This Week in Matrix

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This Week in Matrix 2019-09-06

06.09.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix Ben Parsons

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.

continuum

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

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)

Pattle

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!

This Week in Matrix 2019-08-30

30.08.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix Ben Parsons

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Approved MSCs

Final Comment Period

In Progress MSCs

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

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.

Continuum

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'
  1. Block the room with an antispam module ( https://github.com/t2bot/synapse-simple-antispam )
  2. 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!

This Week in Matrix 2019-08-23

23.08.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix Ben Parsons

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!

CCC poster

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

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!

Pattle

'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

Fractal Progress

Fractal, the GNOME client, continues to progress:

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:

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!

This Week in Matrix 2019-08-16

16.08.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix Ben Parsons

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

In Progress MSCs

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.

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!

This Week in Matrix 2019-08-09

09.08.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix Ben Parsons

Matrix Live

Something a little different this week: Erik helped me install Prometheus logging on my own homeserver, and we recorded it for Matrix Live.

Interesting reading: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/docs/metrics-howto.rst

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

The Official Merch Store

<blink>YOU NEED MATRIX MERCH</blink>

Yes, it's true: Official Matrix Merch is available now. There are stickers, t-shirts and hoodies all available now, go and claim yours from https://shop.matrix.org.

stickers

<blink>CONSUME</blink>

Free Open Source Conference appearance from Oleg

Oleg:

I will be doing a talk on Matrix this weekend (tomorrow) at the annual Free Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) in Sankt Augustin (Germany). If you are around - come by and get some awesome [matrix] stickers! =)

https://programm.froscon.de/2019/events/2330.html

Visit #FrOSCon2019:froscon2019.fiksel.info to talk about the event.

Dept of Spec 📜

Approved MSCs

[MSC 2134]: MSC2134: Identity Hash Lookups 🎉

Final Comment Period

No MSCs have entered FCP

In Progress MSCs

[MSC 2213]: Rejoinability of private/invite-only rooms [MSC 2214]: Joining upgraded private rooms

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite

Huge update from Andrew:

This week’s stats for Dendrite are in! 4 authors have pushed 11 commits to master and 11 commits to all branches. On master, 48 files have changed and there have been 676 additions and 146 deletions.

Of note are the following merged PRs:

We also have a number of PRs that were moved forward but not merged. Add auth fallback endpoint (our oldest PR at the moment!) which we mentioned last week is so very close, but not quite there in time for this TWIM.

In terms of passing Sytests, Dendrite now passes 172 tests, up from 167 last week. This is out of 761 tests in total. So just a small bump (0.6%), but note that things that are crucial for Dendrite development at the moment, such as federating, only cover a small subset of tests, so each passing one can bring us much closer to getting Dendrite usable day-to-day.

Synapse

From Neil:

The big news this week we’ve landed some massive DB improvements (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5706) which should make message sending on matrix.org (and any other server) feel noticeably snappier. :) It'll be in the next release.

Outside of perf, we’ve also been continuing with our privacy project, sydent now supports hashing third party identifiers instead of storing the raw form, and in the coming week we’ll look at minimising the meta data we store. You can track our progress across the full project here (https://vector-im.github.io/feature-dashboard/#/plan?label=privacy-sprint&repo=matrix-org/synapse&repo=vector-im/riot-web&repo=vector-im/riot-ios&repo=vector-im/riot-android&repo=vector-im/riotX-android&repo=matrix-org/matrix-doc&repo=matrix-org/sydent)

Work continues on our installer to make it easier to configure Synapse and we’ll be looking for some community feedback rsn. The room directory revamp is now very close and we hope to have something live on matrix.org in about a week.

Finally we’re working on improving the efficiency of smaller instances sending messages into large rooms, we’re still at the design stage, but it will make a huge difference for anyone self hosting.

andrewsh also informs us:

synapse in up-to-date in Debian unstable — and in buster-backports (uploaded last week)

Ruma

This Week in Ruma: https://ruma.dev/news/this-week-in-ruma-2019-08-04/

Also, get live-streamed Ruma development: https://www.jimmycuadra.com/posts/twitch-live-streams-of-ruma-development/

Does the video include time spent waiting for async to land in Rust?

signaller - new "lightweight server"

ChronosX88 announced that he is "developing a lightweight Matrix server" - check on their progress at https://github.com/signaller-matrix/signaller, also join #signaller_dev:netwhood.online.

TravisR announces various unstable interesting things

TravisR:

If you fancy running highly experimental software on your homeserver which might break things, I have two things for you:

  1. matrix-key-server ( #matrix-key-server:t2bot.io ) is an implementation of a Matrix key server with notary support. Although it follows the specification, it has not been tested against Synapse. It is however fully featured: check it out on the federation tester ( https://federationtester.matrix.org/#keys.t2host.io ) or by querying it yourself ( https://keys.t2host.io/_matrix/key/v2/query/matrix.org ).

  2. matrix-room-directory-server ( #matrix-room-directory:t2bot.io ) is less experimental than the key server but is still very early days. Currently it only offers the ability to manipulate the federated public room directory for your server, but in future it is planned to be its own standalone directory server (room aliases without having to run a whole homeserver). Check it out by searching the t2bot.io room directory from your client.

Dept of Clients 📱

Continuum progressing!

I love getting updates from yuforia - they've been consistently working on Continuum for some time, and by increments are making a great client.

Reuse the ListView of messages across different rooms to reduce memory usage (Experimental) Remember and refocus the last read message, making it easier to go through all unread messages while switching chat rooms freely.

QMatrixClient is now Quotient

kitsune:

Renaming of QMatrixClient to Quotient has been finally merged to the master branch; Quaternion master uses it from now, too. Packagers are welcome to make test builds and report bugs in #quotient:matrix.org. libQuotient 0.6 beta is coming close now!

Riot iOS

  • Test on iOS 13 Beta. Beta 6 fixed most bugs discovered on Beta 5
  • Released 0.9.2 (Waiting for Apple review at the time of writing)
  • Working on privacy concern.

Riot Android

  • Working on privacy concern.

RiotX (Android)

Dept of Identity 🛂

ma1sd 2.1.1

ma1uta announced ma1sd release 2.1.0:

Changes: reworked unbind (MSC1915).

Now ma1sd is compliant with the MSC1915 (unbind).

and then 2.1.1:

ma1sd release 2.1.1 with the security fix and more strict request validation, allows only requests from ma1sd's matrix domains (mirroring bind). Download links: https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.1.1 (archives and the deb package) and https://hub.docker.com/r/ma1uta/ma1sd for docker image.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-facebook, mautrix-telegram and the tulirverse

tulir has been making big updates to two of his bridges:

mautrix-facebook can now bridge formatting, mentions, replies and reactions in both directions.

There is also a logout command now.

mautrix-telegram's switch to mautrix-python is nearly finished (i.e. it didn't cause any errors for the past few days when testing in production). The main reason for the switch is using one Matrix library for all my python bridges. It also means the bridging code like double puppeting and command handling I shared between mautrix-facebook and mautrix-hangouts is now also used in mautrix-telegram.

Visible changes directly caused by using mautrix-python:

  • Logs are now colorful.
  • Python 3.5 is no longer supported.
  • The bridge will refuse to start without access to the base config file.

Other changes that happened during the switch:

  • Telegram "Saved Messages" can now be bridged even when using double puppeting.
  • Mentions on Telegram are marked as read when using double puppeting (messages were already being marked as read, but mentions weren't).

Also, this actually happened last week and the week before that, but anyway: I've moved the CI and docker registry of my active projects to a self-hosted GitLab at mau.dev. Specifically, the CI/docker registry for all four mautrix bridges and maubot and automatic builds for gomuks have been moved. My maubot plugins also have automatic .mbp builds in the CI. For the docker registry, prepending dock.mau.dev/ to the existing image names will work. The old places (docker hub, dl.maunium.net) won't get new builds anymore. The repos on GitHub are still the "canonical" repos, but they're mirrored more or less instantly with maumirror.

He adds:

mautrix-telegram will probably get some sort of history filling in the near-ish future

Also,

I'm going to add some way to put bridged rooms into personal communities for filtering purposes. Not yet sure if it'll be fully built into the bridges or some kind of an external script

IRC bridge RC

Half-Shot:

Hi folks, we've released a RC of the next irc bridge version. Check it out at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.13.0-rc1

Email2Matrix

Slavi, famed for his ansible playbooks, announced:

I've just released Email2Matrix - an SMTP server that can relay incoming messages over to Matrix based on mappings defined in a configuration file.

While it can also be installed standalone and work with any Matrix homeserver (see its documentation), the simplest way to install it is using matrix-docker-ansible-deploy and its guide for Email2Matrix installation.

The configuration process (users, rooms, mappings) is quite manual, but it's simple and has worked well for me for the past year and a half. I've only just polished it up a bit, released and integrated with the Ansible playbook, so others could benefit from it too.

matrix-xmpp-filter

mijutu appeared, and announced:

I started a "matrix-xmpp-filter" project. It's like matrix-ircd, but with xmpp instead of irc. It can also filter messages by weekday, time and regular expressions. Target audience is Sailfish phone users, but it could be used with other xmpp clients too (no xmpp MUC support required). https://k2c42.dy.fi/matrix-xmpp-filter.git/ #matrix-xmpp-filter:ellipsis.fi.

matrix-github (GH issues bridge)

Half-Shot:

https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-github has had quite a few updates. Notably:

  • Support for storing users access tokens securely, using a bot command.
  • Multi-process bridging: The webhook portion of the bridge can be run in a separate function if needed for performance.
  • Images and mentions now work in both directions
  • The readme is now actually helpful, and have also made *.sample.yaml files.
  • You can now use it via oauth

Dept of Ops 🛠

Ananace:

Currently working on a Puppet module to manage Matrix Synapse installs (both directly and through docker), not quite ready for prime-time yet but watch this spot.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Voice to text bot

progserega announced:

I develop matrix Bot, which converting voice messages to text. It use Yandex Speech API and Yandex API cloud (some as aws) for temporary store voice-data before converting. https://github.com/progserega/voice2textMatrix Bot have such logic:

  1. user add bot to room (for example room with whatsapp bridge users - now bridge support adding bot to such rooms)
  2. bot listen room, and when get voice-message - send it to Yandex-cloud for translate (now support only Russian language).
  3. When translating is success - bot get result text and show it in room as notice, such: "Username said: text"
  4. Bot also receive some command, which allow disable it in this room, or disable translating for user, which send command..

Seeing this, I wondered, "y tho?", luckily progserega was able to explain with a graphic! They say a picture paints a thousand words, and it's clear from the conversation below why he'd want to have speech-to-text capabilities.

Speech to Text

Dept of Services 🚀

The Modular Matrix -> Matrix migration tool now supports migration of power levels to the new user.

That's all I know 🏁

So that's all I have to say to you right now! See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

This Week in Matrix 2019-08-02

02.08.2019 23:35 — This Week in Matrix Ben Parsons
Last update: 02.08.2019 20:23

Matrix Live

I chatted to Rick about the new Small instances available on modular.im.

Dept of Spec 📜

Approved MSCs

No MSCs have been approved.

Final Comment Period

In Progress MSCs

(kudos to anoa for providing this well-formatted summary section)

KaTeX rendering support

Tim:

there's now a pull request in for full native math rendering support (via KaTeX), which will replace the shoddy bot that I made last week (or whenever)
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3251

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

This week we’ve been working on implementing identifier hashing in sydent, a brand new installer for Synapse, we’ve trialled some new db perf improvements which look very promising (more on this soon) and finally very close to an all new implementation of room search.

Next week we’ll push out the all new Sygnal, continue with the installer and room search and pick up some tasks under our privacy umbrella to ensure that Synapse is not holding onto any data that it does not strictly need to.

Dendrite

anoa:

Dendrite progress marches forwards. This week we had:

  • Room tagging implemented (thanks peekay_46!)
  • A PR for redactions opened by our GSoC student cnly
  • A PR for authentication fallback (for when clients don’t have a web browser built in and want to use recaptcha from trion129
    • This has been in the works for a while, and just has a couple small changes left to go!
  • Two PRs for filtering database functionality from CromFr
  • A PR for fixing the scope of transaction IDs in Dendrite’s transaction cache from cnly

Cnly’s GSoC period ends on August 26th. He has been a massive boon to the project’s cadence so far and we hope he will continue even after GSoC ends when he has time :)

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🏗

koma, Kotlin Library

yuforia has this update about koma, the library used to power continuum:

Provide automatic deduplication and rate-limiting when downloading media resources. This improves performance of GUI applications, where avatars of many users may appear on screen at once, and some of them may be identical.

libQuotient

kitsune:

libQuotient's master branch now supports sending and receiving reactions, and receiving message edits. We also have another PR in the works from aa13q that would add support for events decryption, as a part of his GSoC endeavour.

Dept of Clients 📱

Fractal 4.2 released

Alexandre Franke announced a new edition of Fractal:

Nightlies of Fractal are currently stuck on a 2 weeks old build because of one of our dependencies… but the long awaited 4.2 stable release is out! You can get it out fresh from flathub as usual.

Changelog:

New features:

    Adaptive window, mobile friendly
    Window size and position are remembered
    Redesigned login
    Spellcheck
    Network proxy support
    Typing notifications
    Badges are shown for operators and moderators
    Keyboard shortcuts for easier navigation across rooms

Better uploads:

    Audio and video files are now tagged correctly
    Image files have a thumbnail
    Various tweaks to the file chooser

Bugfixes:

    Logs actually output something now
    A few issues with invites and direct chats have been resolved
    More reliable scrolling
    Some crashes fixed

Under the hood:

    Code refactor continues
    We’re now using Rust 2018
    Many improvements to the build system and CI

Neo huge update!

joepie91:

Lots of news about Neo!

  • There's now an additional maintainer (joepie91)!
  • A lot of the internals have been refactored, so they should be more maintainable and reliable going forward. Also some future work planned on refactoring the state handling using Redux, which should make it much faster to fix issues and add new features in the future. There are even some ideas already for a future plugin API!
  • Display has been improved in a lot of places. Error messages are now more clearly formatted, images in reply-quotes are now shown as thumbnails rather than just a filename, and the reply-to popup now shows the full event that you're replying to properly. The chat window now correctly sticks to the bottom when you're scrolled to the end and receive new messages, even when an image or video loads - though per-room scroll position restoration isn't done yet.
  • There's now an experimental compact mode! It uses a more IRC-client-like layout for messages, and generally just fits more content onto the screen. It can be enabled with an experimental flag. A screenshot of the compact mode can be found here.

You can try the compact mode at https://neo.pixie.town/app/?compactMode=true.

Riot Web

Message editing composer now supports undo/redo.

Riot iOS

  • Reactions: List of who reacted
  • Native Camera. The embedded camera view has been removed. There is now a new action “Take photo and video”
  • Privacy: We have been working on implementing terms to display before using integrations

Riot Android

  • VOIP / Remove default stun server
  • Make Integration Manager optional (disables widgets, calls)

RiotX (Android)

  • Feature / Direct Room Creation Flow
  • Improvement / Local echo of pending edits
  • Improvement / Seamless transition from timeline to fullscreen image preview
  • Bug fixes

Pattle

Wilko:

Pattle is now available on Google Play!

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Half-Shot:

Hey folks, first an update from the bridges integrations side. We've brought back snoonet and oftc on the integrations menu so you can once again connect matrix rooms to these networks. Other networks should work as standard.

matrix-appservice-irc

Half-Shot again:

On the matrix-appservice-irc side we've made a few fixes to the handling of IRC modes (things that handle how users should behave) when bridged to IRC. This should hopefully make opping and voicing users more reliable. There are a few other fixes in the pipeline too, so a release isn't too far off.

GitHub issue bridging !?

Half-Shot AGAIN:

I had an adventure this afternoon into the world of bridging again, and have made a Github to Matrix bridge. At the moment you can join aliases and saturate your homeserver with the entire history of a issue or PR. You can also chat to folks on issues in realtime.

Check it out at: https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-github

GitHub issue bridging

Dept of Ops 🛠

debian-based K8s-optimized image

Ananace:

Just pushed a debian-based K8s-optimized image as well, it's 150MB larger than the alpine one, but on the other hand it comes with jemalloc support so it's nicer on the RAM instead.

CLI federation tester

kai is someone with no fear of rapid iteration! Versions 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5 of his script were made available this week:

I finished version 1.5 of my small command line based federation tester. The bash script relies heavily on popular Unix tools like awk, curl, jq, sed and so on. Compared to https://federationtester.matrix.org, the outputs are a little more detailed and additional tests are performed, especially on the supported SSL protocols. Currently, it has only been tested under Linux.
The current version improves the handling of port in the .well-known and DNS SRV configuration.
You can download it from #cli_federation-tester_de:matrix.chat-secure.de or directly via https://matrix.chat-secure.de/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.chat-secure.de/MDwYLdrxRdudmcgDzBEALCzN

Dept of Bots 🤖

jcgruenhage has been working on a bot in relation to the startup he's working with:

I made a bot for issuing Json Web Tokens to matrix users based on what homeserver they are on. It's implemented as a maubot plugin (best way to write bots right now) and licensed under the AGPLv3. You can find it over at https://gitlab.com/famedly/bots/jwt, and talk about it in #jwt-bot:famedly.de
As for the usecase, we want to give people from customer homeservers access to an API component, but don't want to maintain a separate account database. This way, they can request a token from the bot and then use that to interact with the API component

Dept of Services 🚀

jaywink used an underrated HTML tag tag to inform us:

<Feneas community hat> We've added a public fully featured Telegram bridge to our Matrix stack. More info in our forum. </Feneas community hat>

This is great - we must tip the hat to tulir, creator of this widely-used bridge.

Final thoughts 💭

red_sky: Nheko now has a weblate instance set-up for users to contribute translations: https://weblate.nheko.im/engage/nheko/

Interview about DINSIC's use of Matrix (all in French)

That's all I know 🏁

So that's all I have to say to you right now! See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

This Week in Matrix 2019-07-26

26.07.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix Ben Parsons

Matrix Live - demos!

We had a great demo session this afternoon, unfortunately the recording quality for some of the items was not good enough to share - and it was interesting stuff too! I cut everything from the RiotX and Riot iOS sections - but we'll make it up to you by getting more news from those projects soon.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

Matthew informed the community:

We're getting more and more folks reaching out for paid help setting up smaller self-hosted Matrix deployments. The core team has its hands full currently with helping out with larger deployments; so if anyone reading this wants to offer paid support to those getting up and running on Matrix then please make us aware so we can potentially route inquiries to you.

This is a great step for Matrix, and a great opportunity for you the reader! There are already several people prepared to start work on Matrix-related endeavours, but the fact that there is more work coming in than we can currently route is amazing. If you'd like to be on an informal shortlist, contact support@, or come chat to me directly.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

So said Neil, who oversees the Synapse-makers:

This week we shipped two new versions, 1.2 (https://matrix.org/blog/2019/07/25/synapse-1-2-0-released) and 1.2.1(https://matrix.org/blog/2019/07/26/critical-security-update-synapse-1-2-1-released). 1.2.1 contains critical security updates, the bugs are long lived and not regressions introduced in 1.2 so all admins are encouraged to upgrade asap.

We’ve also been having some success in improving database performance and hope to ship that rsn so everyone can benefit.

Next week

We’ll continue on db perf, improving logging verbosity (through recategorising some log lines) and generally looking to improve the experience for those admins running on smaller instances.

Ruma

Jimmy released TWIR:

GSOC project: Matrix Visualisations 🎓

Eisha:

The GSoc project “Matrix Visualisations” has continued its progression during the second period:

A “multi-view” has been implemented for the frontend application. It means that it is now possible to independently view multiple DAGs at the same time in the same canvas. It can be useful for observing the same DAG but on different HS’s, at the same time. The only current limitation is that you have to use the same backend for every view (with CS API or with the backend talking to a Synapse PostgreSQL database). This change took a long time as it required to make a lot of changes in the code.

The implementation of the support of the Federation API within the backend is in progress. It is slowly progressing as it needed some discussion before starting the work on it and its implementation requires me to become familiar with a lot of new things, regarding the federation process and the authentication of requests between HS’s.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🏗

matrix-shell-suite taking feature requests

darnir:

Hey, I'd like to put out a call to everyone out there. If there's any script people desire for interacting with matrix homeservers, the #matrix-shell-suite:matrix.org project is taking feature requests.

Olm SAS interface for RubyOlm

Willem:

I had the code laying around for quite a while, but I just completed the Olm SAS interface for my fork of RubyOlm. It also includes interfaces for generating the emoji! 😀

Dept of Clients 📱

Pattle 0.10.0

I've been playing with Pattle 0.10 and have to say, it feels silky smooth to scroll with. It's really making me look again at Flutter development.

From Wilko, project lead:

A new version has been pushed to F-droid and TestFlight!

Note that for TestFlight the new version will be available in a few days.

  • Improve scrolling through chat messages!
    • Messages are now paginated under the hood, before the whole message list was rebuild when loading more messages, causing a jittery scrolling experience.
  • Support typing notifications!
    • Typing notifications are shown and send while typing.
  • Add chat settings screen
    • Currently you can see the chat name, avatar, description and members. More will be added in the future.
    • You can go to the chat settings screen by clicking on the title of the chat. This'll probably change in the future (at least to be easier).
  • Reverse swipe direction of images (thanks Nathan!)
  • Fix ripple not showing on send button
  • Make UI refreshing more efficient
  • The App Store (iOS) name is now 'Pattle' instead of 'Pattle IM'
  • When a chat is open, the UI will only be rebuild if that chat has updates.
  • Lot's of code clean ups and improvements, mostly in the SDK

What's coming up?

  • A release on Google Play!
  • A release on the official F-droid repo!
  • Remove Cupertino specific styling on iOS
    • Will now use Material Design, but altered for iOS. Having the discrepancy between Cupertino and Material was also the reason why some things didn't show up in iOS or why some things would be blue instead of the Pattle red.
  • Notifications!? (F-droid)

Follow development in #app:pattle.im!

Pattle 0.10

Spectral introduces support for reactions

Black Hat:

Reaction support is coming to Spectral!

Reactions in Spectral

Riot Web

From the team:

The edit history of a message now shows differences also for formatted (html) messages.

Riot iOS

From the team:

  • Reactions: We have now an Emoji picker and the screen that displays who reacted
  • Soft logout fully implemented

Riot Android

From the team:

  • New release of Riot (0.9.3) to fix crash on Android 4.x
  • The package is bigger because we embed both 32bits and 64bits, which is now required by Play Store

RiotX (Android)

From the team:

  • Room screen: Manage cancel/resend of unsent messages
  • New DM room creation flow
  • Room upgrade support

Dept of Encryption 🔐

New Pantalaimon release

poljar told us:

Pantalaimon got a new release. This release brings experimental support for search in E2E encrypted rooms, performance improvements in the database department, better support for true headless mode for all the bot lovers, and of course the usual bug fixes and small improvements.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-slack

Half-Shot announced:

0.3.1 of the slack bridge is out with a few bugfixes

Be sure to watch Cadair provide a demo in the Matrix Live video above.

Picard Bot (slack bridging)

Cadair:

SolarDrew and I have been working on re-writing our Picard Bot for a conference next week. Picard helps you bridge between a slack team and a matrix community.

This second version of Picard adds support for reacting to creation of new rooms on slack in real time as well as implementing a set of commands for creating new bridged rooms from either matrix or slack. In addition to this, Picard has matrix commands for inviting you to all the bridged rooms in the community and automatically inviting you to new rooms as they are created. Finally, we have added support for sending welcome messages to all new members of your slack team or matrix community in a DM with the bot, which we are using to explain the chat setup to users and giving them a private place to issue commands.

This is uses matrix-appservice-slack for actually sending events in bridged rooms, and PIcard itself is a skill for the opsdroid bot framework #opsdroid-general:matrix.org and uses the matrix-database plugin for opsdroid which uses matrix room state to back the opsdroid memory.

mx-puppet-bridge, new bridge: mx-puppet-instagram

The work on mx-puppet-bridge things continue! The core library and the implementation received some bugfixes, however, a new bridge is there: mx-puppet-instagram. Currently it supports

  • Auth currently only by username+password :(
  • basic message sending
  • I->M photoes, voice messages, animated image thingies
  • M->I images
  • M->I files as links only

mautrix-whatsapp

tulir has been putting a lot of time into WhatsApp bridging lately, the bridge is more stable than ever:

There's a mysterious new mautrix-whatsapp branch. Related to that, I made a spec proposal and a synapse PR to allow appservice bots to use /sync.

GSoC Project: Reliable Bridges

Thanks for this update from Kai:

It's all coming together now. While all pieces of the puzzle were roughly there, now they are put into the big picture.

The bridge SDK PR has been merged to develop, now providing bridges the benefit of error reporting. The modifications to the SDK are non-breaking, but activation of the feature requires small changes to the bridge using it. But be warned, everything is still under an unstable prefix and rightly so – the implementation is still subject to change. >

The MSC didn't get much love in public, but the concepts required to evolve it are taking shape. It was contemplated to piggyback on MSC 1410: Rich Bridging and to add a retry mechanism. So heads up for more to come on this front.

The display of bridge errors in Riot Web is now a PR and in the state of getting its last few kinks removed. It will start to be available under a lab flag soon.

With everything getting to play together nicely, there will be the first rooms enabling bridge errors to test the code in the wild. Stabilizing the code for everyday use and getting the MSC into a respectable form are the next goals for the project. Those will help in fostering broader adoption among bridges and clients.

Dept of Ops 🛠

k8s images

Ananace made sure everything is up to date for Synapse with 1.2.1 images now available.

Dept of Identity 🛂

ma1sd, identity server forked from mxisd released

ma1uta has been working on ma1sd, a fork of the discontinued mxisd:

ma1sd (https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd) is released. ma1sd is a fork of the discontinued mxisd (https://github.com/kamax-matrix/mxisd) is a federated Matrix Identity Service.

Changes:

  • rename the application name, configuration options to ma1sd. Internal names, packages still use old name mxisd
  • bump some dependencies to the latest versions
  • add openjdk-11 dependency for debian package due to debian 10 doesn't include openjdk-8 (yep, ma1sd can work with java 11).

Downloads:

Feel free to ask me questions about ma1sd in #ma1sd:ru-matrix.org

Final thoughts 💭

kitsune: "the latest versions of libQMatrixClient (0.5.2 - still under the old name) and Quaternion (0.0.9.4) are now available in Debian unstable, thanks to uhoreg"

That's all I know 🏁

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

This Week in Matrix 2019-07-19

19.07.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix Ben Parsons

Matrix Live Smörgåsbord 🎙

Featuring: Open Tracing, Synapse, Dendrite and Riot Web

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec News

(not quite matrix) feneas call for comments on spec for metadata

jaywink:

<community-hat>
I'm working on a specification for exporting metadata and usage metrics out of federated servers. The aim is that the same specification could be re-used cross-protocol for example with not only Matrix servers but also ActivityPub, Diaspora and XMPP servers, as an example. Looking for comments here: https://talk.feneas.org/t/serverinfo-specification-for-server-metadata/99
</community-hat>

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite

anoa:

Feature Updates

Dendrite continues along with more development from anoa, our resident GSoC student cnly, and a few community members. cnly has been working mainly on fixing up /sync issues and other areas of the CS API, fixing the various federation issues, mainly those dealing with room state, and various other maintenance tasks around the codebase that are highly appreciated. peekay_46 has been hard at work completing Dendrite’s implementation of room tagging and trion129 returned to continue with adding a fallback page for recaptcha (for clients that can’t render web pages). We have a number of community PRs still with active members, but most are waiting for reviews, which anoa is working towards.

The Plan

A couple TWIMs ago we teased that Dendrite had a plan in the works. Well one meeting later and here is the proposal:

It will take a while for Dendrite to become feature complete with Synapse, but we’d like people to be able to actually use Dendrite before then. Instead of waiting for feature-completeness, we propose a set of milestones for Dendrite development to reach and prioritize development for.

These milestones are currently listed on Dendrite’s github. The first is “Bot Hosting”, which means, once complete, Dendrite would be suitable as a “bot hub”, allowing server admins to run massive bridges on top of Dendrite while taking advantage of its horizontal-scaling capabilities. As written in the description, this goal includes basic CS API support, as well as federation with other homeservers. At this stage Dendrite should already be usable in rooms with other Synapse servers, which should make it a lot more interesting.

After that is several more milestones, each representing another use case that Dendrite can fill.

Don’t be alarmed at the currently quite small percentage of completeness, as these milestones have just been built from the open issue list. We’re actually quite far along to #1 already :)

We also want to mention that the milestones aren’t completely built yet - there’s still a few more issues to comb through. It’s taken a few days as anoa can’t help himself to fix things as he goes along. A few open issues have also been closed as they had already been fixed earlier.

This is all mentioned in this week’s Matrix Live above by the way, so be sure to catch for some extra details if you’re interested.

We look forward to shipping you a working Dendrite soon™. And as always feel free to join us in #dendrite-dev:matrix.org for discussion.

Synapse

Neil, who oversees the Synapse factory:

This week we’ve been working on improving database performance, shipping the new small hosted homeserver instances - expect a lot of improvements to come that will benefit the whole community and merged our recent OpenTracing support. We’ve also made some changes to how Sydent processes and stores email - more details here https://matrix.org/blog/2019/07/19/privacy-changes-to-new-vector-identity-servers

Next week, expect a new release, more database performance improvements and general Synapse performance work.

Listen to Matrix Live to hear Erik talking about his DB perf work ☝️

Ruma

This Week in Ruma, from Jimmy:

...
While I was working on ruma-signatures, I decided to fill in the missing functionality—signing and verifying events. In the process of doing that, I ended up with a significantly revised API for the crate, which has now been released as version 0.5.0.
...

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🏗

New release of matrix-nio (Python SDK)

poljar said:

New matrix-nio release bringing you documentation improvements across the board, while the documentation is still not fully complete yet it should be much easier to get started with nio.
Another highlight of this release is couroutine support for the event callbacks for the AsyncClient.

Take a look at the getting started guide too.

Ruby SDK

Ananace:

I just cut a 1.3.0 release of the Ruby SDK, mainly focusing on solving an issue due to Ruby extensions polluting the global scope. It also adds a very slightly extended response handling, which recursively adds getters for the keys of the resulting objects.
Many thanks to the people reporting issues to me so I can keep improving the SDK.

The Kotlin library koma

yuforia, author of koma and Continuum:

  • Fixed incorrect type casting in function KResult.map
  • Reorganize the structure of modules, separate APIs that don't require authentication, so that they can be used before signing in

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-slack

Half-Shot announced:

Today we've released 0.3.0 of the slack bridge since the last rc has proved to be stable. I hope you all enjoy the new features we've packed into this release. And as a reminder, there is another release right around the corner :)

Dept of Clients 📱

RiotX (Android)

From the team (see Matrix Live from last week for more from them):

  • RiotX 0.2.0 has been released on Thursday. Main new features: room filtering, message editing in e2e rooms, view editing history. Also many small new features and bugfixes.
  • The team is still working on the main missing features: creation of direct chat, read receipt, along with UI/UX polishing.

If you're using Android, definitely start trying RiotX, you can even find it in the Play Store now.

Riot Web

From the team:

Riot v1.3.0 was released with support for reactions and message editing enabled. Check out the Riot blog post for more details. No changes are needed to enable these features for self-hosted installs anymore (which is change from what was stated in last week’s TWIM update).

We’re continuing to work on several privacy improvements to related to integration managers and identity servers to give users more control over these.

Riot Android

From the team:

Riot 0.9.2 has been released on Friday. It contains some bug fixes and new translations for many strings especially for the device verification feature.

Riot iOS

From the team:

  • We released v0.9.1 with message editing, reactions and file upload.
  • We are continuing to work on reactions (emoji picker).
  • We have started to implement soft logout.

FluffyChat

krille:

In the newest update FluffyChat now supports avatars in Push Notifications. Also translations have been updated and some minor design tweaks have been made.

I know that E2EE for FluffyChat is continuing to be worked on, just not quite ready yet.

Continuum, client based on koma

yuforia, author of koma and Continuum:

  • Update GUI library openjfx from version 11 to 12
  • Rewrite build script in Kotlin, replacing Groovy

Fractal, GNOME client

Alexandre Franke on Fractal:

Several bugs were fixed in the past three weeks. We are also sending typing notifications now. With 4.1.1 out, we’re at the second beta on the way to 4.2.

Also:

some people might be interested in a tweak in our build config that makes it so that crashes are aborts now (i.e. you get a trace and they are not silent anymore)

Spectral

Black Hat is changing Spectral's buildsystem from QMake to CMake.

Dept of Ops 🛠

sendtomatrix script

Madic has created a shell script to send messages to a room:

I've written a linux shell script with which you can send (multiline) messages to a matrix room. It only needs a username / password or access token, server fqdn and roomid as argument or provided by a configuration file. Arguments can overwrite settings from the file, for e.g. using same credentials but different channel. If no access token is provided, a new one will be requested and used to send the message. You can use the script for e.g. cronjobs, nagios notifications or ci pipelines. An example for a cronjob and a nagios notification script is also provided.

shell script nagios

I have ended up with an similar file of my own containing a bunch of commented-out curl lines, but this is a lot cleaner!

You may also recall a similar project: matrix-shell-suite (#matrix-shell-suite:matrix.org).

Dept of Bots 🤖

Maths bot(s)

Tim created a bot for rendering Maths:

I was told that people here might be interested: I just wrote a small bot that can reply with PNG renderings of maths (https://github.com/thosgood/matrix-maths-bot)

and then, tulir blatantly ripped him off was inspired to create a maubot providing the LaTeX to SVG rendering: https://github.com/maubot/tex

Dept of Services 🚀

New room for t2bot.io

TravisR, who arranges and hosts the various bots and bridges on t2bot.io:

#news:t2bot.io is now a room for people who want to follow along with news about t2bot.io which might be missed in #help:t2bot.io. Stuff like when bridges are updated and new services will be announced in there. #status:t2bot.io is where service stability is addressed during major problems with the service.

That's all I know 🏁

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

This Week in Matrix 2019-07-12

12.07.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix Ben Parsons

Matrix Live: RiotX

Nice! Manu and Benoit, who work on the Riot Mobile, discuss the development status of RiotX.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

A bit of everything this week, we’ve made changes to support the upcoming edits and reactions release, worked on soft log out, experimented with improving general perf for small homeservers, landed open tracing support, improved db query load.
Next week we’ll see about landing the small homeserver perf improvements, work on id hashing in sydent, fix some e2ee bugs (made easier to track down with OpenTracing), do some more database performance work and start gradually rolling out the new Sygnal instance.

Construct

Jason back on it:

This week in Matrix, Construct made the crazy-loading mode of client sync the default. Crazy-loading is an approach to initial sync that goes beyond lazy-loading for a better UX. It's even backwards compatible with clients that don't support lazy-loading.

Construct also made significant progress on implementing version 3 and 4 rooms during the week. This is nearly complete, and should be ready for testing by the weekend.

Good to know there is progress with new room versions as more and more rooms start to be moved over to v4. #zemos-test:matrix.org for testing and more info.

Dendrite

This week we’ve implemented profile retrieval over federation, single event retrieval, room tagging as well as host of bug fixes.
Next week we’ll be looking at state resolution and implementing our latest and greatest algorithm needed by modern room versions.

This Week in Ruma

Jimmy provided This Week in Ruma:

Work continues on the major revamp of ruma-events mentioned in the last update.
...
There are also a few modules that are somewhat blocked on an issue in ring. Some of the types in ruma-events contain types from ruma-signatures which don't implement Clone and PartialEq because they contain types from ring which don't.
...
Rust 1.36 was released, and it includes stabilization of the Future trait, one of the long-awaited building blocks for first-class async support in Rust. [...] the biggest reason for Ruma's development hiatus is waiting for async networking in Rust to mature, and this is one of the final pieces of foundational support we've been waiting for. The remaining pieces are async/await syntax, which is expected in either the next version or the one following it, and finally, waiting for important libraries like Hyper and Tokio, as well as web frameworks, to adopt the new stuff.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🏗

libQuotient gets .well-known support

kitsune:

Thanks to Black Hat, libQuotient gained support of .well-known - a very useful feature to connect to Modular-hosted homeservers!

Also, the first block of E2EE functionality from aa13q has been merged to libQuotient master - so far it's just uploading the keys but receiving messages is already well in the works!

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-telegram v0.6.0

tulir:

mautrix-telegram v0.6.0 was released. Recent changes include bridging strikethrough, underline and nested formatting to telegram and some bug fixes, including one security fix. Full changelog on GitHub.

Debian 10 was also released recently, which means v0.6 is the last version with Python 3.5 support. Starting from v0.7.0, mautrix-telegram will only support Python 3.6 and up.

mautrix-telegram v0.6.0 also includes Native Matrix edit support, message editing between platforms.

matrix-appservice-slack 0.3.0-rc2

Half-Shot and the Slack-bridge-gang have announced matrix-appservice-slack 0.3.0-rc2

Hi folks, the slack bridge has had another RC release this week 0.3.0-rc2 which has been deployed onto matrix.org :). In other news, we are nearly done with the port of the bridge to Typescript (slated for the 0.4 release) which has allowed us to clean up the codebase significantly and splat a lot of bugs.

I'm for any movement toward TypeScript - seems to be a winner in the JS-world. Says Half-Shot:

I'm a bit fanatical about Typescript, it's objectively better to write things in TS than JS if you have the freedom to do so. It's also allowed us to keep the bug count down on the Discord bridge, so I'm starting to look at the other bridges for typescript support too.

Reliable Bridges GSoC project 🎓

Thanks Kai for this update!

The new Spec proposal MSC2162: Signaling Errors at Bridges landed! It is about adding permanent errors: The ability of bridges to mark events as not delivered to all participants. While there is already code supporting the feature, the Spec process is important for getting everyone on board and finding potential problems with the current approach.

In spite of being a relatively small proposal, there were already a lot of suggestions and directions in which it can evolve. Shoutout and thanks to everyone who already contributed to it with their comments!

Meanwhile on the more practical front a fork of Riot Web was extended to now support the actual visual display of bridge error markings on messages.

See it in action:

Bridge Error message

Dept of Clients 📱

RiotX big announcement!

  • We have released a beta version to the PlayStore on Thursday! You can download (and rate it) here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.riotx . Also feel free to join https://matrix.to/#/#riotx:matrix.org to provide any feedback!
  • You will find more details about what RiotX can (and cannot yet) do here: https://medium.com/@RiotChat/introducing-the-riotx-beta-for-android-b17952e8f771
  • Now we are working on fixing bugs, and keep going implementing the missing features

I've been using RiotX a lot lately and find it great - really snappy.

Spectral

Black Hat:

Spectral supports .well-known now obviously. see libQuotient update above
Also a lot of changes:

  1. Bubble shapes for pending events are fixed.
  2. You can set device name when logging in. This becomes important as libQuotient begins to upload one-time device key as part of E2EE implementation.
  3. Markdown is parsed automatically by default, and works with replies.
  4. Small UI improvements in timeline and room list.

Continuum

yuforia has continued work on Continuum, a desktop client written in Kotlin:

Continuum now preserves media content URI (mxc://) internally in order to treat them specially, instead of converting to all URI to http (or https) upon receiving.
This week's version never considers cached mxc resources stale and no network request will be performed for refreshing.
Continuum also loads previews for http image links in text messages automatically. The usual http cache control rules are still followed in those cases.

Join #tkmc:matrix.org to chat more about Continuum, or about koma, the underlying library.

Riot Web

Riot v1.3.0-rc.1 is now ready for testing at https://riot.im/staging. This includes some last minute polish of reactions and edits, and also adds initial support for soft logout. This release will have reactions and message editing enabled via configuration on riot.im once it stabilises.
Self-hosted installs that wish to do the same would need to alter their config.json in similar fashion. This is because these features currently depend on unstable APIs, and we don't want to move them out of labs and fully on by default until that is resolved.

Riot iOS

  • Reactions and edits:
    • Enabled by default (no more LABS setting)
    • Reactions with non-unicode keys
    • Original event in the edit history (need homeserver update)
  • Upgraded rooms are now autojoined when tapping on the upgraded banner
  • File upload from the room screen and from the share extension
  • Crypto: logs have been improved and a script has been created to help to debug e2e bugs (see the screenshot at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/pull/692)
  • This Friday TestFlight can be considered as a release candidate

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy: synapse-janitor now available

Slavi:

Thanks to Aaron's frequent mention of synapse-janitor and other such cleanup methods, I've finally gotten inspired enough to give it a try.

The playbook now contains a new Synapse Maintenance documentation page and an easy/safe way to run synapse-janitor.

To give an example, using synapse-janitor and a full Postgres VACUUM yielded a 29% reduction in disk space used by Postgres on my personal homeserver (5.3GB -> 3.8GB).

Alexey Murz Korepov also reminded us about synapse-purge, which we've mentioned here before - but is designed for a similar purpose.

avhost/docker-matrix

Mathijs:

the avhost/docker-matrix image has moved to a debian buster base image, which got us an upgrade from python 3.5 to python 3.7.3 and jemalloc1 to jemalloc2, which should improve the performance of synapse.

Dept of Articles 📝

Pneumaticat: "wrote a blog post on integrating Riot chat with our dapp & scientific research auditing platform, Delphus!"

Final thoughts 💭

I had/stole the idea to create a bot which uses message edits to send frames of an ASCII-art animation. I indeed created the bot, which works to a degree, but is quickly punished by rate-limiting, which limits the effectiveness. Still it's quite fun, you can check out the code here.

TravisR's work on matrix-bot-sdk is interesting for bot or other client devs, and there is a new guide available: http://matrix.org/docs/guides/usage-of-matrix-bot-sdk

A few weeks ago I mentioned matrix-enact, which uses Web Audio API to play back room history. There is a guide to how it was built, looking at the /context endpoint now available: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/creating-a-simple-read-only-matrix-client

Half-Shot "bridged #synapse:matrix.org to #matrix-synapse on freenode to help folks who might be experiencing issues with their homeserver and need a IRC based support channel"

Black Hat made a cool-looking thing: "It basically shows all pictures in this room in a waterfall, with 'infinite scroll'"

Bridge Error message

That's all I know 🏁

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

This Week in Matrix 2019-07-05

05.07.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix Ben Parsons

Matrix Live, featuring Erik and the Interns 🎙

Thanks Erik, Jorik and Oliver!

Note that there is a audio hiccup around 2m30 - video is ok otherwise.

Dept of Spec 📜

Highlights

Movement on Matrix URIs

Sudden interest in matrix-org/matrix.to/pull#47 means we're getting a lot closer to agreement on Matrix URIs. Kitsune even added support for them in Quaternion (see below).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite

anoa:

Dendrite continues marching forward! As more attention is turned towards our fairly lengthy PR list, contributors who have not done so already are reminded to merge Dendrite's master branch into their PRs, as converting the project to go modules caused a lot of conflicts. A tag has been added to each PR that needs forward merging, visible here.

Our GSoC student cnly has been working away on implementing profile retrieval over federation as well as updating his various other PRs and would likely have a lot more if they were getting more reviews, but worry not as things look on track for that next week.

We've also got plans now! Plans for how to properly ship this thing over the coming months so look out for that soon!

Synapse 1.1.0 released

This week we shipped v1.1.0, which provides an overhaul of docker configuration, more authentication options and improved db io. It’s worth noting that v1.1.0 is the first Synapse release to drop support for Python 2 (and Postgres 9.4), this paves the way for using Python 3 only functionality.

We’ve been working on supporting soft logout, more edits and reactions support, open tracing support not to mention a complete rewrite of the push server Sygnal. We’ll be rolling out new Sygnal gradually over the next week or two.

Finally, aided by dropping Python 2 support, we’ve been putting in a bunch of work to improve Synapse in resource constrained environments. This will be a constant theme over the coming months.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🏗

python-matrixbot

Brian Ó appeared to tell us about python-matrixbot. This is a project that has existed for some time.

A Python module meant to act as a base class for a Matrix bot.
The MatrixBot class will connect to the Matrix server, start a listener on each joined room, and listen for room invites from other users. It also includes helper methods you can use to extend the functionality. It is built on the Matrix Python SDK which can be directly accessed via MatrixBot.client

koma

yuforia:

koma got some improvements, based on what's learned developing Continuum, which is a desktop client based on it.

  • Make api calls suspendable functions (which are like Kotlin's flavor of async). This way, the caller don't need to worry about forgetting to call await or a coroutine being left unstarted.
  • Borrowing from functional programming, model the outcome of a call as a discriminated union, which can be either a success or a failure. The successful case is optimized with inline classes, an experimental feature in Kotlin 1.3, and wrapping is avoided.
  • Make MatrixError a subclass of HttpError, because the http status code can be handy

Ruby SDK

Ananace:

Just released version 1.2.1 of the Ruby SDK, fixing an error in the media download URL generation

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-bridge release 1.9.0

Half-Shot was seen to exist IRL this week, he also found time for a new release:

Today we have a new matrix-appservice-bridge release 1.9.0. The bigname feature this week is a new store for mapping matrix events to remote ones, so bridges can handle changes made to sent events like reactions/threading/edits/redactions :). The reason for this feature appearing suddenly will become clear very soon.. 😈

mx-puppet-bridge (inc slack, tox, discord)

Another week, which means more work on the mx-puppet-bridge ecosystem! A new > bridge has been added, mx-puppet-discord. Soru finally added license files > (Apache-2-0) and some readmes.

mx-puppet-bridge

  • bugfixes
  • implement optional double-puppeting (also logging into your matrix acc)
  • relate remote event IDs to matrix event IDs
  • handle edits in both directions
  • handle redactions in both directions
  • initiating conversations from matrix! Invite a ghost for 1:1 or follow a > room alias for rooms
  • bot provisioning: list users and rooms

mx-puppet-slack

  • add linting
  • map channels and slack pills
  • handle message edits
  • handle message deletions
  • properly handle /me messages
  • handle ghost invites
  • handle room joins via alias

mx-puppet-tox

  • add linting
  • improve bootstrapping
  • improve file transfers
  • handle ghost invites

mx-puppet-discord

This is the new puppeting bridge! The idea is that, in the long run, this will > be run in conjunction with matrix-appservice-discord Half-Shot/matrix-appservice-discord), where mx-puppet-discord handles DM > puppeting and matrix-appservice-discord the remaining. For this, the message > parsing was split in a new repository, matrix-discord-parser. The idea is that, in the > future, when inviting a ghost on matrix-appservice-discord it'll initiate > conversation within mx-puppet-discord

  • basic text messages
  • handle files
  • handle edits, deletes

mx-puppet-discord does only DMs, for non-DMs please use matrix-appservice-discord

If you have any questions for any of these, please join our channel > #mx-puppet-bridge:sorunome.de. Software doesn't write itself, please consider > donating on liberapay!

matrix-appservice-slack

Cadair and Half-Shot have been doing substantial work on matrix-appservice-slack.

We've got a dedicated room for slack bridge development over at #matrix_appservice_slack:cadair.com, since it's picked up in terms of community PRs and general interest. It's not currently being used as a support room, however.

They mention,

warning may contain ranting about the codebase

But that could be any room, so it seems ok to me.

WARNING: LATE ADDITION

Hi everyone! Myself and Cadair have been working hard on a new Slack bridge release, and we are finally ready to push out a release candidate for 0.3.

The headline features are:

  • Implement message deletion.
  • Add support for edits.
  • Add support for reactions.
  • Add support for threading (using replies).
  • Support displayname and avatar lookups for Slack bots.
  • Replace channel mentions with canonical aliases for bridged rooms.
  • Support for slack attachments (Thanks @umitalp for the initial groundwork and @Cadair for the cleanup)

The new release is having very final minute checks, and will be available at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-slack/releases shortly.

Dept of Clients 📱

RiotX (Android)

After an internal release, we are working on improving the performance, especially for initial sync and for navigation between rooms.
Also we are fighting bugs.

Pattle 0.9.0 and Testflight available

Wilko:

A new version of Pattle has been pushed to F-droid and TestFlight!

Changes:

  • Fix the infamous FormatException: Not a valid url: error!
  • Room upgrades are now handled!
    • Upgraded rooms are now hidden from the overview
    • To access older messages from the previous room, simply scroll up: the timeline is seamless
  • Improve performance of loading the overview. Opening the app should be a lot quicker now!
  • Improve performance of loading a chat
  • Add ability to swipe through images in a chat (thanks to Nathan van Beelen!) See preview here!

Get Pattle from F-droid for Android by adding this repo:

https://fdroid.pattle.im/?fingerprint=E91F63CA6AE04F8E7EA53E52242EAF8779559209B8A342F152F9E7265E3EA729

APK also in assets of this release.

For iOS: join TestFlight here

Report issues to the repo, you can login via GitHub and Gitlab.com.

Follow development in #app:pattle.im!

To support Wilko: you can now do so via Liberapay and Patreon.

I've invested a lot of money in making Pattle happen on iOS: MacBook, Apple Developer Program, and an iPhone. Pretty costly, so any donations will be greatly appreciated!

What to expect in the next release:

  • Fix timeline jump issues
  • Remove redundant state messages when a room is upgraded
  • Start work on chat details screen (members, change name, etc.)

Quaternion now with Matrix URI support

kitsune:

to push things forward on Matrix URIs front, Quaternion master branch now supports matrix:user/userid, matrix:room/roomalias and matrix:roomid/roomid URIs. For example, Quotient/Quaternion room can be opened by a link matrix:room/quotient:matrix.org.

This will be so much easier to use! Also:

Quaternion has got a new contributor, Roland Pallai (https://github.com/rpallai), who added colouring of messages sent by the local user and support of drag-n-drop of text and images on Quaternion, along with general improvements on the timeline. Many thanks!

Windows builds of Quaternion (CI and future releases) come with Qt Keychain enabled, storing your access tokens in Windows secure storage.

Spectral news

Black Hat:

A lot of improvements have been added to Spectral last week.

  1. Spectral uses QtKeychain now. Access tokens are stored in system keychain instead of in plain text.
  2. Room list's filter has a better UX(aka TabBar). Switching between rooms and DMs is now as easy as switching between, well, tabs.
  3. Notification count in system tray icon, implementation modified from nheko.
  4. Display initial sync progress. Some people have been complaining about not knowing the progress of initial sync so I added an indicator.
  5. A better room setting page. Specifically displaying aliases and changing room avatar are working.
  6. Big emojis.
  7. Typing indicator UI is tweaked and looks better.

Riot iOS

  • Reactions in e2e rooms
  • “Show all” button when there are too many reactions
  • Support edition of emotes and replies
  • Edits history (even in e2e rooms)
  • Fix joining new upgraded room through federation
  • Use via parameters to join a new room (useful in case of federation)

Riot Web

  • Allow resending edits, reactions and redactions through context menu, also better visualization of send errors.
  • Allow redacting and viewing source of edits in edit history dialog

Dept of Ops 🛠

K8s

Ananace:

Bumped the K8s optimized Docker image to 1.1.0, with the same dropping of Python 2 and Postgres 9.4 support as the official image.
NB: The upstream docker configuration changes do not affect the K8s-optimized image, no configuration change is necessary to upgrade from 1.0.0 to 1.1.0

avhost/docker-matrix image

Mathijs:

As announced last week, with the release of synapse 1.1.0 the avhost/docker-matrix image switched to running synapse with jemalloc by default

Dept of Services 🚀

modular.im starting to make Small instances available

modular.im are making the much-asked-for SMALL instances available. This service is rolling out starting with people who have previously enquired about availability, which I gather is a lot of people. Go sign up if you're interested!

The wait is almost over ... We're now rolling out our trial of Small Hosted Homeservers for Matrix. Have you got your golden ticket yet? 😀🎟️ pic.twitter.com/iUkAIHW9MY

— Modular (@ModularIM) July 3, 2019

we've been working on a v1 admin dashboard for managing your Synapse instances through Modular. This is now live on the site and provides a basic suite of functionality including:

  • Viewing users of your synapse homeserver(s)
  • Creating users
  • Deleting users
  • Resetting user passwords
  • Viewing user profile and server access / activity
  • Sending messages to all system users as the system alerts user
  • Information about the synapse instance versions

Final thoughts 💭

Ananace is "continuing the rewrite of the release tracker project. Working towards getting it to only store state in Matrix so it can be run in a read-only environment like a K8s deployment."

lino "wrote a script to update riot. It also works so far, but still needs some improvements"

Black Hat has been working "to add .well-known support for libQuotient" - presumably this will come back to be used in Spectral when it's ready.

Somehow I had a tab open with a maubot for Urban Dictionary.

That's all I know 🏁

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