Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib announces

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

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) announces

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3755: Member pronouns

MSCs in Proposed Final Comment Period:

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

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3667: Enforce integer power levels (merge)

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

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

Random MSC of the Week

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

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

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

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

Brendan Abolivier says

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

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

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

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander announces

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

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

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

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

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

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair reports

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

The other major improvements are:

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

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

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

---

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Syphon (website)

Chat with your privacy and freedom intact

0x1a8510f2 announces

Hi all 👋.

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

Core Team

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

Cross-platform Availability

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

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

Releases

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

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

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

Translations

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

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

Syphon Space

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

SchildiChat (website)

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

SpiritCroc reports

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

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

Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

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

Highlights

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

Features

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

Improvements

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

Translations

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

Bugfixes

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

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

Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Julian Sparber reports

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

Timeline

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

Session verification

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

Room details

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

Login

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

FluffyChat (website)

Krille Fear announces

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

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

FluffyChat 1.3.1 has been released

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

Changelog:

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

Ement.el (website)

Matrix client for emacs

alphapapa announces

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

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat announces

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Thread list is now ordered by last reply

  • Fixes for the room list counter

  • Last stretch of threads acceptance testing before releasing to beta

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

Element iOS (website)

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

Doug says

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

Element Android (website)

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

adam reports

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

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

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

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synatainer (website)

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

saces reports

Synatainer v0.3.1 has been released

New since v0.2.0

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

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

What it does by default:

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

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

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

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

---

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

Dept of Bots 🤖

Mjölnir (website)

The moderation bot for Matrix

Gnuxie announces

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

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

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

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

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

HarHarLinks announces

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

Thib adds

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

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

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

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

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

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

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

Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR says

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

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC3754: Removing profile information

Spec Core Team

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

Dept of P2P 👥

Pinecone (website)

Peer-to-peer overlay routing for the Matrix ecosystem

neilalexander reports

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

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

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

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

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

dmr says

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

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

Otherwise, the release candidate includes:

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

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

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

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

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

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair says

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

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

Nico announces

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

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

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Kegan announces

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

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

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

Thib reports

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

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

• Continuing development of live location sharing.

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

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

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

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu says

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

Thib says

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

Element Android (website)

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

adam announces

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

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

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

Cinny (website)

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

Lozenge reports

v1.8.1 & v1.8.2

Bug fixes:

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

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

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

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Thirdroom (website)

A browser-based open metaverse client

Robert Long says

Our metaverse-on-matrix project is progressing quickly!

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

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

Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP says

v0.6.0 & v0.6.1

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

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

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

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma (website)

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

Jonas Platte says

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

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

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

Jonas Platte reports

In the last few weeks,

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

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

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

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

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

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) reports

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3751: Allowing widgets to read account data

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs had FCP proposed this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered FCP this week.

Merged MSCs:

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

Spec Updates

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

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

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

Random MSC of the Week

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

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

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

Brendan Abolivier reports

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

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

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace says

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

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

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

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

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

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

---

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

Dept of Clients 📱

SmallTalk (website)

Minimal Android messenger powered by Matrix

adam reports

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

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

Features

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

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

Nheko (website)

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

Nico says

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

Apart from losts of bugfixes, expect the following:

Highlights

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

Features

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

Improvements

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

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

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

Welcome back to another week at Element!

Message Threads

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

Community testing

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

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle says

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

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

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

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu announces

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

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle announces

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

Cinny (website)

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

Lozenge reports

Namaste 🙏,

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

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

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

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

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr announces

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

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

Fixed some bugs:

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

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

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

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

matrix-streamchat (website)

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

f0x announces

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

Gatho (website)

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

Jake C reports

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

To receive confirmations of attendance you can either:

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

Other recent improvements are:

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

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

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

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

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

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Polyjuice (website)

Elixir libraries related to the Matrix communications protocol.

uhoreg says

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

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

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synatainer (website)

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

saces announces

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

New since v0.1.0:

• added arm64 support
• improved output of purge_history.sh

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

What it does by default:

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

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

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

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

---

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

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

libli

unonde says

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

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

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

Dept of Guides 🧭

Self-Host a Matrix Map Server

JulianF reports

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

Extensible Events

andybalaam reports

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

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

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

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

TravisR says

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

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

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

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

TravisR adds

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

Thib reports

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

Dept of Spec 📜

Kegan reports

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

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

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

Andrew Morgan (Element) announces

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

MSC Status

Created MSCs:

• MSC3746: Render image data in reactions

MSCs with newly proposed Final Comment Period:

• No FCPs were proposed this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

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

Closed MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3710: User groups

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

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

We have separated it out into two repositories:

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

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

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

What happened in detail to achieve this was:

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

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

Random MSC of the Week

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

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

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

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

richvdh announces

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

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

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

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

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

Kegan reports

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

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

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

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

Here are some results:

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

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

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

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

neilalexander says

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

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

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

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

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

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot (website)

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

Half-Shot reports

matrix-hookshot reaches 1.2.0

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

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

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

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

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

Half-Shot adds

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

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

matrix-appservice-irc (website)

Node.js IRC bridge for Matrix

Half-Shot reports

matrix-appservice-irc 0.33.0

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

The highlights are:

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

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

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

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

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

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

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat says

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

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu announces

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

Element Android (website)

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

adam reports

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

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

matrix-streamchat (website)

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

f0x says

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

Dept of Widgets 🧩

Mjolnir Widget (website)

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

MTRNord (they/them) reports

Mjölnir Moderation Widget

There have been a few changes to the widget:

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

Dept of VoIP 🤙

Element Call (website)

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

Matthew reports

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

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

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma (website)

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

Jonas Platte reports

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

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

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

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

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

Dept of Ops 🛠

Synatainer (website)

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

saces announces

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

What it does by default:

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

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

Room: #synatainer:c-base.org

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

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix Scribe

JulianF announces

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

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

Scribe will post this:

Ann I'm Ann.

Bob Hello! I'm Bob.

when I write this to @scribe-bot:

@julian /scribe as Ann

@julian I'm Ann.

@julian /scribe as Bob

@julian Hello! I'm Bob.

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

Why?

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

If you find this interesting...

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

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

maubot_azuracast

boris reports

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

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

J. Ryan Stinnett says

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

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

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

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

OTWSU 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (Element) reports

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

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3589: Room version 9 as the default room version
• MSC3582: Remove m.room.message.feedback

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC3744: Support for flexible authentication
• MSC3743: Standardized error response for unknown endpoints
• MSC3741: Revealing the useful login flows to clients after a soft logout
• MSC3735: Add device information to m.room_key.withheld message

Spec Updates

MSC3440 continues to be the focus on much review as the proposal inches towards entering final comment period.

Otherwise both MSC3589 (room version 9 as the default room version) and MSC3582 (remove m.room.message.feedback) merged this week. The former brings with it updated versions for rooms as they continue to be created across the federation, whereas the latter is simply a nice clean up to the existing spec :)

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3593: Safety Controls through a generic Administration API!

This MSC aims to introduce a set of generic administrative APIs for Matrix homeservers, starting with those that could potentially be useful for user moderation.

There has long been talk of adding administration APIs akin to Synapse's Admin API to the spec, in part to reduce the number of tools that are specifically created for it, and thus can only be used with Synapse.

Feedback welcome!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

Shay announces

This week we released Synapse 1.53.0! This release adds support for sending to-device messages to application services, adds a background database update to purge account data for deactivated users, and adds more features to improve performance and stability, as well as bugfixes and improved documentation. Check out the release notes here.

In addition to the release, work continues on improving the performance of room joins-progress is being made! Finally, we began the process of switching over Synapse to use Poetry for dependency management-keep your eyes peeled for more information on that project as it develops.

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander says

This week we released Dendrite v0.6.4 which contains a significant number of improvements and fixes. It includes the following:

• All Client-Server API endpoints are now available under the /v3 namespace
• The /whoami response format now matches the latest Matrix spec version
• Support added for the /context endpoint, which should help clients to render quote-replies correctly
• Accounts now have an optional account type field, allowing admin accounts to be created
• Server notices are now supported
• Refactored the user API storage to deduplicate a significant amount of code, as well as merging both user API databases into a single database
• Guest registration can now be separately disabled with the new client_api.guests_disabled configuration option
• Outbound connections now obey proxy settings from the environment, deprecating the federation_api.proxy_outbound configuration options
• The roomserver input API will now strictly consume only one database transaction per room, which should prevent situations where the roomserver can deadlock waiting for database connections to become available
• Room joins will now fall back to federation if the local room state is insufficient to create a membership event
• Create events are now correctly filtered from federation /send transactions
• Excessive logging when federation is disabled should now be fixed
• Dendrite will no longer panic if trying to retire an invite event that has not been seen yet
• The device list updater will now wait for longer after a connection issue, rather than flooding the logs with errors
• The device list updater will no longer produce unnecessary output events for federated key updates with no changes, which should help to reduce CPU usage
• Local device name changes will now generate key change events correctly
• The sync API will now try to share device list update notifications even if all state key NIDs cannot be fetched
• An off-by-one error in the sync stream token handling which could result in a crash has been fixed
• State events will no longer be re-sent unnecessary by the roomserver to other components if they have already been sent, which should help to reduce the NATS message sizes on the roomserver output topic in some cases
• The roomserver input API now uses the process context and should handle graceful shutdowns better
• Guest registration is now correctly disabled when the client_api.registration_disabled configuration option is set
• One-time encryption keys are now cleaned up correctly when a device is logged out or removed
• Invalid state snapshots in the state storage refactoring migration are now reset rather than causing a panic at startup

Sytest compliance is up slightly:

• Client-server APIs: 67%, up from 65%
• Server-server APIs: 95%, same as before

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

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace reports

And my Helm Chart updates continue as they do, with matrix-synapse being updated to 1.53.0

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair reports

Here are the first steps for a bridge to KakaoTalk! The bridge is based on mautrix-python (having used mautrix-facebook as a starting point--there's still plenty of Facebook-specific code in there), with the backend handled by node-kakao (connected via RPC, as there seems to be no Python API for KakaoTalk!).

The bridge doesn't do much yet; all it can do is log in & sync your list of chats (if that). But it's under rapid development & decent momentum, so hopefully it will be usable soon!

For anyone brave enough to try it out, its setup steps are very similar to that of any of the Python-based mautrix bridges (though Docker is currently unsupported).

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

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

Nico announces

We made a small release that just is compiled against the new mtxclient version to fix an issue with servers announcing support for Matrix v1.1 or higher. We strongly recommend you update before the next Synapse stable release is out.

Apart from that Nheko now has support for hidden read receipts (thanks to symphorien, see MSC2285). ZenWalker updated our usage of deprecated gstreamer APIs. Malte has been spending a lot of effort on improving the scrolling experience on the PinePhone as well as allowing to search on mobile. Forwarding should now work properly again as well as calling on mobile and we fixed a small memory leak when opening some dialogs.

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

“Twosday” wasn’t the only exciting thing happening this week. Take a peek at everything else we had going on…

Coming to a Poll near you…

• From next week’s releases, you’ll discover two new updates on polls! First off, you’ll be able to edit a poll as long as no one has yet voted on it - which is great if you create a poll and realise you’ve made a small mistake. Even better, there’s now a new type of poll: ‘closed polls’ don’t show any results until the poll has ended, to keep the surprise.

Location Sharing

• Location Sharing is now available by default for users on all platforms, except desktop (where you can receive but not send locations). Check it out!
• The next stage is live location sharing and ‘pin dropping’, expect more soon.

Threaded Messaging

• Designed to make catching up on rooms easier, and to keep the main timeline as clutter free as possible, Threads are nearly here.
• You can try Threads out on all platforms - you’ll find them in Labs. This feature is experimental; let us know your feedback, and report any bugs as we continue to improve.

Community testing

• We will be looking at search result ordering on Web as part of the new search experience at 17:30 UTC / 18:30 CET on Tuesday, 1st of March
• We’re also hoping to test Threads on mobile devices towards the end of the week, join the testing room to get involved!
• Head over to #element-community-testing:matrix.org to hear the latest on all testing sessions!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle announces

• The EleWeb team has been working on Spaces, Threads, and defects this week.
• We are starting to look at batched updates, which could be bringing performance improvements to us.
• On the process improvement side, we are looking at test coverage and process improvements around PR submission. Don’t be surprised if our developers start a conversation around tests when you submit your next PR 🙂
• V1.10.5 release candidate is available and release is expected to go out on Monday, 28th February.
• And don’t forget; the new and improved search experience is available. It’s in Beta so turn it on, try it out, and send us your feedback!
  • We will be talking to the community about planned improvements in the next Community Testing Session on Tuesday over in#element-community-testing:matrix.org

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

• Improvements to Threads reliability are happening everyday. We’re also making some tweaks to the user experience details, like dragging and dropping files into the Thread panel.

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu reports

• Next week’s release (1.8.3) includes changes and improvements we’ve made to our overall app experience by closing some pesky UI defects.
• This week we’ve also been working on improving the reliability of our Labs features. If you’ve turned on Threads or Bubbles in Labs you may have experienced app slow downs or crashes. In the next version, these will be minimised.
• Spaces on iOS are also getting some attention at the moment and we’re hoping to improve the user experience of Spaces on Mobile.

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle announces

• The next release of Android (1.4.2) includes support for “@ room” and other usability defects you might have seen before… Fixes include steadying the notification badge in the room list, adding the correct interactions on bottom sheets, and opening a DM from the Space member list.
• We’ve also been working on upgrading the voice message experience, adding improvements like scrubbing! Keep sending voice notes and let us know what other improvements we should make.
• Our onboarding flow is also getting a new lick of paint. We want new users to our platform to have a simple and straight-forward experience when they’re creating an account.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

Populus-Viewer

Over at Populus-Viewer, we're continuing to refine the UX, for maximum focus, efficiency and enjoyment. Since last time we've:

1. Reworked the mobile view controls into a sidebar design.
2. Improved the generation of highlight rectangles.
3. Made sure that LaTeX and code listings are always displayed nicely
4. Made it possible to modify text selections within a PDF using the keyboard
5. Added "one-click" links for onboarding new users into a particular server, SSO flow and PDF collection.

We've also had some bug fixes related to federation, and had some of our first ever (maybe the first on matrix - first in the history of the universe?) federated social annotation sessions.

Populus-Philarchive

Populus-Philarchive, our proof-of-concept discussion overlay for preprint archives, now incorporates an OAI-PMH harvester, so it can aggregate OAI bibliographic metadata, and use that data for room creation and discovery. The implementation is pretty general, so it should be easy to tweak for any archive that supports OAI-PMH.

MSC3574

MSC3574 - marking up resources got some love this week, as we added a proposal for serializing annotations on matrix that ought to be compatible with the w3c web annotation data model. This paves the way for interoperability between the matrix annotation ecosystem and services like hypothes.is, and hopefully will make matrix a compelling option even for institutions where compliance with existing web standards is a must.

As always, if you'd like to chat about any of these developments, come visit us at #opentower:matrix.org !

Circles (website)

E2E encrypted social networking built on Matrix. Safe, private sharing for your friends, family, and community.

cvwright reports

The Circles beta on iOS continues inching toward a public release later this Spring.

• This week I added support for infinite scrolling on timelines. (Previously, scrolling the timelines was very clunky -- the user had to manually tap a button to "Load More" every 10-15 posts.)
• Also added a confirmation dialog when the user attempts to leave a group.

On Android, the prototype is coming along nicely, thanks to the efforts of our new developer Taras:

• The login screen works
• Currently working on implementing the timeline of social posts for groups

Dept of Widgets 🧩

Mjolnir Widget (website)

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

MTRNord (they/them) reports

In the last 2 weeks, I increasingly had to learn how to moderate rooms properly, which brought up a lack of nice Mjölnir gui for me. Due to that, I just started to write one. It is at the time of writing still fairly young.

The current features are:

• An overview of the ban list data the user is in (Not for the specific Mjölnir currently. Also requires a user to have joined the list room)
• A quick form to ban a person
• A form to redact someone or a message

Planned features are:

• Support for showing MSC1929 information if available
• Writing a patch for Mjölnir, so the widget can know which banlist the bot watches, so only relevant lists show up.
• Editing the banlist (aka unbanning)
• Adding support for more advanced features like deactivation of users and removal of media on the matrix-media-repo.
• Covering most of Mjölnir's commands
• Redact on ban and similar utilities you might want while banning.

Small getting started (it is simple :D)

To use it, you simply can add it to your Mjölnir Admin room by putting /addwidget https://moderation_widget.nordgedanken.dev?room_id=$matrix_room_id (the variable will get replaced automatically) in the message bar and pressing enter. The widget runs entirely client side, so this is not sending any events to my server. If you still are concerned due to the big amount of permissions asked, you can just build it yourself and host it.

Code and Room

Code is at https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-moderation-widget Room is at: #mjolnir-widget:nordgedanken.dev

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

mtxclient (website)

Client API library for Matrix, built on top of libcurl

Nico reports

You know what would be embarrassing? If changing the version number of something broke Nheko... Well, completely unrelated, mtxclient 0.6.2 is out now which fixes an issue where it would aggressively validate that version numbers started with an 'r'. Otherwise that release is API and ABI compatible, so if packagers could pick that up as a bugfix release into stable releases, that would be great!

Matrix-Rust-SDK-Bot-Framework-Helper (website)

A toolkit for writing commandbots more efficient in rust for matrix.

MTRNord (they/them) says

0.3.1

A small update was released, merging 2 month old PRs.

The changes are mainly features being now deactivated because we did not actually use them and fixing the example in one case. No updates to dependencies.

0.4.0

Dependencies have been updated to the newest versions.

Dept of Ops 🛠

andrewsh reports

The distribution-provided Debian packages for Synapse will only be provided for Bookworm (in testing/unstable) and Bullseye (in bullseye-backports). If you’re still using Buster (through buster-backports-sloppy), consider switching to Bullseye or, alternatively, to packages provided by the Synapse upstream. 1.52.0 is the last version to be provided for Buster through the backports repository.

saces reports

I did not find a docker container to ease/automate synapse and postgres maintenance, so I started one: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/synatainer

Dept of Bots 🤖

reMarkable

Paul announces

I saw an interesting (to me) reMarkable telegram bot somewhere. But I prefer matrix and node.js was more difficult to deploy on embedded. So I wrote a reMarkable matrix bot in Go. https://gitlab.com/ptman/remarkable-matrix

matrix-ukraine-donation-bot

krazykirby99999 says

A Matrix chat bot to send donation links to aid Ukraine in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Setup

Install Python 3.8 or higher

Install python-poetry

python -m pip install poetry

Clone Repository

git clone https://github.com/KrazyKirby99999/matrix-ukraine-donation-bot.git

Install Dependencies

cd matrix-ukraine-donation-bot
python -m poetry install

Usage:

Set environment variables

HOMESERVER=https://matrix.org
USERNAME=matrix-ukraine-donation-bot
PASSWORD=password # or ACCESS_TOKEN=syt_...

Run main.py

python -m poetry run python main.py

Example:

Matrix Community Manager (website)

Looking for a bot to manage events and feedback from your community?

Sleuth reports

Looking for a bot to manage events and feedback from your community?

MCM an information bot. It manages the flow of information between community leaders and their community.

It aggregates messages from community members in several ways.

• A @ mention. You can mention the bot with a message.
• A Direct Message. Members of your community can message this bot privately.
• hash tags. Using hash tags members of your community can send messages tagged to go to a specific back room.

You as an administrator of the bot can send timed announcements to any room using the built in matrix administration interface. You can also manage tags, add and remove admin of the bot, add automatic replies and more. All from the comforts of your Matrix client.

If you have any questions or want help please join #Matrix-Community-Manager:matrix.org Docs and installation guide can be found here

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

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

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR announces

Hello everyone! It's me, not-anoa, here with your weekly spec update. I finally got the scripts to run which means you get a proper update once again (yay).

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

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3589: Room version 9 as the default room version (merge)
• MSC3582: Remove m.room.message.feedback (merge)

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3726: Safer Password-based Authentication with BS-SPEKE
• MSC3725: Content warnings
• MSC3723: Federation /versions

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3286: Media spoilers

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been looking at unblocking MSC3440: Threads so it can make a smooth journey into acceptance. This involves quite a lot of work to ensure that the features we're concerned about are addressed, but so far the FCP progress on it is looking good.

We're also spending a bunch of time working out what room version 10 looks like to try and fix some usability issues with join rules and general maintenance of things like power levels. The hope is that in time for Matrix 1.3 we'll have v10 out (but not made default) for folks to experiment with.

Random MSC of the week

Your random MSC is MSC2974: Widgets: Capabilities re-exchange. I swear it was actually random and only after running the script exactly once. The MSC is interesting because it allows widgets (a feature working its way into the general spec, slowly) to ask for more permissions when they need them. This ensures the widget doesn't need to ask for everything at startup (which is more likely to mean that it gets rejected), and that it can maintain a clean security state during normal operation.

One day it'll probably make it into the spec as part of the larger widget movement, but first we need to get widgets into the spec properly.

The Graph

Numbers only mean so much, and graphs show progress. Here's the breakdown of MSCs over time:

Of note

If you look carefully at the OpenAPI viewer, you might notice a dropdown for not-client-server APIs 👀. There's still work to be done to bring on the missing APIs, but this is in a place where it can be experimented with. Thanks to Alexandre Franke for getting this over the line :)

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

Brendan Abolivier reports

This week we've released Synapse 1.53.0rc1, which includes a bunch of new features, improvements, and other niceties... But more on that next week when we release Synapse 1.53.0 🙂 As usual, we're super grateful for anyone that helps us test release candidates by running them with their homeservers! Please report any breakage or feedback in #synapse:matrix.org

Apart from this we have been continuing our experimentations with Poetry to better manage our dependencies in our Python projects after we switched Sydent to it last week. We're already starting to see improvements off the back of this work, such as automated security PRs and an opportunity to centralise our automated workflows to better reuse them in our projects (see https://github.com/matrix-org/backend-meta). We look forward to bringing all this goodness to Synapse soon!

See you next week! 😀

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace says

And my Helm Chart updates are still happening, also now listed on Artifact Hub for easier discovery. This week saw several element-web updates, finally ending on 1.10.4

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

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

Nico says

Is using Nheko a bit of a pain on your PinePhone? Do you just want bubbles in your chat app, not raw lines of text? Does Nheko waste too much space on timestamps and other metadata for messages?

Well, I am assuming Malte was annoyed by that or similar reasons. But in the end, they did spend a lot of effort reorganizing the way Nheko layouts messages so that people can have bubbles. This should make Nheko feel much more at home on the PinePhone and it seems like they are doing even more to make Nheko a great experience on mobile devices! But just look at it yourself:

If you are scared now and you think: "This is not the Nheko I came to love!", don't worry, all of this is optional. You can play around with the different avatar sizes as well as the bubbles themselves. You can even make Nheko look like it always looked!

There will be some regressions though. If you want to contribute, it would help a lot if you test those changes and report issues that you find! <3

Apart from that, there were also a lot of other bugfixes and cleanups by various contributors. You can also hide events by type now. If you don't want to see stickers or when someone joins a room, just disable that in the room settings! Tastytea implemented that. Long usernames should now also no longer overflow the profile pages and you can reset the state for a single room using the /reset-state /command. This is helpful when updating Nheko to use widgets, but Nheko just threw those events away (or pinned messages or other state events).

That's all, have a wonderful bubbly day!

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat reports

Hello and welcome back to another week at Element!

Location Sharing

• As of this week, Location Sharing is now available by default for users on all platforms, except desktop where you can receive but not send locations.
• We’re starting work on the next stage, which is to enable live location sharing, and ‘pin dropping’ where you can pick any location on a map to share.

Threads

• Threads are now live in Labs on all Element platforms!
  • Please remember this feature is experimental; let us know your feedback and report any bugs as we continue to improve.
• The teams on all platforms are working hard on improving the stability and performance of Threads.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat says

• The new search experience came out this week, you can enable it in Beta to try it out! We are collecting feedback from users to inform upcoming improvements.
• We’re working hard on smashing bugs and reducing the number of defects.

Element iOS (website)

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

kittykat announces

• Along with closing bugs, we’re working hard on adding finesse to our app and removing some of those “papercut” issues that users experience.
  • Keep your eyes peeled for updates and let us know what you think!
• Our first time user experience is being updated also. We’ve introduced new splash screens to help introduce Element. Don’t panic! You can skip straight to “sign-in” if this isn’t for you.
• A new spinner is here… While we work on the speed and performance of the app we’ve introduced a new spinner that does not get in your way while you work.

Element Android (website)

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

kittykat says

• Bugs and Papercuts… Our app is getting some love from our developer team as we try to reduce confusion and simplify flows throughout the app.
  • Keep an eye out for any small changes and let us know what you think!
• Creating a new account in Element can be intimidating for new users, especially those who aren’t familiar with Matrix. We’re introducing new screens and simplifying our questions so that users can sign up with confidence!
  • If you have any feedback, or want to share your thoughts on our first time user experience, get in touch.
• A new layout option hit our app this week: Message Bubbles! If you’re used to seeing inbound messages on the right, and outgoing messages on the left this might be for you. You can access the new appearance option from Settings.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Beeper media viewer

tulir says

I wrote a small web app thing that can download, decrypt and display Matrix media in a browser. The goal is to use it in the Android SMS bridge for sending attachments that are too big for MMS, but it might be useful for other things too.

Currently it consists of the web frontend, a maubot plugin to generate links, and a small server that stores file metadata (so the URLs just contain the decryption key and a short ID to find the metadata on the server). I'll probably continue working on the exact URL format to make it shorter and to encrypt the metadata, and maybe also add an alternative mode where all info is included in the URL to make the server component optional.

You can try it out by sending files in an encrypted room with @media:maunium.net. It'll reply with a link like https://media.mau.chat/AGIPyjtJQAU#KHBwuZFrv1ffCd4ZUylo8MV03P9N4sz2T75zLi1Urcw

The code can be found at https://gitlab.com/beeper/media-viewer

Cactus Comments (website)

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

Asbjørn says

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

Another small-ish release for the client: v0.12.0

This update introduces a new UI for the login form.

Here's the changelog:

• Re-structure login form to more clearly separate matrix.to links from direct login.
• Require user id (e.g. @alice:example.com) instead of username. Only show homeserver url field if .well-known lookup fails.
• Add top-right "X" button to close login modal.
• Login modal now closes when you press outside it.
• Fix some CSS bugs related to positioning the login form in viewport center.
• Make LoginForm a stateful component.

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

Try out a live demo: cactus.chat/demo

Join our Matrix room: #cactus:cactus.chat

Dept of Ops 🛠

f0x says

I worked on adapting the NixOS module for Synapse to support worker deployments. It's a great reproducible deployment method, and super easy to configure. My module is perhaps less quality than the rest of the chain, but it's pretty neat to define your whole Matrix deployment like this: https://git.pixie.town/f0x/nixos/src/branch/synapse-workers/nodes/cosmos/containers/synapse-workers.nix#L60 and have Nix figure out all the systemd units and nginx routes that have to be added

Full Nix code for the module is at https://git.pixie.town/f0x/nixos/src/branch/synapse-workers/common/modules/synapse pictured is the ping stat for a little test deployment with 8 federation senders :P

Dandellion dares

do tell your about publishing my NixOS module for workers in a git repository as well then 👀? https://github.com/dali99/nixos-matrix-modules

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi says

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports installing the matrix_encryption_disabler Synapse module (details here), which homeserver admins can use to prevent End-to-End-Encryption from being enabled by users on their homeserver. The popular opinion is that this is dangerous and shouldn't be done, but there are valid use cases for disabling encryption discussed in this Synapse issue.

Dept of Services 🚀

etke.cc (website)

Your matrix server on your conditions

Aine reports

🎉 Today marks 1 year of the etke.cc! 🎉

During that year, we did:

• Pushed 234 updates and enhancements to the automation framework used as the service core
• Integrated 17 additional components to the matrix stack
• Developed 5 bots and tools to extend matrix capabilities
• Installed 92 new matrix servers
• Helped 172 people and organizations to achieve their goals in the matrix
• Posted 74 updates in the announcements room

Some history:

• the project (not service yet) started on February 12, 2021
• the first installed server was etke.cc itself (yes, etke.cc homeserver is a customer of etke.cc service from the day 1)
• the second installed server was a chatbot, that uses matrix as a platform to interact with users across different chat networks (Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, etc.) - one API to rule them all.
• In May 2021 the service was published globally

#news:etke.cc | #discussion:etke.cc

Dept of Bots 🤖

matrix-wordle (website)

An implementation of the popular Wordle game for the Matrix Protocol.

krazykirby99999 reports

An implementation of the popular Wordle game for the Matrix Protocol.

Source: Github Repository

Made with simplematrixbotlib

Setup

Install Python 3.8 or higher

Install python-poetry

python -m pip install poetry

Clone Repository

git clone https://github.com/KrazyKirby99999/matrix-wordle.git

Install Dependencies

cd matrix-wordle
python -m poetry install

Usage:

Set environment variables

HOMESERVER=https://matrix.org
USERNAME=wordle-bot
PASSWORD=password # or ACCESS_TOKEN=syt_...

Run main.py

python -m poetry run python main.py

Example:

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

TravisR reports

After a few years, matrix-room-directory-server has finally gotten an upgrade to modern times. Intended to eventually be a standalone directory server (making vanity aliases possible, but otherwise not functional as a homeserver), it currently only supports overriding the federation /publicRooms endpoint.

The changes made today are to replace the old, broken, appservice-backed approach with a space-backed approach. You can see this in action on t2bot.io: querying the room directory over federation will hit the room directory server, which is watching #directory:t2bot.io in the background to determine which rooms to serve.

Dept of Guides 🧭

minecraftchest1 says

Hay y'all. I created a blog post about how to host element and matrix .well-known files using cloudflare pages that I thought might be worth sharing. Have a few kinks to work out regarding CORS (might need to clean my browsers cache) though. https://minecraftchest1.wordpress.com/2022/02/17/hosting-element-and-matrix-well-known-files-with-cloudflare-pages/ https://matrix.to/#/#minecraftchest1-blog-matrix-elemet-cloudflare:matrix.org

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

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

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

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:

• MSC3720: Account status
• MSC3715: /relations parity with /messages
• MSC3713: Alleviating ACL exhaustion with ACL Slots
• [WIP] MSC3710: User groups

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

MSCs with newly proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC3440: Threading via m.thread relation
• MSC3613: Combinatorial join rules
• MSC3667: Enforce integer power levels

Closed MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3348: Server-Server Room based extensible communication

Spec Updates

MSC3440 (threading) continues to move forward with a proposed final comment period this week. As a really useful feature in Matrix, it's great to see it getting closer to landing in the spec.

In a similar vein, MSC3613 (combinatorial join rules) had a proposed final comment period. The intention of this is to be a simple mechanism for resolving the "it's not possible to have both a restricted and knock room" situation - as both introduced mutually exclusive join rules. This MSC will likely serve as the basis of a new room version whenever it lands.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3144: Allow Widgets By Default in Private Rooms!

This MSC makes the case for allowing widgets to be created in private rooms by default. The actual spec for it is blocked behind having widgets in the spec (see this tracking PR if you're interested).

As noted in the PR though, this MSC could build on the existing im.vector.modular.widgets unstable prefix for widgets in order to create an implementation for this feature. It does not appear to have happened yet though.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

callahad announces

Hello, TWIM! This week we released Synapse 1.52, which includes new Admin APIs for monitoring federation status and immediately retrying failed connections, as well as for reporting on rooms shared between two homeservers. We've also fixed / improved media previews for sites like Reddit. Plus lots more fixes / refactors / improvements under the hood.

This is a smaller release as it's coming off of our FOSDEM sprint, but we look forward to getting back to more regularly-sized and featureful Synapses this month.

Notably, we've been experimenting with Poetry to better manage Python dependencies in our applications (Synapse, Sygnal, and Sydent). We just switched Sydent over this week and are working out the kinks in our CI and build pipelines. We're looking forward to bringing this consistency to Synapse next month!

See you next week!

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander reports

Yesterday we released Dendrite 0.6.3 which is a primarily bug fix release. It contains the following changes:

• Initial support for m.login.token
• A number of regressions from earlier v0.6.x versions should now be corrected
• Missing state is now correctly retrieved in cases where a gap in the timeline was closed but some of those events were missing state snapshots, which should help to unstick slow or broken rooms
• Fixed a transaction issue where inserting events into the database could deadlock, which should stop rooms from getting stuck
• Fixed a problem where rejected events could result in rolled back database transactions
• Avoided a potential race condition on fetching latest events by using the room updater instead
• Processing events from /get_missing_events will no longer result in potential recursion
• Federation events are now correctly generated for updated self-signing keys and signed devices
• Rejected events can now be un-rejected if they are reprocessed and all of the correct conditions are met
• Fetching missing auth events will no longer error as long as all needed events for auth were satisfied
• Users can now correctly forget rooms if they were not a member of the room

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

Conduit (website)

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

Timo ⚡️ says

Conduit v0.3.0 released last week and over 50 servers already upgraded! This week we looked into some bugs that still happen with this version:

• Element Android doesn't show notifications: A bug where we send 'null' instead of leaving out a field https://github.com/matrix-org/sygnal/issues/295
• Missing profiles when scrolling up: Bug in multiple clients: https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/issues/233

These bugs will be fixed in the coming days.

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace announces

This week saw more updates to my Helm Charts as usual; matrix-synapse is now at 1.52.0

Dendrite Helm Chart (website)

Helm Chart to deploy Dendrite on Kubernetes

jonnobrow reports

I am pleased to share that both v2 and v3 of the Dendrite Helm Chart have now been released.

Dendrite Helm Chart v2

Version 2 included a bump in app version up to v0.6.0 and the necessary switch from Kafka to NATS.

Dendrite Helm Chart v3

Version 3 includes the addition of polylith support as well as some general improvements and fixes.

You can find the latest version of the chart and documentation on GitHub

Thanks to @anthr76:mozilla.org and @s7evink:matrix.org for their support throughout the development of polylith mode.

Dept of Clients 📱

Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Carl Schwan announces

NeoChat 22.02 is out with the possibility of sharing files directly from NeoChat to other apps and services (Nextcloud, Imgur, email, ...). We also added support for minimizing the application to the system tray on startup and you can now label accounts to better organize them if you are using the multi-account feature. Aside from that, we spend some time fixing many small bugs and paper cuts reducing the total amount of open bug reports by 20%.

https://plasma-mobile.org/2022/02/09/plasma-mobile-gear-22-02/#neochat

Hydrogen (website)

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

Bruno announces

We've release 0.2.26. You can now create rooms and direct messages with Hydrogen. There's also a bug fix in this release for replies not loading in e2ee rooms under certain conditions.

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

Welcome to another week of TWIM at Element! Here’s our updates:

Polls and Location Sharing

• Polls is now out of labs, and available in the composer for all users with the latest app versions.
• Location sharing is available on the mobile apps. For now you will need to enable it in settings in order to see the composer icon and send your location. As of next week’s releases it will be enabled by default on all platforms.

Threads

• Threads aims to reduce cross-talk on the timeline by moving side-convo’s to the right panel. If you want to try it out, it's available in Labs on Web today and in Labs on Mobile from next week!
• We’ve been working on improving the stability and speed of threads across platforms.

Community Testing

• Join#element-community-testing:matrix.org to join us for future testing sessions!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle announces

• Metaspaces have landed! Giving users a new way to display favourites, DMs and rooms outside of other spaces. Switch these on in Quick Settings at the bottom left of your app.
• New and improved Search! We’re pleased to move the new search experience into Beta. Head to Settings > Labs to access it.
  • Those of you using Nightly or Develop will see the new experience by default.
  • Provide feedback on your experience directly from the Search window.
• On Web we’ve also been chasing away some bugs, specifically desynced memberlist and stale display names.

In Labs (Enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or Nightly)

• Threads: The MSC is available here MSC3440

J. Ryan Stinnett announces

Thanks to everyone who tested the maximised widgets feature which was recently added to Element Web. It received a sudden burst of attention as part of the FOSDEM conference. 😄 This week we've been fine tuning the feature to ensure it works for more workflows, and we've also cleaned up various associated widget bugs. In particular, in the develop version of Element Web, the pin and maximise actions are more consistent accessible, so you can toggle between pinned and maximised if e.g. you're in a conference room and temporarily want the stream widget to be larger while still having access to the chat timeline.

Next week we'll be focusing more on our Matrix-native collaborative document plans.

Element iOS (website)

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

Doug says

• The next update of iOS (1.8.0) will have improved emoji reactions and location sharing will be on by default!
  • We will also be releasing fixes to the incorrect scrolling on the timeline and home screen sorting.
• Work on a Rust prototype is also underway. We’re excited to learn about the opportunities and advantages of this approach as we start to learn and experiment.

In Labs

• From next week Threads will be available in Labs on Mobile. Switch it on and try it out!

Element Android (website)

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

adam reports

• This version of the Android app (1.4.0) includes message bubbles and location sharing!
• Also, notifications are back online! Some of our users were experiencing intermittent notifications when connected to wifi, but ‘tis no more.
• We’ve also squashed a bunch of other bugs, our favourites include:
  • Welcoming back some font weights that had disappeared
  • Fixing statuses in the timeline for missed or rejected calls
  • Closing the “Invited to Space” dialog after you invited someone to the Space…

In Labs

• Threads have landed in Labs. Switch it on and try it out!

Beeper (website)

All you chats in one app.

Brad Murray says

Beeper is a universal chat app built on top of Matrix. We've created 12+ open source Matrix bridges and integrated them into an easy to use all-in-one service which does not require setting up your own homeserver.

We’re excited to announce that as of today we are now out of Beta! We have been hard at work and we’re now ready to be sharing Beeper with a lot more people, starting first with the people we’ve built up on our waitlist.

For more details and demos on the current state of Beeper, including our recently rebuilt and relaunched iOS app, check out the update on our blog: https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-update-4-out-of-beta or watch the video below.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP announces

The new version contains two new features around the Synapse Admin API, making someone a room admin and listing all unencrypted media URLs.

I've had some good ideas on how to make Matrix Wrench cover more use cases while staying simple for both users and me as a developer. New components allow me to add new API endpoints in as little as 7 lines. So far this only applies to simple endpoints without parameters, like joining and leaving a room, but it can be expanded to more endpoints because of how similar all Matrix endpoints are. Props to the Spec! 🙌

Stay tuned for an editable UI coming soon™️.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict says

Trixnity is now on version 1.1.7. Since 1.1.0 we have fixed many bugs and added some improvements and features. Our reference client runs amazingly reliable and fast thanks to Trixnity 🚀

Features and improvements:

• support presence
• support read receipts
• support push notifications API
• add Unknown to UserTrustLevel
• basic support for relates_to field

Halcyon (website)

Halcyon is an easy to use matrix library inspired by discord.py

gen3 says

Version 1.1.1 released This was a quick bugfix release for a finding by jeffcasavant, in which joining a room with a predecessor, the bot could crash. Thanks Jeff!

If you missed it last week, I published a template / demo stock reporting bot you can find here: https://github.com/WesR/Halcyon-stock-bot . Short and sweet, this little bot should be a great starting point if your looking into making a bot. Make sure to also checkout the library itself for more examples, and usage information https://github.com/WesR/Halcyon.

I'm always looking for more feedback, and love to see what people are working on. Come hangout with us in the Halcyon room: https://matrix.to/#/#halcyon:blackline.xyz

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Pretix Matrix Plugin

Felix says

We have been using Matrix as a chat solution for the attendees of our biannual conference (KIF) and for new students during the introduction week, as well as Pretix to register attendants. Up until now the process to invite attendees to the corresponding Matrix Rooms and Spaces involved some curl and jq magic as well as manual intervention to connect both.

We have now replaced said manual process with a Pretix plugin that invites registered attendees to a configurable Matrix Room or Space. This plugin is now available on the Pretix marketplace or directly from its repository.

Gatho

Jake C announces

I'm excited to share a side-project I've been working on for the last ~3 months: Gatho (http://gatho.party) - a web app for hosting small gatherings.

Gatho is perfect as a replacement for Facebook Events for small social gatherings. I'm a 24 year old Australian who recently deleted Facebook - I've used Gatho for a few parties now and the guests have loved it!

Gatho includes a Matrix bot which, when added to a room, can synchronise RSVP emoji reactions to a linked Gatho event! See gatho.party/getting-started to hear how the Matrix synchronization works.

You can also create one-click RSVP links to send to your friends - no matter which chat/social app they use!

It's fully GDPR compliant and multi-region with an EU server and database, and uses NextAuth.js for passwordless authentication.

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

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

Dept of Ping 🏓

Ping Room

tulir reports

The ping room has been upgraded to room v9. During the 452 days the previous (v6) ping room was alive, it received a total of 735997 org.matrix.dummy_events and 604459 m.room.message events.

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

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

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of oh hey it's FOSDEM

TravisR says

We've got a devroom. check it out. https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/track/matrixorg_foundation_and_community

And let me add

You can join our devroom at #matrix-devroom:fosdem.org to watch all the talks, and our stand at #matrix-stand:fosdem.org

Dept of Spec 📜

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/unstable/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• WIP: MSC3706: Extensions to /_matrix/federation/v2/send_join/{roomId}/{eventId} for partial state
• MSC3700: Deprecate plaintext sender key

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC3383: Include destination in X-Matrix Auth Header

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Abandoned MSCs:

• MSC2810: Consistent globs specification

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3676: Transitioning away from reply fallbacks

Spec Updates

Matrix v1.2 has landed! 🥳 Read the official announcement blogpost and check it out over at https://spec.matrix.org/v1.2/. This release includes headlining features such as Spaces, room versions 8 and 9 which bring restricted join rules, as well as the new Matrix URI scheme.

I'd also like to point out that v1.2 released on 2/2/2022 :)

Otherwise, thank you to aaronraimist and devonh from the community for their fixes to the spec's text that merged this week. They are highly appreciated!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3051: A scalable relation format!

This MSC proposes to pave a way to allowing relating an event to multiple other events, which unlocks some additional use cases. Go check it out if you're interested in extending Matrix's capabilities even further!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

callahad announces

Synapse 1.52.0rc1 is out, but honestly, we're just all hands on deck for FOSDEM tomorrow! As a reminder, members of the Synapse team will be giving a couple of talks during at the event:

• Events for the Uninitiated by Shay at 10:10 UTC

• Beyond the Matrix: Extend the capabilities of your Synapse homeserver by Brendan at 15:40 UTC

Be sure to check out all of the talks in the Matrix.org Foundation & Community devroom or visit the Matrix stand for more freeform discussion — we'll see you there!

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander says

Today we've released Dendrite 0.6.1 which contains a number of fixes and improvements. This release includes the following changes:

• Roomserver inputs now take place with full transactional isolation in PostgreSQL deployments
• Pull consumers are now used instead of push consumers when retrieving messages from NATS to better guarantee ordering and to reduce redelivery of duplicate messages
• Further logging tweaks, particularly when joining rooms
• Improved calculation of servers in the room, when checking for missing auth/prev events or state
• Dendrite will now skip dead servers more quickly when federating by reducing the TCP dial timeout
• The key change consumers have now been converted to use native NATS code rather than a wrapper
• Go 1.16 is now the minimum supported version for Dendrite
• Local clients should now be notified correctly of invites
• The roomserver input API now has more time to process events, particularly when fetching missing events or state, which should fix a number of errors from expired contexts
• Fixed a panic that could happen due to a closed channel in the roomserver input API
• Logging in with uppercase usernames from old installations is now supported again (contributed by hoernschen)
• Federated room joins now have more time to complete and should not fail due to expired contexts
• Events that were sent to the roomserver along with a complete state snapshot are now persisted with the correct state, even if they were rejected or soft-failed

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

• Client-server APIs: 65%
• Server-server APIs: 94%

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

Conduit (website)

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

Timo ⚡️ says

Hey everyone, this evening we will finally release the next Conduit version: v0.3

If you have questions about anything, come and ask us in #conduit:fachschaften.org

We have managed to get a lot of features and improvements into this release, here are some of the most exciting ones:

• Feature: Support server ACLs !248

• Feature: RocksDB Database Backend !217

• Feature: Database backend selection at runtime !217

• Feature: Report users to homeserver admin !218

• Feature: Creation of Spaces (exploring spaces is not supported yet) !220

• Feature: Enable voice calls (requires configuring a TURN server) !208

• Feature: Lazy loading for much faster initial syncs !240

• Improvement: Batch inserts for events !204

• Improvement: Significantly faster state resolution !217

• Improvement: Reuse reqwest client !265

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Dendrite Helm (website)

This chart creates a polylith, where every component is in its own deployment and requires a Postgres server aswell as a NATS JetStream server.

Till F. reports

Hi TWIM followers :)

dendrite-helm is an experimental Helm Chart to deploy a polylith/monolith Server.

After last weeks release of Dendrite 0.6.0, I finally updated my Helm Chart to finally reflect that.

Changes:

• Versioned releases (no morelatest docker tags or such)
• locmai added dependencies (NATS JetStream, Postgres)
• Update README (helm-docs)

Special thanks to locmai, who added the missing dependencies!

Chart

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

It's FOSDEM! Don't forget to checkout my 5 min ramble about custom stickers and emotes in Matrx: https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/matrix_custom_stickers/

In preparation for FOSDEM, I've also been working on some goodies so that you can participate using Nheko in a limited manner:

• Previews for rooms are now fetched for spaces using the hierarchy API
• Widgets for the talks should be shown below the topic as links

While this isn't grand, it should be good enough for some to participate using Nheko. You will need the latest master (some commits aren't even pushed at the time of writing!), but if you are just watching, this should give you an easy way to fetch the talk link for each room. You will still have to watch the actual talk in your browser though.

LorenDB also added a big, fat, red offline indicator. If your server dies because of FOSDEM, now Nheko will tell you.

I hope you all will have a great time and I hope I see you around!

Moment (website)

A Matrix client; forked from Mirage.

@maze:mazie.rocks announces

Releasing Moment, a fork of Mirage! In case you missed out on Mirage, here's what this is:

• A fancy QML + Python client aimed at power users
• Keyboard bindings for almost everything
• Very customizable, with ability to adjust any keybinding/functionality
• A multi-account client
• Adjusts to any screen size

After 6 months of inactivity on the Mirage project, Moment brings it back to life. We have fixed some important issues and will continue to maintain Moment!

🏠 Matrix room: #moment-client:matrix.org

📁 Repo: https://gitlab.com/mx-moment/moment 🌐 Website: mx-moment.xyz 🔍 Differences between Mirage and Moment

🛠 Install Moment from source 📦 Install Moment from Flatpak ⛰ Install Moment on Alpine Linux

Hydrogen (website)

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

Bruno announces

🎺 We've released Hydrogen 0.2.24 and 0.2.25 with session backup writing and some bug fixes! From now on you shouldn't need to have another client running along hydrogen for keys to be written to the key backup!

Bruno adds

We've also just released 0.0.5 of the hydrogen-view-sdk with very early support for registration and exporting more symbols.

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle reports

Welcome to another week of TWIM at Element! Here’s our updates:

Polls and Location Sharing

• Polls is now out of labs, and available in the composer for all users with the latest app versions.
• Location sharing is also now available on the mobile apps. For now you will need to enable it in settings in order to see the composer icon and send your location.

Threads

• Threaded Messaging is making forward progress on all 3 platforms; we’re aiming to help clear up cross-talk on the timeline by moving side-convo’s to the right panel. If you want to try it out, it's available in Labs on Web. We’ll be pushing Threads into Labs on Mobile in the next release!

Community Testing

• Join #element-community-testing:matrix.org to help out with the testing
• Coming up this week:
  • The new search experience: Monday, 7th Feb at 15:30 UTC / 16:30 CET

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle says

• Bubbles are now available! Keeping your inbound messages on the left, and your outbound messages on the right your timeline should now be easier to skim read. This layout is off by default but to see it in action, update your Message Layout appearance preferences from Settings.
• Metaspaces have landed! Giving users a new way to display favourites, DMs and rooms outside of other spaces. Switch these on in Quick Settings at the bottom left of your app.

In Labs (Enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or Nightly)

• New and improved Search!
  • Provide feedback on your experience directly from the Search window.
• Threads, including design updates. The MSC is available hereMSC3440

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu reports

• We’ve been working hard on improving the startup and resume times, you should start to see these in your app in 1.7.0.
• Work on a Rust prototype is underway. We’re excited to learn about the opportunities and advantages of this approach as we start to learn and experiment.
• Also, Xcode13 & iOS15 compatibility has been added for developers
• Coming soon in 1.8.0! Bubbles and an improved Onboarding experience
  • Threads will also be hitting Labs on Mobile soon so let us know what you think.

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle announces

• A hotfix (1.3.18) on Android will fix some bugs we found in this week’s release.
• Bubbles will also be landing soon, you can find this new feature in Settings > Preferences > Timeline. The feature has been merged to develop if you want to give it a try!
• Threads have also been merged on develop.
• We’ve been making improvements to the Onboarding experience for new users too.

In Labs

• Threads will soon be in Labs on Mobile. Switch it on and try it out!

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

Viewer Updates

Here's a big populus viewer update! Since last time, I've been mostly working on improving the user experience and onboarding for non-experts, as well as making my teaching-assistant bot a little smarter - this work is ongoing. But I have had time for a few new features 😁

• Populus now implements MSC3592 - Markup locations for PDF documents, a proposal building on MSC3574 - Marking up resources, so there's a documented format for interoperable PDF annotations (though this is not the final draft, see below!)
• I've reworked the sidebar for the PDF view, improving the aesthetics and allowing for a "fullscreen" view of PDF content.
• I've added user-directory search and improved the usability of the invite modal.

The reason that MSC3574 is not a final draft is that I'm increasingly looking at the w3c's web annotation data model as a compelling foundation for annotations on Matrix. Stay tuned for a upcoming MSC, or come over to #opentower:matrix.org to talk about the future of annotation on Matrix!

Populus-Philarchive

I've also been working on a proof-of-concept for one Matrix use-case that I'm hoping Populus can help fill. Social annotation can be a good tool for getting feedback on works in progress, or for discussing new research with your team or lab. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just pop open a paper on a preprint archive and start commenting, or say "hey friends, I'm reading this paper, what do you think?" And wouldn't it be nicer if you could do that and host the discussion on your university or team's Matrix server?

Here's a first pass at that idea: https://opentower.github.io/populus-philarchive/

At the moment works by just pasting in paper codes from philarchive.org - it'll preview bibliographic information and give you a list of discussions taking place around a given paper, with the option to create a new one. Sessions are shared with populus-viewer, and pdfs continue to be hosted by the original archive. There are a number of clear upgrade paths, by integrating with a preprint archive that has an open search API, or even by adding an OAI-PMH metadata harvester to the backend, to combine the metadata from a bunch of open paper archives. I'm really excited to see where this work goes.

nehko-krunner (website)

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

LorenDB announces

I have been working on a little project over the last week: nheko-krunner. nheko-krunner is a KRunner plugin that loads rooms from nheko, displays them to the user, and allows the user to activate said rooms. How does it do this? Well, I've also been creating a D-Bus API for nheko! This code has not been merged yet, but once it is, you will be able to create your own plugins that access nheko via D-Bus!

The current functionality of nheko-krunner is simply (1) search and switch to rooms that you are in (not unlike the Ctrl-K switcher), and (2) join rooms from their aliases.

If you want to try out nheko-krunner, you will need to build from the dbus branch in my personal fork of nheko and then install nheko-krunner from the above repo.

I hope that somebody finds this useful and I am excited to see what other D-Bus plugins may show up in the future!

Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP announces

The versions 0.4.x brought improvements to the network log, letting you spot and investigate HTTP errors, bad JSON and network errors.

Ideally, I want to focus as much on the Matrix Spec as possible, but for the v0.5.0 I might venture into the territory of the Synapse Admin API, e.g. for listing and deleting media in a room. Please contact me, if you have use cases around media moderation you'd like me to consider.

export matrix messages (website)

A commandline utility to export matrix messages

Aine reports

emm (export matrix messages) v0.9.4 is here

Now you can ignore messages from some users, defined in the -i cli argument.

For example, to ignore TWIM bot and me, -i @twim:cadair.com,@aine:etke.cc

Source code

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Halcyon (website)

Halcyon is an easy to use matrix library inspired by discord.py

gen3 announces

No new release this week. I've been working on the video sending functionality, and I am looking forward to seeing what that enables ya'll to do! In the meantime, I've published a template / demo bot you can find here: https://github.com/WesR/Halcyon-stock-bot . In just 37 lines of (unminified) code, this little bot:

• Sets a status message
• Automatically joins rooms via invite
• Searches messages for $stocks mentioned, then formats and replies the current price and daily percent change for all the tickers in the message Screenshot below

I'm always looking for more feedback, and love to see what people are working on. Come hangout in the Halcyon room: https://matrix.to/#/#halcyon:blackline.xyz Lastly, for more info at on the bot library visit https://github.com/WesR/Halcyon Happy Hacking!

Polyjuice (website)

Elixir libraries related to the Matrix communications protocol.

uhoreg announces

The Polyjuice Project has a new component: Polyjuice Client Test, a tool for testing Matrix clients. Each test has its own preconfigured homeserver environment, implemented using the Polyjuice Server library, and can be customized according to the needs of the test. Only a few tests are implemented so far, but many more are planned, initially focusing on testing functionality related to end-to-end encryption. You can see a demo of it in the Matrix Live video.

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi says

Thanks to HarHarLinks, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now install the matrix-hookshot bridge for bridging Matrix to multiple project management services, such as GitHub, GitLab and JIRA.

See our Setting up matrix-hookshot documentation to get started.

Matrix Corporal (website)

reconciliator and gateway for a managed Matrix server

Slavi says

matrix-corporal (as of version 2.2.3) is now published to Docker Hub (see devture/matrix-corporal) as a multi-arch container image with support for all these platforms: linux/amd64, linux/arm64/v8 and linux/arm/v7. Users on these ARM architectures no longer need to build matrix-corporal manually.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Honoroit (website)

A Matrix helpdesk bot

Aine announces

Honoroit v0.9.4 is here!

New version comes with in-memory caching for thread relations. It significantly decreases amount of requests to homeserver during thread relations solving, both for MSC3440 threads and reply-to chain fallback

Source code, say hi in #honoroit:etke.cc

Dept of Social Media?

matrix-art (website)

A Deviantart Fork based on Matrix

MTRNord (they/them) says

This week the focus was on fixing quirks and making the profile (at least partially) editable and adding translations.

Changes

• Fonts now get hosted on the page itself due to the legal issues in Germany with Google Fonts hosted fonts
• Profile page has a rough UI to edit the profile page if logged in
• Licence gets now correctly displayed according to the Creative Commons Licence requirements
• Initial work on translations has started. A Weblate instance has been set up at https://trans.nordgedanken.dev for this.
• German translation was added
• Progress on the HS side to be able to use it as a public registration server for anyone who wants to post to Matrix Art. (yes, this really has a public registration HS)
  • Mjölnir instance is set up which also is used to moderate Matrix Art in complete (Aka it is joining on creation.) This is used for being able to moderate the website.
• Errors are now properly reported to the user

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

ChatStat (website)

An R package To Gather Stats From Chat Platforms

Gwmngilfen announces

ChatStat 0.1.0 release

ChatStat is an R package for making reports on Matrix rooms.

Ahead of my lightning talk on Sunday, ChatStat has been polished up and given it's first release. You can get it here. Huge thanks to @johrpan:johrpan.de for their contributions too.

The main highlight since my last TWIM is that we actually have report generation now! You can see an example here, or check the project wiki for an example of using the raw data with ggplot2 to make custom plots of your own.

If you do give it a try, please stop by #matrix-matrix_chat_stat:fosdem.org to let us know how you got on!

Matrix in the News 📰

Carl Schwan says

The season 2 of Raising Dion (a Netflix TV show) featured shortly a video call with Riot/Element and a few other open source software (e.g. Karbon). Oh and you might recognize a few usernames in the sidebar 😅

Moe (Moritz Dietz) announces

Circles has made it into a small German speaking Apple News site/App called ifun.de. „Circles-App: Neue alte Ideen für private soziale Netzwerke“ https://www.iphone-ticker.de/circles-app-neue-ideen-fuer-private-soziale-netzwerke-185764/ There wasn’t a mention of Matrix - which is kind of exciting really. This means it can just be the transparent layer of great apps :)

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

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

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Matrix.org?

Thib reports

Kudos to Aaron for adding a GitHub action to matrix.org's repository to check for typos, and taking the time to fix them all! Worry not fellow proofreaders, our post-publication TWIM proofreading tradition is not extinct: some typos are not caught by the CI, such as misspelling of proper nouns (e.g. Devianart) or articles (e.g. "an proofreader" won't make the CI upset)

Alexandre Franke says

May be worth mentioning that Aaron added the same thing to matrix-doc so spec changes and MSCs get the same treatment.

Dept of Spec 📜

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

In terms of MSC updates this past week:

New MSCs:

• MSC3676: Transitioning away from reply fallbacks
• MSC3673: Encrypted ephemeral data units
• MSC3672: Sharing ephemeral streams of location data
• MSC3667: Enforce integer power levels
• MSC3666: Bundled aggregations for server side search

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs currently in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3676: Transitioning away from reply fallbacks (merge)

Spec Updates

The release of Matrix v1.2 is right around the corner, and is expected to go out on February 2nd. This is in line with our quarterly release cycle for the spec going forwards.

Please reach out to us in #sct-office:matrix.org if there are any last-minute MSCs that haven't started/finished Final Comment Period that you believe should be included!

Otherwise there was a lot of discussion surrounding MSC2781: Remove the reply fallbacks from the specification. I'll let the other spec updates in TWIM speak to that though :)

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2291: Configuration to Control Crawling!

A concept similar to robots.txt for the web, but for Matrix! Currently the way to inform room-crawling bots in Matrix today is by banning/kicking them from the room. However, this doesn't allow you to blanket prevent bots from joining - nor does it only inform bots that they should access some of the room's data. It's a binary switch.

Consider if you wanted your room to be crawled, but the room topic to not be indexed. This MSC could help with that! Give it a read/review if you're interested.

Nico announces

Have you ever pinged someone by accident, because you replied to a message with their name in it or maybe even a whole room mention? Or are you avoiding replies for that reason? Did the quote of a messages suddenly vanish when someone edited their message in a client? Or are you just in general unhappy with replies only showing what type of message was replied to, instead of showing the actual image being replied to (on mobile for example)? Were you annoyed, that you could only reply with a text message, but not an emote message, an image, a sticker or even a video?

I spent a bunch of time trying to remove the blocker for that in the Matrix specification, you can find the proposal here: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/2781

As it turns out, it is not quite as simple, because notifications for replies to your messages rely on a bunch of implicit interactions, which is why I also wrote another MSC to fix that: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3664

I'm a bit unhappy with replies across the matrix ecosystem at the moment and I hope this is a small step towards improving things. It's certainly not as exciting as spaces, voip, threads or stickers, but it is something which affects me every day and I think those small papercuts need some attention too.

I hope some of you share my love for the less exciting stuff!

Jonathan announces

To add onto Nico's efforts, I think that mentions today are based on too many "false-positives" (ping on displayname or username mention), and i kinda wish for the "just mention them" UX of discord, telegram, whatsapp, and so many other messengers.

So I've also made a proposal that tries to bring some explicitness in that, a new push rule that'll fire on "mention"; https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3517

It'll look for any @-MXID mention in the plaintext, or look for an <a>-mention "pill" in the HTML. It is a hack, but it is the most correct way of determining if you've been pinged in matrix, at the moment.

Matthew announces

In terms of reply fallbacks - the Spec Core Team gave an overwhelming thumbs up to removing reply fallbacks via MSC2781... but given practically this causes a cascade of other work (defining and implementing push_rules for replies, and defining and implementing push_rules for threads (MSC TBD)) and so as a temporary transitional measure we've instead made reply fallbacks best effort (MSC3676). This means that clients can now reply using non-textual events, and we can use replies as a fallback for threads for non-thread-capable-clients/ASes once MSC3440 lands. To be clear, the intention is still to incorporate all of Nico's excellent contributions on MSC2781 and MSC3664 however.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

callahad announces

Hello TWIM! Last week we released Synapse 1.51. This is a great release which includes lots of performance work around sending aggregations down /sync. It also makes Spaces much more reliable: we tracked down a bug with caching which could cause some sub-spaces to randomly appear empty when queried over federation. We also removed the 50 result limit when listing the contents of a Space.

We're also starting to see some promising results experimenting with ways to make room joins faster (MSC2775). It's not quite ready to demo, but we should have something to show off before too long. 🤞

Last but not least, FOSDEM is in 8 days! The Synapse team will be giving a couple of talks during the day: Events for the Uninitiated by Shay at 10:10 UTC, and Beyond the Matrix: Extend the capabilities of your Synapse homeserver by Brendan at 15:40 UTC. Come say hi! 🙂

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander says

We know that it has been a while coming but today we have released Dendrite 0.6! This version contains a number of significant changes, including switching away from Kafka to NATS JetStream and refactoring a number of other components. We have been making architectural changes recently to help Dendrite scale better in the future and to fix a number of race conditions that were present before. Federation in particular is much smoother and better behaved in this release, with overall lower CPU and memory usage and less resource spikes.

The full changelog is available on GitHub but the highlights are:

• NATS JetStream support, deprecating Kafka and Naffka
• The roomserver now being responsible for fetching missing events and state instead of the federation API, which fixes some race conditions
• Strict ordering and asynchronous input support in the roomserver input API, which smooths out incoming federation significantly
• Consolidated federation API, including functionality from the now-deprecated federation sender and signing key server components
• Database-backed device list synchronisation, which is now more reliable
• Correct gap checking when fetching missing events and state
• Better behaviour and lower resource usage by the /event_auth endpoint

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

• Client-server APIs: 65%
• Server-server APIs: 94%

This is a highly recommended update so if you are running a Dendrite server, please upgrade! As always, you can join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite discussion and announcements.

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace says

And this week has seen some updates to my Helm Charts as well, with matrix-synapse passing through 1.50.2 to end up on 1.51.0

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Half-Shot says

Hey folks, no releases this week but a general update on a little project of ours. I've been working through the problem of making bridges easier to use and supplimenting our command interfaces with pretty buttons and forms. To that effect, we've landed out first PR on adding widget communication support to the matrix-appservice-bridge library \o/.

You can see some of the details here https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/pull/365

but that's not all. I'm doing a talk about this whole subject at FOSDEM which you can tune into! See the deets at https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/matrix_next_gen_interfaces/

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

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

Nico reports

Next to spec work, progress on porting Nheko to 100% qml continues. This week I ported the login and registration pages. I also did some minor cleanups on them and prep work for future improvements (like buttons for each SSO provider or providing email address and registration token inline instead of in a separate popup, if the server requires it). Logging in or registering is often the first thing a user does on a client or maybe even the first thing they do on Matrix! As such I should really spend more effort optimizing that feature, that usually falls off the priority list because I don't use it often!

Once Nheko is 100% Qml we should also see lower memory usage again, here is a screenshot from a Nheko instance with over 100 rooms, that's been running for a few days of active use on Windows:

We also fixed an issue where Nheko could crash the notification service, because it sent images not following the Freedesktop notification specification and tasty spent some time further improving the man page.

Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Julian Sparber reports

Hello folks, it's been a while since we last spoke! We have been focused on the code, but we're long overdue for an update. A lot has happened since November. Fractal-Next is getting closer to feature parity with current Fractal, and even supports new things:

• Timeline

  • Fractal-Next now allows you to open and save sent files

  • It also displays images, videos and stickers in the timeline

  • You can also get a better view of media send to the room thanks to the built-in media viewer

  • It (finally!) supports reactions (displaying them and sending new ones)

• User verification

  • Fractal-Next now supports verification of other users by scanning their QR code, or via emoji

  • When a user is verified, an icon is displayed next to their username in the list of room members

• Room details

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

• General UX

  • Fractal-Next is better integrated with GNOME's secret management service Seahorse

  • It supports room upgrades

  • It also supports inviting users to a room

  • Users can change the category of rooms in the sidebar via drag and drop or by using the context menu

If you want a more lengthy writing about what we've been up to and a note about the NLnet grant, please head out to my blog post "A Long Overdue Update — Fractal Next"

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat says

Polls and location sharing

• Polls is coming out of labs with the next release on all three platforms
• Location sharing is coming out in mobile apps with the next release on Monday and will need to be enabled in labs

Community testing

• Join #element-community-testing:matrix.org to help out with the testing
• Coming up this week:
  • FOSDEM conferencing
  • Threads with the new APIs
  • The new search experience
• All dates and times to be confirmed, follow our channel for updates

Decryption

• You can help us fix decryption errors by enabling automated error reporting
• On Android, enable “Auto Report Decryption Errors” in the settings
• If you are using Nightly or develop.element.io, you can help us fix decryption errors by enabling “Automatically send debug logs on decryption errors”

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

kittykat reports

• Release candidate was late as we have more regressions and release blockers than normal: last minute fixes include a couple of crashes when hanging up a call from the picture-in-picture view and in the appearance tab of settings, plus chasing a crashing bug on Linux.
• Metaspaces has landed in the release candidate: it will give you a new way to group your favourites, DMs and rooms outside of spaces. You can switch these on in the Quick Settings menu at the bottom left from Monday.

• Bubble layout for messages has landed for the upcoming release!
• This release will update to Electron 15 which uses a newer Chromium, so if you host your own Jitsi, please make sure it’s up to date, or you may find calls start breaking.
• Nightly testing went well on Tuesday, with 47 test cases showing up 15 new issues
• In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
  • New thread fallback using the reply chain
  • Better stability when home server supports threads API defined in MSC3440
  • We are intending to add the new and improved search to the next release candidate on 8th Feb, community testing planned for next week

Element iOS (website)

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

Manu announces

• Startup and resume times improved for upcoming release
• Xcode13 & iOS15 compatibility added for developers
• Release v1.3.17 coming out on Monday
• In development:
  • Work continues on Spaces and Authentication

Element Android (website)

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

kittykat reports

• Release v1.3.17 coming out on Monday, includes message bubbles, polls and location sharing
• In development:
  • Message bubbles and Thread are progressing well and will probably be merged on develop next week
  • Improved automated testing (more screened added to the sanity test, including all the Spaces screens)

Cinny (website)

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

ajbura announces

Features

• Room settings
  • Add support for room message search in unencrypted rooms
  • Support options for Room visibility and Room addresses
  • Manage room permissions
  • Enable encryption and manage room history visibility
• Custom emoji
  • Show user and room emoji in auto-complete cmd and emojiboard
  • Show custom emojis in reactions
• Use jumbo emojis for emoji only messages
• Add toggle to use browser's preferred theme
• Show placeholder profile picture when it fails to load
• Show ban, kick, unban options in profile viewer
• Ability to change power level in profile viewer

Bugs

• Fix loading all twemoji on startup
• Fix wrong read receipt count in encrypted rooms
• Reset scroll when switching Home/DM
• Fix gap under typing indicator in some device
• Fix username overflow in timeline change messages
• Fix message formatting

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

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Matrix Highlight (website)

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

Daniel reports

Matrix highlight got experimental support for Firefox! It's still a bit crashy, but it shouldn't be much harder to stabilize it, and get the tool working properly there, too. Firefox is my personal browser of choice, and others have requested it, so it's nice that it's on the horizon :)

Also, after the discussion in Matrix Live and with some minor tweaks, I was able to get the extension to play nice with conduit! So that's now a viable alternative if you want to use Matrix Highlight with your own, self-hosted server.

Circles (website)

E2E encrypted social networking built on Matrix. Safe, private sharing for your friends, family, and community.

cvwright reports

Circles is a project to build a secure, end-to-end encrypted social network using Matrix technology.

• This week the primary focus was on updating Circles to work with the latest Matrix iOS SDK. I also successfully built and packaged the first beta release from an Apple M1 Mac.

• The next step is to develop and integrate a new, more secure password-based login based on the BS-SPEKE protocol. This will replace Circles' current approach, which is described in MSC3265. Hopefully the new login flow will also be of interest to the broader Matrix community.

• Our search continues for an Android developer to help us bring Circles to the world's largest mobile device platform. If you are excited about working with Matrix, Android Studio, and Jetpack Compose, send a resume and cover letter to [email protected].

More info:

• Circles
• Code
• Try the beta

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict announces

Trixnity version 1.1.0 has been released! It adds support for room key backup, which makes developing a matrix client a lot more comfortable.

Here is the changelog:

• Added key backup support!
• RoomService::getAll() returns a reactive list of reactive rooms instead of a reactive list of rooms. This allows to implement huge room lists without performance losses in the UI.
• Some reactive data can be accessed in a non reactive way. Note that you will then only get a snapshot of the data.
• Prevent sending room keys as to device messages, when they cannot be encrypted (e.g. due to missing one time keys).

Halcyon (website)

Halcyon is an easy to use matrix library inspired by discord.py

gen3 reports

Version 1.1.0 Released

Hello again! Halcyon is a python Matrix bot library created with the intention of being easy to install and use. With this release, we have reached our second release milestone! Check out the roadmap in notes.md (located in the repository), for what is planned for RC3! I'm really happy about the performance and functionality gains for this release. If you have any questions or bug reports, come and chat with us over in https://matrix.to/#/#halcyon:blackline.xyz

More info at on the project at https://github.com/WesR/Halcyon

• Added
  • Detailed room info is here! The bot will now cache and provide room info with each message, automatically refreshing in the background. Check out usage.md for info on what is provided
    • get room admin / moderators, topic, related groups and more
  • Better polling through long polling (Thanks @forden:matrix.org for pointing out this improvement)
  • send images with the new send_image() function. It includes simple toggles for blurhash and thumbnail generation
  • More examples in /examples
  • General roadmap and documentation updates
• Fixed
  • A fix for the slow polling, which might have also caused issues on systems with frequent network drops (Thanks @octt:matrix.org)

Dept of Bots 🤖

Bubo (website)

Matrix bot to help with community management

jaywink says

https://github.com/elokapina/bubo

Bubo is a friendly little owl (bot) that helps maintain your community. It's been over a year since cutting the last release, so the changelog contains a bunch of things, namely:

• Added command to set power levels in rooms.
• Added users command to list and create users in a configured Keycloak. Optionally send invites via keycloak-signup, a web app that allows self-registering with Keycloak via short lived tokens.
• Add logging to a Matrix room.
• Bubo admins and coordinators can now be set based on room memberships.
• Add command to make Bubo unlink and part itself from a room.
• Add command to list rooms Bubo maintains but is not admin in.
• Add command to recreate a room. This follows the upgrade room functionality, but does it without needing admin permissions (basically almost everything except a tombstone event). Useful if for example you have accidentally lost admin in a hundred or so rooms in your community. Which may have happened 😅
• The communities command is now deprecated (support for spaces coming in the next version).

Additionally some other changes and fixes, see changelog for full details.

Plans for next up features include syncing with Discourse to replicate spaces from Discourse groups and populate space members from Discourse group memberships (when Discourse shares the same Keycloak SSO provider with the homeserver).

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

matrix-art (website)

A Deviantart Fork based on Matrix

MTRNord (they/them) reports

Reaching another feature Milestone – Submitting images via Matrix Art.

Matrix Art now supports logging in with any account (well-known not supported yet. You need to provide the full server address) and submitting images through the interface. You can now either just log in (No benefit though at this time as comments and follows are missing) or create a Matrix Art Profile.

An Account can also be created later. An Account would create a Profile room at #<mxid> on your server if it doesn't exist. This currently is only possible by doing a logout and login in again with the box checked. A better way will be added soon. Editing the Profile is not yet implemented at this time.

These 2 changes should allow some people to experiment with this. Mobile design is not tested at this time. Submits should work. If you were previously logged in, you will need to log out and back in for some variables to get set correctly.

Registration is still WIP as there is some more moderation prep needed before the server accepts the registrations.

I hope people cheer in and post their images :) (Also, please use the nsfw flag if required. This will make them hidden on the front page but shown in your profile page. I will block people that don't use it from the instance otherwise. Please be sensible.)

Other Changes

• Form readability increased
• Search engine getting filled in the background (Self hosted https://meilisearch.com instance gets used) when submitting
• Loading indicator gets correctly positioned
• Images without thumbnails or html caption don't break anymore
• Directory Database was switched to SQLite
• Roboto font was replaced with Inter font
• Directory Endpoint got secured using the OpenID module in Matrix
• "Devianart" typo got replaced with correct "Deviantart"
• Logout state management got improved

Project Information

For more information, feel free to take a look at https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-art Or join our room: #matrix-art:nordgedanken.dev

Matrix in the News 📰

msirringhaus says

Apparently, a German school forked FluffyChat and is using it for homeschooling: https://www.golem.de/news/matrix-grundschule-forkt-messenger-2201-162562.html (German only news article) Sources: https://gitlab.com/hermanncoders/hermannpost

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

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

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

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://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3664: Pushrules for relations
• [WIP] MSC3662: Allow Widgets to share user mxids to the client
• MSC3659: Invite Rules
• [WIP] MSC3647: Bring Your Own Bridge - Decentralising Bridges

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC2781: Remove the reply fallbacks from the specification
• MSC3030: Jump to date API endpoint
• MSC3589: Room version 9 as the default room version

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3567: Allow requesting events from the start/end of the room history
• MSC2675: Serverside aggregations of message relationships

Spec Updates

Work on preparing the release of Matrix v1.2 is currently underway. As of today, the Spec Core Team is aiming for a release of Matrix v1.2 on February 2nd.

If you know of any MSCs which you believe should be included in Matrix v1.2, but haven't started/finished Final Comment Period yet, please bring them up in the #sct-office:matrix.org, and we'll take a look. Thanks!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3635: Early Media for VoIP!

When I first came across this MSC, I didn't know what "Early Media" as a concept referred to. Even after skimming the MSC... I still didn't really know. But I'll demystify it here in case it peaks your interest and you would like to learn more.

Early media is essentially any media that is exchanged between the moment you start a call, to the moment the other side picks up (a connection is established). For instance, the ringing you hear while waiting for someone to pick up (called "ringback tones"), or the "busy" tone you hear when the line is busy. Those audio bits are known as "early media". Video can also fall into this category (though that's less common).

This MSC would essentially allow Matrix to introduce these concepts in Matrix-only calls (though these days the client just plays sounds while connecting), but more crucially would allow Matrix to interoperate with other protocols (like SIP) that expect to handle these features.

So yay, more interoperability and bridge compatibility!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is the reference homeserver for Matrix

callahad says

After a somewhat bumpy process, we released Synapse 1.50 on Tuesday! The big thing you need to be aware of is that we're turning off support for Python 3.6 and PostgreSQL 9.6, including Linux distributions which ship with those versions by default (like Ubuntu 18.04 LTS). Please make sure your infrastructure is up-to-date.

I'm personally very excited that we tracked down a bug which could cause device list updates to get lost when being sent over federation. When device lists fall out of sync, it can cause failures when attempting to decrypt messages, since the keys may not have been sent to all of the user's devices.

We've also made quite a lot of progress in allowing Application Services to support end-to-end encryption via the still-experimental MSC3202.

For MSCs which have been merged into the Matrix Spec, we now implement MSC3419, allowing guests to send state events into rooms, and we now use stable identifiers for cross-signing and fallback keys per MSC1756 and MSC2732.

Looking to the future: We're aiming to release 1.51 next week so it has plenty of time to burn in before we host FOSDEM 2022. This is a pretty quick turnaround from 1.50, but we'll return to our usual fortnightly release cadence for subsequent releases. To that end, 1.51.0rc1 is out today; give it a shot. 😉

Conduit (website)

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

Timo ⚡️ announces

Hello again! In the last week we continued to optimize the rocksdb backend and Conduit in general, trying to get it as memory efficient as possible. Using valgrind we could see that memory was not getting released in some cases.

We found out that switching to the jemalloc allocator completely got rid of this problem and memory usage seems to be a lot more stable now!

All of this is currently available on the next branch. We are preparing to make a v0.3.0 release soon!

Join #conduit:fachschaften.org to help us test it.

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Helm Chart (website)

Matrix Kubernetes applications packaged into helm charts

Ananace announces

And back to regular form, my Helm Charts have gotten some upgrades again; element-web got upgraded to 1.9.9, and matrix-synapse got both 1.50.0 and 1.50.1 (the configuration generated by the chart shouldn't be affected by the .0 bug, but always good to upgrade)

Dept of Clients 📱

Watch The Matrix (website)

A watchOS client for Matrix

Doug announces

It's been a while since I reported any updates on Watch The Matrix.

The following new features have been added:

• Message bubbles are properly left/right aligned now.
• Support for displaying images.
• Replies are nicely formatted now.
• Ability to send messages and replies (inc FlickType support).
• Redacted reactions are now properly hidden.

Sailtrix (website)

Sailtrix is a matrix client for SailfishOS

HengYeDev announces

This week, version 1.3.7.1 has been released.

Updates:

• Support favorite rooms
• Add View Source
• Add useful active cover
• Merge better notification support by @razcampagne

Fixes:

• Fix bug of images and files not displaying in encrypted rooms
• Add UI placeholder when there are no rooms

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

Threads

• To keep your timeline clean and ordered we’ll soon be introducing threaded messages to Element. Currently the team is working hard on the fallback solution, and polishing up the user interface.
  • Threads is already in Labs on Web, so go ahead and check it out!
  • For mobile, we’re hoping to release Threads to Labs in the next few weeks.

Polls

• Get ready to start asking more questions… Polls are nearly ready to go! You’ll be able to ask folks things like; their favourite superhero, which day you should grab lunch, or even the best way to make tea (milk first, always). ☕️
  • If you just can’t wait ‘til we’re ready to launch, you can enable Polls from Labs.

Location Sharing

• Location sharing is almost here! You’ll soon find a new setting to turn this on, which will give you the location sharing icon in your composer and can be used to tell people exactly where you are!
  • The setting will be in the next release on iOS and Android, and will start “off” by default. Once the feature is settled in, we’ll turn it on by default.

Community testing

• Join #element-community-testing:matrix.org to help out with the testing
• We will be testing the FOSDEM conferencing setup (Element web + widgets) on Monday at 17:00 UTC
• Element Desktop (Nightly) has had an Electron update, join us to test it on Tuesday at 16:00 UTC

Element Web/Desktop (website)

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

Danielle reports

• We’re moving forwards with our PostHog Analytics implementation and are super excited to start to get to know how our users experience Element. Remember; it’s off by default and you have to opt-in to share.
• 2 testing sessions happening this week, join at #element-community-testing:matrix.org

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

• With the coolest project name by far, the Bubbles team is working hard to bring you message bubbles ASAP! These should land in the next week or so but are available in Labs today.

Element iOS (website)

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

Danielle says

• The integration of analytics tracking has been included in the most recent version of the app. Using PostHog Analytics we’ll be able to make informed product decisions for our app as we’ll have more visibility into the usefulness of each feature.
  • Remember; Analytics is opt-in and you don’t have to share any info with us. If you choose to opt-in we’ll start to learn how users use Element and how we can simplify your experiences.

In development:

• Work ongoing on Spaces support, finished improving room long press interactions for Spaces and reviews of space creation changes are nearing completion. Work ongoing on Space settings.
• We’re currently building a simplified first time user experience, the first piece of which will be released in the next few weeks!
• The team is working to update to Xcode 13 / iOS 15.

Element Android (website)

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

Danielle reports

• We’ve had some trouble with the stability of our releases this week but the team’s been working hard to get it all ironed out. Our latest update to the app store fixes some bugs and includes the option to enable analytics.
  • Analytics? Yes! Knowing how our users traverse our app, and understanding this cross-platform, will help us to tailor to your needs and make impactful improvements. If you don’t want to send anonymised event info to Element, no problem! Just say no. If you change your mind, there’s a toggle in Settings.

In development:

• Message Bubbles? Yes, please! With a week of successful testing internally we’re nearly ready to release message bubbles into the wild. We’re excited to see what you think.
• Element’s first time user experience could use a little help, so the team have been working on improvements to our sign up flow that will hopefully reduce confusion for newbies.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP says

New feature: HTTP status in the network log.

Next up: Bulk editing of rooms for updating room power levels or aliases in masses. If you're a maintainer of a homeserver, space or bridge, please let me know your use cases.

export matrix messages (website)

A commandline utility to export matrix messages

Aine reports

It's a small cli tool that does exactly what it says - exports matrix messages from a room. As example you can check etke.cc/news - that page and all items on it generated by emm from #news:etke.cc room.

The tool gracefully supports room aliases, message edits, custom templates (check the contrib/ dir for example) and 2 export modes - single (all messages exported to a single file) or multi (each message exported to separate file, that's how etke.cc/news works)

Source code

Circles (website)

E2E encrypted social networking built on Matrix. Safe, private sharing for your friends, family, and community.

cvwright announces

Circles is a project to build a privacy-respecting, end-to-end encrypted social network on top of Matrix. It was originally built out of the desire for a safer way to share baby photos with friends and family, but it can be used by anyone who wants easy sharing combined with strong security.

Recent news:

• The Circles iOS app is back in beta on TestFlight. Builds 0.99 (6) and 0.99 (8) are rolling out now.
• The latest updates fix some bugs in Circles' use of Matrix's encrypted recovery feature to improve the reliability of E2E encryption.
• FUTO, the new company behind Circles, is hiring an Android developer to help us bring Circles to Android. Interested candidates should send a resume and cover letter to [email protected].

The (old) Circles homepage: https://kombuchaprivacy.com/circles The code on Github: https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios

Dept of Bots 🤖

Honoroit (website)

A Matrix helpdesk bot

Aine reports

long time no see! Today I come with a new internal etke.cc tool that publicly available, because open source matters.

Honoroit is a helpdesk matrix bot with end-to-end encryption support, that utilizes MSC3440 (Threading) to act as a proxy between a customer (any matrix user) and your backoffice (users added in special room), each customer's room = thread in a backoffice room, where multiple operators can send messages to the same customer at once.

Pretty bad description, I know - check the source code to see screenshots.

Updates:

• the v0.9.2 release brings the fallback reply-to mode, so even on matrix clients that doesn't support threads yet you can use it with good ol' replies.
• the v0.9.3 release fixes commands parsing in the reply-to mode and adds prefixes to the thread topics

source code, #honoroit:etke.cc

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

matrix-art (website)

A Devianart Fork based on Matrix

MTRNord (they/them) says

Matrix Art received some minor changes since the last twim post:

• You can now get a rss feed of the posts at https://art.midnightthoughts.space/posts.rss (This is in the same format as devianart does their feeds)
• Mobile should be mostly fixed
• The About-info isn't hardcoded anymore but now uses an event type.
• The page now uses the Roboto Font instead of the default font, which helps with readability.
• Matrix Art cmes with a basic Text Logo now
• Links to the profile page are now easier to notice
• Blurhashes are now supported for images
• The repo now has the Apache-2 License applied
• Dependencies have been pinned
• Various small design improvements were made
• Images now have size hints so the page doesnt jump around as much when loading
• Lots and lots of metadata was added to each page for SEO

Check it out at https://art.midnightthoughts.space Check the Code out at https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-art Or join the Chat at #matrix-art:nordgedanken.dev

Planned for this week is to add registration and usage of external profiles. As soon as that works I am also going to make uploading images work. So with a bit of luck in the next TWIM anyone is able to post their images :)

Dept of Guides 🧭

Éibhear (on matrix.org) reports

Hi TWIM. I published a long-planned, long-in-the-making, long-winded report of how I containerised my matrix-synapse homeserver and its PostgreSQL database in order to get ahead of the application dependency deprecations. This was something I couldn't find for myself, so I put this together to help anyone else who might need it. (And it does contain a TL;DR section!)

Helder Ferreira says

I’ve created [blog post|(https://helderferreira.io/matrix-well-known-with-cloudflare/) explaining the way to host the static well-known files using cloudflare workers gaining speed and stability

Matrix in the News 📰

Brendan Abolivier says

During the holidays I recorded a podcast about Matrix and Element with AnDaolVras/La Cantine Brestoise, which is a French non-profit organising tech events and operating a coworking space in Brest, France. The episode (in French, sorry!) came out on Monday and can be found on their website, on YouTube as well as on most podcast platforms 🙂

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!