This Week in Matrix

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

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

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

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

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

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) announces

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

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

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

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3859: Add well known media domain proposal

🔗Spec Updates

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

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

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

🔗Random MSC of the Week

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

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

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

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

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

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

Shay announces

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

🔗Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander announces

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

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

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

🔗Homeserver Deployment 📥️

🔗Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace says

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

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

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

🔗Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle announces

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

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

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

🔗Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan announces

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

🔗Element Android (website)

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

Danielle says

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

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict reports

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

🔗ruby-matrix-sdk (website)

Ruby SDK for the Matrix communication protocol

Ananace reports

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

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben says

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

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

🔗Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart.

Nico announces

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

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

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

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

ChristianP says

🔗Six days until Matrix Community Summit Berlin 2022

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

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

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

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

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

cel says

🔗One week until DWeb Camp

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

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

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

Site: https://dwebcamp.org/

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

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

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

🔗Room of the Week 📆

ssorbom ⚡️ announces

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

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

#tea:matrix.org

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

Come join us while the kettle is whistling.

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

🔗Dept of Ping 🏓

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

🔗That's all I know 🏁

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

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

🔗Matrix 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://spec.matrix.org/proposals/.

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3865: User-given attributes for users
• [WIP] MSC3864: User-given attributes for rooms
• MSC3862: event_match (almost) anything

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered FCP this week.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Merged MSCs:

• MSC1197: Content Repository CORP Headers

🔗Spec Updates

The Spec Core Team had another retro this week, and part of what we talked about was how most of the spec PR writing falls to just a few people. Starting this week, we're going to try and diversify that work across the Spec Core Team, both for reducing bus factor and increasing bandwidth of spec PRs. Hopefully the results of that will be noticeable!

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3783: Fixed base64 for SAS verification!

For those that don't know, "SAS verification" refers to the act of two devices verifying each other through the use of Short Authentication Strings (SAS). This is the backbone of emoji verification when you verify with another user or one of your own devices.

It turns out that libolm, the olm and megolm encryption library, originally incorrectly encoded the base64 output of the message authentication code (MAC) calculation, which is a values that's passed between devices. Due to trying to maintain backwards-compatibility with older clients, this has not been fixed in newer clients yet.

This MSC proposes bumping the MAC algorithm identifier (which is agreed upon between devices when verifying) to a something new, which allows newer clients to know when to use the new or old (and incorrect) method of calculating the base64 encoding of MAC values.

As far as I can tell, this has no security implications. It's just unfortunate to have incorrect base64 encoding when interfacing with other, non-libolm, implementations of olm and megolm.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

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

Shay reports

The Synapse team is hard at work making Synapse faster and leaner. Work continues apace on faster room joins over federation, and it seems that the work might land sooner rather than later, although there are no solid dates yet. In other news, profiling work is being done to determine ways to hopefully increase the speed of local room joins and DM creation. Stay tuned for more information in the future on that. Finally, it was an RC release week. Synapse 1.65.0rc2 was released, and it contains some fun features and bugfixes. Check it out!

🔗Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib (website)

Dendrite is a second-generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander says

This week we released Dendrite 0.9.2 which contains the following updates:

• Dendrite now supports history visibility on the /sync, /messages and /context endpoints
  • It should now be possible to view the history of a room in more cases (as opposed to limiting scrollback to the join event or defaulting to the restrictive "join" visibility rule as before)
• The default room version for newly created rooms is now room version 9
• New admin endpoint /_dendrite/admin/resetPassword/{userID} has been added, which replaces the -reset-password flag in create-account
• The create-account binary now uses shared secret registration over HTTP to create new accounts, which fixes a number of problems with account data and push rules not being configured correctly for new accounts
• The internal HTTP APIs for polylith deployments have been refactored for correctness and consistency
• The federation API will now automatically clean up some EDUs that have failed to send within a certain period of time
• The /hierarchy endpoint will now return potentially joinable rooms (contributed by texuf)
• The user directory will now show or hide users correctly
• Send-to-device messages should no longer be incorrectly duplicated in /sync
• The federation sender will no longer create unnecessary destination queues as a result of a logic error
• A bug where database migrations may not execute properly when upgrading from older versions has been fixed
• A crash when failing to update user account data has been fixed
• A race condition when generating notification counts has been fixed
• A race condition when setting up NATS has been fixed (contributed by brianathere)
• Stale cache data for membership lazy-loading is now correctly invalidated when doing a complete sync
• Data races within user-interactive authentication have been fixed (contributed by tak-hntlabs)

This brings our current test compliance figures to:

• Client-server APIs: 90%
• Server-server APIs: 95%

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

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗matrix-appservice-discord (website)

ChristianP reports

Announcing matrix-appservice-discord 3.0.0!

What? Another week, another major release? Yes, we want to make breaking changes obvious, and the bridge now requires Node.js 16+.

The release fixes the outdated yarn.lock file. Thanks to the package maintainers of NixOS to point this out! 👋 Furthermore, mentioning Matrix users in Discord got fixed.

And, for the fans of containers, we've re-added the release of Docker images. 🐳 The URL changed and we don't plan to update halfshot/matrix-appservice-discord on Docker Hub. The image can be pulled from ghcr.io/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord:v3.0.0.

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord/releases/tag/v3.0.0

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

Nheko now shows you a pretty preview for rooms you are trying to join. This uses MSC3266, which you might need to enable in your synapse config, if you want to see more than the roomid of the room you are trying to join. It tries to fall back to the /hierarchy endpoint, but that won't work over federation.

Similarly you can now somewhat edit what rooms are in a space. I grew up with Windows 98, so this is a very nested right click menu. We are still discussing some of the wording choices for the options there, so if you have any opinions about it, feel free to give feedback about it! This is part of the bigger goal to be able to manage your communities from within Nheko, so stay tuned for more features coming in that area.

red_sky (nheko.im) also improved our notifications code on macOS. You can now disable the notification sound in the system settings, which for some reason requires badge permissions to show that option... macOS will always remain a mystery to us! Similarly we fixed the source text for notifications on Windows, which should now not show a stray %1 anymore as well as a few other cleanups.

🔗Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat says

• Ever started a DM with someone, only to get distracted and leave them staring into an empty timeline wondering who you are and what you want. Well, it is no more! In this update new DMs will only notify the person you’re messaging once you’ve sent your first message.
• That’s not the only exciting update in EleWeb/Desktop this week, including the newly extended voice messages! Instead of voice messages capped at 2 minutes, users are now able to send a voice note of up to 15 minutes long. Go forth and record 🎤
• In upcoming releases we’re also looking at how to improve a user’s first few days in Element. We know that it can be daunting to stare at an empty screen and wonder how to get going, which is why we’ve designed and built a checklist for new users. This checklist will help them to get off the ground and messaging friends in no time.

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

• Threads improvements are still very much underway. We have a proof of concept (PoC) for improving notifications that we’re testing to ensure scalability and performance.

🔗Element iOS (website)

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

Doug says

• Our release this week was rejected by Apple. Their feedback? Our info.plist comments do not provide enough context as to why we’re asking for access to things like the camera, photos, or contacts. Never fear! We’ve updated our copy and we’re confident that it’s clearer than ever.
• Also in the upcoming release:
  • Fixing the crashes that some users were running into when switching space.
  • The new in-app notifications now also appear in the notification centre
  • And a bug fix for the rare issue of sending duplicate images to a timeline when sending multiple photos
• We’re also working on changing the layout of our mobile apps, and work is well underway on iOS. We’re excited to share these big changes with you so keep your eyes peeled on our socials and in other TWIM notes.
• Join us over at #element-community-testing:matrix.org on Tuesday 16th August at 12:00 BST to try out the new app layout on iOS! There’s a little bit of setup required so check out the room ahead of time for instructions :)

🔗Element Android (website)

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

Danielle says

• In the upcoming Android release we’ve fixed some crashes; including where the app would crash if a user attempted putting non-ASCII characters in their MXID during account creation.
• Biometric login is now disabled if the device you’re on does not support biometrics.
• We’ve also been working hard on adding unit tests to increase coverage.
• There’s work being done on the modularisation of languages that may help decrease the complexity of translation and move us towards a set of common strings between platforms.
• Join us over at #element-community-testing:matrix.org on Tuesday 16th August at 15:00 BST to try out the new app layout on Android! There’s a little bit of setup needed so check out the room ahead of time for instructions 🙂

🔗Cinny (website)

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

ajbura says

🔗v2.1: Custom emojis and stickers (Birthday edition)

Hello everyone,

On July 28 project marked its one-year milestone. During this time it has grown at an unexpected rate, both in terms of development as well as popularity. This is great news, so let's celebrate that with this birthday edition.

In this update, we have added Custom emoji and sticker support to Cinny. Custom emoji and stickers were not in our roadmap but that's the surprise. Aren't they cool? Apart from the emoji and stickers, there are tons of other features such as Blurhash, Mark entire space as read, user pills, and bug fixes. Check out the release page for a detailed changelog.

In the case of the roadmap, we are still on that, work on the "Rich input editor" is in progress and will come as the next release. Stay tuned for that!

The update is live on https://app.cinny.in and the desktop app can be downloaded from Github.

Pro-Tip: Join #cinny-space:matrix.org to check out some cool sticker packs. There are some great packs in #stickers-and-emojis:pixie.town too.

Thank you. See you all next time!

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗libkazv (website)

tusooa reports

We released a bugfix v0.2.1 . Thanks to nannanko who discovered and fixed this bug. There are also docker images.

🔗0.2.1

• Fix crash when receiving a redacted encrypted event. https://lily-is.land/kazv/libkazv/-/commit/98870fa04fa78361f5092cd77f88895e4a228d34

🔗ruby-matrix-sdk (website)

Ruby SDK for the Matrix communication protocol

Ananace says

A new version of the Ruby Matrix SDK has now been released, adding a new abstraction in the form of a Sinatra-inspired bot DSL, as well as general fixes and improvements. Making a Ruby-based Matrix bot can now be as simple as;

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'matrix_sdk/bot'

command(:praise, desc: 'Gives you praise', only: -> { room.user_can_send? client.mxid, 'm.reaction' }) do
  room.send_notice "#{sender}, you tha' man!"
  room.send_event 'm.reaction', {
    'm.relates_to': {
      rel_type: 'm.annotation',
      event_id: event[:event_id],
      key: '👍️'
    }
  }
end

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker.

Slavi reports

Thanks to Charles Wright, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now has optional experimental Conduit homeserver support for new installations. This comes as a follow-up to the playbook getting Dendrite support earlier this year.

For more details, see our Conduit support changelog entry.

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗One week until FrOSCon (website)

ChristianP announces

Next weekend, Sat 20th and Sun 21st, FrOSCon will be taking place. It's a conference about open source software near Bonn, Germany.

There will be some program around Matrix, though I'm still looking for volunteers to help me with a stand and DevRoom.

For the stand we want a small group to explain Matrix to others. For the DevRoom we want some talks and workshops. Anyone's welcome to ask me for more info or to get involved.

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

🔗matrix-locust (website)

cvwright says

Announcing matrix-locust, a new tool for load testing Matrix homeservers, based on the Python load testing framework Locust. It's very early days for this project, but we're already discovering some interesting results. There isn't an official tagged "release" yet, but anyone interested in this topic is encouraged to stop by #load-testing:matrix.org and say hello.

🔗Room of the Week 📆

ssorbom ⚡️ says

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

This week, we are highlighting: #coffee-discuss:matrix.org

A place to discuss buying, brewing, and drinking everyone's favorite morning beverage of choice! I had no idea there was so much Nuance to this topic until I joined this room . For example, did you know there was a correct way to distribute coffee grounds when you first pour to ensure maximum flavor? Neither did I! Whether you are new to the world of coffee drinking, or a seasoned connoisseur of morning Joe, this room has something for everyone who loves coffee.

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

🔗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) says

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

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3861: Matrix architecture change to delegate authentication via OIDC
• MSC3860: Add media download redirect proposal
• MSC3859: Add well known media domain proposal
• MSC3857: Welcome messages

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are currently in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC3818: Copy room type on upgrade

Merged MSCs:

• MSC2832: HS -> AS authorization header
• MSC3818: Copy room type on upgrade
• MSC3844: Remove unused policy room sharing mechanism
• MSC3786: Add a default push rule to ignore m.room.server_acl events

🔗Spec Updates

This week saw the merge of three MSCs from first-time MSC authors! MSC3818 (Copy room type on upgrade) from @Mikaela and both MSC3786 (Add a default push rule to ignore m.room.server_acl events) and MSC3827 (Filtering of /publicRooms by room type) from @SimonBrandner. Nice work to both of them!

🔗Random MSC of the Week

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

A bundle of small quality-of-life changes to the .well-known server and client endpoints. Removing some ambiguities, replacing old and deprecated endpoints as well as a potential size cap suggestion.

Looks like a good contender for one to push over the line given a bit of review and response!

tulir reports

TWIM: someone in #matrix:matrix.org complained that the image in the spec section is always the same, so I made this gif (actually webp) out of all those images:

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗hghs (website)

thejhh reports

We've started work on our HG HomeServer written in pure TypeScript, compilable as a single JS file, with no dependencies except NodeJS. It's intended for a special use cases when Matrix is used as a backbone for custom apps. It's lightweight, minimal and for the moment isn't even planned to support full Matrix spec. We might make it possible to run it on browser later. https://github.com/heusalagroup/hghs

🔗Synapse (website)

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

Shay reports

Another week, another release! Synapse 1.64.0 was released this week, featuring a host of new features, bugfixes, and internal changes aimed at reducing memory usage, increasing performance, and improving the developer experience. Check out the full list of changes here. In addition, work continues on faster room joins. The goal gets closer every day!

🔗Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander announces

This week we released Dendrite 0.9.0 and Dendrite 0.9.1. There are quite a few big changes, including an all-new caching model and several optimisations. This release also moves our baseline supported Go version up to Go 1.18.

The following changes are included across both releases:

• Dendrite now uses Ristretto for managing in-memory caches
  • Should improve cache utilisation considerably over time by more intelligently selecting and managing cache entries compared to the previous LRU-based cache
  • Defaults to a 1GB cache size if not configured otherwise
  • The estimated cache size in memory and maximum age can now be configured with new configuration options to prevent unbounded cache growth
• Added support for serving the /.well-known/matrix/client hint directly from Dendrite
  • Configurable with the new configuration option
• Refactored membership updater, which should eliminate some bugs caused by the membership table getting out of sync with the room state
• The User API is now responsible for sending account data updates to other components, which may fix some races and duplicate account data events
• Optimised database query for checking whether a remote server is allowed to request an event over federation without using anywhere near as much CPU time (PostgreSQL only)
• Database migrations have been refactored to eliminate some problems that were present with goose and upgrading from older Dendrite versions
• Media fetching will now use the /v3 endpoints for downloading media from remote homeservers
• HTTP 404 and HTTP 405 errors from the client-facing APIs should now be returned with CORS headers so that web-based clients do not produce incorrect access control warnings for unknown endpoints
• Some preparation work for full history visibility support
• Upgrades a dependency which caused issues building Dendrite with Go 1.19
• The roomserver will no longer give up prematurely after failing to call /state_ids
• Removes the faulty room info cache, which caused of a number of race conditions and occasional bugs (including when creating and joining rooms)
• The media endpoint now sets the Cache-Control header correctly to prevent web-based clients from hitting media endpoints excessively
• The sync API will now advance the PDU stream position correctly in all cases (contributed by sergekh2)
• The sync API will now delete the correct range of send-to-device messages when advancing the stream position
• The device list changed key in the /sync response should now return the correct users
• A data race when looking up missing state has been fixed
• The /send_join API is now applying stronger validation to the received membership event
• Fixes a crash that could occur during event redaction
• The /members endpoint will no longer incorrectly return HTTP 500 as a result of some invite events
• Send-to-device messages should now be ordered more reliably and the last position in the stream updated correctly
• Parsing of appservice configuration files is now less strict (contributed by Kab1r)
• The sync API should now identify shared users correctly when waking up for E2EE key changes
• The federation /state endpoint will now return a HTTP 403 when the state before an event isn't known instead of a HTTP 500
• Presence timestamps should now be calculated with the correct precision
• A race condition in the roomserver's room info has been fixed
• A race condition in the sync API has been fixed

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

🔗Homeserver Deployment 📥️

🔗Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace announces

This week has seen the usual updates to my Helm Charts - with element-web being updated to 1.11.2 and matrix-synapse to 1.64.0. Additionally, the matrix-synapse chart now also allows for adding entirely custom .well-known data - along with an example on how to use that for MSC1929.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗matrix-appservice-discord

ChristianP announces

This bridge connects users on Matrix and Discord – or other platforms, if combined with other bridges. Earlier this year the community bridge has been adopted by the Matrix.org bridge team to give it some attention. Its most recent update dated back to December 2020 and some fixes waited for a new release.

Well, here it is! v2.0.0 Its breaking changes are the requirement of NodeJS 14 or newer and the usage of yarn instead of npm install. Furthermore, the update introduces a changelog and rolls out the guidelines we use for developing other matrix.org bridges.

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord/releases/tag/v2.0.0

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat reports

• Version 1.11.2 is out!
• „Start DM only on first message“ has landed on develop. Changing the DM flow from invite → message to message & invite at the same time. If you want to see it live, join our testing session at 12:00 BST on Tuesday
• New user onboarding experience is getting closer to release!
• You can also now disable sending read receipts on develop, coming out on 16 August in a release
• Finished porting end to end tests to Cypress! Also started looking into adding support for accessibility testing
• Final comment period for our new code style is over. Next up is updating our contribution guidelines to include changes
• We finished the task around improving tracking of unused code to reduce maintenance burden

🔗Element iOS (website)

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

Doug announces

• Version 1.8.24 is available on the App Store with our new Sign Up and Sign In flows. The update is rolling out slowly and should be available to everyone by Monday.
• The work on our new app layout is coming along nicely with much of it merged into the repo (but disabled behind a build flag).
• In-app notifications will now also be delivered to Notification Centre.
• Continuous improvements are being made to the Live Location sharing feature.
• Integration tests are now run for every PR on matrix-ios-sdk more than doubling the reported test coverage!

🔗Element Android (website)

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

adam announces

• 1.4.31 is rolling out which includes the new and improved FTUE onboarding experience along with fixes for markdown lists no longer always starting from 1 and html entities showing up in messages.
• The new app layout is starting to materialise with PRs available on github for anyone interested in having a sneak peek!
• We’re continuing to make improvements to Live Location sharing and cross signing verification as well as investigating performance issues.

🔗Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

🔗Effektio (website)

ben reports

Development marches forward, with the focus on getting chat into a usable state and task's up as the first MVP app on top: Effektio now support sending multiple images at once in chat, has seen fixes to the chat in widescreen mode, and now support markdown for chat messages. Meanwhile device verification is drawing to a close with a few remaining UI fixes being implement and the state machine for tasks being fleshed out slowly but steadily.

📰 You want updates more frequently and close to when they actually happen? Join our Effektio Matrix News room, discuss general aspect in our foyer or hang out with the devs in our tech channel.

🔗Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr reports

After a short vacation, I've done some new work on populus-viewer. Most of this has been UX and bugfixes, but I've added one new feature that I wanted to share. MSC3775: Markup Locations for Audiovisual Media gives a spec for annotating audio and video on matrix, but it also allows you to annotate images. So, for completeness sake, I've added support for annotating image files in Populus! This might be useful for discussing publication layouts, product designs, or for teaching art history. So populus can now annotate: video, audio, images and pdfs.

As always, if you want to learn more, follow populus development, or discuss the future of decentralized social annotation on Matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.

🔗Dept of Widgets 🧩

🔗matrix-widget-api

Robin says

matrix-widget-api v1.0.0 was released yesterday, reflecting the fact that we're not expecting any big changes to the library's architecture for the foreseeable future, and that it's more or less ready for wider use.

It also comes with a couple of new features ✨ for widget authors: Sending and receiving to-device messages with MSC3819, and getting TURN servers from the client with MSC3846. Together, these features enable some new complex use-cases, such as doing VoIP from inside a widget. See Matrix Live for a preview of what that looks like with Element Call! 📹️

This is as good a time as any to mention that matrix-widget-api doesn't have to just be for web-based apps. If you're building mobile apps with Matrix and want to make use of widgets, running matrix-widget-api inside a web view to liaison with the actual widget can make it a lot simpler to start supporting widget API features. If you're curious, watch Element iOS+Android for upcoming examples of this.

🔗Dept of VoIP 🤙

🔗Element Call (website)

Dave reports

• This week we've been building on the initial work on the pion call server (SFU) from Sean, and have made our very first call through it with Element Call! It's still very early and there's still lots of work to do, but this will allow Element Call to scale up to much higher numbers of people.
• The VoIP team are also looking after widgets now, and in our quest to embed Element Call into the Element apps, we've hit the milestone of releasing matrix-widget-api 1.0.0. We're also making great progress towards embedding into Element Web.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben reports

This week saw a few major improvements on the dev-ex of the Rust SDK (among others): support for refresh tokens landed; we have a setup for integration tests against an actual synapse instance now (and started writing tests); our docs for main now contain the js bindings, too; event handlers can now be unregistered and we've added an API for room specific event handlers. Further more, we've refactored the examples (now to be found in /examples rather than some sub-sub-directory no one finds) and created two more: getting-started combines the autojoin and command-example with a lot more additional inline comment to explain what is going on and custom-events showcases how to use the sdk and ruma types to send any custom events (in that case a ping-ack example) over matrix!

This was also a week of fighting the ci. After the integration tests landed, coverage reporting broke and an investigation was kicked off to check whether llvm-cov is in a usable state for us by now (it is not), but a fix was found. We've also started regretting adding npm-based workflows in our repo, as we've found ourselves at the end of an upgrade bug and the saw CI failing without us changing anything :shakes_fist_at_sky: . A fix was found quickly by pinning a sub-dependency. On a similar note, we've postponed merging the kotlin bindings until the android team is back on it and available to answer some questions we have, and the wasm-js bindings showed build failures on CI, which the original author will have to take a look at after coming back from vacation - thus delaying crypto-js a bit further.

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

🔗Polyjuice (website)

Elixir libraries related to the Matrix communications protocol.

uhoreg announces

It's been a while since I've made an update on Polyjuice Client Test. Since the last update:

• several more tests have been added
• there have been some some front-end improvements
• I've also improved the documentation, done some refactoring, and added some helper/utility modules to make things clearer. My goal is to make it easier for people who don't know Elixir to be able to read and write tests without running away screaming.
• compatibility with some Matrix clients has been improved
• added some functions to make it easy for tests to completely override Matrix endpoints

I'm also happy to say that Polyjuice Client Test has helped find bugs in some clients, which have since been fixed.

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

🔗Matrix Public Archive (website)

madlittlemods (Eric Eastwood) announces

This week I'm showing off an early look at the Matrix public archive. As the name suggests, it acts as an archive of history for your world-readable Matrix rooms. This allows you to view historical content day-by-day and jump back years ago to see what your Matrix room was up to.

More importantly, it also allows Google to do the same thing so you’ll probably start finding Matrix content from your favorite search engine and be able to harness the massive knowledge base stored in Matrix. Imagine seeing Matrix logs instead of Stack Overflow answers when googling questions! The new portal into the Matrix ecosystem 🌌

You can also see this demoed in this week's Matrix Live video (at the top of the page).

Under the hood, we use the MSC3030 /timestamp_to_event endpoint to fetch the messages for a given day and then we sever-side render the events with the Hydrogen SDK. Re-using Hydrogen gets us pretty and native(to Element) looking UI and keeps the maintenance burden of supporting new event types in Hydrogen.

If you want to follow what’s going on and see how it's coming along, you can checkout the project on GitHub, https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-public-archive

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗Matrix Registration Bot (website)

moanos [he/him] says

Thanks to @lifeofbrian:justprojects.de and @ben:rs485.network the Docker image of the bot was shrunk from 406.28 MB to 69 MB (nice)! You can get the new image from Dockerhub or install it via the matrix-docker-ansible-deploy.

🔗Dept of Guides 🧭

jbara announces

I was able to to host a matrix-synapse server on termux app on an android device. I documented the process on termux-synapse github repo And started working on a script that automates the process (final commit is being currently tested before pushing). It was a "for fun" type of thing. But I can see it being useful for people who do not have access to a raspberry pi (such as myself at the moment) to use as a small homeserver. It can hold up in 1 to 1 Direct Messages and in small rooms.

🔗Room of the Week 📆

ssorbom ⚡️ reports

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

This week, we are highlighting: #libregaming-games:tchncs.de

A matrix space dedicated to finding all of the free open source games, engines, and assets in the Matrix world so that you don't have to. Helpfully organized, and well maintained, it is the Premier stop for open source gaming on The Matrix Network!

If you know of a room that you would like to see highlighted, please visit https://matrix.to/#/!bIyiUUnriVoHtYzuPS:fachschaften.org to let us know of the room that you would like to spotlight.

🔗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 📜

TravisR says

Hello everyone! For this week's spec update you get me, Travis, instead of anoa (sorry). The heart of Matrix is the specification, modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals - learn more at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals/

Be sure to read the Spec Core Team (SCT) section in today's update for some exciting news about Matrix though - this has a good chance of affecting how the MSC process works in the future.

🔗MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3844: Remove unused policy room sharing mechanism
• MSC3828: Content Repository CORP Headers
• MSC3827: Filtering of /publicRooms by room type
• MSC2153: Add a default push rule to ignore m.reaction events

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3818: Copy room type on upgrade (merge)
• MSC3255: Use SRV record for homeservers discovery by clients (close)
• MSC2836: Threading (close)
• Threading API (close)

New MSCs:

• MSC3856: Threads List API
• MSC3852: Expose user agent information on Device

🔗Spec Core Team

The SCT has been powering through MSCs for the second week in a row, using a new internal process to encourage activity and hopefully keep momentum going. If there's an MSC you think should be on the agenda, please visit the #sct-office:matrix.org and raise it for consideration 🙂

We've also been at IETF 114 to talk about MIMI - an initiative to define a standard for messaging interoperability inspired by the DMA. Matrix appears to fit perfectly into this use-case, so we've been talking with various folks involved to ensure Matrix is on the radar, including preparing our own Internet-Draft to demonstrate how it could work. MIMI is not currently a working group within the IETF, but the expectation is that it will be soon - we look forward to this happening, and are eager to contribute to the process here - or proposing Matrix itself to IETF as an initiative in its own right.

Watch this space for updates, or visit #matrix-spec:matrix.org to ask questions 🙂

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3554: Extensible Events - Translatable Text!

This MSC covers an Extensible Events (MSC1767) schema definition for translatable text! This would allow a client to send a message in multiple languages, with the receiver able to choose which language they're prefer to see the message in (ideally falling back to a default or machine translation if their preferred language was not available).

Like other MSCs that rely on Extensible Events, MSC1767 will need to land before this MSC can. But until then, it's great to see all of the wonderful things this feature will allow Matrix to do!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

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

Shay says

Greetings! We have been hard at work on Synapse this week. Work on faster room joins continues. In addition, Synapse 1.64.0rc2 was released. Notable features include:

• support for room version 10
• per-room rate limiting for room joins
• support for Implicit TLS for sending emails and much more, as well as a number of bugfixes, improvements to the documentation, and other changes to make Synapse leaner, faster, and generally more awesome.

🔗Construct Server

Jason Volk reports

This week The Construct server runs on Alpine Linux using freshly cut docker images building on the 0.7 release announced last week. A few images are available for preview while a more complete matrix is filled out. I am proud to announce to TWIM that Construct offers the most compact docker image for a Matrix server at just under 15 MiB; the only caveat is that media thumbnailing won't be available.

There's still a lot of room for optimization and docker experts to critique! Feel free to join the discussion at #construct:zemos.net and check out https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct today!

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle announces

• It’s holiday season but that won’t slow us down! We’ve been hard at work fixing defects and improving features.
• Our recently released new search experience is continuing to be improved. This week we’ve added more accessibility, so it can be helpful to all.
• We’ve completely finished the migration of our tests.
• There’s a new “use case” screen for users who sign up, it asks folks who they'll talk to the most on Element and, in the future, that will help us to tailor the experience.

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

• Video rooms continue to improve. Check it out!

🔗Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan reports

• It’s an exciting week for both our mobile teams as we’re ready to release our new authentication flow! If you’ve been reading TWIM for a while you’ll know that we’ve been working hard, across all Element teams, to improve our onboarding experience. Part of this work on iOS was a new Create Account flow.
  • We’re rolling the changes out slowly, so don’t panic if you don’t see the new experience yet!
• In even more exciting news, our test coverage has increased with a big bump. We’ve gone from 12% to 51%!
• We’ve also continued to make updates and improvements to our location sharing feature.
• On the ElementX front we have our first proof of concept for sliding sync (sync v3) working and we’ve almost finished setting up snapshot and integration testing. We also have Rust logs, a new authentication service and performance tests incoming.
• Finally, the account deactivation button has had a change of copy - this keeps us inline with Apple guidelines around deleting and deactivating accounts.

🔗Element Android (website)

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

Danielle says

• Our new Nightly releases are now available and allowing us to catch any bugs or regressions even faster - exciting!

• It will soon be easier than ever to create an account on Element, so if you’ve been waiting for an update before you recommend us to others, it’s nearly time! We’ll be rolling these changes out slowly over the next week or so.

  • Alongside the new create account flow will be an updated sign in and reset password experience. Check it out and let us know what you think.

• Also in this release we’ve added a “match system settings” to the Font size screen.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict says

Trixnity 2.2.0 has been released.

• Mac builds are enabled, which means, that olm is bundled into macOS and iOS builds too. So no need to build olm yourself anymore.
• trixnity-crypto has been introduced, which contains the matrix e2e-encryption stuff and was previously located in trixnity-client. The relocation allows you to possibly use this in e. g. appservices. Key trust level calculation, key backup, key verification will be moved into it too.
• client: basic event relation support has been added to be prepared for the next matrix spec
• client: added server discovery
• updated to kotlin 1.7
• some bug fixes

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben reports

It's been a week of quite, constant progress on many fronts, most not that visible to the outside observer. For once, the progress on integration sliding sync into element-x for iOS has taken up speed, with many smaller bug fixes and additional features exposed through the FFI being added and performance optimisations. After the internal jack-in testing tool, this is the first actual trial of sliding sync for rust (and after the js-implementation, only the second client to actually use sliding sync overall)—and it has been tremendous. Latest tests put the loading time to first view on the first 20-ish rooms at a 150ms range 🎉.

More visible to the keen observers of the repository has been that we've updated the event_handler API to allow removing existing handlers, an important step towards implementing completion guaranteeing API calls, and that we've support for custom encrypted events now.

👉️ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi reports

Thanks to MdotAmaan's efforts, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports bridging to Discord via the mautrix-discord bridge. See our Setting up Mautrix Discord bridging documentation page for getting started.

Note: this is a new Discord bridge. The playbook still retains Discord bridging via matrix-appservice-discord and mx-puppet-discord. You're free too use the bridge that serves you better, or even all three of them (for different users and use-cases).

Slavi reports

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports bridging to Kakaotalk via matrix-appservice-kakaotalk - a bridge based on node-kakao (now unmaintained) and some mautrix-facebook code. Thanks to hnarjis for helping us add support for this!

See our Setting up Appservice Kakaotalk bridging documentation to get started.

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗A New HOPE (NYC) concluded (website)

cel says

Thanks Element Matrix Services (EMS) for hosting our homeserver (hope.net)!

Previously: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/07/22/this-week-in-matrix-2022-07-22#hope-conference

See you in 2024, hopefully!

🔗May Container Hackers (MCH) concluded

https://mch2022.org/

MCH2022 in the Netherlands successfully occurred!

MCH2022 has an IRC-bridged Matrix room: https://matrix.to/#/#_oftc_#mch2022:matrix.org

HOPE and MCH had a bridge room/tent: https://wiki.mch2022.org/Hope#HOPE-MCH_Portal

See you in 2026 or so!

🔗Matrix Summit schedule

Yan says

By the end of last week we received a bunch of proposal for talks and workshops for the conference. It were all together 32 proposals and we accepted almost all of them.

We released already multiple versions of our schedule. The current version is 0.5 html json

There is even some space left for late comers. In case you decide spontaneously to come and want to talk let us know, we will find a way.

🔗Tickets

You now get tickets for the summit for the fantastic price of 0 euro. We like to know in advance how many people will come. If you have already a ticket and can’t come please let us know. So we can give them to people on the waiting list.

🔗Sharing is caring

I case you have a room or ride to share or you are looking for transport or accommodation please visit our #matrix-summit-sharing:c-base.org.

ChristianP reports

If you'd rather listen to Yan and me talking about the Matrix Summit and its schedule, we recorded a podcast episode for you to get informed on the go.

https://fyyd.de/episode/9085227 (German)

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

🔗Effektio (website)

ben reports

The team of effektio, the mobile-first organizing app build on matrix, is happy to announce the new website. Aside from the revamped team section, we are particularly excited about the new product progress page, as the questions "what are you building exactly, and how far are you with the progress" are commonplace. With the product page we hope to provide more clarity what we mean, in actual features, when we say "organize yourself, your friends, family, clubs and all other communities from the palm of your hand". Each feature also links right into the specific section of the Github project, so you can get an unobstructed view of the actual progress happening—and contribute, if you like.

🔗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 🎙

An episode with the maintainers of Threematrix, the 100% Rust bridge between Matrix and Threema!

In addition to that, Open Tech Will Save Us will be back on Wednesday 27 at 16:00 UTC! The topic will be "what makes a platform", or more specifically: "are Linux or the web platforms". There are many fascinating topics to discuss, such as "is it possible to create an app for Linux" (it's not as simple as it sounds), "why are some people against theming?", or "why do developers want to use platforms".

And to answer that, who other than the Linux desktop most advanced projects GNOME and KDE, and people working on Matrix, the protocol that wants to become as unmissable as the web itself, and more specifically on a deeper integration of widgets with Matrix clients?

You can join #otwsu:matrix.org to ask your questions on July 27 during the live show, and bookmark either https://stream.matrix.org or the YouTube stream.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

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

🔗MSC Status

MSC status updates from the past week!

New MSCs:

• MSC3852: Expose user agent information on Device
• MSC3851: Allow custom room presets when creating a room
• MSC3849: Observations and Reinforcement
• MSC3848: Introduce errcodes for specific event sending failures

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3844: Remove unused policy room sharing mechanism (merge)
• MSC3828: Content Repository CORP Headers (merge)
• MSC3827: Filtering of /publicRooms by room type (merge)
• MSC2153: Add a default push rule to ignore m.reaction events (close)

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC3786: Add a default push rule to ignore m.room.server_acl events
• MSC3267: Reference relations
• MSC2832: HS -> AS authorization header
• MSC2676: Message editing
• MSC2285: Private read receipts

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3429: Individual room preview API

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged to the spec this week.

🔗Spec Updates

Lots of MSCs moving through the pipeline in the last couple weeks! As always, be sure to take a look at those in Final Comment Period above - only a few days left to comment on them before they merge/close!

Otherwise the Spec Core Team is looking to try and get a handle on the current MSC backlog - this means taking a look at all of the open MSCs, triaging them and organising them into a loose priority queue. This is likely to take quite a while to do and may not ever be complete - but should give us and everyone else an idea of what's expected to land in upcoming Matrix spec versions.

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3217: Soft kicks!

The idea this MSC proposes is to add a possible m.softkick field to room membership events of type "leave", which if present will inform clients that the user has only been kicked temporarily, and they are welcome to rejoin.

This helps with the IRC bridging use case laid out in the MSC.

ChristianP says

🔗Offline Matrix Spec for Dash and Zeal

I use Zeal – an offline documentation browser using the same docsets as Dash for MacOS. It allows me to browse MDN, ExpressJS docs, NodeJS docs and other languages and formats while not relying on the Internet when traveling. They have "208 awesome docsets", and I guess you know which one I'm missing – or used to miss, until I packaged it myself.

Introducing: The Matrix Spec for Dash and Zeal

If you use Dash or Zeal, give it a try. Let me know, if you find pages that are not working. I hope that Matrix will be included in their list of user-contributed docsets.

Note, this is not an official release distribution of the Matrix Spec. Enjoy at your own risk of this breaking or not getting updated.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Construct Server

Jason Volk says

Construct server has been refurbished to support the Ubuntu 22.04+ platform. I am happy to report that Construct performs faster and more reliably than ever before. It's been a long time since the last update due to COVID-related health problems, but development has picked up again. I'd like to thank @manu_kamath:matrix.org and @uis246 for their contributions, and of course Yan Minari for keeping things together over the past year. Additional work implementing the latest MSC's will continue in the coming weeks so I encourage everyone to show support in #construct:zemos.net and contribute if possible.

Several enhancements have taken place this release, so I'd just like to highlight one here: The media database has been eliminated and has been integrated into the main events database. Construct did always store media in rooms by splitting files into blocks, but it offloaded the content block to separate storage leaving just a hash of the content in the matrix event. Construct now stores blocks directly in event content via hardware-accelerated base64 encoding. The result performs better because there's only one database query instead of two, and the room can be shared between servers in a Construct Cluster.

Construct is a performant and robust Matrix Server and Natural Language Processor. Please be mindful of any laws in your country which require registering your instance for commercial use.

https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct

🔗Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier announces

This week we've released Synapse 1.63! This release includes a few features such as better rate limiting for invites, as well as experimental support for MSC3827 which allows filtering public room search results by room type. The latter will, once stabilised, allow for better discoverability of public spaces since it will allow clients to specifically look for them. Read all about this new release on the matrix.org blog: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/07/20/synapse-1-63-released

We've also spent some time clarifying documentation and prompts about the usage statistics Synapse automatically reports if configured with report_stats set to true. The new documentation page lists exactly what is reported and how this reporting works. This clarification work included removing the use of "anonymised" when referring to this feature to make it clearer that, even though Synapse does not report identifiable information about users and rooms, it does report the homeserver's name (i.e. the value of the server_name configuration setting).

🔗Homeserver Deployment 📥️

🔗Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace says

Since people seemed to like seeing updates on my Helm Charts; matrix-synapse got bumped to 1.63.0 and then 1.63.1, as well as receiving some expanded handling of workers - all worker instances now come with both startup- and liveness probes attached by default.

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗Threematrix (website)

A bridge to the Threema messenger

Moritz Stückler says

Say hello to a new bridge in Matrix universe (or rather fediverse): Threematrix. As you might've guessed from the name: It's a bridge between the Threema messenger and Matrix. Threema is a very popular messenger in europe, especially in German speaking countries (it's a swiss company). We've just released our very first alpha version – it's a very simple bot bridge for now, but we have quite a lot of improvements on our todo list. Currently, it only works with the (paid) Threema Gateway API product, but we're trying to talk to Threema to come up with a more affordable hobbyist pricing model for bridge use. Feel free to follow our releases in the GitHub repo, follow our Mastodon account and join our Matrix room to stay up to date or ask any questions.

P.S.: We're two freelance developers and we're being funded by the German Prototype Fund program. If you're an OSS developer in Germany, check them out!

🔗matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Andrew F says

Hookshot 1.8.1

Hello all -- since our last TWIM announcement, Hookshot has been updated from 1.7.2 to 1.8.1. Aside from usability fixes and documentation improvements, there have been some notable changes to generic webhook support:

• XML webhook payloads are now decoded instead of being treated as blobs of text. This means they render more nicely as room messages, and more importantly, it allows them to work with custom JavaScript transformations. (#410)
• GET requests for generic webhooks are no longer supported by default. For details, refer to the documentation. (#397)

As usual, visit #hookshot:half-shot.uk to follow the development in real-time.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Quadrix (website)

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

JFA says

Quadrix v1.2.2 is now available for Linux (https://snapcraft.io/quadrix, https://flathub.org/apps/details/chat.quadrix.Quadrix) and Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=chat.quadrix.android). Other platforms will soon follow.

New in this release:

• Spanish translation!!!
• Fix for the Jitsi Meet link displayed to non-Quadrix users (thanks to @alpabrz:matrix.org)

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

🔗Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

I got a fantastic release for you to day and it won't fit inside a normal sized update so without further ado, here are the highlights:

• Notification counts 💯 (LorenDB, d42)
  • You can now see notification counts in more spaces, like your task bar or in the community sidebar.
  • For better work-life balance you can hide the notification counts on a per space basis.
  • For notification counts in the task bar your desktop environment needs to support the Unity protocol.
  • Notifications are also preserved across restarts now.
• Moderation 👮‍♀️
  • You can now change the permissions and aliases of a room.
  • Permissions are shown in the Memberlist
  • A new /redact command to redact an event or all messages by a user.
  • You can now provide a reason when inviting, knocking, kicking and banning users.
• Faster startup ⚡
  • On at least some systems startup should now be instant even with thousands of rooms.
• Encryption improvements 🛡️
  • Support for the most recent changes to Matrix E2EE including fallback keys, no longer relying on the sender_key.
  • Compatibility and stability improvements when dealing with different base64 encodings and when verifying users and devices.
  • Fetch the whole online key backup at the click of a button.
• Integration with external apps 🗺️ (LorenDB)
  • Nheko now has a D-Bus API, which you can enable in the settings menu.
  • This allows applications like KRunner or Rofi to list and switch between rooms.

If you are reading this a bit early, the release builds might still be cooking, but they should be available in the next few hours. There about 40 more features and at least 30 bugfixes waiting for you, so checkout the release here: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/releases/tag/v0.10.0 . I'd like to thank as always everyone who contributed to this release, it has been a pleasure to work with you folks and I hope I will see a few of you in the next release as well.

As you might be able to tell, moderation features were a big topic this release. But they are clearly not done yet and I expect more of those to land in the future now that Nheko is fairly mature. There are also a few other cool features planned, so while this release is exciting, there will always be more! Same bad client, same bad... wait, this is not my outro!

Please give this release a whirl and tell us how you like it in #nheko:nheko.im!

🔗Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat says

• We’ve made more improvements to the new search
• Added a new emoji effect for 💝 which you can also send with a /hearts command in the composer
• CicadaCinema and luixxiul have submitted more layout polishes to the app
• Frequently used emojis will appear at the top of the autocomplete suggestions in the composer
• Meanwhile, work continues on message favouriting and live location sharing
• Lazy Loading tests have now been migrated to Cypress. We are coming closer to finishing porting.
• Code style guide is now in final commenting period
• This week’s release (1.11.1) has been delayed until next Tuesday while we fix some last minute issues

🔗Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan announces

• Version 1.8.23 (with in-app notifications!) is now available on the AppStore
• The new first time user experience is getting very close to release
• Good progress is continuing to be made on the new home screen layout
• We can now silence unwanted push notifications, dare I say, finally!
• We have started experimenting with adopting Sync V3 in ElementX
• And, as always, we have fixed various bugs including edited messages not showing the right text

🔗Element Android (website)

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

benoit announces

• Release 1.4.28 has been dropped, to give us time to fix the regression and performance issue added when key share history was worked on. The next RC 1.4.30 will be done next week as usual.
• We have started to work on using the new Realm Kotlin SDK (we are using the legacy Java SDK at the moment): it should improve the stability of the app (and so the crash free session) and improve devX. Nearly all the possible blocking points have been handled. This will force us to use suspend methods, which will be useful for ElementX.
• Latest tweaks on FTUE have been merged on develop. We will iterate on a few things, but we are close to releasing the feature! New wordings for FTUE are waiting for translations on Weblate. Thanks to all the contributors!
• We have set up a nightly build using Firebase app distribution. We keep it internal for the moment, we will see in the future if we want to open it to the community.

🔗Open Super dApp (Android)

Brendan A. Miller reports

New project! open-super-dapp-android is a fully open source, open standard, decentralized "super app" including a secure, encrypted Matrix compatible messenger based off of the Element Messenger, and an Ethereum crypto wallet and web3 browser based off of Alpha Wallet. Our mission is to foster, and provide access to, a decentralized and secure digital commons for all. Github repo: https://github.com/2gatherproject/open-super-dapp-android

OSD is a downstream project of Element, aiming to provide the functionalities of a "super app" like WeChat, just as an open, distributed and not-for-profit app instead of a proprietary, closed and for-profit one.

This software is pre-alpha, actively seeking contributors, donors and maintainers/leaders. Get in on the ground floor and help build something amazing!

Currently, Open Super dApp builds and runs with full functionality of the Element messenger and Alpha Wallet in the same Android app, with all existing tests passing. Efforts to further integrate their functionalities are just beginning.

Next steps include:

• Demonstrate easy to use person to person Ethereum payment functionality between Matrix users.
• Provide a powerful and easy to use messaging and payment javascript API for use by web3 applications accessed through the Open Super dApp. Produce sample web dApps using this API.
• Centralize cryptographic secrets between the wallet and the messenger.
• Build a parallel iOS version for iPhones using Element iOS and Alpha Wallet iOS.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

tusooa says

We released 0.2.0 of libkazv. Change log is as follows:

• Support streaming uploads. https://gitlab.com/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/1
• Fix ctx.dispatch() returning promises resolving to empty EffectStatus. https://gitlab.com/kazv/libkazv/-/commit/c7796a6ab8325773bf47fe83254a377204d6abcf
• Prevent leaking full file path when uploading to matrix server by using only basename for the request.
• Deal with timeline gaps properly. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/1
• Record state events in timeline. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/2
• Add support for streaming download. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/3
• Add support for Boost.Serialization. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/4
• Support encrypted attachments. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/5
• Allow custom random generator with crypto. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/6
• Support auto-discovery. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/12
• Support profile API. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/13
• Support kick/ban API. https://lily-is.land/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/15
• Support room heroes. https://lily-is.land/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/16
• Add coverage report. https://lily-is.land/kazv/libkazv/-/merge_requests/17

🔗Deprecated

• makeDefaultEncryptedSdk() is now deprecated. Use makeDefaultSdkWithCryptoRandom() instead.

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben says

This week has seen an merges of many minor, partially longer-pending PRs into the mainline code base: among them a fix for a longer pending CI problem with Apply builds, an update to latest ruma and many minor fixes and style improvements. We've also gotten the Crypto-bindings for the JS in web using WASM a lot further, the only thing remaining for a release are some last minute PRs and fixes in the release infrastructure. But the most changes to the code base this week have been coming from the appservice department, who've submitted, reviewed and merged a whopping seven PRs this week, fixing various problems and adding a bunch of appservice specific features.

Beyond purely code changes this week has seen a lot of project starts, too: For ones, with the help of the rust team, the iOS Team has started integrating the Sliding-Sync/Sync V3 into the upcoming Element-X-Series; the team has put up the first PR to add integration tests against an actual synapse server (some issues pending); a workshop set out the first ideas for the new upcoming timeline API; and a very interesting draft PR was brought in from community member docweirdo proposing a new API on top of the existing SDK to have futures wait for actual completion - no more sending a message and observing sync for the appropriate response yourself.

👉️ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗Synatainer (website)

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

saces reports

Synatainer v0.4.1-RC1

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

A lot of things added and changed, and I'm sure I missed something, so I will go with a release candidate this time

New in v0.4.1-RC1

• enable PGPASSFILE support for better database password handling
• add tools to detect and maybe fix synapse issue 12507 and 13026 (No state group for unknown or outlier event)
• internal: added an extension for mautrix-go to serve synapse admin api requests
• lots of iternal changes

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

Tools for No state group for unknown or outlier event

[docker run -it --rm registry.gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer:0.4.1-RC1] stui 12507 --help
[docker run -it --rm registry.gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer:0.4.1-RC1] stui 13026 --help

The tools scan the database for the issues and tells you which rooms are affected. Adding the --fix option, it ~~destroys your database~~deletes the bogus extremeties. Use at your own risc. And make a backup.

The doc have still 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

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi reports

Thanks to Stuart Mumford (@Cadair) for starting (PR #373 and PR #622) and to Julian-Samuel Gebühr (@moan0s) for finishing up (in PR #1894), matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now help you set up maubot - a plugin-based Matrix bot system.

See our Setting up maubot documentation to get started.

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗Auto-reply maubot plugin

Brendan Abolivier says

Because I don't like having to change my display name to tell coworkers when I'm away, I've written a maubot plugin for an auto-responder bot.

It allows me to signal when I'm away, at which point anyone who sends a message in an existing DM will be sent an automated reply so they know that I'm away, when I'll be back, and how to reach out to me in case of emergencies (it does this once per DM until I come back). When I'm back, I just need to tell the bot and it will automatically turn off the auto-responder and give me a summary of the DMs in which I've missed messages while I was away.

The source code and package for this plugin are available right here: https://github.com/babolivier/maubot-autoreply 🙂

🔗MSC Bot

minecraftchest1 says

I just created a simple bot that generates a MSC url from the specified MSC id. The source code for the project can be found at https://mau.dev/minecraftchest1/mscbot/. And example instance can be found at @maubottest1:synapse1.arsrobotics.org Demo and use the bot in #msc-bot:synapse1.arsrobotics.org

Cat reminds us

This feature is already in the MSC bot used in #matrix-spec or atleast in one of those bots.

🔗Matrix Release Tracker (website)

A release tracker that posts updates into Matrix rooms

Ananace announces

My release tracking bot received a bunch more work since the last update. It now supports tracking repos, groups, and user stars on GitHub, GitLab (both .com and self-hosted), as well as Gitea (though Gitea requires a token for reading stars). And also tracking "releases" - a.k.a. tags - on bare Git repos, at least as long as they don't require SSH key authorization. Things are getting ever closer to a 1.0 release, with only really some missing bang commands and error reporting being the remaining pieces.

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗HOPE conference

cel reports

HOPE conference (today/tomorrow/Sunday) is using Matrix https://hope.net/

🔗End of Matrix Summit 2022 CfP

ChristianP announces

The Matrix Summit 2022 is a community event taking place Thu, 25th to Sun, 28th Aug at c-base in Berlin. Today's the last day to propose presentations and workshop. The exact deadline is 22:22 (Europe/Berlin).

Will you be in Berlin and have a Matrix project to talk about? Can you organise a workshop about how to use Matrix? How does your community or workplace use Matrix? Submit your proposal now!

https://cfp.summit2022.matrixmeetup.de

🔗Matrix-DevRoom at FrOSCon

ChristianP reports

FrOSCon is a conference that takes place in Siegburg/Bonn, Germany on 21st and 22nd August. Most presentations will be German, but there are some in English as well. It's all about free, open source software.

And, best of all, we'll have an entire DevRoom track for a day – full of Matrix. Furthermore, you can come by the Matrix stand for that famous hallway track. ✨ I know I'll be there. 👋

https://programm.froscon.org/2021/events.html#matrix%20track

🔗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 Matthew gives us a general update on everything Matrix and Element. What is going on with Sliding Sync, OpenID Connect or P2P Matrix? Let's find out!

We're also pleased to announce the next episode of Open Tech Will Save Us has been scheduled. We will be talking live and interacting with you on July 27, 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST) on the subject of platforms with people from GNOME, KDE and Element.

🔗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:

• MSC3847: Ignoring invites with policy rooms
• MSC3846: Allowing widgets to access TURN servers
• MSC3845: Draft: Expanding policy rooms to reputation
• MSC3844: Remove unused policy room sharing mechanism
• MSC3843: Reporting content over federation

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3786: Add a default push rule to ignore m.room.server_acl events (merge)
• MSC3267: Reference relations (merge)
• MSC2832: HS -> AS authorization header (merge)
• MSC2676: Message editing (merge)
• MSC2529: Proposal to use existing events as captions for images (close)
• MSC2285: Private read receipts (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

🔗Spec Updates

The Spec Core Team took a concentrated effort to work through our priority backlog of MSCs, resulting in the decent amount of MSCs hitting FCP this week!

Thankfully the community has nearly matched this number by adding quite a few more MSCs into the fray. But we're still up by 1!

Perhaps one of the most exciting MSCs to move forwards is MSC2676: Message editing, which allows users to edit events (including messages) that they've previously sent. Part of the aggregations work, this functionality has been used extensively throughout the ecosystem. But only now is it making its way into the spec proper. I'm also personally excited about MSC2285: Private read receipts, which allows users to read a room's contents without advertising it.

Of course the above MSCs are still in Final Comment Period; a 5 day period where anyone can raise their concerns about an MSC before it is accepted. So if you have any last-minute comments, be sure to get them in now!

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2666: Get rooms in common with another user!

Another MSC I'm personally excited about! This MSC provides an endpoint on the homeserver to request the rooms (or spaces) you have in common with another user. I would find this useful for incoming DMs from users I may or may not know. Note that the client may not already have this information if it is making use of lazy loading room members, so it needs a way to ask the server for this information.

Looks like the MSC is currently sitting in the Spec Core Team's review backlog. We'll get to it soon!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

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

Shay reports

The Synapse team has been hard at work! This week we published Synapse 1.63.0rc1. Among the notable features are support for MSC3827: filtering /publicRooms by room type, allowing for better discovery of Spaces. You can read more about that here. In addition, the release contains a number of bugfixes, updates to the documentation, and internal changes focused on reducing memory usage and increasing performance, as well as supporting the long-standing goal of faster room joins. More on these next week in the official release announcement!

🔗Conduit (website)

Conduit is a simple, fast and reliable chat server powered by Matrix

Timo on Conduit ⚡️ says

Good news, as you might have noticed, conduit.rs is back online and better than ever! Matrix.org is so kind and donates this Linux server to me. I already host a discord appservice and handle 23k messages per day and, most importantly, now I'm at the top of both #ping rooms ;)

On the development side, I'm currently working on a big refactor, see https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/merge_requests/365 and please give feedback if you have experience this is your chance to have a lasting impact.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

LordMZTE ⚡️ reports

rofi is a application launcher and dmenu replacement. https://github.com/davatorium/rofi. I made a little plugin for it to switch channels on the nheko matrix client https://mzte.de/git/LordMZTE/rofi-nheko

🔗Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

You can now edit aliases in Nheko! This means you can publish your own aliases in the room directory as well as in the room. If an alias can't be used by people (because it isn't listed in the room directory), that alias is highlighted in red with an easy option to fix it (if you have permissions to do so). You can also easily switch the primary (canonical) alias of the room.

With this the feature set I wanted to have for the next release is complete. I wanted to focus on improving moderation and room management capabilities in Nheko and it does now have a very basic sets of capabilities to do so. I do already have plans to expand on them though!

So instead of working on new features, I will be focusing on bug fixes. For a start if someone has the username room, Nheko will now omit the reply fallback to prevent pinging the whole room. The verification window now also should always be big enough to show its contents and we now properly explain to users, why emojis might look different on different devices fixing an issue reported via Twitter... There is also a new icon for the room directory (it is now a building, very punny, huh?).

🔗Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

• Tobias has done some internal refactoring, which will allow us to create more automated tests and prepare for the eventual Qt6 migration
• Nvrwhere has improved NeoChat's Timeline layout: On a wide window, the bubbles will now be centered in the window, in order to better use the space while not stretching the timeline out too far
• He's also fixed several papercut issues around the UI, for example editing and replying using the keyboard shortcuts
• The browser will now properly open when clicking on a link when using wayland
• The first part of Snehit's GSoC project is almost ready to land: The room list is gaining a list of spaces, which can be used to filter for the rooms included in that space
• We're also moving forward on the E2EE support, with NeoChat now allowing a user to send an encrypted message into a matrix room - provided libQuotient supports it 🙂
• Tobias is also working on improved Reaction & Emoji pickers, which will allow users to select different variants like skin tones and which will behave better on mobile devices

🔗Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat says

Community testing

• After some successful testing on current registration flows, we are running testing sessions on the new and improved registration flows over the next week.
• Join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org to give it a go!
• We are also moving away from spreadsheets over to TestRail, a test case management tool which will help us track regressions and issues. We’ll be offering our community testers a change to try it out over the next few weeks.

🔗Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat reports

• Started experimenting with matrix-react-sdk for an improved crypto(graphy) experience
• The share screen button in video rooms on desktop has been temporarily removed until the underlying issues can be resolved
• We have removed most of unused code in the Element Web repositories and are working on setting up tools to avoid forgetting to remove unused code in the future
• The new search experience and DM flow have received some bug fixes and polish in addition to more polish to CSS
• For community contributors:
  • We have added a checklist for PRs
  • We are nearing completion on our first code style guide
    • Check out the code style PR
    • Final commenting period expected to start next week
  • We’ve been tackling our process around reviewing PRs to reduce review time, taking a two pronged approach at focusing on reviewing new PRs quickly and resolving our oldest non-draft PRs every week
  • Did you know that some of our issues in GitHub are labelled with “Help wanted” and “good first issue” if they’re especially suited for community contributions?
• In the works (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
  • Live location sharing has received some updates to permission handling and improvements to labels
  • The new user type screens which are part of registration have landed on develop.element.io and will be released around 2nd of August
  • Message pinning has also received a bug fix for edited messages

🔗Element iOS (website)

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

Doug reports

• Version 1.8.22 RC was released to TestFlight and comes with the following changes:
  • In-app notifications are now available.
  • A shiny new offline indicator that's visible in more parts of the app.
  • A handful of fixes for issues when making calls.
• Unfortunately this build was rejected following the latest requirements for account deletion in the App Store Review Guidelines. We’re looking into ways we can resolve this problem.
• We have started to use Sentry to provide more insights into technical issues encountered whilst using the app.
• Work continues on implementing the new app layout.

🔗Element Android (website)

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

adam says

1.4.28 is being prepared with the following changes:

• Makes the build process compatible with F-Droid again!
• Fixes for voice messages not playing and some characters showing in their escaped html form - such as quotes showing as "
• Nightly builds are on the way, these builds will be under a separate Application ID allowing them to be installed alongside the production Element app. Expect more information to come soon.
• We’re investigating general performance regressions across the app, with some improvements already in the pipeline.

🔗Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

🔗Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr announces

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

• unified SSO and ordinary login cards
• unified media and regular file-uploads, and improved drag-and-drop support
• improved feedback while validating login and registration input

We also added one feature that friends of mine were requesting 😃: annotations can now be equipped with a "motivation" (part of the w3c web annotation data model, mentioned in MSC3574), and filtered by motivation. This makes it easy to, for example, mark some discussions as "questions" about the text, which is pretty useful when managing a class.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗ruby-matrix-sdk (website)

Ruby SDK for the Matrix communication protocol

Ananace says

And I've now finally managed to cut a long-overdue new 2.6.0 release of the Ruby SDK, which includes better support for concurrent multi-threaded usage as well as improvements on Ruby 3.0+. (The tests are currently green for Ruby 2.6 to 3.1)

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben reports

The team is proud to announce the first release of @matrix-org/matrix-sdk-crypto-nodejs to npmjs.com (0.1.0-beta.1) for all the best npm user friendliness you can get. This marks the first release of the crypto ffi for nodejs from the rust team supreseeding the previously existing project. It is also the very first release for nodejs featuring the great new vodozemac core (replacement of libolm). We've marked this as a beta release while we work out any remaining minor hickups or problems, so if you see something, say something! However, the main point of contact to it for most people is probably TravisR |s Nodejs Bot SDK, which is already consuming that beta in its latest release.

👉️ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.

🔗matrix-bot-sdk (website)

A TypeScript/JavaScript SDK for Matrix bots

TravisR reports

matrix-bot-sdk v0.6.0

After a year of working on different ways to support encryption, the bot-sdk has finally stabilized on the rust-sdk crypto crate for crypto bindings internally. Tutorials on how to get your bot/appservice set up and working with the new crypto code are here (note that for appservices you'll need to turn on EDUs and MSC3202 in Synapse). If you run into problems, please report bugs or pop by #matrix-bot-sdk:t2bot.io on Matrix for help.

Alongside support for encryption, v0.6.0 brings a whole lot of other functionality for appservices, Synapse Admin API users, and bots wanting to make use of real DMs. Check out the full changelog here.

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗axon.sh (website)

joe announces

axon.sh v0.17.0 has been released which adds support for managing per-user ratelimits, and includes a fix for a bug related to server discovery. Please try it out and report your experience in #axon:matrix.thisisjoes.site, I'd appreciate feedback!

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗Matrix Release Tracker (website)

A release tracker that posts updates into Matrix rooms

Ananace says

A whole heaping of work has landed for my release tracker project, with it now supporting tracking releases for projects (loose projects, all users stars, or all projects under a namespace) on both GitHub and GitLab (for .com as well as self-hosted instances). Documentation is currently still a bit lacking, but hoping to have more information both on setting it up as well as using it Soon™.

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗ACCU Talk

andybalaam announces

my conference talk at ACCU this year is now out on YouTube: Matrix is a Distributed Real-time Database. I explain what Matrix is, and show how to use curl to send and receive messages, and why it's "interesting" to write a server, and, as the title hints, I introduce the idea that Matrix can be for a lot more than messaging.

🔗Matrix Summit Conference Berlin

/dev/saces announces

Reminder: Matrix Summit Conference Berlin call for participation ends next week

As announced earlier, there will be a conference all about matrix. (See TWIM 2022-07-01)

We encourage everyone with matrix-related projects, products and ideas to come around and give a talk: From the past to the future, from the moment of the idea, the story of the creation or the vision of the future. We’d like to understand the principles as well as the technology. The conference is from people for people, so if you’d like to talk about yourself, your community, your organization, please do. Showcase yourself and your relation to the Matrix world. Let's get to know each other! We aim to compile a versatile program. We are open to contributions of any length, from 5 minutes (lightning talks) to presentations and talks to workshops and hacksessions up to 5 hours. We’ll come together to discover, celebrate and enjoy the world of matrix. Also, if you have any arty, cultural or playful contribution in mind, please offer it.

➡️ Proposals for the Matrix Summit in Berlin can be submitted until next Friday (2022-07-22 22:22, TZ=Europe/Berlin) via pretalx. 📝

Related spaces and rooms 💬: #matrix-summit-berlin-2022 #matrix-summit-2022-orga

🔗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 🎙

Rick and I talk about the the brand new Chatterbox. Is it Riot Embedded rebranded? Did the world need yet another embedded chat solution? Can I host mine? Can I make it clever? Let's find out!

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

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

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3842: Placeholder for power levels & extensible events

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3244: Room version capabilities (close)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

🔗Spec Core Team

The Spec Core Team did some shuffling of our backlog board this week in order to ensure that all in-flight and in-focus items are reflected on it.

Outside of that was the usual rounds of MSC review by team members.

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2199: Canonical DMs!

While the name may not make much sense to the layperson, the idea of a "canonical" Direct Messaging room (DM) is one that would always be referenced whenever a DM between two people is requested. That is, instead of potentially having a few different DM rooms with someone, both you and the other person would always know which room to use when DM'ing each other.

We don't really have this today. DM rooms are just group rooms with only you and someone else in them. If you attempt to DM another user, your client will try to guess the best room to use for this through some clever heuristics. What's lacking is a defined way to always arrive at the same room for this action.

This MSC attempts to define one, and would allow other functionality to be built on top of it, such as definitively knowing which room to send user-to-user data into, and to read from.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier says

This week the Synapse team released Synapse 1.62! It features a lot of changes, including a fairly big update of spam checker callbacks, performance improvements around syncing and device management, improved customisation of .well-known client files, and much more. Read all about it on the Matrix.org blog: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/07/06/synapse-1-62-released

Apart from this, we've been working on refining and fine-tuning our processes as a team over the past few weeks, which, among other things, resulted in the creation of this documentation that gives contributors some insight on how we review pull requests on Synapse. Olivier has also landed his work on running Complement (our next-gen integration test suite) against instances of Synapse using workers, which is a massive improvement for our CI.

🔗Homeserver Deployment 📥️

🔗Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace announces

Hello again TWIM, updates to my Kubernetes charts have been rolling along as usual, though I've been a bit more silent about them. This week sees the addition of a synatainer chart though, for those who want it for maintaining their K8s Synapse. (And the Synapse chart was also updated to 1.62.0, and element-web to 1.11.0) If you have any questions, comments, requests for assistance, etc with them then #matrix-on-kubernetes:fiksel.info is where you want to go.

🔗Dendrite Helm Chart (website)

Helm Chart to deploy Dendrite on Kubernetes

jonnobrow announces

The k8s-at-home dendrite helm chart now optionally configures ingress resources for dendrite in polylith mode. It has also had some bugs fixed and been updated to support the most recent version of dendrite.

Check out the chart here: https://github.com/k8s-at-home/charts/blob/master/charts/incubator/dendrite/README.md

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Quadrix (website)

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

JFA reports

Quadrix v1.2.0 has now been released. It's already available for Linux (https://snapcraft.io/quadrix, https://flathub.org/apps/details/chat.quadrix.Quadrix) and Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=chat.quadrix.android). The Windows, MacOS and iOS versions are awaiting approval from the respective stores.

New in this release:

• Brand new icons from Remix Icons (https://github.com/Remix-Design/RemixIcon)
• Messages can be redacted (for now only by the message owner)
• Users with admin power can kick other users from rooms
• Users can start a DM room directly from the member list in a group room

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

Note: The PR (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/pull/1348) to publish Quadrix on the matrix.org client list has been submitted more than a month ago, but still awaiting approval. Anyone here can help?

🔗Nheko (website)

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

Nico says

You can now edit aliases in Nheko! This means you can publish your own aliases in the room directory as well as in the room. If an alias can't be used by people (because it isn't listed in the room directory), that alias is highlighted in red with an easy option to fix it (if you have permissions to do so). You can also easily switch the primary (canonical) alias of the room.

With this the feature set I wanted to have for the next release is complete. I wanted to focus on improving moderation and room management capabilities in Nheko and it does now have a very basic sets of capabilities to do so. I do already have plans to expand on them though!

So instead of working on new features, I will be focusing on bug fixes. For a start if someone has the username room, Nheko will now omit the reply fallback to prevent pinging the whole room. The verification window now also should always be big enough to show its contents and we now properly explain to users, why emojis might look different on different devices fixing an issue reported via Twitter... There is also a new icon for the room directory (it is now a building, very punny, huh?).

🔗Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle announces

• Our new release, v1.11.0 is live. This release includes;

  • Search leaving Beta! Thanks for all your support and feedback so far we’re excited that this is now the default experience for all.
  • Video rooms are officially in Beta! Previously this was a labs flag but we’re making good progress, keep your feedback coming!

• We’re working on converting tests to Cypress. This week we focussed on lazy loading and we’re nearly at the finish line

• Please note; As we make progress on improving our automated testing, we are asking for more tests to be provided alongside all PRs

• Many more improvements to CSS are continuing to land thanks to community contributions

• Fixed issues with URL previews

• Removed obsolete code from the left panel filtering

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

• More bug fixes have gone in to live location sharing

🔗Element iOS (website)

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

Danielle says

• We’ve had lots of updates with our latest iOS release, check out the full list but here’s our favourites:

  • You can now mark a room as read from the room list. Open the context menu to see the new option
  • We updated the way reactions look on the timeline
  • There’s now an accessibility label and hint when you send voice messages
  • User pills now use the latest data when you’re mentioned

🔗Chatterbox (website)

Chatterbox lets you securely embed Hydrogen on any website!

Thib says

You have probably seen it, this week Element released Chatterbox, an embedded chat client you can use to build chat assistants, chatbots… or probably other use cases we didn't even think of. It's OSS and really just a lightweight Matrix client. Rick talks about it in greater length with me in today's Matrix Live.

✍️ Release blog post: https://element.io/blog/element-launches-chatterbox/ ⌨️ Chatterbox source code: https://github.com/vector-im/chatterbox 🧰 Hydrogen SDK: https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/blob/master/doc/SDK.md 🤖 OpsDroid FOSDEM talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHs2eLp5nwE&list=PLl5dnxRMP1hW7HxlJiHSox02MK9_KluLH&index=3

🔗Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

🔗Cactus Comments (website)

Cactus Comments is a federated comment system for the web, based on the Matrix protocol.

Asbjørn announces

Cactus Comments is a federated comment system for the open web built on Matrix.

Just released a small update for the web client: cactus-client v0.13.0

• Fix for missing end tokens in sync responses from Synapse >= v1.61.0 (Thanks to Tom Price for !20).
• A prettier animation while loading comments.

/ipns/latest.cactus.chat is updated to point to the latest release, so sites linking there should already be using the new version.

Also, while we're here: we're surprised and delighted to so many people using Cactus Comments! We just crossed 300k guest users registered on cactus.chat (roughly equivalent to 300k unique anonymous users). 🎉

An unfortunate side-effect is that we're having to up our hosting game to keep up with you all - and it's getting a bit expensive on our student budgets. We set up a donations page on Open Collective, in case any of you would want to help out. ✨🫂

🌵 Thanks!

• Come play with the demo: https://cactus.chat/demo
• Join our Matrix room: #cactus:cactus.chat

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben reports

After a long hunt, we've eventually found a significant problem with napi-rs, the layer we use in between Rust and Node.js for the crypto-nodejs, in the way it manages the memory coming from async functions in rust. With that out of the way and the last remaining features implemented, we are on the final stretch into in putting out the first prerelease of crypto-nodejs-bindings—brace for it to come near your next npmjs.com early next week 🤞🤞.

While that has still occupied most of the teams' time, the community hasn't been idling either, and implement the API for permalinks to events, exposes the authentication service over FFI and an API to get invite details for Invited Rooms. Thanks everyone!

👉️ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.

🔗matrix-room-element (website)

A custom html element, web component, to display the latest messages from a matrix room

@ugp:matrix.org says

matrix-room-element -> [email protected] (GPLv3)

<matrix-room-element/> is a web component (vanilla JS/HTML/CSS & distributed un-minified) that can be imported and inserted in any web page, to display the content of a (public, soon with authentication, and private room support) matrix room.

• preview: https://sctlib.gitlab.io/matrix-room-element/
• gitlab: https://gitlab.com/sctlib/matrix-room-element
• npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@sctlib/matrix-room-element/

Development is continuing, some new web-components have now prototypes:

• <matrix-login/>, <matrix-logout/>, <matrix-auth/>
• <matrix-create-room/>, <matrix-edit-room/>, <matrix-join-room/>
• <matrix-send-event/>
• <matrix-event/>

It is still heavy in development, and still looking for the right patterns (web components, and matrix).

We're trying to make composable components that can be inserted in any web page, and maybe help users use Matrix as a CMS, embedable anywhere (web). Our first use case is on https://libli.org (that now comes with a /login endpoint - alpha) (this event in libli, loading a matrix-room-element with correct room-id/event-id, https://libli.org/thisweekinmatrix:matrix.org/$KsbQ0JsqAXN9g-57M-aXyVohZYM3SZkKKkuUb9dW928).

Looking forward for use-cases, feedback, attribute naming discussion, simple patterns to make to code readable. (topics: #matrix-room-element:matrix.org #libli:matrix.org )

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi says

Thanks to Julian Foad, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports installing the ntfy push notifications server for you.

See our Setting up the ntfy push notifications server documentation to get started.

JulianF adds

To explain what it's for: Using the UnifiedPush standard, ntfy enables self-hosted (Google-free) push notifications from Matrix (and other) servers. Especially useful for users of Google-free Android (such as from f-droid).

If you try it, please report any feedback or problems or improvements in #matrix-docker-ansible-deploy:devture.com . Any updates to the scripts or docs may appear first on my branch before being merged into the playbook.

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗Who's In This Room Bot

Jake C says

Announce Matrix room members to Signal users in bridged chats with relay mode (as they can't see them), building on the excellent Signal bridge

Your favourite bot for social chats with Signal & Matrix friends just got better!

The bot will now:

• Not show full Matrix usernames to Signal users (they can't use them). It will send their display name if it exists, otherwise their username prefix.
• Send message on invite rather than join, as Signal users may not understand Matrix join vs invite semantics
• Send read receipts so you know it's working

I don't currently have a public bot, but if anyone is interested please join #whos-in-this-room-bot-discussion:jakecopp.chat and say hello!

I'm getting great feedback in my local friend groups with it! PRs or issues very welcome.

https://github.com/jakecoppinger/whos-in-this-room-matrix-bot

🔗Mjölnir (website)

The moderation bot for Matrix

Gnuxie reports

Hi everyone, we have released Mjolnir v1.5.0

which includes:

• The option for reports to be polled via the synapse admin API (rather than configuring proxy pass-through)
• The option to disable the displaying new reports in moderation room (so that you can use the TrustedReporters protection without the abuse reports features)
• A !mjolnir rules matching <entity> command to search watched lists.
• Glob support to the kick command.
• A background queue for kicking (to reduce the load of large glob kicks)
• A slight improvement to the performance of the redact command
• An improvement to documentation (including dedicated setup documentation)
• A new mute action for the since command !mjolnir since 1day mute 100

🔗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 🎙

I had the chance to have Ryan with me for a special edition of Open Tech Will Save Us on Thunderbird to celebrate their 102 release, which includes Matrix support for the first time in a stable release.

We covered many interesting topics, such as the importance of specifying the expected behaviour of clients and servers in a protocol to deliver the best experience to end users (wink, wink, reminds you of something?), why Thunderbird was more dormant and is now vibrant as ever, what they plan for the future. I had good fun and I hope attendees did too! Next episode is going to be at the end of July, but you can already join the Open Tech Will Save Us room

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matthew reports

Audrey Tang, Digital Minister for Taiwan is offering sponsorship for full localisation of Element and other leading Matrix clients into zh_Hant_TW - see https://twitter.com/audreyt/status/1542296087310258176. If you're interested in helping out, please get in touch with Thib and we'll coordinate.

🔗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:

• MSC3840: Ignore invites
• MSC3839: primary-identity-as-key

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC3840: Ignore invites

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

🔗Spec Updates

Bits and pieces of review by both the Spec Core Team and the community peppered about different MSCs.

Various changes to the spec text itself, particularly from @aaronraimist, @DMRobertson and @Kloenk. Thank you all!

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2974: Widgets: Capabilities re-exchange!

This MSC is a relatively simple it. Currently widgets are only allowed to specify their capabilities (what the widget is allowed to do, like reading the logged-in user's display name) when the widget is loaded. This MSC attempts to allow that model to be extended to let widgets ask for additional (or fewer) permissions over time.

I can't help but be reminded of the shift in permissions on iOS and Android here in how they shifted from "ask all permissions up front" to "ask for permission for each thing when it's used in the app" :)

Check it out if widgets are your thing!

🔗Dept of Outreachy 🎓️

andybalaam announces

New Matrix Intern Usman has just started on his project to prototype Favourite messages in Element Web. He's written a blog post introducing himself and the project: https://yaya-usman.hashnode.dev/outreachy-blog-introducing-myself

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier says

This week the Synapse team released Synapse 1.61.1! This is a security release which addresses a high severity vulnerability in URL preview feature. Server administrators are encouraged to update as soon as possible! We have published a blog post explaining the vulnerability and detailing a few workarounds that can be implemented on homeservers which can't be updated right away: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/06/28/security-release-synapse-1-61-1

Other than that we have published the first RC for Synapse 1.62.0 (which was followed today by a second bugfix RC). Synapse 1.62 will feature an improved spam checker API for modules, performance improvements around device lists, more customisation for .well-known client files and much more. Watch this space next week for the full rundown 🙂

🔗Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander announces

This week we released Dendrite 0.8.9 which contains a number of improvements around backfilling room history, amongst other things.

🔗Features

• Incoming device list updates over federation are now queued in JetStream for processing so that they will no longer block incoming federation transactions and should never end up dropped, which will hopefully help E2EE reliability
• The /context endpoint now returns "start" and "end" parameters to allow pagination from a context call
• The /messages endpoint will no longer return "end" when there are no more messages remaining
• Deactivated user accounts will now leave all rooms automatically
• New admin endpoint /_dendrite/admin/evacuateUser/{userID} has been added for forcing a local user to leave all joined rooms
• Dendrite will now automatically attempt to raise the file descriptor limit at startup if it is too low

🔗Fixes

• A rare crash when retrieving remote device lists has been fixed
• Fixes a bug where events were not redacted properly over federation
• The /invite endpoints will now return an error instead of silently proceeding if the user ID is obviously malformed

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

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Thunderbird (website)

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

freaktechnik says

Thunderbird 102 with Matrix support is now available for download at https://thunderbird.net/. The Matrix implementation reflects what's been previously discussed in TWIM with some additional bug fixes. You can read more about what's new in our blog post. Ryan discussed the Thunderbird 102 release as well as the project in general in this week's Open Tech Will Save Us, give it a listen for the latest inside scoop.

🔗Nheko (website)

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

Nico says

Have you ever noticed that some people are just plain @*%&!§%"+? Well, to quickly deal with what they wrote, Nheko now has a /redact @userid:server.name command, so you can redact everything they wrote (as long as it is in the currently cached section of the timeline). Note that you will run into rate limits when using that and Nheko is not yet applying an appropriate backoff in that case.

Similarly, q234rty fixed a lot of cases where icons in Nheko were either blurry or the wrong size. We fixed a few crashes, the room list should now not sometimes store the wrong order of rooms, brausepulver made large avatars cropped locally (since servers don't guarantee any size over 96x96 when cropped and synapse doesn't properly save the full image size in that case) and added a menu entry to copy a roomlink. You can also now define new powerlevels for users instead of using the existing levels in the room and Jason fixed some compiler warnings when a private member struct doesn't have an explicit constructor on some compilers. Nheko also now downloads the full online key backup when you explicitly toggle the switch.

A more noticeable topic might be, that Nheko now requires servers which support the v1.1 API or later and will not allow you to login or register otherwise. At the same time we also enabled support for the shiny and new knock_restricted rule and all remaining groups code was removed (you know, the feature from before spaces were cool).

I also updated Nheko on my work laptop now and since I was quite surprised by how fast it starts now (while my room count is over 900 !), I attached a video of that below for your pleasure.

🔗Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat says

This week is an exciting time in Element land! We have one feature coming out of beta and another going in: the new search experience is going live with the next release, while video rooms will become available for testing. You can already preview them in the release candidate!

Threads

• After investigating ranged read receipts, we are looking at per thread read receipts again as a more practical approach.

Community testing

• RC testing done:

  • Web - MD/HTML support in Space/Room topics
  • iOS - regression testing of messages, reactions and rooms

• Next week:

  • Create DM only on first message

• 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!

kittykat announces

• The new search experience is coming out of labs with the next release! Including much UI polish and ordering improvements.
• Video rooms are going to be available for everyone to try out in beta!
• Work on improving our testing continues with more crypto tests being migrated to Cypress and improvements to test reliability
• Fixed Jitsi video and audio defaults, and improved default layout when video is minimised
• We have had many more CSS changes to polish layout, including this change to fix tile bubbles!
• And finished converting matrix-react-sdk to TypeScript
• In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
  • Made improvements to live location sharing

Nico says

Because sometimes you just have to do something else and it might be interesting to some people:

• I fixed calls not working when trying to use Element Web with a Conduit server: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/8931
• I fixed Element Android still using the unstable endpoint (i.e. the one from the MSC, that proposed it) to list aliases: https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/pull/6288

Sometimes fixing something that annoys you isn't even that hard, and since it annoys you, you have some motivation to fix it. I call this Anger Driven Development (ADD). If you have some things that annoy you, I encourage to try fixing them for a bit. It might help out some other people too. If that makes you want to contribute to Nheko, don't hesitate to join #nheko:nheko.im and ask me to help you out with whatever fix you are trying to contribute.

This time I just decided to clean out some issues, that came up in the Conduit development channel and that weren't fixed yet. Turns out it was just a few lines to change and it hopefully makes the Matrix experience better for everyone in the long run. The changes were also quickly reviewed and are merged now. Do you have any such little fixes that no one hears about, but you are proud of them? Please post about them, I'd love to see them!

🔗Element iOS (website)

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

Ștefan announces

Are you enjoying Location Sharing but have tired thumbs from tapping every time you need to update your location? Then fret no more! Element 1.8.20 features our new Live Location Sharing feature, now available in Labs.

• Live Location Sharing: Now in Labs, we’ve added the ability to send your location in real time to the people and rooms of your choice!
• Mark as Read: Quickly mark a single room as read by long-pressing it on the home screen.
• Annoying bugs fixed: It’s much easier to tap the names and avatars of room members, voice messages now work better with VoiceOver enabled and it is significantly faster to create a new room.

🔗Element Android (website)

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

kittykat announces

• The fix for the bug around accepting invites to DMs has landed in the Google Playstore with version 1.4.25
• We also made improvements to registration, password reset, and other first user experiences
• Room list loading has had a revamp with more intuitive loading indicators
• Location sharing has had many improvements (live location sharing is available in labs if you’d like to take it for a spin)

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben says

Over the last few weeks, a significant push on rust-crypto-support for Nodejs has taken place, e.g. this PR. Major parts are available, the infrastructure to create releases ready, however, a pretty rare huge memory allocation that causes a crash in Nodejs on the CI has blocked progress of the team recently. Debugging this costs a lot of time and it is yet unclear, how much of a problem this really is (as the cause stays mysterious), however it has also been seen in the wild on Windows now-- a concerning development.

But that doesn't mean, there isn't any development going on. Thanks to the active community around the project, we now have a fix to prevent us from processing the same transaction twice, a method to create permalinks, you can now verify sessions through FFI as well as use the Client Builder via FFI. Thanks everyone!

👉️ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.

🔗Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart and maintained by Famedly.

Henri Carnot says

Dart Matrix SDK: Version 0.10.2

This week, the team released version 0.10.2. In this version, we added experimental support for native group call signaling MSC3401. We have been playing with it in our internal clients, and we have to say that we are pretty happy with the result! There are still some bugs, as sometimes a new call is creating instead of joining the existing one. But it's looking great!

We also took the opportunity to fix some bugs in call handling. Now the ringtone is properly properly when rejecting a call. Also, when opening the client, we don't trigger a call event anymore if the call end event is in the sync response.

We also did some refactoring for the sync handler, reducing the usage of JSON objects and adding some try catch to handle issues when handling event room updates. We switched to custom CachedStreamController so even if the stream has already been listened to, you can still access the last sent value.

Finally, when sending messages when under unreliable connection, messages could be sent out of order. This is now fixed thanks to the implementation of a message sending queue.

See you next time ;)

🔗Dept of Instance Managers

🔗axon.sh (website)

An interactive command-line administration tool for Synapse written in Bash.

joe says

This week's release completed support for resolving, creating, and deleting room aliases. Get the code and contribute at https://git.thisisjoes.site/joe/axon.sh (supports GitHub and GitLab login) and join #axon:matrix.thisisjoes.site for discussion and updates!

🔗synadm (website)

Command line admin tool for Synapse (Matrix reference homeserver)

jojo reports

Two is better than one! Ascurius joined the synadm team and helps maintain the github repo, code new features and support users on github and #synadm:peek-a-boo.at.

Thanks to all synadm users, feature requesters and contributors, issue submitters and #synadm:peek-a-boo.at members. It's fun to maintain a project and see its community grow each day!

Some features from the latest releases we'd like to highlight:

• The local part of an MXID can now be used as the <user_id> argument in various synadm commands. Of course, there is still the possibility to use the full MXID if desired.
• We have added a shadow-ban command so that admins now can more easily deal with abusive users: synadm room shadow-ban
• The room state API is now supported, try synadm room state
• And with the help of that API we created a command to easily generate a list of rooms and corresponding admins and mods: synadm room power-levels
• The synadm room search command was adapted to make better use of current Synapse versions possibilities.
• Documentation chapter around using synadm together with Synapse instances deployed with matrix-docker-ansible-deploy.
• The magic around "retrieval of the own homeserver name" got a massive overhaul. This affects several user and media subcommands.
• Have a look at the releases list for more details: https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm/releases

🔗Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

🔗Matrix Summit Conference Berlin calls for your participation.

Yan announces

The will be a 2 days conference about matrix.

26th to 27th august 2022 @c-base in Berlin.

With the first Matrix Summit Conference we try to showcase the matrix-eco-system in its whole width and depth.

We are looking for talks and workshops around matrix-related projects and products. We are interested in all aspects of those: From the past to the future, from the moment of the idea, the story of the creation or the vision of the future. We’d like to understand the principles as well as the technology. The conference is from people for people, so if you’d like to talk about yourself, your community, your organization, please do. Showcase yourself and your relation to the Matrix world. We try to compile a versatile program. We are open to contributions of any length, from 5 minutes(lightning talks) to presentations and talks to workshops and hacksessions up to 5 hours. We’ll come together to discover, celebrate and enjoy the world of matrix. Also, if you have any arty, cultural or playful contribution in mind, please offer it.

You can enter proposals until 2022-07-22 22:22 (Europe/Berlin), 3 weeks from now in our pretalx

🔗Matrix-summit-berlin-2022 matrix summit space

The #matrix-summit-berlin-2022 space will contain all rooms and subspaces related to the event. For the organization of the summit we have orga-room. Just come by if you like to know something or help with the summit. There is a gitlab organisation which contains our codebase and issuetrackers.

🔗Sponsors?

We try to make everything low cost. But we need some money for food, drinks, merch, travel, accommodation. Please contact Yan or write mail, when you can sponsor the event.

Note this is a community event that is not organised by the Matrix.org Foundation.

🔗Matrix User Meetup Berlin

saces announces

Next Matrix user meetup 6.7.2022, 8 pm @ c-base

Meet other matrix users, chat about Matrix, the rest, and everything else, discuss your Matrix ideas, sign each other in persona, and maybe spice the evening with a good mate or beer.

Also when the bbq is lit you may wish you brougth your favorite item :)

Every first Wednesday of the month in the c-base at 8pm ('til the next pandemic).

Matrix room: #mumb:c-base.org

🔗Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

🔗livematrix (website)

An oversimplified, easy to implement, embedded live chat widget that allows your website's visitors to send messages seamlessly to your Matrix account.

osousa announces

The widget is Built using Svelte, so everything goes in one nice bundle, its fast and awesome to embed. No need for external libraries or big framework.js files. Just import into your website's structure one JS and one CSS files. The server uses Golang, the Binary is only 3.2MB in size. Make sure you configure the .env file.

A demo and more information about livematrix can be found here: https://github.com/osousa/livematrix

🔗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 was very busy and we unfortunately didn't have the time to record a Matrix Live. Everything will be back to normal next week!

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

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

🔗MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3834: Opportunistic user key pinning (TOFU)
• MSC3837: Cascading profile tags for push rules

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

🔗Spec Updates

The big news from the spec this last week is the release of Matrix v1.3 🎉 (read the blog post if you haven't already)! Roughly three months since the release of Matrix v1.2, this release brings improvements such as knocking on rooms, room version 10, reduced metadata in encrypted messages and the first pieces of aggregations finally landing in the spec proper. And more! See the blog post for the full changelog.

Most of the Spec Core Team has been away this week, thus there has not been much moving forwards. But we do have two new MSCs from @duxovni and @Johennes, which you can view above.

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3077: Support for multi-stream VoIP by @SimonBrandner!

This MSC allows for differentiating between different incoming streams of media coming from a single user by adding a sdp_stream_metadata dictionary to Voice over IP (VoIP)-related events. This is a relatively simply addition with useful functionality, such as allowing a single user to share both their camera feed and screen share at the same time!

Check it out if that kind of stuff interests you!

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Conduit (website)

Conduit is a simple, fast and reliable chat server powered by Matrix

Timo ⚡️ reports

Conduit v0.4.0 just came out and fixes all the problems you were having* and more! Read the changelog on https://conduit.rs/changelog

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Element iOS (website)

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

Doug says

• Live Location Sharing will be available in Labs in the next release.
• There has been a focus on bug fixes for Element iOS this week. Some highlights include:
  • Making sender avatars tappable again when using Message Bubbles layout.
  • Opened images are no longer cropped when multitasking on iPad.
  • It is now much easier to tap the first message below a sender’s name when using the plain timeline layout.
• And on the ElementX side:
  • Message Bubbles were added as the default timeline style.
  • The Settings screen is now starting to take shape.
  • Theming applied to most of the other screens using our colour palette.

🔗Element Android (website)

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

adam announces

• 1.4.24 released to beta testers which includes support for UnifiedPush and fixes for voice recordings and duplicated messages in the timeline
• We're making it easier to opt in to Live Location Sharing by displaying the labs setting within the location sharing flow, no need to hunt down the setting anymore!
• We have also fixed some outstanding crashes around opening large images in the timeline and signing out

🔗Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

🔗Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr announces

Over the last few weeks we've:

• improved interactions around file uploads
• improved the look of file messages
• reworked the login design
• added topic configuration to room settings
• added previews of room name and topic in tooltips for room icons
• added handling for an eventId component of annotation URLs

Along with a number of other minor bugfixes and UX improvements. And, we've added one neat new user-facing feature: inline previews of video and audio annotations. This one is a little hard to explain, but a video is worth ten thousand words:

🔗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

Over the last month since the last update, we

• Released Ruma 0.6.4 with a bug fix for rich reply fallback generation

• Added support for pretty much everything from Matrix 1.3, which was to a large extent just the removal of feature flags for previously-unstable functionality

  • Thanks to @zecakeh for both implementing most of these features and now stabilizing them in Ruma!

• Improved reply and thread support

• Improved the still somewhat experimental state resolution implementation used by Conduit (not yet merged):

  • Add m.federation to authorization rules
  • Add room version 10 support
  • Fix some bugs in power-level handling

• Got a community contribution for X-Matrix authorization header parsing (taken from Conduit and improved; not yet merged)

• Added methods to sanitize messages (not yet merged)

🔗matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

Jonas Platte says

This week, we

• Improved our JS bindings and how they're tested
• Significantly improved CI times
• Created a new, more readable Login API and deprecated the old one

🔗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!

Hey everyone! Thib is away today so I'm taking over TWIM for this week (but don't worry, he should be back next week!)

Let's see what the Matrix community has shared with us this week.

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

In this week's Matrix Live, Thib talks to Ivan from the Matrix Rust SDK development team to ask him about the SDK's bindings for Node.JS and WASM.

🔗Dept of GSoC 🎓️

Marco Melorio says

Hi there! I'm Marco Melorio and I'm participating in this year's Google Summer of Code, under the GNOME Foundation. I'm working on Fractal, the GNOME matrix client, with the help of my mentor Julian Sparber. More specifically I'm working on implementing a media history viewer to the app.

To follow my progress on the project you can check out my blog here. I've already published a small introduction post about me and a first update post which includes a mockup and milestones about the project.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse (website)

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

Brendan says

This week the team released Synapse 1.61, which main new feature is media retention. That's right, you can now control how long Synapse keeps media files around, which should help server admins manage Synapse's disk space usage more efficiently. On a different note, this release of Synapse removes support for groups/communities (which was deprecated back in Synapse 1.56), as it has now been replaced by Spaces. Farewell groups, you have served your users well.

See the full Synapse 1.61 release announcement on the matrix.org blog here: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/06/17/synapse-1-61-released

Aside from this, the team is as always hard at work on making Synapse better and more efficient.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗Quadrix (website)

JFA says

New version of Quadrix (1.0.6) available on desktops and mobiles. Mainly bug fixes, plus the addition of a button to deactivate the account on the server (this apparently will be soon mandatory for iOS and MacOS messaging apps). The new desktop version should offer better support for Wayland (tested on Fedora 36, Ubuntu 22.04 and Mobian/Phosh). Repo at https://github.com/alariej/quadrix, project room at #quadrix:matrix.org :-)

🔗Nheko (website)

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

Nico announces

Since I skipped the last update, this one is a bit longer :3

First of all there have been lots and lots of updates to the translations! Finnish is now at 100% thanks to the tireless work of Aminda and Lurkki.

Nheko now also shows a nice badge on Unity compatible desktops (like KDE) for unread messages (although that doesn't work properly for multiple profiles being open at the same time due to limitations in that desktop protocol. Thank you d42 for contributing this, may you role a natural 42 every dice throw!

Syldra fixed up the paste behaviour (which didn't properly tie into undo in some edge cases), cleaned up how we find some of our dependencies and made cusor movement more consistent across systems.

Finally we fixed our glare resolution when verifying other sessions, which will be especially noticeable when verifying Cinny, since that responds to verification requests in a different way than I tested before! This should get rid of a whole range of verification issues people might have experienced. As part of our stabilization for the next release, we also fixed a crash on logout because I fatfingered and deleted a return statement, we now send an Element Android compatible height attribute on emotes, properly compile when the C++ version is set to 20, we once again support the current version of the hidden read receipts MSC (so that others can't tell what you read), edits now properly update in replies again, you can close the image overlay again by clicking outside, cancelled uploads properly get removed again, logging out and back in now doesn't mess up your configuration anymore and pinned messages now properly refresh once the events are loaded.

Phew, that was a mouthful. And we are not even done yet!

I spent some time on making Nheko compilation a bit faster again as well as improve startup speed. This might order your room list a bit weirdly for a few days after updating, but should normalize when receiving a few messages in some rooms. With this we now don't need to load the last message in all rooms on startup. This makes Nheko startup now only take 7 seconds on my old laptop (when not doing something CPU heavy at the same time). The remaining startup time is 40% building up the font database and 40% loading the powerlevels for each room. So we do have the chance to speedup startup by probably another 60%. It is unlikely that is necessary though.

When I discovered Matrix, Element was still called Riot. At the time some of the big design changes started happening to make it the Element you know today. One of the sideeffects was that the roomlist was consistently taking up 20% of my CPU on my Laptop, which I used at the time (and am forced to use now again, since I broke my newer laptop). It also used a lot more RAM than it does today. So for that reason I started shopping around for what other clients there are and I found Nheko. Clearly because it isn't a webclient, it had to be faster and use less RAM. Well, it did maybe a bit, but frankly the difference wasn't that much. Especially since at the time it loaded and rendered ALL your messages on startup (kinda). It never removed messages from memory, so it would just continuously render more and more parts of your timeline, which clearly increased RAM usage. It did however never resort the full roomlist, which made it not use a lot of CPU.

Since I didn't know any web development at the time, but I knew some C++, I started contributing to Nheko. At some point I made the roomlist constantly resort, which used quite some amount of CPU, but I quickly fixed that. At the time the most noticeable difference was that my fans didn't spin when using Nheko, but Element did (because of the roomlist sorting, iirc). RAM usage was pretty bad though. So that was one of the next projects, removing all events from RAM and only pulling them from the database as needed. While this means some additional load when switching rooms, it did decrease RAM requirements by quite a bit. Some new features made us still require loading data for every room from the database on startup, which causes quite some noticeable startup delay. The latest changes however got rid of most of that. We now don't need to load the messages from the database anymore. The only thing we still load is a small info object with roomname, notification and member count as well as the power levels of the room.

Since I recently broke my new and fast laptop, I decided to checkout how things changed on my old and slow laptop. Nowadays I am not in 15 rooms anymore, but I am in 900 rooms, but Matrix, servers as well as clients, has also gotten a lot more performant. So in the end I decided to do a little benchmark of where things stand. DISCLAIMER: This is completely unscientific and unfair, so please take those numbers with a grain of salt. Almost no one runs such a slow laptop as I do, so likely your measurements will completely different. Even more, I was video recording the benchmark, which makes both clients a lot slower. Nonetheless it does somewhat mirror my personal experience.

I came to the conclusion that with 900 rooms, Nheko takes about 10-20 seconds to load and be ready for use on my system, while Element takes about 3 to 4 minutes. So basically Element handles 60 times as many rooms about 2x slower than it did back in the day, while Nheko got a bit faster or about the same speed on the same hardware (but still 60x as many rooms). I've attached a sped up video to this post, so that you can compare it for yourself. But since a lot of people ask, I guess the reason is that I wanted to see how fast you can make a Matrix client. I think I somewhat achieved that in the startup time department, but switching rooms still has a loooooong way to go. Also it is just fun to implement whatever you want in a client, since you are the maintainer and none can tell you how bad of an idea it is. That's probably the reason a lot of people start their own clients? (Although I didn't start Nheko, I just wrote too much code and people didn't want to review it anymore.)

That's it, I hope your eyes didn't glaze over with me babbling on about things. See you next time! :3