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!
A short Matrix Live where we can see the goodness coming to Element very shortly!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
/stateand/state_idsendpoints should now return the correct error code when the state isn't known instead of returning a HTTP 500- The federation
/eventshould 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-accountutility will no longer error if the homeserver URL ends in a trailing slash- A regression in
/syncintroduced in 0.9.4 should be fixedAs always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more Dendrite-related discussion.
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.
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
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 :-))
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.
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
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
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 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 wantedtagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.
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
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
devDocker image tag (ghcr, Docker Hub) is built on every commit to main/master branchThanks for all the contributions! 🙌 See the full changelog for details.
HarHarLinks says
Greetings to the world from #matrix-summit-berlin-2022:c-base.org!
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.
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
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
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:
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.
No ping stats while Thib is away, but you can always join the fun at #ping:maunium.net and #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net!
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.
This week Thib (is he ever really away?) shows us how to host Synapse with Docker Compose.
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
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_APPROVALerror codeMSCs in Final Comment Period:
- No MSCs are in FCP.
Merged MSCs:
- No MSCs were merged this week.
Closed MSCs:
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.
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!
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 userslog entries for dead servers- The
/syncendpoint will no longer incorrectly return room entries for retired invites which could cause some rooms to show up in the client "Historical" section- The
/createRoomendpoint will now correctly populateis_directin invite membership events, which may help clients to classify direct messages correctly- The
create-accounttool 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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…
Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix
Benedict reports
Trixnity got some minor updates with bugfixes and iOS ARM64 Simulator support.
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 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 wantedtagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.
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 ;-)
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
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
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.
No ping stats while Thib is away, but you can always join the fun at #ping:maunium.net and #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net!
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
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://spec.matrix.org/proposals/.
MSC Status
New MSCs:
- [WIP] MSC3865: User-given attributes for users
- [WIP] MSC3864: User-given attributes for rooms
- MSC3862: event_match (almost) anything
MSCs in Final Comment Period:
- No MSCs entered FCP this week.
Accepted MSCs:
- No MSCs were accepted this week.
Merged MSCs:
Spec Updates
The Spec Core Team had another retro this week, and part of what we talked about was how most of the spec PR writing falls to just a few people. Starting this week, we're going to try and diversify that work across the Spec Core Team, both for reducing bus factor and increasing bandwidth of spec PRs. Hopefully the results of that will be noticeable!
Random MSC of the Week
The random MSC of the week is... MSC3783: Fixed base64 for SAS verification!
For those that don't know, "SAS verification" refers to the act of two devices verifying each other through the use of Short Authentication Strings (SAS). This is the backbone of emoji verification when you verify with another user or one of your own devices.
It turns out that libolm, the olm and megolm encryption library, originally incorrectly encoded the base64 output of the message authentication code (MAC) calculation, which is a values that's passed between devices. Due to trying to maintain backwards-compatibility with older clients, this has not been fixed in newer clients yet.
This MSC proposes bumping the MAC algorithm identifier (which is agreed upon between devices when verifying) to a something new, which allows newer clients to know when to use the new or old (and incorrect) method of calculating the base64 encoding of MAC values.
As far as I can tell, this has no security implications. It's just unfortunate to have incorrect base64 encoding when interfacing with other, non-libolm, implementations of olm and megolm.
Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team
Shay reports
The Synapse team is hard at work making Synapse faster and leaner. Work continues apace on faster room joins over federation, and it seems that the work might land sooner rather than later, although there are no solid dates yet. In other news, profiling work is being done to determine ways to hopefully increase the speed of local room joins and DM creation. Stay tuned for more information in the future on that. Finally, it was an RC release week. Synapse 1.65.0rc2 was released, and it contains some fun features and bugfixes. Check it out!
Dendrite is a second-generation Matrix homeserver
neilalexander says
This week we released Dendrite 0.9.2 which contains the following updates:
- Dendrite now supports history visibility on the
/sync,/messagesand/contextendpoints
- It should now be possible to view the history of a room in more cases (as opposed to limiting scrollback to the join event or defaulting to the restrictive
"join"visibility rule as before)- The default room version for newly created rooms is now room version 9
- New admin endpoint
/_dendrite/admin/resetPassword/{userID}has been added, which replaces the-reset-passwordflag increate-account- The
create-accountbinary now uses shared secret registration over HTTP to create new accounts, which fixes a number of problems with account data and push rules not being configured correctly for new accounts- The internal HTTP APIs for polylith deployments have been refactored for correctness and consistency
- The federation API will now automatically clean up some EDUs that have failed to send within a certain period of time
- The
/hierarchyendpoint will now return potentially joinable rooms (contributed by texuf)- The user directory will now show or hide users correctly
- Send-to-device messages should no longer be incorrectly duplicated in
/sync- The federation sender will no longer create unnecessary destination queues as a result of a logic error
- A bug where database migrations may not execute properly when upgrading from older versions has been fixed
- A crash when failing to update user account data has been fixed
- A race condition when generating notification counts has been fixed
- A race condition when setting up NATS has been fixed (contributed by brianathere)
- Stale cache data for membership lazy-loading is now correctly invalidated when doing a complete sync
- Data races within user-interactive authentication have been fixed (contributed by tak-hntlabs)
This brings our current test compliance figures to:
- Client-server APIs: 90%
- Server-server APIs: 95%
As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite-related discussion.
ChristianP reports
Announcing
matrix-appservice-discord3.0.0!What? Another week, another major release? Yes, we want to make breaking changes obvious, and the bridge now requires Node.js 16+.
The release fixes the outdated
yarn.lockfile. Thanks to the package maintainers of NixOS to point this out! 👋 Furthermore, mentioning Matrix users in Discord got fixed.And, for the fans of containers, we've re-added the release of Docker images. 🐳 The URL changed and we don't plan to update
halfshot/matrix-appservice-discordon Docker Hub. The image can be pulled fromghcr.io/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord:v3.0.0.https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord/releases/tag/v3.0.0
Desktop client for Matrix using Qt and C++17.
Nico reports
Nheko now shows you a pretty preview for rooms you are trying to join. This uses MSC3266, which you might need to enable in your synapse config, if you want to see more than the roomid of the room you are trying to join. It tries to fall back to the /hierarchy endpoint, but that won't work over federation.
Similarly you can now somewhat edit what rooms are in a space. I grew up with Windows 98, so this is a very nested right click menu. We are still discussing some of the wording choices for the options there, so if you have any opinions about it, feel free to give feedback about it! This is part of the bigger goal to be able to manage your communities from within Nheko, so stay tuned for more features coming in that area.
red_sky (nheko.im) also improved our notifications code on macOS. You can now disable the notification sound in the system settings, which for some reason requires badge permissions to show that option... macOS will always remain a mystery to us! Similarly we fixed the source text for notifications on Windows, which should now not show a stray %1 anymore as well as a few other cleanups.
Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!
kittykat says
- Ever started a DM with someone, only to get distracted and leave them staring into an empty timeline wondering who you are and what you want. Well, it is no more! In this update new DMs will only notify the person you’re messaging once you’ve sent your first message.
- That’s not the only exciting update in EleWeb/Desktop this week, including the newly extended voice messages! Instead of voice messages capped at 2 minutes, users are now able to send a voice note of up to 15 minutes long. Go forth and record 🎤
- In upcoming releases we’re also looking at how to improve a user’s first few days in Element. We know that it can be daunting to stare at an empty screen and wonder how to get going, which is why we’ve designed and built a checklist for new users. This checklist will help them to get off the ground and messaging friends in no time.
In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
- Threads improvements are still very much underway. We have a proof of concept (PoC) for improving notifications that we’re testing to ensure scalability and performance.
Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!
Doug says
- Our release this week was rejected by Apple. Their feedback? Our info.plist comments do not provide enough context as to why we’re asking for access to things like the camera, photos, or contacts. Never fear! We’ve updated our copy and we’re confident that it’s clearer than ever.
- Also in the upcoming release:
- Fixing the crashes that some users were running into when switching space.
- The new in-app notifications now also appear in the notification centre
- And a bug fix for the rare issue of sending duplicate images to a timeline when sending multiple photos
- We’re also working on changing the layout of our mobile apps, and work is well underway on iOS. We’re excited to share these big changes with you so keep your eyes peeled on our socials and in other TWIM notes.
- Join us over at #element-community-testing:matrix.org on Tuesday 16th August at 12:00 BST to try out the new app layout on iOS! There’s a little bit of setup required so check out the room ahead of time for instructions :)
Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!
Danielle says
- In the upcoming Android release we’ve fixed some crashes; including where the app would crash if a user attempted putting non-ASCII characters in their MXID during account creation.
- Biometric login is now disabled if the device you’re on does not support biometrics.
- We’ve also been working hard on adding unit tests to increase coverage.
- There’s work being done on the modularisation of languages that may help decrease the complexity of translation and move us towards a set of common strings between platforms.
- Join us over at #element-community-testing:matrix.org on Tuesday 16th August at 15:00 BST to try out the new app layout on Android! There’s a little bit of setup needed so check out the room ahead of time for instructions 🙂
Cinny is a Matrix client focused on simplicity, elegance and security
ajbura says
v2.1: Custom emojis and stickers (Birthday edition)
Hello everyone,
On July 28 project marked its one-year milestone. During this time it has grown at an unexpected rate, both in terms of development as well as popularity. This is great news, so let's celebrate that with this birthday edition.
In this update, we have added Custom emoji and sticker support to Cinny. Custom emoji and stickers were not in our roadmap but that's the surprise. Aren't they cool? Apart from the emoji and stickers, there are tons of other features such as Blurhash, Mark entire space as read, user pills, and bug fixes. Check out the release page for a detailed changelog.
In the case of the roadmap, we are still on that, work on the "Rich input editor" is in progress and will come as the next release. Stay tuned for that!
The update is live on https://app.cinny.in and the desktop app can be downloaded from Github.
Pro-Tip: Join #cinny-space:matrix.org to check out some cool sticker packs. There are some great packs in #stickers-and-emojis:pixie.town too.
Thank you. See you all next time!
tusooa reports
We released a bugfix v0.2.1 . Thanks to nannanko who discovered and fixed this bug. There are also docker images.
0.2.1
- Fix crash when receiving a redacted encrypted event. https://lily-is.land/kazv/libkazv/-/commit/98870fa04fa78361f5092cd77f88895e4a228d34
Ruby SDK for the Matrix communication protocol
Ananace says
A new version of the Ruby Matrix SDK has now been released, adding a new abstraction in the form of a Sinatra-inspired bot DSL, as well as general fixes and improvements. Making a Ruby-based Matrix bot can now be as simple as;
#!/usr/bin/env ruby require 'matrix_sdk/bot' command(:praise, desc: 'Gives you praise', only: -> { room.user_can_send? client.mxid, 'm.reaction' }) do room.send_notice "#{sender}, you tha' man!" room.send_event 'm.reaction', { 'm.relates_to': { rel_type: 'm.annotation', event_id: event[:event_id], key: '👍️' } } end
Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker.
Slavi reports
Thanks to Charles Wright, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now has optional experimental Conduit homeserver support for new installations. This comes as a follow-up to the playbook getting Dendrite support earlier this year.
For more details, see our Conduit support changelog entry.
ChristianP announces
Next weekend, Sat 20th and Sun 21st, FrOSCon will be taking place. It's a conference about open source software near Bonn, Germany.
There will be some program around Matrix, though I'm still looking for volunteers to help me with a stand and DevRoom.
For the stand we want a small group to explain Matrix to others. For the DevRoom we want some talks and workshops. Anyone's welcome to ask me for more info or to get involved.
cvwright says
Announcing matrix-locust, a new tool for load testing Matrix homeservers, based on the Python load testing framework Locust. It's very early days for this project, but we're already discovering some interesting results. There isn't an official tagged "release" yet, but anyone interested in this topic is encouraged to stop by #load-testing:matrix.org and say hello.
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, we are highlighting: #coffee-discuss:matrix.org
A place to discuss buying, brewing, and drinking everyone's favorite morning beverage of choice! I had no idea there was so much Nuance to this topic until I joined this room . For example, did you know there was a correct way to distribute coffee grounds when you first pour to ensure maximum flavor? Neither did I! Whether you are new to the world of coffee drinking, or a seasoned connoisseur of morning Joe, this room has something for everyone who loves coffee.
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.
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
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:
- MSC3861: Matrix architecture change to delegate authentication via OIDC
- MSC3860: Add media download redirect proposal
- MSC3859: Add well known media domain proposal
- MSC3857: Welcome messages
MSCs in Final Comment Period:
- No MSCs are currently in FCP.
Accepted MSCs:
Merged MSCs:
- MSC2832: HS -> AS authorization header
- MSC3818: Copy room type on upgrade
- MSC3844: Remove unused policy room sharing mechanism
- MSC3786: Add a default push rule to ignore
m.room.server_acleventsSpec Updates
This week saw the merge of three MSCs from first-time MSC authors! MSC3818 (Copy room type on upgrade) from @Mikaela and both MSC3786 (Add a default push rule to ignore
m.room.server_aclevents) and MSC3827 (Filtering of/publicRoomsby room type) from @SimonBrandner. Nice work to both of them!Random MSC of the Week
The random MSC of the week is... MSC2499: Fixes for Well-known URIs!
A bundle of small quality-of-life changes to the .well-known server and client endpoints. Removing some ambiguities, replacing old and deprecated endpoints as well as a potential size cap suggestion.
Looks like a good contender for one to push over the line given a bit of review and response!
tulir reports
TWIM: someone in #matrix:matrix.org complained that the image in the spec section is always the same, so I made this gif (actually webp) out of all those images:
thejhh reports
We've started work on our HG HomeServer written in pure TypeScript, compilable as a single JS file, with no dependencies except NodeJS. It's intended for a special use cases when Matrix is used as a backbone for custom apps. It's lightweight, minimal and for the moment isn't even planned to support full Matrix spec. We might make it possible to run it on browser later. https://github.com/heusalagroup/hghs
Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team
Shay reports
Another week, another release! Synapse 1.64.0 was released this week, featuring a host of new features, bugfixes, and internal changes aimed at reducing memory usage, increasing performance, and improving the developer experience. Check out the full list of changes here. In addition, work continues on faster room joins. The goal gets closer every day!
Second generation Matrix homeserver
neilalexander announces
This week we released Dendrite 0.9.0 and Dendrite 0.9.1. There are quite a few big changes, including an all-new caching model and several optimisations. This release also moves our baseline supported Go version up to Go 1.18.
The following changes are included across both releases:
- Dendrite now uses Ristretto for managing in-memory caches
- Should improve cache utilisation considerably over time by more intelligently selecting and managing cache entries compared to the previous LRU-based cache
- Defaults to a 1GB cache size if not configured otherwise
- The estimated cache size in memory and maximum age can now be configured with new configuration options to prevent unbounded cache growth
- Added support for serving the
/.well-known/matrix/clienthint directly from Dendrite
- Configurable with the new configuration option
- Refactored membership updater, which should eliminate some bugs caused by the membership table getting out of sync with the room state
- The User API is now responsible for sending account data updates to other components, which may fix some races and duplicate account data events
- Optimised database query for checking whether a remote server is allowed to request an event over federation without using anywhere near as much CPU time (PostgreSQL only)
- Database migrations have been refactored to eliminate some problems that were present with
gooseand upgrading from older Dendrite versions- Media fetching will now use the
/v3endpoints for downloading media from remote homeservers- HTTP 404 and HTTP 405 errors from the client-facing APIs should now be returned with CORS headers so that web-based clients do not produce incorrect access control warnings for unknown endpoints
- Some preparation work for full history visibility support
- Upgrades a dependency which caused issues building Dendrite with Go 1.19
- The roomserver will no longer give up prematurely after failing to call
/state_ids- Removes the faulty room info cache, which caused of a number of race conditions and occasional bugs (including when creating and joining rooms)
- The media endpoint now sets the
Cache-Controlheader correctly to prevent web-based clients from hitting media endpoints excessively- The sync API will now advance the PDU stream position correctly in all cases (contributed by sergekh2)
- The sync API will now delete the correct range of send-to-device messages when advancing the stream position
- The device list
changedkey in the/syncresponse should now return the correct users- A data race when looking up missing state has been fixed
- The
/send_joinAPI is now applying stronger validation to the received membership event- Fixes a crash that could occur during event redaction
- The
/membersendpoint will no longer incorrectly return HTTP 500 as a result of some invite events- Send-to-device messages should now be ordered more reliably and the last position in the stream updated correctly
- Parsing of appservice configuration files is now less strict (contributed by Kab1r)
- The sync API should now identify shared users correctly when waking up for E2EE key changes
- The federation
/stateendpoint will now return a HTTP 403 when the state before an event isn't known instead of a HTTP 500- Presence timestamps should now be calculated with the correct precision
- A race condition in the roomserver's room info has been fixed
- A race condition in the sync API has been fixed
As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more Dendrite-related discussion.
Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts
Ananace announces
This week has seen the usual updates to my Helm Charts - with element-web being updated to 1.11.2 and matrix-synapse to 1.64.0. Additionally, the matrix-synapse chart now also allows for adding entirely custom .well-known data - along with an example on how to use that for MSC1929.
ChristianP announces
This bridge connects users on Matrix and Discord – or other platforms, if combined with other bridges. Earlier this year the community bridge has been adopted by the Matrix.org bridge team to give it some attention. Its most recent update dated back to December 2020 and some fixes waited for a new release.
Well, here it is! v2.0.0 Its breaking changes are the requirement of NodeJS 14 or newer and the usage of
yarninstead ofnpm install. Furthermore, the update introduces a changelog and rolls out the guidelines we use for developing other matrix.org bridges.https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord/releases/tag/v2.0.0
Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!
kittykat reports
- Version 1.11.2 is out!
- „Start DM only on first message“ has landed on develop. Changing the DM flow from invite → message to message & invite at the same time. If you want to see it live, join our testing session at 12:00 BST on Tuesday
- New user onboarding experience is getting closer to release!
- You can also now disable sending read receipts on develop, coming out on 16 August in a release
- Finished porting end to end tests to Cypress! Also started looking into adding support for accessibility testing
- Final comment period for our new code style is over. Next up is updating our contribution guidelines to include changes
- We finished the task around improving tracking of unused code to reduce maintenance burden
Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!
Doug announces
- Version 1.8.24 is available on the App Store with our new Sign Up and Sign In flows. The update is rolling out slowly and should be available to everyone by Monday.
- The work on our new app layout is coming along nicely with much of it merged into the repo (but disabled behind a build flag).
- In-app notifications will now also be delivered to Notification Centre.
- Continuous improvements are being made to the Live Location sharing feature.
- Integration tests are now run for every PR on matrix-ios-sdk more than doubling the reported test coverage!
Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!
adam announces
- 1.4.31 is rolling out which includes the new and improved FTUE onboarding experience along with fixes for markdown lists no longer always starting from 1 and html entities showing up in messages.
- The new app layout is starting to materialise with PRs available on github for anyone interested in having a sneak peek!
- We’re continuing to make improvements to Live Location sharing and cross signing verification as well as investigating performance issues.
ben reports
Development marches forward, with the focus on getting chat into a usable state and task's up as the first MVP app on top: Effektio now support sending multiple images at once in chat, has seen fixes to the chat in widescreen mode, and now support markdown for chat messages. Meanwhile device verification is drawing to a close with a few remaining UI fixes being implement and the state machine for tasks being fleshed out slowly but steadily.
📰 You want updates more frequently and close to when they actually happen? Join our Effektio Matrix News room, discuss general aspect in our foyer or hang out with the devs in our tech channel.
A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix
gleachkr reports
After a short vacation, I've done some new work on populus-viewer. Most of this has been UX and bugfixes, but I've added one new feature that I wanted to share. MSC3775: Markup Locations for Audiovisual Media gives a spec for annotating audio and video on matrix, but it also allows you to annotate images. So, for completeness sake, I've added support for annotating image files in Populus! This might be useful for discussing publication layouts, product designs, or for teaching art history. So populus can now annotate: video, audio, images and pdfs.
As always, if you want to learn more, follow populus development, or discuss the future of decentralized social annotation on Matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.
Robin says
matrix-widget-api v1.0.0 was released yesterday, reflecting the fact that we're not expecting any big changes to the library's architecture for the foreseeable future, and that it's more or less ready for wider use.
It also comes with a couple of new features ✨ for widget authors: Sending and receiving to-device messages with MSC3819, and getting TURN servers from the client with MSC3846. Together, these features enable some new complex use-cases, such as doing VoIP from inside a widget. See Matrix Live for a preview of what that looks like with Element Call! 📹️
This is as good a time as any to mention that matrix-widget-api doesn't have to just be for web-based apps. If you're building mobile apps with Matrix and want to make use of widgets, running matrix-widget-api inside a web view to liaison with the actual widget can make it a lot simpler to start supporting widget API features. If you're curious, watch Element iOS+Android for upcoming examples of this.
Dave reports
- This week we've been building on the initial work on the pion call server (SFU) from Sean, and have made our very first call through it with Element Call! It's still very early and there's still lots of work to do, but this will allow Element Call to scale up to much higher numbers of people.
- The VoIP team are also looking after widgets now, and in our quest to embed Element Call into the Element apps, we've hit the milestone of releasing matrix-widget-api 1.0.0. We're also making great progress towards embedding into Element Web.
Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust
ben reports
This week saw a few major improvements on the dev-ex of the Rust SDK (among others): support for refresh tokens landed; we have a setup for integration tests against an actual synapse instance now (and started writing tests); our docs for
mainnow contain the js bindings, too; event handlers can now be unregistered and we've added an API for room specific event handlers. Further more, we've refactored the examples (now to be found in/examplesrather than some sub-sub-directory no one finds) and created two more:getting-startedcombines the autojoin and command-example with a lot more additional inline comment to explain what is going on andcustom-eventsshowcases how to use the sdk and ruma types to send any custom events (in that case a ping-ack example) over matrix!This was also a week of fighting the ci. After the integration tests landed, coverage reporting broke and an investigation was kicked off to check whether llvm-cov is in a usable state for us by now (it is not), but a fix was found. We've also started regretting adding
npm-based workflows in our repo, as we've found ourselves at the end of an upgrade bug and the saw CI failing without us changing anything :shakes_fist_at_sky: . A fix was found quickly by pinning a sub-dependency. On a similar note, we've postponed merging the kotlin bindings until the android team is back on it and available to answer some questions we have, and the wasm-js bindings showed build failures on CI, which the original author will have to take a look at after coming back from vacation - thus delayingcrypto-jsa bit further.👉️ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our
help wantedtagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.
Elixir libraries related to the Matrix communications protocol.
uhoreg announces
It's been a while since I've made an update on Polyjuice Client Test. Since the last update:
- several more tests have been added
- there have been some some front-end improvements
- I've also improved the documentation, done some refactoring, and added some helper/utility modules to make things clearer. My goal is to make it easier for people who don't know Elixir to be able to read and write tests without running away screaming.
- compatibility with some Matrix clients has been improved
- added some functions to make it easy for tests to completely override Matrix endpoints
I'm also happy to say that Polyjuice Client Test has helped find bugs in some clients, which have since been fixed.
madlittlemods (Eric Eastwood) announces
This week I'm showing off an early look at the Matrix public archive. As the name suggests, it acts as an archive of history for your world-readable Matrix rooms. This allows you to view historical content day-by-day and jump back years ago to see what your Matrix room was up to.
More importantly, it also allows Google to do the same thing so you’ll probably start finding Matrix content from your favorite search engine and be able to harness the massive knowledge base stored in Matrix. Imagine seeing Matrix logs instead of Stack Overflow answers when googling questions! The new portal into the Matrix ecosystem 🌌
You can also see this demoed in this week's Matrix Live video (at the top of the page).
Under the hood, we use the MSC3030
/timestamp_to_eventendpoint to fetch the messages for a given day and then we sever-side render the events with the Hydrogen SDK. Re-using Hydrogen gets us pretty and native(to Element) looking UI and keeps the maintenance burden of supporting new event types in Hydrogen.If you want to follow what’s going on and see how it's coming along, you can checkout the project on GitHub, https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-public-archive
moanos [he/him] says
Thanks to @lifeofbrian:justprojects.de and @ben:rs485.network the Docker image of the bot was shrunk from 406.28 MB to 69 MB (nice)! You can get the new image from Dockerhub or install it via the matrix-docker-ansible-deploy.
jbara announces
I was able to to host a matrix-synapse server on termux app on an android device. I documented the process on termux-synapse github repo And started working on a script that automates the process (final commit is being currently tested before pushing). It was a "for fun" type of thing. But I can see it being useful for people who do not have access to a raspberry pi (such as myself at the moment) to use as a small homeserver. It can hold up in 1 to 1 Direct Messages and in small rooms.
ssorbom ⚡️ reports
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 goings on across the Matrix Network.
This week, we are highlighting: #libregaming-games:tchncs.de
A matrix space dedicated to finding all of the free open source games, engines, and assets in the Matrix world so that you don't have to. Helpfully organized, and well maintained, it is the Premier stop for open source gaming on The Matrix Network!
If you know of a room that you would like to see highlighted, please visit https://matrix.to/#/!bIyiUUnriVoHtYzuPS:fachschaften.org to let us know of the room that you would like to spotlight.
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
