This Week in Matrix

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Last week Matrix had a presence at UbuCon Europe and PyCon Ireland. We gave workshops on using Matrix to create bots, and also a session on installing Synapse (see also: Brendan's entry below!)

Hey #PyConIE! We hope you enjoyed the Matrix workshop, find the slides and code samples at https://t.co/aT1dDuEcm1 and make sure to ask any more questions! pic.twitter.com/C2qwV5R3gl

— Matrix (@matrixdotorg) October 12, 2019

Tomorrow I'm off to sunny Manchester with Michael from the Ops team. We'll visit OggCamp, where we'll show off Matrix with a fun demo I previewed on Matrix Live a few weeks ago.

Matrix will ALSO be at:

• Re­decentra­lize Conference 2019
• MozFest 2019

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa:

Last week we set MSC1219 (key backups), MSC2241 (verification over DMs), and MSC2313 (ban lists) for the spec core team to focus on. Those 3 are rolling on into this week as we didn't get a lot of work done last week :)

In other Spec news, Matthew uncovered a stone tablet describing what would in future be known as "MSC2324":

Dept of Servers 🏢

install-party, nice result from UbuCon Europe

Brendan said:

For a workshop anoa and I did at Ubucon Europe last Sunday on how to install Synapse, I worked on a side project that creates a server, attaches a domain name to it and installs Riot and Caddy on it. Attendees can then SSH into it, follow the instructions to install a Matrix homeserver, and use Riot to register an account on it, log in, and join a federated room with all of the other attendees' homeservers in it. We tried it out last week-end for the actual workshop and it worked quite well 🙂 The project is called Install Party, and lives at https://github.com/babolivier/install-party, and if you want to chat about it I've just created #install-party:abolivier.bzh 😉

Synapse

Neil reported:

This week we've been thinking about the future and brainstorming on ideas to improve perf for small instances and sparing some cycles for MSC1228. Next week we'll return to improving IO usage on matrix.org.

Synapse 1.4.1 was released, which fixes a small regression in 1.4.0.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Matrix-Slack Bridge on NixOS

@christian:kampka.net said:

Just FYI, the matrix slack bridge is now available via NixOS: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/70753

Dept of Clients 📱

riots.im available via IPFS

Remember https://riots.im from last week? Now available on IPFS!

@swedneck:permaweb.io said:

toml's riots.im is also available via IPFS: ipfs get riots.im or visit localhost:8080/ipns/riots.im with ipfs installed and running.

Riot-iOS 0.10.0

Manu offered:

On Riot-iOS land, Riot-iOS 0.10.0 has been released on the App Store. We have started a stabilisation sprint. In parallel, we are still polishing the privacy work

RiotX release next week

benoit announced:

RiotX: we are merging waiting PRs and have postponed the release to ensure a maximum of stability and polishing. The release will be done at the beginning of next week and will contains: read marker, camera picker and improved file picker, share to RiotX capability and many bugfixes.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-3ds-sdk

sorunome said:

Heya, matrix-3ds-sdk is a new matrix sdk - for the Nintendo 3DS! It is still deep in development, so expect bugs, some things not working properly etc. Current features include:

• logging in
• sending text messages to rooms
• redacting events from rooms
• resolving aliases to room ids
• basic framework to get a /sync loop working

If you are into 3DS homebrew development or are interested in helping out making a full client based on this, please contact soru (@sorunome:sorunome.de)! 3ds homebrew dev is pretty new to her, so there are plenty of open questions / debugging help would be great!

Support room: #matrix-3ds-sdk:sorunome.de Donate: https://liberapay.com/Sorunome

This is really impressive, I'm looking forward to playing with it. (I'm sure someone at the office must own a 3DS!)

koma

yuforia offered:

koma, Kotlin library for building clients: Added API for retrieving notifications.

Dept of Ops 🛠

mvgorcum/docker-matrix

Mathijs announced:

I uploaded the synapse 1.4.1 image to mvgorcum/docker-matrix:v1.4.1 within about half an hour after the release

docker image of synapse-develop

Mathijs announced:

I've made a docker image of the develop branch of synapse, and automated it to build daily. It's on my docker hub as mvgorcum/docker-matrix:develop, based on the avhost dockerfile. Note that there are no checks, the image is simply built from the develop branch of the synapse git repo every night.

Matrix Synapse for Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

just pushed Version 1.4.1 of the Matrix Synapse for Kubernetes packaging. A bit fiddly to do on a phone 🙂

Synapse 1.4.1 multi-arch docker image

Black Hat told us:

I'm building the Synapse 1.4.1 multi-arch docker image. It will be pushed to Docker Hub in a couple of hours.

Dept of Tulir 🇫🇮

A special section this week from the guy with one editor open for everything, tulir:

I haven't done anything on my own projects this week, but I did contribute to a bunch of other projects:

• Updated SmsMatrix to the latest matrix-android-sdk to fix outgoing sms duplication bug (https://github.com/tijder/SmsMatrix/pull/60)
• Fixed Riot web sending reply fallbacks in edited message content (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3551)
• Fixed some things in the Riot web edit html -> markdown parsing (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3552)
• Made Riot web reply rendering much nicer and more compact (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3553)
• Added full emoji picker for reactions to Riot web (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3554)

The first two are already merged (and SmsMatrix even got a new release on f-droid), the html parsing is waiting for code review and the emoji picker and reply rendering are waiting for design review.

Also, I made a read-only status.matrix.org rss feed room since some people wanted one: #matrix.org-status:maunium.net. I don't remember if I TWIMed these before, but #xkcd:maunium.net and #commitstrip:maunium.net are similar read-only rooms, new xkcds and commitstrips are posted there whenever they come out.

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 🌡

As you may have heard, New Vector, a major entity in the Matrix world, recently completed a series A funding round.

Further reading:

• $8.5M to accelerate Matrix, polish Riot and expand Modular! (from New Vector)
• Why I invested in New Vector (from Notion Capital)
• Communications of the future will be open and secure: why we are partnering with New Vector (from Dawn Capital)
• Why we invested in New Vector — the team building an open and secure communication platform (Sam Endacott from firstminute capital)

Mozilla IM trial ended

Mozilla have been trialing different IM solutions to replace IRC, including Matrix. This trial ended this week, and we hope to hear the results this month. (C'mon, Matrix!)

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil told us:

Matrix.org hit some IO problems earlier this week, while largely a problem with our hosting provider, we’re spending a bit of time to make Synapse more resilient if the same thing were to happen again. This will mean the ability to shard the DB (by table) and spread the load so we are not so dependent on high performance from a given db box. Outside of that we’ve been working on the final polishing of the room directory and getting the sqlite -> Postgres port script into better shape.

multi-arch docker image of Synapse

Black Hat said:

My multi-arch docker image of Synapse has been updated to v1.4.0.

Dendrite

anoa offered:

Not much for Dendrite this week as anoa is off at Ubucon 2019. But we had a few valuable bugs reported by the community, and a pressing reminder to get Dendrite's Monolith mode in as part of its CI.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

slack bridge 1.0.1

Half-Shot told us:

Hey folks, The slack bridge 1.0.1 release is out https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-slack/releases/tag/1.0.1 containing a few bug fixes found since the original release.

IRC bridge

Half-Shot offered:

I've not got much for this week, but the IRC bridge has been undergoing some serious refactors and changes for a larger release. Should be quite a big one when it lands :)

Dept of Encryption 🔐

Search inside E2EE rooms

Update from poljar:

A PR for riot-web has emerged that adds support for search in E2E encrypted rooms. The PR is utilizing Seshat to perform event indexing and search on riot-desktop. While the PR is missing any sort of UI, it is in a usable state.

Dept of Clients 📱

Riot iOS

Manu told us:

phase:1 of privacy work is done. Riot -iOS 0.10.0 will be available soon

every version of Riot Web released on GitHub

toml offered:

Take a trip down memory lane with the Riots of yesteryear at https://riots.im (note the 's'). Hosting every version of Riot Web released on GitHub 😁

Comes with free Wikipedia hole.

Riot Android

benoit announced:

Valere has done a release and is doing some maintenance. He has started to work on integration manager

RiotX

benoit offered:

RiotX: We have fixed quite a lot of issues during the stabilization sprint. We are now working on Sprint 4: read marker, report content, mark all room read, etc. François is changing the media/file picker and we will also be able to share elements from other apps to RiotX. We will schedule a release soon (tm) (should have happen this week, but has been delayed due to stabilization)

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Elixir projects from uhoreg, Polyjuice and Igor

uhoreg told us:

Polyjuice Client, a Matrix client library for Elixir, has a new release. There is now a short tutorial that will teach you how to make a simple echo bot with it.

Then:

Igor, a bot framework for Elixir, has had its first release.

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 🎙

• Ubucon https://sintra2019.ubucon.org/
• PyCon Ireland https://python.ie/pycon-2019/
• OggCamp https://oggcamp.org/
• MozFest https://www.mozillafestival.org/en/
• and more, watch the vid

Dept of Spec 📜

Two MSCs have reached final comment period this week:

• MSC 2176: Update the redaction rules
• MSC 2290: Separate Endpoints for Threepid Binding

Last week the spec core team said they'd start focusing on 3 MSCs per week. Those were MSC2290, MSC2176 and MSC1219. The first two have entered FCP, and MSC1219 will roll over into this week.

Thus, the 3 MSCs the spec core team will be focusing on this week will be MSC2199, MSC1219 and an up and coming security-related MSC. Join us in #matrix-spec:matrix.org for related spec discussions :)

There is also a new MSC, MSC2312 describing the proposed Matrix URI scheme. This is a remake of a much older proposal. The general idea is to make a standard for Matrix URIs: matrix:.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse 1.4.0 released

Neil offered:

Synapse This week we shipped our privacy release [1.4.0](https://matrix.org/blog/2019/10/03/synapse-1-4-0-released ) which is a [huge deal in improving user data privacy](https://matrix.org/blog/2019/09/27/privacy-improvements-in-synapse-1-4-and-riot-1-4 ). Additionally we also included a significant perf improvement which will help anyone [suffering from a build up in forward extremities](https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/1760 ).

Coming up, improved room directory perf, ironing out wrinkles in the room upgrade UX as well as a major reliability boost in the sqlite -> Postgres db porting script.

Dendrite dev recommences

anoa said:

Dendrite's latest hiatus has come to a close after the privacy work had taken so much of my time. Thankfully although PR review is blocked on the dendrite team, the community have continued to submit PRs and even review each other's PRs (thanks cnly !).

Fixes this week have mostly focused around the CI. We finally got Dendrite's CI unborked (t'was borked in a half-way transition between CircleCI and Buildkite), but it's now working and faster than ever. We're also working to add the Sytest test failure results to the top of the CI window such that people can see which tests failed and the associated Dendrite logs.

Additionally we had some new and merged PRs this week! A federation fix from cnly, a change to allow Dendrite to better work in kubernetes setups by aditsachde, and a codebase fix from @manasseh:matrix.org, who's also working on another fix involving updating gomatrixserverlib to support more recent spec versions.

Some things people were asking about:

• Progress of dendrite is tracked in Dendrite's milestones. We're currently aiming for #1 (Client-Side) Bot Hosting.
• CI not running for community PRs - Buildkite hosts currently run multiple PRs from many different projects, so we can't trust arbitrary code to run on them quite yet. There's a project in progress to run the code in a sandboxed environment (think VM or container) to lift this restriction :)

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-slack 1.0 released

Half-Shot offered:

Aaaaaaaaaaand shipped 🥳 https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-slack (1.0 is out!)

Check out the announcement post, big congrats to Half-Shot for getting this out.

Bridging animated stickers to mautrix-telegram

tulir said:

mautrix-telegram will soon be able to bridge animated stickers to matrix as images or videos, thanks to a pull request by Eramde.

Dept of Clients 📱

Riot Web 1.4.0

Big release for riot-web, check out their release: https://medium.com/@RiotChat/new-privacy-controls-for-riot-dc3661888563

Riot Android and RiotX

From Benoit:

Riot-Android: 2 main things have landed on develop, to be released early next week:

• Catching up on riot-web new Privacy Controls (choose identity server, stun server, securely compare contacts)
• [fdroid only] A new background sync mode for notifications. You can now choose between 'optimized for battery' and 'optimize for realtime'
  • build available on buildkite

RiotX:

• Read Markers have landed on develop (jump to last read) Focus on stabilization and bug fixes

Continuum

yuforia offered:

Continuum, desktop client written in Kotlin, version 0.9.26:

• Width of columns can be adjusted by dragging, this is a screenshot showing the mouse cursor placed between the first two columns.

• Fix occasional out-of-bounds array access errors while calculating bounds during layout passes.

FluffyWeb: Matrix client with Flutter for Web

@krille:ubports.chat offered:

As a proof of concept, I have created a little Matrix client with Flutter for Web, named FluffyWeb. This client has only basic features but it shows the possibilities of Flutter for Web and it seems to work fine so far. The client has a responsive design and should work on mobile fine too. Check it out at: https://christianpauly.gitlab.io/fluffyweb/ (Not working in Internet Explorer - I recommend the AOL Messenger in this case)

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruby SDK 1.4.0

Ananace said:

Just released version 1.4.0 of the Ruby SDK, the main change in this release is the addition of a naïve set of methods to replace the logger implementation. This should allow the gem to slot more easily into projects where existing logging configuration is already in place.

Dept of Ops 🛠

1.4.0.Mania

With the release of Synapse 1.4.0, there was a rush to get packages and containers updated, the community are always fast, but we should acknowledge Anance for having his k8s images updated within a few minutes!

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi announced:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy has also been updated to support Synapse v1.4.0 and riot-web v1.4.0.

As always, referring to the project's changelog before upgrading is a good idea.

KUDOS to this this project! I love that I can git pull, ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts setup.yml --tags=setup-all without really checking and my toy homeserver is automagically updated.

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

Just pushed the Kubernetes-optimized images for Synapse version 1.4.0

mathijs's docker images

@mathijs:matrix.vgorcum.com reported:

I set up my own docker-hub account to push images of RC's of synapse at mvgorcum/docker-matrix that aren't built for the avhost/docker-matrix repo

Dept of Bots 🤖

msc name linker bot

anoa said:

I made a bot that gives the link for msc names. Code is here: https://github.com/anoadragon453/msc-chatbot

Dept of Welcomes 👐

Welcome to the JRuby team who announced they will be moving their official chat to Matrix.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Let's 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 💭

Mastodon released v3.0.0 - check it out.

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 AMA on /r/privacy happening this weekend

Go check out https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/da219t/im_project_lead_for_matrixorg_the_open_protocol/ and join in asking questions!

First Librem 5 Smartphones are Shipping

Might be interesting to readers: the phone with Matrix at its core is starting to ship: https://puri.sm/posts/first-librem-5-smartphones-are-shipping/.

Fork Awesome includes Matrix icon

Fork Awesome now include the [ m ] as an icon! View it at https://forkaweso.me/Fork-Awesome/icon/matrix-org/

Dept of Spec 📜

Following on from last week, the 3 MSCs the spec core team have chosen to focus on this week are: 2290 (3pid binding endpoints), 2176 (redaction rules), and 1219 (key backups), spurred on by finishing off the spec work for the privacy sprint, and cross signing.

MSC Updates:

News from 2019-09-20 09:00:00 until 2019-09-27 20:07:55.

Merged MSCs

No MSCs have been merged this week.

Final Comment Period

No MSCs have entered FCP this week.

New MSCs

• [WIP] MSC2306: Removing MSISDN password resets
• MSC2299: Proposal to add m.textfile msgtype
• MSC2300: /ping endpoint
• MSC2301: server info endpoint

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse v1.4.0rc1

Neil told us:

This week we put out a release candidate for 1.4.0 which support a whole host of privacy features including greater control over interactions with identity servers, cleaning up redacted events and user meta data (like IPs and user agents) and warning users when they are using the default trusted key server (matrix.org).

Aside from privacy, the thing that is most exciting is switching on our solution for mitigating forward extremities build up by default. It should make a big difference for the CPU of servers in fragmented rooms.

matrix-corporal v1.6.0

Slavi reported:

matrix-corporal v1.6.0 was recently released to address an issue when used in conjunction with Synapse Single-Sign-On login flows (CAS or SAML).

Until now, matrix-corporal used to interfere with /login requests and demand that users always authenticate with a username/password. Since v1.6.0, you can use matrix-corporal for automatic management of users/rooms/communities, while letting authentication happen through SSO (as provided by Synapse).

Dept of Bridges 🌉

famedly-email-bridge

sorunome offered:

famedly-email-bridge should be fully working now! Not only is there a readme now, but also a share of other changes:

• whitelist/blacklist who may use the bridge
• threaded conversation: rooms in which you just send messages as if to chat and the bridge bundles them into emails and sends them off
• invite ghosts to a room to start a threaded conversation
• incoming emails in email rooms have a link to reply to, starting a threaded conversation
• email templates for sending emails: add a header or footer, if you want
• sanitize incoming HTML to make sure it is only matrix' subset

New Twilio bridge: mautrix-twilio

Tulir told us:

https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-twilio / #twilio:maunium.net is now a thing. Message (+formatting) and media bridging works. Unlike all my other bridges, this one is a relaybot-style bridge.

I'm also working on a maubot that accepts invites, announces them in a control room and then invites people from that control room when requested. That bot should be ready NWIM.

matrix-appservice-slack 1.0.0-rc3

Half-Shot reported:

The slack bridge got an RC3 today and it is now LIVE on matrix.org!! This brings in a whole host of new changes like speedups for message processing, typing notifications and more reliable edits/reactions/replies. Since the 1.0 release required a migration of data files, we have made every effort to migrate integrations across. If you find that your slack bridge (hosted on matrix.org) is no longer working, please contact me

matrix-appservice-irc 0.13.0

Half-Shot told us:

Hi folks, the IRC bridge has finally gotten its 0.13.0 release this morning. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases contains all the juicy details

Bifrost resumed

Half-Shot offered:

Work on Bifrost has resumed! We're doing our best to refactor and replace bits that were hacked together at the start of the year and really improve on reliability and documentation. The official matrix.org bridge awaiting our work on PostgreSQL before we can move it further, but the project is accelerating :) https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-bifrost/tree/develop

Dept of Clients 📱

"riot-vim"

maze reported:

Hello. I made a thing for using the Vim text editor for sending messages in Riot, and a friend suggested I share it here. Here it is: https://gitlab.com/MRAAGH/riot-vim#riot-vim

This thing is bananas - take a look at the gif.

New client library for Elixir: polyjuice_client

uhoreg said:

I have extracted Igor's guts, and have distilled them into a new client library for Elixir: polyjuice_client. I've also started working on a library of Matrix utility functions for Elixir that would be relevant to multiple components (clients, application services, homeservers, identity servers): polyjuice_util.

Continuum 0.9.25

yuforia told us:

Continuum, desktop client written in Kotlin, version 0.9.25:

• Change text color of selected item in room list for higher contrast.

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

koma, the library behind Continuum:

• Force new TCP connection when a SocketTimeoutException occurs in a pooled connection to fix recurrent timeout errors caused by connection reuse.

Fractal 4.2.1

Alexandre Franke reported:

Fractal 4.2.1 got released, with a bunch of updated translations, a crasher fix and a couple of other bug fixes.

Riot Android

benoit told us:

the privacy work is in review. The release will be done soon

RiotX

benoit announced:

RiotX: A big work to stabilize the application and to implement little missing feature has been done. Also Two releases has been done this week. Please refer the the changelog for a (rather) complete list of what has been done (https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/blob/develop/CHANGES.md) Also the read marker feature is in review. There are still remaining bugs which will be fixed before the merge.

RiotX is really coming along, please try it out.

Dept of Ops 🛠

New Synapse Docker Image

Black Hat reported:

I made a docker image for Synapse (again). However, this time it uses PyPy3. It is a drop-in replacement for matrixdotorg/synapse. Anyone is welcomed to test the impact of it on CPU utilization.

OpenSAPS

Stanislav told us:

OpenSAPS (Open Slack APi Server, https://gitlab.com/pztrn/opensaps) is now provides Docker container for ease of use. Just mount /app/opensaps.yaml and you're set. Registry is reachable at https://gitlab.com/pztrn/opensaps/container_registry

Dept of Bots 🤖

matrix-nio project template

anoa offered:

I made a template repository for creating Matrix bots with poljar's matrix-nio: https://github.com/anoadragon453/nio-template! It also has a room: #nio-template:amorgan.xyz.

If you've ever wanted to make a Matrix bot with python, this repository can help you get started.

matrix-fly-paper is now "matrix-fly-swatter", has new scope

serra-allgood offered:

The matrix-fly-paper bot has been renamed to matrix-fly-swatter. On reflection, I realized the original goals for the bot were too ambitious and the project has become an exercise in becoming familiar with the client<->server api. The planned features have been cut back to simply automating sending m.room.server_acl events to several rooms at once. At a later date, planned features may be expanded, but there are other projects I'd have more fun working on in the meantime.

Dept of Ping 🏓

It's the section where 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 🎙

I spoke to Half-Shot about LOTS of topics in bridging, well worth a watch if you're interested in using Slack, IRC and other platforms with Matrix.

Dept of Spec 📜

Approved MSCs

No MSCs have cleared FCP this week.

Final Comment Period

No MSCs have entered FCP this week

In Progress MSCs

• MSC2291: Configuration to Control Crawling

The Spec Core Team is going to try and select 3 MSCs to prioritise per week to work on, in order to not stretch resources too thin and to communicate clearly what it is we're actually up to. More details to follow.

Otherwise this week has been continuing to iterate on existing MSCs, as well as updating the MSC template to rename the "Tradeoffs" section to "Alternatives", and to get rid of "Conclusion" which was always just an unnecessary repeat of the introduction.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Construct

Notes from Jason:

Construct did a round of performance work and pursued some of the easier opportunities with the most effective returns. At present, the biggest performance bottleneck Construct experiences is with I/O, specifically latency from accessing disks in a random pattern. This week a few open opportunities for prefetch pipelines were taken, allowing the server to stream data directly from the disk to the client with minimal buffering. This was implemented in several places, mostly for the /media/ system, and also for the /members lists, improving the performance of requesting the members of a room like #whalepool:ericmartindale.com .

There is one area though that requires a special mention for being an order of magnitude more impactful than any other area where a pipelined stream was placed. We have analyzed the way Riot conducts a room change, and by the simple placement of a prefetch operation when the server receives an im.vector.breadcrumb_rooms, which comes early during the room change, Construct is able to populate the room's timeline significantly faster. That has a compounding effect, as the browser initiates several requests based on (and after) the received timeline data- meaning those responses come significantly faster.

Construct is the community driven Matrix server written in C++ for maximum performance. Swing by #test:zemos.net or https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct/ for more.

Synapse

Neil said:

Synapse This week, lots of hacking but not much in the way of news. We’ve been focusing on more privacy improvements as well as polishing up the SAML integration. Next week, expect a wodge of privacy related features to land.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Matrix Slack bridge 1.0 RC2

Half-Shot said:

The Matrix Slack bridge has had another release candidate this week. 1.0 RC2 is out now. We've rewritten the codebase in Typescript and made many changes, and need your feedback before release so please do not hold back on testing it! The 1.0 release is slated to arrive sometime next week :)

famedly-email-bridge - new email bridge!!

sorunome told us:

Presenting famedly-email-bridge, a new email bridge! It is still early in development but can already send and receive emails.

Features so far:

• Receive emails by a prefix (e.g. [email protected], [email protected])
• Send emails with said prefix
• Receiving emails parses plain body, html body and attachments
• Sending emails collects all messages for a given amount of time. After that it creates an email based on that! Supports edits, redactions and files (image, video, audio, file)!

Things planned for the future:

• Route emails to channels based on threading (reply-chain)
• Send emails by making a new channel and inviting an email ghost and just sending messages!

IRC bridge progress: postgres

Half-Shot told us:

My other news that I forgot to mention is that I have a branch of the IRC bridge that runs off postgres, rather than flat file storage. It's much less memory/cpu intensive and might even offer a bit of a speedup :)

For ref: The current room/user store files for the freenode bridge take up 250MB when stored to disk. The existing storage system works on the principle of loading the whole datastore into memory and periodically saving to disk. Hopefully by not requiring the bridge to load all the state into memory, there are savings to be made.

mautrix-telegram v0.6.1

Tulir told us:

mautrix-telegram v0.6.1 has been released, no changes since the release candidates two weeks ago. mautrix-telegram v0.7.0 is scheduled to be released within 6 weeks.

Also, there's a WhatsApp business API bridge using Twilio in development, though I'm guessing most people won't have any use for that.

Dept of Clients 📱

Continuum progress

yuforia said:

Continuum desktop client written in pure Kotlin, version 0.9.24:

• Non-square avatar images are scaled up and cropped to fit a square, instead of being scaled down and put into a square.
• Scale avatar images when font size is increased/decreased with Ctrl and +/-. Below is a screenshot of Continuum with UI scaled to be 67% larger.
• After signing-in, open the messaging view each time it's launched instead of showing the login view and requiring one extra click.
• Shutdown background threads and close database so it won't be busy if Continuum is closed and immediately re-launched.

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

Riot Web

Ryan offered:

Riot Web worked on the last remaining bits of the current privacy sprint. We are planning to do a release soon that includes this privacy work from the last few months. We are also working on a few improvements for first time users around the create room dialog. We also shipped several patch releases (1.3.5 and 1.3.6) to fix high priority bugs.

Riot-iOS

Manu said:

Riot-iOS has made some progress on the privacy sprint. We fixed some major issues with VoiceOver. Those fixes will be released soon in a hot fix release: 0.9.5.

Riot Android

Benoit:

Riot Android: Still working on privacy

RiotX

Benoit reported:

A release has been done (0.5.0) with login with SSO support. There is also a new "no network" indicator, which is a bit bugged, we will fix that. Stabilization sprint is still ongoing. We already have fixed quite a lot of issues. François is still working on the read marker and is also fixing issues related to the permalinks.

krombel reported:

It might be interesting to some of you that the F-Droid repo for RiotX is finally working again. There was an issue with buildkite which in the end led to the situation that the built apk had a lower versionCode as the apps already in the repo. The repo was then "intelligent enough" to no offer it as update. benoit was able to resolve that so the repos are updating again.

Dept of Ping 🏓

New!! A new section where we will 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 💭

Slack have invented bridging, very creative of them.

Nico has reappeared, on the tropical island Reunion and is looking again at his Elixir Homeserver project: Plasma.

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 📜

Approved MSCs

• MSC1802: Remove the '200' value from some federation responses

Final Comment Period

No MSCs have entered FCP

In Progress MSCs

• MSC2290: Separate Endpoints for Threepid Binding
• MSC2260: Update the auth rules for m.room.aliases events

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Mozilla trialling Matrix as an IRC replacement

In fact they're having a standoff between Matrix, Mattermost, Rocket.chat and Slack.

We're eager to see the results of this trial, the feedback will be very valuable for everyone regardless of the final outcome. (Though of course, we are optimistic..!)

Keep up with the discussion in various places.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

This week sees us complete the last items on the privacy sprint and we expect a release to land early next week. Aside from that OpenTracing is now live, the configuration tool is ready to go (modulo the new Synapse release) and we’ve been trialling out room directory improvements.

Next week expect Synapse 1.4 to land which will contain privacy sprint support as well as a host of bug fixes and perf improvements.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-slack 1.0.0-rc1

MAJOR milestone for Half-Shot this week!

Hello Twimians! After many weeks of creativity, pain, and slack, the bridge team are proud to present our first release candidate for the slack bridge. This release brings in a ton of new changes that should massively improve the slack<->matrix experience. The headline features are Postgres support, Puppeting, RTM (websocket) support as well as an entirely refactored codebase written in Typescript.

This release has made heavy changes to the schema of the slack bridge and as such we are not recommending that anyone upgrade their existing slack bridge instances to 1.0.0-rc1. A migration script is currently being worked on, but for the time being existing installs should not be upgraded to 1.0.0 release candidates.

matrix-appservice-irc 0.13.0-rc2

Half-Shot announced:

HELLO IRC FANS. Or possibly not irc fans, if you are running a Matrix bridge.. After a long period of not-being-ready the IRC bridge has a new RC, https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.13.0-rc2. Hopefully the last, but time will tell.

Keybase bridge, mega-pre-alpha

Half-Shot reported:

There is also now a keybase bridge

This is ready for testing, room here: #keybase:half-shot.uk

Dept of Clients 📱

Scylla

@daniel:riot.danilafe.com reported:

Hi all! I haven't been around much because our homeserver chugs a little when federation is enabled, but I've got a few updates to share about Scylla, the Elm-based web client for Matrix:

1. There have been a few optimization changes. The naive Elm approach leads to recomputing room names and usernames on every keystroke, which causes huge performance issues in rooms with many users (like #freenode_#haskell!). The new versions of Scylla avoid recomputing room names and message HTML, leading to much better performance in large rooms and rooms where a lot of history is loaded.
2. The recommended fixes in the spec regarding flickering have been implemented, and messages should no longer flicker.
3. "m.notice" and "m.emote" events are now supported
4. There has been a minor visual update to make the interface look a little more consistent and professional.

FluffyChat 11.16

@krille:ubports.chat offered:

We have released FluffyChat 11.16 with minor bug fixes and updated translations. A nice new feature: Messages which contains emojis only are now displayed with a much bigger font. 💕

Continuum 0.9.23

yuforia reported:

Continuum desktop client written in pure Kotlin, version 0.9.23:

• Include Elliptic Curve module to be able to connect to HTTPS servers using ECDSA

• Removed dependency on kotlin-reflect and tornadofx completely and make packaged size about 5 MB smaller, which is a 10% to 20% reduction, depending on the target platform and package format

• In addition to automatic scaling when HiDPI is detected, font size scaling is added. Press Ctrl and + or - to increase or decrease the font size. Font size scaling is not limited to texts, components with their size defined relative to the font size also gets scaled.

• When a image message is clicked, a viewer is opened to provide a closer look. Now the updated viewer is opened in new windows, multiple images can be viewed at once, and interaction with the main window is not blocked. Images also gets scaled when the viewer window is resized.

• Removed borders and backgrounds from 3 buttons and give them a flat appearance.

Fractal

Alexandre Franke told us:

Since last time, Fractal got many translation updates. Current coverage can be seen here. We’re also now disabling the message entry if the user is not allowed to send messages to the room and fixed a crashed when logging out or logging in with the wrong password.

Brawl, new web client from Bruno the Riot dev

Bruno told us:

I've been working occasionally for the past months on a basic matrix web client called Brawl, focusing on performance, offline usage and working on my old phone. I recently got it in still limited, but somewhat useful state. Unsure how much time I'll have to keep working on this regularly, but wanted to share it here anyways. Check it out on https://github.com/bwindels/brawl-chat, there's a GIF of it in action 🙂

Riot Web

From the team:

We’ve made good progress on our first FTUE (First Time User Experience) project: “Improve add & create room”, with only the makeover of the create room dialog remaining. Next week more FTUE projects, and we hope to get some progress on cross-signing, barring any other distractions.

Riot iOS

From the team:

• Finalising privacy
• Release 0.9.4 with support of the new Riot configuration link to quickly customise servers on the authentication screen.

Riot Android

From the team:

• Two minor releases have been made (0.9.5 and 0.9.6), to allow auto configuration of the homeserver in the login screen with a configuration link, and to fix an issue with SSO using Google account.
• Still working on privacy

RiotX (Android)

From the team:

• Working on stabilization. We already have fixed some issues.
• François is still working on ReadMarker
• Benoit is working on saving draft (storing unsent messages)
• Also implementing SSO login and M_CONSENT_NOT_GIVEN error

ALSO: "bashtrix"

Matthew reported:

i wrote a toy client in ~8 lines of bash (thanks to anoa for fixing it up): https://github.com/ara4n/random/blob/master/bashtrix.sh; context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20948530

Dept of Ops 🛠

synapse-simple-antispam now available in matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi offered:

due to the large number of invite-spam attacks and increased interest in the synapse-simple-antispam spam checker module, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now has support for installing and configuring it.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Release Tracking Bot from Ananace

Ananace reported:

Had some free time and ideas this week, so I've improved my release tracking bot to now correctly handle repos mixing full releases as well as tags (lightweight and/or annotated). GitHub's API really sucks in the tags department, so this required a rework to GraphQL queries instead, and it's looking good on that so far. The bot currently still only handles tracking all starred repos of a given account on GitHub, but I'm working on GitLab support, as well as support for tracking arbitrary repos. And a provisioning API is also somewhere on the roadmap,

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil from Synapseland:

This week privacy items have dominated, but we’ve also been edging towards getting our room directory improvements out, shipping a new configuration creator and making further progress on the federation side bus project to improve performance of smaller instances.

We also deployed open tracing on matrix.org, which will help a lot in tracking down all sorts of strange behaviour in the wild and fixing some bugs in the sqlite -> postgres migrator.

Next week we’ll land the room directory improvements, much of the privacy work, and have the configuration creator ready for testing.

Construct

Jason:

Construct added user room listing support so that you can find out what public rooms a user is a member of should they choose to not be invisible. To find out the list of rooms for a user, simply open the room directory in Riot and type a user mxid starting with @...

Construct is implementing the concept of invisibility for users:

The exact mechanism for invisibility is not completely finished but there are obviously some limitations for this feature:

• Only users who are local to the server can set any kind of invisibility. Remote users are always fully listed. One day when the spec has "user's rooms" we would be glad to adhere to an m.user.invisible-etc configuration state event in such a room
• Since there is no federation support for user's rooms list publication, the rooms list for a user is limited to what the server knows (rooms it has seen the user in).

Construct is eager to implement any MSC's regarding user room and group membership listing over the federation.

Construct is written for maximum performance in C++, and is developing rapidly - join #construct:maunium.net for more info.

matrix-media-repo updates for quarantining and purging media

TravisR announced:

matrix-media-repo has received a bunch of updates regarding quarantining and purging media - see the admin docs for more information. There's also an s3 upload bug fix if you're using that.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

GitLab bot to be re-written as a maubot

Tulir announced:

lorico has been rewriting my old GitLab bot to python/maubot: https://github.com/maubot/gitlab/pull/23. Progress on that is looking very good and it'll probably be ready within a week or two.

Check the maubot GH page for more.

mautrix-telegram, small release

Tulir again:

I decided to make a minor mautrix-telegram release with some small fixes, since v0.7.0 will take a while still. v0.6.1-rc2 is out now, the full release will probably happen next week if nobody finds any problems. Main changes:

• Invalid reply fallbacks sent by Riot web in edits are now ignored
• User and portal sync errors are now caught so that the sync command wouldn't fail if one telegram chat disappears.

Dept of Clients 📱

Riot Web

Tidy update from Bruno this week:

This week we were doing the last bits of the privacy work, and fixing bugs and adding a format bar in the new composer (still behind labs flag).

We’ve also been planning the First Time User Experience work, which will start at full speed next week. This is an effort to address some issues that new users hit in the first days of using Riot. See https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/projects/16#card-25137120 and Matthew talking over the details at https://youtu.be/JYsiHSL0lEA?t=710. Letterboxes in the left panel will likely only be removed as part of the new community project though, as we need parts of the new community UX to keep things usable for power users.

Also, if you're using https://riot.im/develop please enable the new composer in Labs, it works well and deserves testing.

Continuum desktop client, many updates

yuforia reported:

Continuum desktop client written in pure Kotlin, version 0.9.20:

• Updated login page appearance
• Added validation to user ID and server address fields
• The server address gets automatically filled with https:// followed by server name when user ID is being typed
• After signing in, the token and server address are automatically saved
• Added progress indicator when being signed in. It doesn't block user from controlling Continuum, pressing Esc will cancel the signing-in process.
• Speed up application start-up by drawing the window and opening the database in parallel. Now the window typically appears within half a second with its size and position on screen restored to be the same as the last time it was opened. The most recently used accounts get loaded and automatically filled within a second.
• Added drop shadow effect to scroll-to-latest-messages button to increase contrast
• Fix: Always retry synchronization after getting a network error. Previous versions didn't retrieve new messages in a timely manner when the network is unreliable. A delay is added if the error is not a time-out to avoid stressing the homeserver.

koma the Kotlin library behind Continuum:

• Fix suspend/hibernate detection. Synchronization is restarted automatically after the computer resumes from sleeping. The reason is that any previously opened connection is unlikely to be still alive, opening new connections reduces delay.

• Fix incorrect interface declaration that caused login to fail

Pattle 0.13.0 released

Wilko said:

A new version has been made available and should soon be on F-Droid, Google Play and TestFlight!

Expect the new version to be on most platforms in 2 days.

It's not the biggest release, but a release nonetheless.

Changes

• Separate public and personal chats
• Use a bullhorn icon for public chats without an avatar
• Fix sync being started multiple times on startup
• Fix the room.member_count error (might require clearing of data)
• Many SDK changes, for features in future releases

Get Pattle

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

Please let me know what you think of the separation of personal and public chats! Currently it's implemented using a bottom navigation bar, but tabs could also be an option (which is closer to what WhatsApp does)

Riot Mobile versions

All teams when I asked responded:

Privacy, privacy and privacy.

Dept of Services 🚀

t2bot.io has 300k MAU

TravisR told us:

t2bot.io has surpassed 300k monthly active users (about 35k daily) 🎉

roughly 250k are (bridged) from Telegram, the rest is from Discord. (there's some very small numbers which include the bots, webhooks, and other tiny bridges, but together they form less than 100 users)

room list viewer tool

joepie91 offered:

Inspired by a question in the Matrix HQ channel, I've built a (rudimentary) room list viewer at https://matrix-rooms.cryto.net/ - you can just enter a homeserver (hostname) and see all the public rooms on it, without needing to log into anything. This might be useful for showing other people what kinds of rooms exist on Matrix!

Dept of Blockchain 🤷‍

OI Chat, Matrix based chat uses blockchain for authentication

@friedger:matrix.org said:

OI Chat has been updated and now connects blockchain users on Blockstack and EOS (and the rest of the matrix universe): https://www.producthunt.com/posts/oi-chat-2 The sever has no passwords or requires permissions by other social account providers, it verifies the authenticity of the user using properties of the blockchain IDs, it names registered on the blockchain.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Matrixmon

Matrixmon new release 0.4.0, featuring Docker image hosted on Docker Hub and an option to specify custom config file location.

Dept of Bots 🤖

matrix-fly-paper: new project for room moderation

@serra:lost-angles.im reported:

matrix-fly-paper is a new bot project intended to help automate server and room moderation. It's currently not ready for any kind of use, as I'm trying out serious TDD and attempting a functional approach to break from my OO training. Feedback is appreciated, stop by #matrix-fly-paper:lost-angles.im to talk shop

If you're interested in such things, there is an existing tutorial on how to use matrix-bot-sdk for exactly this at https://matrix.org/docs/guides/matrix-bot-sdk-room-admin-features.

Dept of Merch 👕

About a month ago we started selling merch at shop.matrix.org, and WOWEE ZOMG we sold a lot of stuff! If you are happy with your purchase I'd love to hear from you - share photos of where you put the stickers or you happily wearing the t-shirt in #twim:matrix.org and I'll make a little collage.

If you are not happy with your purchase then please message me at @benpa:matrix.org and I will try to make it right.

Final thoughts 💭

You should complete this EU-related FOSS survey, and if you wanted to say nice things about Matrix that would be fine by us.

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 📜

Approved MSCs

• MSC1957: Integration manager discovery

Final Comment Period

• MSC2263: Give homeservers the ability to handle their own 3PID registrations/password resets
• MSC2264: Add an unstable feature flag to MSC2140 for clients to detect support

In Progress MSCs

• MSC2246: Asynchronous media uploads
• [WIP] MSC2249: Require users to have visibility on an event when submitting reports
• [WIP] MSC2260: Update the auth rules for m.room.aliases events
• MSC2261: Allow m.room.aliases events to be redacted by room admins
• MSC2244: Mass redactions
• MSC2265: Proposal for mandating lowercasing when processing e-mail address localparts

Notes on the Spec from tulir

I made a few spec proposals: MSC2244: Mass redactions and MSC2246: Asynchronous media uploads. Mass redactions are useful for fighting spam (and bridging telegram deletions) more efficiently. Asynchronous media uploads would make it possible for bridges (like telegram) to handle messages synchronously and thus keep message ordering without blocking all messages behind some media upload.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Erik reported:

• Busy landing the remaining items for the privacy project.
• Reviewing and landing the room stats work Oliver has been busy with before he finishes his internship this week (thanks Oliver!).
• Jorik has been doing the finishing touches to the Synapse installer (which looks awesome fyi).
• We’ve also been looking at a basic message retention implementation in Synapse.
• Finally, Hawkowl had a lot of fun at Kiwi Pycon last week (woo keynote!), and is now back and looking at improving performance of outbound requests.

Construct

Jason from Construct:

Construct added support for server notice rooms. As the server administrator I've placed quick access to the server control room for myself in this section.

Construct has also added support for the server-side commands \\read <room-tag>, for example \\read m.low_priority will mark all low-priority tagged rooms as read. The command \\read * also will mark all rooms as read.

Also, we now allow users to configure whether they transmit typing events by setting state events in their home-room. If a user creates an event with the type of ircd.typing.disable.send and the state_key of the room_id, typing events will not be sent to that room for them. Further variations exist, such as ircd.typing.disable.sync to prevent the client from receiving typing events for a particular room or all rooms.

Learn more in #construct:zemos.net

Matrix Visualisations GSOC project 🎓

Eisha announced:

I've finished my GSoC project "Matrix Visualisations", you can view my final report at this address https://gist.github.com/Kagamihime/d0e7ac434b0d80eb201260d213dea0b7

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mx-puppet-twitter NEW

sorunome reported:

mx-puppet-twitter....do they ever stop?!

Now there is a twitter DM bridge based on mx-puppet-bridge! It uses twitters webhook API to receive direct messages instantly.

So far implemented:

• basic message sending in both directions
• Image, Gif and Video sending (twitter special-cases those) in both directions
• twitter oauth to authenticate

Support room: #mx-puppet-bridge:sorunome.de Donate on liberapay: https://liberapay.com/Sorunome/donate

Jojii email bridge NEW

Jojii announced:

For all those who want a new emailbridge, I have great news for you! The new bridge supports sending and writing emails, using multiple rooms for multiple email-addresses. In addition you can use markup to improve the style of your emailbody, which gets translated to HTML. Here you can find the repository: Matrix-EmailBridge

Go join #jojiiMail:matrix.jojii.de for more.

Big news for the Slack bridges

Half-Shot offered:

The Slack bridge has had a whole week of care applied to it. We've switched the bridge entirely over to Typescript, and overhauled large parts of the codebase to make future work easier (for ex, using the Slack node library rather than request calls). If that's not exciting enough, we've also added support for the RTM API, which means the bridge can use websockets when talking to slack. This gives us nice things like typing updates, and the ability to deploy without needing a webserver to listen for events. Release 1.0 is imminent, but before then we are hoping to land Postgresql support so that the bridge can scale up to meet the high demands placed upon it.

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir told us:

mautrix-whatsapp got a bunch of small fixes and a dbms migration tool.

Dept of Clients 📱

Riot Web

Ironed the bugs out of the new composer, which is available on https://riot.im/develop behind a labs flag. Please test!

Riot iOS

Privacy, privacy and privacy.

Riot Android

A security release has been done on thursday. More details here: https://medium.com/@RiotChat/matrix-android-sdk-security-issue-affecting-riot-android-36b4792ea0d6

In parallel we continued working on privacy.

RiotX (Android)

A release has been done today (v0.4.0). The main new feature is Read Receipts!

Neo Renaming

f0x reported:

I'm considering renaming Neo, to help with getting a nice domain, and better findability in general. Any suggestions welcome in #neo:pixie.town.

Pattle 0.12.0

Wilko told us:

A new version has been pushed to F-Droid, Google Play and TestFlight!

⚠️ This update requires a reinstall or clearing of data ⚠️: Because of some database changes which were not that easy to migrate, you'll have to reinstall the app or clear the data.

Expect the new version to be on most platforms in 2 days, and on Google Play in a few hours.

Changes

• Add a dark theme!
• Add basic settings page
• Add ability to change your own display name
• Allow multiple lines while typing a message
• Render line breaks in messages
• Fix issue where homeserver setting was overridden by the user domain
• Mark new messages as read while chat is opened
• Fix chats being sorted by your own display name change
• Fix multiple issues regarding the member count of room being null
• Use Flutter beta, which means that you can paste in textfields again!

Get Pattle

• Android

  • F-Droid
  • Google Play
  • APK

• 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!

Continuum 0.9.19

yuforia reported:

Continuum the pure Kotlin desktop client

• Provide builds of self-contained executables that have no external dependency. The Linux version has been done. AppImage is used, producing a binary of about 50 MB.
• Adjust appearance. Remove alternating row high-lighting in list views. Remove extra padding between messages.

Quaternion has many visual improvements

kitsune reported:

Thanks to Roland Pallai, Quaternion master branch is now able to use customised fonts and sports a faster timeline, better copying and a few other improvements. Settings dialog window is coming.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

igor: a Matrix bot framework for Elixir

uhoreg offered:

for fans of strange programming languages or of monster movie clichés, I've created a Matrix bot framework for Elixir: https://gitlab.com/uhoreg/igor

Dept of Encryption 🔐

poljar:

Initial code dump of Seshat, a Matrix event indexer/database that should enable search for encrypted rooms in riot-desktop. The dump contains a rust library as well as node bindings. The repo can be found here.

Dept of Ops 🛠

ARM docker images for synapse

Black Hat told us:

Apparently there are no ARM docker images for synapse, so I built a multi-arch synapse docker image. Supported CPU architectures include armv7, aarch64 and amd64.

Dept of Bots 🤖

tulir:

There's a useless new maubot plugin that lets you run python and soon shell scripts from Matrix. Not intended as a public bot as it doesn't have any sandboxing, but it does have a "userbot" mode to run it under your own account so that you can use it in any room.

Slightly mean to call your own bot useless :(

Final thoughts 💭

If you've suffered from invite spam lately, you can solve the problem by following these instructions:

There's 3 methods to block the room:

1. Use the synapse admin API for it:

curl -s -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"new_room_user_id":"@abuse:YOUR_SERVER.org"}' 'https://YOUR_SERVER/_matrix/client/unstable/admin/shutdown_room/!BAD_ROOM:example.org'

2. Block the room with an antispam module ( https://github.com/t2bot/synapse-simple-antispam )
3. Ignore the user with /ignore

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 🌡

Installing Matrix @ CCCamp 2019

It's CCCamp 2019 this weekend. Tonight, anoa will be leading an "Install Synapse" workshop in the Librehosters Village- keep decentralisation growing!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil:

This week we’ve been working on getting our brand new room directory implementation ready, creating a new Synapse installer, and creating a TURN server testing tool. We’ve also been pushing on with the privacy project and fixing up some bugs and perf issues.
Next week it’s all about getting the room directory out of the door, shipping the installer and continuing on with the privacy project. We are in the early stages of a project designed to reduce the load caused by outbound SSL connections, it is looking very promising. We’re also going to give the sqlite->postgres porting script some love as well as working on some message retention ideas, and also ways to reduce the meta data we store.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-facebook updated

Tulir announced:

the adding portal rooms to user-specific communities feature that appeared in mautrix-whatsapp and mautrix-hangouts last week is now also available in mautrix-facebook

Gitter bridge is back

Half-Shot offered:

The gitter bridge is back to working order again today! We've made changes so that Gitter side admins can now issue a !matrix kick|ban name command to evict users who are causing issues, rather than relying on reports or matrix side admins.

matrix-appservice-bridge library 1.10.0

Half-Shot reported:

The matrix-appservice-bridge library also saw its 1.10.0 release this week, which has experimental support for bridge errors and also has a bugfix related to room upgrades.

Discord bridge will soon use matrix-bot-sdk

Half-Shot said:

Finally, the discord bridge has very nearly switched to Travis's bot SDK stuff. We are very close to a release, so please stand by :)

Dept of Clients 📱

Riot Web

From the team:

• Work on privacy.
• We’ve also been continuing the work on the new message composer implementation. Features are still missing, but this has now landed behind a labs flag on /develop. We’d be especially interested in feedback whether typing with an IME (Chinese, Japanese, …) works better than before.

Riot iOS && Riot Android

From the team:

• Working on privacy:
• Working on identity server v2 API

RiotX (Android)

From the team:

• Read receipt work has been merged to develop. We will release next week, after a small UI iteration
• François is working on Read Markers

Riot with Math support

Tim offered:

I've hosted a version of riot with the changes from https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3251 (for math support) built in so that people can test/use it if they want. It can be found at https://www.pigeon.digital — please do let me know about any bugs you may find!
there is now a room specifically for the LaTeX fork hosted on www.pigeon.digital where you can leave any feedback, report any bugs, or ask for any help: #pigeon.digital:matrix.org

Pattle 0.11.0 released

Wilko reported:

A new version has been pushed to F-Droid, Google Play and TestFlight!

Pattle is now available on Google Play and the official F-Droid repository!

⚠️ F-Droid users ⚠️: The old repository (fdroid.pattle.im) is gone! Please use the official F-Droid repository.

Expect the new version to be on most platforms in 2 days (however, Google Play in a few hours).

Changes

• Fix UI not updating on sync!

• Add ability to send images from your gallery!

• Use Material Design on iOS (although with slight changes to fit iOS)

• Reporting errors to Sentry is now optional, you can choose so at login time

  I do urge everyone to enable it to help me develop Pattle!

• Show a dialog with the option to choose between register and login if the server does not have the ability to check for username availability

• Show notification count in chat overview

  Default notifications will be grey, highlighted notifications will be red.

  Chats with unread notifications will always show on top.

• Send read markers and receipts when a chat is opened for 2 seconds

• Add ability to show password while logging in

• Pattle will now show up as 'Pattle Android' or 'Pattle iOS' in the device list

• Decrease spacing between items

• Fix spacing of messages when sending a new message

• Numerous other fixes

Get Pattle

• Android
  • F-Droid
  • Google Play
  • APK
• 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!

Support me

If you would like to support me, you can do so via Liberapay and Patreon!

'matrixcli', new client enables Matrix as a unix util

Very interesting project: matrixcli is a versatile command line client using the matrix-python-sdk. It's not a conventional IM client, rather it exposes access to Matrix rooms so you can pipe to them as you would other Unix utils.

Continuum progress

yuforia offered:

Continuum

• Handle key mappings and mouse mappings in a more idiomatic way
• Updated appearance, spacing and alignments. https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/glNXYasGpmkWJBNYBtUCqgYO

Fractal Progress

Fractal, the GNOME client, continues to progress:

• fractal-gtk: Migrate to GtkSourceView4
• autocompletion-popover: Fix misplacement on small window widths
• Backend-API: Split request building and parsing from singleton
• directory: Remove duplicate entries for rooms

Neo refactoring progress

f0x told us:

Neo's refactoring is almost done, with the latest changes being css-modulesifying the old stylesheet
We're also looking for nice domain name suggestions, to house the soon to be redesigned project page

Dept of Encryption 🔐

libQuotient E2E Progress (GSOC 🎓)

aa13q reported:

The GSoC is soon coming to the end this year and I'm happy no announce that receiving of the encrypted messages PR is here! https://github.com/quotient-im/libQuotient/pull/346 A significant amount of work still needs to be done (session storage, sending messages, device handling, attachments). And I'm interested to implement it after the summer period since I've already dived into the subject :) Here's the small demo of the receiving messages process: https://youtu.be/gGykLh4mVDg

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Matrix-ClientServer-API-java

Jojii created a new Java-based implementation of the Matrix CS API: Matrix-ClientServer-API-java, they call it "A small and simple java API for the Matrix ClientServer Protocol".

They created Matrix-Grep-Bot using the API.

Dept of Ops 🛠

flexible ansible role just for synapse

JCG offered:

For people looking for a rather flexible ansible role just for synapse, https://gitlab.com/famedly/ansible/synapse got your back. You can use it to deploy synapse with pip or docker, depending on what you prefer for your host. It's an actively maintained fork of https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ansible-synapse, which has been archived recently and was unmaintained for a while before that. It's just been updated to v1.3.1 too.

New Bridges for matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi offered:

The matrix-docker-ansible-deploy Ansible playbook has gained new bridging capabilities:

• thanks to Eduardo Beltrame (Munfred) and Robbie D (microchipster), support has been added for bridging to Google Hangouts via the mautrix-hangouts bridge. Learn more in: Setting up Mautrix Hangouts bridging.

• thanks to kingoftheconnors and Stuart Mumford (Cadair), support has been added for bridging to Slack via the appservice-slack bridge. Learn more in: Setting up Appservice Slack bridging.

This increases the number of services/protocols that the playbook can setup bridging for to 8: Telegram, Whatsapp, Facebook, Google Hangouts, IRC, Discord, Slack and Email. Learn more in Bridging other networks.

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy gets support for all Synapse config options

Slavi offered:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now harness the full power of Synapse, thanks to our newly-added support for Extensible Synapse configuration.

Dept of Bots 🤖

New /health maubot

Ananace announced:

Just built a quick maubot plugin to add a /health endpoint to maubot, so that database failures and other brokenness can be tracked and dealt with appropriately.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

In which Matthew talks about:

Synapse

• perf speedup
• installer
• turn tester
• extremities fix by default
• security work
• privacy work

Riot

• privacy; IS and IM permissions and management. Hashed lookup API. Metadata cleanup (GCing redactions; deleting media; history retention); TURN management
• aggregations paused
• FTUE next up
• Cross-signing
• Immutable DMs
• ...then communities

RiotX

• 0.3 came out last week - handles DMs; lots of polishing; reduces the APK down to ~10MB!

Bridges

• moving stuff into proper managed infrastructure
• bifrost should be back soon?
• gitter kept breaking but we're actually working with their team to fix that
• working out how to automate deploying them on modular hosts

Dept of Spec 📜

Approved MSCs

No MSCs have been approved.

Final Comment Period

• MSC2229: Allowing 3PID Owners to Rebind
• MSC2230: Store Identity Server in Account Data
• MSC2010: Add client-side spoilers
• MSC2197: Search Filtering in Federation /publicRooms

In Progress MSCs

• MSC2228: Self destructing events
• MSC2233: Unauthenticated Capabilities API

Dept of Servers 🏢

Ruma

Jimmy reported:

This Week in Ruma: https://ruma.dev/news/this-week-in-ruma-2019-08-11/

He was also a guest of the Rustacean Station podcast this week:

Ruma and the Matrix Communication Protocol: An Interview with Jimmy Cuadra (Rustacean Station podcast): https://rustacean-station.org/episode/001-ruma/

Construct CS API progress

Jason said:

Construct implemented event relations from the client-server API. Now clients can view edit history of messages.

Learn more in #construct:zemos.net

Dendrite

anoa:

Progress for Dendrite this week has been a bit starved due to ongoing privacy work from the backend team. However it continues to move forwards with the excellent help of cnly reviewing and merging PRs.

We had 3 authors have pushed 5 commits to master and 6 commits to all branches. On master, 14 files have changed and there have been 298 additions and 121 deletions.

Notably we had trion129’s work on providing a fallback webpage for recaptcha authentication finally merged! This was another early PR that was dragged up from the bottom of the list to be modernised and integrated into the current codebase.

Also this week was some work from cnly on refactoring gomatrixserverlib and exposing some more of its internal constants to deduplicate code between itself and Dendrite.

Finally, we had some more work on an unmerged PR from cnly, which adds some internal query APIs for which servers are currently joined to a room, for use by other components later down the line.

No new Sytests are passing this week. We’re still currently at 172 tests passing out of 761 tests in total.

Matrixmon updated

Matrixmon, the perl C2S testing utility has been updated to v0.2.0 with support for SSL connections.

Synapse

Synapse 1.3.0 was released - check out the blog post.

contains performance improvements to reduce disk I/O and reduce RAM usage. We’ve been running it on matrix.org for a week or so and are really pleased with the results.

Ananace's k8s tooling, Slavi's matrix-docker-ansible-deploy and andrewsh's Debian packages were all updated within an hour of release, which is a great community achievement. 👏

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Major mautrix-* bridges update

tulir said:

mautrix-telegram got some fixes to bugs that appeared during the move to mautrix-python. It also got a manhole similar to the one in synapse, which gives admins access to an interactive Python shell inside the bridge while it's running. The main part of the manhole (server and repl) is in mautrix-python, so you can expect the feature to appear in mautrix-facebook, mautrix-hangouts and possibly maubot in the future.

mautrix-whatsapp and mautrix-hangouts can now automatically add rooms to a user-specific community to help with filtering. mautrix-facebook is also getting that feature in the near future.

mautrix-facebook now has a search command, which means you can now actually initiate conversation with facebook users.

Dept of Clients 📱

Riot Web

From the team:

• Privacy work continues
• STUN fallback server for assisting with voice & video call negotiation (only used when your homeserver is not configured with it’s own TURN server) changed from Google to Matrix.org server and a prompt has been added to request permission before using the fallback server
• Many small steps towards supporting user choice of identity servers and integration managers, including no identity server at all

Bluepill (Sailfish client) status update

Cy8aer said:

Users can now download artifacts from my gitlab account since I got an SDK container from CoDerus running, cross compiling to Sailfish-RPMs in the Gitlab-Ci. But my programming progress on master looks a bit silent because I swap to matrix-nio.

Fractal

Alexandre Franke told us:

Fractal nightlies are building again.

Continuum

yuforia told us:

Continuum:

• Reimplement ScrollBar for the message list view to make it more consistent with Riot Web. It has a flat appearance now and only appears when the mouse hovers over the list of messages. https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/kVfBsoAsguMmESNThxnUmaTM
• Rewrite the list view partially to handle lists with several types of items more efficiently. The message list has text messages, images, membership updates, etc. Each type needs to be rendered differently, but items of the same type could reuse GUI components when they scroll into and out of view.

Dept of Ops 🛠

K8s optimized images of Synapse RCs

Ananace offered:

Since the coming 1.3.0 release is bringing along a whole bunch of perf improvements, (and I want to test them out on my IO starved setup) I'm building K8s optimized images of the RCs. Only the debian version of the image though.

They expanded:

It's basically the regular docker image, only with some changes to make it fit nicer in Kubernetes
And there's no Helm chart at the moment, was poking at that for a bit but took a break from building one as I - back then - had trouble with the amount of data that had to be generated
You can only have one Synapse pod at any given time, as it's not scalable. Though you can scale it with workers (as I do myself)
Database-wise, I'm personally running three node HA clusters using Stolon

Dept of Services 🚀

New public instance: Permaweb.io

swedneck said:

We run a public instance on Permaweb.io for everyone to join. We’re a large community of developers focusing on the decentralized web, with lots of channels dedicated to IPFS. In fact, we even host Riot on IPFS! We make full use of Matrix’s bridging capabilities, to Discord, IRC, Slack, Gitter and Telegram too! Come join us at #general:permaweb.io or register at https://riot.permaweb.io/ (or any other compatible client) and say hi!

Dept of Bots 🤖

Notification/Remind-Me-Bot using matrix-bot-sdk

Anton (@antonivan:matrix.org) is working at Matrix Towers this summer for work experience. He's been learning about Matrix and matrix-bot-sdk:

This week I made a Notification/Remind-Me-Bot using Travis's bot sdk, it took me 1 and half days, and is able to - set reminder, check reminder, cancel reminder, set interval reminder, cancel interval reminder. It is also able to store multiple reminders and cancel them using the numbers 1 - ∞ . Here is a link to my Github repo - https://github.com/joakimvonanka/Matrix-Remind-me-bot

Dept of Event Videos 📹

Matrix talk @ FrOSCon

Oleg's talk at FrOSCon was apparently really well received:

Video recording from the Matrix talk @ FrOSCon. Video is in German slides in English.

• Video: https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2019-2330-matrix
• Slides: https://programm.froscon.de/2019/system/event_attachments/attachments/000/000/579/original/presentation.pdf
• Channel: #FrOSCon:fiksel.info

He's also thinking of writing a guide to creating presentations:

If someone is interested on an efficient way of creating presentation using only open source tools I'm planing to write an article on that.
Small spoiler: matrix is one of them 😉

Final Thoughts 💭

This week, I have been mostly thinking about... merch. We blew the cache on stickers, so if you are waiting for stickers specifically and have not heard from me, that is probably why. Please contact me with any questions!

That's all I know 🏁

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