This Week in Matrix

The Spec

As many know, we've been aiming for the end of August to cut the first ever stable releases of the remaining APIs in the spec which have up to now been marked unstable - i.e. providing a snapshot of the spec which correctly matches the reference implementations (other than implementation bugs) and which can be used in isolation to develop production grade implementations of clients, servers, etc without need to reference any other implementations. There's been a massive sprint to pull this together, and as of the time of writing there are still PRs and commits landing every few minutes.  We'll post a full update on our progress on Monday; meanwhile you can see a sneak peek over at the August 2018 r0 project board.

Spec work has completely precluded any other backend dev this week.

Half-Shot, gone but not really gone

This week we say farewell to Half-Shot, who has been working fulltime on bridges over the summer. He has managed the matrix.org bridges largely single-handedly, with a big focus on the often-volatile IRC bridge(s).

Bridges

matrix-appservice-irc 0.11.0

It's a big deal, and it's rolling out to IRC networks this week. Half-Shot released matrix-appservice-irc 0.11.0, with the following included:

New features & improvements:

• Cache modes internally
• Replace nicks with user pill mentions
• Kick users if we fail to create an IRC client for them on join (aka ILINE kicks)
• SASL support
• Add err_nononreg so we can announce PMs that failed
• Formatting of replies

Bug Fixes:

• Fix invalidchar nick
• Don't answer any msgtypes other than text in an admin room.
• Fix provisoner leaving users on unlink
• Fixed a bug where content of events the bridge hadn't cached were not being used in replies.
• We were calling authedRequest but the request was not mocked out.
• There was a bug involving intents in m-a-b so it was bumped

Metrics:

• Metrics for MatrixHandler - Iline Kicks
• Idle connection metrics
• QueuePool.waitingItems should use it's internal queue size

Misc:

• Section out tests, linting and coverage into separate stages for Travis

WhatsApp

tulir has been working on mautrix-whatsapp bridge.

now bridges a lot more stuff, such as formatting, media and replies. I'm also almost done with desegregating users so that Matrix users join the same group chat portals rather than everyone having their own portal to the same chat

Zulip chat, bridged by Zulip

Matthew discovered there is a Matrix-Zulip bridge on the Zulip side. So if you're running a Zulip server (for some reason), and want to bridge with Matrix check out the integration docs here.

IRC Connection Tracker

Half-Shot created a new component to enhance the reliability of IRC-Matrix bridging:

IRC Connection Tracker is a thing now. It's a project to separate out the IRC connections from the appservice so the two can be run independently, so that restarting the appservice doesn't affect the IRC connections. It's hopefully going to allow bridge stuff to run faster when it's done.

This project is still really early stage. You can take a look at the Proposal document here.

Clients

Nheko 0.5.4

Not technically this week, but Nheko 0.5.4 was recently released

• The settings page now includes the device id & device fingerprint (thanks @valkum )
• The Polish translation has been updated (thanks @m4sk1n )

Get the latest builds of Nheko from bintray.

Fractal

Alexandre Franke and the GNOME crew have been working on Fractal, gearing up for their upcoming 3.30 release.

Fractal 3.29.92 got released and we are freezing strings to give GNOME translators a bit of time to complete translations for 3.30 next week. Latest developments include tweaks for the title bar, misc bug fixes, a new presentation for uploaded files (that are not images, those are still displayed inline) with buttons to download or open them. Development builds are now parallel installable for easier testing and CI has been improved.

Seaglass

neilalexander:

Seaglass now has some early support for inline images and attachments, and supports Quick Look. Also handles emotes and notices better. It also has version numbers now, various other little fixes and Aaron Raimist has been working on auto-update support.

Version numbers! Now when you go to download the tarball from bintray, you can see what's going on!

There's also been some work on supporting dark mode on Mojave (which looks particularly sexy) and even Touch Bar support!

Riot Android v0.8.15

Riot Android v0.8.15 is on it's way to the Play Store.

Changes in Riot Android 0.8.15 (2018-08-30)

MatrixSdk:

• Upgrade to version 0.9.9.

Improvements:

• Improve intent to open document (#2544)
• Avoid useless dialog for permission (#2331)
• Improve wording when exporting keys (#2289)

Other changes:

• Upgrade lib libphonenumber from v8.0.1 to 8.9.12
• Upgrade Google firebase libs

Bugfix:

• Handle \\/ at the beginning of a message to send a message starting with / (#658)
• Escape nicknames starting with a forward slash / in mentions (#2146)
• Improve management of Push feature
• MatrixError mResourceLimitExceededError is now managed in MxDataHandler (vector-im/riot-android#2547 point 2)

Changes in Riot Android 0.8.14 (2018-08-27)

MatrixSdk:

• Upgrade to version 0.9.8.

Features:

• Manage server quota notices (#2440)

Improvements:

• Do not ask permission to write external storage at startup (#2483)
• Update settings icon and transparent logo for notifications and navigation drawer (#2492)
• URL previews are no longer requested from the server when displaying URL previews is disabled (PR #2514)
• Fix some plural and puzzle strings, and remove other unused ones (#2444)
• Manage System Alerts in a dedicated section

Other changes:

• Upgrade olm-sdk.aar from version 2.2.2 to version 2.3.0
• move PieFractionView from the SDK to the client (#2525)

Bugfix:

• Fix media sharing (#2530)
• Fix notification sound issue in settings (#2524)
• Disable app icon badge for "listen for event" notification (#2104)

Riot iOS 0.7.3

Changes in 0.7.3 (2018-08-27)

Improvements:

• Upgrade MatrixKit version (v0.8.3).

Bug fix:

• Fix input toolbar reset in RoomViewController on MXSession state change (#2006 and #2008).
• Fix user interaction disabled in master view of UISplitViewController when selecting a room (#2005).

Changes in 0.7.2 (2018-08-24)

Improvements:

• Upgrade MatrixKit version (v0.8.2).
• Server Quota Notices in Riot (#1937).

Bug fix:

• User defaults: the preset application language (if any) is ignored.
• Recents: Avoid to open a room twice (it crashed on room creation on quick HSes).
• Riot-bot: Do not try to create a room with it if the user homeserver is not federated.

Riot Web

There's been lots of work debugging and optimising Lazy Loading, which is edging closer to being turned on by default.  We've also been working away at improving E2E UX - starting with finishing key backup, and then improved verification, and then finally cross-signing (at last!)

SDKs

Ruby Matrix SDK

ananace is working on the Ruby Matrix SDK "fixing issues and documenting as I go".

Matrix Android SDK

Changes to Matrix Android SDK in 0.9.9 (2018-08-30)

Improvements:

• Clear unreachable Url when clearing media cache (vector-im/riot-android#2479)
• "In reply to" is not clickable on Riot Android yet. Make it a plain text (vector-im/riot-android#2469)

Bugfix:

• Removing room from 'low priority' or 'favorite' does not work (vector-im/riot-android#2526)
• MatrixError mResourceLimitExceededError is now managed in MxDataHandler (vector-im/riot-android#2547)

API Change:

• MxSession constructor is now private. Please use MxSession.Builder() to create a MxSession

Changes to Matrix Android SDK in 0.9.8 (2018-08-27)

Features:

• Manage server_notices tag and server quota notices (vector-im/riot-android#2440)

Bugfix:

• Room aliases including the '@' and '=' characters are now recognized as valid (vector-im/riot-android#2079, vector-im/riot-android#2542)
• Room name and topic can be now set back to empty (vector-im/riot-android#2345)

API Change:

• Remove PieFractionView class from the Matrix SDK. This class is now in Riot sources (#336)
• MXMediasCache.createTmpMediaFile() methods are renamed to createTmpDecryptedMediaFile()
• MXMediasCache.clearTmpCache() method is renamed to clearTmpDecryptedMediaCache()
• Add MXMediasCache.moveToShareFolder() to move a tmp decrypted file to another folder to prevent deletion during sharing. New API MXMediasCache.clearShareDecryptedMediaCache() can be called when the application is resumed. (vector-im/riot-android#2530)

Matrix iOS SDK

Changes in Matrix iOS SDK in 0.11.3 (2018-08-27)

Bug fix:

• MXJSONModel: Manage m.server_notice empty tag sent due to a bug server side (PR #556).

Changes in Matrix iOS SDK in 0.11.2 (2018-08-24)

Improvements:

• MXSession: Add the supportedMatrixVersions method getting versions of the specification supported by the homeserver.
• MXRestClient: Add testUserRegistration to check earlier if a username can be registered.
• MXSession: Add MXSessionStateSyncError state and MXSession.syncError to manage homeserver resource quota on /sync requests (vector-im/riot-ios/issues/1937).
• MXError: Add kMXErrCodeStringResourceLimitExceeded to manage homeserver resource quota (vector-im/riot-ios/issues/1937).
• MXError: Define constant strings for keys and values that can be found in a Matrix JSON dictionary error.
• Tests: MXHTTPClient_Private.h: Add method to set fake delay in HTTP requests.

Bug fix:

• People tab is empty in the share extension (vector-im/riot-ios/issues/1988).
• MXError: MXError lost NSError.userInfo information.

Tools

matrix-to-riot

Half-Shot shared a handy Firefox extension: matrix-to-riot

This is a tiny webextension to forward matrix.to links to an open Riot tab.

Really useful if you often click matrix.to links and find yourself needing to URL-hack to get to where you need to be.

That's all for now

We're going to shift this week's Matrix Live to Monday, alongside the upcoming blog post on the spec release progress. Have a good weekend!

Synapse 0.33.3

Big week for Synapse: v0.33.3 was released this week. You'll find preparation for support for Lazy Loading and Room Versioning, lots of bugfixes, and a great contribution from vojeroen: support for sending SNI over federation for vhosted servers. More complete change log here, features below:

• Add support for the SNI extension to federation TLS connections. Thanks to @vojeroen! (#3439)
• Add /_media/r0/config (#3184)
• speed up /members API and add at and membership params as per MSC1227 (#3568)
• implement summary block in /sync response as per MSC688 (#3574)
• Add lazy-loading support to /messages as per MSC1227 (#3589)
• Add ability to limit number of monthly active users on the server (#3633)
• Support more federation endpoints on workers (#3653)
• Basic support for room versioning (#3654)
• Ability to disable client/server Synapse via conf toggle (#3655)
• Ability to whitelist specific threepids against monthly active user limiting (#3662)
• Add some metrics for the appservice and federation event sending loops (#3664)
• Where server is disabled, block ability for locked out users to read new messages (#3670)
• set admin uri via config, to be used in error messages where the user should contact the administrator (#3687)
• Synapse's presence functionality can now be disabled with the "use_presence" configuration option. (#3694)
• For resource limit blocked users, prevent writing into rooms (#3708)

Ananace has upgraded his K8s-optimized Synapse image to 0.33.3

Spec

• A large chunk of e2e has landed in the spec, largely thanks to Zil0's work. There are still some things left, but the main bits related to sending encrypted messages is in there. Attachments and key sharing are being reviewed today
• TravisR progressed on Push, Application Services, and Client-Server APIs.
• To follow along with progress, the best place to look is the August 2018 r0 tracker.

E2E

Key backups are being worked on, and we've had some new thoughts on key verification.

ru-matrix.org

Well are you?

Alexey and ma1uta have a new Russian-language community wiki available at https://ru-matrix.org. This:

accumulates Russian translates of Matrix FAQ and manuals, and other info about Matrix in Russian. Also we starts a public Matrix Synapse server for Russian users with free open registration

Russian Matrix users: feel free to add and complement articles in our wiki to make Matrix more friendly for Russian users.

Client News

Seaglass

neilalexander has been on a roll the last few weeks working on Seaglass, the macOS-native client:

Seaglass now has support for creating, joining and leaving rooms, and accepting/rejecting room invites, redacting messages, improvements to the room settings pages, timestamps, some visual tweaks, lots of bug fixes, early support for detecting failed message sends, scrolling improvements

Matrique

Black Hat continues work on Matrique, a glossy Qt client:

Typing notification and desktop notification of Matrique are working, plus other improvements

See the latest commits here.

Riot Web

Lazy Loading (LL) is available on develop behind the LABS flag, and is being polished. It will probably not make it to next release, but it's progressing!

Riot Mobile

New releases are imminent for both Android and iOS:

• iOS: bug fixes and Lazy Loading in settings
• Android: bug fixes, better management of permission requests at startup

Shared Secret Auth and Matrix Corporal

Slavi has been working on several operations tools for Synapse. Firstly Shared Secret Auth password provider module for Matrix Synapse.

It allows external systems (which know the shared secret) to easily obtain access tokens for any user hosted on the homeserver. This is incredibly useful for all sorts of automation (no more pre-generated access tokens or plain-text passwords).

With this tool, you can pass a mxid, and get back an access_token for that user. With this, you can do whatever actions would normally be done with a token. For example, you for a new starter at a company, you could join a set of rooms known to be needed by new starters.

Support room for Shared Secret Auth: #matrix-synapse-shared-secret-auth:devture.com

Next, he has released Matrix Corporal, reconciliator and gateway for a managed Matrix server:

It's a way to take control of Matrix (Synapse) in a corporate (or other such) environment.
Based on a configuration policy (generated by an external system, like your intranet), it can auto-create and auto-disable users, keep their profile and authentication details to date, auto-join/leave users to communities and rooms, etc.
It's also meant to sit in front of the Matrix Synapse Client API, inspecting and allowing/denying requests, in accordance with the configuration policy (preventing people from leaving certain rooms/communities, preventing them from messing around with their profile details, etc.)

Support room for Matrix Corporal: #matrix-corporal:devture.com

Note that Slavi also maintains matrix-docker-ansible-deploy, which can deploy these projects along with Synapse itself.

Bots

twimbot

I was extremely young when I first read and understood Larry Wall's explanation about the virtue of laziness, but I did not expect it to lead here. Cadair has created (I think inspired by an idea from TravisR), a "twimbot". This bot works in conjunction with opsdroid and the opsdroid connector-matrix - it works by storing selected messages from #twim:matrix.org in room state. In this way, it either assists the author by making it easier to produce the blog post you're reading, or it coldly replaces the author, leading to his sacking and penury. To view updates currently held by the bot, join #twim_updates:cadair.com.

Hashtag bot

When he's not working away on the Matrix Spec, TravisR continues to work on less [essential|sane] Matrix projects. This week we have @hashtag:t2bot.io, a bot that converts #hashtags to Matrix groups.

Why? Because why not. Source available on github: https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-hashtag-bot

Bridges

matrix-appservice-bridge and matrix-appservice-irc

Half-Shot will only be working full time with the Matrix Core team for another week (!!!), but until then he's going full-speed with bridge work. First matrix-appservice-irc:

Just pushed out matrix-appservice-irc 0.11.0-rc3 which contains a lot of nice things. The full changelog is there, hoping to get some of this tested and running on the matrix.org servers soon, but initial testing looks good :)

Having worked so much on IRC bridging the last few months, Half-Shot has this week managed to make improvements to matrix-appservice-bridge:

Released matrix-appservice-bridge 1.6.0 which contains mostly things I was writing for the irc bridge and factored out instead. There's a couple of goodies like automatic caching of profiles/events, and getEvent as a way to fetch events from the homeserver without fiddling with context.

Full changelog: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/blob/1.6.0/CHANGES.md

Some Intent operations now cache requests that would otherwise fall through to the homeserver which can be expensive. This is configurable for Intents via the opts.caching.ttl and size options. AgeCounters now allow you to set your own time period buckets. Added a new function Intent.getEvent which will fetch events from the homeserver without any context information, which should be quick. MembershipCache is now exposed to let folks read and write to the cache while also letting the bridge access it.

a release: Fix issue where roomState would fail. b release: Fix issue where we were calling this.intent inside intent like fools! c release: Fix issue where some stole js-sdk code was not checked thoroughly.

WhatsApp

tulir announces that mautrix-whatsapp "is now somewhat usable for basic chatting".

It uses the go-whatsapp library to talk with the WhatsApp Web API. Using the web API means that you'll still need WhatsApp on your phone connected to the internet, but it also means you won't get banned for using the bridge.
The bridge is still very alpha, but basic message bridging and some advanced features already work. There's a features & roadmap document about that.

To come chat about the WhatsApp bridge: #whatsapp:maunium.net.

mxtoot

mxtoot is a Matrix-Mastodon bot from ma1uta, creator of Jeon and the ecosystem around it.

There were two releases last week:

0.4.6 with additional commands (follow, unfollow, mute, unmute, block, unblock users, show followers and followings of the specified user) and a little bugfix.

0.4.7 is out now, which increases the length of messages to 4000 characters.

GSOC is finished!

GSOC 2018 has been valuable for everyone involved!

• Thank you zil0 for all your work on the Matrix Python SDK, E2E and and spec work.
• Thank you APWhiteHat: lots of work on dendrite, including a bunch of stuff on federation, as well as typing notifications!
• and thank you to Cadair for helping to organising it!

The Construct using asynchronous disk IO

Jason writes:

the Construct has advanced to fully asynchronous disk IO in a single-threaded environment.
RocksDB is a highly configurable and customizable database with a very large callback surface to support many different environments, which is good to connect it with something like AIO.
Normally RocksDB gets its performance from concurrent standard POSIX system calls (blocking IO) with multiple threads. The callback surface and its internals are not specifically suited for deviating from the pthread model. However I hacked RocksDB and tricked it into believing that my userspace contexts, which mimic the std::thread/pthread interface, are threads.
This is an example of a RocksDB callback to read from a file, it expects this callback to return immediately (i.e as soon as the kernel returns from a blocking read(2).) Except, where I call fs::read() that is actually a stack-suspension which makes a request to linux AIO where the stack resumes after AIO has called back with the data (see: https://github.com/jevolk/charybdis/blob/master/ircd/aio.cc)
No modifications to the internals of RocksDB were necessary. The Construct is being developed here: https://github.com/jevolk/charybdis.

Community Guides Index

Some weeks ago I asked for suggestions for content to add to a "Community Guides Index". There was not a wave of feedback, but we have enough collected content to be able to share a first pass of this Index. Check out the content there, and please please contact me if you have articles, videos or anything else you'd like to see included. Of course, if you'd like to produce some content and have it included, that would be great too! Ideas for missing articles:

• any content in a language other than English
• DevOps, how to use k8s or ansible to install Synapse
• how to use the Application Services API to make a bot

OggCamp 2018

OggCamp last weekend was great - massive thank you to Jon for organising and running the show - we love your work!

Presentations from Ben and Half-Shot seemed to go down well, we all chatted with Open Source fans and generally flew the flag for Matrix.

New Rooms

• tulir has enough projects that he has created #:maunium.net, for any project of his that doesn't have it's own room
• Support room for Shared Secret Auth: #matrix-synapse-shared-secret-auth:devture.com
• Support room for Matrix Corporal: #matrix-corporal:devture.com
• If you prefer the cold output of a machine, #twim_updates:cadair.com shows you the updates as they're posted in #twim:matrix.org.
• WhatsApp bridge: #whatsapp:maunium.net

So long…

Hope you had a good week, hope you enjoyed reading this post! Amandine is back after some needed vacation time, and has this week's Matrix Live below.

This feels like a bumper (extra big) post, so let's get straight into it!

Spec

TravisR continues to plow through work in documenting, clarifying and confirming the spec. You can check out his project on Github: August 2018 r0, which should give an idea of both the scale of the project and the amount of work which has been done. Rather than list out individual items as I have been, please take a look at that project, and come chat in #matrix-spec:matrix.org if you'd like to contribute.

Clients

Riot web

Some exciting things on Riot Web this week!

Bruno has merged his work on lazy loading room members lists, which should mean we see some big performance improvements, especially in larger rooms. You can expect to see that released on /develop soon.

He has also just started to work on the riot redesign, and has begun on some of the more visible changes like resizeable panels:

More news on the redesign to come soon!

nheko 0.5.3 released

nheko 0.5.3 was released this week. From the changelog:

Features

• Add option to disable desktop notifications
• Allow user to configure join rules for a room
• Add tab-completion for usernames

Improvements

• Remove the space gap taken by the typing notifications
• Remove hover event from emoji picker
• Add tooltips for the message indicators
• Fix compilation on FreeBSD
• Update Polish translation
• Small modal improvements

Seaglass builds being generated

Seaglass, the MacOS-native client, now has automatically generated builds available on bintray.

Seaglass is now a very usable and stable client on macOS. neilalexander has been very active this week:

Seaglass has had various updates, including the groundwork for joining and leaving channels, LOADS of crashes fixed, some more work done on avatars and E2E encryption has been fairly well road-tested now Still need to complete UI for device verification and setting E2E but it works fine in existing channels

Quaternion

kitsune has been working on Quaternion:

Quaternion has gained a new way to highlight mentions - with tinted background instead of colored text. Also, the majority of work on rooms grouping is done, and the current master branch features the roomlist grouped by tag (but rooms under each tag are pretty much out of order so it's not really ready for daily use yet).

Quaternion is looking for a macOS packager - if someone has the chance to help out in this area, speak to kitsune in #QMatrixClient.

Palaver

Arne came at us with the v0.2.1 release of Palaver:

A few days back Palaver has been moved to Gitlab. And I have since released v0.2.0 and v0.2.1. A runnable jar-file of the latest release can be downloaded at https://gitlab.com/MrCustomizer/palaver/tags/v0.2.1. The biggest changes in v0.2.x are the replacement of all the web views with native JavaFX components (as I don't feel comfortable embedding a whole browser stack in a desktop application) and support for read markers. There is a short YouTube video demonstrating the read marker implementation:

Riot mobile

This week, work continued on Lazy Loading room members for Riot Android, and progress toward a release for 0.7.0 on iOS.

neo client

f0x has begun rewriting Neo using matrix-js-sdk.

Matrique

Black Hat has been working on Matrique:

Matrique now has a (basic) room management panel, a working emoji picker, an unread marker and supports playing "m.audio". It should be available at Flathub any time.

SDKs and such

Jeon, Jmsdk, Gene, Matrix-Jabber-Bridge: ma1uta-world

ma1uta is continuing to make progress on his Java-focused collection of APIs and SDKs, he's eagerly awaiting the r0 release of the spec (aren't we all!)

Jeon (https://github.com/ma1uta/jeon) (client2server and application api) has released on the Maven Central Repository with version 0.4.1. The next goal: the stable release of all apis 1.0.0 after the Matrix spec will be released (I hope it will be soon :)) Jmsdk (https://github.com/ma1uta/jmsdk) the client and bot SDK have released on the Maven Central Repository. Gene (https://github.com/ma1uta/gene) the lightweight api for android has released on Maven Central Repository with 0.2.1 version. So, everyone can use this libraries without additional settings and additional repositories. Matrix-Jabber-Bridge (https://github.com/ma1uta/matrix-jabber-java-bridge) the double-pupped bridge between the Matrix and Jabber. I am still working on it and I think it will be released in a few weeks.

Ruby SDK v0.0.3

Ananace has tagged and released the next development version of the Ruby Matrix SDK - 0.0.3. He has plans to "finish up documentation and unit testing", with the aim of making a v1.0.0 release.

mautrix-appservice-go

tulir has a new, yet-to-be-revealed project, and in support of this he's been working again on mautrix-appservice-go:

mautrix-appservice-go is a bit more active again: it now has an initial intent API similar to the one in mautrix-appservice-python (which in turn is based on the intent API from matrix-appservice-bridge).

Synapse

No release this week, but Synapse has been progressing:

• Python 3 port continues at pace, we expect to have a beta to test in monolith mode rsn (Hawkowl leads this)
• Erik has been working on some federation API refactoring to make matrix.org snappier and hopes to have the new state resolution algo ready to go if not deployed late next week
• Richvdh has been looking at performance, as well as spec PRs/ Next week will be r0 work

Many Synapse maintainers are also doing huge lifts on development of the spec.

Matrix support now in ntfy

Half-Shot took a rare 30-minute window away from bridge maintenance to add Matrix support to ntfy. ntfy describes itself as

A utility for sending notifications, on demand and when commands finish

but in fact, you also send notifications whenever you like by calling ntfy send from anywhere you'd normally execute shell commands. This will make it really easy to integrate Matrix notifications into any other application!

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi brought updates to matrix-docker-ansible-deploy:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy got a lot of improvements lately:

• email-sending support, so that Matrix Synapse can send email notifications (enabled by default)
• mxisd Identity Server support (enabled by default)
• more detailed docs split into various sections (used to be a single README, but with more and more features it was turning into a wall of text)
• started keeping a changelog, especially for backward-incompatible things

the playbook can now also set up and configure Maximus's matrix-synapse-rest-auth

Riot Translations

@csybr:dodsorf.as and @dandellion:dodsorf.as appeared and announced that there is now a Norwegian Nynorsk translation available for Riot Web, matrix-react-sdk and riot-android. Non-Matrix-related aside: as a lazy Brit, I was vaguely aware of the cultural weight language carries in the history of Scandinavia, but didn't realise that Norway still has some fundamental differences ongoing.

Giveth

The Giveth project have produced a bot built on matrix: giveth-bot

For some more context:

Giveth is re-engineering charitable giving, by creating an entirely free, open-source platform, built on the Ethereum Blockchain.

The current giveth-bot:

handles welcoming people, can answer questions and handle our crazy points dishing system to reward contributors!

mautrix-telegram

mautrix-telegram now has an official 0.3.0 release. Says tulir:

No major changes since the release candidates last week, except a Telethon update that might have fixed history backfill.

"The End of GSOC"

Well, it may well be the end of the Julian's GSOC 2018 experience with the Fractal project, but I think Google will continue to run the programme. Check out Julian's experience (and the large number of issues resolved!) in this blog post.

OggCamp

This weekend Neil and I will be representing Matrix at OggCamp, "an unconference celebrating Free Culture, Free and Open Source Software, hardware hacking, digital rights, and all manner of collaborative cultural activities", if you will be there, come find and chat to us. We'll be the two nerdy-looking guys, so we should be easy to spot.

We'll meet again…

But for now, you can watch Neil host Matrix Live below (using the fan-favourite format of walking around the office), and come chat to us in #twim:matrix.org

Community Guides Index

As part of an overhaul of the documentation surrounding Matrix, I'm planning to launch a "Community Guides Index". This will be a page or section on Matrix.org with links to useful and informative documentation hosted elsewhere. If you have or know of informative articles, please let me know, or share them in #TWIM:matrix.org.

Clients

Seaglass

Seaglass now supports E2E rooms, leveraging matrix-ios-sdk! Additionally, maintainer neilalexander has had a productive week:

Seaglass has had many updates, including:

• message coalescing
• room settings (history/join rules and changing aliases/addresses)
• loading member list in rooms
• some starting work on loading avatars
• various UI and stability tweaks!

Quaternion: new redacted message handling options

Many of you will have seen the incredible volumes of spam plaguing Freenode over the last few weeks. Kitsune has added new features to Quaternion to help:

In response to the recent spam deluge from Freenode Quaternion has got an option to tidy up your timeline after all the spam-cleaning: you can hide all redacted messages or just those that came from recently joined users (along with the join message). So as long as the spammer gets moderated, it can become inexistent for you. The experimental code doing that will eventually be moved to libQMatrixClient for the benefit of Matrique, uMatriks and other clients based on the library.

This is especially cool: moving functionality to the lib for the benefit of other projects makes me very happy. :D

Fractal GSOC write-ups

Eisha and Julian finished their GSOC 2018 Fractal involvements this week, and Eisha has a blog post recounting her experience: My Final Report for GSOC 2018. Julian will have his ready too.

Riot

Big updates are on the horizon for both iOS and Android, with 0.7.0 of iOS headed to TestFlight today with a release due once it's through beta & AppStore review.  More details once the releases are out!

Meanwhile on Riot/Web, Lazy Loading members is pretty much complete - just writing end-to-end tests to ensure that encryption still works well when lazy loading is enabled.  Next up is actually progressing the redesign at last!

Spec status

• MSC1425/MSC1501 richvdh has been thinking about Room Versioning
  • A summary in his words: "room upgrades are implemented by creating a new room, shutting down the old one, and linking between the two"
• MSC1497 thorough discussion happening against Matthew's proposal for Capabilities support in the CS API
• MSC1442 though you may have seen it previously, I recommend anyone who is able to take a look at Erik's "State Resolution: Reloaded" proposal. This documents his "thoughts on the next iteration of the state resolution algorithm that aims to mitigate currently known attacks". It very clearly explains the current problem, and the proposed solution. While heavy, I found it really useful for helping to understand State Res and everything it affects.
• MSC1485 tulir proposes "Hint buttons in messages", which effectively provide pre-defined responses for users. This is especially valuable for Bots which can only accept a certain range of replies. I'd love to see this implemented, having long ago built a "choose your own adventure" engine using similar features from another messaging platform.

APIs and SDKs

Gene, minimalistic client-server api for Matrix

Not strictly this week, but we missed it before. ma1uta has been working away on his Java-based Matrix suite. Gene is a more lightweight API implementation than Jeon, covering all of the current C2S spec. A big motivation is to be able to use Gene on Android, which is not possible for Jeon due to it having more dependencies.

Ruby Matrix SDK

The Ruby Matrix SDK now has auto-generated, proper documentation, thanks to Ananace. v0.0.2 is the current release, but it's under active development and v0.0.3 is expected presently.

Telegram Puppeting on t2bot.io with mautrix-telegram

TravisR has rolled out tulir's mautrix-telegram bridge for everyone on t2bot.io's bridge.

This is a public trial to see how the bridge copes with multiple people puppeting their accounts. Of course, you don't need to puppet your account unless you want to. For more information on how to set this up, please visit https://t2bot.io/telegram

As part of this project, mautrix-telegram 0.3.0 release candidate was released.

Informo project releases SaltStack states

vabd, from the Informo project, arrived to say they have produced "a set of SaltStack states that includes deploying fully working Synapse homeservers: https://github.com/Informo/salt-states"

They introduce the Informo project:

Informo's a project (still a work in progress, currently) that aims at bypassing censorship of information on the Internet, by basically having news items go through a decentralised and federated network made of Matrix homeservers. Since we need to host nodes to this network (at least for testing purposes), we've worked on a working and automated infrastructure using SaltStack, which involved hand-writing a few SaltStack states, including states handling the installation and configuration of working Synapse homeservers. In the spirit of giving back to the community, we're publishing all of those hand-written states (available at the GH link above) under the GPLv3 license. If you want to discuss with us about what we're doing, or this topic specifically, please join us in #discuss:weu.informo.network ? The project is still pretty much a WIP and the technical specifics (even the ones we already implemented in our projects) are still under discussion and subject to changes (as mentioned in the GH repo's readme). All I can add for sure to what we already say is that we'll be working in partnership with NGOs to promote the project in countries where the press is heavily censored, and we're planning on implementing a cryptographic verification chain of some sort to reduce the risk of intentional disinformation.

Synapse 0.33.2

Synapse 0.33.2 is out now:

The release focuses on performance, notable highlights include reducing CPU consumption through speeding up state delta calculations and reducing I/O through lazily loading state on the master process Separately work continues on our python 3 port and we hope to have something concrete to trial very soon – we're really excited about this and expect step change improvements in CPU and memory use.

Latest synapse is now available on Debian thanks to andrewsh.

Room Tagging

This is not from this week at all, other than that it was new information to me. Actually it's ancient, matrix-wise, but I think it's interesting for those who don't know! Although Riot doesn't have an interface for adding custom room tags ("Favourites" and "Low Priority" come by default), Matrix supports arbitrary strings as room tags, and will display them if you add them via another CS API call. To facilitate this TravisR created a small script, tag_room.sh, which makes it very simple to set your own room tags.

FIN

That's all folks! Remember, lots of progress is happening with the Spec, if you want to be involved or follow along the best place to start is by joining #matrix-spec:matrix.org.

No Matrix Live this week due to vacation and general scheduling fun; sorry!

If you have documentation or articles related to matrix, let me know!

We'll meet again!

Spec Progress

Progress on the spec has been motoring since TravisR dived (dove?) into it full time a few weeks ago - the Federation API r0 megathread bug that tracks progress on filling in the gaps on the S2S API is clearing its checkboxes at an impressive rate.

Lining up spec PRs for @matrixdotorg sure does look pretty. pic.twitter.com/YHQ00ZgzYl

— Travis Ralston (@turt2live) August 3, 2018

Some points of note regarding current proposals:

• MSC1466 Erik proposes a soft_logout field to be added to the body of 401 responses, to better help handling of encryption keys. Check the proposal notes
• MSC1452 agreement has been reached on Homeserver Warning Messages

We're going with pinned messages (option 2) and room tags (option 5) as that seems to be where the consensus is: it re-uses existing bits of the spec and room tags also help clients that don't know about this specific room tag to handle the room the right way

• MSC1426/MSC1421 Discussion about the review process itself

• MSC1425 Room Versioning It's likely that in the immediate future we'll want to change the properties of rooms in a way that will not be compatible with existing servers - for example, changing the rules for event auth or state resolution, or changing the format of an event id.

• MSC1318 Documentation describing the anticipated Open Governance of Matrix.org (aka, Matrix.org Foundation)

Python SDK -> Python 3 ?

The maintainers of the Matrix Python SDK are mulling some major changes to the library. In particular, the desire to use await / async syntax means they are considering making Python 3.5 the minimum supported version. Go chat about this change and comment on the proposal issue.

Clients

Riot/Web 0.16

Big congratulations to the Riot/Web team on the release of 0.16. You can read all about it here, but I'll give you the headlines now:

• Replies are now available, there is UX for them and they look great
• Jitsi is now the default video conferencing provider across Web, iOS and Android, with new widget integrations for Riot Web
• New composer (text box) using Slate.js rather than Draft.js, which fixes many existing bugs and improves performance

Meanwhile, Lazy Loading implementation is approaching completion, promising several factors of improved resource utilisation!

nheko 0.5.2

Also now available on flathub!

Go download nheko and check out the 0.5.2 release notes.

New features just in the last week or so:

• Mark own read messages with a double checkmark
• Add option to specify the scale factor
• Add input field to specify the device name on login.
• Add option to ignore key requests altogether.
• Show device list in user profile & add option to create 1-1 chat.

Plus lots of improvements and bug fixes.

libQMatrixClient and Quaternion

kitsune has been working on resend functionality:

libQMatrixClient and Quaternion have gained ability to resend and discard unsent messages. this means if Quaternion could not, after several attempts, deliver a message, a user can click "Resend" and it will try again

On the subject of libQMatrixClient, it's exciting that Konversation, the KDE IRC client, may in future start to use libQMatrixClient for Matrix support!

Matrique

Black Hat announces a Flatpak repo for Matrique:

Matrique now has a Flatpak repo. It is the nightly build of the master branch. You can add the repo by typing flatpak remote-add matrique https://b0.gitlab.io/matrique-repo/matrique.flatpakrepo and install it by flatpak install matrique org.eu.encom.matrique As it is still Alpha quality, bugs are expected. Feel free to open an issue if anything goes wrong!

Fractal 3.29.6

New release of Fractal to 3.29.6. Notes from the changelog:

• Add German translation
• Message right click menu with: view source, reply, copy text and delete
• Styles for quotes in messages
• Initial sync speed up

Neo

Incremental improvements to Neo from fox:

Neo now has inline youtube and image url previews, and handles room state changes such as name, avatar and topic as they occur.

Riot/Mobile

• Android: a lot of bug fixes and small UI improvements
• iOS: Lazy Loading is coming to life, showing huge improvements in bandwidth usage and performance in the app

Updates on IRC bridges from Half-Shot

Half-Shot has been working tirelessly on the IRC bridge lately, so I wanted to update on his recent successes:

I've recently been working on mitigating the effects of a netsplit on the IRC bridge, and optimising it to start and run faster. This week I trimmed down the heap usage (where the memory usually goes) to just under a gigabyte on my 10,000 matrix user test bridge. Previously it could spike to as much as 3.5GB. This optimisation is still in a testing phase but results are looking positive.

For reference here is the memory usage of the Freenode process during startup:

And here are the results of my local test bridge before and after the change:

Before:

After:

We also made some internal changes to the appservice-bridge to cache the joined state of all the bridge users and therefore avoiding joining rooms which saves us some time on startup.

Matrix for Grafana, and more from Ananace

In his regular spot, Ananace has made progress on his Matrix sysadmin/ruby suite:

• Grafana alerting ingester supports images, plus more per-task configuration options.
• The K8s-optimized docker image for Synapse has been updated to 0.33.1
• The release tracker has gotten multiple performance improvements.
• the Ruby SDK continues to be slowly worked on.

Synapse

Synapse 0.33.1 is out now as a security update release. Please update if you haven't already - it fixes two issues concerning event visibility where if you knew the event ID of an event you could read it even if you didn't have access to it; we don't believe these have been exploited in the wild, but you will definitely want to upgrade now.

Meanwhile the Python 3 port is progressing well (all sytests now pass in Python 3, i think!), and intrepid folks are starting to experiment with running it in production.

Decentralised Web Summit & Matrix Live

Meanwhile, Matthew & Amandine have been in San Francisco for the 2018 Decentralised Web Summit - so this week's Matrix Live is live from SFO and gives a quick overview of the sort of things we got up to!  Some of the sessions are already online thanks to the (somewhat unreliable) live stream (e.g. here's Muneeb (Blockstack), Amandine, Danielle (Dat), and Zooko (Zcash) talking about their respective governance models & growing pains over the last 2 years: https://youtu.be/tsz3ffrJDpw?t=12133).  The summit was a massive success, with lots of discussions about decentralised reputation, UI/UX for decentralised apps, metadata-resistance, the balance of P2P versus decentralised-servers, etc.  Hopefully some of the conversations we had will result in some major improvements to Matrix in the future!

Edit: Here are the slides for our "Diving into Decentralised Communication" workshop, for those interested in a comparison between Matrix/SSB/Mastodon/Status/Vuvuzela/Briar.  They're pretty minimal, as they just formed a framework for discussion, but might still be of interest.

mautrix-telegram now supports double puppeting

tulir has been working away on mautrix-telegram, and has a major breakthrough:

It means you can log in to the bridge with your Matrix account to make messages you send from other Telegram clients appear from your Matrix account.

It can also be used to enable bridging of ephemeral events, which synapse doesn't send to appservices (read receipts, typing notifications, presence).

Also, the bridge has a new HTML parser which should be much better than the old one. It might have caused some new bugs though (like m.emote bridging breaking)

Coffee and the FAQBot

I've been slowly working on matrix.org the last couple of months, updating the FAQ, updating content and UI/appearance of try-matrix-now. As you may know, the FAQBot, created and maintained by Coffee, uses try-matrix-now for it's data, so Coffee updated the bot to start to use some of the new fields.

The final puzzle piece needed for FAQBot has been put into place: https://gitlab.com/Matrixcoffee/extract-web-to-org
This is the bit that grabs "Try Matrix Now!" and turns it into questions that FAQBot can use.
While I was working on that bit of code anyway, I also added support for the new 'home', 'repo', 'room' and 'language' fields. FAQBot will now give more and better information accordingly. For example, it is now possible to ask, "where is the Riot Android source code?" although it is generally better to just ask "where can I find Riot Android?" which combines several fields into a single answer.
4 of 7 items are now completed: https://gitlab.com/Matrixcoffee/FAQBot/issues/2
and the remaining 3 items before FAQBot's release are just the final review and integration tests.

New Discord Bridge Maintainer

Half-Shot has been working stridently on the Discord Bridge lately, and the project has now attracted a second maintainer:

We've got a new member of the maintainer crew in discord bridge land (bringing the total count to 2.) I'd like to welcome Sorunome :). They are going to be helping review the influx of PRs, chew some issues and be a point of contact in the community. They've already filled my PR queue up and it's going to help us move even faster!

In other Bridge news, matrix-appservice-bridge 1.5.0 is out now, uses the latest matrix-js-sdk and matrix-appservice-node, and contains a lot of changes.

Bruno unit tests

Bruno, the latest and greatest addition to the [riot-web] team, has been working on configuring end to end unit tests. His scripts now install synapse from the metal, install riot and then run a test suite. Take a look at the animation below to get the idea!

Fractal 3.29.5

Alexandre Franke tells us about new features in Fractal 3.29.5, and how the project has benefited from GSOC 2018 contributors:

Fractal got a big new release 3.29.5, which includes Eisha's multi-line input (with markdown syntax highlighting) and Julian's room details redesign, as well as his refactor on avatar code which leads to a perf boost.

Ananace: Grafana webhook for Matrix notifications

Ananace, always working on sysadmin tooling with matrix, comes back with a new tool: Grafana webhook for Matrix notifications. This release is described as "the very first 'It doesn't crash instantly' version", but this is surely a useful project.

Quaternion / libQMatrixClient support local echo

kitsune had a surprising week while working on his QMatrix projects:

/me accidentally found a year-old feature branch in his Git and thought of rebasing it in order to eventually continue working on it. As a result, libQMatrixClient and Quaternion master branches support local echo from today. Too bad the same trick doesn't work for E2EE.

Too bad indeed!

Riot/Web

• Cut the release candidate for 0.16-RC1
• Lots of final polishing on Jitsi; all bugs fixed now
• Likewise all Slate bugs fixed - many thanks to t3chguy for finishing them off
• Lazy Loading Members implementation progressing well
• Release due on Monday
• On crypto: uhoreg has also been progressing on hooking up incremental key backup

Riot/Mobile

• Room version upgrade support!
• Replies UI implemented on iOS and working well
• Lazy Loading Members is done and working on iOS - speeds up launch by a minimum of 3x

Synapse

• Hawkowl is running the first ever Python 3.6 synapse! RAM usage looks to be 2-3x less than on Python 2.7. Still work to be done to merge all the PRs though.
• Landing all the Lazy Loading patches; 3 down, 3 to go
• Gathering feedback on the state res prop - thanks to uhoreg for wading through it!
• Catching up Lots and lots of PRs
• Implementing room versioning and gathering feedback on the MSC
• Perf fixes - optimising current state res a bit & fixing sync performance
• => End-to-end message latency on matrix.org has been improved by 3-5x over the last few days(!!!)

Dendrite

• Super-exciting to see E2E working thanks to fadeAce's PR: https://twitter.com/matrixdotorg/status/1022887733931520001

Super-exciting to see end-to-end encryption working with Dendrite thanks to a massive PR from first-time contributor fadeAce!! https://t.co/SLIPvgYGAm pic.twitter.com/s47SWjY46o

— Matrix (@matrixdotorg) July 27, 2018

• OpenTracing support has been dusted off and is working again cross-service
• See the community update for much more!

Spec

• Travis continues to blitz through the S2S spec, PRs are flying around everywhere (and even landing!)
• Uhoreg continues to work on the E2E spec merges with Zil0

We'll meet again…

See you next week, and don't forget to watch Matrix Live below!

Spec Updates!

First of all: we've just released the first draft of the proposal for our next generation State Resolution algorithm as MSC1442 (State Resolution: Reloaded).  This is the result of a massive amount of work from Erik - if you are at all interested in the problems that state resets have plagued us with, then you will want to read the proposal and please comment on it!

The next step on State Resolution: Reloaded (once approved) is to be able to actually roll it out - and to this end, richvdh has proposed MSC1425 (Room Versioning proposal). This was published at the beginning of the week but we haven't had any feedback yet - again, please read & give feedback as the intention is to start working on this as soon as possible!  Matthew's also been updating the Lazy Loading proposal (MSC1227).

Meanwhile, the Matrix Spec is now awash with activity, lots of work from TravisR, Cadair and others to accelerate progress. Take a look at the proposals list to stay up to date, or straight to the matrix-doc repo and #matrix-spec:matrix.org room to get the raw activity.

Finally, discussions relating to the spec proposal process itself have attracted attention: MSC1426 and MSC1421, and we're already trialling the new process (using Github PRs rather than Google Docs) in MSC1442 (State Resolution: Reloaded) already.

nheko 0.5.x

nheko 0.5.1 is out, and it's great! Get a version for your platform from bintray.com. I've been using it for the last week or so (on macOS) and found it very stable and usable. mujx commented that "highlights were encryption support & desktop notifications on all platforms", but you can get much more thorough notes from the release notes.

Plasma

It's been several weeks since we mentioned Plasma, but work on the C2S parts of the spec implementation have been happening quietly behind the scenes. Project lead Nico said recently:

I've updated the CI test server with the latest snapshot version of plasma. createRoom and invite C2S endpoints are fully implemented and should work as expected.

You can find the full list of implemented endpoints in the readme, and also read the architecture overview.

kitsune, live on stage

kitsune presented an introduction to Matrix (for a technical audience) at the Tokyo Linux Users Group - you'll need to skip to 1h41m16s into the video.

GTAD pulls in description and summary fields from the API

kitsune continues working on GTAD, and this week has started automatically including docs in libQMatrixClient:

GTAD is now aware of description and summary fields in API descriptions so you can use them with Javadoc/Doxygen. As a result, libQMatrixClient master branch now enjoys doc-comments throughout its CS API layer - the rest of the library builds in envy.

SimpleMatrix

MTRNord introduced us to SimpleMatrix:

SimpleMatrix is my approach on making an Android App that is more easy to use than the official one in Terms of UX and UI. Planned is also a Android Wear App within this App for mostly Notifications.

SimpleMatrix is planning to use matrix-java-sdk, but for now is a visual mockup, it doesn't currently connect to Matrix.

Room: #SimpleMatrix:matrix.ffslfl.net Git: https://git.nordgedanken.de/Nordgedanken/SimpleMatrix

Tales of Half-Shot and his many Bridges

Arrival of the Discord DMs

After lots of begging, frustration and eventually an offer of a free lunch (thanks Anoa): I give you Discord DMs.
This first cut bridges over existing regular and group DMs to Matrix. In the future we will also allow you to create DMs from Matrix so that you can contact users without even logging into Discord. With thanks to the #discord:half-shot.uk community for helping shape this feature!

Currently this is in PR form but is very likely to make it into the 0.3 release of matrix-appservice-discord.

Half-Shot fixes the Foonetic IRC bridge

For those who (want to) use Foonetic IRC channels, Half-Shot is here for you! Previously this bridge had been down due to invalid certificates, but this is now resolved.

Synapse

Synapse 0.33 landed on Thursday, boasting 2x speed-ups for /sync and (briefly) meaning that the matrix.org homeserver felt impressively snappy and fast!  Ironically traffic levels promptly grew again such that the synapse master process is now the bottleneck once more, but between incremental state res, python 3 and upcoming room-sharding work we should see the performance fixes continuing to come!  Meanwhile, lots of PRs in the queue for Synapse 0.34 - including Lazy Loading support as per (MSC1227), and a whole new set of stats functionality for tracking per-room and per-user stats.

Riot

Lots of activity in the build up to Riot/Web 0.16 - merging the new Slate rich text editor to /develop (try it now!), upgrading Jitsi and turning it on by default (at last!! - again, try it on /develop, although you'll have to enable it in Labs).  We'd be particularly interested in how Jitsi is behaving, as so far for us it's been unrecognisably improved over the previous deployment.

Meanwhile, lots of work on Lazy Loading members on Riot/Web and Riot/iOS, and lots of stability perf work in general across mobile.

State Resolution Special... Matrix Live!

And finally, all you could ever want to hear about the new State Resolution algorithm on a special edition of Matrix Live, starring Erik & Matthew!

Welcome to TWIM for Friday the 13th! Nothing too scary, but lots of client updates and news.

Quaternion

kitsune:

Quaternion has gained a new /html command that allows one to send raw HTML. Note that an actually displayed HTML subset entirely depends on the receiving client; no HTML validation or sanitation is done; a plaintext version is automatically created by stripping all the HTML tags.

neo

f0x is working on Neo again:

added emotes, working localecho and /rainbow

rainbows :D

matrix-logger

A useful tool from CromFr for anyone who wants to archive logs of rooms.

I wrote a small matrix "client" for logging messages in joined rooms, and store them in a format very similar to Weechat logs. Source code (Rust) Binary release (x86_64 windows & linux) Please open issues if encounter any bug or need specific features.\nAlso I'm new to rust, so any review / advices would be appreciated :)

Matrique client progress

Black Hat has been working on Matrique, and it's looking really good! Screenshot below.

Matrique now has support for sending/receiving messages (plaintext, markdown, HTML, rainbow), emotes and notices. It also supports receiving images, videos, files and states. I am still working on file receiving functions.

I love that all clients include rainbow messages.

fluffychat for Ubuntu Touch

New to me, fluffychat is a "Simple Matrix Messenger for Ubuntu Touch". The design philosophy for this app is focused on simplicity, and the hope is for it to complement uMatriks, another Ubuntu Touch client.

Why are you not just contributing to uMatriks? uMatriks is great and it's superb, that someone has created a Matrix Client for Ubuntu Touch. But sometimes you have a so detailed vision of a user interface, which you want to implement, that you can not just contribute to an existing project. However, I would like to work with the uMatriks developers together. We could use the same push gateway for example.

Riot/Web

• Welcomed Bruno onto the Riot/Web team! (and said farewell to Luke)
• Lots of bug blitzing
• Riot 0.16 due next week, with Jitsi-everywhere (at last) and Slate for composer.
• We now have an end-to-end test harness (via puppeteer!) at last - being applied at first to fix onboarding bugs.
• Lazy loading members in progress

Riot/Mobile

• Major perf work ongoing
• Decoupling members from state…
• …and then lazyloading members.

Synapse 0.32.2 available

v0.32.2 is now available, which includes the m.room.server_acl security feature discussed in a previous blog post.

• If you're not running 0.32, please upgrade!!
• Python 3 progresses!
• Quite a lot of ops work to keep matrix.org alive. Status page coming soon! (We promise!!)
• Looking at metrics and quotas for better experiences on limited-resource homeservers.

Spec

• State res fix
• Version bump
• Lots of omission PRs landing
• TravisR S2S work
• Work on both IS & AS API too
• Uhoreg work - .well-known, and 3pid logins
• Some internal discussions about improving the proposal process; particularly having a 5 day 'final comment period' similar to Rust's. Once we've got alignment within the core spec team we'll MSC it.

Dendrite

• Anoa & APwhitehat continue to blitz onwards on AS and federation
• thirdparty protocol support for application services in the works.
• continued progress on getting the AS query APIs supported. PR for /alias still being reviewed, PR for /users happened this week and now being reviewed
• Timestamp massaging for application services ready and in review
• APWhiteHat did a good chunk on federation, now migrating to supporting the various EDUs, starting with m.typing events.
• …running out of low hanging fruit…

AS

• matrix-appservice-irc 0.9.1 is here with perf improvements!
• Lots of work on trying to make it start up sooner

E2E

• UISI stats
• Device list syncing
• Encrypted backup

Debian Packages

andrewsh has packaged synapse 0.32.2 for Debian

uhoreg has packaged quaternion 0.0.9.2 for Debian

That's all folks

Watch Matrix Live below, and see you next week!

matrix-synapse for Docker and k8s

Ananace has been working on configuration files for Synapse:

So now the K8s stuff has configuration examples for Synapse + Riot + mxisd + coturn, all runnable on your very own Kubernetes cluster - though with some manual tinkering required at the moment.
I've updated the Kubernetes configuration examples to include everything you need for a full Matrix stack; Synapse + Riot + mxisd - using the built-in K8s ingress
And + coturn of course, not to forget

Take a look: https://github.com/ananace/matrix-synapse

mautrix-telegram is now the primary Telegram bridge on t2bot.io

TravisR:

t2bot.io is now running mautrix-telegram as the primary Telegram bridge. Feel free to join the other 10k users on the bridge and bridge your own Telegram group to your room: https://t2bot.io/telegram/.

We should give a big shout of thanks to tulir for his consistent and continued work on mautrix-telegram.

Debian packaging

andrewsh:

I'm packaging Circle IRC/Matrix client for Debian and backporting synapse to stable.

Google Summer of Code

The second evaluation for GSOC 2018 is nearly here, so we have some updates from the student participants:

apwhitehat is working on Dendrite

Dendrite updates for TWIM (before GSoC 2nd eval): This month we've got most of the federation APIs working on Dendrite. These are:

• State APIs #486
• Get missing events API #516
• Query user devices #498

We still need to figure out pagination for backfill API.

On applications services, we've got a lot of APIs working, thanks to anoa. Authentication now acknowledges App services, though lot of other stuff is under review. I am eagerly waiting for it to land.

On the same topic, anoa says:

We've had a PR from fadeAce/dirichlet_zby for the server-side implementation of end-to-end encryption support in Dendrite. Will be looking forward to seeing that land as well.

There is an explanation of the endpoints required for this in the CS API docs.

Zil0 is working on E2E in the Python SDK

Sounds like Zil0 has been going great guns on the matrix-python-sdk:

Encryption in matrix-python-sdk should now work fairly well.
The biggest parts to write were device tracking and key persistence. All the PRs are now opened, and the code is fully tested and documented.
It is possible to try out the implementation before it lands by referring to instructions written here.
Also a special thanks to poljar for some great work on new Olm bindings, which allowed the project not to get stuck with packaging issues.
Further work include encrypted attachments, device verification and key sharing.

koma, kotlin client

Last week I mistakenly referred to Koma as being written in Rust, then Java. This was all incorrect, though being written in Kotlin, Koma does run on the JVM and use JavaFx.

sideboat:

This week in koma, we are improving the room info window used for viewing and editing the name, icon, and aliases of a room. In the upcoming release, user power levels will be taken into account, so that editing options will only be shown when the user has enough power.

Synapse

Neil says:

We've just cut the next release candidate for Synapse: 0.32.0rc1.
The upcoming release focuses almost entirely on security; fixing federation bugs and adding new features for countering abuse.

Riot

This week we welcome Bruno to the Riot team, he's off and away working on getting integration tests set up.

Otherwise:

• More work on the Jitsi integration
• More work troubleshooting E2E failures
• v0.15.6 and v0.15.7-rc.1 now available

Self-reference

This week was only six days long, but to make up for it we'll have a bumper eight day edition next time! Come join us in #TWIM:matrix.org and share what you've made.

Welcome

Welcome to This Week in Matrix, let's see what updates the community has to offer this week!

koma

Announcing his update nearly a week ago, radicus released v0.7.3 of koma.

There have been quite some changes since updates of the project were last posted, but the major ones are:

• Upgrade to JavaFx 9
• Experimental support for infinite scroll on message list
• Rewrite ListView to improve performance and reduce jar file size

dialogflow connector

vurpo has released matrix-dialogflow, which allow the use of DialogFlow agents as chatbots:

I've written a little bot for connecting a DialogFlow agent to Matrix as a chatbot. I did this for my own personal purposes but I know someone else might find this handy as well.

mautrix-telegram

tulir:

New stuff in mautrix-telegram:

• A basic telematrix database import script
• Improved config for relaybot message formatting, including the option to use Matrix displaynames (instead of just mxid localparts) I've also been planning an improved Matrix->Telegram formatting converter and a provisioning API for integration managers like Dimension.

jmsdk

ma1uta has been working on a matrix client this week. To that end, he has implemented jmsdk, a "very early version of the matrix sdk and common classes (client, bot, …)"

Currently implemented the matrix client on the java with full support of the C2S API. It still under development and contains bugs.

He has also been working on a "bot sdk with core classes to write custom bots and appservices."

matrix-appservice-voip

Max has been working on VoIP bridging between Matrix and regular phones using Freeswitch:

We have successful VoIP bridging between Matrix and regular phones using Freeswitch, for 1:1, both directions! a v0.1 is scheduled in a few days once configuration is possible and a getting started doc is written.

Next steps:

• more voice backends (think Jitsi, etc.)
• SMS support with Twilio and/or OVH initially
• mxisd integration to automatically invite bridge users if needed and suggest bridge users
• mxgwd integration to auto-join HS regular users if a VoIP bridge user invites them, so > calls are directly seen
• And much more in later releases

Join #matrix-appservice-voip:kamax.io for more info, or visit the Github repo

transform

A wild bettiah appeared, announced a completely new homeserver implementation in TypeScript:

I have been working on a homeserver implementation over at https://github.com/bettiah/transform . It is fairly basic at the moment, but the development experience is straight-forward and even fun.

I'm interested to see a TypeScript backend running, and of course it's great to have more homeserver implementations! Some highlights from the readme:

Transform is a matrix homeserver built using Typescript and Redis. It is not fully functional yet. Status: Register, Login, CreateRoom, Invite & Join seem to be functional with riot web client. But quite a lot of functionality is missing and the software is definitely not ready for deployment in a public facing role. Design: A lot of the code is auto-generated from the excellent swagger specs for the client-server api. Contributing: It is early days yet. However, Typescript has enabled safe & rapid progress. Redis streams too seem to have a very well thought out api and the whole thing has been a fun experience so far. Contributions are very welcome.

dsn-traveller source code released!

Good news for those following the progress of dsn-traveller, the source is now publicly available!

From Florian:

I received permission to publish the source code of the DSN Traveller bot (https://dsn-traveller.dsn.scc.kit.edu/) prior to handing in my thesis: You can find it at https://github.com/florianjacob/dsn-traveller, it's written with ruma-client and Rust async/await.

Room remains at #dsn-traveller:dsn-traveller.dsn.scc.kit.edu.

E2E for Python SDK

Late breaking, but not itself broken, &Adam has news from matrix-python-sdk:

first olm-centered E2E PR for the python sdk merged to master (finally). Lots of great work from Zil0 still to be merged waiting on PR review. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-python-sdk/pull/224

Fractal

From Tobias:

No new Fractal release this week. Development was quite active nevertheless, with Jordan's new inline audio player landing in master, Julian getting close to landing the first part of the new room settings, and Eisha working on improving the image viewer.

Riot

• New Release! v15.6 - https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/releases/tag/v0.15.6
• Jitsi by default for Video calls
• Replies to messages
• New room sharing feature

New Rooms

• #matrix.fi:matrix.org - a room for Finnish speakers

And so…

All good things must come to an end, so it is with this blog post! Watch this week's Matrix Live (hosted by yours truly) below, and come see us in #twim:matrix.org!