete key backups
• MSC2530: Body field as media caption

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, MSC2474 has entered FCP. Keeping with the E2EE theme, we've switched focus to MSC2526. So the new list of MSCs for next week is: MSC2366 (verification flows), MSC2399 (UISI messaging), and MSC2526 (deleting key backups).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander said:

• Some of the work for /get_missing_events has been done now for filling gaps in the room DAG

• Federation sender performance and parallelisation have been dramatically improved, which helps a lot in big rooms

• Retries, backoff and blacklisting have also been implemented in the federation sender to handle cases where remote homeservers are unavailable much more gracefully

• Retrieving missing state when receiving incoming events over federation is a bit more robust now

• Creating direct chats now works

• Invites are mostly working now overall, both locally and over federation

• RespState and RespStateJoin have been fixed in gomatrixserverlib

• Room joins and leaves are now handled by new code across the roomserver and federation server perform APIs, which reduces complexity significantly

Synapse

Neil offered:

• Redis live in production for m.org! We did not expect this to translate into a significant improvement in performance directly, but it means that we can add new workers without any extra overhead on the master process which has been very useful in supporting cross signing.

• Fixing bugs leading to messages getting stuck at the bottom of the timeline as well as messages not making it to sync at all.

• Lots of improvements to deal with the extra load generated by cross signing.

All of these changes will be available in v1.13.0 which should have a release candidate ready rsn.

Next week, we continue to work on sharding changes, further SSO support and ensuring that cross signing adoption is as smooth as possible.

architect

Gnuxie said:

Architect is a homeserver project written in Common Lisp. We intend to create a high performance homeserver using the meta-programming features of Common Lisp to reduce the amount of redundant and timely code that needs to be written and maintained.

architect events

I created a json-schema library, to generate class definitions directly from the Matrix specification. These classes also have information attached to them to allow for serialisation, using a metaclass from json-clos.

This is done entirely dynamically without writing to source files. The invocation of json-schema that creates classes for the client-server, server-server and application-service protocols is only about 20 lines.

I definitely approve of separating out the event library and generating it from the spec - Ruma also has this approach.

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo told us:

This week I refactored most of the data handling code to make it both more efficient and easier to read. I started by splitting a file called "data.rs" into multiple smaller files that handle just one part of the database, like "users.rs", "rooms.rs" or "edus.rs". I continued improving the code by making methods return iterators instead of vectors and propagating errors instead of crashing directly. Lastly, I added a few comments here and there and made sure everything works.

Meanwhile, @Valkum experimented with CI and @MTRNord is working on FluffyChat Flutter support.

Finally, I want to thank my supporters on Liberapay.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-signal bridge

witchent told us:

After a few weeks of work the matrix-signal bridge is now functional again. In the process I also added the possiblity to send audio and video files among other things.

If you want to try it out go to https://github.com/witchent/matrix-puppet-signal.

mx-puppet-bridge

mx-puppet-bridge is a general bridging library that supports (double)bridging and relays. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for others to bridge new third-party protocols to matrix. Support room Donate

sorunome reported:

mx-puppet-bridge now supports emote syncronising using revolution's custom emotes! The discord protocol implementation (mx-puppet-discord) already utilizes this

Easybridge is a multi-user bridge for small Matrix servers

LX reported:

Easybridge is a multi-user bridge for small Matrix servers, with the idea of making it easy for non-technical users to bridge their external accounts into Matrix. Once configured next to a server, users can just go to a dedicated web page and add their accounts with a simple form. Currently supported protocols include IRC (buggy), XMPP (basic feature only), Mattermost (quite in good shape) and Facebook Messenger (has issues with disconnections). Available at the following link: https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/lx/easybridge

matrix-appservice-slack

Half-Shot offered:

Hello one and all. Today we're releasing the 1.2.0 of the slack bridge. No notable changes from the last RC this time, but another release should follow this one soon to make changes to the provisioning system :)

Dept of Clients 📱

gomuks

gomuks is a terminal based Matrix client written in Go. Source on GitHub

Tulir offered:

gomuks's e2ee support is now on the master branch. The basic olm/megolm things like key distribution work fine, but no advanced stuff like key import/export or device verification yet.

I'll probably add e2be to mautrix-whatsapp next and then add some of the advanced e2ee stuff to gomuks. I'll also make a v0.1.0 release in gomuks after I figure out some bugs in message history loading.

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) reported:

Apart from some further speedups, we've been working on reactions. Nheko can now display them and sending them should be done soon too. We also fixed a few bugs, when people reported them and you can now select, who you want to reply to by using a keyboard shortcut (Alt+Arrow keys for now). We will probably release a new version once reactions are done.

RiotX v0.19.0

benoit said:

We have released RiotX v0.19.0 on the PlayStore on Tuesday! This is a pretty huge release, including all the work on cross-signing, but also other features like changing account password, deactivating account, saving media to Gallery, etc., without forgetting a lot of bug fixes. More detailed change log can be found here: https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/releases/tag/v0.19.0.

We are now working to implement the main missing features compare to Riot-Android, with the target to upgrade Riot-Android with RiotX codebase in a few weeks.

Riot-iOS

Manu offered:

This week has mostly been another cross-signing week to improve it and to fix bugs. We released 0.11.2 on Monday. We are going to release 0.11.3 with the work we made this week. It should be available in the App Store tomorrow.

We also released MatrixSDK 0.16.4 with the last version of AFNetworking. That means apps using the MatrixSDK should be able to publish to the App Store again. There is no more usage of UIWebView.

Radical Native

stoic offered:

Your favorite way of electron-free searching through encrypted rooms in Riot Web was just updated to v0.1beta11, featuring:

• Windows support

• Packages for Ubuntu/Debian (.deb), MacOS (.pkg) and Windows (.exe) to make installation a whole lot easier

• Updated to latest seshat (1.3.3)

• Get it here: https://github.com/stoically/radical-native

New translation projects for RiotX and Nio

Take a look at https://translate.riot.im/projects/riot-android/ and see if you can help with translation there.

Nio (client) translations are also now available on Weblate - go forth, translate and help Kilian out. Or, "aushelfen" him, as he might say.

Revolution

Revolution is a riot-web fork that has things like custom emotes. Have you heard of it before? Well, it's been around for about two years already!

You can try it out on https://ponies.im/_matrix/client/develop or build it yourself from the repos at https://gitlab.com/ponies-im

git clone <https://gitlab.com/ponies-im/matrix-js-sdk.git>
cd matrix-js-sdk

yarn install
yarn build

yarn link
cd ..

git clone <https://gitlab.com/ponies-im/matrix-react-sdk.git>
cd matrix-react-sdk

yarn link matrix-js-sdk
yarn install

yarn build
yarn link

cd ..
git clone <https://gitlab.com/ponies-im/riot-web.git>

cd riot-web
yarn link matrix-js-sdk

yarn link matrix-react-sdk
yarn install

yarn build
yarn electron # this also launches the app

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma

Ruma is a Rust project to create a comprehensive set of APIs for Matrix. Previously there was a Ruma homeserver project.

jplatte offered:

Things are progressing at a fast pace, and after a few weeks of mostly pre-releases, we've now got

ruma-events 0.21.0

With this release, it is now easier than ever to work with malformed and / or custom events. Some big changes are already being planned for the next release.

ruma-api 0.16.0

We basically just deleted lots of code that is no longer needed with ruma-events 0.21.0. We also got rid of the dependency on the url crate, which really didn't have a very good reasont o be there.

ruma-client-api 0.8.0

With this release, ruma-client-api is basically up-to-date with r0.6.0 of the matrix specification. Special thanks to @iinuwa for updating a bunch of those endpoints, and for adding support for the user-interactive authentication API!

Dept of Bots 🤖

Opsdroid home-assistant bot

Oleg reported:

After seeing the fabulous matrix live opsdroid party I decided to release my home-assistant bot.

I use this bot for triggering home-assistant automations via matrix. All commands and actions can be configured using just a config file.

• Get it : https://gitlab.com/olegfiksel/home-assistant-bot

• Talk about it: #home-assistant-bot:fiksel.info

P.S: Thanks for Opsdroid! ❤︎

Awesome example of life imitating art! After we recorded the Matrix Live last week I resolved to get Opsdroid and Home Assistant running!

New Public Rooms 🏟

/r/AV1 discord bridged to Matrix

dandellion reported:

Anyone here is interested in AV1 (the new open video codec) and related modern codecs?

I have bridged the /r/AV1 discord to +av1:dodsorf.as

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰

Doctor Who watchalongs

Brendan said:

The Matrix community editions of the Doctor Who watchalongs continue! Next up on our line-up is another two-parter on Sunday (May 10th), we'll be pressing play on The Zygon Invasion at 7PM BST, then on The Zygon Inversion at 8PM BST! Joining us on Twitter will be Peter Harness (writer) & Ingrid Oliver (Petronella Osgood aka The Osgoods™︎), and maybe more 🙂

As always, to join the fun or know first-hand when the next event will happen, head over to #doctor-who-watchalong:abolivier.bzh

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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