This Week in Matrix

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

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

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC2716: Incrementally importing history into existing rooms

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

go-neb

nikofil reported:

• Handle SAS verification by adding an endpoint where the decimal SAS code generated by another device can be sent. If this code matches with go-neb's generated code, the verification succeeds and the device is marked as trusted.

• Add a cryptotest service which can be used for other clients to test their functionalities related to e2ee. This currently includes a challenge / response, key forwarding functions (key request / key forward) and SAS verification. SSSS and cross-signing are planned for the future. (PR is under review)

Dept of P2P 👥

iOS P2P Demo

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander said:

The Element P2P demo on iOS has seen a number of updates in the last week - now at build 31 - which contains a number of fixes:

• QUIC session setup is now far more reliable

• QUIC sessions are now reset when the node's network coordinates change

• The federation sender now wakes up properly on incoming QUIC sessions

• Network coordinates are now cached for remote federated nodes, reducing the number of DHT searches and speeding up resuming federation

• HTTP pools are disabled, which reduces head-of-line blocking problems on stalled sessions

• A number of timeouts have been lowered

• Dendrite has been updated to the latest version

If you have an iPhone or iPad and want to play with the demo, grab the public TestFlight!

Dept of Servers 🏢

matrix-media-repo v1.2.0

matrix-media-repo is a highly customizable multi-domain media repository for Matrix

TravisR told us:

v1.2.0 is out now, with a bunch of bug fixes and some added features:

• Thumbnail support for apng and webp images (thanks Sorunome!)

• Experimental (but pretty stable) support for Redis as a cache - instructions here

• Optional oEmbed support for things like previewing tweets - turn it on here

• Dynamic thumbnail support

• Per-user quotas

v1.2.0 is also much faster at file uploads, however some areas of matrix-media-repo can still be improved - general performance work is planned for the next release.

Learn more about matrix-media-repo.

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander announced:

We are happy to announce the beta milestone for our first versioned release of Dendrite, which we anticipate to land in the next few weeks. Once these issues are cleared, we'll have made the big breaking changes that we want to make and will have a migration mechanism in place for database schema upgrades.

This will make life significantly easier for anyone who wants to start experimenting with and running their own Dendrite homeservers without unexpected breakages. More updates to follow soon - join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for the latest!

This week, Dendrite's end-to-end encryption support has also been mostly rounded off with the exception of a few minor bugs and edge-cases.

Changes this week include:

• TLS certificate verification is now enabled by default

• A new federation_disable_tls_validation config option has been added to override the above

• Added support for processing inbound device lists from federation

• Local device list changes are now sent outbound over federation

• One-time key counts are now sent in /sync

• Direct server signing key fetches are now limited to 15 seconds

• State events that fail signature checks on federated room joins are now properly ignored

• A number of SQLite database lock bugs have been fixed using TransactionWriter

• A bug when finding joined hosts in the federation sender in SQLite mode has been fixed

• Logging levels have been adjusted in a number of areas

Spec compliance:

• Client-Server APIs: 51%, same as last week

• Server-Server APIs: 54%, up from 53% last week

Asked whether this progress means that matrix.org would be running on Dendrite next year, Neil said he was certain that it would definitely be ready:

Anything is possible

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo reported:

• Improve long polling when user is invited (thanks @gnieto)

• Documentation and code cleanup

• Getting initial server_server code back into shape

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Oh and btw look at Matrix Live this week!

Synapse

Patrick offered:

This week in Synapse land we continued with our performance push making further progress on the async/await-athon. We will move into the storage layer this coming week which will leave the caching layer and a few other bits outstanding. Separate work continued to get the event persister into a shardable state. The first step being to replace the event stream token with its own type and then threading that through the code base.

We have also continued to improve on our push capabilities and released a new version of Sygnal (0.8.2) with support for pushing to iOS devices via Firebase.

We are also very close to getting a workable version of the new push rules. The idea is to test it out in the wild before getting it enshrined in the spec.

Next week will see a continued focus on sharding and async/awaiting, more notifications work, logging improvements, and a host of bug fixes!

Dept of Bridges 🌉

maubot rss plugin

Tulir reported:

I released v0.2.0 of the maubot RSS plugin. The most recent addition is support for JSON feeds, stolen from inspired by FantasyCookie17's jsonfeed-bot.

Other changes since v0.1.0:

• Per-feed toggle to send posts as m.text instead of m.notice
• Automatically moving subscriptions across room upgrades
• Some fixes for handling weird feeds

maubot/rss is a maubot plugin that posts feed updates to Matrix rooms. It supports RSS/Atom/JSON feeds, customizing message templates per-feed/room, and more.

mautrix bridges

Tulir reported:

All my bridges now have options for automatic e2ee key sharing in portal rooms. Currently they don't have verification support (other than manually marking as verified in the database), so enabling key sharing isn't entirely secure yet. I'll probably invent some sort of web verification interface after nikofil adds cross-signing to mautrix-go.

This also means mautrix-python now supports sending and responding to key requests. I'll port the interactive verification and future cross-signing code from mautrix-go to mautrix-python at some point too.

Dept of Clients 📱

Fractal

Alexandre Franke offered:

4.4.0 is out as promised last week! Get it off Flathub now.

After we announced our intention to release, we discovered a regression that prevented joining new rooms because there was a mixup between room aliases and room id during a switch from internal structures to ruma-identifiers. Luckily we managed to fix it in time and make the release as intended.

Full changelog since 4.2.2

New features

• Videos now have a preview directly in history

• New videos player: click on a preview to open it

• Improved audio file support, with a nicer presentation and seeking

• Redacted messages are removed from history

• Edited messages are replaced with their new content and show a small icon

• Translations have been updated

• Spellcheck language is saved per room

• New swipe-back gesture to go back from room to room list in narrow view

• New swipe left and right gesture to navigate through media in media view

• SOCKS proxy are now also supported

Bugfixes

• Thumbnail for pasted images have been fixed

• File type detection for uploads is more reliable

• Typing notifications are now only sent when text is actually typed in the message input

Under the hood

• Code refactor is still going

• Some improvements to logging, including access token removal for privacy

Element Android

valere told us:

Sorry we missed last week TWIM!

• Element Android 1.0.4 🚀 has been released to the store, it contains several bug fixes, and is adding back some moderators functionality (see list of banned users for a room + actions)

The team has been mainly working on stabilisation + refactoring of the current code base.

We are also trying to give more visibility on what is coming next:

• Pin code protection 🔓 (merged on develop)

• Improvement of big media upload

• Cancelling send, retries, better upload progress...

• Call fixes and improvement

• Improve fdroid polling for notification

The team is partially off, expect some delays in handling of issues and PR reviews

SchildiChat Android

SpiritCroc reported:

SchildiChat is a new fork of Element for Android (previously RiotX), which features some UI changes, to make it more comfortable to use for people who are used to other common instant messengers.

The most important changes are the following:

• The overview screen lists all chats in one list instead of the tabbed layout in Element

• Message bubbles (optional)

• Theme choice based on the system-wide dark/light theme on recent Android versions

It is now available on Google Play, it might appear on F-Droid too in the future.

#schildichat-android:matrix.org is the place to find out more.

New AppImage for the Element Desktop Matrix Client

srevinsaju told us:

As per this issue comment, I was asked to inform this channel of the new AppImage for the Element Desktop Matrix Client. 🎉. Interested users may get them on appimage.github.io or on my releases page, offering Continuous builds (refreshed every day) for stable and beta builds 😃

IndieChat announced

indiechat announced:

Hello, World! [IndieChat], a new Android matrix client is in Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=chat.indie.cam

This is forked from FluffyChat:

I have changed the archive feature. Added a splash screen. Further simplified settings. Login times work faster compared to FC. I am connecting it to my Jitsi instance. which operates p2p and is completely analytics free. Message notifications are analytics free. It will eventually be an extension to a videocall app developed by myself. It adds variety to the ecosystem. It strictly follows license rules, credits the developers and links to their wonderful work. And it is a great thing to do in my spare time ☺️

Element-iOS

Manu said:

This week, we started a new sprint to finalise remaining rebranding and iOS13 SDK issues. Note that have a plan to make CallKit and PushKit back!

In parallel, we have finished to setup the CI for the 3 iOS projects.

Dept of Encryption 🔐

Device dehydration

uhoreg told us:

I missed out on demo day last week because my demo wasn't ready yet. But I recorded a video, so here is what you would have seen if I had managed to finish on time: https://scitech.video/videos/watch/4aad91c3-30bb-479f-8437-a517354594db

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrixbz

patrick announced:

simple matrix bots with matrix-nio

Hey all! I built yet another bot library. matrixbz was built with the intention of making it easy to draft matrix bots. Check out the github - I've added some examples where you can build a bot in ~10 lines of python code. matrixbz features:

• Auth - you can specify user(s) who are authorized to call commands. bot only accepts invites from those users.

• Cache - you can cache results for particular command invocations.

Check out the package.

Ruma

iinuwa reported:

We have released version 0.0.1 of the ruma crate! Thanks to all of our contributors!

Besides that and continuing to refine ruma-events, here are some other highlights over the past couple weeks:

• Implemented a few more endpoints implemented on ruma-federation-api

• Added helper macros for creating identifier types

Dept of Bots 🤖

Hemppa

Cos told us:

Hemppa the bot is a general use bot that has lot of modules for various uses and super easy API to create more. Hemppa received support for Mastodon. Now you can login to your Mastodon account and send toots via Matrix. Next major feature would be to subscribe to hashtags and users and get notifications to Matrix rooms. https://github.com/vranki/hemppa#mastodon

HOPEless, the HOPE conference bot

valka said:

The Hackers on Planet Earth conference went almost entirely self-hosted this year due to not being able to hold an in-person event, and used Matrix to go virtual! hopeless was the robot-heart of the conference, providing community+room ACLs for attendees. The bot also has a bunch of other features including:

• configured admins sending notices to rooms

• ability to manually and programmatically schedule announcements for scheduled events happening, like workshops or talks

• the ability for users to re-join rooms and generate invites for themselves as necessary

• admin commands for inviting attendees and presenters without tickets

• an attempt to be friendly and solve people's common problems without a real person having to assist (surprisingly effective!)

Many thanks to the nio-template for existing, otherwise this wouldn't have been possible!

anoa (nio-template) creator responded:

Wonderful! I plan to give it some more love soon, including some docker magic to make it easier to run.

If you ever have any feedback about improving it, feel free to post it in #nio-template:amorgan.xyz :)

matrix-diskstation-bot

KB1RD said:

This is just a stupid simple bot based on T r a v i s R's matrix-bot-sdk-bot-template that forwards alerts from a Synology DiskStation NAS to Matrix room(s).

It's on GitHub and Docker Hub

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. Join #ping: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 🌡️

Matrix is being used in the "world's biggest messaging and collaboration" deployment.

[Matrix will] be rolled out by the German education system to provide collaboration tools for half a million seats in the states of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg

Casual 500,000 user deployment, very nice!

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa announced:

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

Finished FCP:

• MSC2689: Fix E2EE for guests

• MSC2663: Errors for dealing with non-existent push rules

• MSC2611: Remove m.login.token User-Interactive Authentication type from the specification

• MSC2610: Remove m.login.oauth2 User-Interactive Authentication type from the specification

• MSC2579: Improved tagging support

• MSC1849: Proposal for m.relates_to aggregations

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC2713: Remove deprecated v1 Identity Service API

• [WIP] MSC2706: IPFS as a media repository for Matrix

• MSC2705: Animated thumbnails for media (and thumbnail content-type requirements)

• MSC2704: Explicitly allow alternative origins in MXC URIs and specify deduplication requirements on uploads

• MSC2703: Media ID grammar

• MSC2702: Specifying semantics for Content-Disposition on media

• MSC2701: Clarifying Content-Type usage in the media repo

• MSC2700: Thumbnail requirements for the media repo

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we'll be continuing on with MSC2674 (aggregations pt1: relationships) and adding MSC1544 (QR code verification) on top.

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

karlik

karlik announced:

for matrix-ircd

• Merged update for total move to async / await into development branch, (hopefully) soon to be merged to master

• Made single-threaded project thread-safe for easily scaling up to potentially many threads

• Added additional logging for tls and non-tls connections for more clear debugging

Dept of Servers 🏢

E2E Dendrite

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

kegan reported:

E2E Dendrite work is progressing, and we're making a lot of breaking changes ahead of our first stable release which you can expect in the coming weeks.

As for the changes this week:

• Add a bare bones user directory. This is mainly to benefit the iOS Yggdrasil demo.

• The dendrite-config.yaml configuration format has been overhauled. It's still in review but expect big changes here!

• Fixed a bug with SQLite when handling large rooms (thanks @HenrikSolver!)

• Device lists now work locally, with federation support to come.

Spec compliance is up from last week:

• Client-Server APIs: 51%, up from 49%.
• Federation APIs: remains at 53%.

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo announced:

Welcome back! This week was very productive:

• Ignore users (thanks @devinr528)

• Long polling (faster and more efficient /sync)

• Fix and improve presence

• Room tagging (thanks @gnieto)

• /publicRooms pagination

• Refactor endpoints into modules

• Export endpoints as a library (useful for p2p!)

• Config options to set the maximum upload size or disable encryption

• and more!

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Synapse

Neil offered:

This week we shipped 1.18.0 which contained support for our worker sharding performance projects that you’ve been hearing about recently.

We also shipped a security and feature release of Sygnal (actually two each…). The main new feature being the ability to run behind an HTTP proxy which is useful in environments that mandate that all traffic go through a proxy.

Aside from that week we continued our async/await-athon and Patrick provided a visual update

We’ve been documenting worker support and diving into sharding the event persisters. This is not a small job since it means every other part of the code base that assumes an integer stream id will need to be updated to be aware of multiple stream ids from multiple persisters.

Over in feature land we’ve been working on the notifications project and most of the backend support is done. The project will mean more intuitive defaults as well as a much better client UX in configuring notification settings.

Finally special thanks to Aaron Raimist for a bumper docs PR

Synapse Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

Just pushed the 1.18.0 K8s-optimized Synapse images, now only doing the debian-based version as like upstream - though still including jemalloc. So latest/v1.18.0 and *-debian will be the same in this version and going forwards. Additionally, the *-debian tags will only remain for a release or two more before disappearing, as they're now superfluous.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-telegram

Tulir offered:

I finally added automatic backfilling options to mautrix-telegram. Like my other bridges, it can backfill old messages when creating portals and missed messages when restarting, and it can disable notifications in the room while backfilling.

I also added bridging for your own read receipts, so if you read a message with another Telegram client, the bridge will mark it as read on your Matrix account with double puppeting.

Dept of Clients 📱

NovaChat

eric reported:

NovaChat is a new Matrix-based desktop client that aggregates all your chat networks into one app

July 31 Updates:

• New room list design, featuring collapsible 'clusters' (see gif)

• Enabled encrypted room search (thanks #seshat:matrix.org!)

• Added [mautrix-twitter]( https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-twitter)

• Worked around FB Messenger bridge 'forced-logout issue' by routing traffic through proxy on Raspberry Pi at each users home

In the works...

• Create new clusters of chats in room list, using tags

• iMessage bridge, using jailbroken iDevice

• Android Messages bridge

Adding new users weekly. Sign up for the NovaChat beta. Or send me a DM @eric:nova.chat

gomuks

gomuks is a terminal based Matrix client written in Go. Source on GitHub

Tulir told us:

gomuks can now do interactive verification for e2ee. Most of it is thanks to nikofil's SAS verification PR to mautrix-go, I just made a UI for using it. Currently gomuks can only send verification requests, but I'll add some interface for accepting incoming requests soon.

Related to verification, there are some new commands for verifying/unverifying/blacklisting devices and viewing device lists. There's also a toggle to disable sending messages to unverified devices.

This is super exciting, raises gomuks to the level of a daily driver IMO.

Fractal

Alexandre Franke announced:

We will release version 4.4 next Friday. Now is a good time to test the nightly version and check if it doesn’t break anything with your homeserver compared to 4.2.
The changelog has been sparsely given in previous TWIMs, but you could have a look at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal/-/commit/463e6bc9988e2d8fffbfc38058f8d0b12cd074d7

Element-iOS, previously Riot-iOS

Manu announced:

We released 1.0.2 this week to the AppStore and on TestFlight. It's mainly a bug fix release after the Element rebranding.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

mautrix-go

nikofil offered:

SAS verification support has been merged! Support for it should also be landing in go-neb soon, both for verifying with the bot's device and for testing with go-neb's client testing service. Next up, looking at SSSS and eventually cross-verification support.

Dept of Ops 🛠

YunoHost

Pierre told us:

YunoHost is an operating system aiming for the simplest administration of a server, and therefore democratize self-hosting.

Synapse integration had been updated to 1.15.2 (1.17.0 available in branch testing)

Riot Web integration had been updated to 1.6.8 (Element 1.7.1 available in branch element)

Final Thoughts 💭

Tobi said:

We, some German Synapse admins, have created a survey about the usage of Matrix-Synapse for private statistic purpose (results will be published alike). As suggested in #synapse:matrix.org, this could also be a topic for "TWIM".

Find the survey at http://go.kabi.tk/MatrixQuestionnaire2020.

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. Join #ping: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 🌡️

New guide for client e2ee implementation, including cross-signing

Thanks and congratulations to Sorunome this week for releasing a new guide: Implementing more advanced e2ee features, such as cross-signing. This is a hugely detailed guide detailing the necessary steps to enable Cross-Signing and verification. Thanks as well to uhoreg and poljar for their work in reviewing the text!

New Masters Thesis written on Matrix

Julian Sparber announced:

I wrote a master thesis that tries to create e2e encryption based on Ethereum on top of Matrix. It may not solve all problems but it's an interesting experiment

https://blogs.gnome.org/jsparber/2020/07/20/i-finished-my-masters-degree/

I didn't get to look at this yet but it's exciting!

Dept of Spec 📜

kitsune (guess who's back!?) said:

I have put the long-awaited MSC2312 out of WIP - this is about matrix: URIs in case you haven't heard - and it's already in active discussion at #uri-scheme-proposal:matrix.org! Join the fun to make it the most awesome! The upcoming Quotient 0.6 has an implementation of those so adventurous Quaternion users can start experimenting right away.

Spec

anoa reported:

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

Abandoned MSCs:

• MSC2579: Improved tagging support

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2689: Fix E2EE for guests (merge)

• MSC2663: Errors for dealing with non-existent push rules (merge)

• MSC2611: Remove m.login.token User-Interactive Authentication type from the specification (merge)

• MSC2610: Remove m.login.oauth2 User-Interactive Authentication type from the specification (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC2695: Get event by ID over federation

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus, we've reduced last week's list of 5 MSCs down to one, MSC2674 (aggregations part 1: relationships). Next week, we're going to focus entirely on that MSC to make some headway on finally getting aggregations into the spec.

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

HTML embeddable Matrix client

arnav-t announced:

For the GSoC project HTML embeddable Matrix client this week:

• Added status bar for connection errors

• Added support for displaying typing notifications

Dept of P2P 👥

P2P / Dendrite

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

kegan announced:

The P2P Yggdrasil iOS demo has seen some improvements:

• Federation sender blacklists are now persisted which is important as the iOS app will be frequently terminated.

• SQLite3 now uses TransactionWriters in more places to reduce the amount of 'database is locked' issues.

• Federation sender has had much of its storage code refactored and de-duplicated.

In addition, there has been much work getting Dendrite to support E2E rooms, which it now mostly does.

You can create and join E2E rooms and have a conversation locally, though there's issues with it over federation. In addition, Dendrite currently lacks device lists so adding new devices may result in unable-to-decrypt errors:

• Send-to-device events now work over federation.

• Device key uploads and querying now work both locally and over federation.

• One-time key uploads and claiming now work both locally and over federation.

Spec compliance is up from last week:

• Client Server APIs: 49%, up from 48%.
• Federation APIs: 53%, up from 51%.

Doesn't it feel like we'll be using Dendrite in the wild really soon now?

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo offered:

Another quiet week. Next week should be more exciting again.

• Moved to stable rust (rocket now compiles on stable!)

• Implement /joined_rooms (thanks @aura)

• Add max_request_size config option to set the maximum size for file uploads and other requests (thanks @CapsizeGlimmer)

Synapse

Neil said:

This week we continued on our async/await athon, you can track progress here, expect steady progress over the coming weeks.

We dusted off the notifications project working with our pals in the Element client teams to ensure that the push rule defaults make sense. On the flip side we made further improvements to Sygnal and will merge the ability to have it sit behind a proxy rsn.

We are also trying to figure out how media retention limits should work in Synapse.

Up next is to continue our performance push. We need to spend time between pulling things off the master process as well sharding the event persister. We will continue with notifications and maybe finally squash https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/2528

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Introducing matrix-figma

Half-Shot reported:

Hello people. It's been a while since I've talked about a new bridge...or actually any bridges. Fear not, now you can hear both! Today I'm announcing the birth of another project matrix-figma. Figma is an online collaborative design tool. It was created to scratch an itch with the Element design team, who wanted to see comments appear in their Matrix rooms in realtime when someone commented on a Figma file.

The bridge works by first joining it to an "admin room", which functions as a permitted user list. The bot can then be invited to any other room so long as the invitee is in that admin room, and can then ask the bot to start directing comment notifications into the room.

The room uses room state to hold configuration, so you can host the bot as a docker container anywhere without the need for any support files!

I can announce that the bridge is now functional for simple use cases such as these, with more interesting functionality in the future.

Please check out https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-figma to see if the bridge is right for you :)

slack-matrix-migration

Sven offered:

I opened a PR for https://github.com/Awesome-Technologies/slack-matrix-migration, which makes it compatible with recent Synapse versions and adds new config options allowing to effectively import a Slack workspace history to an existing homeserver via federation.

This Python project was initially intended for a full migration from Slack to a new Matrix homeserver and allows reusing the imported user accounts. We have some research groups using Slack that would like to import their Slack workspace history to our Matrix homeserver. This PR allows to import a (free) Slack export to a fresh and empty Synapse instance that is federated with our main homeserver. We do not need a full "migration": we kick all imported users and invite the existing Matrix users from our homeserver.

Two groups already imported the history and switched to Matrix, one more is in queue and probably more to come.

This is a really, really exciting development, and the context for which Sven is expecting to use it is BIG, I can't wait til we can share more about it!

mautrix-twitter

Tulir said:

The Twitter DM bridge I announced last week mostly works now. It does text and reaction bridging in both directions, twitter->matrix media bridging, end-to-bridge encryption and backfilling. I also added support for it in mautrix-manager for web-based login.

If it mostly works, I guess it's time to mostly start trying it out!

Dept of Clients 📱

Fluffychat

sorunome offered:

Fluffy 0.16.0 has been released! It is already available on F-Droid, Google Play and IOS Testflight will follow. You can also try it out in the webbrowser. Visit https://fluffychat.im

Features

• Implement web notifications

• Implement a connection status header

Changes

• Switch out database engine for faster performance

• Greatly improve startup time

• Added languages: Galician, Croatian, Japanese, Russian, Ukrainian - Thanks a lot to all the weblate users!

• Only show the microg toast once, if you have play services disabled

• Homeserver URL input now strips trailing whitespace and slash - Thanks @Katerina

• Also use prev_content to determine profile of a user: This allows the username and avatar of people who left a group to still be displayed

Fixes:

• Fix not being able to initiate key verification properly

• Fix message sending being weird on slow networks

• Fix a few HTML rendering bugs

• Various other fixes

• Fix the 12h clock showing 00:15am, instead of 12:15am - Thanks @not_chicken

• Fix an issue with replies and invalid HTML

• Fix messages getting lost when retrieving chat history

• Fix a bug where an incorrect string encoding from the server is assumed

• Fix a bug where people couldn't log in if they had email notifications enabled

Mirage

miruka reported:

0.6.0 is out today:

Added

• Room member profiles:

  • Can be accessed by clicking on a user in the room's right pane, or focusing the filter field and navigating with up/down/enter/escape

  • Includes large avatar, display name, user ID, presence info,

    power level control and E2E sessions list

• E2E Verification:

  • Sessions for room members can now be (manually) verified from their profile

  • Sessions for different accounts within the same client will automatically

    verify each others based on session keys

  • Verifying a session will automatically verify it for all connected accounts,

    as long as the session keys are identical

• Presence:

  • Added presence (online, unavailable, invisible, offline) and status message control to the accounts context menu in the room list

  • Added togglePresence{Unavailable,Invisible,Offline} keybinds bound by

    default to Ctrl+Alt+{A/U,I,O}

  • Added openPresenceMenu keybind to open the current account's context

    menu, Alt+P by default

  • The room member list is now sorted by power level, then presence, then name

  • The room member list will display presence orbs and last seen time for

    members if the server supports it. Last seen times for offline members are also automatically retrieved as needed.

  • Set logged in accounts offline when closing Mirage

  • Linux/X11 specific: Add auto-away feature configurable by the

    beUnavailableAfterSecondsIdle setting (default 600 for 10mn), can be disabled by setting it to -1.

• Session sign out: you can now sign out your other sessions from the

  account settings. This currently only supports password authentication.

• Pasting images via Ctrl+V or composer context menu, shows a preview of

  the image before uploading

• Added basic keyboard navigation for account settings session list

• Add a verified devices indicator to encrypted room headers

• Add experimental support for rendering of inline images and custom emotes in

  messages

• Add kineticScrollingMaxSpeed and kineticScrollingDeceleration settings

• When highlighting accounts, rooms or members in lists

  (focus filter field and use up/down), the highlighted item's context menu can now be accessed with the keyboard Menu key

• Support for Menu key when keyboard-navigating messages in the timeline

• Add context menus to text field and areas

• Add a button to quickly expand the room pane when collapsed and focus

  the filter field

• Clicking on the current tab button for the room pane now fully hides it,

  this can also be toggled with the new toggleHideRoomPane keybind (default Ctrl+Alt+R)

Changed

• When panes are smaller than their default width due to user resizing or

  window size constraints, focusing certain elements will auto-expand them until the focus is lost: filter fields, member profile and room settings

• Reduced the default kinetic scrolling speed, which was hardcoded to an

  aggressive 4000 before. This can be restored with the kineticScrollingMaxSpeed setting.

• Improve key verification popup texts and make the session details copiable

• Power levels/room permission change events will now show a line of text or

  table containing the details of what exactly changed

• Messages containing tables will no longer be width-limited

• Using the sendFileFromPathInClipboard keybind (default Alt+Shift+S)

  now shows a preview of the file if it's an image and asks for confirmation

• Image messages now show spinners when loading the thumbnail

• Clicking on a GIF message will now open it externally like other images

  instead of pausing it. A dedicated play/pause button is now displayed in the corner.

And more: full changelog

Riot-iOS, no sorry, Element-iOS

Manu offered:

Last week, we forgot to announce that we renamed the Riot-iOS app to Element but this is not a surprise anymore. The app version is now 1.0.0. This change came with a lot of UI tweaks like new icons and new colors.

Since then, we made bug fixes we will release soon. This week, we also worked on PIN protection for the app, including support of Touch ID and Face ID.

Element Android

Francis offered:

This week has been focused on bug fixing, there will be a release next week. We also started to work on PIN protection for the app.

quotient

kitsune offered:

Quotient 0.6 released! The release notes are somewhat long, since it's been 4 months since the last stable version update, and more than a year since the 0.5 release - thanking two heroes of this release, and giving a nod to the original Quaternion author who happened to contribute using an inverted time machine. Read here: https://github.com/quotient-im/libQuotient/releases/tag/0.6.0

Big news - first release in a year. Do take a look at the full notes, they're very readable. In particular, they call out contributions from Black Hat, Alexey Andreyev and the original project creator, Felix Rohrbach aka @fxrh.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

ruma

Ruma is a Rust project to create a comprehensive set of APIs for Matrix. Previously there was a Ruma homeserver project.

jplatte said:

We weren't in TWIM for a while, but that doesn't mean no progress! Apart from Devin's constant work on ruma-events, there was also some movement in ruma-identifiers and ruma-client-api, with the former seeing a new release, 0.17.0.

We're planning to do more releases next week, and hopefully a 0.1 release of the ruma crate that provides a simpler entry point by re-exporting everything else, in one of the weeks after that. Stay tuned!

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

This Ansible playbook is meant to easily let you run your own Matrix homeserver.

Slavi said:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy just gained support for its first bot - matrix-reminder-bot.

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

Then, another report:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy has gained support for synapse-admin.

See our Setting up Synapse Admin documentation to get started.

Dept of Bots 🤖

matrix-wug

dandellion said:

It's been a while since it's come up, but matrix-wug is a bot capable of transcribing characters writable via normal keyboards to scripts from other languages/notation systems

It supports: x-sampa, z-sampa, proto-indo-european, Inuktitut, and Iñupiatun.

Now it also supports hiragana! The romanization system is something like Wāpuro rōmaji, but sticks to Nihon-shiki when in doubt.

I want this transcription to be forgiving, so if you find it not transcribing something in a way you'd expect it to, feel free to DM me!

To use it use the hi key with a delimiter like /x/ or []

hi/konnichiwa maatorikusu!/

vøgg is also behind pantalaimon now so it now works in encrypted rooms 😀

If you need to convert swiggles into a different type of swiggle, dandellion has you covered here.

Jitsi Token Service

kinta reported:

https://gitlab.com/communia/matrix-jitsi-token-service

This bot is not about adapting the current jitsi integration provided by Element IM as widget.

If you have a configured jitsi server to be authenticated with jwt tokens as in https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/tokens.md , this bot will assist you when claiming for a jwt instead of going to jwt.io each time. You'll need to create a user and invite you in each room where you want to create a jitsi room url respecting the matrix power levels in the room.

When the service is running invite the bot and send message !jitsi-jwt

If you are a moderator in the room (alias you have enough power levels to redact messages), then you will get a direct message from bot with the url to jitsi room with the jwt get parameter.

cody 0.7.0

carl told us:

New cody release. @cody:bordum.dk is a chat bot that works as a REPL for your matrix rooms. This week I worked on metrics. I host a Grafana instance with anonymous access allowed, so codys charts are now embedded the #cody:bordum.dk chat room.

Announcing The Very First Release of sMythbot

ssorbom told us:

I am proud to announce the very first release of sMythbot, the Matrix chatbot designed to control your Myth Tv DVR remotely. This release should be considered a tech preview. I welcome feedback and Bug reports. More information on installation and setup is available in the project wiki.

It currently supports the following commands

• !smythbot help: Display this message

• !smythbot set mythbackend address: Sets the Myth Tv backend address to use for this room.

• !smythbot set mythbacked port: Sets the Myth Tv backend port to use for this room.

• !smythbot view mythbackend address: Allows you to view the Myth Tv backend address set for this room

• !smythbot view mythbackend port: Allows you to view the Myth Tv backend port set for this room

• !smythbot view mythbackend info: Allows you to view various pieces of information for the Myth Tv backend connected to this room. It will not work if the address and port are not set.

• !smythbot display upcoming recordings: Displays the upcoming recordings on your Myth Tv Backend.

• !smythbot display recorded programs: Displays the recordings from the default recording group that are stored on your Myth Tv Backend.

You can find out more information at my Github Page

I love a project designed to scratch the author's own itch!

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Noteworthy Elements for Mobile Web

balaa said:

The team behind Noteworthy (Matrix over WireGuard overlay networks) has started work on bringing better mobile web support for Element (riot-web).

Noteworthy Elements is a lightweight shim powered by the Ionic Framework thats goal is to bring first-class support for Element running on mobile devices.

What we have so far

• Usable version of Element wrapped in native iOS / Android app

• Ability to run multiple instances of Element in a native iOS / Android app (ie connect to multiple home servers simultaneously)

Our initial experimentation has been positive and our goal is to make Element the best mobile client for Matrix with minimal fuss. With minimal changes to Element's codebase our goal is to land (significantly better) support for mobile web in upstream Element. Join us over at #noteworthy:tincan.community to get involved!

Trust-based Moderation Using Distributed Chat Systems for Transitive Trust Propagation

Florian said:

I just stumbled over the master thesis TrustNet: Trust-based Moderation Using Distributed Chat Systems for Transitive Trust Propagation. While it is mainly targeted at systems like Secure Scuttlebut and Cabal, I think it is also of interest for the people thinking about trust-based moderation for Matrix.

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. Join #ping: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 🎙

Let's hear from Christian about working on his dream projects, his thoughts on bridging, hosting, and the importance and nature of chatbots and assistants.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

"Element"

This week was the announcement of the much-awaited rebrand: Riot is now Element. In fact, three brands are coalescing into one: Riot and New Vector will be referred to as Element, while the SaaS platform known as Modular.im is now Element Matrix Services.

Note that Matrix is not involved in this change. Matrix is still Matrix, don't worry about that!

CommCon Virtual 2020, with added Matrix

CommCon is an event dedicated to Real-Time Communications. In 2020 they made the difficult decision to go online-only, but had a fear of missing out on the "hallway-track" that is so important to industry events. Their solution was to include a live chat to run alongside their streamed talks!

Matrix was a natural choice for the crowd, but they wanted a way to encourage viewers to join the correct room from their own Matrix clients. To do this, they used the GSOC project from arnav-t - an HTML Embedded client - to present a live scrolling-view of the chat. You can see the result at https://2020.commcon.xyz/live/.

Dept of Spec 📜

uhoreg said:

anoa is away this week, so no pretty graph, I'm afraid. (this is intolerable - BP)

MSC status

Merged MSCs

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs in Final Comment Period this week.

New MSCs:

• MSC2689: Fix E2EE for guests

Spec Core Team

This week, the Spec Core Team will be focusing on MSC2610 (Removing m.login.oauth2 from User-Interactive Authentication), MSC2611 (Removing m.login.token from User-Interactive Authentication), MSC2663 (Errors for dealing with non-existent push rules), MSC2674 (Event Relationships), and MSC2689 (Fix E2EE for guests).

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

Ruma/Matrix GSoC update

Ruma is a Rust project to create a comprehensive set of APIs for Matrix. Previously there was a Ruma homeserver project.

devinr528 reported:

The End is Nigh

This week in the ruma/matrix Google Summer of Code project, I worked on refactoring both ruma-api and ruma-events. After moving some of the larger chunks of the ruma_api_macro::api::Api::to_tokens method to helper functions, I spent time removing repetition from the Request/Response code generated by the ruma_api! macro. For ruma-events, the input parsing was changed to only allow valid names for the Any*Event enums. Altering the input parsing had the added benefit of replacing all of the string comparison and manipulation with strongly typed comparison and manipulation.

The final few issues to be resolved before the next crates.io release for ruma-events can happen are related to redacted events. Support for redacted events was added to the Any*Event enums, they now have redacted variants of each event kind. A few follow-up PR's have been merged to fully integrate redacted events into ruma-events, fixing specific event deserialization issues and splitting the UnsignedData struct into Unsigned and RedactedUnsigned.

HTML Embeddable Matrix

arnav-t reported:

This week for the GSoC project of HTML Embeddable Matrix Client:

• Added a read receipts menu for messages.

• Minor bug fixes

• Automatic hyperlinking of URLs in pipeline

See above for details of this project being used in the wild!

mautrix-go

nikofil announced:

• Added the capabilities to request room keys from other devices, as well as share room keys with other devices that requested them

• Currently working on device verification using SAS, will then work on key export / import

neb

• Updated to latest mautrix version with some minor fixes, most notably using m.encryption event parameters

Opsdroid(GSoC)

tyagdit said:

End to End Encryption with matrix

• The new connector has been fully implemented!

• Device verification has been put on hold for the time being

• No extra configuration is required

• Check out all the changes here

Matrix database

• Work has begun on porting the matrix database module to matrix-nio and integrating it into opsdroid core

• It uses matrix rooms as databases

• Users can store key value pairs as state events in a room

• Also works with encrypted rooms to allow for encrypted storage

matrix-ircd GSOC

karlik announced:

for matrix-ircd:

• Merge in futures 0.3 support for matrix and http modules

• Opened pull request for updating tests, irc module, and bridge module to futures 0.3 & remove several futures dependencies

• updating several packages TLS packages to their more modern counterparts

Dept of Servers 🏢

matrix-media-repo

matrix-media-repo is a highly customizable multi-domain media repository for Matrix

TravisR said:

matrix-media-repo has just released v1.1.3 with several improvements and bug fixes - please give it a go, and get support in #media-repo:t2bot.io

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo told us:

• @the0 finished /event

• I rebased Jamie's WIP appservice branch

• I wrote some documentation for our database: https://git.koesters.xyz/timo/conduit/wiki/Database

I also investigated why so many sytests fail and created this issue: https://github.com/matrix-org/sytest/issues/913 Apparently Sytest did not expect a server to optimize their /sync responses as much as Conduit does :P.

Note: The official Conduit server is now reachable at "https://conduit.koesters.xyz". Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Synapse

Neil said:

A big week for matrix.org performance.

Hot on the heels of shipping shardable federation readers last week, this week we shipped shardable federation senders. There is still plenty of work to do, but together these changes has made a massive difference to federation lag overall and hopefully those of you not on matrix.org are noticing the difference when you talk to matrix.org users.

This graph shows the impact to outbound federation lag.

Aside from that we also shipped shardable push and frontend proxy workers as both were starting to max out on CPU as well as a shardable client reader, allowing us to shard registration which was especially important this week :)

Finally we moved typing notifications from the master process and optimised incoming replication queuing to buy us a little more head room.

Next steps are to revisit where all the remaining cycles are going on the master process. To help us profile we are migrating to async/await semantics and Patrick produced this natty graph to track progress.

Outside of performance we shipped a bug fix to prevent large initial syncs taking out the synchrotrons. The admin api sprouted an end point to list room members (thanks awesome-michaeland the ability to reactivate previously deactivated users.

Coming up we’ll dust off the notifications project which has been put on hold while Riot transmogrified into Element and we’ll continue with chipping away at the master process.

Synapse Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace said:

And another bump of the K8s-optimized Synapse images, this time to 1.17.0

Synapse adoption graphs

We only featured this a month ago, but I want to call attention again to this awesome Synapse version adoption tracking project from Chris . I wanted to know how quickly Synapse 1.17.0 would be the most deployed version (~36 hours), and the answer is right there!

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-twitter

Tulir announced:

I started working on a Twitter DM bridge that uses the internal API instead of the complicated official one. It should be easier to set up than bridges using the official API, since there won't be a need to get API keys and forward webhooks. The main risk is that Twitter doesn't like people using the internal API and starts blocking users like Facebook does, but hopefully that doesn't happen.

So far I've only made a simple library for the API, but the bridge should be usable by the next TWIM. The bridge and API library are at https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-twitter and there's a discussion room at #twitter:maunium.net.

Dept of Clients 📱

Element Android 1.0.0

benoit announced:

Element Android 1.0.0 is out! Download or upgrade it from the PlayStore at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.app or download it from the F-Droid store at https://f-droid.org/packages/im.vector.app/

• PlayStore users: Element should come as a regular upgrade of the application Riot-Android, and the upgrade will update your previous account and data, without the need to log in again.

• F-Droid users: Element is a new app, you have to install it and log in again.

• RiotX: RiotX will disappear from the PlayStore (it was only a beta application). We will provide a very last update to inform users to install Element Android

Please report any issues at https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android (which will probably be renamed soon), because Element Android is actually RiotX code! Thanks for all the contributors of RiotX, we still have lots to do to make the app even better and full featured.

Radical

Davo announced:

After seeing all the Element room avatars, I thought to myself, "you know what, #radical-webext:matrix.org needs a new icon"… so I sat down and combined a couple of icons. The result:

Radical also quickly (as always) got updates when Element 1.7.0 and 1.7.1 were released. Huge thank you to stoic for making Radical in the first place.

Element F-Droid repos

krombel announced:

I updated my F-Droid repos which are containing the dev builds to reflect the latest naming change to Element.

The people who formerly used my repos for getting the dev repo of Riot-Android should update to the new repo. It wont be updated to get Element

As always you can grab the F-Droid or GPlay flavor and you can pick the repo which reflects your flavor on https://fdroid.krombel.de

Note: As "the new repo" is internally the same repo as the one of RiotX (and Riot.imX) the people who already used that don't need to update their packet source. They will get the updates to Element via the old repo urls.

Feel free to use it 🙂

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

maubot

Tulir announced:

As promised last week, maubot now supports end-to-end encryption. It's a bit bare at the moment, so you need to manually insert the device ID into the database for it to start working, but other than that it works. Plugins don't need to be changed at all, the framework will handle everything.

While I was adding e2ee to maubot, I also improved mautrix-python's crypto stuff so that it's easier to use it directly as a client library with e2ee. Some day I might even add docs :D

matrix-appservice-cr

Chris Vincent reported:

Related to my previous update here, I've just published an initial version of a Matrix Client-Server client library for the Crystal programming language: https://github.com/cvincent/matrix-client-cr

Is this the first time we've seen tooling for Crystal?

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

This Ansible playbook is meant to easily let you run your own Matrix homeserver.

Slavi announced:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy is now ready to help you with the Riot -> Element transition.

We have a few ways to handle the migration depending on how much change and breakage you're willing to tolerate. See our Migrating to Element documentation page.

Incredibly thorough migration paths here!

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix-Alertmanager bot v0.3.0

jaywink offered:

Matrix-Alertmanager bot has a new release of v0.3.0. Highlights are compatibility with AWS Lambda, better error handling if message fails to send and the ability to do a @room mention on firing alerts. Find it here.

cody 0.6.0

carl reported:

REPL for your matrix rooms

This week, we got support for javascript (nodejs) with !js. The code

complexity was considerably reduced, which should make adding new languages much easier in the future. All Python sub-dependencies are now pinned, making

cody builds even more reproducible.

Chat with cody: @cody:bordum.dk

Read the source: https://gitlab.com/carlbordum/matrix-cody

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Noteworthy (Matrix over Wireguard overlay networks)

balaa said:

Noteworthy team (patrick and myself) have open sourced both components (spoke & hub) of Noteworthy (Matrix over Wireguard overlay networks -- https://github.com/decentralabs/noteworthy) we are actively welcoming testers/contributors and working with a handful of projects on incorporating our deployment model over in #noteworthy:tincan.community -- it is also the fastest way (less than a minute) to deploy your own home server! Also, working on incorporating Noteworthy into the popular ansible deployment repo to enable users who don't have access to a publicly accessible to deploy their own home servers.

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. Join #ping: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 it's Open Tech Will Save Us!

• Jay Graber (@arcalinea, @arcalinea:matrix.org), creator of Happening and all-around decentralisation fan gave an overview of the decentralized social media ecosystem.
• Ania M. Piotrowska (@aniampiotrowska), known for her work on Nym, Loopix, and at UCL presented "Building private future for the internet with the Nym mixnet".
• Burak Nehbit (@nehbit, @burak:tomesh.net) gave a deep dive into his work on Aether P2P.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa reported:

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:

• MSC2630: checking public keys in SAS verification (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC2677: Annotations and reactions

• MSC2676: Message editing

• MSC2675: Serverside aggregations of message relationships

• MSC2674: Event Relationships

• MSC2673: Notification Levels

• MSC2666: Get rooms in common with another user

Note that a majority of those new MSCs are split out from MSC1849 (the aggregations MSC) to make it easier to review 🙂

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we're sticking to implementation work. anoa did have some time this week to make the graphs more useful though:

Check out that graph!

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

HTML embeddable client GSoC project

arnav-t told us:

This week for my HTML embeddable client GSoC project:

• Added full markdown support and made replying and quoting fully functional

• Added a lot more configuration options to the client, including a read-only mode

• Fixed some bugs

go-neb

nikofil said:

• work is still being done on the bot's functionality to test different crypto functionalities of other Matrix clients when thrown in a room with them

• slight improvements to mautrix-go (sql store can now store multiple Olm accounts and their sessions, key rotation params taken from encryption event, other minor things)

• add some simple instructions to the readme for enabling e2ee for neb as well as integrate these mautrix changes (PR #330)

• room_key_requests will probably be the next thing to be developed for mautrix-go

Nheko (GSoC)

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Chethan said:

• Added user cache which stores the encrypted user keys and updates them on sync

• Added Verification Cache which stores verified devices of a user

• Showing Verification Status of a device on Userprofile

Dept of P2P 👥

Riot iOS P2P Demo

Neil Alexander announced:

Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on the next P2P demo, using Yggdrasil as the transport instead of libp2p. Although libp2p is arguably more featureful in many ways, Yggdrasil does have one major benefit in that it provides full overlay routing. Participants in the network can carry traffic on behalf of other participants, resulting in something much closer to a true mesh network.

The mad science doesn't end there however. I've also built a custom Riot iOS build that includes the full Dendrite P2P demo (yes, that's a homeserver running locally on your phone). If you have an iPhone or iPad, it's available in public TestFlight right now and you can play with it!

The demo still is very experimental and has a number of bugs still (including but not limited to messages occasionally taking a while to deliver, the app crashing when going into the background sometimes etc.) but we'll be improving it further in the coming weeks and it's quite fun to play with, particularly if you can do so with other people nearby.

Thanks to the same technology that powers AirDrop, the demo will automatically find and connect to other nearby devices running the demo and build up a network automatically - even if you are not on the same Wi-Fi network (or indeed connected to Wi-Fi at all)! If you don't have any other nearby peers to test with then fear not - you can still configure a public static peer in the app settings and join the wider network that way.

With any luck the room directory will even work too, showing published rooms from other nearby devices. If not, try joining #beachparty:b5ae50589e50991dd9dd7d59c5c5f7a4521e8da5b603b7f57076272abc58b374 from within the app.

Questions, comments or feedback? Join us in #p2p:matrix.org!

Dept of Servers 🏢

A new way to test homeservers - Complement

kegan reported:

Many of you know that I work on a Go homeserver called Dendrite, and so I've had to get familiar with SyTest: a black-box homeserver integration testing project. Unfortunately SyTest has a number of problems: from the dialect of perl, lack of documentation for federation bits, the inability to run a single test, and so on. Having a solid black-box integration testing project is crucial for the ecosystem to ensure spec compliance (and hence compatibility between server implementations) and for making all servers more stable and reliable.

As a side project I've been working on a modern Go rewrite called Complement which is now ready for a bit more exposure. It currently only has a handful of SyTests converted but I hope to rapidly expand the number in the coming weeks. Complement makes heavy use of Docker to agnostically run homeservers, and already includes a Dockerfile for configuring a Dendrite instance. To try it out, clone the repo and run:

(cd dockerfiles && docker build -t complement-dendrite -f Dendrite.Dockerfile .)

COMPLEMENT_BASE_IMAGE=complement-dendrite:latest go test -v ./tests

If you're interested in learning more and maybe adding some tests check out ONBOARDING.md.

My overall hope is that Complement will lower the barrier to entry when adding tests by so much that it encourages any bugfix/feature in any homeserver implementation to result in a new test. This will benefit everyone and create a feedback loop which will make Matrix even more reliable.

Asked about Sytest and SyTS, Kegan added:

Complement currently implements the same tests as sytest, so tests which pass sytest will pass complement (though that will diverge as complement will guard against more race conditions by default). There's about 9 different kinds of tests currently testing CS-API and Federation (outbound to a dummy server and inbound via a federation client)

The problem with SyTS was that the test tooling around it ultimately wasn't expressive enough. I was using Jest and kept finding myself fighting it by bumping up against issues like https://github.com/facebook/jest/pull/8751 and the multi-process parallelisation stuff was too opaque. The assertion helper functions also lacked context because they rely on behavioural testing names like describe("foo") { it("should say bar") { ... } etc so when your assertion fails (eg wrong value for a JSON key using assert equals) it just says unhelpfully "foo != bar" where what I really want is to know what it actually does say then, and other contextual info around the object (maybe the key name was typod). When I realised that the assertion lib didn't have this and I'd need to add it, coupled with parallelisation concerns and head-desking against Jest, I found myself wishing I just used something else. I stuck with it though and then realised that all the federation stuff (signature checking, canonical JSON, etc) would need to re-implemented when I knew I had working code in Go. Both of these things combined and I thought "you know what, I'm just going to do this in Go" but you'll note that the architecture is identical, so SyTS lives on as an early prototype for Complement ;)

Find out more in the room: #complement:matrix.org.

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander told us:

While I've been busy distracted with the P2P demo, Kegan has been on a mission to implement some new features. Changes this week include:

• Redaction is now mostly implemented

• User-interactive authentication is now implemented

• Device lists in the client API are now implemented

• Media APIs are now available on both /r0 and /v1 endpoints which makes Riot iOS a bit happier

• Some federation sender bugs have been fixed

• Some database locks in the federation sender in SQLite mode have been fixed

Spec compliance has improved a bit:

• Client-Server APIs: 48%, up from 45% last week

• Server-Server APIs: 51%, up from 50% last week

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo said:

Conduit

Hi everyone, here are some things we worked on this week:

• Work on to-device sending improvements

• Work on room tags (thanks to @gnieto)

• Merged /logout/all endpoint (thanks to @CapsizeGlimmer)

• Work on /joined_members (thanks to @CapsizeGlimmer)

Last week we had a list of major features still missing. Here's a list of what already works:

Registering, logging in, creating rooms, room visibility, join rules, basic permission management, public room list, inviting, creating DMs, e2e encryption, key backups, device verification, cross signing, notifications, uploading media/files (also user/room avatars), lower-resolution media thumbnails, voip calls and a few other thing's I'm forgetting right now. So it's useable for non-federating chats already.

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Synapse

Neil reported:

In Synapse land this week, we shipped 1.16.0 and err 1.16.1.

Lifting from the blog post, the highlights are:-

• An important performance fix to improve room state resolution.

• An option to enable e2e by default for new rooms.

• Ability to run multiple media repo workers side by side.

• Ability to mark specific content as being safe from quarantine.

• Bug fixes to make migrating from SQLite to Postgres more reliable - if you are running sqlite for anything other than evaluation purposes then please migrate!

We also put out a release candidate for 1.17.0 which all being well we’ll release on Monday. 1.17.0 is really a bug fix release the most notable being finally squashing a long standing bug that caused locally rejected invites to get ‘stuck’ client side.

Continuing our matrix.org performance theme, having now got the CS API largely into a good state of responsiveness, we are looking at federation lag. Today we shipped a sharded Federation Reader to matrix.org which has reduced the average lag from seconds to milliseconds. We are just running two currently and are still tuning as we figure out how to get the best from it. Initial impressions seem promising. Watch this space.

We also have a PR out for review to shard the Federation Sender, which will have much the same effect in the other direction.

Once we have sending messages via the Client-Server API, much reduced federation lag and a sharded Pusher we’ll take a look at room joins.

Synapse Deployment 📥️

dacruz21/matrix-chart

Typo Kign reported:

v2.3.0 of dacruz21/matrix-chart has been published with Synapse 1.16.

Kubernetes

Just pushed the 1.16 K8s-optimized Synapse image tags, this time done from a tablet in a server room between moving a bunch of hardware.

New WireGuard-based deployment

balaa announced:

Hi everyone, my friend Patrick and I have been working on making Matrix more accessible in the context of personal overlay networks powered by WireGuard. We’ve built a 1-click deployment solution for Synapse & Riot based on docker. The interesting part is that it gives you public addressability via a distributed proxy service that we have been developing. We are free and open source and welcoming contributors and testers ASAP! We are imagining an ecosystem for building collaborative intranets and see them as foundational to a freer, more equitable internet. Please join us at #noteworthy:tincan.community See https://www.patrickdlg.com/personal-messaging/ and https://noteworthy.tech/start/

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir announced:

mautrix-whatsapp got some bugfixes and improvements:

• You can now create private chat portals by inviting a WhatsApp ghost user (e.g. from a group chat)

• WhatsApp users in groups are now synced to Matrix properly, including kicking users who left the group without the bridge noticing

matrix-sms-bridge

Benedict offered:

I fixed some bugs in matrix-sms-bridge and added a feature that allows delayed sending of sms messages with the sms send command. It runs very fast and stable in my production environment.

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) reported:

Not much to talk about currently, since I'm breaking my Nheko to replace the entire event store at this moment, but I have some heads up on an annoying bug that I fixed on my branch:

Sometimes we had a weird issue, where Nheko wouldn't load the language the user set on their system. This was especially annoying when I wanted to test a specific language, like Japanese, and I couldn't figure out the right LANG* variables to set the language to Japanese in Nheko. Turns out, this was a bug in Nheko and you wouldn't have guessed so, when looking at the examples in the Qt documentation. Anyway, KDAB wrote a nice blogpost explaining this issue: https://www.kdab.com/fixing-a-common-antipattern-when-loading-translations-in-qt/

If you are a Qt developer, you may want to check your applications, if you are also affected.

Riot-iOS

steve offered:

This week, we worked on the rebranding.

RiotX / Riot-Android

benoit announced:

We will release a beta (0.91.5) of Riot-Android this evening, including all the recent changes and lots of fixes. We are still working to prepare the great release!

Daydream

MTRNord told us:

While not much is happening on the master branch some things happened on the Redesign branch:

• Daydream does the sync now on a worker which is similar to using a thread

• jplatte made a PR for optimizing multiple Parts of the Code which significantly improved the overall Daydream performance ( https://github.com/daydream-mx/Daydream/pull/22 )

• Some rework of the Login logic happened to prepare for well-known support

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

mautrix-python

Tulir offered:

When I initially implemented end-to-bridge encryption in mautrix-python, I used matrix-nio in a slightly hacky way to get it done quickly. It worked fine in some cases, but also caused some undecryptable messages. I tried switching to using matrix-nio's crypto module directly, but the sans-I/O design made that difficult: there were too many parts that needed to be hooked up to the actual I/O and I wasn't able to find them all. In the end, I just decided to implement the basic e2ee stuff directly in mautrix-python the same way it's implemented in mautrix-go.

All my bridges based on mautrix-python (Telegram, Facebook and Hangouts) have been switched to use the new crypto stuff. After a few initial bugs that are already fixed, it seems to work better than the old system. I'll probably add native e2ee to maubot soon too, which is my last main project that's still missing e2ee.

Dept of Internet of Things 💡

Mozilla IoT Matrix Adapter 0.3

Christian reported:

The Mozilla IoT Matrix Adapter can send posts based on events in your home.

Version 0.3 brings the ability to use room aliases instead of internal room ids. Furthermore, you can configure it to accept invites and follow room upgrades.

Due to utter negligence and malpractice by myself, we missed the update for this project last week. Of course, 0.2 is now superseded by 0.3, but here is the 0.2 update anyway:

Released v0.2.0 of the Mozilla IoT Matrix adapter. It's now possible to post in multiple rooms (still one per post).

Dept of Bots 🤖

Cat Disruptor 7000

Stephen D told us:

I wrote a pretty simple Matrix bot in Rust which is loosely based on Cat Disruptor 6000. It will react with 🐈️ to any message containing the string "cat" *. Since it is a small project, I hope it can be used as an example for other people interested in writing Matrix bots in Rust. It implements several important features (crypto/device store, auto-accepting invites, crafting custom events, etc.) You can host it yourself, or you can try it out by inviting the user "@catdisruptor:m.scd31.com" to your room! https://git.scd31.com/stephen/cat-disruptor-7000

* Cat Disruptor 6000 does not do this (it is used for disrupting monologues with cat pictures). However, many instances of Cat Disruptor 6000 also include a separate bot, which is what Cat Disruptor 7000 is mimicking.

matrix-imposter-bot

mr_johnson22 said:

matrix-imposter-bot - A bot that uses your account to repeat other people's messages. This gives relay-bot capabilities to puppet-only bridges.

Updates:

• Can be much more easily deployed with a production-level WSGI server. It comes with waitress but it's possible to use any other server.

• Member join/leave/rename now post messages

• Shuts down when receiving a term/exit/quit signal, instead of hanging

For more details, see https://github.com/mrjohnson22/matrix-imposter-bot

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

cody

carl offered:

cody is a REPL for your matrix chat rooms.

This week, the big new feature was support for Ruby with the message prefix !rb.

Chat with cody: @cody:bordum.dk

Read the source: https://gitlab.com/carlbordum/matrix-cody

Dept of Jobs 💰️

Famedly is recruiting

sorunome announced:

Heya, we (famedly) are looking for about 2-3 more flutter developers. We are a german startup which works on revolutionizing communication in the medical area. We build on top of matrix, so having some matrix-knowledge would be very beneficial.

You might have seen us previously in TWIM with projects such as famedly-email-bridge or the famedly dart SDK.

While we are based in Berlin we do allow remote work, and communication in english is fine, too.

If you are interested or have more questions, please message Niklas Zender.

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. Join #ping: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 🌡️

Open Tech Will Save Us 4

The next Open Tech Will Save Us event will take place on Wednesday, that's 2020-07-08! Line-up is confirmed as:

• Jay Graber (@arcalinea, @arcalinea:matrix.org), creator of Happening and all-around decentralisation fan will summarize an overview of the decentralized social media ecosystem that they're working on.
• Ania M. Piotrowska (@aniampiotrowska), known for her work on Nym, Loopix, and at UCL will present "Building private future for the internet with the Nym mixnet".
• Burak Nehbit (@nehbit, @burak:tomesh.net) will give a deep dive into his work on Aether P2P.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa reported:

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

Finished Final Comment Period:

• MSC2604: Accept device information for the login fallback endpoint

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC2659: Application service ping endpoint

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, as last week we are sticking with "implementation" for now. We'll be back soon :)

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

This week was the first evaluations, we'll have results to share next week.

matrix-ircd (GSOC)

karlik offered:

for matrix-ircd:

• Removed futures 0.1 dependency & move all modules to futures 0.3

• Update all tests to use async / await

• Begin merging updated futures to async_await branch

go-neb

From nikofil:

• e2ee merged and some bugs fixed (pr #324)! You should be able to use neb normally in an encrypted room now, if that's not the case please let us know!
• Added integration tests for both encrypted and unencrypted rooms to neb in order to catch things that might break some core functionality in a subtle way (issue #326)
• Similarly, created a PR for mautrix-go for testing the Olm and Megolm session establishment and message encryption / decryption (pr #12)
• Next up, working on a service for neb for testing the crypto functionality of other clients: neb will send messages to a room, rotate keys etc. and your client is supposed to respond!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander said:

This week has seen some new architectural changes and a number of bugs fixed:

• A new Current State Server component has been added, which tracks room state

• The Public Rooms API has been deprecated in favour of the Current State Server

• Event size limits are now honoured with the correct return code

• Invites have seen some refactoring and retiring invites should work better now

• The federation sender now persists unsent PDUs to the database and will automatically retry when Dendrite is restarted, making resend behaviour much more reliable (particularly in the P2P demos)

• Some room checks in /state and /state_ids have been fixed

• Some additional restrictions have been added to /send and we now return the correct error codes

• A bug where current state was incorrectly used when getting missing/backfill events has been fixed

• A bug where you couldn't rejoin a room that you created after wiping your database has been fixed

Spec compliance:

• Client-Server APIs: 45%

• Server-Server APIs: 50%

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo reported:

This week I didn't have much time to work on Conduit, but together with @the0 we could implement both password changing and account deactivation!

With last week's key backup and cross-signing PR landing in master, here's a list of all major features still missing from Conduit:

• All of Federation

• Appservices

• Push Notifications

• Notification settings

• Message Search

• Presence

• Room Tagging

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Synapse

richvdh reported:

Synapse 1.15.2 shipped this week with some important security fixes - if you haven't already upgraded, please do asap! Meanwhile, we're also preparing a 1.16 release with the normal round of bugfixes and incremental improvements.

The big focus in the Synapse team continues to be on performance for larger Synapse instances, which is reflected in the support in 1.16 for running multiple media worker processes. We're working on giving other worker processes the same treatment, so expect more of the same in the weeks to come!

Synapse Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace announced:

Just pushed the 1.15.2 tags for the K8s-optimized Synapse image.

Docker matrix

Mathijs offered:

The avhost image including coturn, jemalloc, and mjolnir for synapse 1.15.2 was released at avhost/docker-matrix:v1.15.2, while the RCs images were released on my personal repo; mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.16.0rc1 and mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.16.0rc2

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Twilio & Maubot based SMS bridge

Jeff Casavant offered:

I wrote a very simple Twilio & Maubot based SMS bridge recently which I've been running for long enough with no delivery errors that I'd consider it stable. It's oriented towards bridging many individuals to single rooms via SMS. You'll need to have a Maubot instance in order to run it.

https://github.com/jeffcasavant/MaubotTwilio

Dept of Clients 📱

Syphon - new client announcement

usbfingers offered:

Hey TWIM ,

Tuesday, I did a soft announcement of open alpha for Syphon - a privacy centric matrix client

Source: https://github.com/syphon-org/syphon

Website: https://syphon.org

Features:

• no analytics.

• no proprietary third party services

  • iOS will have APNS opt-in, but will be made clear to the user

• all data is AES-256 encrypted at rest

• E2EE for direct chats using Olm/Megolm

  • group chats will be supported in the coming weeks

• all indicators of presence are opt-in only (typing indicators, read receipts, etc)

• customize themes and colors throughout the app

Please note there's still a lot of work to do and a lot of features missing that other clients have. It's not ready for everyday use.

Please let me know if you have any questions or would like to contribute!

Riot Web

Ryan told us:

This week we released 1.6.8, and the highlights include:

• Upgraded to Electron 9 for desktop builds, which should fix various Linux tray icon issues

• Jump to first unread message improved to handle reactions and other non-message events

• Desktop now shows a file saved message when downloading a file

• Cross-signing setup flows reworked to simplify choosing a security phrase or key

Fractal

Alexandre Franke announced:

The previous Fractal update was quite a while ago but we’ve kept busy.

There has been a lot of under the hood work that users won’t notice and which we won’t delve into. In addition to them, we have a few nice things:

• Matrix API tokens are redacted in logs for better privacy when submitting bug reports.

• A send button was added next the message entry. This is especially relevant for touch screens.

• We are less noisy with typing notifications that we send out.

• We support SOCKS proxies.

• Notifications for non text messages have been tweaked.

• We gained support for edited message display. They are replaced with the newer content and a little icon is shown next to them. Editing messages is not supported yet though.

NovaChat July 3 update:

eric told us:

• Added icons for each chat network to room list

• Got Twitter DM bridge working again

• Improved search bar UI

• On-boarded 30 new users!

• Launched (accidentally) on Hacker News

• Fixed a ton of reliability bugs in the 7 bridges we support (changelog)

• We are hiring (full-time or part-time) remote React developers to work on our (source available, still TBD on final license) Riot fork Send me a DM if interested.

NovaChat has been getting good coverage lately, on Twitter and Hacker News.

RiotX published in the beta channel of the Riot-Android app

benoit announced:

RiotX is now published in the beta channel of the Riot-Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.app. You can get the last beta version by becoming a tester if you want to. There will be no more update of RiotX on the PlayStore. Current RiotX users should signout from RiotX and signin again on Riot-Android. Riot-Android users do not have to do that. The changelog can be read here https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/releases/tag/v0.91.3-beta. And this week we are working on implementing what's remain on our list, and we are fixing as many bugs as we can before the great release.

Riot-iOS

steve offered:

This week, we made some improvements for the cross-signing UX.

We started to work on the rebranding. And we also made some small improvements in the display of some events in the timeline.

Dept of Ops 🛠

ma1sd release 2.4.0

ma1uta offered:

ma1sd release 2.4.0.

Changes:

• Enabled v2 API by default.

• Added experimental support of the database connection pooling for postgresql

• Added option to bind ma1sd to specified address.

• Added error logging for LDAP authorization.

• Added full request and response logs for debug.

• Avoid including bridged user in directory lookups (https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/pull/45)

• Add experimental multi-platform buillds for amd64 and arm64 platforms.

• remove warning about matrix-synapse-ldap3 (https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/pull/50)

Bugfixes:

• https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/issues/26

• https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/issues/29 (partial)

• https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/issues/22

• https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/issues/27

Downloads:

• https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.4.0

• docker pull ma1uta/ma1sd:latest

• docker pull ma1uta/ma1sd:2.4.0-arm64 (image for arm64)

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

This Ansible playbook is meant to easily let you run your own Matrix homeserver.

Slavi said:

it appears to be puppet week in matrix-docker-ansible-deploy-land!

Thanks to various contributors (Johanna Dorothea Reichmann, Tulir Asokan and Hugues Morisset), the playbook has gained support for 4 new bridges: mx-puppet-instagram (see our docs), mx-puppet-twitter (see our docs), mx-puppet-discord (see our docs) and mx-puppet-steam (see our docs).

This brings the total number of bridges supported by the playbook to 15!

Dept of Bots 🤖

matrix-reminder-bot v0.1.0

anoa offered:

The release, v0.1.0, of matrix-reminder-bot is out! 🎉

I've eliminated most of the bad bugs that were present, so will be doing some feature development for a bit. As of now, the features of the bot are:

• Setting reminders

• Have a reminder ping yourself or the whole room

• Alarms which continue ringing until silenced

• Support for end-to-end encrypted rooms

• Postgres and SQLite support

• Docker support

Find it here: https://github.com/anoadragon453/matrix-reminder-bot/ and join the discussion at #matrix-reminder-bot:matrix.org!

Enjoy! ❤️

IPFS Bot

MTRNord offered:

Did you ever have the issue that a media event sent from someone is too large for your HS and you don't want to fiddle with the link?

IPFS Bot might be a solution. Invite @ipfs:nordgedanken.dev or Check out https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-ipfs-bot/ to use the bot.

If you reply to any media event with !ipfs the bot will send you a link to the media stored on ipfs.

Known issues are:

• E2EE not yet working (It joins but can't yet decrypt the related event)

• Error handling is basically not existent. Therefore crashes might happen until I sort this out.

• It currently does very verbose logging. This will be removed when the bot is more stable

• Images sent from RiotX sometimes seem to not play nice with ruma

(Demo for the IPFS Bot): https://ipfs.nordgedanken.dev/ipfs/QmSfde3V4QL1Lv96Ar62qgnhaEtyi9jzPkKRCBMh4Wqm6F?filename=2020-06-27_16-41-09.mp4

We could include this video here, but it seems me appropriate to link to an actual IPFS location.

cody, REPL for your Matrix chat rooms

carl offered:

Hello, I am announcing my first matrix bot - cody - that will evaluate code snippets in your Matrix rooms and return the result. Here is an example interaction:

user> !py "Hello world!"
cody> 'Hello world!'

user> !py list(range(10))
cody> [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

You can chat with him @cody:bordum.dk and view the source code at https://gitlab.com/carlbordum/matrix-cody

This initial release only supports Python, but the plan is to add support for more languages in the next few weeks. The repo might also be of interest to some of you as it has CI, CD to DockerHub, complete dev environment with cody, pantalaimon, synapse and riot using docker-compose, simple metrics and Grafana-dashboards-as-code.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Matrix Notepad Version v0.2.2

KB1RD told us:

A real-time collaborative text editor using the Matrix protocol.

matrix-notepad.kb1rd.net

Nope, it's not dead.

• New version of logootish-js with a completely new algorithm

  • In particular, I should note that this new algorithm is tested extensively, so I think the bugs should be out

• Corresponding updates to internal event structure

• Fixed UI & CSS bugs

• Improved UX for room title editor

• Currently, conflicting text will be displayed, but conflicts will not be indicated in any way

• I almost forgot to mention: The room list is now filtered using the typed rooms MSC (event ID org.matrix.msc1840). #test-document0:kb1rd.net is a room with that state event set.

I also made a flame graph of the internal algorithm and I'm surprised by some of the results. The good thing is that I think there's quite a few ways to speed up the algorithm. Here it is:

https://logootish-js.matrix-notepad.kb1rd.net/flamegraph/test/listmodel-nc.perf.js/flamegraph.html#{%22merged%22:false,%22nodeId%22:null,%22excludeTypes%22:[%22cpp%22,%22regexp%22,%22v8%22,%22native%22,%22init%22,%22core%22]}

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. Join #ping: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 first thing tomorrow morning, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

Matrix Live 🎙

It's demos this week!

• Riot X video calls (valere)
• Room list (TravisR)
• Notifications - (Michael (t3chguy) & richvdh)
• E2E Onboarding (Dave & Nad)
• Modular SAML support (ChristianP)

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Merch Returns!

Yes it's back! For the first time in months we are shipping branded IRL-items featuring Matrix branding. Head to The Shop to stock-up.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa announced:

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:

• MSC2631: Add default_payload to PusherData

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2604: Accept device information for the login fallback endpoint (merge)

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC2654: Unread counts

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, unfortunately our three MSCs from last week ( MSC2366 (verification flows), MSC2403 (knocking), and MSC2630 (SAS security)) are still pre-FCP. Most of the team has been quite busy with implementation for the past few weeks. Instead of advertising those 3 MSCs again, we're going to switch the focus to "implementation" for a bit until we're freed up again.

So the focus for this week is: MSC implementation work. However, this should not discourage any MSC authors from responding to MSC feedback in the meantime 🙂

Dept of GSoC 🎓

Ruma GSoC

devinr528 reported:

This week in the ruma/matrix Google Summer of Code project, ruma-events was made ready for use! After adding stripped and sync event generation to the event_enum! macro there were only a few small tweaks needed to try it out in some dependent rust crates. I spent a few days converting matrix-rust-sdk to use the ruma-monorepo. Since ruma is used on both client and server-side, I also opened a PR to update Conduit, a homeserver implementation written in Rust. To test that everything worked together, I updated rumatui, my command-line client written in rust.

Then I could test that Conduit sent, and matrix-rust-sdk received the new ruma events successfully. While updating, I felt the pain of not having accessor methods for the Any*Event enums to get at the event fields held within. I have opened a pull request to add the generation of these methods to the event_enums! macro. Hopefully, the Conduit and matrix-sdk PR's will be merged and the ruma monorepo can be tested in the wild!

matrix-ircd GSOC

karlik told us:

Moved matrix protocol, irc protocol, and bridge module to futures 0.3. Converted some utility functions to new futures, and updated the http implementation to use the standardized Hyper library instead of using a custom http implementation.

go-neb

nikofil said:

• Created PR for enabling e2ee across all services! This required a few changes to how the bot client is initialised, as well as changes to all services to use the new functionality instead of directly sending messages to a room. https://github.com/matrix-org/go-neb/pull/324

• Added code from another of tulir's projects to Mautrix to allow storing the crypto material (olm / megolm sessions, accounts etc.) in a SQL database, adding a second way besides using Gob storage. https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-go/pull/10

• Future plans are to work on the library itself to add any features that might be missing.

HTML embeddable chat rooms

arnav-t told us:

This week I've worked on the following features for the project "HTML embeddable chat rooms" under GSoC '20:

Added support for signing-in

Via sign-in popup

The user can enter their credentials into the modal dialogue box.

Via postMessage interface

iframe.contentWindow.postMessage({
    cmd: 'login',

    args: {
        user: 'username',

        passwd: 'password'
    }

}, origin);

Arguments:

args (object):

• username (string) - Username

• passwd (string) - Password

Response:

{

    status: 'success', 
    message: 'Attempting sign in...'

}

Added support for default avatars

Using the same design as Riot. However, I am just using flexbox and text instead of drawing on an HTML5 canvas. The HSL color is generated by hashing the user ID.

Quoting and replying

Added on-hover buttons and reply popup above message composer similar to Riot web. Quoting prepends the message (quoted) to the message composer similar to Riot web and replying would also work similar to Riot web. It will be fully functional once markdown parsing is added.

Guest access

The client now supports guest access. If no access token or user ID is provided in the configuration file, the client attempts to register a guest account on the home server. Room contents are viewed using peekInRoom.

If the guest attempts to send a message, only then joinRoom is called to avoid spam (each page load would lead to a guest joining the room).

Nheko

Chethan told us:

SAS Verification is completed and works !

Supports both Emoji and Decimal Verification Only uses curve25519-hkdf-sha256 as key_agreement protocol

Brand new UserProfile written entirely in qml. https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/pull/203

Mtxclient

Updated with needed APIs for SAS verification.

https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/mtxclient/pull/32

Opsdroid

tyagdit reported:

Port to Matrix-nio

• The matrix connector is now using matrix-nio!

• Bots can send and receive texts, images, files as before

• No change in configuration required, just update opsdroid and run as before

• Encryption is not yet implemented

• You can check out the PR here

Enabling E2EE

• Sending and receiving encrypted texts, edits, replies works just as normal messages

• Images and files are being worked on

• User shouldn't have to change much about their configuration to use encryption

• Some testing is due

• Check out the progress here

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

kegan reported:

This week has been mainly about testing to ensure that all the progress over the past few months is kept up-to-date and correct. We've also added a few features in order to get certain sytests working. To that end:

• Invites can now be declined over federation and they will be reflected in /sync responses.

• Errors encountered when joining a room over federation are now sent back to the client.

• Errors encountered when accepting an invite over federation are now sent back to the client.

• Dendrite will now check server names meet the server name grammar in the specification.

• A bug which caused client-api-proxy to not actually proxy correctly has been fixed, thanks @fantashley !

• /send now abides by the limits in the specification: 50 PDUs / 100 EDUs.

• The docker-compose scripts now include appservice_api, thanks @fantashley !

• Sending invites over federation will now fall back to v1 if v2 fails with a 404.

• Dendrite now implements room.timeline.limit completely (in both in-line and stored filter formats).

• Dendrite now sets the limited flag on /sync responses correctly.

In addition, we now have support for collecting code coverage output from SyTest. This indicates we are testing roughly 70% of the Dendrite codebase. The remaining 30% are hard to reach via integration tests (e.g database failures, communication problems between internal APIs).

Spec compliance:

• Client-Server APIs: 45%, up from 40% last week

• Server-Server APIs: 50%, up from 38% last week

In total, we've made an additional 45 sytests pass this week.

Mascarene

Nico reported:

Mascarene v0.2.0 has been released.

This version implements a minimal set of client API endpoints to work with Riot and allow user registration,

room creation, invitation and messages sending on the same running instance (no federation support).

Docker image are also available. See this documentation

for rough installation instructions.

Join us at #mascarene:beerfactory.org

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo told us:

This week I finished the cross-signing PR:

To try it out yourself, open Riot (preferably https://riot.im/develop) and join the <https://conduit.koesters.xyz:14004> homeserver.

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Synapse

Neil told us:

This week we’ve been working on further improvements to event persistence and ironed out a nasty bug where an unusually long state resolution could block the reactor overall and impact send times. We seem to have got to the bottom of this and m.org has improved a lot as of today.

More generally we’ve been trying to characterise matrix.org performance so that we can continue to improve over the coming months.

We are going to focus on:-

• Client send event

• Outbound Federation Latency

• Inbound Federation Latency

• Room joins

As well as tracking the CS API generally.

We are using apdex with a satisfied limit of 250 ms and a tolerating limit of 1000 ms. By the end of the Summer we will aim to hit an apdex score of 0.9 for each area.

For instance here is Federation Send Event Apdex graphed overtime. You can see that we are averaging about ~0.8 currently, so plenty to keeping us busy!

Next up will be to work on Outbound Federation Latency

Aside from that we’ve been working hard on the upcoming Notifications improvements. Mapping the push rules to the demands of the UI has been challenging and we’ve been through several iterations. If you’d like to learn more take a look at Michael and Rich’s explanation in this week’s Matrix Live. Rich’s presentation has Sheltie pictures #justsayin’

Dept of Bridges 🌉

It's a Tulir kind of week.

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir told us:

The WhatsApp bridge got a bunch of improvements this week, such as:

• Matrix -> WhatsApp gif bridging

• Bridge status notices if your phone battery is low

• A command to get group invite links and another command to join groups using invite links

• Matrix <-> WhatsApp bridging of most membership changes

mautrix-facebook

Tulir reported:

The Messenger bridge mostly got bugfixes, but also Matrix->Facebook bridging of all media and location messages

mautrix-telegram

Tulir offered:

The Telegram bridge now supports logging in by scanning a QR code, although it requires using the master branch of Telethon instead of a release. I also fixed bridging captions in file messages, so they're now bridged as separate messages like with images

Half-Shot bridges roundup

Half-Shot offered:

Hey all, I've got several releases to talk about this week!

First, matrix-appservice-slack has been updated to 1.4.0 with several quality of life changes such as automatically setting the bot profile on startup, supporting logging out of slack accounts and adding a health checkpoint. There are also quite a few bugfixes so make sure you update.

matrix-appservice-irc was also bumped to 0.18.0 with the headline features being Node 14.x support.

We've also shipped 0.19.0-rc1 which has stopped support for Node 10.x. Why? Because we're adding worker support to the bridge! This release starts to make use of the new(ish) worker_threads feature so that we can dish out processing to separate threads (running their own UV event loops, for node enthusiasts). The first thing to be workerized is metrics, so that metrics may still be reported should the bridge become saturated, but we plan to split out more work as things progress.

Finally matrix-appservice-bridge got a few fixes to support our new worker land, as well as being updated to support matrix-js-sdk 6.0.0. You can checkout the changes for 1.13.1 here.

Dept of Clients 📱

Fluffychat

sorunome offered:

Fluffychat Version 0.15.0 is released, and should be available in the Play Store, on F-Droid and in IOS Testflight soon! This makes Fluffychat the first non-Riot matrix client that supports Cross-Signing.

Features:

• New room list app bar design

• Chat app bar transparent

• Implement web file picker

• Minor design and UX improvements

• Implement Cross Signing

• Restore keys from online key backup

• Added translations: Czech, Spanish, Slovakian

Changes:

• Show presences of users sharing a direct chat

• Big refactoring

Fixes:

• Various fixes, including e2ee fixes and olm session recovery

Pattle: version 0.18.0

Wilko said:

A new version has been released and will soon become available on Google Play, TestFlight and F-Droid!

Changes

• You can now play videos!

• The main public address (room alias) of chats are now shown in chat's details

• The time of sending is now always show on the right side for images

• Notifications are grouped nicer, there's now one notification for Pattle, grouped by chat

• Fix sending an image crashing the app

• Fix urls not being accounted for in time placement (#132)

• Fix chat input not scrolling

• Fix multiple issues regarding showing notifications

• F-Droid: All left-over proprietary code is now removed, thanks to Bubu for notifying me!

Get Pattle

• Android

  • F-Droid
  • Google Play

• iOS (TestFlight)

Get involved

• Follow development: #app:pattle.im

• Issues or suggestions: Post them here!

• Donate: If you want to support Pattle, you can donate!

Mirage

miruka* reported:

0.5.2 is now out:

Added

• Sessions/device list: you can now inspect, rename and manually verify

  your devices from the account settings page. The interface is still work in progress, keyboard navigation and signing

  out sessions will be added in a next version.

• Re-add client-side unread/highlight room indicators.

  If your account has push notifications disabled, which precise cross-client counters depend on, the local indicators will be used as fallback.

• Support the MIRAGE_CACHE_DIR environment variable to override where

  files and thumbnails are downloaded

• A bunch of theme additions, check the full log

Changed

• Overhauled account settings to match the design of other tabbed pages.

  The horizontal layout design has been removed due to complicated code and being impossible to extend without breaking it.

• The display name field in account settings is now colored,

  preview your new display name's color as you type

• For rooms without image avatars set, the room settings's avatar color now

  responds to the name field as you type

• Overhauled scrollbars:

  • Now match the Mirage theme and much better visibility

  • No more right margin for the timeline's bar

  • Minimum height to prevent the bar from becoming impossible to grab

• Use brighter text for room names of rooms that have unread messages

• Buttons, tabs, text fields and areas now have animated bottom borders

  to represent keyboard focus instead of being highlighted like when hovered

• Text fields and areas can now have rounded corners, following the theme

• Tabbed pages (Sign In, Add Chat, etc) can now be swiped left and right

• Popups can now be scrolled when their content is bigger than the

  window's height

• Replace most generic checkmark icons for apply buttons in popups

• Pressing escape in forms will consistently trigger corresponding

  cancel buttons

Fixed

• Various fixes, see full changelog

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) offered:

• Most of our time this week was spent trying out device verification with Chethan. It's fun and I could finally file bugs in Nheko against someone else!

• We fixed some issues that should hopefully make text in the timeline less blurry again.

• Fixed a bug which cause some clients like fluffychat to break in E2EE rooms (we accidentally sent a null relation when not replying...)

• Fixed an issue, where Nheko didn't verify the format of html formatted messages correctly, causing it to render messages in a way which wasn't compliant to the spec.

• Thanks to the work of a Pirate and his friends, current versions of Nheko should be available in backports for Debian Buster once again!

Riot Chat for Nextcloud

Gary Kim announced:

Riot Chat for Nextcloud 0.5.0 The new version updated the Riot.im version to 1.6.6 and added the ability for admins to set their own custom config for Riot rather then using the settings interface in addition to a few bug fixes.

Riot Chat for Nextcloud allows individuals and organizations with a Nextcloud instance to easily set up and configure their own Riot instance with just a few clicks on a web interface without the need to write a config file.

Join the development Matrix room at #riotchatfornextcloud-general:garykim.dev. Check out the source code here.

Riot-iOS

Manu told us:

This week, we completed UX for cross-signing and secure backup. We made associated settings but we still need to polish them.

Sygnal and the new push extension have been updated to match Apple requirement and our privacy concerns. Events content are no more sent anymore. We started to implement the new room notifications settings UI.

RiotX

benoit told us:

This week we were mainly working on cross-signing, room settings, VoIP stabilization and performance improvement.

Riot-Android

benoit reported:

We will publish at the beginning of next week a beta version of the migration to RiotX codebase on the beta channel of the PlayStore, to be able to ensure the migration works fine, before release it to production.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Matrix Dart SDK: v0.33.0

Wilko told us:

• Support custom events using RawRoomEvent and RawStateEvent

  Check the README for details.

• Add ability to register using Homeserver.register

• Add VideoMessageEvent

• Add Room.canonicalAlias and Room.alternativeAliases

• Add format field to TextMessage (thank you Cyril!)

• Remove equatable dependency

Get it on pub!

Net::Matrix::Webhook

joepie91 discovered this project, presented yesterday at Conference in the Cloud:

Net::Matrix::Webhook implements a webhook, so you can easily post messages to your matrix chat rooms via HTTP requests. It uses IO::Async to start a web server and connect as a client to matrix. It will then forward your messages.

matrix_scrape_emoji_translations script project

sorunome announced:

Soru wrote a quick program that scrapes riot-web, riot-x and riot-ios for translations of the emoji names for emoji verification and combines them all into an easily-readable json file, so that other client developers can use it. Since all three riot versions have a different set of translations, it might also be helpful for them. You can find the source code along with the outputted json files here.

Dept of Bots 🤖

"Scandinavia and the World" comic bot

Tulir offered:

To add to my existing xkcd and CommitStrip maubot plugins, there's now a similar plugin for Scandinavia and the World comics: https://github.com/maubot/satwcomic

Like the other bots, you can self-host it, use my instance (@satw:maunium.net) in your own room or simply join #satwcomic:maunium.net to automatically get the latest comics in Matrix.

matrix-webhooker

kinta announced:

A bot that will allow to room administrators and moderators to generate room custom commands (in a similar way how telegram commands are thought).

When they are invoked it will post the message event object data and a predefined context object along with a token to a custom url. More information in: https://gitlab.com/communia/matrix-webhooker

Matrix webhook

kinta told us:

https://www.drupal.org/project/matrix_webhook

Drupal module to receive links shared from a matrix room. Get links provided by a matrix bot in a room. With this module one can get media from a matrix own bot to any drupal site. Once installed and bot is created through matrix-webhooker bot. A blog entry about it (in spanish) in https://planet.communia.org/content/enlaces-desde-matrix

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰

Pollvis - new poll visualiser project

We have a couple of conferences coming up who are planning to use Matrix as part of their offering, much as we do with Open Tech Will Save Us. To help add some more features, I created an MVP "poll visualiser", which watches a room and works in tandem with the poll-bot from Brendan Abolivier . This project is still at the beginning, but might be interesting to some! Find the code at https://github.com/benparsons/pollvis.

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. Join #ping: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 🌡

Matrix Merch Store is back

Are you emerging from lockdown? Dazed and wondering what to wear? Need some apparel which says "I'm cool and I have great taste in decentralised communications protocols"? Then you should visit The Matrix Merch Store!

T-Shirts, Hoodies, Zipped Hoodies and Stickers available now!

Matrix Decomposition: Analysis of an Access Control Approach on Transaction-based DAGs without Finality

Florian told us:

We published another scientific paper on Matrix, this time it is called Matrix Decomposition: Analysis of an Access Control Approach on Transaction-based DAGs without Finality! Its main topic is the question of how access control can work based on a structure that only provides a partial order on events and no consensus on the current state, i.e. the Matrix Event Graph. We found some concrete, non-critical security issues related to both incorrect specification as well as divergent homeserver behaviour. While the last remaining mitigations found their way into Synapse 1.14.0, we provide ideas on structural solutions to avoid both problem classes in the future using formal verification.

The paper was published at the ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies(SACMAT) last week. My talk went well (🎉), it was recording and is yet to be published by the conference.

The paper was previously mentioned on the Matrix blog.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa reported:

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:

• MSC2399: Reporting that decryption keys are withheld
• MSC1703: encrypting recovery keys for online megolm backups

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC2644: matrix.to URI syntax v2
• MSC2638: Ability for clients to request homeservers to resync device lists

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, the team has been spread a bit thin with other work. As such, we're still on the same three MSCs: MSC2366 (verification flows), MSC2403 (knocking), and MSC2630 (SAS security). We're hoping this week will be more productive in terms of spec.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander announced:

This week has seen a lot of work put into fixing broken tests and refactoring parts of the codebase.

• The media API has had quite a bit of attention this week and now media over federation works properly, as well as much better filename handling

• A new user API component is now responsible for user accounts, devices, access tokens and account data

• The server key API has been updated with more reliable validity checking and new tests

• Logging into Dendrite using Riot iOS is now supported thanks to some minor tweaks/fixes

• URL handling for version 3 rooms has been improved

• A bug in the format of /v1/send_join has been fixed

• The /joined_members response has now been fixed

In addition to that, we've made good progress on embedding the Dendrite-powered Yggdrasil demo into Riot iOS, which we'll hopefully be demoing in a couple of weeks!

Spec compliance has improved:

• Client-Server APIs: 40%, up from 36% last week

• Server-Server APIs: 38%, up from 35% last week

Synapse

Neil offered:

Highlights this week

• We released 1.15.1, this is a bug fix release, sorry if you were bitten.

Changelog in full

Bugfixes

• Fix a bug introduced in v1.15.0 that would crash Synapse on start when using certain password auth providers.

• Fix a bug introduced in v1.15.0 which meant that some 3PID management endpoints were not accessible on the correct URL.

Outside of that

• Implemented unread message counts (MSC 2625) - This is part of the a more general notifications improvement project in conjunction with the Riot teams. The aim being to make Notifications easier to configure. We’ve also been working on push rule definitions for the default behaviour. More on that next week.

• Have the ability to shard the media repository worker. This means we can now run an arbitrary number in parallel, thereby improving upload reliability and performance, we are running this on Matrix.org.

• Re-enabled Jaeger on matrix.org - previously we needed to switch it off due to the performance overhead, we needed a few tweaks but now it is working well and helping us to determine the cause of slow requests. It seems like the HTTP requests between the event creator and event persister workers can sometimes be slow - we are not sure of the cause yet, we are working on it but it will mean further performance improvements to message sending.

• Next up performance wise is working on sharding the federation sender to improve federation lag. We’ll also try replacing simplejson with stdlib json which seems to be much faster at dumps nowadays.

• Finally, we’ve fixed a bug that meant that quarantining media would from time to time include quarantining sticker packs

Other interesting bugs

We fixed a spec compliance bug in fetching remote media raised by our pals in Dendrite-land. We fixed a bug causing federation .well-known requests to fail due to not including the user-agent header. We removed references to six (thanks @ilmari) and finally, fixed a bug that caused stream id to go backwards on the replication stream.

Next week we’ll continue to work on notifications and performance. You can track our progress here https://github.com/orgs/matrix-org/projects/8

Synapse adoption graphs

Chris said:

Wondering how quick this weeks synapse release was adopted by homeserver admins? Head over to https://graph.settgast.org/ and see yourself that it only took a little over 2 days for 1.15.1 to become the most used synapse version. I plot hourly distribution of synapse versions there. (Disclaimer: Only collects stats for homeservers that my homeserver sees in any of its rooms, which are around 2000 at the moment)

This is super cool! I love that this has been created, and also how well it reflects on homeserver admins! /me scurries to update to 1.15.1...

Asked to share the process, Chris sent:

Its a horribly hacky python script, but I can at least share it here: https://gist.github.com/csett86/96190592390b2c3d8c12c020ce312723

What version are you running?

Synapse on a ROCKPro64

How is Synapse performance these days? PINE64 are running their instance on their own ROCKPro64 hardware.

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo announced:

This week I worked on server-side key backups and cross-signing - the second most requested features (federation being the first one). Key backups are already working! Take a look:

Cross-signing should be working, but there is a bug where emoji verification gets stuck. I hope we can find the mistakes and finish the PR next week.

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or (new!) Bitcoin!

Synapse Deployment 📥

Kubernetes

Ananace said:

Just pushed 1.15.1 tags for the K8s-optimized Synapse image.

Docker-matrix

Mathijs announced:

The image for synapse v1.15.1 including jemalloc and mjolnir anti-spam has been released to avhost/docker-matrix:v1.15.1.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-ircd, GSOC project

karlik offered:

For matrix-ircd google summer of code:

• Began moving the codebase to the more modern futures 0.3 (previously futures 0.1)

• Introduced more modern async / await syntax for improved code clarity

• Wrote some additional unit tests, doubling the overall test coverage to 32%

• Updating the 2016 code to use rust 2018 idioms PR # 64

• Swapped repository to use stable rust (previously nightly) PR #65

mautrix bridges

Tulir told us:

To make the bridge info state events a bit more useful, all my bridges now include the room name and avatar URL in them. The events are also updated whenever the name or avatar changes, and there's a new option to re-send the event to all existing portals so old portals would get it too.

Dept of Clients 📱

RiotX: Version 0.22.0

benoit said:

RiotX: Version 0.22.0 has been released on Tuesday, it includes integration manager support, sending stickers, modifying power levels, and lots of other things! See https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/releases/tag/v0.22.0 for a complete list of the changes.

This week we've been working on audio and video calls (The PR is in review). We are also trying to improve the performance of the application. We are adding room settings, and we have started to work on the migration Riot-Android -> RiotX.

PS check out Valere trying the new features:

Arch Linux (AUR) package for Revolution - a Riot fork by ponies.im

Sophie still alive said:

I made an Arch Linux (AUR) package for Revolution - a Riot fork by ponies.im:

• https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/revolution-desktop-git/

• https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/revolution-web-git/

• https://gitlab.eastcoast.hosting/ponies

Daydream

MTRNord told us:

Daydream is getting a new Design and the first page is ready at https://app.daydream.im/

Additional changes are:

• Removed client side js (except what's needed to load wasm stuff)

• Replaced loading animation with css only version

• Replace icons with css only version

• Add e2e tests

• Add Basic Notifications

Currently on top of the TODO list of Daydream is:

• Adding a wasm compatible (indexed db based) state store

• Notifications

Rumatui is basically usable

WIP Command line Matrix client using matrix-rust-sdk

devinr528 told us:

After some slow progress, rumatui, the rust command line chat client, is usable by anyone. You no longer need an account or have previously joined rooms. Registration and room search have been implemented! Using left/right arrow keys from the login screen will toggle to registration. Once registered hitting the left arrow will bring up the room search window. After typing your search term hit Enter and select the room to join by pressing Ctrl-d.

For the brave who would like to give it a try cargo install --git <https://github.com/DevinR528/rumatui> --branch room-search.

Added since last update

• Room search is now available

  • Public rooms can be joined from the room search window

• A user can register from the new register window

  • This features complete User Interactive Authentication by opening a web browser

• Message edits are shown

  • When markdown is part of the message they are properly formatted

• Reactions display under the respective message

• Redaction events are handled for reactions (emoji) and messages

"Basically usable" is a standard we can all aspire to for our projects and endeavours.

Riot-iOS

Manu told us:

This week, we worked on the new UX for cross-signing and secure backup. In parallel, we continued to improve the new push implementation. We are very closed to complete the two features.

gomuks

gomuks is a terminal based Matrix client written in Go. Source on GitHub

Tulir announced:

I added a command to add and remove local aliases for rooms. Changes to alt_aliases are also now rendered properly.

Riot Web

Ryan offered:

This week we had an off-cycle 1.6.5 release to fix registration on some homeservers when email validation is required. After that, we've made a 1.6.6 RC including:

• Added support for new emoji in Unicode 13

• Emoji picker now supports searching by emoji characters (to find related ones) as well as text

• Added a homeserver admin .well-known option to control default E2EE behaviour

• Many more bug fixes and smaller improvements

Riot Web Themes

jo offered:

made a couple riot themes! Dracula and Dracula Flat

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aaronraimist/riot-web-themes/master/Dracula/Non-flat/Dracula.json https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aaronraimist/riot-web-themes/master/Dracula/Flat/DraculaFlat.json

Find images here and here

Go to https://github.com/aaronraimist/riot-web-themes to find out how to use these.

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) offered:

• We released 0.7.2, which was a bit more messy than we would have liked...

• As with every release we are currently working through the new bug reports. :D

• I started working on SSSS and online key backup support. For this I wrote my own base64 and base58 encoders. As a result of this we dropped libsodium as a dependency, which should make Nheko a bit easier to package or build. It's also fun to write base conversions, although 58 is a horrible base!

From the changelog:

• Reactions
  • React to a message with an emoji! 🎉
  • Reactions are shown below a message in a small bubble with a counter.
  • By clicking on that, others can add to the reaction count.
  • It may help you celebrating a new Nheko Release or react with a 👎 to a failed build to express your frustration.
  • This uses a new emoji picker. The picker will be improved in the near future (better scrolling, sections, favorites, recently used or similar) and then probably replace the current picker.
• Support for tagging rooms [tag]
  • Assign custom tags to rooms from the context menu in the room list.
  • This allows filtering rooms via the group list. This puts you in a focus mode showing only the selected tags.
  • You can assign multiple tags to group rooms however you like.
• SSO Login
  • With this you can now login on servers, that only provide SSO.
  • Just enter any mxid on the server. Nheko will figure out that you need to use SSO and redirect your browser to the login page.
  • Complete the login in your browser and Nheko should automatically log you in.
• Presence
  • Shows online status of the people you are talking to.
  • You can define a custom status message to tell others what you are currently up to.
  • The status message appears next to the usernames in the timeline.
  • Your server needs to have presence enabled for this to work.

Wowow that's a lot this time!

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

quotient

kitsune said:

after a couple of setbacks that didn't let us to make the releases earlier, the Quotient project has finally made two new releases:

• GTAD (the piece of code magically producing readable C++ code from a Swagger API description) has achieved version 0.7 (https://github.com/KitsuneRal/gtad/releases/tag/v0.7.0) adding a few tricks in order to make...

• ...libQuotient 0.6 beta2 (https://github.com/quotient-im/libQuotient/releases/tag/0.6-beta2) rely entirely on the upstream matrix-doc specification, rather than a soft fork closely following the main sources! From now on it's "upstream first", in a sense that the original matrix-doc will be used to build Quotient codebase. Let's see how often it breaks ;) In other news from the last few weeks:

• some housekeeping and deprecation work in the API has been done in preparation to getting User Interactive Authentication along the next (post-0.6) release cycle of libQuotient.

• also thanks to the updated code generator, the CS API code has been optimised, consolidating more code in the header files and making data deserialisation lazy; this helped significantly reduce compilation times, and runtime performance also improved a bit.

• the number of configurations tested by CI has been extended, allowing to chase down a few more bugs that managed to go under the radar before.

• when used with new enough Qt, CBOR is used to cache data locally - entirely transparently for clients.

Expect more news in the coming weeks, including continued work on matrix: URI proposal and its implementation in Quotient.

ruma-events' Google Summer of Code project

devinr528 sent us this late entry!

This week in ruma-events' Google Summer of Code project, after trying out the new Any*Event enums matrix-rust-sdk, we found a few big flaws. There was no easy way to go from StateEvent<AnyStateEventContent> to StateEvent<SpecificEventContent>, the other issue was one could create a StateEvent with differing content and prev_content fields using the AnyStateEventContent enum. The 0.22 ruma-events will be similar to the existing API; each event type has a corresponding event enum variant.

pub enum AnyStateEvent {
    RoomMember(StateEvent<MemberEventContent>),
    RoomAliases(StateEvent<RoomAliases>),
    // ...
}

There were a few minor fixes during the week also. Unknown field deserialization is fixed, allowing deserialization of a JSON blob that has extra fields which are ignored. Custom events are now present in the Any*EventContent enums, although now they have to be moved up to be included in Any*Event enums. Benchmarks for deserialization have been added and used to increase performance.

🧙 Polyjuice Client

Polyjuice Client is a Matrix library for Elixir

uhoreg announced:

Polyjuice Client, a Matrix library for Elixir, had a new release. This release fixes syncs, which apparently were completely broken in the last release (whoops). The wizarding community also welcomes a new contributor, Pierre de Lacroix.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Gitea

s7evink reported:

Gitea 1.12.0 was finally released. It's now possible to send notifications (commits, pull requests, etc.) directly to Matrix using webhooks.

Dept of Internet of Things 💡

Mozilla WebThings Matrix Adapter

Christian offered:

I heard that you people like IoT?! With the Mozilla WebThings Matrix Adapter your Raspberry Pi sends you messages about your home. Want a log of when the front door has been opened? Need a low battery alert for your IoT devices? With the Mozilla IoT gateway and this adapter, you can send these events to a Matrix room of your choice!

https://gitlab.com/webthings/matrix-adapter

Dept of Bots 🤖

Alt alias maubot plugin

Tulir announced:

Ever since m.room.aliases was replaced with alt_aliases, there hasn't really been any way to find aliases on other servers, since most room admins don't bother finding and publishing alternate aliases. To help solve that problem, I made a maubot plugin to let users publish alternate aliases in rooms: https://github.com/maubot/altalias

By default it lets users publish aliases with the same localpart as any already published alias. If that behavior is sufficient, you can simply invite it to a room and give it permissions to send m.room.canonical_alias events. Alternatively, it can be configured to allow aliases that match specific regexes.

Once it's set up, users can create a local alias and use !altalias publish <their alias> to publish it. The bot will make sure the alias points to the right room, check that the localpart is allowed and then add it to alt_aliases.

I have it running at @alias:maunium.net and I've added it to all my rooms already. Other rooms are also free to use that instance.

go-neb on NixOS

maralorn offered:

As of https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/89327 a go-neb module was added to nixos and will soon be available on nixos-unstable and in the 20.09 release. You can use it to declaratively install and configure go-neb matrix bots on nixos. I use it for prometheus alertmanager alerts and it works really cool! Thx to hexa- who did most of the work on it.

Opsdroid

Cadair offered:

opsdroid 0.19 has been released, not many matrix specific features in this release, just making it slightly easier to get a connector or database instance by name. However, this release paves the way for the merge of the pull request transitioning opsdroid to use the matrix-nio Python library, so the next release should be packed full of matrix stuff 😀

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

That's all I know 🏁

Thanks to Alexander and Nico for their help editing this edition.

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

Open Tech Will Save Us #3 🎙

If you somehow missed this, please take a look!

• 1:00 Rabble talking about Planetary and SSB
• 31:19 Annie on Ditto
• 1:10:20 Erik on Synapse Perf

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa announced:

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:

• MSC2265: Proposal for mandating case folding when processing e-mail address localparts

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2399: Reporting that decryption keys are withheld (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC2631: Add fallback_content to PusherData

• MSC2630: checking public keys in SAS verification

• MSC2625: Add mark_unread push rule action

• MSC2618: Helping others with mandatory implementation guides

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we're sticking with the same three from last week: MSC2366 (verification flows), MSC2403 (knocking), and MSC2630 (SAS security).

In possibly more exciting news, the Spec Core Team has decided to start separating the scattered casual implementation tips and notes in the spec out and putting them in a series of implementation guides! These will take the form of gitbook-style things, and will initially feature front-to-back implementation guides for a generic Matrix client and homeserver. For more details to provide feedback, check out the associated MSC2618!

Dept of GSoC 🎓

This is the second week of the coding phase of GSoC 2020. Find updates from the students below:

GSOC/Opsdroid

tyagdit told us:

• The port from matrix-python-sdk to matrix-nio is almost completed. Sending and receiving most events works properly. Changes are expected be merged in a few days. This PR itself doesn't implement E2EE, that will be a different PR

• Alongside that I've been working on implementing E2EE with nio which is partially done, sending and receiving messages works so far. some changes to the MatrixStore interaction and testing is left.

Nheko

Chethan told us:

Device verification for Nheko

• Done
  • Adding Device List ( Although it already exists it is re-written in qml )
  • Detecting to_device device_verification messages
  • Part of the flow is done
• Yet to Complete
  • Complete the rest of the flow

go-neb

nikofil offered:

• Implementing end-to-end encryption for go-neb turns out to be a lot easier than expected thanks to the https://github.com/tulir/mautrix library, which contains out of the box e2ee support!

• The first week of GSoC was spent switching go-neb's usage of gomatrix for mautrix, which was easy as the latter is a fork of the former. This caused a pretty big PR that touched most of go-neb's files, although the changes were simple and easy to review. The PR was merged shortly after into go-neb.

• During the second week, it was time to add some basic e2ee support to go-neb. This was complicated slightly due to the bot's ability to create multiple clients and its treatment of /sync responses, however in the end e2ee is now working.

• The code is still of course a mess and session keys are often lost in the void. The code will be cleaned up and tested further next week, bugs will be (hopefully) fixed and another PR will be submitted to go-neb then to officially add e2ee support!

• Code can be found at https://github.com/nikofil/go-neb/tree/e2ee until it can be cleaned up

HTML-Embeddable rooms

From arnav-t:

Matrix has enormous potential to be used in many different use cases be it embedded chat rooms, comments section, chat boxes, etc. This project aims to fill that niche by providing an easy to use and easy to deploy client for users to embed on their webpages.
The client would mesh well wherever it is embedded by providing a postMessage interface to allow the parent webpage to interact with the client and dynamically modify it whenever needed (For example:- A comments section that is always the same theme as its parent webpage).

Features

As of now, the following features have been added (with more on the way)

• List of joined rooms that can be selected
• Live room timeline events
• Support for image-based messages
• Message composer and ability to send messages to a room
• Dark and light themes for the client
• Changeable highlight colors
• Toggleable room header, room timeline, and message composer components
• postMessage interface for sending commands from the parent window

Currently, I'm working on adding more options to the postMessage interface as well as adding more interactivity to the client itself.

Find out more on the project page: https://github.com/arnav-t/riot-embedded.

Ruma/Matrix GSoC update

Ruma is a Rust project to create a comprehensive set of APIs for Matrix. Previously there was a Ruma homeserver project.

devinr528 announced:

This week in ruma-events' Google Summer of Code project, I was able to finish the macros needed to generate the event content enums and trait implementations required for events. I started by defining the generic event structs (state, message, etc.) and manually writing the Serialize and Deserialize implementations. Over the next few days, this was moved into a custom derive macro called Event. The derive now implements all necessary traits with appropriate bounds, so a StateEvent<C> can not contain any ephemeral event content and so forth. I have removed the raw mod and related FromRaw and TryFromRaw traits, moving the validation into the deserialization and constructor for the few types that needed it. On the event content side of things, a function like procedural macro was used to allow declaring the enum using Matrix event type identifiers.

event_content_enum! {

    /// Any message event.
    name: AnyMessageEventContent,

    events: [
        "m.call.answer",

        "m.room.message",
        // ...

    ]
}

// Produces
pub enum AnyMessageEventContent {

    CallAnswer(CallAnswerEventContent),
    RoomMessage(MessageEventContent),

}

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander offered:

Much of this week's work has been maintenance-related with refactoring, cleaning up etc.

• Key fetching/expiry behaviour has been fixed, improving the reliability of federation.

• The monolith and component setup has now been refactored.

• A number of unused internal APIs have now been removed.

• Other internal roomserver APIs have been streamlined.

We have also started building an Yggdrasil-powered P2P demo (as opposed to the previous demos built using libp2p) and even includes support for embedding Riot Web in the single binary. It's not very stable/usable yet but there will be more news on that to follow within the next couple of weeks.

We have also started building and releasing Docker images for Dendrite on Docker Hub for those who want to use Docker to test Dendrite deployment.

Spec compliance is unchanged from last week:

• Client-Server APIs: 36%

• Server-Server APIs: 35%

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo reported:

Welcome back! This week I focused my efforts on better error handling. My goal was that every problem would be forwarded to the client (e.g. InternalServerError response) and also be logged. Yesterday I merged the giant PR this resulted in. Hopefully this will make Conduit easier to debug in the future.

Here are some other things I finished this week:

• User-interactive authentication (e.g. you need to type your password again if you want to delete devices)

• Config option to disable registration

I also found the problem with Riot not showing notifications for new messages and created a bug report. With a few tweaks, I managed to solve this on my account and now mentions, DMs and more play the notification sound (it also works on Riot X!).

@gnieto fixed a bug that prevented Riot from loading history when you join a room and @PublicByte implemented the /whoami endpoint.

Thanks to my supporters on Liberapay!

Synapse

Neil said:

This week we shipped 1.15.0, edited highlights include:

Features

• Add admin APIs to allow server admins to manage users' devices. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#7481)

• Add an option to disable autojoining rooms for guest accounts. (#6637)

• For SAML authentication, add the ability to pass email addresses to be added to new users' accounts via SAML attributes. Contributed by Christopher Cooper. (#7385)

• Add support for generating thumbnails for WebP images. Previously, users would see an empty box instead of preview image. Contributed by @WGH-. (#7586)

• Support the standardized m.login.sso user-interactive authentication flow. (#7630)

Bugfixes

• Allow new users to be registered via the admin API even if the monthly active user limit has been reached. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#7263)

• Fix a bug in automatic user creation during first time login with m.login.jwt. Regression in v1.6.0. Contributed by @olof. (#7585)

• Fix a bug causing the cross-signing keys to be ignored when resyncing a device list. (#7594)

• Fix bug where returning rooms for a group would fail if it included a room that the server was not in. (#7599)

• Fix duplicate key violation when persisting read markers. (#7607)

• Prevent an entire iteration of the device list resync loop from failing if one server responds with a malformed result. (#7609)

• Pass device information through to the login endpoint when using the login fallback. (#7629)

• Advertise the m.login.token login flow when OpenID Connect is enabled. (#7631)

• Fix bug in account data replication stream. (#7656)

Internal Changes

• Improve query performance for fetching state from a PostgreSQL database. Contributed by @ilmari. (#7567)

• Speed up processing of federation stream RDATA rows. (#7584)

• Refactor Ratelimiter to limit the amount of expensive config value accesses. (#7595)

• Clean up exception handling in SAML2ResponseResource. (#7614)

• Check if the localpart of a Matrix ID is reserved for guest users earlier in the registration flow, as well as when responding to requests to /register/available. (#7625)

Aside from that we continue out push towards improving performance both in terms of sharding workers but also improving tools to manage disk space usage. Specifically this week and next we are looking at db tuning and sharding the media repo worker. We are also noticing that the typing handler is chewing more CPU than would be expected. It could be a good candidate for moving away from the master process.

More broadly we are changing the defaults for notifications and making changes to support a more general overhaul of notifications.

Finally we are looking at how to not only delete messages after a certain time period, but also how to delete the associated media (which becomes difficult when considering e2e content along side long lived content such as avatars and sticker packs).

For more detail on what is coming next, take a look at our public task board.

Synapse Deployment 📥

Kubernetes

Ananace told us:

Just pushed version 1.15.0 of the K8s-optimized Synapse images

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir told us:

The WhatsApp bridge can now bridge location messages from WhatsApp to m.location on Matrix and contact messages as vCard files (until Matrix gets a native contact message type).

It also now encrypts media properly when bridging messages in encrypted rooms. I had apparently missed that when adding end-to-bridge encryption earlier.

mautrix-facebook

Tulir said:

mautrix-facebook got a few improvements and bugfixes:

• Added timestamp massaging

• Added support for bridging video and file messages to Matrix

• Fixed backfilling with SQLite (it didn't work due to the python timezone mess, fix contributed by erdnaxeli)

• Improved options for automatic reconnecting. The bridge should now work fairly reliably when using all the auto-reconnect options and backfilling, it only breaks if facebook decides you've been hacked

mautrix bridges in general

Tulir said:

Since MSC2190 and the related Synapse PR aren't moving much, all my bridges now generate appservice registration files with the workaround. The workaround is needed to avoid patching synapse or using other hacks, and I decided to enable it by default as many people had problems related to having to apply it manually.

The WhatsApp, Facebook and Hangouts bridges now have an option to use double puppeting to disable notifications when backfilling. It can be useful if you want to copy chat history to Matrix, but don't want to be spammed with hundreds of notifications while it's happening.

Nova-slack

eric offered:

To get things ready for NovaChat launch, we added a bunch of new features to a fork of the mx-puppet-slack client that Sorunome created. You can try it out here. We'll be pushing our changes upstream soon.

New features:

• message backfilling at room creation and reconnect

• syncs read status to/from Slack.com

• adds all users to bridged room during initial creation

• automatically bridges all channels and DMs that you are part of during initial setup, so you don't have to wait for a message to arrive for it to appear in Matrix

• tons of little reliability fixes

matrix-sms-bridge

Benedict announced:

My matrix-sms-bridge got an large update, which introduced an automated way to create and write messages to telephone numbers via commands in a bot room. See the docs for more information, how to use it.

Dept of Clients 📱

NovaChat v0.1.1

eric reported:

Introducing NovaChat - a desktop chat client that supports 9+ different chat networks, built on top of Matrix. Think of it as a modern Adium/Trillian.

How it works

NovaChat is a system with three parts designed to work together:

• a new desktop client, based on Riot-web

• a federating homeserver (nova.chat)

• a set of Matrix bridges configured to run on a private server called a bridgebox

Matrix bridges are awesome but generally require you to run own homeserver. NovaChat removes that restriction, without sacrificing security and privacy. Your remote chat network credentials never leave your bridgebox, and messages are encrypted* on the bridgebox before being sent to the NovaChat homeserver.

*Encryption is currently enabled on Telegram/FB/Hangouts/Whatsapp bridges, mx-puppet-bridges coming shortly)

Very rough system diagram:

> NovaChat desktop client <> NovaChat homeserver <> bridgebox <> remote chat networks

Features

• Fancy new UI, heavily inspired by Telegram. See photo below or see it in action

• Easy graphical bridge set up (no more fiddling with config files)

• Reliable bridging, with delivery confirmations and bridge disconnect warnings

• Includes 8 pre-configured bridges: Facebook/Whatsapp/Hangouts/Telegram/Slack/Instagram/Twitter/Skype. Planning to add more soon, or submit a PR!

• Works on Mac OS, Linux and Windows

You don't need to be technical to use NovaChat, it's designed to Just WorkTM. If you need help setting up a bridgebox, we are offering hosting and maintenance for USD $5 per month.

The vast majority of this software has been created by the talented tulir and dm0141. I personally am a terrible coder (you can tell which parts I did), but I do have experience building products and teams, and I'm excited to begin working in the Matrix universe. I wrote recently about how I believe Matrix is the Universal Communication Bus! Thanks goes to Sorunome for creating the mx-puppet-bridges!

We're developing the whole project in the open (though not all components are open source), check the issue backlog :)

Want to help? We're hiring Matrix developer to work on the project with us. Send me a message if you're interested! Particularly looking for a React dev to help with frontend on nova-web.

NovaChat chat room: #novachat:nova.chat

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

red_sky announced:

nheko 0.7.2 is ready for release. Here's the summary of changes:

Highlights

• Reactions

  • React to a message with an emoji! 🎉

  • Reactions are shown below a message in a small bubble with a counter.

  • By clicking on that, others can add to the reaction count.

  • It may help you celebrating a new Nheko Release or react with a 👎 to a failed build to express your frustration.

  • This uses a new emoji picker. The picker will be improved in the near future (better scrolling, sections, favorites, recently used or similar) and then probably replace the current picker.

• Support for tagging rooms [tag]

  • Assign custom tags to rooms from the context menu in the room list.

  • This allows filtering rooms via the group list. This puts you in a focus mode showing only the selected tags.

  • You can assign multiple tags to group rooms however you like.

• SSO Login

  • With this you can now login on servers, that only provide SSO.

  • Just enter any mxid on the server. Nheko will figure out that you need to use SSO and redirect your browser to the login page.

  • Complete the login in your browser and Nheko should automatically log you in.

Features

• Support for showing users presence and status message as well as setting your own status message"

• Respect exif rotation of images

• An italian translation (contributed by Lorenzo Ancora)

• Optional alerts in your taskbar (contributed by z33ky)

• Optional bigger emoji only messages in the timeline (contributed by lkito)

• Optional hover feedback on messages (contributed by lkito)

• /roomnick to change your displayname in a single room.

• Preliminary support for showing inline images.

• Warn about unencrypted messages in encrypted rooms.

Improvements

• perf: Use less CPU to sort the room list.

• Limit size of replies. This currently looks a bit rough, but should improve in the future with a gradient or at some other transition.

• perf: Only clean out old messages from the database every 500 syncs. (There is usually more than one sync every second)

• Improve the login and register masks a bit with hints and validation.

• Descriptions for settings (contributed by lkito)

• A visual indicator, that nheko is fetching messages and improved scrolling (contributed by Lasath Fernando)

Bugfixes

• Fix not being able to join rooms

• Fix scale factor setting

• Buildfixes against gcc10 and Qt5.15 (missing includes)

• Settings now apply immediately again after changing them (only exception should be the scale factor)

• Join messages should never have empty texts now

• Timeline should now fail to render less often on platforms with native sibling windows.

• Don't rescale images on every frame on highdpi screens.

Matrix-Static release v0.3.0

Michael (t3chguy) reported:

New Matrix-Static release v0.3.0

With improved support for media and tombstone events and a bunch of bug fixes! https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-static/releases

Should be deployed to view.matrix.org shortly

Arch Linux package of radical-native

Peter Roberts told us:

I've made an Arch Linux package of radical-native.

Riot X

valere announced:

• Several improvements on SSO login flow 🔒

• Support of power levels ⚡️

• Add remove favorites 🌟

• Multiple bugs and glitches fixes 🐛

The team is currently actively working on:

• Voip 1:1 Calls 📞

• Cross Signing bootstrap simplification 🔑

• Performances Improvement 🔥

• More room settings ⚙️

Riot Web

Ryan told us:

There's been lots of work many fronts this week, including:

• Continued work on cross-signing bootstrapping robustness

• New room list implementation in progress

• Upgraded fonts for new emoji

• A refreshed look for matrix.to is underway

• The appearance tab is being tweaked and expanded

• Read marker consistency improvements

Most of this work is still in progress or has only landed on develop so far. Our next RC will happen next week.

Riot-iOS

Manu offered:

This week, we continued to iterate on the implementation of the new push notification service thanks to user feedbacks. Those feedbacks also show that the app uses less battery.

On login, this is now possible to recover your cross-signing and your key backup from your recovery passphrase or key.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

libolm 3.1.5

uhoreg told us:

libolm 3.1.5 has been released. It mainly collects the various build system and documentation fixes that have accumulated since the last release. It also includes a new wasm build target (which apparently is used for running matrix-rust-sdk in the browser), as well as TypeScript definitions for the JavaScript bindings.

Ruma

Ruma is a Rust project to create a comprehensive set of APIs for Matrix. Previously there was a Ruma homeserver project.

jplatte told us:

Most of the work this past week was on ruma-events, for more on that see the GSoC section! Devin got far enough with that so we now know it all works out and can replace the previous ruma-events API. When that was clear, ruma-events was also merged into our new monorepo; now the only remaining crate to be merged is ruma-client (where I'm also waiting for some pending changes).

Dept of Ops 🛠

Matrix Helm chart

Kubernetes Helm chart for easily deploying a Matrix homeserver stack

Typo Kign told us:

Version 2 of my Matrix Helm chart is out! It now allows for running a federating homeserver without needing an external load balancer for the federation service, potentially lowering costs (depending on your cloud provider), and definitely reducing the headache of managing TLS certificates!

dacruz21/matrix-chart is a Kubernetes Helm chart for easily deploying a Matrix homeserver stack, complete with Synapse, Riot, VoIP calls, bridges, and other backing services. It's ideal for anyone looking to run a large homeserver, or for corporate environments where security is paramount!

Dept of Internet of Things 💡

Tuple Weather Station Example

Alexander Eisele announced:

This week I've programmed a small POC for a Matrix weather station.

It's build using a ESP8266 Microcontroller and a BME280 Sensor for temperature, humidity and barometric pressure.

The data is send over the Tuple Matrix <-> MQTT bridge.

Code: https://github.com/derEisele/tuple-weather-example

You can join this project on #tuple:eiselecloud.de.

I'm personally really excited about this project!

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix bot for Redmine

progserega told us:

https://github.com/progserega/matrix_redmine_bot

1. Bot can create, accept (to user) new issues in Redmine from matrix

2. Bot can add comment or/and files to issue by it id

3. Bot can show messages (for user) from Redmine in matrix room

Dept of Guides 🧭

Levans said:

Anyone running a federating instance of Synapse will likely have seen this: Synapse is database-hungry. It tends to take a lot of space. In this post, I'm documenting how I shrunk my homeserver database from 100GB to a little under 8GB, during a long maintenance cleanup. https://levans.fr/shrink-synapse-database.html

Very pleased to see this, I have a feeling I'm going to be running it in the near future...

New Public Rooms 🏟

New room "Matrix Outreach"

JulianF reported:

There's a new room "Matrix Outreach" #matrix-outreach:matrix.org for folks interested in "Helping each other explain and promote Matrix to the public: creating slogans, introduction leaflets, info-graphics, elevator pitch, Wikipedia articles, and so on."

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. Join #ping: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!

Firstly... 🏃‍♀️

Make an entry in your calendar, don't just write it on your hand: Open Tech Will Save Us is back for a third edition!
Next Wednesday, 10th June 2020!

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa reported:

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:

• Proposal for storing megolm keys serverside

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2265: Proposal for mandating case folding when processing e-mail address localparts (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC2611: Remove m.login.token User-Interactive Authentication type from the specification

• MSC2610: Remove m.login.oauth2 User-Interactive Authentication type from the specification

• MSC2604: Accept device information for the login fallback endpoint

• MSC2596: Proposal to always allow rescinding invites

• MSC2589: Improve replies

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've still got MSC2366 (verification flows) on our plate, but we're removing MSC2399 (UISI messaging) as it just needs one more final tick. We're adding MSC2403 (knocking) in its place.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Mascarene

Nico said:

Mascarene is a quite new homeserver implementation project started a few months ago. Now it's time to introduce it.

Mascarene is written in Scala, runs on JVM and relies on Akka actor model. Out of the box it provides features like efficient streaming I/O, clustering and live data distribution. Data are backed in a PostgreSQL database.

The project is in early stage but already provides a few endpoints which make Mascarene able to talk to Riot.

You can test it at https://snapshot.mascarene.org. You should be able to register, login, create a room and talk to yourself.

Current work is focused on client API implementation; federation or e2ee will come later.

Contributions are welcome, join us on #mascarene:beerfactory.org

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo told us:

Welcome back! This week I went through the whole Client-Server API and wrote down everything that is still missing from Conduit. You can find issues for all of them in the milestone for Conduit 1.0. This should make it more easy for contributors to find something to work on and gives a lot more structure to the repo (maybe I also did it, because it's so satisfying to close issues and see the milestone percentage go up 😛).

Some of the issues I could already close this week include:

• Implement redaction

• Implement loading the message someone replied to (/context)

• Fix bugs with notifications

• Don't send typing events when nothing happened

• Bundle typing events into one EDU

• Don't send notification counts every /sync

• Implement heroes

As you can tell, a lot of work is starting to go into smaller improvements, which is a good thing, because it means most of the core work is already done!

Thanks to my supporters on Liberapay (Take a look, I improved it 🙂).

Synapse

Neil told us:

This week in Synapse land we have been focusing on bug fixes especially SSO and soft logout.

We also spent some time thinking about how to further improve performance for large scale deployments (like matrix.org). In short this will mean sharding contested workers such as the media repo worker, the federation sender and the federation reader. We also want to remove some more functionality from the master process because it is still sitting at about 80% and we’d like some more head room. We'd also like to fix up the state compressor so it can easily be run as a background progress to save on disk space, this will benefit all installations big and small. Finally we want to speed up joins over federation. Exciting times.

Next week, more of the same and we should start on some of the perf items. Also look out for changes to notification defaults.

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander offered:

Updates:

• Room version 6 support has been added

• Server signing keys which have passed their validity period are now re-requested and updated properly, increasing reliability of federation substantially

• Federated room joins have been significantly sped up by requesting missing auth events inline when verifying room state, rather than repeating the entire verification for each missing event

• Local send-to-device support has been added (federated send-to-device coming soon)

• A lot of code clean-up has taken place (with more to come), including cleaning up the internal APIs and the component bases

• Decoding of room version 3 event IDs in request URLs has been improved

• Inbound federation requests now interrupt backoff intervals on outbound sends

• A new internal API exists now for interrupting backoff intervals on the federation sender

• The federated /devices endpoint now returns in the correct format

• Public rooms are now sorted by their member count

• Only our own aliases are stored in the public rooms directory now

• gomatrixserverlib is now responsible for marking room versions as supported/stable

• Spec-compliant transactions are now sent to the appservice component

• File URIs for SQLite databases are now set up using common functions

• Handling registration for a user that already exists has been fixed (thanks S7evinK!)

• Dendrite can now be configured to use a HTTP proxy server for outbound HTTP (thanks dr-bonez!)

Sytest compliance:

• Client-server APIs: 36%

• Server-server APIs: 35%

In other news, Kegan wrote a post on how p2p.riot.im works, including Dendrite's journey to SQLite and WebAssembly!

Additionally! You may have already read about v0.1.1 of the P2P Matrix demo - this is a big update, with local storage, room alias handling, federation improvements and more!

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Matrix Appservice Minecraft bridge now in beta

Dylan reported:

My Matrix Appservice Minecraft bridge is now in beta

• https://github.com/dhghf/matrix-appservice-minecraft

Here is our Matrix room #minecraft:dhdf.dev

More screenshots: https://github.com/dhghf/matrix-appservice-minecraft#screenshots

Tuple

Alexander Eisele reported:

Tuple is a very early simple matrix <--> mqtt bridge for IOT and other embedded devices.

It's my very first golang project, but it works(TM).

• Repo: https://gitlab.eiselecloud.de/matrix/tuple

• Discussion/Testing: #tuple:eiselecloud.de

This is exciting! I would love to see more IoT-related projects!

mautrix-hangouts

Tulir reported:

mautrix-hangouts can also do backfilling now, both when creating portal and missed messages when connecting

mautrix-facebook

Tulir told us:

mautrix-facebook got support for backfilling history when creating portals and backfilling missed messages when connecting. There's also an option to periodically reconnect to potentially fix the bug where Facebook decides that you don't get messages anymore, but doesn't actually disconnect you.

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir said:

I had apparently forgotten to implement bridge information in the whatsapp bridge when I implemented it in my other bridges, but that mistake is now corrected. I also fixed a bug with encryption where it would generate too many one-time keys and cause messages to be undecryptable. Finally, mautrix-whatsapp had its first release this week since it's working reasonably well now.

Dept of Clients 📱

Radical Native

stoic reported:

Eager to test the keytar feature (pickle key stored in OS secret storage) with Riot Web? Support landed in radical-native v0.1beta13, which uses Rust keytar bindings under the hood. Testing requires the latest and greatest of Riot Web, so riot.im/develop might be the place to see it in action

Keytar support is a very very new feature, uhoreg, who has been working on it in the shadows and wasn't expecting to see it land yet, commented:

😲

Pattle: version 0.17.0

Pattle is a client written for Flutter using Dart

Wilko offered:

A new version has been made available and will become available on Google Play and TestFlight!

⚠️ If you're not logged out, it's recommend that you logout and additionally clear your data after installing the new version! ⚠️

Changes

• Added the ability to reply to messages!

• You can now accept (and reject) invites!

• You can now join and search channels!

• Chat input has been redesigned!

• Chat details has been somewhat redesigned

• The group icon in the chat's details is now blurred and can be shown unblurred by scrolling to the top

• Replies are now a maximum of 3 lines long

• The current version is now shown in settings

• Wait a bit after typing before checking the homeserver when logging in

• Chat name change events are now shown

• Chat icon change events are now shown

• Errors are now reported to Sentry again!

• You won't enter the app with empty chats if the initial load failed

• Show date above chat creation event

• Fix time sometimes being dark and not readable on image messages

• Fix sender's name going outside of bubble

• Sender is now in bold for chat description change event

• More messages are now loaded if initially not enough are displayed

• Show ripple effect on chat app bar when tapping

• And more!

Get Pattle

• Android

  • F-Droid
  • Google Play

• iOS (TestFlight)

Get involved

• Follow development: #app:pattle.im

• Issues or suggestions: Post them here!

• Donate: If you want to support Pattle, you can donate!

RiotX v0.21.0

benoit announced:

RiotX v0.21.0 has been released on May 28th. It adds support to identity server configuration and e-mail/phone binding and unbinding. It's also now possible to switch between languages inside the app and to display the list of attachments (media and file) of a room. A new setting has been also added to hide redacted (deleted) events in the timeline. As Riot-Android SAS v2 is also included in this release. Also formatted_body for m.notice and m.emote are now taken into account.

This week we were still working on implementing VoIP (audio and video call). Support for integration manager, widgets and sending stickers has been merged to develop. Many new features are coming soon, stay tuned!

Riot-Android classic

benoit offered:

Riot-Android: Version 0.9.12 has been released on May 20th. I forgot to mention it the TWIM of last week. It contains a fix for favorite rooms vanishing and also the SAS v2 implementation (new key agreement method).

Mirage

miruka said:

Mirage 0.5.1 has been released today:

• Persistent, cross-client, push rules-aware unread message counters

• Read receipts are now sent to mark rooms as read

• Basic room settings can now be edited and saved

• More control over window alerts, e.g. only enabling them for messages mentioning you

• Lots of bugfixes

Full changelog

Riot-iOS

Manu said:

This week, we finalised our work around the iOS13 SDK. The coming public TestFlight (0.12.2) is the result of this work. It comes with a lot of changes including a full rewrite of the push handling codebase, trying to find solutions to make matrix e2ee compatible with iOS Notification Service Extension. Most of these changes are unfortunately invisible for end users. Please report any issues. Note this is safe to switch between this TF and 0.11.5.

In parallel, we started to implement the cross-signing bootstrap and the recovery management. The UX of this is going to be refined on Riot-Web and RiotX-Android. Riot-iOS will implement the refined UX directly.

Riot Web

A glossy Matrix collaboration client for the web. https://riot.im

Ryan told us:

We had several Riot Web releases this week, first with 1.6.3:

• Security fix for auth handling in SSO deployments, thanks Quentin Gliech for responsible disclosure

• Added more shortcuts to jump to read marker and upload a file

• Fixed notification tray icon stability for desktop on Windows

• Added an IRC style layout (currently available in labs only)

• Added font scaling settings (currently available in labs only)

• Fixed several bugs in the cross-signing bootstrap process

• Converted older banner-style UI for updates etc. to newer toasts

This was quickly followed by 1.6.4 to fix a few regressions with dismissing toasts, compact timeline layout, key backup, and tooltips on scroll.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Matrix Dart SDK: version 0.32.0

Wilko announced:

• Databases are now deleted as a migration strategy

This will be in effect until 1.0 (or a bit before). If needed, make a backup between every minor version bump.

• All members necessary to render the timeline are now loaded from the store

• Room.myMembership has been removed, use Room.me.membership

• Add Rooms.enter and Room.join to join rooms

• Add Room.leave method

• Add PublicRooms

• Add useful getters to Member like isInvited or hasJoined

• Remove AliasesChangeEvent

• Errors in the separate isolate are now added to the updates stream where possible, or thrown in the calling isolate

• Fix profile API not working on servers where authorization is required

• Add MyUser.hasSynced

• Fix count not being nullable in MemberTimeline.load

• More fixes and small changes!

Get it on pub!

Ruma

Ruma is a Rust project to create a comprehensive set of APIs for Matrix. Previously there was a Ruma homeserver project.

jplatte offered:

This week,

• Devin, our GSoC student, started blogging on ruma.io

• We released ruma-identifiers 0.16.2 and ruma-federation-api 0.0.2

• We started updating ruma-events and ruma-client-api with the changes from version r0.6.1 of the client-server specification

• We started moving all of our libraries into one monorepo!

  • As part of this, we introduced a kind of meta-library so you no longer have to keep the versions of the individual libraries in sync manually

  • We're hoping that this makes experiments across multiple libraries and the overall contribution process easier 🙂

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰

Safe Support Chat

Brendan said:

Safe Support Chat, previously known as OCRCC Chatbox, now has a website with guides on how to set it up for organisations: https://www.safesupport.chat/

For context, Safe Support Chat is an embeddable chatbox built on Matrix with cool features such as end-to-end encryption support to enable individuals to seek support with organisations that provide it. It was initially built for the OCRCC (Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres) in order to allow survivors of sexual violence to communicate and seek help safely with OCRCC facilitators.

Kim Allen of Primal Glow Communications, one of the parties involved in Safe Support Chat's development, also recorded a podcast with Nomadic Labs about this project: https://podcast.nomadiclabs.ca/episodes/the-adventure-of-building-an-open-source-chatbox

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

This Ansible playbook is meant to easily let you run your own Matrix homeserver.

Slavi reported:

Thanks to benkuly's efforts, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports bridging to SMS (with one telephone number only) via matrix-sms-bridge.

To learn more, see our Setting up Matrix SMS bridging docs page.

CLI Federation Tester

Kai reported:

A new version of the terminal-based federation tester has been released. The current version 1.11 should now cover the entire server discovery process including scenarios with a .well-known configuration without a port, but with a DNS SRV entry.

The script relies on bash, curl, jq and openssl. It has been tested on linux but should also work on *bsd and macos.

The script can be downloaded here:

#cli_federation-tester_de:matrix.chat-secure.de

(The message about the latest version will always be pinned)

FLAP

Louis Chmn announced:

Hi, I've build FLAP to help other self-host multiple free software. FLAP can currently help you to easily setup Synapse, Riot, Nextcloud, SOGo and Jitsi all with SSO and low maintenance needs. Feel free to give it a try !

• Sources are here: https://gitlab.com/flap-box/flap

• If you need help setting things up, Matrix room is here: #flap-software:matrix.org

For French companies, I am also offering managed paid hosting: https://www.flap.cloud

Dept of Bots 🤖

sparky's Matrix Bot

sparky told us:

Announcing Matrix Bot (name is a work in progress)

The first "official" release of matrix bot has been made and you can find the latest release source at https://github.com/sparky8251/matrix-bot/tree/v1.0.0

It's flagship features are currently

• an imperial <--> metric unit converter for common conversational units

• a configurable search and link for issues/pulls that responds to any message containing something in the format of jf#123 or jf #1234

• a configurable general purpose URL linker that responds to messages containing things such as docs@hwa or link @troubleshooting (both sides of the @ are configurable)

There are plans to enable group pings, get a help command that can be limited to function only in a specific room, and more in the works so be sure to check back soon!

matrix-reminder-bot

anoa reported:

matrix-reminder-bot bot to remind you about things. Supports reminding an individual in a room or the whole room itself. Also supports setting alarms, which will continue to sound periodically until silenced.

Built with nio-template and the excellent matrix-nio library.

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

Final Thoughts 💭

There are bounties to be had! AU$500 to support Emoji Reactions in Fractal, for reference this is tracked on the GNOME gitlab.

We didn't hear from Spectral too recently, but there are signs of code being written.

This week I've been chatting with conference organisers making really interesting virtual event plans, and I'm bursting to share some of the Matrix integration plans, hopefully more details coming soon.

elmussol said:

For those who Hubzilla or Zap or ActivityPub or Friendica or Diaspora, there is now a Hubzilla forum for all things Matrix: https://elsmussols.net/channel/matrix

That's all I know 🏁

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