This Week in Matrix

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

36c3: Matrix Assembly is the place to be

If you're at 36c3 this weekend, come and find us! Use c3nav app to find our assembly, or just join #chaosevents:matrix.org to come chat

Bundeswehr considering Matrix

Oleg said:

The German Army is considering using Matrix as "secure WhatsApp" for soldiers. (In German) https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Open-Source-Bundeswehr-baut-eigene-verschluesselte-Messenger-App-4623404.html

Dept of Servers 🏢

matrix-oauth

TravisR reported:

For those who want to integrate Matrix into their application with OAuth, there's now matrix-oauth ( #oauth:t2bot.io ). Ideally useful for "Login with Matrix" buttons, this is a relatively easy OAuth 2.0 provider to set up in front of your homeserver. In future it'll support more granular scopes to avoid having to give a real access token to the third party application.

A demo of matrix-oauth in action is available at https://demo.oauth.t2host.io/

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Amazon Alexa skill

TravisR offered:

Yelling at your Amazon Alexa to send a message to your Matrix contacts is now possible with matrix-alexa-skill ( #alexa:t2bot.io ). A hosted version using matrix-oauth is coming soon, assuming I can get the privacy policy and such over to Amazon to review in a timely manner, though you're more than able to self-host in a matter of minutes. Check out the README for more info - some experience with setting up complicated things is required.

mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome offered:

mx-puppet-bridge got a new feature: protocol implementations can now specify custom commands that are invoked via the provisioning room!

mx-puppet-discord

mx-puppet-discord received quite a few bug fixes and new features!

• Fix echo back of edits
• [User Tokens] being friends is enough now to DM each other!
• fix multi-edits
• [User Tokens] support group DMs
• Implement ability to bridge guilds!
• [User Tokens] add friends management

Description on how to use these features are found in the readme!

If you enjoy these projects, please consider to donate. Thank you!

Dept of Clients 📱

Spectral gains public room directory

Black Hat reported:

Public room directory and user directory support in Spectral is finally there!

Continuum, plus koma library

yuforia offered:

koma, a Kotlin library. Dominic Fischer (github: Dominaezzz) started working on the project last week and so far:

• In preparation for multiplatform support, converted JVM code to agnostic Kotlin, using the library atomicfu

• Added Github Actions configuration to run builds automatically

Continuum, desktop client based on Koma:

• Generate room name from members when neither name nor aliases are configured

Dept of Ops 🛠

ma1sd 2.2.2 released

ma1uta announced:

ma1sd (fork of the mxisd) 2.2.2 released: https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.2.2 Changes:

• bugfix
• added hash lookup for the ldap provider.

Dept of Services 🚀

kapsi.fi has set up a Matrix homeserver

Cos reported:

Finnish non-profit hosting service kapsi.fi has set up a Matrix homeserver for their members. Kapsi has around 5000 members and 20 volunteer administrators. Instructions for use (in FInnish) at https://www.kapsi.fi/palvelut/matrix.html

Dept of Bots 🤖

MatrixVideo2oggBot

@progserega:rsprim.ru reported:

Matrix bot for converting youtube video to voice.

Bot https://github.com/progserega/MatrixVideo2oggBot get youtube URL, download video, convert to ogg-vorbis audio and send it to user. Some times my friends give me youtube video-urls, but I do not have time for see it. But I have time when I go home in car. But on road network is not always good and at end of day battery is low and phone may be hot (when I connect to charger and play video) and freeze... Simple way for me - is convert youtube video to small size voice and download it to phone and play it as music in player playlist. Bot help to this. May be it help anybody also. 🙂

Matrix in the News 📰

Andres offered:

Matrix gets a mention alongside other four decentralized protocols in one of the biggest argentinian newspapers (regarding Twitter's iniciative of decentralization). https://www.lanacion.com.ar/tecnologia/cinco-iniciativas-descentralizar-redes-sociales-dejar-depender-nid2317548

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Matrix selected for the public Mozilla community

You may well have read about it by now, but Mozilla (purveyor of popular web browsers and champion of the open web) selected Matrix to replace IRC for their comms! You can read their own announcement here. Please note that this doesn't have to mean the death of Moznet on IRC - if someone wants to pick up matrix-ircd and finish it off, we can keep exposing an IRC listener too! Huge thanks to everyone who participated in the Mozilla trial and placed their trust in Matrix :)

A Glimpse of the Matrix

Florian reported:

Florian presented his poster A Glimpse of the Matrix:Scalability issues of a new message-oriented data synchronizationmiddleware at the 20th International Middleware Conference at UC Davis, California on 2019-12-11. The poster abstract describes measurements of the public Matrix federation and discusses scalability issues of the current message routing mechanism. Additional details can be found in the Extended Tech Report.

Those scientific publications were based on the data gathered by the DSN Traveller in 2018 which was part of Florian's master's thesis. The anonymized raw data was published in conjunction.

All related resources

pic.twitter.com/NYxbYllQ9F

— Middleware2019 (@middleware2019) December 12, 2019

Accessibility in Riot/Matrix

Very thorough article on accessibility in Riot/Matrix, written partly in light of the Mozilla announcement. https://marcozehe.de/2019/12/20/how-to-get-around-matrix-and-riot-with-a-screen-reader/

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse v1.7.2

Neil told us:

We shipped 1.7.2 (and 1.7.1) - all admins are encouraged to upgrade asap, note 1.7.1 is a security release, and 1.7.2 fixes a back pagination bug introduced in 1.7.1. Aside from that we are looking at implementing MSC2260: Update the auth rules for m.room.aliases events and adding a per media quarantine API.

Deploying Synapse

Several packaging projects have been updated to deploy the new version:

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat
• also from the Debian repos thanks to @andrewsh:matrix.org

Ruma

jplatte reported:

another blog post has appeared on the ruma website: https://ruma.dev/news/these-weeks-in-ruma-2019-12-14/

cortex workers performance

Black Hat has been using his Rust cortex Synapse workers project. He reported:

I flexed on other homeservers by making getflexedon.me the fastest homeserver in the ping room, made possible with cortex.

Black Hat does point out that this is still in a testing phase, but it's great to see workers being created.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

famedly-email-bridge

sorunome said:

Some more work has been done on famedly-email-bridge! Now you can define email routes (e.g. [email protected] -> @bob:example.org) and optionally have conversations create a new thread room, instead of dumping them into the email room.

zammad tickets bot

It might seem like Half-Shot hasn't made a new bridge in a while, but here he is:

I've started another bot project: https://github.com/half-shot/matrix-zammad. This currently splurts zammad tickets into Matrix rooms, and will eventually do a lot more.

Dept of Clients 📱

Continuum

yuforia said:

Continuum, client for the desktop:

• Start using experimental asynchronous Flow as observable value for UI. Making use of Kotlin's coroutine features, it makes it possible to update values while avoiding switching to the main UI thread. It's also easier to cancel on-going HTTP requests when their values are no longer needed.

Riot-iOS

Manu told us:

This week, we have been still working hard on verification by DM. We have started the implementation of cross-signing.

RiotX v0.11.0 released

benoit said:

RiotX: We've released RiotX v0.11.0 on Thursday. It includes support to open (some of) matrix.to links, soft (and hard) logout, and lots of small UI/UX/crash fixes. For the first release of 2020, we will change the way we handle the initial sync, which can be a long task, by running it in a foreground service. Also the room profile screen should finally arrive.

riot-web

Bruno reported:

this week I've been working on the new verification flow in the right panel. it's nearly there, but likely won't get merged today anymore.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Matrix Message github action

Nice and simple project for using Matrix messages in Github actions. See the code, or the marketplace page.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Final Thoughts 💭

It being the time of year that it is, some of us will be at 36c3 in a week or so, come chat in #chaosevents:matrix.org if you'd like to say "hi". (You can also say "Guten Tag", which is more fun!)

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 🌡

Matthew notes:

We'd like to welcome Twitter to the world of decentralised communication protocols after Jack Dorsey's announcement this week that Twitter is building a decentralised social media team. It seems that the constraints they're working with are to focus on decentralised reputation (supporting different content filtering algorithms), incentive models (presumably some kind of token) and avoiding consensus-based standards processes. It's worth noting that we've been working on decentralised reputation stuff in Matrix for a while now - of which MSC2313 - Moderation policies as rooms is the most concrete result so far, and it's great to see Twitter thinking about how to adopted different filtering mechanisms for their content. It sounds as if they're approaching this from a blockchain/incentives angle however, so it remains to be seen whether they'll be interested in our work - especially as Matrix doesn't have a microblogging client yet (but only because nobody has made one yet). We'll be trying to talk to them whatever to see if we can be of use, eitherway :)

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa said:

Here's your weekly update for what happened in spec land!

While it may look quiet from the state changes list, there's actually been a flurry of activity on MSC2376 and MSC2385 (for disabling URL previews on a per-message basis), MSC2380 (for a method of querying the metadata of a piece of media without downloading it) and MSC2346 (for showing metadata about the bridges that are currently active in the room)! Now's the time to jump in if you want to have your say!

Updates:

Merged MSCs

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period

• No MSCs in FCP.

New MSCs

• MSC2385: Disable URL Previews, alternative method

Spec Core Team:

The Spec Core Team is on the same track as last week with no specific 3 MSC focus, but working on bringing up a lot of MSCs across the board.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil announced:

Synapse 1.7.0 is out, check out all the details here, admins can now specify message retention policies at a server and room level. We also changed the defaults for the room directory to be privacy preserving by default.

Next up we’re taking a look at support for redacting room alias events 1, 2 as well as porting Sydent to python 3.

Deploying Synapse

Several packaging projects have been updated to deploy the new version:

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat
• also from the Debian repos thanks to @andrewsh:matrix.org

Dept of Clients 📱

Fractal

Alexandre Franke told us:

We gained the ability to save spellcheck language per room, which makes me quite happy as I keep switching between English speaking and French speaking ones and was growing tired of those red underlines and having to switch manually every time.

Data is stored in /user/{}/rooms/{}/account_data/org.gnome.fractal.language.

Continuum updates

yuforia said:

Continuum, Kotlin client for the desktop:

• Updated to Kotlin Json and HTTP libraries, removed Moshi and Retrofit from dependencies

• When there is an error when loading notifications, one can click to retry or view the cause

nheko

Nico said:

nheko mostly fixed bugs regarding the new file encryption this week and did some organizational stuff:

• We fixed a compliance issue, where Riot couldn't decrypt our media
• You can now actually see your encrypted images, when you sent them
• We fixed some tests regarding our session key export
• We fixed our coverage of our automated tests
• We did some prepwork for device verification
• A few minor usability fixes and code cleanups

RiotX v0.10.0

benoit told us:

RiotX v0.10.0 has been released on Tuesday, with some bug fixes and a new Breadcrumbs drawer to switch between rooms super super fast. Give it a try! Now we are implementing workflow when the access token get invalidated, with SoftLogout support. Also, we are still working on improving the initial sync management, which can be a long task on big account, and that causes some problem with the current implementation. Among various other subjects: matrix.to support, room profile screen, verification in DM, cleanup dependencies to reach the F-Droid store, we are quite busy!

Riot-iOS 0.10.4

Manu reported:

This week, we released Riot-iOS 0.10.4 with a couple of hot fixes on device verification. In parallel, we have been still working on verification by DM both on UI and SDK sides. As a collateral effect, the aggregation of m.reference has been implemented in the SDK. This means the SDK is now ready for message threading !

Riot Web + Cross-Signing

Ryan said:

Cross-signing keys and secret storage can be created in Settings for advanced users with the cross-signing feature flag enabled in labs, though please keep in mind that these features are still in development. More work is still needed to change to verifying users instead of devices. More accessibility fixes have landed as well.

Matthew added:

as part of all the work around cross-signing, we're shifting device verification to happen in the context of DMs so verification is done per-user rather than per-device, and so you can track your verification history and generally massively improve the UX. valere made a great video of how this is shaping up between RiotX and Riot/Web...

Check out the video here

Dept of Ops 🛠

ma1sd 2.2.1 released

ma1uta said:

Release 2.2.0 of the ma1sd (fork mxisd) https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.2.0 Changes:

• support of the MSC2140 (hash lookup)
• support of the MSC2134 (API v2)

and then...

ma1sd hotfix 2.2.1 released with a lot of bugfixes. Also the v2 API (MSC2140) was disabled by default because it breaks backward compatibility in lookup behaviour.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix bot functionality in Python

Cos reported:

I have created a modular bot for writing Matrix bot functionality in Python easily. It already has bunch of modules ranging from weather to calendar integration and more will come. Even the location bot from last week's TWIM is now implemented as a module. I hope you find it useful. PR's of new modules are always welcome. https://github.com/vranki/hemppa

Mlrdb, LDAP sync bot, announced

@dalang:mc.kircheneuenburg.de offered:

A Bot to sync LDAP groups to matrix rooms. Rooms will be created automatically and group member changes are reflected in the matrix rooms. The bot is currently in beta and documentation will be added in the next weeks. New features for simple integration will be added soon. Have a look at the repo: https://git.sr.ht/~davidlang/mlrbd

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰

mautrixfs - Matrix client as a FUSE filesystem

Tulir offered:

I've started a new project: mautrixfs is a Matrix client as a FUSE filesystem. It's very WIP and currently only supports reading events by ID. I'm hoping to have something more useful in a week or two.

tulir later added:

for media uploads, I just realized that my asynchronous uploads MSC would make it significantly easier to implement. It could have a file you read to allocate a mxc uri and then you could simply write the data to the file corresponding to that mxc uri

Matrix in the News 📰

Matrix featured in Skrolli

Cos offered:

Finnish computer culture paper magazine Skrolli published two articles spanning 5 pages about Matrix in latest edition. For non-subscribers the digital edition readable with mobile app is free for limited time. Read more (in Finnish) at https://skrolli.fi/

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

I chatted to Kilian from the new Nio project about his progress on a new iOS client.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Yesterday we announced the availability of zipped hoodies! The resulting avalanche of orders was a shock for our local Post Office, who watched with surprise as I burst in, laden with packages like a mule.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa offered:

Here's your news for what happened in spec-land last week!

Merged MSCs

• MSC2367: Add reason field to all membership events
• MSC2324: Facilitating early releases of software dependent on spec

MSCs in Final Comment Period

No MSCs are in FCP...

New MSCs

• MSC2380: Matrix Media Information API
  • This is a markdownification of MSC1310
• MSC2370: Resolve URL API
• MSC2375: Appservice Invite States
• MSC2376: Disable URL Previews

TravisR confirmed:

The spec core team is focused on implementing a bunch of MSCs so that we can make progress with the spec.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil told us:

This week we've mainly been tying up loose ends on the matrix.org data centre migration. Outside of that one interesting feature to land on develop is that of configurable message retention. It means that as an admin you can set a default period after which messages will be removed from the server (a year say), what’s more the default is configurable on a per room basis via state events. Note, this feature applies to messages only, not media (on its way!). Configurable message retention will be make it into the next versioned release.

matrix-synapse-ldap3

anoa said:

After 2 long years, matrix-synapse-ldap3 has finally gained another release: v0.1.4. If you want to allow users to sign in to Synapse using their LDAP accounts, then this is the module for you.

Get the release notes here: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-synapse-ldap3/releases/tag/v0.1.4

Dept of Clients 📱

Fractal

Alexandre Franke offered:

4.2.2 got released! Get it now off Flathub.

New features:

• Translation strings have been updated

Bugfixes:

• Newlines now work when markdown is enabled
• Account settings can be accessed again
• Redaction is working again
• Compatibility with HTTP-only (non HTTPS) servers has been restored
• Some crashes fixed

Under the hood:

• Code refactor is still going

As if all that wasn't enough, how about this image of Fractal running on a Librem5, from Adrien Plazas:

nheko

Nico offered:

Nheko just merged support for encrypted files in e2ee chats. This allows you to send and receive encrypted files and even play videos and other media in the new timeline. Those changes are still on the development branch, but will be included in the next release, which should be 0.7.0. If you want to try it out, you can get development builds here.

koma

yuforia announced:

koma, the Kotlin library behind the desktop client Continuum:

• Rewrite all Moshi json adapters with kotlinx serializers, replace API interface declared using Retrofit with HTTP requests constructed using ktor. The majority of the changes needed to enable multiplatform support is now made.

RiotX 0.9.1

benoit reported:

Released v0.9.1 on Thursday! This version includes a new login flow and account creation flow. Read marker has been reworked, to simplify user experience on mobile. Also you can type and send user pills.

We are now working on room and user profiles, and matrix.to link handling. Verification in DM development is progressing well. Also we implemented a first version of breadcrumbs, to switch between recent rooms very quickly.

Riot-iOS

Manu announced:

Riot-iOS 0.10.3 is on its way to Apple review. The release note is: This release includes bug fixes and improvements, like:

• Ask permission before opening a widget and the integration manager.
• Display room name, user name and user avatar in the Jitsi conference screen.
• Support Welsh and Italian languages.

Messagerie

Manu reported:

let me share Messagerie: https://github.com/manuroe/messagerie, an iOS app and, maybe, in the future, a MacOS app.

Messagerie is a chat app written to test SwiftUI and Combine to make a real and, hopefully, useful app. Messagerie misses a lot of things but it has:

• Support of Matrix using SwiftMatrixSDK
• E2EE
• Multi-account (swipe the navigation bar to switch accounts)
• Dark mode and auto-sizing fonts (well, they come for free)
• 4 screens at the moment: a Matrix login screen, a room list, a room screen and a very early beginning of a SwiftUI text composer to post text message

This is a personal and a side project, but RiotX-iOS will probably take benefit from it.

Riot Web means Cross Signing!

Ryan announced:

Riot Web is largely focused on nudging cross-signing forward over the last week. Key verification and cross-signing setup continues to make progress. We've also fixed a few bugs and merged some accessibility improvements.

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi reported:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy has been made more flexible in terms of how its services can be exposed to the web. Reverse-proxying using another local (in-machine or on-the-network) webserver should be easier. SSL-termination using Traefik is now also a possibility, although we're yet to confirm it as a success and document exactly how to do it. Read more in the CHANGELOG.

riot-desktop-builder docker image

Mathijs announced:

I created a dockerfile and corresponding docker image that can build the develop branch of riot-desktop for both windows and linux.

Dept of Bots 🤖

msc-chatbot

anoa announced:

msc_resolver2 is back and now isn't annoying with all new features like:

• actually showing you the MSC title when it links it
• not posting the same links multiple times
• not posting a link when you've already linked the msc in the original message
• ignoring edits
• ignoring content of replies

rejoice! Code is https://github.com/anoadragon453/msc-chatbot

malobot - send or receive location messages

Cos said:

It would be cool to be able to share location in Matrix rooms. This bot by cos solves the egg part in chicken and egg problem of having no clients able to send or receive location messages. Next we need a mobile client that can send location updates. Which one will be the first? https://github.com/vranki/malobot/

Dept of Ping 🏓

Final Thoughts 💭

swedneck made a room for discussing how matrix could be used to implement forums: #matrix-forums:permaweb.io

Mathijs pointed out that there is a Matrix feature which enables spoilers.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa announced:

Here's what happened in spec land this week:

Merged MSCs:

• MSC 1756: cross-signing devices using a master identity key
• MSC 2313: Moderation policies as rooms (ban lists)

Final Comment Period:

• MSC 2324: Facilitating early releases of software dependent on spec
• MSC 2367: Add reason field to all membership events

New MSCs:

• MSC 2336: Key verification flow addition: m.key.verification.accept

The Spec Core Team have chosen the following three MSCs to focus on for next week: MSC 1270 (URL resolver in media), MSC 2366 (accept in verification), and MSC 1849 (aggregations/edits)

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse v1.6.1

Neil offered:

This week we put out Synapse 1.6.0, and 1.6.1 checkout all the juicy details in the blog post. Aside from that message retention and ephemeral message support continues and we expect the latter to merge early next week.

The next big thing we’ll be looking at is sharding out the Synapse master process so that instances running in worker mode can make full use of the CPU power available. This will make a big difference to matrix.org.

Deploying Synapse

Several packaging projects have been updated to deploy the new version

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs
  • Mathijs was also happy to remind everyone of Docker itself
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat

Additionally, from JCG:

Synapse 1.6.1 has been packaged for VoidLinux, FreeBSD and Alpine Linux, with NixOS waiting to have the PR updating it to 1.6.1 merged. Synapse 1.6.0 has been packaged for Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 20.04.

Docker for synapse-ldap

JCG announced:

The container image with the updated LDAP auth provider over at https://gitlab.com/famedly/container/synapse-ldap/container_registry has been updated to 1.6.0 too.

Matrix over Yggdrasil

Neil Alexander:

Timothée has been working on a university project to integrate the Yggdrasil library into the CoAP proxy, which allows Matrix homeservers to federate over a pure Yggdrasil connection instead of using IP. The Yggdrasil portion gives full reachability and traffic forwarding between nodes in the mesh even in complicated topologies, and end-to-end encryption as an additional benefit

As a reminder,

Yggdrasil is a proof-of-concept mesh network that is designed to avoid the scaling issues that we've seen in the past with existing mesh systems. It uses a spanning tree-based topology and aims to make all nodes in the mesh fully routable, even at massive scale

If you'd like to know more, come chat to the folk in #yggdrasil:matrix.org, and read https://yggdrasil-network.github.io

Department of Matrix jobs 👩‍💻

New Vector (the startup which the original Matrix team founded in order to hire folks to work on Matrix as their day job) are currently hiring people so if you ever wanted to work on Matrix full time get in touch.

Neil says:

You can read all about it here but we are particularly keen to speak to people who want to hack on Synapse or work in Operations.

We are remote friendly though find it easier to hire people in some territories than others, so if you have any questions just ask.

You can apply via the site, or alternatively reach out to @neilj:matrix.org (engineering) or @nadonomy:matrix.org (design).

On top of this, Neil Alexander, creator of Seaglass and maintainer of Yggdrasil, will be joining New Vector. He said:

I shall most likely be working with the backend team on Synapse/Dendrite and I think there's a couple of other things like the coap-proxy too

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mx-puppet-bridge

Tulir said:

I made two pull requests to Sorunome's mx-puppet-bridge projects:

• A relaybot mode in mx-puppet-bridge. Basically means any mx-puppet-bridge can be used as a relaybot bridge.
• OAuth login flow for mx-puppet-slack. Should be useful for those in slack workspaces that disallow legacy tokens.

Matrix-Appservice-IRC

Half-Shot offered:

My fellow comrades, today we have released 0.14.0-rc1 of the IRC bridge. The changes are massive and vast, and frankly it probably could have been done in 2 or 3 releases. At any rate, this release contains support for PostgreSQL Datastores and Sentry monitoring, amongst other small quality of life changes. The bridge has also had a total refactor using Typescript, and it's a little bit nicer to look at now.

Dept of Clients 📱

Redesign of Ditto is out!

Annie told us:

• Ditto is now redesigned with a fresh new look!
• Functionality:
  • Login, send / receive messages, logout
• On Deck:
  • Notifications, writing a new message (in that order)

Come chat about UX and things you'd like to see in Ditto!
Matrix room: #ditto:elequin.io

iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/9M0ERlKd
Website: https://dittochat.org
Feedback: https://plan.dittochat.org

swedneck asked if being purple in colour, the project used libpurple? The answer is no, it uses React Native, and he was widely rebuked for doing so.

nio, new client for iOS

kilian offered:

I spent the last few days building my Matrix client Nio 😄 Apple just approved a very early first alpha for TestFlight distribution. It really doesn't do a lot aside from account authentication and displaying recent chats and messages. It is able to handle e2e encryption, but unfortunately doesn't persist the encryption keys right now (meaning it loses them and re-requests them from other clients on being restarted). It's built on SwiftUI and runs on iOS (iPhone and iPad). The app will likely not run as-is on macOS in the future, but I'd love to also build a separate version of Nio for macOS once the iOS app is functional.

Website: https://nio.chat Repo: https://github.com/kiliankoe/nio TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/KlXr3kKz

Note that this is not connected to the existing Matrix project, matrix-nio.

Continuum and koma, client and library in Kotlin

yuforia reported:

koma, Kotlin library:

• Start replacing Retrofit with Ktor, which is JetBrain's HTTP library for building projects that can be compiled to Native, JVM, and JavaScript. Currently, coexistence of both libraries causes the package size of applications based on Koma to increase to some extent, this will no longer be the case after the transition is complete.

Continuum, desktop client based on koma, version 0.9.31:

• Implement minimal XML parsing without adding additional dependencies to extract user ID and name from formatted_body used by Riot
• Display mentioned users with highlight and avatar.

Riot Web

Ryan reported:

• Continued work on setting up cross-signing and secret storage keys in labs
• Device verification is moving to the user info panel and happening via DMs also in labs
• Fixes for system theme and read receipts
• Improved signing for Windows builds
• Converting tests towards native promises

Riot-iOS

From Manu:

We have a new bottom sheet that we are going to use a lot in the coming designs. We used it in the widget permission screen. Meanwhile we are working on user verification by DM

Riot-android

From Manu:

We made a release this week with all the work around privacy for the use of an Integration Manager and widgets.

RiotX

From Manu:

All flows for registration and login are now supported. Please test them on your specific homeserver configuration in case we miss something. We are also working on user verification by DM.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Docker

Mathijs reported:

mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.6.1 is now on docker-hub

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy riot-web image

Slavi announced:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy has switched from the bubuntux/riot-web Docker image to the official vectorim/riot-web image. There should be no visible changes for users. We're just hoping for faster releases by keeping closer to upstream.

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

OpenPush is Marcus' project to remove the need for Google to be involved with push notifications on Android. We chat in some detail here about his work, the Prototype Fund, and other great topics.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

matrix.org server migration

Neil reported:

Those following closely will know that the matrix.org home server has been having some problems with our hosting provider. This really came down to I/O provision and stability therein. It turns out that running a homeserver is harder when it can’t talk to the db.

We have now fully migrated to our new provider (with improved hardware specs) and you should notice everything feeling much much snappier.

https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1197828358664589312?s=20

https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1197576886278393856?s=20

Public rooms upgraded

Neil reported:

We have also taking the time to upgrade all of our community rooms to modern room versions. This should mean an end to state resets and other unintuitive behaviour associated with large public rooms.

kitsune, international man of mystery

kitsune offered:

I have been dismantling my habitat in Japan and will spend a couple of weeks in Moscow, Russia before moving further west to the Netherlands. Due to this, expect very low activity on Quotient front in December; but I still intend to release the first beta of libQuotient 0.6 in the remaining week, breaking the half-year span without releases.

Good luck!

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa told us:

Here's your weekly spec update on what happened last week in spec land.

New MSCs:

• MSC 2359: E2EE VoIP Conferencing [WIP]
• MSC 2356: Bulk /joined_members endpoint

Entered Final Comment Period:

• MSC 1756: cross-signing devices using a master identity key
• MSC 2313: Moderation policies as rooms (ban lists)

Merged:

• MSC 2284: Making the identity server optional during discovery

This week, the Spec Core Team is focusing on the following 3 MSCs: 2241 (DM key verification), 2324 (new spec process), and 2326 (label-based filtering).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse v1.6.0rc1

Neil told us:

This week released Synapse v1.6.0rc1 and will release the real deal next week. 1.6.0 contains a lot of ground work for e2ee cross signing, supporting multiple databases (to aid db sharing) as well as a bunch of bug fixes and perf improvements.

Aside from that we’ve been working on room retention support and ephemeral messages which should be ready to merge rsn.

Finally we’ve been working on improving config granularity for caching, such that individual caches can be configured via homeserver.yaml. Experimenting with this approach to caching has proved to be very powerful in tuning performance, expect to see it on mainline shortly. Further down the line we'd like to make it more dynamic so that manual tuning is unnecessary.

This is also now available from Mathijs' docker hub repo.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-facebook

Tulir reported:

Facebook decided to break everything and switch from long polling to MQTT over websockets, but mautrix-facebook has already been updated with initial support for the new protocol. It's still a bit buggy though, e.g. reconnecting after a disconnection doesn't seem to work properly

Dept of Clients 📱

Brawl 0.0.12

Bruno offered:

I have started deploying Brawl, you can try it at https://bwindels.github.io/brawl/

Also few small new features and fixes since the last TWIM mention a while back:

• make initial sync faster: it uses the lazy load members feature to not load a lot of room state on initial sync as that isn't used yet anyways.
• more useful room list: room aliases and are now recognized for the room name, and DMs are named after the user id.
• some smaller bugs fixed

Continuum and koma progress

yuforia announced:

koma, Kotlin library:

• Update Kotlin to latest release 1.3.60
• Start making use of kotlinx.serialization, making the first step toward multi-platform support (which enables a Kotlin project to be compiled to native, JavaScript, or JVM)

Continuum, desktop client based on koma:

• Implement pop-up and sound, which will be used to show notifications

https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/TJlhyKntaXngkHJvdgPIhOsK

Riot iOS

Manu announced:

We are almost done in our privacy work around integrations and integrations manager. While we were working on widgets, we made some improvements on them. They now have a menu with some actions (refresh, open in Browser, remove). The jitsi widget now displays the room name, user avatar and name.

Seshat

@poljar:matrix.org told us:

The PR for matrix-react-sdk has finally landed, the PR for riot-web needed some documentation and is waiting for final review. Work on the UI for our indexer inside of riot has started and some more functionality to load events that are files has been added inside of Seshat as well.

Riot Android

@valere35:matrix.org reported:

Privacy work related to Integration Manager about to be released (SDK + App). Also a couple of bug fixed (including the infinite app restart after SSO token expiration)

riot-web

Bruno reported:

riot web just gained in-app notifications for verification requests on /develop. See PR at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3661 . All of this is behind the verification over DM labs flag!

matrix-notepad

Check out these docs, very nice!

@kb1rd:kb1rd.net said:

matrix-notepad It's been a slow two weeks for matrix-notepad since I've been a bit busy.

• The core "Logootish" algorithm was documented
• "Logootish" was separated out into its own repo (logootish-js) and converted to TypeScript.
• TypeDoc was used to document the logootish-js algorithm
• Fixed some wonderful spelling errors in the algorithm code
• Nothing has changed for the main Matrix Notepad repo, so there's no user difference. It just makes the core algorithm a bit easier to read.

My plan in the future is basically to work out rich text and JSON object collaboration (clearly, this is far away!) and create some kind of "universal client" that can load up web apps to use the algorithm in a single Matrix room. The result would be that it's much easier to create collaboration apps.
Obviously, that's a far-off goal, but my point in documenting the algo is to get ahead of the game a bit

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-bot-sdk v0.4.0 release

TravisR announced:

v0.4.0 has been released of the matrix-bot-sdk. Last week was beta 15, and now it's out for real. There's quite a few changes from v0.3.9, but here's an overview:

• Support for encryption through Pantalaimon

• Support for metrics

• Finished support for appservices

• Better support for bridges (storage, mappings, and utility functions)

• Classes for events and other structures in Matrix

• Utility classes for permalinks, profile caching, Synapse admin APIs, and server ACLs (globs)

• Improved documentation

• A template repository for bots

• Improved logging support

• Various bug fixes and improvements

Give it a test, and report any issues in #matrix-bot-sdk:t2bot.io ! The full diff is available here: https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk/compare/v0.3.9...v0.4.0

simplematrixlib, new Python library

@swedneck:permaweb.io said:

I made a really simple matrix library for python, and a couple of utility scripts that make use of it! https://gitlab.com/Swedneck/simplematrixlib, https://gitlab.com/Swedneck/py-matrix-utils

Dept of Bots 🤖

maubot

Tulir announced:

Maubot will now automatically follow room upgrades. In addition to that, plugins storing room IDs in the database have been updated to automatically update the database when the room is upgraded.

In other maubot news, the PR by lorico to rewrite my old GitLab bot as maubot plugin was finally merged.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Final Thoughts 💭

Impressive progress on the PinePhone, Martijn Braam has been showing off various apps running, particularly interesting is that they are showing Quaternion.

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 I spoke to Annie from the Ditto project.

Find out more:

#ditto:elequin.io
Testflight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/9M0ERlKd
Feedback: https://ditto.upvoty.com

Dept of Spec 📜

MSC2354: Device to device streaming file transfers

Mathijs offered:

I opened my first MSC, to use webrtc for streaming file transfers from device to device (rather than account to account)

Spec

anoa said:

** New MSCs **

• MSC2354: Device to device streaming file transfers
• MSC2356: Bulk /joined_members endpoint

** In Final Comment Period **

• MSC2284: Making the identity server optional during discovery

** Merged MSCs **

• MSC1946: Secure Secret Storage and Sharing
• MSC2244: Mass redactions

The Spec Core Team's focused MSC's continue to be MSC1756 (cross-signing), MSC2324 (new spec process), and MSC2313 (ban lists).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

anoa said:

This week saw work on implementing message retention policies, the continuation of migrating matrix.org to new hardware and some other little fixes.

The public rooms directory is also set to private by default now. Please read the accompanying blog post for the reasoning behind it.

Ruma updates

We missed it at the time, but the Ruma project has some updates to share, focused on the ruma-events projects.

https://ruma.dev/news/new-releases-2019-11-05/

Known Matrix Server Selector Websites

Over in #matrixservers:raim.ist, grin provided this list-of-lists of Matrix public home servers:

• https://www.hello-matrix.net/
• https://matrix.grin.hu/stat/
• https://the-federation.info/matrix%7Csynapse
• https://www.anchel.nl/matrix-publiclist/

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir reported:

mautrix-whatsapp now has basic relaybot support. Since WhatsApp doesn't have usable bots, relaybot in this case means using a normal account as a relay. To enable the relaybot in your bridge instance, copy this config block into your config, update is as needed, and simply log in normally in the configured relaybot management room.

matrix-appservice-slack 1.0.2

Half-Shot announced:

Hey all, matrix-appservice-slack 1.0.2 has been released. This contains a small number of bug fixes and doc changes.

Dept of Clients 📱

Pattle: version 0.14.0

Wilko announced:

A new version has been made available and should soon be on Google Play!

Note that this version will not be on TestFlight (yet) because notifications are currently only implemented on Android (using Firebase, so same goes for F-Droid for the time being).

Changes

• Show notifications when receiving a new message!
• Username is not checked whether it's available anymore

This was done for a future feature (registration), however, a different approach will probably be taken.

Get Pattle

• Android
  • F-Droid
  • Google Play
• iOS (TestFlight)

Issues or suggestions

If you stumble upon any issues or would like to suggest features, please do so here! You can login via GitHub and Gitlab.com!

Follow development

Follow development in #app:pattle.im!

Kotlin projects: koma and Continuum

yuforia told us:

koma, Kotlin library:

• Implement timeout in coroutines instead of waiting for timeout errors from HTTP library, which makes it easier to change the timeout on demand and may improve performance to some degree
• Make use of experimental feature contracts in Kotlin 1.3 to avoid cast errors when inline class is used in non-local returns
• Add API for getting thumbnails

Continuum, desktop client based on koma, version 0.9.28:

• Use thumbnails of images and avatars to reduce data usage

https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/GMyoaOATXbdcgKnGXCgpDnEA

Riot web

Bruno said:

Riot web should gain a new design for the member panel, with a UX more suited for a world where cross-signing is a thing. Will land today or early next week behind a feature flag on /develop.

There are some screenshots on the PR: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3620

Riot-Android

benoit offered:

Riot-Android: we are working on widget permission: new widget permission UX and use integration manager defined on the homeserver by default.

Riot iOS

Manu offered:

Riot iOS: We have fixed the display of terms for integrations. Riot iOS 0.10.2 is on his way to the App Store

RiotX

benoit offered:

RiotX: We are working on registration and login flow. Also spoiler are rendered and can even be sent using /spoiler command. It's also possible to block (ignore) and unblock users. Performance have been improved, and we are now using the new FragmentFactory. We are working on room detail screen, sticker rendering, and lots of other fun features. We schedule a release at the beginning of next week.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-bot-sdk v0.4.0-beta.15

TravisR reported:

v0.4.0-beta.15 of the matrix-bot-sdk has been released. v0.4.0 final is a themed release for lightweight bridges, and so far much of the common functionality is there. Some of the more niche and large features have yet to land, but the final release is still on the horizon (see what's left here). Please give it a test (npm install [email protected]) and report any issues to #matrix-bot-sdk:t2bot.io.

BETA FIFTEEN

Seshat new release

@poljar:matrix.org offered:

Seshat got a new release 🎉. Seshat now supports transparent index encryption. The PRs for Riot-desktop have been updated and encryption has been enabled for the index. The PRs are currently awaiting review, encrypted search will come to a place near you really soon™.

Dept of Ops 🛠

New guide about installing Synapse using only free resources

@ptman:feneas.org offered:

I (and hopefully others) feel that matrix needs more home servers. That's why I wrote a guide for setting one up using free resources and @benpa was kind enough to include it on matrix.org: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/free-small-matrix-server/

Room Directory defaults in matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Regarding the recent discussions about room security, Slavi has been thinking about default settings for his ansible playbooks:

I wasn't entirely convinced what we should do about it. For my own personal (family & friends) homeserver, I have a few rooms published (this room being one of them), which are all public and OK to be published publicly. I was okay with the old defaults. Still, I can see how people may expect stricter defaults though. I've leaned on following this advice and making it not publish by default. I've made that change here.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix-Alertmanager v0.1.0

@jaywink:federator.dev reported:

Matrix-Alertmanager, a bot that relays Prometheus Alertmanager alerts to Matrix rooms, gets a new release v0.1.0. Thanks to "daniego" the messages are now HTML formatted. Also dependencies have been bumped, Matrix JS SDK by "Lyr" and all the other deps by me. For more info: https://git.feneas.org/jaywink/matrix-alertmanager

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣

aa13q offered:

I've made a presentation about Matrix at the local 2600 meetup at Saint Petersburg, Russia recently. And now translated the text retelling into English too. It's an introduction presentation in general but (thanks to kitsune! :) it also contains good comments about the parts I've missed :) Would be happy to get feedback about the typos/etc. I hope it could be helpful to somebody who is willing to tell about Matrix in other local places :) https://aa13q.ru/#!posts/2019-11-01-matrix-2600/meta.md

@jaywink:federator.dev reported:

Not a part of the organizers, but syncing here for wider reach. There is a "FediConf 2020" conference being planned to happen in Barcelona sometime between May and September next year. It will be a conference for a wide audience of federated folk, so Matrix people might be interested in joining up. There is a poll for dates, a forum and also a Matrix room: #fediconf:matrix.libertalia.world

kitsune said:

in a complete coincidence with aa13q, I also talked about Matrix at Tokyo LUG. Plenty of good discussion. TLUG folks are extremely interested in decentralised identities and data retention as next most important frontiers in Matrix evolution.

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Sorry folks, no matrix live this week, your regular programming will continue next week.

Dept of Spec

A big week in spec land.

Client-server r0.6.0 and Identity r0.3.0 spec releases

TravisR offered:

If you've been waiting all this time to start implementing some of the privacy improvements the team has been making over the last few months, now's the best time to do it. Clients interacting with identity servers or 3rd party identifiers (3PIDs) have some changes to make, and identity servers themselves have a whole new authed API so they can expose terms of service requirements to users.

Check out the specs at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/client_server/r0.6.0 and https://matrix.org/docs/spec/identity_service/r0.3.0

You can read all about it here

anoa announced:

Approved MSCs

• MSC2334 - Change default room version to v5
  • Our fastest FCP ever - less than 24hrs!

Final Comment Period

• MSC2244: Mass redactions
• MSC1946: Secure Secret Storage and Sharing

New MSCs

• [WIP] MSC2346: Bridge information state event

The Spec Core Team have chosen MSC1756 (cross-signing), MSC2324 (new spec process), and MSC2313 (ban lists) to focus on this week :)

Dept of Clients 📱

Riot-iOS

Manu offered:

• 0.10.1 has been released on the app store. It includes minor improvements and bug fixes like the call issue. Full release descriptions can be found on respective repos: Riot, matrix-ios-kit and matrix-ios-sdk.
• This release includes better logging to track app kills in background but it seems that iOS13.2.2 released by Apple yesterday fixes the issue. We are looking for more feedbacks on that topic.
• On develop, the app can now use the integrations manager advertised by the homeserver.

RiotX

benoit reported:

We have finished implementing long click on a Room item, to configure notification settings of the room and to be able to leave the room. We can now ignore user (after a report of content only for the moment). The list of ignored users is displayed in the setting. Users can be un-ignored. We are also working on improving performance and improving code structure. As usual, we have also fixed some bugs. A release will be done at the beginning of next week, then we will try to work on the login flow and account creation flow.

Riot Android

benoit offered:

We are working on the Integration Manager management.

Riot Web

Neil had this to say:

The Riot gang landed 1.5.1 which contained the emoji picker (thanks Tulir!).

Additionally they have been working furiously to make some progress against e2ee device cross signing and have just merged the ability to authenticate via DMs. It's behind a labs flag and will only work if both parties are enabled, but this is big step towards our cross signing dreams. Watch this space for more cross signing features over the coming weeks.

Fractal

Alexandre Franke offered:

We did a couple bugfixes including one for a long standing crasher and another more recent crasher.

Seshat

@poljar:matrix.org said:

Seshat gained the ability to encrypt the event database and index. A PR has landed and is awaiting review. Now your Matrix client can securely store and index your E2EE messages.

Quarternion

kitsune said:

I took time to port Quaternion from Qt Quick Controls 1 (deprecated upstream) to Qt Quick Controls 2, the lighter UI widgets kit that Spectral also uses. Most of regressions are fixed and the result is likely to land in the master branch sometime next week. The overall looks will remain the same, just a minor refresh of visuals. Aside from improving performance the porting should help to solve widget scaling issues on multi-monitor configurations.

Matrix Notepad

@kb1rd:kb1rd.net reported:

• Released version 0.1.4, which fixes a number of bugs and cleans up a lot of the code
• I'm considering converting the algorithm code only to TypeScript (it's a mess rn)
• I said this last week, but I think I finally got all the bugs out of the internal algorithm 🤞
• I'm also working on a proper explanation of how the algorithm works (An explanation of just the events is here)

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil said:

This week we shipped 1.5.1 which contains a small bug fix to prevent a potential DoS vector.

Separately we merged support for label based filtering into develop and are now working on allowing admins to configure message retention policies.

Aside from that we’ve continued to work on sharding out the database which we’ll put live once we have migrated matrix.org onto new hardware (woo!) and finally we’ve been fixing some bugs affecting event auth rules.

Coming up on the horizon are ephemeral messages (the ability to send messages with a specific ttl), more io perf work and a bit further down the line we’ll dust off our attempts to shard out room processing from the master process, meaning Synapses running in worker mode will have much more CPU headroom.

Rust Workers

Black Hat told us:

I'm working on writing Synapse workers in Rust. Only a few things are working, but the performance seems good.

Department of Ops

Kubernetes

Ananace announced:

Just pushed the K8s-optimized Synapse 1.5.1 image

Docker - improved LDAP

JCG reported:

another Synapse container image, but this one is new: If you had problems with LDAP in the official Synapse image, try this image: https://gitlab.com/famedly/container/synapse-ldap/container_registry. It's based on the official images, but updates the LDAP auth provider to the latest commit of the master branch. The official image comes with the latest version released to pypi.org, which is a bit older. Aside of that change, it's exactly the same, so you can use it as a drop in replacement.

Docker - multi-arch

Black Hat told us:

my multi-arch synapse docker image is updated to synapse 1.5.1

Docker

Mathijs said:

The images for synapse v1.5.1 were pushed to docker hub for avhost and my personal repo.

Server Tombola

@mj:nltrix.net offered:

It gets a tombola of versions at the list of Public Synapse Homeservers https://www.anchel.nl/matrix-publiclist/

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Half-Shot announced:

Hey folks, I've released matrix-appservice-irc 0.13.1 which fixes a critical bug in 0.13.0 where messages from matrix would crash the bridge. Users brave enough to be running develop do not need to do anything. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.13.1. This would only have affected you if you tried to install or update the 0.13 bridge in the last two weeks.

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec Updates

anoa reported:

Merged MSCs

• Proposal for storing megolm keys serverside

Final Comment Period

• MSC2334 - Change default room version to v5
  • This one rushed right from new into FCP! Mostly due to it being very non-contentious.

New MSCs

No other new MSCs appeared this week.

MSCs the Spec Core Team are focusing on next week are: MSC2244 (mass redactions), MSC1946 (SSSS), and MSC2313 (ban lists).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse 1.5.0 released

Various updates including a security fix, check the announcement.

Several packaging projects have been updated to deploy the new version:

• matrix-docker-ansible-deploy from Slavi
• Kubernetes from Ananace
• multi-arch synapse docker image from Black Hat
• avhost/docker-matrix and mvgorcum/docker-matrix from Mathijs

Like always the mvgorcum/docker-matrix repo also includes the release candidates, as they were released.

Install Party

Brendan announced:

A couple of weeks ago I shouted here about a project I've been working on named Install Party, which provides tools for provisioning and managing servers for Matrix homeserver install workshops/parties.

Since then, I've been working on improving it, and today it's finally reached v1.0! This version includes configurable DNS and infrastructure providers, the ability to create multiple server in one run, user-defined post-install scripts, as well as codebase cleanups and a better documentation.

You can find more details about the project and this release at https://brendan.abolivier.bzh/install-party-1.0/, and in #install-party:abolivier.bzh 🙂

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-telegram

Tulir told us:

• Parallelized file transfer: The bridge now has an option to use multiple telegram connections and a streaming connection to the Matrix media repo when copying files. This should make it much faster and use less ram for big files.
• Matrix doesn't have native captions, so !tg caption <text> now exists to send the next image or file to telegram with <text> as the caption.
• Animated sticker bridging and helm charts were merged into master.

matrix-appservice-node 0.4.1 released

Half-Shot reported:

Bridges-in-nodejs-fans, today we have released 0.4.1 of the matrix-appservice-node library. For those not aware (presumably most), this library is a barebones piece of kit that helps you to listen over the AS api for transactions, in a more barebones manner than matrix-appservice-bridge. The changes in this release are a total transformation of the library into Typescript, and updating dependency packages which had gotten out of date.

EDIT: I cocked up the release, so have a 0.4.1

matrix-appservice-bridge 1.11.1 released

Half-Shot offered:

Also, https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/releases/tag/1.11.1

Dept of Clients 📱

Ditto Chat project announcement

Annie said:

Officially announcing a new mobile client project: Ditto Chat

• Project Status

  • Minimum Viable Product is on TestFlight
  • Can: login, send / receive messages

• Tech Stack

  • Bare React Native - no Expo
  • matrix-js-sdk

• Vision

• I want Ditto to be a chat app that is user-friendly and performant for the average user, rivaling apps like GroupMe, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

• Later on, I want Ditto to have a desktop / browser version and be stable enough for regular use.

CONTRIBUTORS: I would love to have some help on Ditto if anybody is looking for a side project! Join #ditto:elequin.io for updates.

More photos: http://dittochat.org

Check out the room at #ditto:elequin.io.

miitrix

sorunome offered:

Miitrix has received some updates!

• Save state and resume when starting up - no need for an initial sync each time anymore!
• Send read receipts
• Send typing notifications
• Remove HTTPC and only use CURL to add support for servers that don't have TLS1.1 anymore! And way faster!

Support room: #miitrix:sorunome.de Donate: https://liberapay.com/Sorunome

Miitrix was featured as a star attraction at MozFest last weekend, thanks Soru!

Good morning #mozfest! We're here for the final day, come and see us on the 6th floor and see Matrix running on a Nintendo 3DS 🎮 #matrix #mozfest19 pic.twitter.com/cZqcAn2tcZ

— Matrix (@matrixdotorg) October 27, 2019

Continuum 0.9.27

yuforia reported:

Continuum, desktop client in Kotlin, version 0.9.27:

Added notification viewer.

https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/ziPiTnybBwEEcSMPZRjhNlsV

Fractal

Alexandre Franke told us:

We fixed redaction, it’s working again. We still don’t remove the messages from view but there is a WIP merge request to do just that.

#matrix-client-developers:matrix.org

f0x announced:

#matrix-client-developers:matrix.org has been revived, intended for discussion between developers of different Matrix clients.

This is the room to head to for Matrix Client developer chat.

Matrix Notepad

KB1RD announced:

Version 0.1.2 update brings a major overhaul of the user interface. The main features are:

• A new sign in dialog (with password authentication. No access tokens!)
  • Those who are already signed in will stay signed in
  • Also created a Matrix Notepad logo
• Technically, a single Matrix client is used instead of re-creating it each time a new document is opened
  • This makes document loading faster
• Added a document list and an add button
• Added the document room ID to the URL
• Fixed various bugs that have been encountered. Maybe I can finally say that it's bug-free!

Riot v1.5.1-rc.1

Riot v1.5.1-rc.1 is up on https://riot.im/staging with a collection of bugfixes, some further a11y fixes and... a new reaction picker from tulir!

Dept of Bots 🤖

matrix-episode-bot

anoa told us:

I made a bot that can give you links to TV show episodes that get mentioned in rooms: https://github.com/anoadragon453/matrix-episode-bot

It's not as cool as it sounds. Basically you put all the titles and links in a config file and whenever someone says e.g "I really like S05E09", it'll give you the name of that episode and a link to it. You can also just mention an episode title and it'll give you the link.

Made with nio-template.

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Matrix.org

Public service notice from vdh:

It won't have escaped many peoples' notice that the matrix.org homeserver has been struggling over the last few weeks. The main problem is poor disk I/O performance on our database server: for various reasons, it seems that the server can no longer keep up with the demands we're putting on it.

The good news is that we have a plan to sort it out, and we're working on setting up alternative hosting which will be able to handle our traffic for the foreseeable future! Please bear with us over the next couple of weeks while we get new servers set up.

Matrix Notepad

@kb1rd:kb1rd.net told us:

Just released the first version of the Matrix Notepad, a small webapp designed to allow people to collaborate on text files over Matrix. There are a bunch of bugs that I'm still working on fixing, but if you'd like to check it out it's here! I will be adding incremental fixes for various issues, but feel free to add to the issues. :) If you'd like to chat, I'll be checking #matrix-collaboration:kb1rd.net.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

@richvdh:sw1v.org told us:

This week much of the team's focus has been on performance, both in terms of dealing with matrix.org's immediate woes and some more strategic work on helping Synapse to scale. On the latter front, Erik has been making great progress in supporting multiple Postgres databases.

We've also put out a release candidate for Synapse 1.5.0 with lots of bugfixes and changes under the hood. As ever, help with testing the RC is much appreciated!

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-discord v0.5.2 released

Half-Shot reported:

matrix-appservice-discord has had a new release (v0.5.2) to fix some out of date packages.

matrix-appservice-bridge v0.11.0

Half-Shot announced:

matrix-appservice-bridge has had a new release (v0.11.0) which allows developers to disable usage of the stores entirely. This should solve problems facing some bridges which no longer use them.

mautrix-hangouts image bridging

Tulir offered:

Cadair's pull request to add Hangouts->Matrix image bridging to mautrix-hangouts was merged.

Dept of Clients 📱

miitrix

From sorunome, this crazy 3DS project!

Miitrix is a client for the Nintendo 3DS, using the matrix-3ds-sdk! Here is an early demonstration video. The current featureset includes:

• Sorting room list by last messages
• Room name fallbacks (canonical alias, joined members)
• sending messages
• receiving messages
• receiving edits & redactions
• receiving join, leave, ban events
• lazy-loading extra information in the background

Support room: #miitrix:sorunome.de Donate: https://liberapay.com/Sorunome

Riot web

Tulir announced:

Two of the Riot pull requests that I twimmed last week, the reaction emoji picker and edit html parser improvements, have been merged into develop. The remaining one (reply rendering improvements) still needs some code and design work.

Ruby Matrix SDK version 1.5.0 released

Ananace said:

The Ruby SDK is out with another new version, 1.5.0 this time. Adding an event and a check to let applications track and handle errors that occur in the background listener thread of the client abstraction. This version also exposes a setter for the open_timeout value on the lower-level API client (and the client abstraction through it), for users that are plagued by slow-to-open TCP connections to their relevant HSes.

As always, feel free to drop by #ruby-matrix-sdk:kittenface.studio if you have questions, comments, corrections, or just want to discuss the project - or use cases - in general.

Fractal

Alexandre Franke reported:

Since the 4.2.1 release a month ago, there’s been a slow but steady stream of commits including code cleanups, translation updates and minor bugfixes. The highlights are issues solved around settings not being reloaded after verification dialog was closed, account settings not loading, connections to http only servers failing, and a regression that prevented users from sending messages to newly created rooms.

Riot iOS

Manu reported:

We are still working on 2 fronts:

• fixing most important issues in our stabilisation sprint
• privacy project: Adding an email or phone number is now protected by a password (if your homeserver requests this authentication)

Riot Android

Manu offered:

• privacy project: Adding an email or phone number is now protected by a password (if your homeserver requires it)

RiotX Android

Manu offered:

• We released 0.7.0 this week. You now have read markers and can share content to Riot. You should also find the app even faster.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-3ds-sdk

sorunome offered:

A lot has happened on the side of matrix-3ds-sdk. So much so, that it is possible now to write clients out of it! The changelog includes:

• fetching member info
• fetching room info
• proper sync loop
• aggressive filters to reduce data (initial sync would crash on large accs otherwise)
• room leave and invite callbacks
• room info callback

Support room: #matrix-3ds-sdk:sorunome.de

Dept of Ops 🛠

Helm charts for mautrix-telegram, mautrix-twilio and maubot

Tulir offered:

mautrix-telegram and mautrix-twilio now have experimental Helm charts: https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-telegram/tree/helm/helm/mautrix-telegram. There's no replication/horizontal scaling stuff, but they should be useful if you're already using Helm for other stuff.

To make managing maubot plugins possible with Helm, I added a simple standalone plugin executor to maubot. It's basically just a simple script that sets up all the things plugins want (matrix client, config, database, webserver) and passes them to the plugin.

The standalone executor can be used to run any maubot plugin without any changes to the plugin itself, but building good docker images needs to be done separately for each plugin. The supportportal plugin has a standalone docker image and a helm chart using that image.

Dept of Ping 🏓

That's all I know 🏁

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