This Week in Matrix

Matrix Live

This week

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Gwmngilfen reports

AnsibleFest 2022 happened this week, and the work the community has been doing with Matrix got quite some attention! We got a mention during the Day 1 Keynote (YouTube) and again during an interview with theCUBE.net. Both are worth watching 🙂

Thanks to the shoutout from Adam in the Keynote, we've had 40 new people join the #social:ansible.com room 🚀 and lots of interest in Matrix at the Fest Community Booth. Huge thanks to @maxamillion:one.ems.host and @cybette:ansible.im for their time! ❤️

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

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

New MSCs:

• MSC3914: Matrix native group call push rule
• MSC3912: Relation-based redactions
• MSC3911: Linking media to events
• MSC3910: Content tokens for media

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3905: Application services should only be interested in local users (merge)

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3005: Streaming Federation Events
• MSC2775: Lazy loading over federation
  • Superseded by MSC3706 and MSC3902.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Spec Updates

The Spec Core Team are continuing to work on spec maintenance in the run up to Matrix v1.5 (due next month!). Again, if you'd like to help out with small fixes and corrections to the spec, feel free to take a look at the list of open spec clarification issues. Thank you!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2700: Thumbnail requirements for the media repo!

This MSC has the goal of clarifying the mimetypes of media that a homeserver both MUST and SHOULD support thumbnailing for. The intention is to give clients a clearer picture of what file formats will receive a proper thumbnail before they are uploaded to the homeserver.

Comments on the MSC seem to suggest that the MSC as it stands does not completely solve the problem: while it does give clients an explicit list of supported mimetypes, the list is quite short. And the list of SHOULD mimetypes cannot be relied on.

The MSC also clarifies that encrypted media should always be uploaded with a mimetype of application/octet-stream, instead of the original media's mimetype, which seems like a welcome and uncontentious point. And finally, it defines 501 M_UNSUPPORTED to be returned instead of an internal server error on thumbnailing failure.

I believe the next step for this MSC is for the current threads to be incorporated into the text; so don't miss the threads when reading it!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Brendan Abolivier announces

This week we've released Synapse 1.69! It comes with improved caching tools for third-party modules, and support for a bunch of experimental features, such as thread-aware read receipts (MSC3771) and an approval flow for new registrations (MSC3866). As part of this release, we've also laid out the removal schedule for the long-deprecated legacy Prometheus metric names, and the generate_short_term_login_token module API method. Read all about it on the matrix.org blog: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/10/17/synapse-1-69-released

Another big thing in Synapse 1.69 is experimental support for faster remote room joins! You can read more about it on the blog: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/10/18/testing-faster-remote-room-joins but briefly, we are ready for server admins to begin testing, with some caveats. If you've read the post and feel confident, turn it on, give it a spin and let us know how it goes!

Alongside 1.69, we're also disclosing a moderate severity vulnerability that we fixed back in Synapse 1.62. If your deployment runs a Synapse version older than 1.62, and is openly federating, please update to a more recent version of Synapse at your earliest convenience. More info on this in advisory GHSA-jhjh-776m-4765 and CVE-2022-31152.

This week we've also released the first release candidate for Synapse 1.70 (1.70.0rc1). This release will include experimental support for thread-aware notifications (MSC3773) and filtering (MSC3874), improved validation, advertising support for Matrix 1.3 and 1.4, and the usual load of bugfixes and internal improvements. We're very grateful to anyone helping us make Synapse more stable by testing and running release candidates, and reporting bugs to the issue tracker and general feedback to #synapse:matrix.org 🙂

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander announces

This week we released Dendrite 0.10.4 which contains the following features and fixes:

• Various tables belonging to the user API will be renamed so that they are namespaced with the userapi_ prefix
  • Note that, after upgrading to this version, you should not revert to an older version of Dendrite as the database changes will not be reverted automatically
• The backoff and retry behaviour in the federation API has been refactored and improved
• Private read receipt support is now advertised in the client /versions endpoint
• Private read receipts will now clear notification counts properly
• A bug where a false leave membership transition was inserted into the timeline after accepting an invite has been fixed
• Some panics caused by concurrent map writes in the key server have been fixed
• The sync API now calculates membership transitions from state deltas more accurately
• Transaction IDs are now scoped to endpoints, which should fix some bugs where transaction ID reuse could cause nonsensical cached responses from some endpoints
• The length of the type, sender, state_key and room_id fields in events are now verified by number of bytes rather than codepoints after a spec clarification, reverting a change made in Dendrite 0.9.6

As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more related discussion.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot (website)

A multi purpose multi platform bridge, formerly known as matrix-github

Andrew F reports

matrix-hookshot 2.4.0 is here with yet more features!

Good news everyone. This release adds improved JIRA & GitHub event support. Here are some highlights:

• Multiple JIRA connections may now be added to a single room (as well as across multiple rooms).
• JIRA widgets now properly support adding listeners for issue creation -- a small bug prevented it from working last release.
• JIRA widgets now support adding listeners for issue updates. This was technically already supported, but it wasn't shown in the widget -- now it's there for the world to see.
• JIRA connections now support version events. So far, this includes version creation, updates, and releases.
• GitHub connections now support workflow completion events.
• The stability of GitHub login sessions has been improved overall.

As usual, feel free to join #hookshot:half-shot.uk for setup advice & feedback.

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

Desktop client for Matrix using Qt and C++17.

red_sky (nheko.im) says

Nheko now has native builds for Apple silicon macs! No need for Rosetta! If you have an Apple silicon device, please check out the latest nheko nightlies so we can get feedback on how it’s working!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Danielle reports

• The new release candidate is available in staging ahead of the release early next week. Try it out!
  • The new WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) composer is available in Labs soon; It’s in active development and we’ll be adding more functionality soon.
• Notifications research is near conclusion; We trawled hundreds of GitHub issues, discussions, looked at competitors and interviewed some users. We’re really excited to bring improvements to your experience.
• We’re beginning work on integrating the Rust matrix_sdk_crypto into Element Web (to replace the existing libolm-based implementation of encryption)

In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):

• Threads is making great progress and we’re hoping you’ll start seeing these improvements in the next few weeks! Keep your eyes open for updates.

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Manu announces

• Element-iOS RC 1.9.9 available on the public TestFlight with under labs settings:
• New device manager
• WYSIWYG editor
• Voice Broadcast is on heavy development. We have recording and playback working.
• ElementX work is resumed with full support of iOS16 and XCode14

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

benoit announces

• Release candidate 1.5.4 is available for the tester on the PlayStore. It includes a lot of new features, most of them behind lab flags: new device management, new WYSIWYG editor, Voice broadcast, etc. Also the application is now targeting Android 13 devices. Please refer to the full changelog for more details.
• We are working to migrate from the Realm Java SDK to the Realm Kotlin SDK. This is a big change, which should simplify developers' lives, but also reduce the number of crashes related to Realm.

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle reports

Community testing

• Help us test the WYSIWYG editor and other new features at 4pm on Wednesday 26th Oct
• For more info on our next testing sessions (sync or async), you can join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org!

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

It's been a little while since our last update, but Populus development continues! In addition to the usual bugfixes, we've made a number of ergonomics improvements suggested by the experiences of other users at my university. These include:

1. Buttons for message actions (react, redact, reply, and so on) are now displayed in a way that doesn't overlap with sender names

2. Avatar images for discussions can now up uploaded simultaneously with discussion creation.

3. Older collections of discussions can be "archived" using m.lowpriority

4. Moar tootips!

We've also made some minor graphical improvements: loading messages are now indicated with a nice low-contrast SVG hint, rather than the literal-minded "loading message" message. Some icons have been improved, and the bartab (lines in the margins) display logic has been improved. And, we're now on the latest JS-SDK version.

Dept of VoIP 🤙

Element Call (website)

Native Decentralised End-to-end Encrypted Group Calls in Matrix, as a standalone web app

Florian Heese says

👋 Hello form the VoIP team. This week we have a bunch of news. 1) We released Element Call version 0.3 with a lot of UX polishing including i18n (thx to the great community) and paving the way for a proper 2) integration into Element Web and Desktop. If you want to give it a try:

• Use https://develop.element.io or Element Desktop Nightly
• Enable in Settings -> Labs -> Calls
  • Element Call Videorooms
  • New group call experience
• Now you can create
  • A new video room backed by Element Call or
  • Enable Calls in the Rooms settings of a room and just press the regular call button

3. And by the way we also added screen-sharing with Element Desktop Nightly using the embedded Element Call.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Next-gen crypto-included SDK for developing Clients, Bots and Appservices; written in Rust with bindings for Node, Swift and WASM

ben announces

While the sliding sync extensions are being tested and bugs found during the tests reported and fixed, the FFI for the new timeline API has been approved and merged this week. The third big chunk that was merged this week, was a refactoring to Replace QR with SAS verification and the yet to be merged signaling for SAS verification.

While forcing the (not clearly spec'ed) sending of authentication tokens for get_profile and get_display_name, we've also noticed a bug where we sometimes, unintentionally include the access_token in debug output - and fixed that. We will be providing a patch release and RustSec about this soon.

Other than that, this week has seen many smaller fixes, like making the store-setters on client-builder actually adhere to the builder pattern or removing string from storerrors, and improvements like the API to set local trust or setting workspace wide dependencies for uniffi and others.

👉 Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

cos announces

Zoo 2022, a Commodore 64 Demoparty has decided to bridge it's various chat channels via Matrix. You can join via Matrix, Discord, IRC or Telegram and participate in the party programme. The actual party will be held 28.-30.10 in Orivesi, Finland. https://2022.zooparty.org/

Matrix in the News 📰

Matthew says

our friends at Bluesky announced their application protocol for building decentralised social media called AT. While not based on Matrix, there are some parallels, and some stuff we may be able to steal get inspiration from around portable identity :) https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/10-18-2022-the-at-protocol

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.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse: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!

Matrix Live

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Matrix Live

Our guest for Matrix Live is Rich, to talk about how the Synapse team is hard at work to hunt those pesky spinners. Faster room joins now? Yes! But only for the brave!

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Matrix Live

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Matrix Live

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Matrix Live

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Matrix Live 🎙

A short Matrix Live where we can see the goodness coming to Element very shortly!

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Matrix Live 🎙

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Happy TWIMday everyone! Thib is away this week again, so I'm covering for him as your host in this edition of This Week In Matrix.

Matrix Live 🎙

Following up on last week's tutorial about using Docker Compose to install Synapse, this week Thib explains how to use Ansible to deploy your own Matrix homeserver.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

TravisR reports

Earlier in the year, t2bot.io passed 1 Million known rooms and now it's passed 10 Million bridged users (10,039,915 users to be exact, at time of writing). Most of these users will be people who have participated in a channel/chat on Discord or Telegram that was bridged to Matrix through t2bot.io's free service, with about 500 thousand being active each month.

Approximately 8 Million of the users are from Telegram, covering about 11% of all Telegram users (previously 15% based on information available at the time). The remaining 2 Million are Discord users, roughly 0.5% of Discord's user base. For perspective, t2bot.io has just over 683 Million events in the database and is bridging between 30 and 40 thousand people a day.

Like last time, this is just a milestone update, though it's also a good reminder to host your own server if you can. Element's own hosting platform is a great option if you'd like to have a server without running it yourself, and Beeper offers a richer bridging experience than t2bot.io can feasibly provide. If you'd like to go down the self-hosting route, check out Thib's video guide on hosting synapse or last week's Matrix Live for a better understanding of what hosting Synapse actually means.

As for an interesting statistic: despite not having much functionality that deals with Spaces, t2bot.io can see 2687 Spaces from the wider world. The plan in the coming months is to support a way to bridge a whole Discord server to a Matrix Space, making this statistic hopefully more interesting as time goes on.

Dept of Spec 📜

uhoreg reports

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:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC3874: Filtering threads from the /messages endpoint
• MSC3873: event_match dotted keys
• MSC3872: Order of rooms in Spaces

Spec Core Team

The Spec Core Team has been continuing to push forward on the spec. Several new MSCs have been opened recently. The Spec Core Team is available in #sct-office:matrix.org when MSC authors think that they are ready for primetime.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2162: Signaling Errors at Bridges!

Bridges sometimes are unable to relay messages to the remote service for one reason or another. This MSC proposes a way to allow bridges to indicate that a message failed to be delivered, and allow users to tell the bridge to retry.

Dept of Outreachy 🎓️

andybalaam announces

Usman's internship, working on Favourite Messages, is coming to an end! Check out Usman's blog post and Andy's blog post! To follow progress on Favourite Messages (which is still very much a prototype), check out the tracking issue: Tracking issue for Favourite Messages. Thanks to Usman for being an awesome mentee!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Brendan Abolivier says

This week we've released Synapse 1.66.0rc1! This upcoming release deprecates delegating email validation to an identity server (more info here) and includes improved validation around user-interactive authentication, support for a couple of experimental features, as well as the usual batch of bug fixes and performance improvements 🙂

As always, any help with testing and feedback on this RC is appreciated! Feel free to drop any feedback or bug report in #synapse:matrix.org and the Synapse repo respectively.

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander announces

This week we released Dendrite 0.9.5 which includes a number of fixes, particularly for federation:

• The roomserver will now correctly unreject previously rejected events if necessary when reprocessing
• The handling of event soft-failure has been improved on the roomserver input by no longer applying rejection rules and still calculating state before the event if possible
• The federation /state and /state_ids endpoints should now return the correct error code when the state isn't known instead of returning a HTTP 500
• The federation /event should now return outlier events correctly instead of returning a HTTP 500
• A bug in the federation backoff allowing zero intervals has been corrected
• The create-account utility will no longer error if the homeserver URL ends in a trailing slash
• A regression in /sync introduced in 0.9.4 should be fixed

As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more Dendrite-related discussion.

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi reports

Thanks to Aine of etke.cc, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now set up the new Postmoogle email bridge/bot. Postmoogle is like the email2matrix bridge (also already supported by the playbook), but more capable and with the intention to soon support sending emails, not just receiving.

See our Setting up Postmoogle email bridging documentation to get started.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Aine reports

follow-up to Slavi's announcement: Postmoogle is here!

Actually, he explained it pretty good, so here are some additional links

Source code and Roadmap with implemented and planned features and as usual, say hi in the #postmoogle:etke.cc

Dept of Clients 📱

Quadrix (website)

A Minimal, simple, multi-platform chat client for the Matrix protocol.

JFA says

Quadrix v1.2.5 has been released! The update is already available for Linux, MacOS and iOS. The Windows and Android updates are awaiting approval from the respective stores. This release has mostly "under the hood" improvements (upgrade to React Native 0.69, React 18 and other key dependencies), but also fixes a few bugs and brings minor UI improvements.

Great news: Quadrix finally made it to https://matrix.org/clients/ :-) Many thanks to @madlittlemods:matrix.org!!!

Please leave feedback/comments at #quadrix:matrix.org or in the issues at https://github.com/alariej/quadrix (stars welcome :-))

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

kittykat says

• Our code style guide has now finished review and we are now working on updating eslint-plugin-matrix-org to match it
• We will be release an RC2 to fix a regression around progress bars

In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):

• We’re working hard on updating Threads, squashing bugs and improving performance. We have several MSCs open introducing new functionality to read receipts so that notifications work better than ever.

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Ștefan reports

• We’re working hard on making the new layout ready for general use, squashing bugs and taking names until everything is in tip top shape. We have a test flight build out: we’ve delayed the release to next week while we iron out the last creases.
• In ElementX land we have started on adding analytics and Xcode Cloud support and have updated our logging strategy. We will also start adopting sliding sync and using the new Rust Timeline providers

Dept of VoIP 🤙

Element Call (website)

Native Decentralised End-to-end Encrypted Group Calls in Matrix, as a standalone web app

Robin announces

Element Call v0.2.7 and v0.2.8 have been released this past week, adding local volume control, full screen mode, audio in screen sharing and, ahem, fixing an embarrassing bug where we broke walkie-talkie mode... 🐑 Oh, and it's also all in TypeScript now. 🚀 https://github.com/vector-im/element-call/releases/tag/v0.2.7

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

simplematrixbotlib (website)

simplematrixbotlib is an easy to use bot library for the Matrix ecosystem written in Python and based on matrix-nio.

HarHarLinks says

simplematrixbotlib has reached version 2.7.0, adding support for end-to-end encryption! 🎉 Come chat over at #simplematrixbotlib:matrix.org!

Here is a summary of things that have happened since we last announced v2.6.3 on this channel:

• 🌐 The repo canonically moved to https://github.com/i10b/simplematrixbotlib, but the PyPI package remains available in the usual place.
• 🔒️ E2EE support! To enable it, simply install the optional e2ee dependencies. Find out how in the manual.
• 😄 Emoji verification support! Enable the option and you'll be able to interactively verify between the bot and your devices. (But mind that for now, in-room verification is not supported, but only to-device).
• ☝️ Fingerprint verification support! As an additional method, the bot will print it's encryption fingerprint so you can "manually verify".
• 🗄️ Extensible config file! It is now easier than ever to add your own configuration options to the built-in TOML config file.
• 🧹 The usual housekeeping, bumping matrix-nio to 0.19.0.
• 🗨️ I (HarHarLinks) will be presenting the library this weekend at #matrix-summit-berlin-2022:c-base.org! If you are in the Berlin 🇩🇪 area, come visit c-base!

The easiest to use bot library for Matrix. Get started in just 10 lines of code:

import simplematrixbotlib as botlib

config = botlib.Config()
config.emoji_verify = True
creds = botlib.Creds("https://home.server", "user", "pass")
bot = botlib.Bot(creds, config)

@bot.listener.on_message_event
async def echo(room, message):
    if botlib.MessageMatch(room, message, bot, PREFIX).is_not_from_this_bot():
        await bot.api.send_text_message(room.room_id, message.body)

bot.run()

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben announces

With a few people out of office, this weeks has been one of the more quiet ones, but progress has been made non-the-less. Again a lot happens in draft PRs and the background, like with the upcoming Timeline API but also the path forward for integrating the crypto bindings into the js-sdk. There are a few notable PRs merged this week still improving the API (#972 and #973, #961), upgrading to latest ruma, removing dependencies (parking_lot) to improve compile times as well as merging the release infrastructure for crypto-js.

👉 Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Alertbot (website)

moanos [he/him] announces

This new bot allows users to use webhooks to forward monitoring alerts (e.g from prometheus) to matrix rooms. This means that you no longer have to use E-Mail or Slack to receive alerts. To set it up visit Github Alertmanager or join #alertbot:hyteck.de

Opsdroid (website)

An open source chat-ops bot framework

Oleg says

Though this release doesn't include Matrix-related changes. Still there are new feature and fixes worth mentioning:

• The brand new command center backend (docs) from @FabioRosado
• Several fixes to the Slack connector contributed by @chillipeper
• A fix to the Telegram connector from @D3N14L
• Couple of fixes to the Websocket connector from @FabioRosado
• And a lot of fixed links in the docs by @jaas666
• Also now the dev Docker image tag (ghcr, Docker Hub) is built on every commit to main/master branch

Thanks for all the contributions! 🙌 See the full changelog for details.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

HarHarLinks says

Greetings to the world from #matrix-summit-berlin-2022:c-base.org!

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Array in a Matrix reports

Matrix AI that generates messages based off other users' messages using a neural network. The bot trains its GPT-2 model using the CPU and is written in JavaScript (Node.JS) and Python. The project's code can be found here.

MinesTRIX (website)

A privacy focused social media based on MATRIX

Henri Carnot reports

Hi all, quite a lot happened since the last twim post a few months ago.

In a nutshell, we refactored the feed page and user page for a better viewing experience. We also now allow displaying and commenting post images in a dedicated view. Also, you can now send follow request using knocking, thanks to profile as space support. (Yes, MSC is coming)

Finally, we have now multi account support, better stories display and refactored login and settings page.

Well... we almost modified everything :D

See more at https://minestrix.henri2h.fr/posts/

Stay tuned, event organization is coming soon (you can see the first implementation in the blog post.

PS: For those at the Matrix summit, I will be presenting it tomorrow

Dept of Guides 🧭

Nate Covington reports

I recently made a blog post / video walk through of Matrix, hopefully it will be helpful to someone: https://www.covingtoncreations.com/blog/what-can-matrix-do-for-your-organization

Room of the Week 📆

ssorbom ⚡️ says

Have you ever felt lost in the Matrix world? Too many rooms and spaces to manage? Well, back by popular demand (with Timo's blessing), I present, The Room of the Week! Every week we strive to highlight a room or a space that we believe deserves attention for discussing interesting going on across the Matrix Network.

This week on room of the week:

We Are All Tech enthusiasts on The Matrix Network, but do you ever experience Tech burnout? Do you ever wish you could find discussions in The Matrix Universe about things other than Tech? Well, this week we bring you a very technical solution!

Because we are highlighting:

#non-technology:matrix.org

A space where you will find information about everything except technology. Groups are helpfully categorized by Subspace, and feature discussions about everything from musical instruments to beverages. If it isn't about computing, it's there.

If you have a room you wish to see highlighted, join us at: https://matrix.to/#/!bIyiUUnriVoHtYzuPS:fachschaften.org?via=chat.shawnsorbom.net&via=matrix.org&via=fachschaften.org To get your favorite room of the week highlighted.

Dept of Ping 🏓

No ping stats while Thib is away, but you can always join the fun at #ping:maunium.net and #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net!

That's all I know 🏁

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

Hey folks, welcome to a new edition of This Week In Matrix! Thib is offline this week and next so I'll be taking over while he's away.

Matrix Live 🎙

This week Thib (is he ever really away?) shows us how to host Synapse with Docker Compose.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew shared with us the Matrix Summer Special 2022! Come read all about what's happened in Matrix-land so far this year, and what's coming up next, right here: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/08/15/the-matrix-summer-special-2022

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) announces

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

New MSCs:

• MSC3871: Gappy timelines
• MSC3870: Async media upload extension: upload to URL
• MSC3869: Read event relations with the Widget API
• [WIP] MSC3868: Room Contribution
• MSC3866: M_USER_AWAITING_APPROVAL error code

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3859: Add well known media domain proposal

Spec Updates

This week the Spec Core Team focused on improvements to the spec source itself. richvdh opened a PR for edit events, and yours truly did a small PR to clarify the required state of the response to /_matrix/client/v3/login/.

There's a lot more open issues available for people to tackle however, so feel free to get involved and help out if you have some spare time!

Finally other than the usual rounds of review by the team, I've been working on a spec process document that aims to explain the practical portions of the text found at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals/, but in a easily scannable manner. Look out for a PR with that in the near future.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2871: Give widgets an indication of which capabilities they were approved for! What a mouthful!

Historically, widgets have laid outside of the spec and have only been implemented in a small subset of clients - mainly Element. As of recent weeks though, there's now a team at Element backing the feature. So exciting times ahead!

Regardless, let's highlight this MSC! It solves a crucial problem with a simple solution. Widgets can ask the client they're embedded in to do certain things (if granted certain capabilities), and the client, potentially after asking the user for permission, can allow or deny those actions. This MSC adds the machinery for a further step: the client will tell the widget what capabilities they requested were allowed, and which were denied.

I believe this spec is non-contentious, but is blocked on widgets entering the spec as a whole. Regardless, if this particular piece of the puzzle interests you, or you'd like to read all about widgets in general, the see either the MSC above or this widget spec tracking PR: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/pull/825.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Shay announces

It's the last days of summer here and we are toiling away at making Synapse faster and leaner! In addition to continued work on faster joins, we released Synapse v1.65.0, with new features such as support for stable prefixes for private read receipts and a new module API method for creating a room (plus some other features!), as well as a host of bugfixes and internal changes to make Synapse faster and more stable. Make sure to check it out!

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander announces

This week we released Dendrite 0.9.4, containing primarily bug fixes:

• A bug in the roomserver around handling rejected outliers has been fixed
• Backfilled events will now use the correct history visibility where possible
• The device list updater backoff has been fixed, which should reduce the number of outbound HTTP requests and Failed to query device keys for some users log entries for dead servers
• The /sync endpoint will no longer incorrectly return room entries for retired invites which could cause some rooms to show up in the client "Historical" section
• The /createRoom endpoint will now correctly populate is_direct in invite membership events, which may help clients to classify direct messages correctly
• The create-account tool will now log an error if the shared secret is not set in the Dendrite config
• A couple of minor bugs have been fixed in the membership lazy-loading
• Queued EDUs in the federation API are now cached properly

As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more Dendrite-related discussion.

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace says

This week has seen a quite a few Helm Chart updates; element-web got updated to 1.11.3, matrix-media-repo got a Redis usage fix, and matrix-synapse got updated to 1.65.0

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

Desktop client for Matrix using Qt and C++17.

Nico reports

Nheko now has some very dirty hack to render spoilers on desktop platforms. This does not show the reason and not work in mobile mode, doesn't hide it from notifications or from the sidebar. But it is at least something. Similarly we tightened what tags we allow when validating the incoming html again. Also, as a small fix, DMs should now also properly start with encryption enabled when started from a profile and there were a few crash fixes when searching for direct chat partners and closing the window too quickly or when a user uploads a device with invalid keys.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Danielle announces

• Bug fixes and final polishing has been taking place for our “Start DM on first message” project. This is where the user receiving a new room invite as a DM will not get the notification until you’ve sent a message.
• The team is testing embedding Element Call in Element Web, as well as working on other improvements to Video rooms.
• The new user’s checklist is live in product. It’s our first version so let us know what you think!

In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):

• Notifications improvements to Threads are underway. The team has been testing the new MSC and related Proof of Concept (POC) which we think will solve most of the issues with Threads right now.

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Ștefan announces

• We did the AppStore review dance and version 1.8.27 is now available. We even got better usage strings out of it.
• We now have UI integration and performance tests in ElementX. Even more, they’re joined by some really nice Screenshot UI tests. Test all the things!
• We’ve fixed some small bugs and some not so small ones, coming to an Element close to you early next week. The way things are laid out, you might even see a new feature land 😉
• The new app layout testing session went well and we are looking for more iOS testers for future sessions. If you’d like to help out in future sessions, please join #element-community-testing:matrix.org

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

Danielle says

• We had a very successful testing session with the all new app layout. If you’d like to take part in a future session, join us over at #element-community-testing:matrix.org
• This week we’ve been working on fixing some FTUE crashes and covering some edge cases. Thanks to the community members submitting bugs and more info - keep it coming!
• We’re investigating reports of missing messages, as well as a bug with the Threads beta where not all 'threaded messages' are showing up in the right place…

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict reports

Trixnity got some minor updates with bugfixes and iOS ARM64 Simulator support.

ruby-matrix-sdk (website)

Ruby SDK for the Matrix communication protocol

Ananace reports

Just pushed another version (2.8.0) of the Ruby Matrix SDK, which drops support for the EoL Ruby 2.6 (and drops a bunch of workarounds for it) in order to support much improved caching of room state data, along with more helper methods and a fix for a floating accessor that didn't get hooked up correctly.

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben says

The Matrix Rust SDK team has been busy this week, too. Progress has been made on Siding Sync in particular, the types have been finalised and merged into mainline ruma, and more API has been made accessible via FFI. The new reactive Timeline API has been progressed, it, too, has some FFI definitions now, allowing mobile client to start playing with it. Crypto-JS, too, has progressed, adding support for de/encrypting attachments in an memory efficient fashion. On the crypto-side, the longer on-going refactor and improvements have yielded another few PRs, too, that have successfully merged, while others are still pending reviews. Other than that, we've seen quite a few smaller fixes and improvements, around logging, docs and the examples.

👉️ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.

Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart.

Nico announces

This week in the dart SDK we mostly fixed bugs. Many of those are related to call negotiations where streams were closed in the wrong order, not closed at all or in group calls the call never learned about new members or the call_ids would not match. There were also a few fixes to the background thumbnailing support added in 0.11.1, helper methods were added to easily send the right message corresponding to the mimetype of some media and fetching a timeline for some event id should work properly again.

We have some support to mark a room as either a dm or a group using slashcommands now, you have more flexibility when implementing the SSSS Bootstrap now (using the extra Bootstrap parameter in onUpdate() and to round it all off, we now have nice coverage numbers as well as coverage display on merge request diffs.

For more info, check the release notes for 0.11.2, 0.12.0, 0.12.1 and 0.12.2: https://pub.dev/packages/matrix/changelog ;-)

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

ChristianP says

Six days until Matrix Community Summit Berlin 2022

In less than a week the Matrix Community Summit Berlin is taking place at c-base. Join us early on Thursday (25th August) for a Barcamp where we will brainstorm, draft and prototype new ideas. The main conference days are Friday and Saturday (26th and 27th August). We have a schedule all about Matrix hosting, clients and development. With three simultaneous tracks there sure is something for you to listen to. It's also the perfect place to get to know other community members. Look forward to talks, workshops, a signing party, a Matrix P2P live test, dinner and barbecue!

We're not planing to stream or record the event. Our focus lies on providing a great in-person activities. If attendees want to blog or toot/tweet about it, please use the hashtag #MatrixCommunitySummit. Also, German-speaking folks can look forward to more coverage from the event on my podcast. https://chrpaul.de/podcast/

Because we've heard about some confusion: The event is NOT organised by the Matrix Foundation. To minimize the misconception, we've renamed it to the Matrix Community Summit Berlin. This is an event initiated by Yan, jaller94 and other Matrix enthusiasts. We also organise the Matrix Meetup Berlin.

Matrix Space: #matrix-summit-berlin-2022:c-base.org

Schedule: https://cfp.summit2022.matrixmeetup.de/matrix-summit-conference-2022/schedule/

cel says

One week until DWeb Camp

Next week (August 24-28), people will meet outdoors in California to learn and share about decentralized web technologies.

Some attendees and organizers are using Matrix internally for camp chat.

Public chat: https://matrix.to/#/#decentralizedweb-general:matrix.org

Site: https://dwebcamp.org/

Schedule (in progress): https://dwebcamp2022.sched.com

More info: https://gitlab.com/getdweb/dweb-camp-2022/#dweb-camp-2022

Previously announced: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/04/14/this-week-in-matrix-2022-04-14#dweb-camp

Room of the Week 📆

ssorbom ⚡️ announces

Have you ever felt lost in the Matrix world? Too many rooms and spaces to manage? Well, back by popular demand (with Timo's blessing), I present, The Room of the Week! Every week we strive to highlight a room or a space that we believe deserves attention for discussing interesting going on across the Matrix Network.

Last week, we were serving coffee, this week, it's tea! Specifically, tea at

#tea:matrix.org

Do you prefer sheng or shu puerh? Maybe bit more into lapsang, liuan or perhaps cliff oolongs? Greens or whites? Sencha? Having mood to discuss impact of varios clays and pot shapes? Is it better warm up water in bofura, tetsubin or electric kettle? Simply everything about the tea.

Come join us while the kettle is whistling.

If you have a room you wish to see highlighted, join us at: https://matrix.to/#/!bIyiUUnriVoHtYzuPS:fachschaften.org?via=chat.shawnsorbom.net&via=matrix.org&via=fachschaften.org To get your favorite room of the week highlighted.

Dept of Ping 🏓

No ping stats while Thib is away, but you can always join the fun at #ping:maunium.net and #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net!

That's all I know 🏁

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