This Week in Matrix

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)

Release of v0.3.0 on Friday: full changelog can be found here: https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/releases/tag/v0.3.0

We are working on read receipt management, it’s nearly functional

🔗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

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)

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 🛠

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:

user add bot to room (for example room with whatsapp bridge users - now bridge support adding bot to such rooms)

bot listen room, and when get voice-message - send it to Yandex-cloud for translate (now support only Russian language).

When translating is success - bot get result text and show it in room as notice, such: "Username said: text"

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

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 🌉

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

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:

This Week in Ruma: https://ruma.dev/news/this-week-in-ruma-2019-07-21/
now with liberapay, to support Ruma: https://liberapay.com/ruma/

🔗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:

https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.0.0 - deb package and tar/zip archives

https://hub.docker.com/r/ma1uta/ma1sd - docker images

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

MSC2181: Add an Error Code for Signaling a Deactivated User
- New MSC, with FCP proposed.
- Will allow matrix clients to differentiate between incorrect password entry and a user who has been deactivated.
MSC2174: Move the redacts key to a sane place
MSC2175: Remove the creator field from m.room.create events
MSC2176: Update the redaction rules
- richvdh storms in with 3 MSCs to fix some old spec issues relating to event redactions.
MSC2184: Allow the use of the HTML <details> tag
- ananace’s first MSC!
- Allowing expandable content within messages.
- Would be very useful for logs dumps, bot help messages and for posting other large content without spamming the room.

🔗(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

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.

Full perimeter can be found here: https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/milestone/6?closed=1

Known limitation: crash on device running Android KitKat (4.4). We are considering supporting only device running Android Lollipop (5.0) and up (see/approve/comment https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/issues/405)

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

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:

Bubble shapes for pending events are fixed.

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.

Markdown is parsed automatically by default, and works with replies.

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

MSC2140: Terms of Service for ISes and IMs
- Largely complete
MSC2134: Identity Hash Lookups
- Largely complete
- Going ahead with the simple hash lookup method
Matthew/msc1849 rewrite
- Rewrite of the Proposal for m.relates_to aggregations MSC with new updates
MSC2153: Add a default push rule to ignore m.reaction events
- Will help prevent ghost notifications appearing when a reaction is the last event in the room

🔗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

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

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

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.

Spectral uses QtKeychain now. Access tokens are stored in system keychain instead of in plain text.

Room list's filter has a better UX(aka TabBar). Switching between rooms and DMs is now as easy as switching between, well, tabs.

Notification count in system tray icon, implementation modified from nheko.

Display initial sync progress. Some people have been complaining about not knowing the progress of initial sync so I added an indicator.

A better room setting page. Specifically displaying aliases and changing room avatar are working.

Big emojis.

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

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!

This Week in Matrix 2019-06-28

28.06.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

Matthew & Amandine talk to Ross Schulman; new Matrix.org Foundation Guardian!

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

🔗Hottest GovTech Startup in Europe at The Europas tech awards

New Vector won Hottest GovTech Startup in Europe at The Europas tech awards last night for work on rolling out Matrix for France and elsewhere!

It was mainly judge-based, but public votes were used to filter.

We're super proud to have won the hottest Gov/Reg/Civic Tech startup at @TheEuropas for creating self-sovereign secure communications on top of @matrixdotorg for the Public Sector - particularly with @_DINSIC and @tchap_dinsic! (So proud we created a twitter account at last :D) pic.twitter.com/PGqoHx007T
— New Vector (@NewVectorHQ) June 27, 2019

🔗Rust Embedded community is moving to Matrix

They held a public vote, and Matrix won very convincingly.

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

MSC2134 Identity Hash Lookups is making steady progress

Readers who like crypto/hashing are encouraged to join in the fun

MSC2140 Terms of Service for ISes and IMs is nearing a conclusion

MSC2108 Sync over Server Sent Events hopes to add an alternative sync method to long-polling

Finally servers pushing events!

MSC2010 Adding client-side spoilers is a small feature but requires a lot of thought to integrate it seamlessly

Sorunome thought this would be easy

Lots of small fixes across the board.

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse

Here's Neil:

With 1.0 shipped we are now starting to take a closer look at Synapse performance more generally and this will be a theme for us over the coming months. We want to improve not only large scale deployments such as Matrix.org but also optimise for smaller instances.

You may have seen a few trial servers run by core team members in matrix.org community rooms popping up and this is a precursor for a broader effort to make synapse more manageable on less powerful infrastructure. My own instance has been sat at a pretty steady 256MB of RAM.

Other than that, based on 1.0 feedback, we have been working on improving the Synapse upgrade path and expect to put out a new release next week containing the tweaks. Specifically this means improving configuration for Docker installs, and configuration management for sending emails.

We’re also implementing open tracing into Synapse, initially to help with e2ee debugging, but it will make tracking down strange behaviour easier more generally.

Finally we’re bringing our push server Sygnal kicking and screaming into 2019 and will upgrade to Python 3, drop gevent for twisted and update our vendor specific libraries, not mention improving the monitoring and alerting. We’ll also add in open tracing which will help hunt down push failures.

Finally finally, look out for a DAG visualisation tool written by GSOCer Eisha referenced elsewhere in TWIM - we consider this to be seriously cool, and can’t wait to start using it in anger.

Note: 1.0 is the last release to support python 2 and postgres 9.4, the next Synapse release will drop support for both, see https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/08/synapse-deprecating-postgres-9-4-and-python-2-x for more.

🔗Dendrite

Dendrite received a few updates this week. Notably:

Cnly has been implementing typing notifications support in #718

anoa has been fixing up the flaky sytests in #631. The team is considering moving from CircleCI to BuildKite for tests in the future.

Cnly has added a few issues for odd bits and bobs they’ve found around the codebase. This is much appreciated!

🔗Construct

We now support building with Clang, and also GCC-9

Work on version 3/4/5 rooms has been underway.

🔗Ruma

This Week in Ruma: https://ruma.dev/news/this-week-in-ruma-2019-06-23/

This week was spent working on a big revamp of ruma-events, the library that defines Rust types for the "events" used in Matrix. After some discussion in #ruma:matrix.org, I decided to make a move towards treating ruma-events as a higher-level library. Previously, ruma-events has more or less offered Rust types that are exact representations of the JSON structures used by Matrix. However, by representing events this way, it would be possible for users to easily create values that, while valid JSON, would be invalid events according to the specification. The way we're approaching this problem is by separating serialization/deserialization of JSON from validation of events.

🔗Jeon/JeonServer

ma1uta:

Jeon 0.9.0 release. It is a release candidate for Jeon 1.0.0 which complies with the Matrix stable release 1.0. Not a lot changes, just added missing endpoints and events. Also I started to work on JeonServer, a Matrix server written on java.

Jeon is a set of Java interfaces to Matrix APIs, JeonServer is a proposed homeserver.

🔗matrix-media-repo

TravisR:

matrix-media-repo has received some speed improvements and is generally nicer to memory when using the s3 datastore. Give it a try and leave feedback in #media-repo:t2bot.io.

🔗GSOC project: Matrix Visualisations 🎓

Eisha appeared with this terrific GSOC update:

The GSoC project “Matrix Visualisations” has made good progress during this first period:

The implementation of the CS API backend has been completed to properly retrieve events from a room in real time.

Many features have been added to the UI, here are some of them:

The DAG is displayed vertically, every node of the same “depth” are on the same level in the graph and each node has outgoing arcs for each of its previous events (if they have already been retrieved).

The node at the top of the DAG allows to fetch earlier events by selecting it.

Each node can have two different colors whether its “origin” is the HS the application is currently talking to or not.

The full JSON body of an event can be displayed by double clicking on its node.

It is possible to select which fields of the events will be directly included in the labels of the nodes.

A (server-side) backend has been implemented so that the application can directly talk to the PostgreSQL database of Synapse. You can find it on this repo.

Note that the support of the Federation API has been postponed so I could work on this Synapse database backend. The UI of the application isn’t very beautiful or well-organised yet, as the effort is focused on the backends and core functionalities for now, but improvements will be made once these functionalities will be completed.

Remember you can check TWIM from last week to get a reference on the other three GSOC projects.

Matrix Visualisations

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🏗

🔗matrix-bot-sdk

TravisR:

matrix-bot-sdk v0.4.0-beta.1 has been published with a bunch of improvements for appservices. There's still more planned before the final v0.4.0 release, however live testing is always better than unit tests. If you use the library, try npm install [email protected] and report any issues to #matrix-bot-sdk:t2bot.io.

🔗libQuotient, now with EncryptionManager

libQuotient introduces EncryptionManager, check out the PR for more info, and also review aa13q's GSOC update from last week.

🔗Ruby SDK

Just cut a 1.2.0 release of the Ruby SDK, including fixes for timeout handling, some general code cleanup and documentation work, and a collection of getters and setters for most of the specced room state types

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗freenode IRC bridge restarted

The freenode IRC bridge was restarted with the following fixes:

Some characters in IRC usernames (such as “|”) would cause IRC user’s messages to not appear on the Matrix side.

Room upgrades are now handled a bit more cleanly

🔗mx-puppet-bridge platform

Sorunome has been working on her all-new bridge platform, mx-puppet-bridge:

This week soru has been working more on mx-puppet-bridge, together with mx-puppet-slack and the now-new mx-puppet-tox.

🔗mx-puppet-bridge

This is work on the underlying bridge, protocol implementations still have to do their thing

room name, icon and topic (was already implemented but untested)

ghost name and icon (was already implemented, but untested)

file sending in both directions (image, audio, video, file, autodetect) (was already implemented, but untested)

have own ghosts create rooms --> appservice bot is not needed, more invisible bridging (especially nice for 1:1 rooms!)

implemented 1:1 room bridging

implemented provisioning interface via appservice bot

remote -> matrix presence handling

remote -> matrix typing notifications

matrix -> remote puppet name tracking

matrix -> remote puppet avatar tracking

mx-puppet-bridge uses caching for better performance

Added linting

🔗mx-puppet-slack

Lots of work here, smoothening things out

room name, icon and topic bridging

ghost name and icon bridging

file sending in both directions

presence and typing notifs

🔗mx-puppet-tox

This is a new one! It bridges tox over to matrix...or, well, more acts like a client (as tox doesn't have multidevice). Basic chatting was already functioning with only around 300 lines of code! The node toxcore bindings seem to only include support for 1:1 chats (and not the new group chats), so only that is implemented.

ghost name and icon bridging

file senidng in both directions

presence and typing notifs

matrix -> tox name and avatar syncing

There is already substantial documentation available, and a Matrix room at #mx-puppet-bridge:sorunome.de.

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗RiotX (Android)

We are finalizing the MVP of RiotX. Many new features, along with many bug fixes this week:

Notifications for version with or without Firebase Cloud Messaging

Reply in e2e rooms

Change of DI tool (We are now using dagger2)

New settings, split into categories

New set of Emojis for quick reactions

New application icon

And many other little features

New disclaimer screen, displayed at first startup

New suggestion screen (based on bug report screen)

Min SDK version has been set to API 19 (Kitkat), mainly for security reasons, but also because we are using MotionLayout which is available only on API 18+.

Remaining work to do before we can release the first beta version on the PlayStore:

Encrypt/Decrypt attachment in e2e rooms

Last event display in the room list

Test, test, test, and fix, fix, fix :)

🔗Integration of Matrix into Delphus

Pneumaticat:

Our company, Scintillating, has integrated Riot as an end-to-end encrypted chat, video, and voice call provider for our decentralized scientific study management system Delphus. We have created a method of linking Matrix IDs with Ethereum addresses to allow scientific researchers to look up participants and create chat rooms to talk with individuals in a privacy-preserving manner.

🔗Spectral

We didn't get a Spectral update for a few weeks! Black Hat reported:

Quite a few changes in Spectral in the past few weeks. The room list filter is improved, and it only shows rooms with unread notifications by default. User can optionally hide join/leave events. Empty avatar in direct chats is fixed. Each user now has a unique message bubble background color in the timeline.

🔗Pattle: version 0.8.0

Wilko, chief Pattler:

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

Although this isn't the biggest release, it's still a big step: the first release of iOS will be available! The build is currently still in review by Apple.

You can download the iOS app via TestFlight soon, join #app:pattle.im to get the link immediately when it's available!

🔗Other changes

Add .well-known support!

Automatically update homeserver property in 'Advanced' while typing username

Fix messages being wrongly grouped by sender

Fix direct chats staying marked as direct when someone else joins

🔗Install this release

F-Droid:

Add the following repo in F-droid: https://fdroid.pattle.im/?fingerprint=E91F63CA6AE04F8E7EA53E52242EAF8779559209B8A342F152F9E7265E3EA729

Install 'Pattle'

APK: Download from the assets of this release

🔗Issues

If you stumble upon any issues, please report them! You can login via GitHub and Gitlab.com, so it's really easy to do!

🔗Follow Pattle

Follow development in #app:pattle.im!

🔗Support me

If you would like to support me, 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!

🔗continuum updates placeholder avatars

https://matrix-team.pages.debian.net/blogue/2019/06/26/june-2019-matrix-on-debian-update/

continuum tweaked the appearance of placeholder avatars. To make most users appear visually distinct, continuum has always used colors based on checksums and usernames to generate placeholders if any user doesn't have an image as avatar. In previous versions, it always used two characters of the name. In the new version, if the username contains ideographic (usually east-asian) characters, a single character would be used. The reason is that the number of ideographic characters is vast and duplicates are less common, and most of them are close to a square or circle in shape so a single one would fit the GUI component better.

🔗FluffyChat edges closer to E2E

Krille:

Last weekend hummlbach (from the UBports community) visited me and we worked 18 hours on implementing end2end encryption. We are now able to send encrypted messages. Key sharing and decrypting will follow.

Not available in the released version yet, but join #fluffychat:matrix.org for more info. Also: 18 hours! Woah.

🔗Quaternion

Quaternion received several updates recently, check out #quaternion:matrix.org for more info.

🔗Fractal released 4.1 dev version

Alexandre Franke:

Fractal released a 4.1 development version, which was added to the beta channel of flathub. danigm is eager to get 4.2 out soon and is trying to fix the last few bugs we want to see gone before then. He already opened a few merge requests.

🔗riot-web

Updated the reactions UX with a new tooltip-style interaction

Added edit history dialogue and other small editing tweaks

Riot Desktop config options (such as default HS, theme, etc.) can now be overridden for easy customisation

🔗riot-iOS

New reactions in the event contextual menu

Edits in e2e rooms

Still refining reactions and edits

🔗matrix-enact, read-only client which performs the contents of rooms with Web Audio API

Some time ago I made a toy: https://play.matrix.org/matrix-enact/

This is a read-only Matrix client, which takes the contents of a public room and "enacts" it, that is, it performs it using the Web Audio API in your browser

The original intention was to be a demonstration of what can be done with /context endpoint, but the project scope expanded a little. Hopefully people find it fun!

Get the source code here: https://github.com/benparsons/matrix-enact

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

Slavi and his many helpers have been working on matrix-docker-ansible-deploy:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy has seen a lot of work on bridging lately. All currently existing bridges (Discord, Facebook, IRC, Telegram, Whatsapp) have been redone in a way that makes their configuration completely playbook-managed, as well as extensible. Besides this, with Synapse v1.0 already out, we've taken the opportunity to simplify the installation instructions a bit. If you haven't upgraded recently, now would be a great time. As always, be sure to take a look at the CHANGELOG before doing so.

🔗Update from the Matrix on Debian team

This is an update on the state of Matrix-related software in Debian

🔗Dept of Identity 🛂

🔗mxisd forked

Following the announcement that mxisd would not longer be worked on, ma1uta has stepped up to provide support:

I forked mxisd (https://github.com/ma1uta/mxisd) and will provide support this project. You can ask about help in a new room #ma1sd:ru-matrix.org A new temporary name will be ma1sd (thanks Dandellion ). Due to changing maintainers I start to prepare the new 2.0.0 release and should audit code and dependencies. Also I forked matrix-synapse-rest-password-provider (https://github.com/ma1uta/matrix-synapse-rest-password-provider) because it often uses with mxisd. Docker image, ansible support, debian, nixos and archlinux packages are temporary unavailable due to code auditing and changing maintainers.

🔗Link existing unix accounts with accounts on a Synapse homeserver

Cos created an article detailing how to link existing unix accounts with accounts on a Synapse homeserver.

🔗Dept of Bots 🤖

🔗poll-bot

Brendan:

I made a Matrix bot that uses reactions to do polls! The code is available at https://github.com/babolivier/matrix-poll-bot (with a screenshot of how it works) and you can invite @poll-bot:abolivier.bzh in your room if you want to try it out 🙂

Bot works by taking a list of emoji + responses from a user, then makes a new message event with those emojis each voted for once. In this way, you can quickly make a reaction-based poll.

🔗reactbot, a maubot

tulir, never enough maubots:

The reactbot I announced last week has been updated to support arbitrary response content instead of just reactions. As examples, the repo now has a stallman interjection bot (ported from this and a replacement for jesaribot. Reactions as responses are still supported and the repo still has the TWIM cookie bot example too.

🔗Final thoughts 💭

Ananace has been looking again at a release tracker they'd previously been working on.

kernel.org have set up an ActivityPub instance (see https://people.kernel.org/about.) Not strictly Matrix but interesting that they decided to move to a federated platform.

First GSOC evaluation submissions were due this week, all four Matrix projects are proceeding well. See Eisha's update above, and the other three last week.

red_sky, nheko maintainer, was seen to say: "I know there hasn't been much activity from me lately. I was on vacation last week. I'll be getting back to work on 0.7.0 today"

The Europas awards ceremony was held at a venue next to my old flat. Small world! Small flat too.

🔗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 2019-06-21

21.06.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

🔗Matrix Live 🎙

Matthew and Amandine talk about what we're hoping to ship in June

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Dendrite

We have a whole lot of Dendrite news this week! First, from anoa, on the Matrix team:

Progress has been picking up this week with some of Cnly’s many PRs finally getting merged! Cnly is our resident Google Summer of Code student this Summer and has been making strides ever since. We also finally fully migrated to BuildKite for Continuous Integration (which is much quicker than TravisCI) and have implemented golangci-lint as the project’s opinionated linter (catching some bugs in the process).

As part of CI, we’ve set up Sytest for Dendrite, which grants us a loose method of keeping track of progress as we go along. Currently the only way to do so is to take a look at the testfile which holds all the tests we know Dendrite to be passing, and cross-referencing that with the list of all sytests (which isn’t actually available anywhere). We’re hoping to make some nice way of visualizing progress over time with this data (and possibly break it down into Federation/Client/Application Service categories), but this will take some time.

We’d also like to thank some new contributors that have shown up since Matrix 1.0’s release. serra-allgood contributed a fix for querying aliases when using at least one application service, while DrGlitchMX sent a PR in for some database fixes. SUMUKHA-PK’s PR to add room tags is still around and should see some love very shortly.

As far as the current goals of the project, we’re looking to primarily make Dendrite federate with Synapse, which will allow it to actually be usable for testing/basic day-to-day usage. We intend to have it done so in the next few months, so stay tuned!

Next, from Cnly, who is doing GSOC🎓 on Dendrite:

For Dendrite, the first phase of GSoC has primarily seen improvements for the existing code including bug fixes, refinements for testing, and some refactoring that prepares Dendrite for later feature implementation. Among the changes, two important ones will be the initial support for EDUs in /sync responses as well as a federation destination cache that allows for more effective federation.

In the next phase, more focus will be put into feature completion, mainly for the Client/Server API component. Since this part of work covers various still-under-construction areas in Dendrite, it is foreseeable that more progress will actually be made than proposed.

🔗Ruma

This Week in Ruma: https://ruma.dev/news/this-week-in-ruma-2019-06-16/

Work is underway to bring Ruma up to date with version r0.5.0 of the Matrix specification. Starting with the most foundational libraries and working up towards the higher-level ruma-client, this work should be done in the next week or two. The bulk of the work since the last update has been on ruma-events, adding all of the events that were previously missing, and doing a full pass through existing events to make sure our definitions match the specification.

I can't wait to see more updates out of Ruma!

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗matrix-appservice-discord 0.5.1

This announcement is nearly a week old from Half-Shot, coming in right after the previous TWIM was published:

We've released v0.5.1 of the discord bridge today. It's mostly comprised of small bugfixes and features, but contains metrics support for tracking performance on the bridge. https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-appservice-discord/releases/tag/0.5.1

🔗mautrix-telegram

tulir:

mautrix-telegram got some bugs fixed and minor features:

Updated to Telethon 1.8

Option to limit maximum document size when bridging so it wouldn't download 1.5gb files and run out of ram

Made the state cache get updated when sending state events. Not doing this was causing some problems on t2bot.io, which has disabled echoing state events (probably for performance reasons)

🔗Reliable Bridges GSOC 🎓

Kai is working on bridging in Matrix, mentored by Half-Shot:

The first phase of GSoC is nearing its end and progress has been made on the Reliable Bridges project.
The main focus of the work was on delivering a running implementation for the signaling of permanent errors. Work has been done on matrix-appservice-bridge together with matrix-appservice-discord. An internal version of the Discord bridge with the new feature is already running and the related PR for the bridge SDK is in the state of being completed.
The next phase of GSOC comes with new goals. First, the preparation of a MSC for the signaling of bridge errors, so that the feature can be discussed in the community and can become a part of The Spec. The second goal will be the modification of Riot Web, so that the user is notified when an error condition occurred.
There also has been a slight change of plan: The work on notifying clients when parts of the system are temporarily unavailable needs reconsideration as not even the core Matrix network itself has this capability. The way forward here should probably be a unified solution.

🔗New TypeScript puppeting lib: mx-puppet-bridge

Soru, who you probably know from her work on matrix-appservice-discord, has started a new library:

Soru started working on a new puppeting library, for a lack of a better name it is currently called mx-puppet-bridge.
Unlike the existing puppet bridge, the focus of this one is to handle multiple users at once, all dynamically without needing to edit the configuration file over and over. Additionally the new codebase results in quite a few things smoothened out for easier protocol implementations.
Furthermore mx-puppet-bridge is written in typescript and based on travis' matrix-bot-sdk.
As protocol implementation for testing, soru also wrote mx-puppet-slack (again, for the lack of a better name). Basic message sending in both directions is already fully functional.

Exciting stuff! And all the more so for the third-person announcement style!

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗gomuks

tulir:

Gomuks had a bunch of changes:

Added support for rendering redactions and edits (rendering reactions coming up next)

Added commands to create rooms, start private chats and edit room tags

Rendered images now don't take up the whole width

Improved memory usage slightly

Broke everyones existing caches (rm -rf ~/.cache/gomuks should help if it panics at startup)

The command for creating rooms and the image resolution limit were added by a new contributor, J. R., who is currently working on adding .well-known discovery support.

I've been having a good play with this and like it at lot!

gomuks

🔗continuum, JavaFX client

Improved support for more types of events in continuum this week:

invitation events are supported

support for events that typically appear when a room is being set up is in progress

events that are not yet supported are displayed with a fallback view. Blank rows in previous versions are now fixed. You could always right-click on any event to view the source, of course

continuum

🔗Pattle, Dart client

Wilko came in with this thorough update, Pattle development is MOTORING:

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

This release is mostly focused on bug fixing and bug reporting! This is why I urge all users who have been having problems before to try Pattle again! Chances are that your problem has been fixed, and if not, it will be reported with more information so I can fix it!

When an error is reported, this data is sent:

Operating system version

Device model, brand, manufacturer and whether it's a simulator

A unique ID based on your device

In some errors the homeserver domain is logged, I will try to prevent this in the future.

This release also includes preparation for an iOS release next week!

Fixes and other changes:

Handle rooms that the user has left (a notice is shown that you can't send any messages)

Show a date header above the chat creation event (not the first known event in the list as before)

When an error occurs during sync, show a message, including the Exception name

Fix replies causing an error if the formattedBody does not adhere to the spec (thanks to Mathieu!)

Fix errors not showing when logging in

Fix loading spinner showing when checking username or logging in even if loading took less than 3 seconds

Fix direct chats not detected when adder after the initial sync

Some general syncing issues have been fixed (causing the dreaded infinite loading spinner).

To install this release, add the following repo in F-droid:

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

And install 'Pattle'.

Or download the APK.

If you stumble upon any issues, please report them!
You can login via GitHub and Gitlab.com, so it's really easy to do! (Logging in via GitHub did not seem to work previously, but it will now!)

Follow development here: #app:pattle.im!

If you would like to support me, you can now do so via Liberapay and Patreon. I actually need money for the Apple Developer program, which costs 100 euros per year to release Pattle on the App Store and Testflight.

🔗Dept of Encryption 🔐

🔗Quotient (former QMatrixClient)

aa13q is a GSOC 🎓 student, working on E2EE and mentored by Kitsune:

I'm working on my E2EE GSoC task: https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/07/welcome-to-the-2019-g-so-c-participants One-time keys uploading part is implementing currently. Draft device keys uploading is also here. The implementation follows E2EE guide: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/end-to-end-encryption-implementation-guide
My contribution and reports are currently here: https://github.com/a-andreyev/libQuotient/wiki/GSoC-2019-reports. Also, feel free to reach me via Quotient group https://matrix.to/#/#quotient:matrix.org.
I'm trying to reuse Black Hat's qtolm project: https://gitlab.com/b0/libqtolm -- added CMake files to include to libQuotient project, special thanks to Black Hat for his work.
Thanks to my GSoC mentors and Matrix and Quotient communities for support and solid groundwork. Long term goal is to provide modern Qt-based library to support full-featured matrix clients like Quaternion, Spectral or even to revive Telepathy IM connection manager https://github.com/TelepathyIM/telepathy-tank! %)

P.S.: Maybe somebody reading this is brave enough to play with Qt-based server implementation too? :)

🔗Riot Web

Updating reactions UX to match new designs

Continued refinements to editing *Tweaked SAS verification dialogs to behave more nicely

Also: Riot Desktop was updated on the Snap Store.

🔗Riot iOS

On the aggregation side, we have started to work on the phase:2 sprint (https://vector-im.github.io/feature-dashboard/#/summary?repo=vector-im/riot-web&repo=vector-im/riotX-android&repo=vector-im/riot-ios&label=feature:aggregations&label=phase:2):

Updating reactions UX to match new designs

Support edition of event being sent

🔗Riot Android

Sync with Weblate

PlayStore assets has been translated to Spanish

🔗RiotX (Android)

Implementation of notifications is progressing well

Migration from Koin to Dagger2 is nearly finished

Many other tasks have been done to try to close ambitious phase 1:

encrypt/decrypt attachments in e2e rooms

Display redacted events properly in e2e rooms

Permalink navigation

Display version of app and Matrix sdk in settings

Disambiguation of display names

Many other bug fixes...

🔗Dept of Ops 🛠

🔗avhost/docker-matrix

Mathijs:

My PR to the avhost/docker-matrix image (formerly the silviof) adding jemalloc support has just been merged. The image will now run synapse using jemalloc by default, which has been shown to reduce memory usage.
The first image is tagged as avhost/docker-matrix:jemalloc if all goes well the next synapse release will include jemalloc by default

🔗Dept of Services 🚀

🔗New (web) forum from Federated Networks Association

jaywink:

Feneas (short for Federated Networks Association) just launched a new discussion forum aimed at creating a collaboration space for the federated web folk. Of course there is a category for Matrix as well. Have a peek! More info here: https://feneas.org/federated-networks-forum/

🔗Diaspora mirror of this blog (meta)

jaywink:

Should you want to follow the Matrix.org blog using your Diaspora protocol compatible account, there is an unofficial mirror of the blog at [email protected]. (disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the account, just found it and reporting)

🔗Final thoughts 💭

🤔 A company named "Slack" had an IPO, in which the share price closed up 50%. Slack are involved in "Instant Messaging" software and their product is known for the ability to connect to other services.

⏰ It's the first GSOC assessment NEXT WEEK. We'll get updates from all four projects, but notice that three of the projects have already provided updates above.

🤖 tulir created TWO new maubot plugins, one for translating things: https://github.com/maubot/translate. Check out the bot user. The other is a "react bot", https://github.com/maubot/reactbot, "that reacts to messages that match predefined rules".

⁉️ Black Hat (from Spectral and more) is "experimenting with ruma-client-api and plans to create something awesome with it", Alexandre Franke (from Fractal) got a new laptop. Fox "just did [their] last java uni exercise ever and am now free from this curse, will have time to work on Neo".

🔨 This website has had a lot of polish over the last couple of weeks. We'll be focusing on the incremental improvements still needed, and also on adding new documentation. Let us know what you think we should do next.

🔗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 2019-06-14

14.06.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Neil Johnson

🔗Matrix Live - Prof. Jon Crowcroft, Foundation Guardian 🎙

Matthew & Amandine talk with Prof. Jon Crowcroft, one of the new Matrix.org Foundation Guardians!

🔗Matrix 1.0

The big news this week is that we declared ourselves to be out of beta. You'll want the full post for all details, but here's a taste:

We are very excited to announce the first fully stable release of the Matrix protocol and specification across all APIs - as well as the Synapse 1.0 reference implementation which implements the full Matrix 1.0 API surface.

This means that after just over 5 years since the initial work on Matrix began, we are proud to have finally exited beta!! This is the conclusion of the work which we announced at FOSDEM 2019 when we cut the first stable release of the Server-Server API and began the Synapse 0.99 release series in anticipation of releasing a 1.0.

As part of the 1.0 we also announced the Matrix.org Foundation.

For the full update on the Foundation, please check out the new website content at https://matrix.org/foundation which should tell you everything you could possibly want to know about the Foundation, the Guardians, the Foundation’s legal Articles of Association, and the day-to-day Rules which define the Open Governance process.

Thanks to everyone who has stuck with us along the way to make this possible.

🔗Synapse

We released Synapse 1.0.0 this week to coincide with Matrix 1.0. As a release Synapse 1.0.0 focuses on security and stability which in turn builds a firm foundation for the performance improvements that you can expect to see over the Summer. Read all about it here.

🔗Crypto

We have not one but two working end to end demos of device cross signing! This is going to be huge and is key step towards being able to make Matrix e2ee by default.

Cross Signing Demo

Additional Treats

But wait there's more! Pantalaimon not only provides a way for clients and bots to participate in e2ee rooms, it now provides the ability to search. Checkout this (religious themed) demo.

🔗Pattle

Pattle is going great guns at the moment. Here's Wilko:-

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

Add ability to create group chats!

Show chat creation events ('Wilko has created this group')!

Show emote messages correctly!

Handle display name changes! Display names of messages will now be as they were at time of sending.

Don't show invite and join events in direct chats This is only happens for the two initial users in the direct chat. If someone invites someone else to the direct chat (trough another client), the invitation will show up in the timeline.

Use the timeout parameter while syncing. This means that receiving new messages should be way quicker! (Thanks Mathieu!)

Store messages retrieved remotely (thanks Mathieu!) This means that scrolling up in a chat will be faster now, because the messages are cached.

Always show a date header above the oldest event

Show replies correctly in chat overview

Show sent state icon next to own message in chat overview

Show newly joined rooms at the top in the chat overview

Use a bit bolder font for chat names in overview To install this release, add the following repo in F-droid:

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

And install 'Pattle'.

Or download the APK from the link.

If you stumble upon any issues, please report them! You can now login via GitHub and Gitlab.com , so it's really easy to do!

Follow development here: #app:pattle.im!

There is now also a room for the Matrix Dart SDK (which is being developed for Pattle): #sdk:pattle.im

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

Pattle	Pattle

🔗RiotX (Android)

Crypto has been merged to develop \o/. We are still working on the feature, for the remaining actions: delete device, export and import keys, keys backup / SAS UI polishing, cleanup keys when signing out, and also fixing bugs…
A new screen has been added to create Rooms.
Animation of the Floating Action Button on the catchup screen has been improved.
Valere has started to work on notifications.
François is working on migration to Dagger2 (instead of Koin). It should improve performance and will allow us to implement multi-account support(!)
Copyright, Term and conditions, privacy policy and third party license screens are coming soon.
Progress indicator on Home for initial/catchup sync is coming soon as well.

🔗Riot Android

Fix issue on SAS, to allow cross-signing.

🔗Riot iOS

Work continues on edits and reactions - we'll have something for you very soon ...

🔗Riot Web

Editing now supports editing unsent messages(!!), editing emotes, and lots of polish
Reactions now instantly cancel when you redact them
Redactions now instantly redact when you send them
Released v1.2.2-rc1 (up for testing at https://riot.im/staging/) - this release includes room breadcrumbs being out of labs, some fixes for inviting by email, fixes uploads in chrome canary / firefox nightly, config file validation, some fixes for the new emoji font and lots of other bug fixes.

🔗Ruma

Jimmy reports that

New versions of the ruma-api and ruma-api-macros libraries were released, and work is underway to bring ruma-events up to date with client-server spec r0.5.0

🔗Media

TravisR has this to say: >Both matrix-media-repo and Dimension have been updated to handle federation certificates. Please update, as you would for Synapse 1.0.0

🔗Fractal

Alexandre Franke has fixed the regression he found last week. The team also did a bit of housekeeping with a few dependency updates.

🔗Misc

Half-Shot reports that:

I wrote a bot to control ansible playbooks https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-ansible-bot. I'm informed such a thing already exists as an ansible module, but I failed to realise that and wrote a independent one in TypeScript.

tulir reports that:

I made a simple reminder maubot: https://github.com/maubot/reminder It's available at https://matrix.to/#/@reminder:maunium.net

For room admins wondering if they can upgrade their rooms to v5, I made a bash script that checks all the servers in a room and prints a nice summary of the number of servers and members on each version: https://gist.github.com/tulir/aa2df287a0d192b86e5b675687791d16

Atreatis reports that:

Currently grin is building a backend for matrixservers.net that will collect data and push statistics every hour to our website. Next to that I wanted to push forward that me and several others are looking into building a Code of Conduct that should help every new and existing home server. This code of conduct will be build and curated from scratch in-order to help and support the network or any general project.

Pneumaticat has this to say:- >My homeserver (potatofrom.space) is open for some public registration! Also on Atreatis's matrixservers.net.

They promise 'One nine of uptime guaranteed, or your money back' which sounds pretty like a bargain.

So that's it folks, until next week. Come and say hi at #twim:matrix.org

This Week in Matrix 2019-06-07

07.06.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

We are sooo close to Matrix 1.0. So close! The PR which announces the arrival of v1.0 exists already.

TravisR said:

Work towards 1.0 is progressing nicely - still on track for a Monday release! View our progress at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/projects/2?fullscreen=true

🔗Dept of Servers 🏢

🔗Synapse

Neil, who oversees the creation of Synapse:

Quiet week, not much happening, the only real progress has been shipping a Synapse 1.0 release candidate :) Joking aside we’d really appreciate your help in testing it ahead of the full release next week. Get the RC here https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases/tag/v1.0.0rc1

Also friends don’t let friends operate a Synapse install without a valid certificate on the federation API. Post 1.0, servers that are not compliant will be locked out of the federation. While the copy needs updating to reflect 1.0’s imminent release, our handy FAQ (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/docs/MSC1711_certificates_FAQ.md) has all the details.

🔗Construct

Construct, a C++ homeserver has been doing testing this week:

I'd like to give special thanks to Ddanyspin97 (Danilo Spinella) for working on building construct with the musl C library so we can enjoy extremely small VM images, as well as Black Hat for building on Alpine linux also using muslc and Thomas Lewis for starting work on the FreeBSD build.

🔗Ruma

Ruma, a homeserver written in Rust, has a new surge of activity following the Rust language syntax developments last week. This Week in Ruma received it's first edition in ~6 months!

Jimmy, project lead:

the ruma homeserver is now targeting stable rust, which means the entire project is now on stable rust

🔗New project: load balancer for synchrotron workers

Soru:

[I] wrote a proof-of-concept load balancer for synchrotron workers....well, proof-of-concept because it isn't tested much, yet!

It routes users to synchrotrons based on their user ID to maximize performance, as per worker docs and, if a synchrotron catches fire it'll also automatically start shuffling workers around.
The repo can be found here, for support just poke soru wherever she is

Contributions are welcome!

Join the newly created room at #matrix-synchrotron-balancer:sorunome.de to discuss.

🔗Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

🔗Ruby SDK

Just released version 1.1.0 of the Ruby SDK, which includes a few more and improved CS API endpoints, better room alias handling, lazy loading of join rules and guest access, and the forgotten - oops - handling of room avatars.

And released version 1.1.1 of the Ruby SDK too, fixing another embarrassing mistake with not including the S2S API methods correctly, which lost the server version retrieval method (The only currently implemented part of the S2S API)

🔗Dept of Clients 📱

🔗RiotX

Are you in the know about Matrix? If not, prepare to learn about RiotX, a completely re-written Matrix client for Android. This new version has a Kotlin SDK.

Benoit, from the team:

Many things to announce this week on RiotX:

Crypto is starting to work! We can now decrypt message and send encrypted messages. The whole feature is not implemented yet, but we will merge the PR at the beginning next week before going further. Thanks François for the great work!

On the timeline, message composed by only emoji are now displayed bigger (as in other Riot clients)

We can now see details and actions of each message, including state event.

We can also see the detailed list of reactions for a particular message, and reaction display rendering has been improved. More details of what has been improved by Valere can be found in this PR description: https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/pull/168.

Local echo on message edition has been improved

The 3 main themes has been implemented (Light, Dark Black). Status theme is still there but has not been tested yet. There are still some little issues which will be fixed in the next coming days.

The new Home is on develop, composed by a catchup tab, a direct message tab and a group room tab. The drawer is now used to display the groups hierarchy.

A debug signature has been added to the git repository, so the APK built by buildkite can now be installed and replace a previously installed APK.

There is still lots of work to do, but we are quite confident to deliver a first alpha version of RiotX to a larger audience at the end of June.

🔗famedly talk

We've heard about Famedly before, and here they are with an announcement about their new client:

After some months of work our app 'famedly talk' is now able to send and receive messages. We are now concentrating on implementing the most important functions in a stable manner.

famedly talk screenshot

🔗continuum

fix some missing avatars and names of rooms. Normally continuum saves all useful data to disk when syncing, but the previous version missed some of it, the newer version will query the server for the missing pieces

🔗Fractal

This week in Fractal: Alexandre Franke noticed nightly was broken on all three of the computers he was using it on. He bisected and found out when the regression was introduced, but still needs to figure out why it broke and how to fix it.

The symptom is syncing forever on startup and never actually syncing. The commit introducing the borkage is this one.

🔗Riot Web

Working on polish for reactions and edits
Improving configuration of the default homeserver
Added Albanian and West Flemish languages thanks to translation contributors

🔗Riot iOS

Working on reaction local echo.
Working on message edition.
Restrict reactions to room messages.

🔗Riot Android

Nothing special this week.

DID YOU SEE THE RIOTX UPDATE ABOVE?

🔗Dept of Bridges 🌉

🔗matrix-appservice-irc 0.12.0 released