Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) 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

New MSCs:

• MSC3787: Allowing knocks to restricted rooms
• MSC3786: Add a default push rule to ignore m.room.server_acl events
• MSC3782: Matrix public key login spec
• MSC3780: Knocking on action=join
• MSC3779: "Owned" State Events
• MSC3775: Markup Locations for Audiovisual Media
• MSC3773: Notifications for threads
• MSC3772: Push rule for mutually related events
• MSC3771: Read receipts for threads

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC3787: Allowing knocks to restricted rooms

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

"Wowza, that's a lot of new MSCs!" I hear you say. This is actually a listing of the last 3 weeks, as it was pointed out to me that the last 3 editions of TWIM have not all features an MSC status update - which means some MSCs may not have necessary made it into the limelight.

As such, here's those from this past week, as well as the ones that were missed!

Spec Updates

It's that time of the year again - a new Spec release is on the horizon! Matrix v1.3 is expected to land sometime this month, and will include:

• MSC3440 (threads) + related MSCs
• MSC3787 (knock+restricted join rules)
• MSC3604 (room version 10)
• Any other MSCs which have so far been accepted, but not yet made it into the spec.

MSCs which land between now and v1.3 might get incorporated if easy enough, though chances are they'll slip to v1.4 (expected next quarter).

On top of that, the other bit of news is that the proposal-in-review label has now been removed from the matrix-spec-proposals repo and thus all MSCs. This doesn't mean your MSC is no longer in review! We simply found the label redundant along with the other labels in the process (it was attached to all MSCs which hadn't been accepted/merged yet, which means very little) and thus we decided to remove it to reduce noise.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2881: Message Attachments!

This MSC has actually been potentially(?) superseded by MSC3382. In short, both look to provide a solution to the problem of attaching (multiple!) images to messages, such that clients can display an album of images in a single event in the timeline.

Check it out if you're interested in introducing such a feature!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

Synapse v1.58.0 was released this week! Check out the v1.58 blog post for the full scoop, but the highlights are:

• Our Docker images and Debian packages are now built from a dependency lockfile courtesy of Poetry. Props to David for leading the charge on this multi-week epic.
• An experimental implementation of MSC3383 has been contributed by @Bubu and @jcgruenhage at Famedly, which will help with proxying federation traffic, amongst other uses.
• An experimental implementation of MSC2815 has been merged, which allows room moderators to view redact event content for the purposes of moderation. This was contributed by @tulir at Beeper.
• Device list updates are now asynchronous thanks to Erik, leading to much faster login times for accounts in big rooms.
• plus many other bug fixes and improvements!

We also released a v1.58.1 patch shortly afterwards to address an issue with the Debian packages on some configurations. Server admins not using the Matrix.org Debian packages do not need to install this patch release.

Otherwise, ongoing work from the core team continues with Sean and Rich working on faster room join performance, Olivier pushing forwards on testing Synapse with workers in Complement, while Erik has been tackling general performance work.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Half-Shot reports

Hey folks! We're announcing our 1.6.0 release for matrix-hookshot today. More features in this release: tadzik has gotten involved and given us support for RSS feeds in this release. You can check out how to get going with those in our hosted documentation.

The highlights this time around are:

• Add RSS/Atom feed support (#315)
• Add support for GitLab in the widgets configuration UI. (#320)
• Send a notice when a GitLab merge request gets some review comments. (#314)
• Add new !hookshot gitlab project command to configure project bridges in rooms. See the docs for instructions. (#321)
• New hookshot_connection_event(_failed) metrics for tracking successful event handling. Reinstate matrix_* metrics which were previously not being recorded. (#312)

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

This week brings another round of big improvements & new features!

Features & fixes include:

• Fixes to Docker support & the documentation for setting it up
• Changes to the login flow
  • The bridge can now be configured to enforce a login flow that more closely matches the official KakaoTalk desktop client's, and to better warn you when a new login will kick out another one of your KT sessions. This will hopefully prevent the bridge from getting KT accounts banned!
• Backfilling for KT->Matrix read receipts
• Commands for adding/removing KakaoTalk friends
• Commands to edit your KakaoTalk ID & mark it as shared or hidden
• Matrix->KT DM creation, i.e. the ability to create a new DM with a KakaoTalk user from within Matrix
  • This might fail on the first attempt at creating a DM. If it does, try re-inviting the KakaoTalk puppet to the room.
• Many stability & correctness improvements

With the combination of friends list curation & DM creation support, it should now be possible to connect with KT contacts entirely from Matrix! Simply add some friends, list them, and invite a listed friend to a 1:1 room!

---

• Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net
• Testing room: #kakaotalk-bridge-testing:miscworks.net / https://open.kakao.com/o/gjGQFuae
• Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

matrix-appservice-irc (website)

Node.js IRC bridge for Matrix

Half-Shot announces

Hi folks, note that today (Wednesday) we released a high security update for the matrix-appservice-irc bridge. Please update to 0.34.0 as soon as you can.

Dept of Clients 📱

Thunderbird (website)

Thunderbird is a free open-source email, calendar & chat app.

freaktechnik reports

This week we released Thunderbird Beta 101.0b1. It includes a bunch of bug fixes for the Matrix implementation and shows reactions as system messages, so you know when someone gives you a 👍️.

Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

Someone on Twitter complained that no chat client works like MSN anymore, where you could have separate windows for each chat. So for MSN compatibility we added that. (It is a bit experimental still, expect some stuff to not work or crash)

Bulbu also went through a lot of effort to add a second set of emoji shortcodes to Nheko. Those should be more familiar to people coming from other platforms or clients while the old shortcodes are available still as well. We also saw a lot of progress on the Finnish, Chinese, Indonesian and Russian translations, animated images should work properly in the image viewer again, buttons for opening the member list are now clearly marked with a people icon next to them. The memberlist is also now search- and sortable.

Anyway, have a look at how important multiple windows are:

FluffyChat (website)

Krille Fear reports

FluffyChat 1.4.0 has been released with a lot of bug fixes, performance improvements and new designs. Take a look at the new designed sign up screen, which also now supports recommended homeservers from joinmatrix.org

Krille Fear reports

Full changelog:

• design: Display icon for failed sent messages (Krille Fear)
• design: Display own stories at first place and combine with new stories button (Krille Fear)
• feat: Add "Show related DMs in spaces" settings (20kdc)
• feat: Better image sending experience (Krille Fear)
• feat: Display event timestamp if selected (Krille Fear)
• feat: Faster image resizing (Krille Fear)
• feat: Groups and Direct Chats virtual spaces option (20kdc)
• feat: New onboarding design (Krille Fear)
• feat: Onboarding with dynamic homeservers from joinmatrix.org (Krille Fear)
• feat: Play audio messages in stories (Krille Fear)
• feat: Use native imaging for much faster thumbnail calc on mobile (Krille Fear)
• feat: add Dockerfile for nginx/web builds (TheOneWithTheBraid)
• feat: allow to create widgets (TheOneWithTheBraid)
• feat: remove diacritics (henri2h)
• feat: irish language support (Graeme Power)
• feat: Enable screensharing on Mobile
• feat: support AppImage builds
• feat: Improve spaces design
• fix: Android theme is not auto updating when system theme changes (Krille Fear)
• fix: Chat view becomes gray for a second on sending reaction (Krille Fear)
• fix: Don't request new thumbnail resolution on every window resize (Samuel Mezger)
• fix: Dont display own failed-to-send events in stories (Krille Fear)
• fix: Hide markdown in chat list preview and local notifications (Krille Fear)
• fix: Hide pinned events if event is not accessible or loading (Krille Fear)
• fix: Image sending (Krille Fear)
• fix: Make audioplayer waveforms thinner and better clickable (Krille Fear)
• fix: Some story layout bugs (Krille Fear)
• fix: Widgets dialog crashes (Krille Fear)
• fix: login form supports switching fields via tab (Philip Molares)

Ement.el (website)

Matrix client for Emacs

alphapapa announces

Ement.el has received several updates since the last time it was mentioned in TWIM:

Additions

• A new room list command, ement-taxy-room-list, shows rooms grouped "smartly" (and programmably). (It will be made the default soon; until then, call the command to use it.)
  • The new room list shows unread-notification/highlight counts, similar to Element.
• Basic support for spaces:
  • Rooms (and spaces) can be added to and removed from spaces.
  • Rooms are listed under their spaces in ement-taxy-room-list.
• Reactions can now be toggled off (i.e. redacted) by clicking them, like in Element.
• Command ement-room-send-file allows uploading non-image files to rooms, and file messages are now displayed usefully, so the files can be downloaded or viewed.
• Command ement-ignore-user ignores and unignores users.
• Command ement-tag-room adds and removes favourite, low-priority, or custom tags on rooms.
• Command ement-room-occur allows searching messages in a room buffer, similar to Emacs's occur command (i.e. it locally searches already-received messages).
• Membership events are now coalesced by default, similar to Element (especially helpful in large public rooms, like bridged IRC rooms, where join/part spam can be overwhelming).
• "In reply to" links in replies, as well as other matrix.to links, can be activated in a room buffer to go to the linked message.
• Mentions in outgoing messages are HTML-linkified (aka "pilled"), like Element.
• Generated avatars for rooms that have none, similar to Element. (Only displayed in ement-taxy-room-list for now.)
• Option ement-shr-use-fonts (disabled by default, which prevents HTML messages from being displayed in a different font).
• Faces for favourite/low-priority rooms.
• Redacted messages that are still known locally are now displayed with a strikethrough (after reconnecting, their content will be unknown).
• When images are disabled, image messages are presented as clickable URLs, so they can still be viewed.
• Some events, like membership events and images, are displayed alongside a vertical bar to help distinguish them from normal messages.
• Even "hotter"-looking timestamps for rooms updated in the last hour.

Changes

• Refactored notification system. Now easier to configure (see M-x customize-group RET ement-notify RET).

Fixes

• Improved error handling when looking up homeserver hostnames and .well-known URIs.
• Improved error handling when processing malformed events.
• "Elemental" display style (not used by many users, apparently).

Come join us in #ement.el:matrix.org!

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat announces

Element

Decryption

• Progressing through implementing sharing keys for past messages (MSC3061)
• Improved UTD (Unable to Decrypt) analytics to gather more insight on the most common errors faced by users

Community testing

• Thank you all who joined the async community testing sessions.
• We tested 51 cases and found 16 issues and potential improvements this week in the RC (release candidates) between all platforms
• Next week, we are planning to test:
  • New search experience on Web
• For more info on our next testing sessions (sync or async), you can join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

madlittlemods (Eric Eastwood) reports

In this months demos (also shown off at the top of the TWIM post), Eric showed off a proof of concept to anonymize your screenshots so you can easily include more context when submitting logs or bug reports without worrying where the bug occurred. The current concept will color block all of the text on the page to still maintain the structure of the app but completely hide the content itself.

This still has a ways to go before it's integrated in Element under the click of a button so if anyone wants to take over or give feedback, go comment on the issue, https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/9615. If you want to use the anonymization now, you can manually run the JavaScript snippet from the issue in the browser devtools.

This mode could even be further extended further to include event_id labels in the corner of each message to easily correlate the logs to the screenshot.

Happy screenshotting!

kittykat reports

• Continuing with UI polish and MSCs for releasing threads out of Beta:
  • MSC3771: Read receipts for threads
  • MSC3772: Push rule for mutually related events
  • MSC3773: Notifications for threads
• We are testing out Sonarcloud, you’ll see comments from the sonarcloud bot in new PRs about bugs, vulnerabilities and other inconsistencies that it has found
• Our first time user experience is getting some attention in Web. We’re working on simplifying a user’s first session as we know it can be pretty daunting
• As part of our efforts to improve PR review times, we have put together some guidance on how to choose a good issue to work on
• There have been some bug fixes and improvements around ending Jitsi calls
• In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
• Check out this week’s Matrix Live for a preview of video rooms :)

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu says

• We’re thinking about new ways to give flexibility on the Home screen - watch this space!
• The new Create Account flow is being implemented, currently we’re working on the captcha and T&Cs pages
• Fix several crashes like when searching or when clicking bottom bar twice
• Improve interaction with spaces which are in a space
• ElementX-iOS
  • We are going to share more and more about ElementX-iOS, a complete rewrite of the Element-iOS app using matrix-rust-sdk. We made a prototype last quarter. The result was so promising that we want to go full steam on it
  • We are finishing the setup of the project to have a good developer experience
  • Then, we will attack user stories listed in this board that target the personal message use case
  • Watch the today TWIM video with Stefan, Manu and Thib for more details

Element Android (website)

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

benoit announces

• Work is moving forward with our proposals for a new app layout, we’re excited to share it with you
• Our Create Account experience is still being updated, we’re currently working on ensuring that the Sign-in pieces work as expected
• Fixed a number of crash bugs around calls, launching app and space list
• Notifications have have been improved so that there is a noise for every notification which is received when they are enabled, in line with how web and iOS work
• On the SDK side, we are working to improve / clarify / document the public API. It’s still in progress, but the generated API documentation is already visible here: https://matrix-org.github.io/matrix-android-sdk2/

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr reports

Over the last two weeks, the theme in populus-viewer development has been permissions:

1. The settings menu for rooms has been redesigned
2. It's now possible to assign and remove standard roles (admin and moderator) from populus viewer
3. It's now possible to set power levels for standard events and actions from populus viewer
4. It's now possible to ban and unban using the membership management modal
5. Redacting the messages of others is now exposed as an action for those with that permission.

Besides that, I've been having some fun on the css-overhaul branch reorganizing some design elements, and centralizing the color CSS in a few variables, opening the way for things like a dark mode and user-definable themes. Here's a peek at the new milder and more welcoming default look:

gleachkr says

The permissions work now has us at one thousand commits. Here's to the next thousand! 🎉 As always, if you want to learn more, follow project progress, or talk about the future of social annotation on matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.

Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP announces

Matrix Wrench 0.7.0

I'm working on a few features for Wrench's anniversary on 13th June. Here's a bug fix for storing identities and a new button to check your membership status in a room.

• Added: A "Am I a member?" button tells your membership state in a room.
• Fixed: Unchanged identities got deleted from localStorage when editing identities twice.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict says

After a few release candidates and weeks later, we released Trixnity 2.0.0 today! It contains many breaking changes due to a large refactoring, which allows us to share a lot code between server and client implementations of the Matrix APIs. This means, that Trixnity can be used to implement matrix servers in addition to application services and clients!

Trixnity finally has support for Kotlin/JS. You can implement a browser client or even better: multiplatform client. Support for Kotlin/Native will follow soon (e. g. for iOS clients). Right now, there is no trixnity-client-store implementation for JavaScript (e. g. IndexedDB), so you need to stick with InMemoryStore at the moment.

Besides notification support (push rules are evaluated), we introduced helpers to get the complete timeline as Kotlin-Flow (no more complicated loops to get the timeline). You can even subscribe to all timeline events, which is really helpful to implement bots with e2e encryption support. Speaking of e2e encryption: libolm is bundled into trixnity-olm jars, so you don't need to build olm by your own anymore.

These are the most important features. For the complete changelog, have a look at the release candidates.

Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart.

Henri Carnot [famedly] announces

This week the team released version 0.9.0 which contains new features and some refactoring as many deprecated endpoints were removed so make sure to use the new ones when doing the migration. Support for the Element recent emoji (io.element.recent_emoji) was added. A new method to get the last read marker was added. Lastly, the timeline logic was enhanced, and it's now possible to load the timeline at a specific event. So you can load the room to the last event and then paginate through the new events. When reaching the last event, the timeline will automatically allow new events to be added in the timeline when received.

See you next week ;)

Dept of Ops 🛠

Cadair announces

I have spent the day ignoring more important things and trying to have something to TWIM. I wrote (yet another) GitHub Action for sending build status to matrix rooms. This action looks at all the completed jobs in your workflow and posts a combined status for the workflow as a message and reactions for all the individual jobs, inspired by the maubot GitLab plugin.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Sundar

Hyperbased in Hyperspace says

Hello together. I made a generic bot, named Safed Sundarata, or Sundar in short, that should make it easy to get basic special functionality working. It has a lot of different functionality so you have an example code to work off of. The main motivation for this bot was to provide an !error <code> command for the developers in the ReactOS Matrix Rooms, which translates error codes to human readable text. Then of course i added other useful or fun commands to the bot. You want to read the Readme to find out more. This is the first time i ever wrote a bot, so feedback and corrections to the Source Code are highly appreciated. It is written in Go using the mautrix-go framework (thanks tulir and everyone who worked on this making it easy!). Even easier is to run and build it with go, no insane build system with broken dependencies required, which was the reason why i made it from scratch.

Mjölnir (website)

The moderation bot for Matrix

Gnuxie 💜🐝 announces

Mjölnir

We have released v1.4.2 of Mjolnir https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir/releases/tag/v1.4.2 which includes:

Bot:

• A new JoinWaveShortCircuit protection, thanks to Jonathan with https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir/pull/280. This protection can be used to detect a mass-join scenario and set the room to invite-only.
• Change of behaviour: Mjolnir will now apply server ACL and member bans to the most recently active rooms first (while syncing). The order was random before.
• The causes of errors at startup (e.g. via misconfiguration) have been made more clear.
• The image with the latest tag on dockerhub is now correctly in sync with the main branch.

Synapse Module:

• The python module version is now in sync with the current git tag.
• The Readme's example config has been fixed (thanks to Maranda ).

graim (website)

A bot to moderate communities bridged with Discord via matrix-appservice-discord

luphoria announces

I am releasing a brand new moderation bot, graim! This bot allows you to moderate communities that are bridged with Discord via matrix-appservice-discord. You can tie a Matrix account to a Discord account, and moderate both platforms seamlessly from either end! Graim supports one Discord server and as many Matrix rooms as you want, per instance. :) You can run it yourself from the Github - https://github.com/luphoria/graim You can join the matrix space, which is bridged to the Discord server

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

andybalaam says

I'm streaming every week live coding Rust and Matrix at https://twitch.tv/andybalaam and https://andybalaam.uk.to (Owncast). Feel free to join me as I write a Rust Matrix bot. I'm currently on a side quest to add Redis support to the matrix-rust-sdk crypto store. You can watch past streams at diode.zone/a/andybalaam.

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 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib says

Taking my GNOME Foundation hat on for this news: the GNOME Foundation is adopting Matrix! Is this TWIM worthy? It probably wouldn't have been if it wasn't for all the great work of Gwmngilfen! We published a joint blog post (though in all fairness Greg did all the heavy lifting) to explain how the decision was taken, and transparently share the data we had at hand.

In practice that means after years of Matrix being around in the GNOME community and being the most popular platform, it's finally moving out of the grey zone of "everyone is using it but some older contributors really like their current set up, so it exists but it's not officially our primary platform". For now we're keeping both our Matrix instance and the bridge to GIMPnet (the IRC network GNOME people have been using for years). The major change is that IRC is now our legacy, so if tradeoffs have to be made Matrix will keep the premium experience.

Again, huge shout out to Gwmngilfen who gave meaning to the data I handed to him.

https://blog.ergaster.org/post/20220425-adopting-matrix/

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) reports

Spec

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:

• MSC3784: Using room type of m.policy for policy rooms
• MSC3783: Fixed base64 for SAS verification

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC3244: Room version capabilities

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

Hello again everyone! Your regularly-scheduled TWIM Spec update has returned, along with graph-based media!

Quick news to point out this week is that a new maubot plugin has been written to simply note the details of MSCs after their IDs ("msc1234") have been posted in a room. The bot supports multiple MSC IDs in a message, message edits, threads and end-to-end encrypted rooms.

A copy of the bot is currently running under @mscbot:matrix.org, so feel free to invite it to a room if you'd find that useful!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3216: Synchronized access control for Spaces!

This MSC serves as an alternative to MSC2962, and essentially allows for user permissions to be simultaneously enforced across a set of rooms in a Space. This would allow functionality to users of platforms like Discord, where a user can be a moderator in a guild, and thus in all of that guild's channels.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

richvdh says

A few operational issues have taken up quite a bit of the team's time this week, but we've still found time to cut a couple of release candidates of v1.58. Highlights include:

• Locked python dependencies for our Docker images and Debian packages, thanks to David's poetry work.
• Some big performance fixes, including an optimisation to login from Erik and one to message backfill from yours truly.

We're also excited to see quite a few contributions from outside the core maintenance team: thanks to Dirk, Beeper, Famedly and everyone else in the community who has made pull requests!

Meanwhile on the core team, Sean has been continuing to lay groundwork for faster room joins, and Olivier has been doing some exciting work so that we will (finally) be able to test Synapse in worker mode under Complement.

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander says

This week we announced Dendrite 0.8.2 with a bunch of usability fixes. As always, join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more discussion and updates.

Features

• Lazy-loading has been added to the /sync endpoint, which should speed up syncs considerably
• Filtering has been added to the /messages endpoint
• The room summary now contains "heroes" (up to 5 users in the room) for clients to display when no room name is set
• The existing lazy-loading caches will now be used by /messages and /context so that member events will not be sent to clients more times than necessary
• The account data stream now uses the provided filters
• The built-in NATS Server has been updated to version 2.8.0
• The /state and /state_ids endpoints will now return M_NOT_FOUND for rejected events
• Repeated calls to the /redact endpoint will now be idempotent when a transaction ID is given
• Dendrite should now be able to run as a Windows service under Service Control Manager

Fixes

• Fictitious presence updates will no longer be created for users which have not sent us presence updates, which should speed up complete syncs considerably
• Uploading cross-signing device signatures should now be more reliable, fixing a number of bugs with cross-signing
• All account data should now be sent properly on a complete sync, which should eliminate problems with client settings or key backups appearing to be missing
• Account data will now be limited correctly on incremental syncs, returning the stream position of the most recent update rather than the latest stream position
• Account data will not be sent for parted rooms, which should reduce the number of left/forgotten rooms reappearing in clients as empty rooms
• The TURN username hash has been fixed which should help to resolve some problems when using TURN for voice calls (contributed by fcwoknhenuxdfiyv)
• Push rules can no longer be modified using the account data endpoints
• Querying account availability should now work properly in polylith deployments
• A number of bugs with sync filters have been fixed
• A default sync filter will now be used if the request contains a filter ID that does not exist
• The pushkey_ts field is now using seconds instead of milliseconds
• A race condition when gracefully shutting down has been fixed, so JetStream should no longer cause the process to exit before other Dendrite components are finished shutting down

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

The bridge should finally be at "Good Enough" status--and to celebrate, I've bumped the version to 0.2.0 🥳

Features & fixes include:

• KT->Matrix file messages
• Matrix->KT room leaves
  • To leave a KT channel from Matrix, issue the !kt leave command in a portal room.
• Ability to name the virtual "device" for the KakaoTalk login session created by the bridge
  • This makes it easier to distinguish between multiple login sessions of the bridge
• Improvements to KT->Matrix joins, kicks, and admin status
• Many significant stability & correctness improvements
• Docker support
  • This is currently in the testing branch until I can confirm that it works properly

I've also opened a PR to showcase this bridge on https://matrix.org/bridges/ 😃

---

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Testing room: #kakaotalk-bridge-testing:miscworks.net / https://open.kakao.com/o/gjGQFuae Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle says

Threads

• The Threads Beta is live! Turn it on in Labs

  • Let us know your feedback as we continue to work on this feature.

• The next step for Threads is improving our notifications and push rules on threaded messages. We’ve drafted some MSCs and are excited to move them forwards.

Community testing

• Thank you all who joined the async community testing sessions.

• Next week, we are planning to test:

  • Improvements to the new search experience on web
  • Video rooms!
  • And the new release candidate

• For more info on our next testing sessions (sync or async), you can join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle says

• We have increased our pool of issue triagers, so expect to meet more of our web team on GitHub

• Published epic issue for our tech strategy for 2022

• The way that read receipts are displayed in rooms with lots of people has improved

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

  • Focusing on resolving last issues with threads, currently blocking on MSCs for read receipts for threads and push rules for mutually related events
  • Video rooms are getting ready to enter beta!

Element iOS (website)

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

Danielle announces

• The leaving space experience is now in line with web: you can leave all rooms, none of the rooms or only selected ones
• Our first time user experience and create account flow is being improved.
• Started prototypes for IA experiments. We’re hoping to make the app much easier to use and will test out new interactions and patterns to see what works for users.

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle reports

• Hard at work fixing bugs - we’ve squashed one where the UI would freeze after incremental syncs and we’ve also made improvements to the read line and read markers.
• Our team is still working on the sign up flow. It’ll be ready soon and we hope that new-to-element users will find it much easier (and less scary) to create an account and get chatting.
• We’ve started designing and building prototypes for a new home experience; we’re excited to start experimenting with ways we can simplify our app.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Thirdroom (website)

A browser-based open metaverse client

Matthew reports

lots of exciting progress happening on Third Room - an open metaverse client powered by Matrix: https://github.com/matrix-org/thirdroom/discussions/47

Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP says

v0.6.2

• Added: A "Remember login" checkbox lets you decide whether to store an access token in localStorage.
• Added: The room lists now have external matrix.to links.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma (website)

A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.

Jonas Platte announces

Our last update included the words "if things go to plan", and even though that's usually calling for trouble, not so this time! We released Ruma 0.6.0 yesterday and apart from a tiny missing feature that was fixed and released as 0.6.1 today, everything went smooth 🙂

The biggest breaking changes are

• new owned identifier types – calling .to_owned() on &UserId now gives you an OwnedUserId instead of Box<UserId>
• a new event enum hierarchy, where redacted events are better taken into account

Also, with this release we can now claim practically 100% coverage of Matrix v1.2, that is you can send and receive requests for all specified endpoints of the various APIs, as well as send and inspect all specified event types, all with a strongly-typed Rust API.

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 Buscarron bot. It's a bot you can use to send any form (HTTP POST, HTML) to a (encrypted) Matrix room

See our Setting up Buscarron documentation to get started.

Buscarron (website)

Web forms (HTTP POST) to matrix

Aine reports

the Miounne's successor is here - meet Buscarron!

There were no news about miounne for a while because we worked on a new "iteration" that can handle matrix encryption (thanks to the mautrix-go).

So, here is it - Buscarron v1.0.0 with e2e encryption and multiarch (arm32, arm64, amd64) support. It can handle any HTTP POST/HTML form and send it to a (encrypted) matrix room. Of course, Buscarron has small neat features like spam checker and rate limiter.

etke.cc is migrating to Buscarron and deprecating Miounne.

Go check out the source code and say hi in the #buscarron:etke.cc

Dept of Bots 🤖

Location streams bot for MSC3489

ChristianP announces

I wrote a small, extensible bot that replays GPX recordings as a location sharing stream. This is an implementation of MSC3489: Sharing streams of location data with history and may help you debug the feature or see it with real world data. Join my Space to see this in action (with the Element Web Labs feature): #geo-trackers:iot-staging.ems.host or run the bot with your own rooms and GPX files. https://gitlab.com/jaller94/matrix-location-sharing

Opsdroid (website)

An open source chat-ops bot framework

Cadair says

Opsdroid 0.26 has been released this week. Included in this release are some improvements to the Rasa NLU parser if you want natural language training for your matrix bots as well as some small documentation improvements to the matrix connector and other bug fixes. Big thanks to Oleg for many of the changes as well as all the other contributors.

Matrix Community Manager (website)

The highly configurable message aggregation and filtering bot for matrix!

Sleuth reports

Matrix Community Manager has seen some work in the features department over the past week.

With the new Ansible playbook I think it's possible for someone with a bit of Ansible experience to get this bot up and running in under 10 minutes. I did a fresh install in 4 minutes. That is a fresh VPS and creating a new matrix account. Instructions for the Ansible deploy can be found here.

The major features are:

• An Ansible playbook that should simplify the installation process for new users.
• Edits to the message that triggered the bot will now be reflected in the bots message. This bot now has a feature Twitter doesn't have :laughing:.
• Hashtags are now called filters. Filters are more customizable allowing for custom delimiters and now show the originating room.
• The AutoJoin feature has filters to control who or from where invites will be excepted.
• Announcements can have more than one output room. Using a comma separated list of room ids.

A few bugs were fixed as well:

• Some text characters were causing messages to be classed incorrectly thus causing crashes.
• Exotic characters specifically in links were causing crashes.

Come chat on Matrix

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix Meetup Berlin

ChristianP says

We're meeting on Fri, 6th May at 6:30 PM in the c-base. Please join us, if you're looking for locals who work with Matrix and use it regularly. Our Matrix room is Matrix Meetup Berlin.

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 🎙

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

dmr says

Hello again everyone. This week the team released Synapse 1.57.0, followed by a 1.57.1 patch release that fixed a problem in the 1.57.0 docker image.

This week was a little on the quieter side again, with some of us away on holiday and others away with illness. Nevertheless, this week develop saw a variety of activity. Some personal highlights:

• Shay's effort to document Synapse's numerous config options landed. This is a huge and comprehensive effort that'll help administrators to understand all the options they have to configure Synapse.
• Further progress from Rich on the fast room joins project. In some tests we've seen a 5x speed-up over the status quo!
• A subtle bugfix from Erik which corrects incorrect counts in one of the Admin API endpoints.
• The remainder of the poetry work has landed. There were a few last-minute complications in CI to smooth out, but we've now finished the migration. Synapse's docker images and debian package now come with a fixed set of dependencies (even transitive ones) in a way that lets us support multiple Python versions and interpreters.

We're looking forward to shipping these in Synapse 1.58, whose RC is scheduled for Tuesday the 26th of April.

I'm also keen to see how PR 12522 from Rich and Olivier progresses. It aims to fix a nasty memory bug which can cause Synapse to get stuck in an OOM loop.

As ever, I'd like to express thanks to our community of users, server operators and contributors. Thanks are also due to @callahad: today is his last day of managing the Synapse team. We're all going to miss him and wish him well: thank you for everything you'd done over the last year and a half.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Heisenbridge (website)

Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.

hifi reports

Release v1.12.0 🥳

• Make MAXLINES and PASTEBIN option available to every room & global defaults (thanks @BtbN)
• Fix 'NoneType' is not iterable error (thanks @BtbN)
• Upgrade to Mautrix 0.16

Not much to see here. A small contribution release which is always a nice thing when people come around and help 🤗.

Go and get some ☀️ sunlight from GitHub, PyPI or matrix-docker-ansible-deploy!

Thanks!

Dept of Clients 📱

Sailtrix (website)

Sailtrix is a matrix client for SailfishOS

HengYeDev says

Summary of development this week

• Sailtrix is fixed on Sailfish 4.4, which added sandboxing to all apps
• Sorting is fixed in the favorites tab
• The create room dialog is fixed
• Some validation is added to the login page
• Sharing with other apps and bluetooth is added for newer Sailfish versions
• SSO seems to be working, still in testing

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat announces

Location sharing

• As a follow on from our previous launches, the team is building “live location sharing”. This will allow you to automatically share where you are in the world with others for a period you choose (15 minutes, 1 hour, or 8 hours), instead of sending a single static location.

Community testing

• We ran our first async community testing session this week. Thank you all who joined in! We found 13 issues so far, which is good going.
• We have some new features landing for the search experience on Web, join us for testing from Thursday!
• You can join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org to find out more!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle says

• Threads is in Beta! The team is hard at work smashing bugs and improving notifications so that we can remove the beta label and get everybody access to our new feature!
  • If you’re using Threads, don’t forget to give us your feedback.
• This week the team discussed how our Web product looks and feels to new users. While we use our own products all the time, it can be good to take a step back and ensure that our product decisions benefit all users, including the newbies. Watch this space for more info in the coming weeks as we continue to trial things that we hope will make onboarding to Element easier.
• In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
  • Video rooms are coming together nicely, with the addition of lobby screens and room list stickiness to wrap up the design implementation

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu announces

• The newest version of the app (1.8.13) is ready! In this release we’ve made a bunch of improvements and bug fixes, check it out here.
  • Our favourites include: Force touching room previews no longer update your read receipts, there’s a congratulations screen for new users when creating an account, and we’ve reduced the number of home page reloads.
• Also new in product are presence indicators! From your home page or DMs you’ll be able to see if a user is present or away. Note; this is only supported if your homeserver has it enabled.
• Upcoming; We’re working on adding ‘mention pills’ when tagging users in a room.
• Please note; We’ll soon be removing support for iOS 12 and iOS 13

Element Android (website)

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

benoit says

• The team is working on fixing bugs and making improvements to flows like “ignore user”. We’ve also made some changes to the way we format code.
• Element Android 1.4.12 is ready to be released but currently on hold in the Play Store due to rules around User Generated Content (UGC). We’re chatting with Google and the new update should be available soon.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

We've added two major user-facing features to populus viewer:

1. A two-up view in the pdf viewer, allowing you to view and annotate two pages at once on a wider screen
2. An audio viewer, complete with audio annotation, so that you can annotate temporal segments of an audio recording

I'm especially excited about the latter - being able to discuss audio recordings will be a great teaching tool, and I'm hoping it might also be useful for things like people who want to talk about podcasts together (for purposes of editing, or just for fun), and people who want to annotate recordings of public talks of various kinds. The last use case would also be pretty well served by video annotation - so that's now rising on the agenda. I've created an MSC, here where I'll be filling in the details of a proposed format for interoperable audiovisual media annotations. As always, if you've got questions, want to follow development progress, or just want to talk about the future of social annotation on Matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.

nheko-krunner (website)

A KRunner plugin to list joined rooms and possibly other things from nheko.

LorenDB says

nheko-krunner has finally been released! Version 0.1.0 contains several handy features such as searching your rooms, joining new rooms, and starting and switching to direct chats. Furthermore, if a room has unread notifications, nheko-krunner will let you know by tacking on a notification count to the room name (e.g. This Week in Matrix (TWIM) (1). Currently this feature is not disable-able, but I plan to dive into writing KCMs (KConfig Modules) soon so that I can add a toggle for this.

Hopefully a few people find this handy, and remember that if you don't use KDE, nheko still has a handy D-Bus API that you can use to write integrations with other software.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

Jonas Platte says

Over the last weeks, we've been doing a lot of refactoring in preparation for the 0.5.0 release, but we also

• Added support for retrieving room account data
• Made it easier to create a client while being offline
• Fixed a rare bug with SSO login (localhost didn't always resolve, so we switched to 127.0.0.1)
• We made some progress on sliding sync and adding an FFI interface for the main matrix-sdk crate

Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart.

Henri Carnot [famedly] says

We haven't done any regular posts about it in a while, but the SDK sees almost weekly releases. (We did release version 0.8.20 last week) If you forgot about it, the Matrix Dart SDK is the SDK FluffyChat, the Famedly clients and a few others use. Let me summarize some of the changes for those who haven't kept up:

One of the killer features is probably WebRTC support 🚀. It handles all the signalling for you, which makes integrating call support into your Flutter or Dart Matrix client fairly simple. Currently it supports version 1 of the call protocol, which is still an MSC and implements a few of the other MSCs. Experiments with group calls are still in progress.

We also switched databases a few times and tuned it more (we posted about FluffyBox last year). The database backend should now be a lot more stable and more performant, while also using less memory.

Continuing with stability, we worked a lot on how the timeline is stored and structured, leading to a much more robust experience. The SDK is also now completely nullsafe 🎉, which gets rid of a lot of annoying error modes. There were some fixes to E2EE here and there, but mostly the experience has been really solid and didn't need much work.

Some of the more recent developments include widget support as well as improving the file upload experience. The SDK now inserts a dummy event for a pending upload, images are thumbnailed and resided in a different isolate and uploads are automatically retried after a connection failure. We are also working on improving the push support, making it easier to fetch events from a push.

And I'm currently working on bringing fragmented timeline support. Nico told me it would be pretty (not) easy to do... and I have to say, he was right. Good first issue 🙃

See you next week ;)

Dept of Ops 🛠

Nix-matrix-appservices

Pacman99 announces

I've created a NixOS module, nix-matrix-appservices, that can simplify the bootstrap and maintenance of matrix appservices on nixos. With it, appservices can be spun up easily with registration and tokens handled by the module. Most mautrix and mx-puppet bridges have been tested to work and they can be setup in a couple lines of nix code. There are plenty of options you can make use of to configure more complex appservices. You can find the the code, matrix room(gitlab badge), and usage information here: https://gitlab.com/coffeetables/nix-matrix-appservices

Synatainer (website)

Synapse Maintenance Container – Docker container with tools for synapse & postgres database maintenance

saces announces

Synatainer v0.4.0

New since v0.3.x

• autocompressor have only one setting
• add a golang tool stui - synatainer terminal ui
• replace the vacuum shell script with stui

stui is a typical golang binary, it's also available as stand alone version from the release page

For now it can only do a full vacuum and show some rugged formatted database info

[docker run -it --rm registry.gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer:latest] stui vacuum-db --help
[docker run -it --rm registry.gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer:latest] stui db-info

The doc have a lot of space for improvements…

---

Start the container without command and let do its magic :)

What it does by default:

• daily:
  • purge all rooms without local members
  • run the state autocompressor (500/100)
• weekly:
  • delete old remote media (>90 days)
  • delete old message history from public joinable rooms (>180 days)
• monthly:
  • vacuum the database

Source: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

Compose example: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer/-/snippets/2264828

---

If you are looking for a docker container with just the auto compressor for linux amd64/arm64 in it, her you go: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/rust-synapse-compress-state

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi announces

Thanks to Julian-Samuel Gebühr (@moan0s) - moanos [he/him], matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now help you set up matrix-registration-bot - a bot that is used to create and manage registration tokens for a Matrix server.

See our Setting up matrix-registration-bot documentation to get started.

Slavi says

Thanks to Aine of etke.cc, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now set up Borg backups with borgmatic of your Matrix server.

See our Setting up borg backup documentation to get started.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

MinesTRIX (website)

A privacy focused social media based on MATRIX

Henri Carnot announces

just did release V.1.5.5 today, this is the last update since a few months ago.

Some of the changes are:

• feat: compliance to the latest version of MSC3639: Matrix for the social media use case
• feat: added images support for posts. You can now send multiple images in a post and display them in a gallery view.
• feat: New emoji picker, you can now select and react to message in one continuous press.
• feat: Comments nesting, (using threads)
• feat: Image comment (read only :()
• feat: Dark theme support
• feat: New settings page (added a lab section :D, seems you need to have one if you want to build a proper Matrix client)
• feat: proper emoji support for desktop. Thanks fluffychat :)
• feat: Initial story support
• feat: various UI enhancements.

Concerning the messaging feature:

• feat: Initial poll support
• feat: read only spaces support
• feat: room list search box
• feat: chat settings dialog
• feat: read receipts list dialog
• feat: reaction list dialog
• feat: now use rounded avatar. Let's be consistent with other clients.
• feat: better display for replies and m.notice.
• feat: Localization support thanks to the Matrix Dart SDK

And some work already in for multiple profiles support, and profile as space (just use a public space to store your profile rooms).

If you are interested, come say hi in the room.

PS: You can also help us to design the underlying MSC, especially, we need some opinions on how to name things (the profile rooms) the room !!

Dept of Ping 🏓

We know you missed it, 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!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit (website)

cel says

• Gained v9 room support on next branch: https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/merge_requests/257
  • Binaries available here: https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/blob/next/DEPLOY.md#installing-conduit
  • v9 rooms enable private rooms to allow access to members of a Space or other room without a separate invite.

Synapse (website)

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

dmr reports

Hello everyone. This week the Synapse team cut a release candidate for Synapse 1.57. It contains:

• Continued work on the faster joins project.
• Additional Module API support for working with 3PID associations, account data changes and making users admins. The first two in particular are vital to to merge the DINSIC fork of Synapse into the mainline source tree.
• Experimental, partial support for MSC3202, Encrypted Appservices; additional support for threads via MSC3666 and via MSC2675.
• Plus a number of bugfixes within Synapse and fixes for spec compliance issues.

As ever, our warmest thanks to to our contributors for sharing their time, effort and expertise with the project. We look forward to seeing your work in the wild, come the 1.57 release proper on Tuesday the 19th of April.

On develop, we have been powering through a number of different tasks:

• further work on fast room joins;
• efforts to better document Synapse's config file;
• strides towards making Synapse's requests internally cancellable;
• performance improvements for device list updates; and
• another spurt of work to get complement (finally!) testing Synapse in worker mode.

Speaking personally, my efforts to manage Synapse's dependencies using poetry are coming to a close. As I write this, I've just submitted my last (planned!) PR for this project. It's been several months in progress now, and there were many moving parts; some unexpected bugs in poetry and even one in pip; plus a heck of a lot of CI config to change and understand. My sincere thanks to the broader Synapse team for their help in getting the last batch of changes made, reviewed and merged. Once this is all said and done I hope we'll all reap the benefits of

• a stabler CI pipeline,
• reproducible virtual environments in our docker and debian images, and
• automated PRs for security updates.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot 1.5.0 (website)

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

Half-Shot reports

Hey webhook-consuming-people! The hookshot webhook bridge 1.5.0 update has now been released. This release is a bit softer than 1.4.0, containing some smaller features and bugfixes. Thanks to everyone who contributed!. The highlights are:

• Allow specifying msgtype for generic webhook transformations. (#282)
• Add new GitHubRepo config optionnewIssue.labels which allows admins to automatically set labels on new issues. (#292)
• Allow priority ordering of connection command handling by setting apriority: number key in the state event content. (#293)
• Support GitLabpush webhook events (#306)

The matrix-docker-ansible-deploy playbooks have also been updated to be 1.5.0 compatible :)

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair reports:

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

This week brings many new features:

• KT<-> Matrix message deletion/redaction
  • Note that KT doesn't allow deleting a message if it's too old, so Matrix->KT redactions will fail for old messages.
• KT->Matrix user name/avatar live updates
  • As opposed to only being updated on backfill / manual sync
• KT<->Matrix read receipts
  • Caveat: KT->Matrix read receipts are only updated live, not on backfill / manual sync
• KT->Matrix member join/leave
  • Only joins were tested so far, but leaves should work too
• KT<->Matrix admin status / power levels
• KT->Matrix channel name, description, and cover photo
• General stability & usability improvements
• systemd setup instructions

I've also launched an instance of the bridge & opened a public portal room for testing purposes:

• Matrix side: #kakaotalk-bridge-testing:miscworks.net
• KakaoTalk side: https://open.kakao.com/o/gjGQFuae

Logging in to my bridge instance is restricted, but Matrix users can still join the room thanks to the magic of relaying!

At this point, I'd say the bridge is now fairly usable. Please try self-hosting if interested!

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Matthew reports

A new GTK4 matrix client called gotktrix surfaced on HN, written in Go with a bespoke matrix client SDK implementation. Looks impressive!

Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

After a long and arduous journey, LorenDB's dbus interface for Nheko got finally merged. Currently this allows you to list rooms as well as switch between them. In the future we might add simple messaging support, so that you can automatically send messages into specific rooms using scripts. The API is disabled by default, since it is not authenticated. Enable it at your own risk!

Another long standing PR, that finally got merged, was MTRNord (they/them)'s support for pretty power level formatting. Nheko can now tell you what changed in a power level instead of just telling you that it changed. This should make them much more accessible to users, that don't like looking at the raw event source all the time (weird, eh?).

The image viewer should also be more reliable now and notification counts should be correct after a restart.

We have also been playing around with qt6 support. At this point we have a working Qt6 branch, with a few functional regressions:

• No voip (gstreamer has no Qt6 support yet)
• No drop shadows on buttons
• No switchable color schemes

So far Qt6 looks pretty great and seems to fix a lot of the minor annoyances.

We are also still looking for some student or interested individuum to take part in the Google Summer of Code and improve the call support in Nheko! Deadline is drawing close, so if you intend to apply, better work on your proposal quickly! If you need any feedback for your proposal, feel free to DM me and ask me to review it/questions. I'm looking forward to someone applying! <3

Anyway, merry christmas everyone or whatever you are celebrating this weekend!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat announces

• Threads Beta is live, find it in Labs!
  • As always, check it out and let us know what you think.
• We’re aligning on a style guide and a new module system (links will be shared once both are finalised)
• Added our first Cypress test - this will improve how we create and run e2e (end to end) tests. The tests will continue to be run by CI.
• In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
  • Continuing to get a native lobby screen for video rooms together

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu announces

• We will inform users in the next release that we will no longer support iOS12 and 13. It will be effective the release after, i.e. April 25th.
• We had a big drop on UTDs (Unable to Decrypt errors) since 1.8.8.
• We are setting up the ElementX-iOS project to rewrite the Element-iOS app. It will be based on SwiftUI and the Matrix Rust SDK. The roadmap is available here.

Element Android (website)

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

kittykat says

• Element 1.4.11 is available on the PlayStore and on F-Droid. Release notes: https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/releases
• We may experience some delays in shipping the app through the Android PlayStore as we are in discussions about whether not decrypted messages should be reportable
• Cleanup to the SDK API has landed on develop - this will help with generating API documentation and migrating to the Rust SDK
• Roadmap for migration to the Rust SDK

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat announces

Threaded Messaging

• Exciting news this week; the Threads Beta is live on all platforms! If you haven’t seen Threads yet, head to Settings > Labs and check it out.
  • Please note; If your homeserver doesn’t yet support threads functionality you may not see the beta, or your experience will be degraded. If this applies to you, you’ll see a warning message before you activate Threads.
• The team is continuing to squash bugs and improve performance, we’ve also started working on the next improvements…
• Notifications and badges are top of mind for us next. We need to ensure accuracy of badge counters and consistency between platforms (if you use more than one). We’re looking at this now so keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming MSCs.

Community testing sessions

• We are restarting our testing sessions! Join #element-community-testing:matrix.org to take part
• We are trying out a new asynchronous format with office hours for discussion to enable more people to be involved

Dept of Encryption 🔐

libolm

uhoreg reports:

libolm 3.2.11 has been released. This release mainly features improvements to the Objective-C and Java bindings, but also fixes building of the documentation, which was broken for quite a while. For more details, see the release notes.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma (website)

A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.

Jonas Platte says

Over the last two weeks, we have been busy working towards the 0.6.0 crates.io release of Ruma. If things go to plan, it should be published in the coming weeks (but no promises). That means mostly finishing some large refactorings, but we also got some bug fixes in, as well as a number of convenience functions for working with certain events:

• Add RoomPowerLevelsEvent::power_levels
• Add convenience methods
• Add transaction_id accessors
• Add convenience constructors for threads

Dept of Internet of Things 💡

HASSkbot - Home-Assistant ask bot

Oleg reports

HASSkbot can be used to control an action in Home-Assistant via Matrix reactions.

It's an Opsdroid bot, which reacts to a home-assistant entity state change (like person leaving a zone) and asks for confirmation in Matrix if it should run additional home-assistant automation. Matrix reactions are used for confirming or canceling an action.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Arya K reports

Merseklo is now out of beta it is a moderation bot for matrix written in pure bash with the only deps being jq and curl

Honoroit (website)

A Matrix helpdesk bot

Aine reports

benpa is back in town and I can't keep silence: here is a small update on Honoroit - v0.9.6 comes with "stable spaces" support that will work with new versions of element (yes, even on Element Android from F-Droid).

Go check the source code and say hi in the #honoroit:etke.cc

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

DWeb Camp

cel reports

DWeb Camp 2022 website and registration launched: https://dwebcamp.org/

• August 22-24 BUILD; August 24-28 CAMP; Aug 28-29 TAKE DOWN.
• Camp Navarro, CA, USA
• Announcement: https://matrix.to/#/!WBhcGXTDMlzyTPWoJv:matrix.org/$164991727237835sdywy:matrix.org
• Volunteer: https://dwebcamp.org/participate/
• Apply for fellowship: https://dwebcamp.org/fellowships/
• Sponsor: PDF

DWeb Camp is a gathering hosted by Internet Archive and volunteers dedicated to Decentralized/Distributed web projects. Previously it happened in 2019, and Matrix had some presence there. Maybe people from Matrix projects and/or Matrix.org will be there this year?

That's all I know 🏁

Come back next week for a much restored TWIM! With Matrix Live, Spec updates, Dept of Ping and so on. :D

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew announces

https://arewep2pyet.com is finally here as a tracker for our progress on P2P Matrix

Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR 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

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3700: Deprecate plaintext sender key (merge)
• MSC3666: Bundled aggregations for server side search (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC3767: Time based notification filtering
• MSC3765: Rich text in room topics

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been largely looking at proposals which are at or near FCP in an effort to get them through the last stages of the process. We're also thinking about what the next release (v1.3) looks like and when we'll end up putting it out into the world. If you have MSCs which you'd like included, please stop by the #sct-office:matrix.org on Matrix with your suggestions - if they're near enough, we'll try to get them in.

Random MSC of the week

The script has elected MSC3391: Removing account data as the random MSC this week. It's a small but interesting MSC which helps clean up account data on the server when it's no longer needed, though how this sort of removal gets represented to clients can be a challenge. It's currently missing an implementation if someone is looking for a medium complexity contribution this weekend 😉

The Chart

So many MSCs are in the open state, which is why we're continually looking at merging MSCs which are ready to go.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier reports

This week, we've released Synapse 1.56! It includes only a couple of new features but quite a few bug fixes and internal improvements. One of the main changes included in this version is that Synapse will now refuse to start if configured with open registration with no verification (e.g. email, recaptcha, etc). This is an attempt at reducing the likelihood of spam across the federation, as most cases of abuse we've observed over time usually involves the attacker(s) finding homeservers with open registration and automatically creating a lot of accounts on them in order to evade sanctions.

This version of Synapse also deprecates the groups/communities feature of Matrix. This is a feature we introduced back in 2017, and was the predecessor of Matrix spaces. But now that it has been mostly replaced by spaces, we have decided to retire this feature, which we thank dearly for its 4 years of good and loyal service to the federation.

Read all about this, and more, in the release announcement on the Matrix.org blog! 🙂

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander announces

This week we released Dendrite 0.8.0, which is primarily a feature release, and then Dendrite 0.8.1 which fixes an emergency bug. It's also a recommended upgrade if you are running a Dendrite deployment. It includes:

• Support for presence has been added

  • Presence is not enabled by default
  • The global.presence.enable_inbound and global.presence.enable_outbound configuration options allow configuring inbound and outbound presence separately

• Support for room upgrades via the /room/{roomID}/upgrade endpoint has been added (contributed by DavidSpenler, alexkursell)

• Support for ignoring users has been added

• Joined and invite user counts are now sent in the /sync room summaries

• Queued federation and stale device list updates will now be staggered at startup over an up-to 2 minute warm-up period, rather than happening all at once

• Memory pressure created by the sync notifier has been reduced

• The EDU server component has now been removed, with the work being moved to more relevant components

• It is now possible to set the power_level_content_override when creating a room to include power levels over 100

• /send_join and /state responses will now not unmarshal the JSON twice

• The stream event consumer for push notifications will no longer request membership events that are irrelevant

• Appservices will no longer incorrectly receive state events twice

Our sytest compliance numbers are now:

• Client-server APIs: 83%
• Server-server APIs: 95%

As always, join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more news and discussion.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Half-Shot says

Matrix-Hookshot: The one with the widgets release

Hello webhook fans! As teased last week, configuration widgets have landed in hookshot! 1.4.0 now contains all you need to setup your very own webhooks without having to leave the comfort of your GUI. The plan is for widgets to be greatly expanded over the new few releases to support more services. Eventually, this work is going to propagate out to other matrix.org bridgey projects 🌉.

The full feature list for this release looks a bit like:

• Add support for configuring generic webhooks via widgets. (#140)
• Show the closing comments on closed GitHub PRs. (#262)
• Webhooks created via !hookshot webhook now have their secret URLs sent to the admin room with the user, rather than posted in the bridged room. (#265)
• Automatically link GitHub issues and pull requests when an issue number is mentioned (by default, using the # prefix). (#277)
• Support GitLab release webhook events. (#278)

Update away, and let me know how you get on.

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair reports:

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Many updates this week! New features include:

• Mentions & replies, both incoming & outgoing
  • Small exception: Matrix->KT replies don't yet work in KT "open channels" yet.
• Ability to create a portal by inviting a KT puppet to a DM
  • Note that this currently only works for KT direct chat channels that already exist & have been active recently.
• Connection resilience between the Python and Node components of the bridge
  • i.e. If the Node component ever exits & restarts, the Python component will reconnect to it automatically. This helps both with deployment (since it allows the components to be started in any order) and crash tolerance (since a Node crash & restart no longer requires a manual restart of the Python component)
• Clear warnings when receiving a KT message that the bridge doesn't yet support

At this point, the bridge should be fairly usable now. Very soon I'll open a Matrix-bridged KT channel to act as a public stress-test!

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

Heisenbridge (website)

Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.

hifi reports

Heisenbridge roundup!

Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.

Release v1.11.0 🥳

• Fixed retry behavior on startup to wait for HS startup
• Ignore TAGMSG messages from IRC server
• Fixed HTML messages not working as commands
• Fixed room aliases in messages dropping the message completely
• Upgrade to Mautrix 0.15

Just your typical bug fix release but this release also breaks support for homeservers not supporting the "v3" API path so if you run Synapse 1.47 or older the bridge will not start. Sorry.

Go and get some spring cleaning from GitHub, PyPI or matrix-docker-ansible-deploy!

Thanks!

Dept of Clients 📱

Thunderbird

freaktechnik reports

Thunderbird is a free open-source email, calendar & chat app.

The latest Thunderbird beta finally has Matrix support enabled by default. Get Thunderbird beta now to try it out. There have been many improvements to the Matrix implementation since the last update, including:

• Almost complete end-to-end encryption support
• Support for displaying formatted messages
• .well-known home server discovery
• Message redactions
• Now all room invites let you respond
• Lazy loading room members

Element Web/Desktop

kittykat reports

• We removed skinning! It won’t be in the release this week, but will land in 2 weeks (roughly). If you notice bugs, please report them!
• Threads Beta went into the RC!
• Looking at a module system for extending functionality - if you have modules we haven’t talked about, come by #element-dev:matrix.org to let us know.
• In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
  • Work on video rooms continues, and we’re exploring how we can make them feel more native.

Syphon (website)

Chat with your privacy and freedom intact

0x1a8510f2 says

Syphon is a Matrix client with heavy emphasis on privacy and ease of use; currently in open alpha.

Hi all 👋.

We released 0.2.13 this week mainly fixing an annoying bug that could cause messages sent while a configured proxy server was down to be re-sent multiple times once the proxy came back online. If you use a proxy with Syphon, this update is highly recommended!

In addition, this release will only show the option to use hidden read receipts if the feature is supported by your server.

Finally, a range of translation updates and improvements are included in this release.

More changes are coming soon, including a (currently work-in-progress) implementation of MSC2228 (self destructing events). As far as we know, we're on track to be the first user-facing implementation of this MSC, putting Syphon on the bleeding edge of Matrix!

Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

Thanks to the awesome polyjuice client, Nheko now supports MSC3700, which slightly improves privacy in encrypted rooms. It also lead to us fixing issues with the secure symmetric secret storage, where some clients use a different base64 encoding than recommended in the spec, which could make unlocking the secrets with a recovery key or passphrase fail. And we also improved the key queries on initial login, which would sometimes fail to_device messages with a warning, that the device is unknown.

As a small feature, you can now close the currently open room using Ctrl-W, spaces are not treated as DMs under some circumstances anymore, you should get a less confusing error message than 500 when entering an invalid alias now and lots of fixes to the translations.

Thank you, LorenDB, Apurv and Mikaela for the contributions!

Hydrogen (website)

Hydrogen is a lightweight matrix client with legacy and mobile browser support

Bruno reports

Have released the SDK, v0.0.10 with custom tiles support. Calls and theming are getting closer, the latter we were planning to release this week but hit a blocker for theming support in develop mode, so we'll have to postpone to next week.

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu announces

• Considering dropping support for iOS12 - this will impact 0.9% of sessions. Requiring iOS 13 or newer will allow us to use SwiftUI libraries.
• You will be able to opt in to threads in the next release (currently in testing), alongside updates to room preview on long press in room list, ability to share any location and support for more languages

Element Android (website)

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

benoit reports

• Release candidate 1.4.11 is currently available on the PlayStore if you are a tester. Should be pushed to production next Monday! F-Droid publication is in progress too. Learn more about the full release content here: https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/releases
• Add banner to timeline when location sharing is running. Live Location Sharing (a.k.a. LLS) is still a work in progress and not available in the Element app yet.
• Improved unit test coverage (especially around login with MXID)
• Improved how threads look in the main timeline
• Add notification for users to opt in to threads
• Polishing around spaces to bring them into line with latest designs
• Hotfix for leaving all rooms in a space without leaving the DMs. The hotfix is included in the release candidate 1.4.11.
• We are considering modifying our rules to format source code. We will try to limit the impact on forks, but it will not be easy.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr reports

Since last time, we've made a lot of small quality-of-life improvements, but a few changes that stand out are:

1. We've improved support for offline PWA usage.
2. We've improved caching of space contents, reducing the number of times that we need to hit the spaceHierarchy endpoint and improving performance.
3. We've moved to a more in-the-spirit-of-the-spec way of handling hidden annotations: these are now represented by rooms with an m.space.parent event, and no correpsponding m.space.child event in the resource-space.
4. We've added a modal for viewing image messages at full-size.

Number 4 works nicely with my teaching-assistant-bot (built with matrix-bot-sdk, mathjs, and chartjs), which helps me visualize information about student activity.

MSC3752 - Markup Locations for Text, has also filled out quite a bit! Implementation coming soon hopefully.

As always, if you'd like to learn more, or talk about the future of social annotation at matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org!

Matrix Highlight (website)

A decentralized and federated way of annotating the web based on Matrix.

Daniel announces

Matrix highlight saw some "under the hood" changes this week, in particular a refactor to rely less on the Chrome/Firefox extension API. This should make it possible (in theory, and with some more work) to run Matrix Highlight on pages without installing anything! Aside from the obvious, I think that there are additional use cases opened up by this change; one such case I have in mind is as a commenting system on a site (a la cactus comments, but with the ability to highlight page snippets!).

In the process of all of this, I've spent some time running Matrix Highlight in Firefox. I've encountered no issues during this time, so it seems like the tool is usable from FF, too.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict reports

Trixnity 2.0.0-RC1 has been released. This release candidate contains many breaking changes due to a large refactoring, which allows us to share a lot code between server and client implementations of the Matrix APIs. Yes, that means Trixnity can be used to implement a matrix server! We also made some progress to make the client module (with all the high level logic) multiplaform. This is the only module, which does not support Kotlin/Native and Kotlin/JS yet. There are many other features (like client-side notifications!), which has been added. See the changelog for more details:

features/improvements:

• clientserverapi-server: new module for server-side REST endpoints of the Client-Server-API (Server-Server-API will follow soon)
• olm: libolm is bundled into trixnity-olm jars
• client: push notification support (push rules are evaluated)
• client: introduce helpers to get complete timeline as flow (no more complicated loops to get the timeline)
• client: allow subscribing to all timeline events -> really helpful for bots with e2e support
• client: allow to sync once (e. g. for push notifications)
• client: content field of TimelineEvent gets also set for unencrypted events
• client: public access to keys
• clientserverapi-model: allow custom field in pusher data
• core: introduce BaseEventContentSerializerMappings

bugfixes:

• client: remove direct room, when other user leaves room
• client: change varchar length to support MariaDB
• clientserverapi-client: first sync after pause without timeout

simplematrixbotlib (website)

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

krazykirby99999 says:

An easy to use bot library for the Matrix ecosystem written in Python. https://matrix.to/#/#simplematrixbotlib:matrix.org

Version v2.6.3 Released!

2022-04-06 5f54f69

Notes:

• The command matcher now has support for case-insensitive matches.

Additions:

• Add case insensitive option to command matcher

Modifications

• Update Pillow Dependency to version 9.0.1

Removals:

• None

Deprecations

• None

Polyjuice (website)

Elixir libraries related to the Matrix communications protocol.

uhoreg announces

Polyjuice Client Test is a testing tool for Matrix clients. Since the last TWIM update,

• two new tests have been added: key history sharing (MSC3061) and no plaintext sender key (MSC3700).
• more clients endpoints have been implemented or stubbed. This has improved compatibility with some Matrix clients, and reduced noise in the logs.
• the deployment at https://test.uhoreg.ca/ now automatically runs the latest version from git. This Matrix-based continuous deployment is powered by another personal side-project, which will be revealed in the future.
• the UI is now significant less ugly (unless you hate purple, in which case you may find it more ugly).
• #polyjuice:uhoreg.ca now exists for discussing anything related to the Polyjuice project

Dept of Ping 🏓

Dept of Ping will return!

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) 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

New MSCs:

• MSC3761: State event change control
• MSC3760: State sub-keys
• MSC3759: Leave event metadata for deactivated users
• MSC3758: Expand push rule conditions
• MSC3757: Restricting who can overwrite a state event

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs had FCP proposed this week.

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3667: Enforce integer power levels

Spec Updates

There's been lots of new MSCs this week! Three of them - those regarding state restrictions and subkeys - are related to the ongoing live location sharing work that Element is currently working on. See MSC3672 for the current state of the spec work for that feature.

Otherwise the spec core team has been reviewing a flurry of MSCs this week. This includes MSC3383 (Include destination in X-Matrix Auth Header), MSC3700 (Deprecate plaintext sender key) and MSC2246 (Asynchronous media uploads). Exciting things in the pipeline!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2815: Proposal to allow room moderators to view redacted event content!

Another MSC in the sphere of moderation, and one that aims to put moderation control more in the hands of room admins rather than homeserver admins. A similar MSC in this realm is MSC3215 (Aristotle), which aims to send event reports to room admins, rather than homeserver admins that may not even have control over the malicious user.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier announces

Happy Friday everyone!

In case you missed it, we've released the first release candidate for Synapse 1.56 on Tuesday. This one includes a couple new module-related features, but also quite a few bugfixes and internal improvements. I'll talk about this in more details next week when Synapse 1.56 gets properly released, but the key points of this release is that Synapse will now refuse to start if it's configured with unsafe registration settings (i.e. open registration without any form of verification) as well as if it's running against a PostgreSQL database with the wrong locale values. Have a look at the upgrade notes for more information about this.

Apart from that, the team still continuing work on the two main topics I've been mentioning in previous weeks: fast room joins and integrating poetry. The latter is getting reeeally close to the finish line now, as the pull request has recently entered the review stage. So watch this space for more exciting news on this topic!

That's all for this week, catch you all next time 🙂

matrix-media-repo (website)

Matrix media repository with multi-domain in mind.

TravisR reports

MMR v1.2.12 is out now with a bunch of added features, removal of in-memory cache (per last release's deprecation notice), and some bug fixes.

Most notable are some added/improved support for JPEG XL, HEIF, and HEIC thumbnails, content ranges support (allowing the ability to skip to a part of a video), and a way to make the logs a bit quieter.

Give it a go and report issues to the issue tracker 🙂

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Half-Shot announces

It feels like one of these comes out nearly every month, which probably means we're doing something right! This release takes a step back and fixes quite a few of our more longstanding bugs and fixes many nits here and there. Please read the change notes carefully as some APIs have moved around and your load balancers / config may need adjusting. One final note is that this release drops support for Node 12, making the minimum version Node 14.

Once again, thanks to the wider Matrix community for filing bugs and submitting PRs, it's very much appreciated!

matrix-appservice-bridge 4.0.0

Half-Shot says

More updates! This week the bridge library itself gets a major update. We've made a few breaking changes, notably we now expect target homeservers to at least be Matrix v1.2 compatible. Also, this release brings the new "Provisioning and Widgets API" which allows developers to start creating HTTP APIs for their bridges which work for both provisioning mode (shared secret tokens) and widget API style (authenticating via Matrix OpenID token sharing). This stuff is still a little experimental, but it's starting to power our new experiments in the bridge world.

You can check out the release here

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

Media messages, both from or to KakaoTalk, are now supported! The biggest exceptions are inbound files & stickers. The latter may be a hard sell to get working, due to how KT manages stickers, but I'll look into it some more before giving a concrete answer.

The bridge is also now responsive to disconnects, like when you log in from another KakaoTalk desktop client (since the bridge mimics the desktop client, and KT only allows one desktop client to be logged in at a time!). Luckily, not all KakaoTalk APIs rely on the same connection that chatting does, meaning that some functionality can continue to work even when "disconnected". The bridge now takes advantage of this, meaning that profile-management commands (currently just the list-friends command) will work even if you get disconnected from chats for whatever reason.

The bridge is drawing ever closer to "good enough" status... Please give it a try if curious!

---

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

matrix-appservice-irc (website)

Node.js IRC bridge for Matrix

Half-Shot reports

Heyo, we released a hotfix release for the IRC bridge this week. This fixed a rather nasty regression where the bridge would kick everyone from the Matrix side when a Matrix ban list is updated. People who aren't using the new ban lists feature don't need to upgrade.

Please check out https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.33.1 for more details

Dept of Clients 📱

Michael says

The perthchat.org team has created their own Android client, a promotional fork of the popular Element Android client!

For more details checkout: https://news.perthchat.org/perthchats-new-android-app/ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.perthchat.app

Nheko (website)

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

Nico announces

1.0 is a big number and a step not taken lightly. But Nheko has been in development for half a decade and we think it is time to take a step forward! As such we worked hard to fix readability issues in the app. Your messages should now be readable on any theme, because we send the first half as white text and the second half as black text (thank you, rrogalski for the contribution). For accessibility reasons this is enabled by default. We also added an improved typing indicator. Sometimes it is hard to notice when a message is too long, as such we gradually adjust the background color the longer the message gets. It also helps a lot, if you have a bad theme and can't read the text against the background color. Just enter a few characters and the background will change, so the messages should become readable. But that is not all! We all know some people have a harder time seeing colors than others. So for accessibility we also slowly rotate the screen, so that even if your display is monochrome, you don't miss out. Please see the attached video for a demo or check out our release candidates here and here.

Before this month we also rewrote the room creation dialogs to be less confusing. We now have separate dialogs for direct chats and group chats, which should cut down confusion between the options by a lot. You can also now edit the topic and name of a room inline and Malte added a jump to bottom button. On mobile you can also now drag to the sides to reply. Last but not least, you can now knock on rooms from Nheko using /knock or if an invite failed because you were not allowed to join a room and you can add a reason to room joins, leaves, invites, knocks and everything. Some of those features require the server to support Matrix v1.1, so make sure you update your servers to use them.

Nico announces

Excuse the blurry picture, but Bubu just sent me this and I just had to share it!

Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

NeoChat now has a KRunner plugin thanks to work done by Nico (not the one from Nheko 🙂). This allows plasma users to search for and open matrix rooms directly from their desktop. You will be able to enable it from the KRunner settings after the next release.

Snehit changed the room preview to no longer show markdown characters, fixing a few situations where this would be unexpected.

On the end-to-end encryption side, we're currently working on implementing device verification.

Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Julian Sparber reports

This week I have something really exciting to report. We moved Fractal-next to the main development branch. This means that we now have nightly flatpak builds[1], so users can already try out the new version of Fractal without having to build it from source. This will also give use much more feedback and many more bug reports, hopefully not too many :) Note that this isn't a release and the software should still be considered unstable.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal#development-version

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

It’s April Fool’s day but there will be no tricks here; We’re far too excited to share all our good work with you 😉

Message Threading

• Exciting news for Threads; Next week we’re releasing a public beta!

  • It’ll be opt-in, so don’t forget to head to Settings and join in if you haven’t already.

• We’re still working on perfecting notifications, so none of your messages are missed.

• The team is also working hard at improving the stability of Threads, ahead of the release next week.

• As always, please let us know your thoughts and feedback!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Kegan says

Coming soon to an Element-Web near you...

Danielle announces

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

• Voice rooms are now known as video rooms! We’ve landed some new designs to help make the experience more coherent, and bring them out of ‘prototype’ status.
• Threads! From next week you’ll be able to turn on threads in all versions of Element but for a sneak preview you can head to Labs in Develop or Nightly and access Message Threading from there.
• We’re continuing to work on our updated search experience: we are going to be merging the people and room search dialogs into the new search experience and adding filtering. Expecting work to start early next week.
• Along with some feature work in Labs, the team is hard at work closing issues and clearing pesky bugs.

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu reports

• Our latest release is a hotfix (1.8.10) resolving a crash that occurred when uploading a photo via the camera in the timeline.
• Following a team discussion and input from all areas we’ve decided to change how we launch new languages in Element. We’ll soon be moving to an automatic rollout model meaning, if there’s any amount of a language available, and it’s set as your preference, you’ll see it in the app.
  • Previously we’d wait until hitting the 80% mark and then manually push the translation. This leaves too much room for us to forget, or restricts access to those languages hanging around the 70% mark…
• Other things we’ve been working on this week include; improving the new user experience, and starting to prototype with the layout for the app.
• We released spaces on iOS this week! Where you could only view spaces before, you can now create and manage them from your phone. We have more improvements planned for the next release.

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle announces

• The Android team has been determined over the past weeks to improve our internal process, increasing efficiency and quality of building and deploying. With that in mind, we’ve recently published a guide for PRs on our Android Repo. It’s still a draft right now but if you want to know more about our approach, read it here.
• In terms of building we’re continuing on our path of improving the quality of the app by focussing on bugs and UI issues.
• We’re also working on improving our new user experience to make it easier for newbies to get up and running on Element Android!

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

matrix-streamchat (website)

Matrix powered stream overlay for OBS, to integrate live chat in your favorite (selfhosted) streaming setups.

f0x announces

matrix-streamchat got it's first proper release, after some battletesting by another streamer :D https://git.pixie.town/f0x/matrix-streamchat/releases/tag/0.0.2 hosted instance is also available at https://streamchat.pixie.town

Matrix Highlight (website)

A decentralized and federated way of annotating the web based on Matrix.

Daniel announces

Matrix Highlight got an update this week. I've switched the highlighting widget to use a shadow DOM, which means styles from the page don't affect styles from the extension itself. This used to affect quite a lot of pages, but shouldn't be much of a problem anymore!

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma (website)

A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.

Jonas Platte says

This week, we

• updated the space-hierarchy rooms chunk type to use a decicated join-rule type
• added support for more transitional extensible-event types
• removed the origin field from PDUs
• added support for MSC2654 (Unread count)

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

Jonas Platte announces

In the last two weeks,

• Support for vodozemac as an alternative to libolm has been merged, and enabled by default 🎉
• A bug around invitations to previously-left rooms was fixed

There was also a decent amount of internal cleanup / developer experience work, so if you previously tried to contribute but ran into weird IDE bugs or code inconsistencies, make sure to check back. The same goes for sliding sync, which has been making decent progress – stay tuned!

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

andybalaam reports

I'm doing a talk about Matrix at the ACCU Conference on Saturday 9th April. Recordings of talks will be available soon after the conference, and tickets are still available to be there live in person or online! Here's the talk summary:

The Matrix network provides messaging (like WhatsApp or Slack) that offers all the features you expect, but without centralised control: it's an open standard, and anyone can run a server. The servers link together, so you can talk to other people even if they use a different server (kind of like email).

In the first half of this session, we will explore the basics of the protocol: making simple HTTP requests to send and receive messages, and discuss some of the interesting distributed-systems issues that make writing a server exciting.

In the second half we will explore the fact that messaging is only one potential use of this network, and look into some examples of other real-time use cases that are in active development, taking note of how these use cases benefit from the real-time and distributed nature of the network.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

matrix-art (website)

An image gallery for Matrix

MTRNord (they/them) reports

There was some silence lately on this, but activity is picking back up.

Mainly, the project is getting rewritten. Why? Well, I learned from the issues and ran into issues with the framework used. There are going to be various changes to the architecture (like no more SSR, no nextjs, pwa support and more).

Feel free to follow https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-art/pull/121 for progress.

Another big thing that's going to change is that I am working on a complete redesign. While I am still fairly early in the iterations, I wanted to share the first art direction Matrix Art is going to go. The main changes are that I try to have an art language which distinguishes it from the other proprietary players, as well as compensating for the fact that Matrix Art has a much lower volume of images on it's feed. Please be aware that this is way before the first round of polish. :)

If you want to connect with matrix-art please join the room: #matrix-art:nordgedanken.dev or follow/star the github project :)

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 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib announces

You might have been following our past efforts on making sure the DMA was meaningful. Those efforts are being rewarded, and Amandine covers in a blog post what this means for Element and other businesses in Europe. Matthew covers what this means for Matrix and end to end ecrypted services.

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:

• MSC3755: Member pronouns

MSCs in Proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC2246: Asynchronous media uploads
• MSC3700: Deprecate plaintext sender key

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3667: Enforce integer power levels (merge)

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

Mostly continued review of MSCs, while implementation work continues on in the background.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2499: Fixes for Well-known URIs!

This MSC proposes some much-desired practical and usability fixes to the "Well-Known" discovery method for Matrix homeservers. This is part of the system that enables homeserver's to "delegate" their homeserver address (your Matrix ID is @alice:example.com, but your homeserver is listening for requests on homeserver.example.com).

Well-known for homeserver delegation was introduced a number of years ago, and since then some friction has arisen from various implementations. This MSC aims to address a collection of them!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier says

Hey everyone! This week we've released Synapse 1.55, which includes a bunch of new features, performance improvements and bugfix. If you're using Mjolnir to moderate your rooms, and/or synctl to manage your homeserver, this release also introduces a few changes you definitely want to be aware of, head over to the announcement on the matrix.org blog for more!

Yesterday, we noticed a compatibility issue with a newly released version of Jinja, which is the tool we use in Synapse to render e-mail and web templates. We've quickly put out Synapse 1.55.2 to address this - so if you were unable to start Synapse because of it just update and you should be fine 🙂 Note that this doesn't apply to deployments of Synapse using the matrixdotorg/synapse Docker image or Debian packages from packages.matrix.org since they are already using a compatible version of Jinja.

Apart from that, work continues towards integrating Poetry with Synapse, which should prevent this kind of issues from happening in the future, and on improving room join times.

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander announces

We've just released Dendrite 0.7.0, which has quite a lengthy list of changes:

• The roomserver input API will now queue all events into NATS, which provides better crash resilience
• The roomserver input API now configures per-room consumers, which should use less memory
• Canonical aliases can now be added and removed
• MSC2946 Spaces Summary now works correctly, both locally and over federation
• Healthcheck endpoints are now available at:
  • /_dendrite/monitor/up, which will return 200 when Dendrite is ready to accept requests
  • /_dendrite/monitor/health, which will return 200 if healthy and 503 if degraded for some reason
• The X-Matrix federation authorisation header now includes a destination field, as per MSC3383
• The /sync endpoint now uses less memory by only ranging state for rooms that the user has participated in
• The /messages endpoint now accepts stream positions in both the from and to parameters
• Dendrite will now log a warning at startup if the file descriptor limit is set too low
• The federation client will now attempt to use HTTP/2 if available
• The federation client will now attempt to resume TLS sessions if possible, to reduce handshake overheads
• The built-in NATS Server has been updated to version 2.7.4
• NATS streams that don't match the desired configuration will now be recreated automatically
• When performing a graceful shutdown, Dendrite will now wait for NATS Server to shutdown completely, which should avoid some corruption of data on-disk
• The create-account tool has seen a number of improvements, will now ask for passwords automatically
• The /sync endpoint will no longer lose state events when truncating the timeline for history visibility
• The /context endpoint now works correctly with lazy_load_members
• The /directory/list/room/{roomID} endpoint now correctly reports whether a room is published in the server room directory or not
• Some bugs around appservice username validation have been fixed
• Roomserver output messages are no longer unnecessarily inflated by state events, which should reduce the number of NATS message size errors
• Stream IDs for device list updates are now always 64-bit, which should fix some problems when running Dendrite on a 32-bit system
• Purging room state in the sync API has been fixed after a faulty database query was corrected
• The federation client will now release host records for remote destinations after 5 minutes instead of holding them in memory forever
• Remote media requests will now correctly return an error if the file cannot be found or downloaded
• A panic in the media API that could happen when the remote file doesn't exist has been fixed
• Various bugs around membership state and invites have been fixed
• The memberships table will now be correctly updated when rejecting a federated invite
• The client API and appservice API will now access the user database using the user API rather than accessing the database directly

In addition, there are some minor changes for Docker users:

• Docker images are now published to GitHub Container Register as well as Docker Hub — they can be found here
• Docker images are now being automatically generated for the main branch by CI and will be available on the :main tag

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

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair reports

This week brings yet more bugfixes & stability to DMs: now, there should be no trouble sending messages into a KakaoTalk DM that hasn't been active for a few days.

The other major improvements are:

• A command for listing your KakaoTalk friends list, appropriately named list-friends
• Receiving images from KakaoTalk

I had hoped to finish support for sending images from Matrix by today, but I couldn't quite crack it in time--either KakaoTalk changed their API for sending media messages, or I'm doing something wrong 🙃

Nonetheless, the bridge is rapidly approaching a state of being usable!

---

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Syphon (website)

Chat with your privacy and freedom intact

0x1a8510f2 announces

Hi all 👋.

A little over a year has passed since our last update, but we're not dead! On the contrary, Syphon has seen some significant improvements over the last year both in terms of features and project structure; the project is more alive than ever before, and we're really excited to share some updates!

Core Team

Syphon now has a core team, consisting of @ereio:matrix.org (creator of Syphon), @ed:geraghty.london, @dnisbetjones:mozilla.org, and @0x1a8510f2:0x1a8510f2.space (me)! With some of the workload now being shared, we're hoping Syphon will grow even faster with less time needed to review and merge PRs, triage and fix bugs, evaluate and implement features and answer support requests.

Cross-platform Availability

Syphon has been steadily expanding its list of supported platforms over the past year:

• @ed:geraghty.london worked hard to bring Syphon to Windows with full feature parity, including (currently unofficial) Windows builds of Syphon.
• @btdmaster:asra.gr has created an AUR package of Syphon for Arch Linux users.
• I've been busy creating a flatpak for Syphon which is available on Flathub.
• Regular and official ARM64 builds are also planned soon, with the first manual one already released. Once the CI infrastructure is properly set up, these will be included for every release and the flatpak will receive ARM64 support too!

Releases

Between 0.1.7 (21 Mar 2021) and 0.2.12 (23 Mar 2022), 21 releases were published. Of course, too much changed to list everything, but here are some highlights:

• Multi-account support 🎉
• Media messages 🎉
• Markdown support 🎉
• Message editing 🎉
• Key import and export 🎉
• App lock with encryption 🎉
• HTTP proxy support 🎉
• Theme tweaks
• 3pid auth support
• EXIF data removal from sent images
• System brightness setting
• Various customisation options
• (Unencrypted) chat message search
• Ability to deactivate an account
• Countless new translations
• Massive performance improvements
• Numerous bug fixes (including encryption and SSO)
• Lots of refactoring and cleanup

Many of these would not have been possible without our awesome contributors.

Translations

We have also received many contributions in the form of translations and Syphon now supports, at least partially, 26 languages. Of these, 6 languages are fully or almost fully translated. To deal with all the incoming translations, there is now also an official Weblate page for Syphon.

All of these translations are submitted by volunteers and we're really grateful for their contributions in making Syphon more accessible to an international audience.

Syphon Space

We also now have an official Syphon space which we use for support, development discussion or just friendly offtopic chat. Come join us if you like at #syphon-space:matrix.org!

SchildiChat (website)

SchildiChat is a fork of Element that focuses on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list for both direct messages and groups, which is a more familiar approach to users of other popular instant messengers.

SpiritCroc reports

SchildiChat-Android now has more styles of message bubbles! So if you prefer the Schildi-bubbles over the Element ones (which you can use too in SchildiChat if you want), you can now also select between bubbles with or without tail, and select some more round bubbles than what we had previously, which was a highly requested feature!

If you wonder what makes SchildiChat special except for the different design now that Element has bubbles as well: it's hard to describe in a couple of short sentences, as it's mostly in the details. So if you are interested in a list of things that we did on Android, I wrote up some aspects here. Note however that this list is usually not really kept up-to-date, and there might already be some things that are now outdated since I added them. However, it might give you some general ideas of what SchildiChat has to offer :)

Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

Beep, boop, v0.9.3 is out. It's mostly bugfixes and small improvements, changelog below:

Highlights

• New upload UX
  • Queue multiple uploads by pasting or dragging multiple files.
  • Videos will now properly have a thumbnail as well as images.
  • Duration, width and height is now also properly included so that clients can resize appropriately.
  • Thumbnails are excluded if they are bigger than the original image. (tastytea)
• Improvements for mobile devices (Malte E)
  • You should now be able to scroll by touching anywhere with no random dead zones.
  • Preedit text can now be used in a completer and is properly sent
  • If an input method is active, pressing Enter will not send the current message.

Features

• Optionally always open videos and images in an external program. (math)

Improvements

• Build macOS releases against Qt 5.15.3 to resolve missing spaces after some punctuation.
• Send the shortcode as the body for stickers without a body.
• Elide long usernames in the timeline. (Malte E)
• Cleanup the reply popup. (Malte E)
• Use standard buttons where possible. (tastytea)
• Various improvements to the bubble layout. (Malte E)
• Enable online key backup by default.
• Update the bundled gstreamer in our Flatpaks.

Translations

• Indonesian (Linerly)
• Estonian (Priit)
• Finnish (Priit)
• Esperanto (Tirifto)

Bugfixes

• Fix hovering the action menu.
• Try to avoid using unknown UIA flows.
• Don't Components actively in use.
• Fix screensharing.
• Fix device id when doing SSO logins.

Downloads should be live now, flatpak might take a while to publish still :3

Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Julian Sparber reports

Hello folks, quick update on what major things happened in Fractal-next the last two month. The most exciting addition is definitely the SSO support we merged this week and therefore we could close a 2 years old issue.

Timeline

• You can now send files via drag-n-drop and via the file send button to a room. It also includes a nice preview for Images.
• The timeline now shows audio messages with a small inline player.
• Fractal-next lets you now remove messages you sent

Session verification

• During first login, Fractal checks if the user hasn't started session verification from another client before offering to start a new one
• The QrCode scanning is now spec compliant, and asks for user's confirmation after scanning.
• We dropped screenshot support for QrCode scanning, since it makes the UX worse without adding any real benefit.

Room details

• The room details show now the members of the room including the power level

Login

• Fractal-Next now supports SSO 🎉️
• We implemented auto-discovery of the homeserver via .well-known

FluffyChat (website)

Krille Fear announces

Sorry that I was a little bit silent in the last weeks. So much stuff to do...

If you haven't heard it yet (because I have not made it that much public yet) there are experimental video calls in FluffyChat now. You need to enable them first under Settings > Chat and then you can try them out. They should be fully compatible with the Element video calls. But be aware that they are very unstable at the moment and may let your app crash.

FluffyChat 1.3.1 has been released

This release contains a lot of updated translations and bugfixes. I'm very excited about the new keyboard shortcuts from TheOneWithTheBrain. Also in your stories you can now pick the background color and the size of the picture. This is still a little bit experimental but I will share of course update the stories MSC asap. Thanks to all contributors and translators.

Changelog:

• Allow app to be moved to external storage (Marcel)
• Translated using Weblate (Arabic) (Mads Louis)
• Translated using Weblate (Basque) (Sorunome)
• Translated using Weblate (Basque) (—X—)
• Translated using Weblate (Chinese (Simplified)) (Eric)
• Translated using Weblate (Czech) (Sorunome)
• Translated using Weblate (Dutch) (Jelv)
• Translated using Weblate (English) (Raatty)
• Translated using Weblate (French) (Anne Onyme 017)
• Translated using Weblate (Galician) (Xosé M)
• Translated using Weblate (German) (Maciej Krüger)
• Translated using Weblate (Indonesian) (Linerly)
• Translated using Weblate (Irish) (Graeme Power)
• Translated using Weblate (Persian) (Anastázius Darián)
• Translated using Weblate (Russian) (Nikita Epifanov)
• Translated using Weblate (Swedish) (Joaquim Homrighausen)
• Translated using Weblate (Turkish) (Oğuz Ersen)
• Translated using Weblate (Ukrainian) (Ihor Hordiichuk)
• Update proguard rules to a more modern setup (MTRNord)
• chore: Minor story viewer fixes (Krille Fear)
• chore: Remove story line count and make answering to stories online (Krille Fear)
• chore: Update dependencies (Dependency Update Bot)
• design: Make pinned events use less vertical space (Krille Fear)
• feat: Extended stories (Krille Fear)
• feat: Restrict map zoom to tile server capabilities (Marcel)
• feat: implement keyboard shortcuts (TheOneWithTheBraid)
• fix: Build on macOS (Krille Fear)
• fix: Emojipicker issues (Krille Fear)
• fix: Hide redacted stories (Krille Fear)
• fix: Mark story as read (Krille Fear)
• fix: Open room from notification click produces errors (Krille Fear)
• fix: SSO on Android 12 (Krille Fear)
• fix: Send read receipts on all taps (Krille Fear)
• fix: make fluffy usable at 720 px wide (Raatty)
• fix: Add forgotten sendOnEnter (Krille Fear)
• refactor: Switch to just audio for playing sounds (Krille Fear)

Ement.el (website)

Matrix client for emacs

alphapapa announces

[[https://github.com/alphapapa/ement.el][Ement.el]], a Matrix client for Emacs, has learned to create new rooms and invite users to rooms. Feedback is appreciated; see our chat room, [[https://matrix.to/#/#ement.el:matrix.org][#ement.el:matrix.org]], or the issue tracker on the repo.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat announces

• Threads will be released behind a labs flag in the next release and enabled by default in the Release Candidate (RC) from 5th April

• If you’re using an older version of Synapse (<v1.55.0) you might experience compatibility problems with stable prefixes. After upgrading Element to v1.18.0 unstable threads will be moved to the main room timeline

• Groups have been deleted on develop. It has also landed alongside other fairly major changes so please definitely report issues if you see them

• Continuing work to remove skinning from the application. This is a fairly major change to how everything works under the hood, so when it lands please report any issues with the app as most will be subtle and therefore might be missed.

  • Currently expected to land on or about April 5th
  • Component replacement will still be possible (and this will be documented)

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

  • Thread list is now ordered by last reply

  • Fixes for the room list counter

  • Last stretch of threads acceptance testing before releasing to beta

  • Iteration to the new search dialog to integrate people & public rooms search into the new experience.

Element iOS (website)

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

Doug says

• Element 1.8.7 was released on the App Store after delays with the review: we’ve made ignoring users easier and now suggest a Matrix ID when using “Sign in With Apple” to resolve the issue.
• Space creation and management will be available in the next release, due next week.
• We had some issues with publishing releases to TestFlight so the latest release candidates haven’t been updated publicly - we have been testing them internally so releases will not be delayed

Element Android (website)

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

adam reports

Our current in progress release 1.4.6+ is running a little behind schedule, however when it does land it'll contain:

• Fixes in the timeline for missing messages, inconsistent read marker, decryption crashes and the room icon looking like donut
• Improved Threads via MSC3440
• The ability to share a user specified location

For the forks, a heads up that we've updated our development branch Kotlin version to 1.6.0 which involved overhauling a lot of our when statements

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synatainer (website)

Synapse Maintenance Container – Docker container with tools for synapse & postgres database maintenance

saces reports

Synatainer v0.3.1 has been released

New since v0.2.0

• add a db-shell and scripts to reset the state compressor
• add options for passing purge/keep room lists

Start it without command and let it do its magic :)

What it does by default:

• daily:
  • purge all rooms without local members
  • run the state autocompressor (small setting 500/100)
• weekly:
  • delete old remote media (>90 days)
  • delete old message history from public joinable rooms (>180 days)
• monthly:
  • run the state autocompressor (big setting 1500/300)
  • vacuum the database

Source: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

Compose example: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer/-/snippets/2264828

---

If you are looking for a docker container with just the auto compressor for linux amd64/arm64 in it, her you go: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/rust-synapse-compress-state

Dept of Bots 🤖

Mjölnir (website)

The moderation bot for Matrix

Gnuxie announces

We have released Mjölnir v1.4.1 (via v1.4.0)

Which in addition to fixes, includes a few new tools that you might find useful:

• a protection for detecting & measuring federation lag in your rooms
• bugfixes for the synapse antispam module (in particular squashing a bug that was removing users from the profile directory when blocking was disabled)
• a new message length limiter for the antispam module
• a new command to grab admin permissions from rooms being administrated by users on your homeserver
• a command to show when users in a given room have joined
• another command to filter through recent room joiners by the time they joined.
• Improvements that make writing protections easier.

Don't forget you can join our development room #mjolnir:matrix.org if you have any have any questions for setting up and running Mjölnir!

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

HarHarLinks announces

don't miss #otwsu:matrix.org on March 30th!

Thib adds

The theme of the episode is "analytics and privacy". We will have guests from the awesome non-profit Exodus Privacy to shed some light on analytics: what can your apps know about you and how you can get better informed.

Nad from Element will give us the perspective from the other side: as a vendor, does it make sense to use analytics? Are there better alternatives? Is there a way to do it right?

Join us in #otwsu and on matrix.org/open-tech-will-save-us

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 🎙

This week my guest is Adam who created the minimalistic Android client your family wants… by accident. And Adam has more ideas for the future.

Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR 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

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC3754: Removing profile information

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've mostly been working on our existing projects. Unfortunately this means little to report this week, but if there's something that needs out attention then please mention it in #sct-office:matrix.org 🙂

Dept of P2P 👥

Pinecone (website)

Peer-to-peer overlay routing for the Matrix ecosystem

neilalexander reports

Things have been relatively quiet on the P2P front recently as we have been working on fixing bugs in Dendrite, but we will be releasing build 94 of the P2P demos for iOS and for Android soon, which feature new fair queuing in Pinecone. This should help to reduce congestion from single nodes. It also includes all of the latest Dendrite updates.

• Android: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1uK_BcHGiAYHkN6OAA7P73obAquwShRg5
• iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/Tgh2MEk6

The demos are still very rough around the edges — join us in #p2p:matrix.org for discussion!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

dmr says

Hello everyone. It's been a quieter week for the Synapse team---many of us are away this week.

We released Synapse 1.55.0rc1 yesterday, a little later than usual. A full release is still planned for the coming Tuesday (22nd March). Please note that this release breaks compatibility with Mjolnir 1.3.1 and earlier. Administrators using Mjolnir should ensure it is upgraded before upgrading Synapse to 1.55.0rc1.

Otherwise, the release candidate includes:

• New tools in the module API enabling modules to prevent administrators from deleting rooms and deactivating users. Half-Shot explains the movtivation here.
• Experimental support for using Twisted's asyncio reactor. If this is feasible, it might allow us to leverage tools and libraries for Python's growing asyncio ecosystem.
• A performance fix for logging in on large accounts.
• A variety of other bugfixes and internal tweaks.

Please feel free to try it out and let us know how you get on: either in the #synapse:matrix.org or on GitHub if you encounter any unexplained problems. As ever, many thanks to all contributors involved.

Behind the scenes we've been working on a few longer-term projects:

• Continued support for threading (MSC3440) and the mechanism which supports it, relations (MSC2674).
• Managing Synapse's dependencies using poetry to formally lock requirements across all our debian and docker releases.
• Performance investigations: we're looking at getting better profiling information; and seeing if we can reclaim CPU cycles by cancelling processing when a requester terminates their request early.

Hopefully we'll see these plans come to fruition over the coming weeks.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair says

This week brings some bugfixes to DMs, and general improvements to the way channels are synced on startup.

I've also written some setup instructions to assist anyone wanting to try this bridge out for themselves!

As for bugs, I just stumbled upon a big one just now: if a KakaoTalk channel hasn't had activity for a few days, sending a message in its Matrix portal may crash. This happens because of the KakaoTalk API's apparent eagerness in forgetting about inactive channels (IIRC content that's a few weeks old is deleted from their servers, for privacy reasons), and the likely fix is for the bridge to use the right API calls to trigger those channels back into an active state before trying to interact with them.

Once that's fixed, the next thing I'll get out of the way (for the sake of completeness) is the web-based login interface, which all of the other mautrix-python bridges support (and is quite nice for privacy-conscious users that would rather send their KakaoTalk passwords directly to the bridge, instead of through a Matrix homeserver).

After that, I'll work on contact searching & inviting contacts to group chats or DMs.

---

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

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

Nico announces

After our release last week, of course all the bugreports came out of the woodworks. As such we fixed issues with device ids being set incorrectly after SSO, screensharing, overlapping in the reply popup and UIA flows without fallback support like https://github.com/devture/matrix-synapse-shared-secret-auth showing up as UIA stages. Key backup is also now enabled by default (if it has the correct signatures and everything), various layouting fixes and more.

We'll probably make a bugfix release in the next few days.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Kegan announces

I have been working on integrating MSC3575: Sliding Sync into Element-Web. This is a pretty large endeavour but there has been a lot of progress on it already!

There now exists a JS-SDK PR to add the core bits of Sliding Sync (along with E2EE/to-device extensions), and a React-SDK branch which adds the Labs flag, config.json section for the proxy URL, and sets up room subscriptions when you select a room. The net result?

This is still early days: you cannot scroll the room list yet and there's still many outstanding issues to fix before it can land on mainline, but it's at the stage where it's almost ready for people to try out. Watch this space...

Thib reports

• Continuing with the removal of the skinning layer, instead recommending module replacement - please talk to us in #element-dev:matrix.org if this is a surprise.

• Continued removal of Groups/Communities - we’re expecting it to land this week (for release on about April 11th).

• Continuing development of live location sharing.

• We’ve reduced tsc errors by 70% in react-sdk unit tests!

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

  • We're working on a prototype for voice rooms, which are persistent voice chats similar to Discord's voice channel feature. Expect this to receive more attention and polish over the coming weeks
  • Threads are now using the stable prefix m.thread and are currently undergoing acceptance testing. We’re hoping to launch it out of labs in the next few weeks.

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu says

• The release on the App Store is still blocked on the review. We continue to work hard to solve this issue.
• The threads feature received a lot of polish and bug fixes. We are not far from making them out of the LABS setting.
• The timeline got several bug fixes.
• We fixed memory leaks in the share extension.
• The name and avatar customization after account creation is almost done.

Thib says

• We’re currently at the last mile of testing for space creation & space management on iOS. Thanks to everyone who helped with community testing last week!
• We’re currently on track to merge and ship these changes at the end of this month.
• Once released, Element on all platforms will have parity across the core spaces feature set!

Element Android (website)

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

adam announces

• 1.4.4 has dropped across all channels, we've had some promising early feedback that the storage/RAM usage is starting to decrease, as always thanks for the reports and keep them coming! Full release notes available in the usual place

• Threads are levelling up and becoming driven by MSC3440, increasing their reliability and cross device consistency. If you're already using threads we'll automatically migrate them for you in the next release 1.4.6

• Live location sharing work has started! Soon you'll be able to share and receive location updates in real time

Cinny (website)

Cinny is a Matrix client focused on simplicity, elegance and security

Lozenge reports

v1.8.1 & v1.8.2

Bug fixes:

• Fix new messages don't appear
• Fix pressing a key with an active highlight jumps in history
• Fix not all emoji-only messages being detected as Jumbo-emoji
• Fix muted room show unread indicator
• Fix view source shows original event for an edited message
• Fix wrong notification count and NaN notification
• Fix ⌘ CMD + k hotkey not working MacOS
• Fix sending message not mark room as read

Release: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny/releases/tag/v1.8.2

Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in Join our channel at: #cinny:matrix.org Github: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny Twitter: https://twitter.com/@cinnyapp

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Thirdroom (website)

A browser-based open metaverse client

Robert Long says

Our metaverse-on-matrix project is progressing quickly!

• Robert and Nate have been working on updating the Third Room demo to use the latest bitECS and threecs work as well as moving rendering and game update loops off the main thread!
• Bruno has been porting Native Group VoIP to Hydrogen SDK which Third Room will use for both spatial voice chat and DataChannels
• Ajay has a working scaffold of the early UI concepts paired with Hydrogen SDK to incorporate the room list and chat views.

More design work is happening as well, here's our latest from Rian

Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP says

v0.6.0 & v0.6.1

Want to purge a space recursively? Matrix Wrench now has a button for that. It will try to fetch a list of all sub spaces and rooms and offer you to delete them via the Synapse Admin API.

Also, you can now knock on rooms and the room lists allow to navigate to a room page by clicking on a room ID.

Next up will likely be searchable lists for rooms and users as well as other usability and layout improvements. The goal is to have a nice-looking, stable v1.0 release for its anniversary on 13th June. I'm looking for help with design and documentation.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma (website)

A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.

Jonas Platte says

Nothing user-facing changed last week, but this week:

• @timokoesters fixed some bugs in the state resolution code around knocking (room version 7) and restricted rooms (room version 8 / 9)
• @zecakeh added loads of primary extensible event types:
  • m.image
  • m.video
  • m.audio
  • m.location
  • m.voice
• @ShadowJonathan added support for the server-version endpoints for the server-server API (MSC3723) and the identity-service API (MSC2320)
• [@zecekeh] added support for threads and translatable text messages
• I (@jplatte) moved the prev_content state event field into unsigned as per Matrix v1.2
• @zecakeh cleaned up the module structure for discovery-related endpoints

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

Jonas Platte reports

In the last few weeks,

• @gnunicorn created separate crates for the different storage backends
• @zecakeh made it easier to initialize those storage backends
• I (@jplatte) created a ClientBuilder to simplify client initialization
• @zecakeh moved some functionality into a new Encryption type to improve the API structure
• I updated the SDK to make use of Ruma's support for the v3 endpoint paths on servers that support it
• I improved the quality of the SDKs logs as part of some profiling experiments

Additionally, these things have been in progress for a while and deserve a mention as well even though they're not finished yet:

• @gnunicorn is working on sliding sync (MSC3575)
• @poljar is working on integrating vodozemac, a libolm reimplementation in Rust

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 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) 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

New MSCs:

• MSC3751: Allowing widgets to read account data

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs had FCP proposed this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered FCP this week.

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3440: Threading via m.thread relation
• MSC3316: Add timestamp massaging to the spec

Spec Updates

Keeping in step with our quarterly spec releases, the release of Matrix v1.3 is expected to land sometime early Q2 2022. This release will include Threads (as defined by MSC3440), as well as a number of other MSCs which land in the meantime.

Speaking of other MSCs, client developers should be aware of upcoming work to support live and static location sharing in the ecosystem. A notice on the subject has been posted today in the Matrix Client Developers room.

A reminder that the matrix-doc GitHub repository has been split into two new repositories: matrix-spec and matrix-spec-proposals. Read more about this in the last edition of TWIM.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2398: proposal to allow mxc:// in the "a" tag within messages!

This MSC makes the case for allowing linking to MXC content by using of an <a> tag in the HTML-formatted formatted_body field of a m.room.message. As MXC urls could contain HTML files, it could be rather useful to link directly to them, as you would any other webpage. Your client would then translate this to an http/s URL which can be used to view/navigate to the file.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

Brendan Abolivier reports

We've released Synapse 1.54! It includes quite a lot of nice improvements, including around URL previewing, and new callbacks for third-party modules. Check out the release announcement for more info on all this goodness.

We've also landed more of the ground work to improve the time it takes for new servers to join big rooms, which Rich was talking about last week. Aside from this, we're continuing the effort towards switching Synapse to use Poetry, which will enable reproducible builds for Synapse. These are some very exciting projects which will be maturing in the coming weeks, so watch this space!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace says

Missed last weeks update, but my charts rolled along regardless. Currently serving; element-web 1.10.6 and matrix-synapse 1.54.0 (and matrix-media-repo 1.2.10)

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

The basics of the bridge are now ready! Backfilling, message sending, and message receiving are now implemented...albeit quite buggy and untested.

For anyone curious to try it out, installation follows the same general steps as tulir's Python-based mautrix bridges, plus a backend Node module that must be launched before the Python component of the bridge. I'll write a README with proper setup instructions soon!

Just note that for the time being, updates to the bridge may invalidate its database!!. I won't guarantee stable DB upgrades until the bridge's early growing pains have settled down.

Reminder that my KakaoTalk ID is fair-mw if anyone wants to help me test things out 🙂

---

Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

SmallTalk (website)

Minimal Android messenger powered by Matrix

adam reports

👋 I'm happy to finally reveal the side project I've been working on - SmallTalk, a tiny native android matrix client focused on chatting with family and friends!

I've been wondering, how small can you make a functional native android matrix client? So far 1.7mb! (*when served from an app bundle)

Features

• E2E encryption (including importing Element E2E keys)
• Merged room and DM list
• Message bubbles
• Push notifications

Currently in closed beta whilst ironing bugs, improving error handling and adding basic features like accepting invites, however apks are available on github for eager testers!

Nheko (website)

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

Nico says

I am happy to present you a new release with the cute name 0.9.2!

Apart from losts of bugfixes, expect the following:

Highlights

• Message bubbles (Malte E) 💬
  • Give a colorful and space saving background to messages.
  • Optionally shrink the usernames to save even more space.
  • Your messages are on the opposite side of messages sent by other users.
• Basic widgets 🗔
  • Widgets in a room are shown below the topic.
  • Open them in your browser to view them.

Features

• Autocompleter for custom emotes using ~. Note that this currently inserts raw html into the message input.
• Support running Nheko without a secrets service using a hidden setting.
• Add zooming and panning to the image overlay.
• Add a manpage. (tastytea)
• Offline indicator. (LorenDB)
• Proper previews for unjoined rooms in spaces (on supported servers).
• /reset-state /command to reset the state of a single room.
• Allow hiding some events from the timeline. (tastytea)
• Hidden read receipts. (Symphorien)
• Open room members dialog when clicking the encryption indicator.
• Click to copy room id. (Malte E)
• Allow specifying a reason for message removal, bans and kicks. (tastytea)

Improvements

• Speed up blurhash and jdenticon rendering.
• Use fewer threads for image decoding reducing memory use.
• Document secret service installation on Arch. (Marshall Lochbaum)
• Make edits replace previous notifications for the same message on Linux.
• Add alternatives for Alt-A as a shortcut on systems where that is already used.
• Apply clang-tidy suggestions. (MTRNord)
• Make custom emotes twice as high as the text to improve legibility. (tastytea)
• Ensure high quality scaling is used for custom emotes. (tastytea)
• Reduce allocations for the timeline by around a factor of 2.
• Render messages half as often, when displaying them for the first time.
• Increase maximum number of items in completers to 30.
• Run the gstreamer event loop also on macOS and Windows.
• Make presence update dynamically.
• Cleanup the raw message dialog.
• Make settings responsive.
• Improve Login and Registration pages.
• Add custom stickers & emotes to Q&A.
• Improve scrolling on touch screens. (Malte E)
• Reduce size of state events.
• Update OpenSUSE install instructions. (LorenDB)
• Use newer flatpak runtime.
• Fallback to using the shortcode in custom emotes, when there is no title set. (Ivan Pavluk)
• Improve a lot of hovering behaviours.
• Make spinboxes in scrollable pages unscrollable. (Malte E)
• Fix deprecation warnings in gstreamer code. (Scow)
• Make room directory fit mobile screens. (Malte E)
• Make room search accessible on mobile. (Malte E)
• Fix calls on mobile.
• Add arch binary repo. (digital-mystik)
• Improve long topics in the room settings. (Malte E)
• Fix typos. (ISSOtm)
• Improve the message input on mobile devices. (Malte E)

I hope this one works for you and we didn't break too much stuff and thanks a lot to everyone who contributed!

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

Welcome back to another week at Element!

Message Threads

• Our MSC 3440 completed its final comment period this week which is a super exciting move forwards for our team! We are now using a stable prefix and server-side support for Threads so the whole experience should be much better.
• The team is hard at work fixing bugs so that we can launch with as much confidence in our solution as possible.
• If you’ve been using Threads whilst in Labs, please keep giving feedback and raising any issues you may find.

Community testing

• Join #element-community-testing:matrix.org to help out with the testing
• Coming up this week:
  • Spaces on iOS: Tuesday, 15th Mar at 16:00 UTC / 17:00 CET

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle says

• On Web we’re focussed on improving the app and fighting bugs;
  • This week we are seeing fewer reports of decryption errors!
  • On Develop, you should no longer find that editing messages messes with their formatting.

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

• Pinned messages are getting some attention in Labs. Keep providing feedback for us!

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu announces

• The next app store release is delayed due to some flows that do not match Apple guidelines - we’ll be updating the Apple SSO default values and introducing “Decline & Block” to invitations.
• This week we checked-in on our language status and updated some things; We now support Ukrainian.
• We’re working hard at updating the activity indicators in the app. While we work on the performance and load times in general we want to enable users to go about their tasks without being blocked by the activity indicator. The new indicator sits towards the top of the screen and should be out of the way for most tasks, whilst still informative. Let us know what you think!
• The iOS team are also improving the onboarding experience for new users; aiming to make Matrix account creation as simple as possible.

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle announces

• We’re continuing on our path to increase the quality and usability of the app; the next release is v1.4.4 (already available for beta testers!) includes things like moving the typing indicator from the top bar to the bottom of the timeline.
• We are also improving our PR process. In particular we want to reduce the time the submitters have to wait to get a review.
• Our onboarding flow is being updated. We want new users to have a simple and straight-forward experience when they’re creating an account.

Cinny (website)

Cinny is a Matrix client focused on simplicity, elegance and security

Lozenge reports

Namaste 🙏,

We are happy to announce that Cinny now support all the features of Spaces — a way to group rooms in Matrix. This means that you can now create new spaces from client, add rooms or subspaces inside them or manage the added rooms. We have also made our unique feature of Pinning spaces to sidebar more easy and organized. With this option all the spaces and subspaces will be visible at one place and you can select the one you want to pin or remove. One more unique feature we added with update is the Categorized subspaces, what this do is make all the subspaces inside a space appear as categories. This is helpful when there are deep nested spaces inside a space and breadcrumb is pain to navigate back and fourth. Keep in mind that this ignore the nesting of subspaces and all of them will appear under mainspace, but nice thing is that you can select which subspace you want to categorized and which not. Another exciting update related to spaces is the Drag-and-Drop. Earlier there was no option to reorder pinned spaces but now with DnD you can reorder them as you like.

Apart from spaces this update also include option to drag and drop files, ||sending spoiler||, desktop notification and viewing event source. (Thanks to @ginnyTheCat for these amazing additions.)

Full changelog is available at: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny/releases/tag/v1.8.0

Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in Join our channel at: https://matrix.to/#/#cinny:matrix.org Github: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny Twitter: https://twitter.com/@cinnyapp

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr announces

In the last two weeks we've made some UX improvements:

1. The PDF viewer now has nicer tooltips
2. The width of sidepanels is now adjustable
3. Searchbars now have hints to help find the keyboard shortcut
4. Error messages are now displayed more uniformly
5. Populus-viewer now has an icon
6. Failed messages are now indicated, with the option to resend

Fixed some bugs:

1. room avatars should now update more quickly
2. highlights should always display immediately after joining a new discussion

And added a service worker, for a better offline experience.

Finally, we've opened a new draft MSC (just a stub at the moment) to create a format for annotations on text documents. So... matrix annotations as a vim plugin? The future is bright 😎

As always, if you're interested in this work, or in the future of annotation and scholarship on matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.

matrix-streamchat (website)

Matrix powered stream overlay for OBS, to integrate live chat in your favorite (selfhosted) streaming setups.

f0x announces

Matrix Streamchat got it's first alpha release, and was successfully set up + used by someone else this week Recorded a little demo video on the setup with OBS: https://youtu.be/HmJ3XwJXB7I, and implemented the GUI for configuring the chat's settings and looks, to then copy the link into an iframe (embedded chat) or OBS (overlay).

Gatho (website)

Invite friends to your event with a one-click RSVP link - no matter which chat/social app they use!

Jake C reports

Gatho.party is a replacement for Facebook Events for small social gatherings. I've used it for a number of parties and received great feedback, and I'm seeing others are starting to use it too 🎉

To receive confirmations of attendance you can either:

• Use the included Matrix bot to automatically sync RSVP emoji reactions in a linked Matrix room (great for your friends on Matrix or in a bridged Signal chat)
• Send a unique one-click RSVP links to you friends without Matrix (eg. Instagram DMs, SMS)
• And as of this week, guests can "self serve" and add their own RSVP via the unique event link, so you can just drop the event link in a Facebook Messenger chat or iMessage group (without email or phone verification at the moment, so hosts will need to moderate if their guests go rogue and add multiple fake names!)

Other recent improvements are:

• Ability to delete guests
• Improved call to action and copy text for when a guest with a "magic" link is prompted to RSVP
• Confetti animations when your guests RSVP via the Gatho website as "Going"

I'm currently testing an experimental chat embed using Matrix Live so your guests not on Matrix can optionally see your linked Matrix room - I've found some of my friends join Matrix after seeing this so they can join the action!

I'm keen to eventually use Cactus Comments once I figure out a bit of Elm and have more spare time so that non-Matrix guests can post too.

The Gatho website and bot is open source (AGPL-3.0) on Github, PRs and Github issues are very welcome! It's built using Next.js in Typescript.

I'd love to hear your feedback! Join the Matrix room at https://matrix.to/#/#gatho-events:matrix.gatho.party

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Polyjuice (website)

Elixir libraries related to the Matrix communications protocol.

uhoreg says

Polyjuice Client Test is a tool for testing Matrix clients by creating a predefined environment for each test. Since the last time it was mentioned in TWIM,

• more tests have been added: a test for basic end-to-end encryption message sending and receiving, symmetric key backup (MSC3270), and key withheld codes (MSC2399). More tests (and improvements to existing tests) to come.
• the UI has improved a bit. Sorry, it's still ugly, but slightly less so. Also, now you can search through the tests.
• I am now running a publicly-accessible instance of it at https://test.uhoreg.ca/ so you can test your clients without having to set it up yourself. This instance is stable-ish, in that it should always be available, but may be restarted randomly, in which case you may need to re-start your tests.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synatainer (website)

Synapse Maintenance Container – Docker container with tools for synapse & postgres database maintenance

saces announces

Synapse Maintenance Container – Docker container with tools for synapse & postgres database maintenance

New since v0.1.0:

• added arm64 support
• improved output of purge_history.sh

Start it without command and let it do its magic :)

What it does by default:

• daily:
  • purge all rooms without local members
  • run the state autocompressor (small setting 500/100)
• weekly:
  • delete old remote media (>90 days)
  • delete old message history from public joinable rooms (>180 days)
• monthly:
  • run the state autocompressor (big setting 1500/300)
  • vacuum the database

Source: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

Compose example: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer/-/snippets/2264828

---

If you are looking for a docker container with just the auto compressor for linux amd64/arm64 in it, her you go: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/rust-synapse-compress-state

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

libli

unonde says

hello! wanted to show a small matrix web client made with unminified js/html/css & web components (wip++) https://libli.org/ https://gitlab.com/sctlib/libli + https://gitlab.com/sctlib/matrix-room-element looking forward feedback comments or anything, cheers & viva la matrix!

for now it only uses default matrix messages, and it is read only, so users have to login/register/CRUD through element (or any other client) the idea would be to give back users control on their data, allow them to "collect" (individually or as group), any type of content, gathered into matrix room

For now, the client is making HTTP requests to matrix API, to fetch the data of a (public) room, all message & state events. it also give a "clean URL" libli.org/room:server.tld so users can access their "profile" (chat room) easily (just like a twitter, instagram, medium) page

Dept of Guides 🧭

Self-Host a Matrix Map Server

JulianF reports

Following Element's recent announcement of location sharing with support for self-hosted map tile server, I went ahead and set up one, and have written a blog post about it, explaining how to go a little further than the currently published guide, and with Ansible scripts included. *> https://wrily.foad.me.uk/self-host-a-matrix-map-server

Extensible Events

andybalaam reports

Andy Balaam wrote a blog post explaining extensible events - it shows simple examples of what message events look like now, and how they change with extensible events. It also covers the abbreviated forms of m.message: m.text and m.html, which can make it somewhat more confusing to understand.

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 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

TravisR says

t2bot.io - a public integrations network for Matrix - has passed 1 Million known rooms and 8.3 Million bridged users. 10,000 of these rooms are attributed to Voyager (a bot which actively goes out to find rooms to map Matrix, with the map currently down for maintenance), leaving the remaining ones either bridged, previously bridged, or using a different integration offered by t2bot.io for free.

The 8.3 Million users are mainly Discord and Telegram users which have been brought over to Matrix through bridges. The stats say "excluding Twitter-bridged" because there's 424,832 old accounts from back in the day when t2bot.io had a free Twitter bridge available. To further break this down, about 6.8M are Telegram users (12% of Telegram) and 1.3M are Discord (<1% of Discord).

For perspective, t2bot.io has about 569 Million events stored in its database and sees approximately 30 thousand people bridged daily from the wider world into Matrix through its bridges.

This post is just a milestone update, but it also serves as a reminder that running your own server/bridges is also possible. In fact, it's even recommended to have better control over your own data and avoid latency issues that large providers, like t2bot.io, can unintentionally introduce. Synapse is relatively easy to set up with minimal sysadmin knowledge (guide), and there's always paid offerings like Element Matrix Services (for home and also for fun) and Beeper for a richer bridging experience than t2bot.io can feasibly provide.

TravisR adds

in the eternal battle of "t2bot.io should be successful" and "please oh god self-host", the above^

Thib reports

It is to be noted that eQualitie has set-up public Matrix and Element instances for Ukrainian people who are struggling right now. If you are in Ukraine or are in touch with Ukrainian people who need secure communications, you can show them https://kyiv.dcomm.net.ua, https://odessa.dcomm.net.ua, or https://kharkiv.dcomm.net.ua depending on their location so they get instructions on how to create an account on Matrix and stay in touch

Dept of Spec 📜

Kegan reports

MSC3575 Sliding Sync work is progressing, and a number of new features have been added to the MSC with implementations in the built-in web client in the proxy. A list of changes include:

• spec/proxy: the ability to filter the room list by room name.
• spec/proxy: Aninitial flag on the room to distinguish between updates and the initial sync for a given room. This can be used as a hint to clients to determine if they should update/replace their local data for that room.
• proxy: more efficient algorithm for determining overlapping sets of ranges, resulting in fewer bytes over the wire when scrolling.
• proxy: the client implementation now supports sending basic text messages as well as issuing/join,/invite,/leave commands.
• proxy: the client implementation now has a developer HUD which tracks the Tx/Rx bytes as well as a visual representation of the sliding window.

The net result is a basic but incredibly low bandwidth syncing client: 60.79KB to download an entire initial sync on matrix.org. Further improvements will be done on the client to make sure it doesn't scale with the number of rooms on the user's account (it currently does because it naively adds a placeholder for each room in the list) to ensure it remains extremely snappy and a vision for what Sliding Sync can do in practice, right now. Please continue giving feedback on MSC3575 or in #sliding-sync:matrix.org as the API is still in development and will change depending on what clients require.

Andrew Morgan (Element) 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

Created MSCs:

• MSC3746: Render image data in reactions

MSCs with newly proposed Final Comment Period:

• No FCPs were proposed this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3440: Threading via m.thread relation (merge)
• MSC3316: Add timestamp massaging to the spec (merge)

Closed MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3710: User groups

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

Heads up! You may have noticed some changes to the matrix-org/matrix-doc github repository this week. The first major one being that it no longer exists!

We have separated it out into two repositories:

• matrix-org/matrix-spec - the source text of the spec. Issues and pull requests filed here should relate to the source of the spec.
• matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals - all Matrix Spec Change proposals. New MSCs should be filed against this repository as pull requests. Issues should not be filed against this repository (and no, the issue tracker cannot be disabled, as it would cause transferred issue link redirects to 404).

The primary motivation for this was to separate concerns of interacting with matrix-org/matrix-doc. Those interacting with the spec's source would have to wade through long-lived spec proposals, while those only interested in spec proposals would need to filter out spec source files and other issues and PRs related to them. This also helps writing tooling against the repo either as it no longer needs to filter MSCs via issue labels.

Existing links to matrix-doc should be automatically redirected by github to the right place. MSC authors and developers should update their git remote settings to point to the new repos.

What happened in detail to achieve this was:

• matrix-doc was renamed tomatrix-spec-proposals
• matrix-spec was created
• All files other than the "proposals" folder were transferred frommatrix-spec-proposals tomatrix-spec
• All open issues frommatrix-spec-proposals were transferred tomatrix-spec

Further details are available here: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/927

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3383: Include destination in X-Matrix Auth Header!

This MSC asks for the simple change of adding a "destination" field to the Authorization header of federation requests. This would have the benefit of allowing reverse proxies - potentially handling traffic for multiple homeservers - to know where requests should be sent. Or for forward proxies, which could validate outgoing requests from a homeserver before they're sent.

There is currently some discussion on the fundamental idea of the MSCs, which will need to be resolved first before it can move forwards.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

richvdh announces

Quite a varied bag this week! Firstly we cut a release candidate for Synapse 1.54.0, which we hope to release next week. As ever, testing and feedback is much appreciated.

Our switch to Poetry for dependency management has come a few steps closer, by removing tox from our Continuous Integration, and converting some of our ad-hoc scripts to proper Python entry points.

Meanwhile we've been continuing to knock out blockers to improving room join speeds, including better exception handling and logging, and some exciting work to reduce wasted work when a client disconnects while we're still processing a request.

We've also been taking a wider look at performance problems, such as slow /sync and /login times.

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

Kegan reports

I have been asked by numerous people over months if there are any kind of graphs comparing Synapse and Dendrite. Up until now, my answer has been "as far as I know, no". However, this got me thinking whether I can use Complement to engineer some kind of performance testing infrastructure. After hacking on it for a day or two, I can now share some of the work I've done in this area. There now exists two new binaries in the Complement repo: perftest and perfgraph. The former will run some tests and output a .json file. The latter will consume these files to generate .svg graphs. The tests performed include:

• Creating a bunch of rooms with different users. (currently 10 users and 50 rooms)
• Joining a bunch of rooms with different users.
• Sending messages into rooms with different users. (currently 100 messages)
• Doing an initial sync for all users.
• Updating the display name of all users.
• Doing an incremental sync for all users.

The metrics are collected using docker stats. This means the entire container is measured, not just the homeserver binary (e.g any daemons or assistive processes are included in the metrics) and includes:

• CPU time consumed
• Memory consumed
• Bytes transmitted/received
• Disk read/writes
• Time taken

Here are some results:

This was a surprising find and probably indicates that Dendrite has a memory leak somewhere when creating events. However, the fun doesn't stop there. We can also use this tool to compare different versions of the same homeserver:

This allows us to quantify any performance improvements we've been working on, and you can clearly see how we're being more efficient with CPU in newer versions. But the fun doesn't stop there either. We can also compare different flavours of the same version of a homeserver:

You can quantify the cost of running sqlite or postgres for your particular installation.

Care must be taken when interpreting results. Lower doesn't always mean better. For example, a low readout on "create_users" may be a cause for concern as it might indicate that the server is not hashing passwords correctly (e.g using bcrypt/scrypt which are designed to consume CPU/memory). Servers which don't implement all of the specification will also be abnormally low on CPU/memory (e.g not having to calculate unread counts or handle push notifications naturally means less work to do so less resources consumed). Furthermore, these tests do not yet test federation, so expensive remote joins are not measured (remote joins require the joining server to check signatures, hashes, etc of a lot of events which doesn't happen for local servers). That being said, I have hopefully illustrated how useful this tool can be for both server developers trying to improve their software and server admins who want to use the right server for their hardware. The graphs are still a work-in-progress and there's a lot more that can be done in this area beyond a few days work, but it's a start.

neilalexander says

Today we've released Dendrite 0.6.5 which contains early push notification support as well as a number of fixes and improvements. This release includes the following changes:

• Early support for push notifications has been added, with support for push rules, pushers, HTTP push gateways and the /notifications endpoint (contributions by danpe, PiotrKozimor and tommie)
• Spaces Summary (MSC2946) is now correctly supported (when msc2946 is enabled in the config)
• All media API endpoints are now available under the /v3 namespace
• Profile updates (display name and avatar) are now sent asynchronously so they shouldn't block the client for a very long time
• State resolution v2 has been optimised further to considerably reduce the number of memory allocations
• State resolution v2 will no longer duplicate events unnecessarily when calculating the auth difference
• The create-account tool now has a -reset-password option for resetting the passwords of existing accounts
• The /sync endpoint now calculates device list changes much more quickly with less RAM used
• The /messages endpoint now lazy-loads members correctly
• Read receipts now work correctly by correcting bugs in the stream positions and receipt coalescing
• Topological sorting of state and join responses has been corrected, which should help to reduce the number of auth problems when joining new federated rooms
• Media thumbnails should now work properly after having unnecessarily strict rate limiting removed
• The roomserver no longer holds transactions for as long when processing input events
• Uploading device keys and cross-signing keys will now correctly no-op if there were no changes
• Parameters are now remembered correctly during registration
• Devices can now only be deleted within the appropriate UIA flow
• The /context endpoint now returns 404 instead of 500 if the event was not found
• SQLite mode will no longer leak memory as a result of not closing prepared statements

Spec compliance, as measured by Sytest, currently sits at:

• Client-server APIs: 76%, up from 65% last time
• Server-server APIs: 95%, up from 94% last time

As always, you can join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite discussion and announcements.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Half-Shot reports

matrix-hookshot reaches 1.2.0

Hey folks, I'm back from holidays and I'm proud to say that hookshot is kicking out release after release. This release is especially large and contains a bounty of new features and fixes. Of note are:

• JIRA Datacenter (On Premise) is now supported.
• You can now configure fine grained permissions for users on the bridge by userId, homeserver domain or room membership (think spaces).
• Generic webhooks has sprouted a versioned API, with v2 allowing for finer control over the output.
• GitHub connections now include the closing comment when issues and PRs are closed.
• GitHub connections will also notify a room when an existing issue has been relabled to one filtered by that room.
• Figma now uses MSC3440 for comment threads.

But seriously go check out the release, there is way more there than I can include in this TWIM post. Happy webhookin, matrix gang!

In case you did not know, Hookshot can be installed via spantaleev's Ansible playbook. In addition to updates for this new release, the role has recently gotten some improvements and fixes by the community, so in case you had issues before, now is the time to try again!

P.S oh and I almost forgot, we rehomed to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-hookshot. This doesn't change much, other than some redirects in your browsers cache.

Half-Shot adds

permissions:
* actor: '*'
  services:
  - level: commands
    service: github
* actor: '!the-internal-element-room:matrix.org'
  services:
  - level: manageConnections
    service: '*'
* actor: '@random-on-the-side-user:homeserver.org'
  services:
  - level: manageConnections
    service: '*'

Allows anyone to run github commands in rooms. User part of the room listed can actually go and create connections to anywhere (we use it internally at $work), and then there is a final random user who gets those permissions because they refuse to join that room :p

matrix-appservice-irc (website)

Node.js IRC bridge for Matrix

Half-Shot reports

matrix-appservice-irc 0.33.0

Two bridge updates from matrix.org in one week? You would be forgiven for thinking it was FOSDEM Christmas.

The highlights are:

• Support splitting users from different homeservers into different IPv6 blocks. We used this at FOSDEM to split attendeeds into a different ILINE.
• Added a new metric clientpool_by_homeserver which lists the states of IRC clients, by the top 25 homeservers. Useful to know who is using your bridge.
• Add support for subscribing to moderation policies. This allows a bridge admin to subscribe to Matrix "ban lists" and filter who can use their bridge.

This release also now requires Node 14.x as Node 12.x will be out of support very soon.

See the changelog for yourself over at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.33.0

Dept of Clients 📱

Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

This week, we've fixed a few annoying issues in NeoChat:

• On platforms with a system tray, NeoChat no quits correctly when the system tray integration is disabled
• Similar state events are now aggregated into a single message (so no more scrolling through "Moderation has changed the access control lists" 🙂)
• Sending messages starting with a ':' works correctly again

We've also improved NeoChat's startup time from cache by a factor of several hundred, depending on the situation

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat says

• Released v1.10.5 and also v1.10.6 as a hotfix for a crash
• Surveyed users and collated feedback from search result ordering for improvements to the new search experience (enable it in Settings -> Labs in production)
• In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
  • Pin drop location sharing has been added
  • Fixed message ordering issues in threads
  • Fixed threads discovery when scrolling back in a room
  • Added a couple of new ways to access pinned messages, in the room header and info panel
  • Improved the reliability of pinned messages with edits

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu announces

• New release, v1.8.3, is out
• Still improving the activity indicator
• Working on missing messages bugs
• Making progress on the registration flow by setting name and avatar
• In development:
  • We will be trying out Spaces on iOS at 16:00 UTC / 17:00 CET on Tuesday, 8th of March. Head over to #element-community-testing:matrix.org to hear the latest on all testing sessions!
  • Live location sharing has started
• In labs:
  • An option to use the last member avatar and name in the timeline

Element Android (website)

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

adam reports

• Our newest release, v1.4.2, is out!
• Progress is being made on fixing “unable to decrypt” errors (UISI) - re-architected legacy code.
• Our language capabilities have expanded with improved Japanese translations (special thanks to the contributor for this!)
• The team is working on process improvements to reduce incoming PR backlog and getting to those faster.
• We’re actively looking into the reported increased memory usage.
  • As always, thank you for feedback and reports, it helps a lot.
• For those using the SDK, we’ve deprecated the main Matrix entrypoints, more information here

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

matrix-streamchat (website)

Matrix powered stream overlay for OBS, to integrate live chat in your favorite (selfhosted) streaming setups.

f0x says

a very simple invite-accepting bot as part of matrix-streamchat to more easily facilitate peeking into rooms over federation. You run one on your guest-access enabled homeserver, invite it to your remote room, and now all guest accounts from your server know they are in fact allowed to publicly read the room over federation without joining themselves. https://git.pixie.town/f0x/matrix-streamchat/src/branch/main/autojoin-bot

Dept of Widgets 🧩

Mjolnir Widget (website)

A widget for moderating with mjolnir. Highly WIP. Use at your own risk!

MTRNord (they/them) reports

Mjölnir Moderation Widget

There have been a few changes to the widget:

• Ability to kick people was added
• Inter font was added to improve readability
• Work on having a setup page for the bot was added which allows to easily add the bot to your room (sets up permissions and invites the bot as required)
• Added support for a state event which tells the widget about "who is the bot?" and "which lists does this bot monitor?" Which also allows you to use the widget without being in the banlist room yourself. (See https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-moderation-widget#use-a-state-event-to-allow-showing-relevant-lists-only-in-the-dropdown for more information)

Dept of VoIP 🤙

Element Call (website)

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

Matthew reports

Element Call has entered beta! Head over to https://call.element.io (formerly matrixvoip.dev) to play with in-browser native Matrix voice/video calling powered by MSC3401, supporting all webrtc-capable mobile & desktop browsers. See all the details over at https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-element-call/

• Offers high quality video calls with around 6 or 7 participants as a small & simple, standalone app that allows anyone to drop into a video conference easily.
• This is beta - please file bugs at https://github.com/vector-im/element-call/issues and be aware that currently all participants need good bandwidth
• This is the first implementation of MSC3401: a spec for secure, federated voice and video conferences.
• Integrations into other clients are coming soon, Hydrogen is working on it right now
• We’ll also be developing a server to mix media streams so calls can scale up to much larger number of participants. The server will only ever see your encrypted media, so calls will stay secure and confidential.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma (website)

A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.

Jonas Platte reports

We're back (to TWIM)! Here's some highlights from the past few months:

• Stronger types for some things:
  • Base64 which ensures you always decode / encode with the appropriate base64 dictionary [@jplatte]
  • TransactionId which is simply a little more explicit than String and easier to generate a random instance of [@jplatte]
• Stable support for lots of previously-unstable functionality that got stabilized upstream as part of the Matrix specification releases v1.1 and v1.2 [@zecakeh]
• Support for versioned endpoints in the client-server API [@ShadowJonathan]
• Rehaul of our module structure to match the client-server API's new versioned endpoints (before: r0::foo::get_bar, after: foo::get_bar::v3) [@ShadowJonathan]
• More fine-grained feature flags for MSC implementations (before: everything behind unstable-pre-spec, after: most things behind dedicated unstable-mscXXXX features) [@zecakeh]
• matrix.to URI parsing [@zecakeh]
• MatrixUri type [@zecakeh]

All of these changes are available in version 0.5.0 which was released about two weeks ago.

Additionally, @zecakeh recently started implementing extensible events and doing some pretty heavy internal refactoring that will make our release process faster and hopefully make contributing to Ruma easier as well.

With all these changes we're very close to supporting all of Matrix v1.1 (and Matrix v1.2 too!), with the only major omission being Secure Secret Storage and Sharing (SSSS). Some work on that was done as far back as last year's GSoC but it was blocked on a medium-sized refactoring of how we handle account data. I'm planning to get that over the finish line over the next weeks.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synatainer (website)

Synapse Maintenance Container – Docker container with tools for synapse & postgres database maintenance

saces announces

Start it without command and let it do its magic :)

What it does by default:

• daily:
  • purge all rooms without local members
  • run the state autocompressor (small setting 500/100)
• weekly:
  • delete old remote media (>90 days)
  • delete old message history from public joinable rooms (>180 days)
• monthly:
  • run the state autocompressor (big setting 1500/300)
  • vacuum the database

Source: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

Compose example: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer/-/snippets/2264828

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix Scribe

JulianF announces

I'm working on a little hobby project, The Matrix Scribe.

The Matrix Scribe helps us re-post or transcribe messages into matrix that we received from somewhere else, posing as different ghost users to represent the original authors.

Scribe will post this:

Ann I'm Ann.

Bob Hello! I'm Bob.

when I write this to @scribe-bot:

@julian /scribe as Ann

@julian I'm Ann.

@julian /scribe as Bob

@julian Hello! I'm Bob.

That is an illustration of the goal. The output part works already; the bot part isn't implemented yet.

Why?

• I want to encourage people to experiment and play with extending Matrix in creative ways.
• As a building block for myself towards building more usual matrix bridges. Scribe is the input half of the matrix half of a bridge, so literally one quarter of a typical matrix bridge.
• I hope that I myself and maybe some other people will find Scribe fun or useful in itself.

If you find this interesting...

• Come and say hello in the matrix room: #matrix-scribe:foad.me.uk
• See the blog post or the project README (similar content in both)

Scribe is not intended to mislead users. It should be deployed in such a way that its use is clear, and require appropriate permissions.

maubot_azuracast

boris reports

a simple bot https://github.com/borisrunakov/maubot_azuracast built with maubot, that you can use to request data from your azuracast self hosted instance. It's not much but ok...

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

J. Ryan Stinnett says

I'll be speaking at the new HYTRADBOI conference (29 Apr) about building collaborative, open software on Matrix. All of the talks sound super interesting, highly recommended! 😄 The talks will be public after the conference as well.

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!