This Week in Matrix

matrix-appservice-irc got a release 0.12.0. This is a smaller release, as it's based upon 0.12.0-rc2 which was released back in March (when exams hit). In the meantime, working towards a speedy 0.13.0 release :)

Changelog for 0.12.0:

The bridge now supports upgrading rooms, and will follow room upgrades to the new room.
Added support for the RoomLinkValidator, which allows admins to manually configure rules about plumbing rooms.
A dockerfile is now included.
Add support for "feature flags", allowing users to dynamically enable/disable bridge features for their account.
Add command "!bridgeversion"

High-level plan for 0.13.0:

Fix the most serious P1 bugs like not dropping messages, handling PARTs better, dropping support for older versions of node, and generally better UX.

Dept of Services 🚀

matrixservers.net

Atreatis provided an update to matrixservers.net:

I've open sourced the website of https://matrixservers.net and I am open to contributions towards the website through the github repository: https://github.com/Atreatis/matrixservers
Currently I have refactored matrixservers.net from Hugo to Jekyll which was totally worth it at all times

Join #matrixservers:novaim.com for more.

www.matrix-wiki.org

sanlox:

I launched https://www.matrix-wiki.org as a place to collect information, lists, guides and manuals related to matrix. I hope as a community we can work together on this to create a central knowledge base for the matrix protocol.

Final thoughts 💭

I spent so much of my week migrating matrix.org to a great new design (from Nad), and am really happy with the result. I'm also really happy with Gatsby, the SSG we've chosen. All these things have flaws but overall it works well.

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 2019-05-31

31.05.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

Matrix Live - Half-Shot and Sorunome discuss the Discord-Matrix Bridge 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Alongside Synapse’s 1.0 release, the Matrix Specification is also getting a 1.0 on June 10th. In practice this means a fresh release of the Client-Server, Server-Server, Application Service, and Identity Service specifications. The Push Specification is just so simple it hasn’t needed an update yet.

Work has been happening to get all the specs in shape for 1.0 - follow along at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/projects/2?fullscreen=true

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Main news in synapse-land this week is that we released Synapse v0.99.5.2, which fixes a big performance regression which was introduced v0.99.5. Folks who are currently on v0.99.5/v0.99.5.1 are advised to upgrade asap.

Otherwise, work has been continuing apace towards a v1.0 release on 10th June.

Construct

Construct is a homeserver implementation in C++:

Construct has added support for Server Access Control Lists (m.room.server_acl). The exact behavior of the implementation is configurable by the server administrator, and is even more comprehensive than Synapse. In Construct, ACLs can be configured to cover incoming EDUs, outgoing events, and indirectly fetched events.

The GraphicsMagick library has been utilized to implement the media thumbnailing feature called for by the specification. This is an optional dependency written in C and offers a rich API which as been extremely fun to work with. In the future, expect your Construct to be capable of things like annotating images with the Server Command Line which can be used to generate memes in your chatroom or write custom text on top of stickers!

On the backend we have devoted significant effort to getting the most out of dynamic-linking to simplify the architecture of a large and modular free-software project. This effort makes adding features and contributions to Construct extremely straightforward. I will enumerate the basics for those familiar with developing C software: We are now loading all modules at runtime with the flags RTLD_GLOBAL|RTLD_DEEPBIND|RTLD_LAZY and we build with the flag --weak-unresolved-symbols; during execution we hook the error handling in ld.so to throw our own C++ exception directly from the PLT slot of a missing symbol. In summary this allows features to be added to Construct by simply creating an interface in a header and definitions in a loadable module, while still enjoying optional loading and unloading of the module at runtime. This is a significant feat that remains unrealized in most existing projects around the free software ecosystem!

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Dept of Clients 📱

nheko 0.6.4 and 0.7.0 roadmap

red_sky updated us on nheko:

Just wanted to pop in and mention that 0.6.4 is out this week. It comes with a decent number of bug fixes.

And then:

Nheko 0.7.0 roadmap is out: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/milestone/2
Also, Nheko-Reborn has a new team member, with MonokelPinguin joining the team : https://github.com/MonokelPinguin. (goes by Nico in the #nheko-reborn room)

el0 pointed out that nheko is available on flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.github.NhekoReborn.Nheko

continuum, JavaFX client

yuforia:

continuum modified the JSON parser to save a copy of the source. Now fields that are not standard or not yet supported are displayed when you right-click to view the source. For example, "age" and "transaction_id" are not used by the app, but are available when viewing the raw JSON

continuum screenshot

Neo

f0x has been working on Neo:

Neo can now finally fetch old backlog, with a fancy css loading animation

The Neo room has moved to #neo:pixie.town, and the site+deployment are being moved to https://neo.pixie.town

Fractal 🦶

Alexandre Franke:

Fractal got initial support for being kicked, implemented by first time contributor Isaac Curtis.

We also joined the new call at https://stopthemingmy.app

Riot Web

Continued work on edits and reactions. Also ongoing work on sdk-level support for cross-signing. Released Riot 1.2.0 (and 1.2.1).

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-telegram, mautrix-facebook, mautrix-hangouts, mautrix-whatsapp

Can you believe it, tulir had a busy week working on his various bridges:

mautrix-telegram now has native Matrix edit support in both directions and basic Prometheus metrics. I'll probably start making 0.6.0 RCs after improving the metrics a bit.

mautrix-facebook and mautrix-hangouts got some bugfixes and options to configure the displaynames of the ghost users on Matrix (like adding (FB) or (Hangouts) suffixes).

mautrix-whatsapp's Matrix puppeting was finished (meaning typing notifs, read receipts and presence updates can now be bridged to WhatsApp) and unexpected disconnection handling was fixed (automatic reconnections should now usually work again). Backfilling needed some hacks to work with Matrix puppeting. The problem is that the real Matrix users have rate limits and can't send timestamp-massaged messages. I decided to just invite the default ghost user to the room while backfilling and make it leave afterwards so that private chat room names and such would stay intact. Some clients like Riot Android/iOS sometimes do weird things, such as moving the room out of "People", but that shouldn't be too bad.

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy makes Synapse optional

Slavi:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy has seen some work in becoming more flexible.

Synapse is not a requirement anymore. People can now use the playbook to install any of the other services, wiring them to a Synapse instance installed in another way. This is mostly useful for installing bridges or other auxiliary services without going "all in" on the playbook. Not having Synapse as a fixed requirement also opens the door for installing alternative homeservers, when such become available in the future.

On a similar note, to ease maintainability, all bridges have been moved to separate Ansible roles (outside of the matrix-synapse role). There have been lots of improvements related to bridge configuration with even more likely to come soon.

0.99.5.2 kubernetes-optimized images

Ananace had 0.99.5.2 kubernetes-optimized images ready to go very quickly.

Dept of Services 🚀

Matrix User Documentation launches 🎉

Aaron (formerly known as Aaron Raimist) has been a major help to the Matrix project, and has recently launched something new:

I have started another Matrix documentation project, Matrix User Documentation. I know, there are several however none of them aim to actually be a handbook for using Riot or any other clients. I would like for this to become a place where you can find "The (unofficial) Riot Handbook" or "The (unofficial) Quaternion Handbook" as well as a place where you can find answers to more of your FAQs.

It's still very early, only a few answers are written so far and none of the handbooks have been started but I would welcome any community assistance. You can view what I have so far at: http://mud.raim.ist/en/latest/

You can contribute some documentation at: https://github.com/aaronraimist/matrix-user-documentation and join our room: #matrix-user-documentation:raim.ist

matrixservers.net

We welcomed Atreatis to Matrix recently. They are creating a new directory service:

Someone mentioned earlier that there is a need for a list of public servers on Github so people can find and add their public matrix servers. Which combines well with what I am building at the moment. Hopefully you guys don't mind helping me out on creating the list and spreading the word. The repository can be found here: https://github.com/Atreatis/matrix-servers

Final thoughts 💭

Matrix Shell Suite is a promising looking project which could deserve more attention.

Thank You to PyConWeb and especially to Hardy for letting richvdh and myself host TWO Matrix sessions at your event last weekend - was a great time and I hope everyone enjoyed the presentations and workshops.

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 2019-05-24

24.05.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

Matrix Live - Wilko, creator of Pattle 🎙

This week I chatted to Wilko, creator of Pattle.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil:

Folks, big news this week as we announce that Synapse v1.0 is scheduled for release on 10th June - read all about it here

Aside from that we shipped v0.99.5.1 which (hopefully) is the penultimate release ahead of v1.0. Please, everyone upgrade to v0.99.5.1 because it implements rooms v4 which will be the default room version in Synapse v1.0.

0.99.5.1 also contains experimental support for edits and reactions which are currently hidden behind a Riot labs flag.

Dendrite

Brendan:

Some activity has been happening this week in Dendrite-land, with Brendan adding support for Go modules to the project, and anoa adding SyTest runs to the project’s CI. These were two long-awaited maintenance works that will make working on Dendrite much easier in the future!

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

libQMatrixClient (that will soon become libQuotient) 0.5.2 has been released, with the sole purpose of fixing a nasty bug unmarking some direct chats when doing initial sync or a clean-cache start up. Everybody on 0.5.x branch is advised to upgrade.

Dept of Clients 📱

QMatrixClient to Quotient

The process of renaming QMatrixClient to Quotient has commenced - expect some turbulence while we're transitioning. The place for the repos is at https://github.com/quotient-im. Note that although the library repo name has changed, the old version of the library will continue releases under the old name (libQMatrixClient), and only in the master branch the library will be renamed. In most cases redirects should bring you home even if you request the old URL (thanks to GitHub); however, people with git repos are strongly advised to update their remotes to new URLs!

In other news:

For platforms that don't have a separate libQMatrixClient package (that is, Windows, macOS, Flatpak and AppImage), Quaternion 0.0.9.4 has been rebuilt with libQMatrixClient 0.5.2 - in the form of Quaternion 0.0.9.4c release.

tangent

tangent is an embeddable HTML client from sanlox:

I added guest login, possibility to disable guest login, possibility to set own message limit on startup and various error messages. Cleaned up the code to make it more consistent and faster. Everything I wanted to have for this tiny embeddable web chat is now there so I'd consider it finished for now.

Check it out at: https://sanlox.dev/tangent/

continuum

yuforia updated their JavaJX client:

minor changes in continuum this week:

updated controlsfx to version 11, which has better modularization support

sync issue indicator now uses NotificationPane from controlsfx, so now it has slide-in animation when it appears https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/VtPORWFqBamfnuJtPtgEXWBs

Neo now has image, video and general file sending

Fox:

Neo now supports sending multiple images, videos and files at once. You'll get a bar with previews, and the option to remove them from the queue/add more.
There's also been a bunch of changes to how events are handled. Images and videos should be much more robust against missing keys (no thumbnail, no information, etc), and there's basic displaying of the most common state events.
I also added an experimental media repository fallback option, which is disabled by default, and only implemented for room avatars. This allows you to provide a list of alternative homeservers Neo is allowed to try when your own homeserver can't load a piece of media.
Due to the loss of lain.haus, I lost admin access in the Neo room, so keep your eyes out for a new one when my infra is back.
I'm currently not really versioning anything, but I do push significant commits to https://neo.lain.haus/neo for people to try. Once it gets to a more useable state, I'll start adopting semantic versioning.

Spectral update

Black Hat:

You can now paste images from the clipboard in Spectral. It is also possible to change room name and topic in room settings. A new release is pushed to Flathub to address direct room issues. Also there've been discussions about implementing custom room themes and backgrounds.

Riot Web

Continued work on reactions and edits

New emoji font added to standardise emoji appearance and assist OS / browser combinations that don’t support emoji by default

Riot Mobile

Continued work on reactions and edits

Riot-iOS has a new actions menu on event

Fix registration with an email

Riot and RiotX available from F-Droid

krombel updated their Riot(X) F-Droid repos:

I finally found some time to update my fdroid repos which provide the development builds of riot and riotx. Now the builds of buildkite are part of the repos.
There are now 4 separate repos: One for each app and flavor. You can have a look at https://fdroid.krombel.de to find out the URL for the version you want to use.

Riot-dev (F-Droid; Repo; Build-Source)
    https://fdroid.krombel.de/riot-dev-fdroid
    https://fdroid.krombel.de/riot-dev-fdroid/fdroid/repo
    Fingerprint: 312E07B9444D0D1B615EBBAAC55EA4E5A54E123C3BEFCCA5D18B5E12DFC95BDC

Riot-dev (GPlay; Repo; Build-Source)
    https://fdroid.krombel.de/riot-dev-gplay
    https://fdroid.krombel.de/riot-dev-gplay/fdroid/repo
    Fingerprint: 81EDF1741A51B944B00B55E307C7AA043623CB646599182A104B895B6B319844

RiotX-dev (F-Droid; Repo; Build-Source)
    https://fdroid.krombel.de/riotx-dev-fdroid
    https://fdroid.krombel.de/riotx-dev-fdroid/fdroid/repo
    Fingerprint: FD146EF30FA9F8F075BDCD9F02F069D22061B1DF7CC90E90821750A7184BF53D
RiotX-dev (GPlay; Repo; Build-Source)

    https://fdroid.krombel.de/riotx-dev-gplay
    https://fdroid.krombel.de/riotx-dev-gplay/fdroid/repo
    Fingerprint: 5564AB4D4BF9461AF7955449246F12D7E792A8D65165EBB2C0E90E65E77D5095

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Major WhatsApp bridging update

tulir made great strides on mautrix-whatsapp this week:

I've been working on mautrix-whatsapp to add history bridging and Matrix puppeting.

New portals are populated with some history when creating them (exact count is configurable)

All messages missed during bridge downtime are backfilled

Creating portals is smarter now:

When logging in initially, it'll create portals for a few recent chats (count configurable).

It'll create portals when there are incoming messages as before, but it should no longer create portals for chats that only have old messages.

The missed message backfilling creates portals when necessary.

Matrix puppeting isn't quite finished yet. It can already use your Matrix account to bridge messages sent from whatsapp mobile, but it doesn't use the account to bridge EDUs (typing notifs, presence, read receipts) yet.

To make the history bridging a bit nicer, I made a PR to fix timestamp massaging in synapse: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5233. Timestamp massaging was removed from the spec in 1.0, but it wasn't intentionally removed from synapse, it just broke due to other changes. It was probably supposed to stay there as an easter egg until there's a proper solution for bridging history.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Ananace pushed updated K8s images for Synapse 0.99.5

Bubu updated synapse on Arch:

Archlinux updated to synapse 0.99.5 as well after the requests, urllib3 incomopatibility thing was sorted out.

Mathijs updated the synapse avhost docker image:

With synapse v 0.99.5.1 the avhost docker image has finally moved to python 3

Dept of Services 🚀

Modular

New widget for Scalar: EtherCalc.

Dept of Bots 🤖

QuatBot

Very very new, let's take a look at QuatBot, which uses libQuotient:

QuatBot is a simple meeting-management bot for use with the Matrix. Taking turns during an online meeting -- and making sure everyone gets to have their say -- takes a bit of organizing, and this bot helps you do that. QuatBot runs as a command-line application.

Dept of Articles 📝

uhoreg wrote a really informative article about key verification:

For those who want to know more about the security behind emoji-based key verification, I've written a blog post about it: https://www.uhoreg.ca/blog/20190514-1146

Dept of GSOC 🎓

GSoC 2019 – Reliable Bridges

Thanks Kai for this introduction to his project:

The Reliable Bridges GSoC project is about implementing a feedback mechanism for the Matrix network in cases where bridges are not able to properly handle messages. Currently clients are unable to know if a message was successfully sent over a bridge. With the new mechanism in place they get the information about errors happening at bridges and can behave accordingly by e.g. notify the user of the failed delivery.

The implementation is foremost focused on the matrix-appservice-dicord bridge which uses the underlying matrix-appservice-bridge. A JS bridge was chosen so that as much code as possible is brought into the SDK and other bridges can profit sooner from the work done.

The first step for implementing the new feature will be the signaling of permanent errors occurring at the bridge (in contrast to temporary failures). They might occur e.g. when the sending account was banned on the bridged foreign network. These permanent errors will be implemented as a new type of PDU originating from the bridge.

After permanent errors are done, the subsequent weeks will see work on temporary failures which might include work on Synapse as well as work on Riot Web to have a client which actually uses the new events. As these events are new features being introduced there will also be a MSC draft. There everyone can check out the proposed solution and tear it apart with their criticism (if applicable 😉).

For discussions related to the GSoC project or when you have some opinions on how the MSC should look like, you are invited to join the Reliable Bridges Matrix room.

That's all I know 🏁

Finally Alan, friend of Matrix and creator of TADHack and TADSummit is doing an "Open Source Telecom Software Survey" - if you could add value to this research by completing it please do so here: http://alanquayle.com/2019/05/open-source-telecom-software-project-survey/

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

This Week in Matrix 2019-05-17

17.05.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

Matrix Live - Reactions and Edits coming to Matrix

If Since you've been chatting on Matrix this week, you'll have noticed some new features rolling out.

In Riot develop, hit Labs in the Settings menu and you'll be able to try out the new Reactions and message editing features.

Dept of Servers

Synapse

Neil said:

This week we shipped 0.99.4 - no stand out ‘oh my gosh’ headlines, just lot lot of bug fixes and perf improvements - get involved. We’ve also been working hard to getting things like reactions and edits going, as well more prep for improving perf for small server instances.

Construct

First Construct update for a few weeks:

Construct has added a server command line available in any room when starting a line with a special character (by default it's '\'). The commands are private so the room doesn't actually see it. More on this next week, or check out #test:zemos.net.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks

Ruby SDK now 1.0!

Big news from Ananace this week:

Finished getting the test coverage to a reasonable enough percentage to feel comfortable releasing the Ruby Matrix SDK as a nice and stable 1.0 (.0)

This is great! All Rubyists should check it out. Ananace notes:

I still need to set up fixtures for all the API endpoints I'm exposing so I can verify every single API call as well, but I see that as a later thing as that relates mostly to how the other side (the HS) handles my input, not to how the SDK itself handles said input

Dept of Clients

Pattle

Wilko:

A new version of Pattle is available on F-droid!

Changes include:

Implement direct chats correctly!

Use user user avatar as chat avatar if direct

Hide user name in direct chat

Use names of room members if no room name is set (whether the chat is direct or not)

Add border to left of replied-to messages to easily differentiate them

Show redaction events!

Use icons instead of letters if chat has no avatar

Use different icons for direct chats than group chats (and in the future public chats)

Use user color for direct chats if the user has no avatar

Simplify member change messages ('Pat has joined' -> 'Pat joined', etc)

Tweak font sizes (thanks to Mathieu Velten)!

Change date header style (smaller and full caps)

Development happens here and development discussion happens here: #pattle:matrix.org!

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

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

And install 'Pattle'.

Riot (various)

This week the various Riot teams (web, iOS, Android) have been spending time implementing reactions/edits, but also:

Riot Android

PR review from community: Matomo SDK will replace Piwik SDK

Weblate is up again, a sync has been done.

RiotX (Android)

Crypto integration is still ongoing

Reactions are coming soon!

New home and navigation to rooms development started

tangent

tangent is an exciting young project designed to create a very lightweight browser-based new client. sanlox:

did alot of changes on tangent to make it more stable and performant, only registration and guest login are left to do, git changed to https://gitlab.com/sanlox/tangent

Test the latest at: https://sanlox.dev/tangent/

Spectral timeline UI and more

Black Hat:

Polished the timeline UI for Spectral.

Added m.video support.

Also added drag-and-drop support in Spectral.

Fractal now with keyboard shortcuts

Alexandre Franke:

Ana, first time contributor, added a bunch of cool keyboard shortcuts to ease navigation in Fractal. One can now e.g. go down to the next room with unread messages with ctrl+shift+page down.

continuum updates

yuforia:

Load message history from server lazily when scrolling

Loaded messages are always saved to disk, so if you aren't offline for too long, only a few messages will need to be fetched the next time you login

The screenshot also shows the UI for handling invitations

early-day reactions support in Quaternion

This week was too packed IRL but I took an hour to experiment with reactions that are a rage in riot.im/develop these days. An experimental "kitsune-reactions" branch understands reaction events and allows clients to further process them. A proof-of-concept in Quaternion will land over the weekend.

Scylla

via Aaron Raimist:

Update on Scylla from VaNilLa: Though I am very busy with schoolwork, I found time to fix a long-standing issue: the names of private messages showing up as <No Name>. this is gone now, and rooms are sorted alphabetically to make it easier to navigate.
Try Scylla here: https://scylla.danilafe.com
Come join us in #scylla:riot.danilafe.com to discuss

Dept of Bridges

matrix-appservice-discord 0.5.0

Evening, we've just cut the first RC of matrix-appservice-discord 0.5.0. Most of the changes this time around are bugfixes to formatting, internal re-architecturing / performance boosts and shifting more things to the database. Please help test if you run an instance, so we can get a 0.5.0 out swiftly. The next release has a lot of features planned for it 😉

Also - congratulations to Half-Shot on finishing all his final-year exams! How will you fill your time now?

mautrix-telegram/mautrix-hangouts/mautrix-facebook/mautrix-whatsapp

Think tulir's been busy this week?

Lots of small changes in my projects:

mautrix-telegram had a bunch of bugs fixed, like multiline messages from some clients not being bridged correctly.

mautrix-hangouts got matrix->hangouts image bridging and some bugfixes.

mautrix-facebook also got some bugfixes.

mautrix-whatsapp now informs the user about connection problems rather than crashing and has commands to try to reconnect. It also now bridges redactions in both directions.

Dept of Ops

kubernetes from Ananace

Ananace updated their k8s packaging for Synapse to 0.99.4: https://github.com/ananace/matrix-synapse

Debian Packages

andrewsh announced the Debian Matrix Packagers Team has its own dedicated blog

for everything about Matrix on Debian, join #debian-matrix:matrix.org

silvio/avhost synapse docker container

Mathijs:

the silvio/avhost synapse docker container is making progress in moving to python 3, the container is made smaller and no longer runs synapse as root

There are some important differences between this and https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/tree/master/contrib/docker:

it puts all the configuration files, logfiles and media files in the volume, you don't really configure it with environmental variables but just by editing the homeserver.yaml file in the volume, and it also contains coturn

Dept of Bots

Half-Shot created a "reactbot":

Hot on the heels of the rapid developments of the reaction work, I've written a bot that automatically reacts when spotting certain phrases inside rooms. Honestly I have no idea what the use case is for this, but it exists and I currently use it to stick the :dog: reaction on every dog related event. https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-reactbot

The bot is also now used in #twim:matrix.org, whhere it performs the needed work of adding red circles to submissions.

tulir's karma maubot now also supports reactions and redactions, and the maubot sed plugin now underlines changes in messages.

Dept of Status of Matrix

t2bot.io has launched a new website

t2bot.io has launched a new website, surpassed a milestone of 300k total bridged users (70k of those are active monthly), and launched 2 new early-beta-quality bridges. If you're looking to try out tulir's latest Hangouts or Facebook Messenger bridge then t2bot.io is an option for that, assuming you don't mind the occasional bug, missing feature, or problem. Check out https://t2bot.io/hangouts/ and https://t2bot.io/messenger/ for setup instructions.

That's all I know

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

PS Massive thanks to Aaron Raimist for doing the needful to make full articles appear in RSS!

This Week in Matrix 2019-05-10

10.05.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

Matrix Live

This week Neil and Matthew are talking about recent security issues - this is a really long and detailed chat, but you can skip to around the 32 minute mark to hear about other news - including progress on reactions. Reminder that for a good "big picture" overview of the progress of Matrix, you can look at the Homeserver High Level Roadmap.

Dept of Servers

Synapse

Neil, Synapse-dev wrangler:

Reactions continues at full speed, we have a draft PR and will be implementing over the coming week. The ability to blacklist IPs over federation will land imminently, as well as a nasty device management bug that led to a spate of E2E errors. Next week is all about Reactions, resuming work on the small homeserver project and finally getting back to Synapse 1.0 blockers following all the remediation drama of the past few weeks. With any luck we’ll have a new Synapse release for you next week.

Dept of Encryption

Pantalaimon

Says poljar:

Pantalaimon received a configuration file. The configuration file adds the ability to configure multiple Homeservers and pantalaimon will run having each Homeserver exposed on a different TCP port.

The panctl utility has received support for more commands, it now has the ability to accept SAS requests, confirm them, import/export keys, list pan users as well as list devices of users. Completions for the commands were also added.

Dept of Clients

Pattle - big update!

Wilko announced:

A new version of Pattle is available on F-droid!

Lots of changes again, including:

Render HTML formatting in messages!

Replies are now rendered!

Show date headers between messages of different days!

Render usernames with a color in chat timeline

Add loading indicators (when logging in, loading chats, etc.)

Show error banner at the top if syncing failed

Syncing now resumes after a failed attempt (no more restarting)

Fix messages not being sent if connection was lost and the app restarted

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

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

Follow development here and in #pattle:matrix.org!

Fractal

Alexandre Franke:

Although the development pace has been reduced lately, the Fractal team managed to make significant progress towards the 4.2 release. More specifically since our previous news, Chris has landed much of his adaptive view work to get Fractal in a mobile friendly state so it’s ready to run on the Librem 5 once Purism starts shipping them. But he didn’t stop there: eager to see his awesome work in the hands of many people (figuratively, the literal application will have to wait for the phone to be out 😛) as soon as possible, he tackled a few bugs that we really wanted to get sorted out before we got a new version out.

Alexandre also prepared the changelog with a bird’s-eye view of all changes that happened since 4.0.

Last but not least, we had a few external contributions for features such as network proxy support and typing notifications.

Riot Web

Progress on message composer for editing messages.

Riot iOS

0.8.6 has been released on Tuesday

We are working on reactions

Riot Android

We have fixed some minor bugs, our efforts are now on RiotX

New FDroid mode support for high service level, regardless of battery usage.

RiotX (Android)

Benoit has started to implement the crypto on RiotX. Basically all the legacy has been imported and a migration to the new architecture is done. Lots of plumbing and rework, but it should be the fastest way to support crypto on RiotX.

Valere is working on the emoji picker and reactions, and has also added some actions on events (copy, share, view source, etc.)

François has added room invitation support. It will be possible soon to see invitations, and accept or reject them.

continuum

yuforia has news on continuum, a JavaFX-based client.

this week in continuum

right-click on a room in the room list to send invitations

experimental support for receiving invitations

membership data are now also persisted in database

FluffyChat available as a Snap package, plus E2EE progress

Krille announced FluffyChat for Linux desktops:

FluffyChat is now also available as a Snap package for desktop Linux
https://snapcraft.io/fluffychat :D
It's a Matrix client written in Qml for Ubuntu Phones. Now it is working for Linux Desktop too.

He also has news to share re E2E:

Progress has been made at the end2end encryption for FluffyChat. Qml bindings for the libolm library are mostly ready and the app can now create keys and upload keys to the server. Device tracking is now implemented too.

E2E when? SOON! See the branch here: https://gitlab.com/ChristianPauly/fluffychat/tree/e2eencryption

Dept of Bridges

New Hangouts bridge from tulir / mautrix

tulir has been using his mautrix-python lib, which was recently used to enable his mautrix-facebook bridge, to bring a new method for Matrix-Hangouts bridging:

New bridge again, this time it's Hangouts: https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-hangouts / #hangouts:maunium.net. As with the Messenger bridge, currently the main difference to matrix-puppet-hangouts is multi-user support (also no hacky JS/Python mixing).

Before making mautrix-hangouts, I put a bunch of the generic bridging parts of mautrix-facebook into mautrix-python's bridge module and used that in both bridges. After Debian 10 is released, I'll drop Python 3.5 compatibility in mautrix-telegram and move it to use mautrix-python and the bridge module too.

Next week I'm planning on adding a bunch of features to both my new bridges, such as bridging formatting and remaining media types (so no new bridges planned for now :D).

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks

QMatrixClient is now "Quotient"

The vote on a new name for the QMatrixClient project has been going on over the past week.
We have a winner now, and the new name is "Quotient"! In the nearest weeks, expect changes in the library code (it's going to be libQuotient from the next release), room aliases (already ongoing), links to the repos etc. etc. Where possible, we're going to smoothen the migration path by providing legacy fallbacks (e.g., the new C++ namespace, Quotient, will be introduced but the old one, QMatrixClient, will stay its synonym, although deprecated).
Just in case you missed all the previous mentions of the topic - it's only related to the overall project and the library, but not the client - its name remains Quaternion.

Why rename?

Because the previous name has been a bit clumsy and, most importantly, the project is no more focusing just on client-side but on a wider set of applications of Matrix (no homeserver in plans though). See also the recent backlog of #qmatrixclient:matrix.org (now also #quotient:matrix.org) earlier this week for the whole discussion

Ruby Matrix SDK hits v0.1.0

Ananace:

Just published version 0.1.0 of the Ruby Matrix SDK, and I've gotten enough testing written now where I feel comfortable not marking this as a pre-production release. So feel free to integrate it into more than just prototypes and experiments. 😃
Relevant links; GitHub page, #ruby-matrix-sdk:kittenface.studio.

Opsdroid big updates, with focus on Matrix

Cadair:

Opsdroid 0.15 has been released, with a lot of matrix focused updates. The biggest of which is support for sending and receiving images and files. There have also been a bunch of bug fixes such as clean exit of the matrix connector and correct handling of events which are not parsed. There are also a bunch of other not matrix specific changes like support for the awesome parse library for string matching. Read all about it in the release blog: https://medium.com/opsdroid/event-dispatching-simple-parsing-and-more-in-v0-15-3f721b8a6d6c

PK interfaces for ruby_olm

Willem:

This week I've been adding PK interfaces to cjhdev's Ruby bindings for Olm, in preparation of improving my Tchap proxy. The PK interfaces can be found in my fork of ruby_olm. Building the native extensions for the gem has had a major overhaul, so no pull request yet.

Dept of Ops

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy update

It's been a few weeks since we heard from Slavi about matrix-docker-ansible-deploy, but he's been working away on it:

We haven't shared any matrix-docker-ansible-deploy updates lately, but we've had lots of community contributions.

Most of it has been bug fixes and various internal improvements, but we've also landed a few large features. Here's what's most interesting lately:

Facebook bridging support via mautrix-facebook

Support for mxisd-controlled user Registration

Examples for how to use a Caddy webserver instead of the integrated nginx webserver

Goofys support for other S3-compatible object stores

Dept of Status of Matrix

jaywink, maintainer of https://the-federation.info, told us what we all know to be true: Matrix is great and is getting more popular:

Matrix (Synapse) jumps to second place in https://the-federation.info site, which lists servers of the federated social web. Help us map the true size of the Matrixverse by adding your server by going a https://the-federation.info/register/yourdomain.tld. Note, SRV and well-known lookups not yet working, so registration needs to happen with the Matrix server real domain (and port if any).

That's all I know

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

PS to people who would normally be reading this in their own RSS reader - I apologise, we'll get the full-article feed back up soon.

This Week in Matrix 2019-05-03

03.05.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

New matrix.org Security Disclosure Policy and moderation pages

Check out the Matrix Official Security Disclosure Policy, which also features a "Hall of Fame": https://matrix.org/security-disclosure-policy/

We also have an official moderation guide now at https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation

Servers

Synapse

Last week

Work progresses on reactions support, expect a more formal MSC rsn, but for check out https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/matthew/msc1849/proposals/1849-aggregations.md for more details. Aside from that we now have an API to send server notices, support is coming for blacklisting IP ranges for federation traffic and finally we published a security disclosure policy and hall of fame https://matrix.org/security-disclosure-policy/. We’ve also been tracking down some device management bugs that prevent e2e message decryption as well as fixing some security bugs.

Next week

More reactions work, device management bug hunting and server key validity support.

Crypto

Olm 3.1.2 bugfix release.
Pantalaimon: Initial SAS support through panctl http://webmshare.com/play/QeBY1
Pantalaimon: Support for sending out key requests.

Clients

There are some BIG (capital and bold!) client releases this week, let's take a look

Quaternion 0.0.9.4

Big release for Quaternion this week, following lots of work on libQMatrixClient. kitsune reports that:

Quaternion is now officially at version 0.0.9.4! Optional native scrollbar for the timeline, files uploading, initial support of matrix.to links (the foundation for future Matrix URIs), first complete translations, and much much more - the long list is here: https://github.com/QMatrixClient/Quaternion/releases/tag/0.0.9.4. Packagers are advised to take a look at the building and packaging section of the release notes: there are a few updates for you there.

Spectral

Continuing the QT-client theme, Black Hat has released a new version of Spectral to FlatHub, join #spectral:matrix.org for more:

A new version of Spectral is released on Flathub this week! The last release is half a year ago, and there are a lot of changes since then, including a better UI, bug fixes and performance improvements.

Changelog:

Increase minimum Qt version to 5.12.
Redesigned UI.
Emoji and username auto completion in text input.
Respect server-side notification settings.
Emoji picker.
Fix font size in HiDPI.
Improved reply UI/UX and rich reply UI.
Sending/receiving typing notifications.
Switch to hoedown for parsing markdown.
Display notification count.
Responsive UI.
Fix #2(Room/People separator issue).
Infer device name from system information.
Image caching.

And of course various performance improvements. For my account Spectral takes ~35MB RAM initially, compared to 45~50MB before.

Pattle new release

pattle screenshots

Wilko came to announce a new Pattle release, that's the Flutter client:

A new release of Pattle has been pushed to F-droid! Lots of different changes this release, including:

Viewing images!

Actual local echo (message is immediately placed in the timeline)

Sent state indicators are now shown next to the message time (clock for still being sent and a checkmark for sent)

Show member change events! (x has joined, left, invited, etc)

Thumbnails are now used for chat avatars, which should improve performance a bit

Other small fixes :)

Check out a video demo at here.

continuum

yuforia reports that:

This week in continuum:

Remove support for embedded webview and open external browsers when necessary instead. Many users actually prefer it this way. And dependency on a fairly large native module is gone.

Improvements on the emoji input. Removed some style classes and tweaked some sizes to make the appearance more compact and flat. https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/matrix.org/PvFFPAvoDhiHghsyeJnWVyAK

Riot Web

Initial UI work on reactions and editing, nothing useable yet though.

Riot iOS

Release of 0.8.5 :
- Grouped notifications
- Interactive device verification (by emoji)
- WebRTC and Jitsi libs updates
- min iOS version is now 10 (Jitsi constraints)
Initial UI work on reactions, nothing useable yet though.

Riot Android

Benoit from the Riot team:

CI has been configured on Buildkite for the Android matrix sdk, riot and riotx.

The Android sdk can now be integrate as a grate dependency via Jitpack.

Riot 0.9.1 has been released with sas feature included! Device verification is easier with riot web and riot Android users, soon with riot ios users. Will be on production channel on Monday.

We have finally pushed the security fix on GH.

Also working on the crypto modularization to integrate it on RiotX.

We will concentrate our effort on RiotX now

RiotX (Android)

Working on reactions

Bridges

matrix-appservice-discord searching for a new maintainer

Sorunome reports that:

We (matrix-appservice-discord) are looking for a new maintainer!

What are we looking for in a maintainer?
You wouldn't have to be super active, however a few minutes per day would be greatly appreciated. You'd be responsible of reviewing PRs! Because of this not being afraid of Typescript and not being afraid of Discord is required - no need to be at pro-level!

So we are basically looking for someone who can help us look over PRs and maybe do some themself. If you think you are interested, please message us in our matrix room!

Bridging Facebook Messenger

tulir:

I made a new Facebook Messenger bridge: https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-facebook / #facebook:maunium.net. Currently the main difference to matrix-puppet-facebook is multi-user support like my WhatsApp and Telegram bridges. The bridge is Python and the code structure is similar to mautrix-telegram, so I'll probably eventually create a generic bridge library out of the common parts.

SDKs and Frameworks

Ruby SDK

Ananace reports that:

Working on the Ruby SDK again, planning to try and get it to the point where I feel comfortable calling it a provisionary 1.0 release. I want to propose additions to various software using it after all, and that tends to look better if it's 1.0 - or close. 😃

That's all I know

That's all for this week folks, come chat in #twim:matrix.org for more, or to share what you've been working on.

PS this interesting-looking project is not ready for public eyes on it yet, so please refrain from checking out the code and discussing with the author in #tangent:matrix.org

This Week in Matrix 2019-04-26

26.04.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Neil Johnson

Hello and welcome

No Ben this week. I'm afraid this means no matrix live, but fear not your Ben orientated programming will resume next week.

Things that have happened

Riot Android

New Riot.im application has been delivered to the PlayStore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.app. It replaces the previous app. More details here: https://medium.com/@RiotChat/riot-im-android-security-update-2b3f655ad739
François and Benoit were at AndroidMakers Paris on Tuesday and Wednesday. We’ve seen plenty of interesting conferences and come back with many ideas to improve Riot UX/UI/Implementation/testing/etc.
SAS device verification review is over, will be merged once we have the tagged OLM library.

RiotX (Android)

Valere has started working on reactions (which will be implemented only on RiotX for Android).
François has worked on merging membership Events in the timeline

Riot iOS

Interactive device verification has been merged
Jitsi and WebRTC updates have been merged
Fix bugs in order to prepare a release

Crypto

uhoreg reports that:

olm 3.1.0 has been released. This release adds new functions to help with SAS-based key verification (a.k.a. emoji-based verification) and with cross-signing. The Python bindings are also now available on pypi, so you can install it using "pip install python-olm", though you need the olm library and development files installed first.

Also

Python-olm available on pypi.
Initial SAS verification support for nio.

Spectral

Black Hat reports that:

Spectral's redesign continues, featuring a beautiful responsive UI(not kirigami yet, sorry) and more functionalities. Legacy UIs such as the room detail panel are changed to fit into redesigned UI better. Basic room upgrade support is added, allowing you to switch between the old room and the new room. Room settings and user detail dialogs are added. You can also ignore users in the user detail dialog.

matrix-nsfw

A Black Hat double header this week:

matrix-nsfw has been ported from Golang to Rust. The backend machine learning framework is also switched to Tensorflow, giving a major performance boost. For anyone that doesn't know what matrix-nsfw is, it is a bot-like utility that detects NSFW images in a room. The new repo is at https://gitlab.com/b0/matrix-nsfw-rust

Neo

Sometimes a picture tells a thousands rainbow coloured words. Thanks Foks

Ruma

Jimmy reports that:

All of Ruma's libraries (but not yet the homeserver itself) are now targeting stable Rust!

Continiuum

yuforia reports that:

If a room member is not visible on screen, updating their name doesn't require switching to the main UI thread

Apply formatting when viewing the json source of an event
Reuse GUI components to improve performance, update content of views instead of creating new ones
Use a hash set to avoid going through the list of room members in some cases * Move more of local storage into the database: names and avatars of users and rooms, room membership, recently used accounts, etc.
Placeholder avatars are made with GUI components and instead of generated bitmap images
Switch to gradle multi-project build to modularize

After switching from plaintext files to an embedded database, some components are still in the process of being rewritten, coming next week: load messages from server on demand when scrolling, if they are not yet stored in database; add support for invitations;

matrix-appservice-discord

Sorunome reports that:

matrix-appservice-discord work has finally resumed! The PRs for both migrating the room and user store to SQL have been merged, and many awesome new things should follow up soon!

Synapse

The reactions and edits API is taking shape, we’re making progress on our small homeserver setup, and we’re hunting a new set of device key management bugs that came to light in the absence of matrix.org.

We’ve been a bit disrupted these past few weeks, but work towards Synapse 1.0 continues and we’ll soon be ready to offer a release candidate.

miniVector

Curious Cat reports that: >miniVector 0.8.29 is available on Goldy and Froid (and are unaffected by the Riot/Android re-release drama).

The 'Incident'

We know you'll have a bunch of questions, we'll be publishing a full post-mortem next week. Thanks for bearing with us.

The End

See you next week, it will be Bentastic I can assure you. Be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

This Week in Matrix 2019-04-18

18.04.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Matrix.org Team

Welcome to the new blog!

Check out the new digs! We're happy with this newly deployed blog, and all the old and loveable content is right down there. If you find issues, let me know. You may remember Nad, from previous editions of Matrix Live - huge thanks to him for his work on the design and upkeep of this new deployment.

Notes from the downtimes

Github tokens

jaywink:

Due to the security incident, all GitHub access tokens for the Scalar GitHub integration were cleared. This means that if you have a GitHub bot in the channel and want to use the !github bot commands, you need to re-login to github via the integration manager menu. Note, existing webhooks are untouched and should work fine without re-authenticating.

Bridges

From the matrix.org bridge team, we are resurrecting bridges as fast as possible. Currently running are the freenode, slack, gitter and gimpnet (now hosted on gnome.org) with more to come today and next week.
We have the snoonet and oftc irc bridges back. Mozilla is coming soon hopefully this weekend too!

Whoop! Mozilla is actually up now!

Pattle new release on F-Droid

Wilko:

A big release of Pattle has just been pushed to the F-droid repo! Changes include:

Display names are now shown

You can now click on chats and view them!

Messages are grouped by time and sender (see screenshots)

Add fancy transition animation and ripples to chat messages (see video)

Use Sentry for error reporting (only Android version and device model is sent, along with the stacktrace of the error)

Also, please note that if you have a matrix.org you probably have reinstall the app if you're logged in because of the recent matrix.org incident (because there's no logout button yet and no detection for invalidated access tokens)

There has actually been a release since, which includes:

message sending and viewing image history!

libQMatrixClient 0.5.1.2 && Quaternion 0.0.9.4

kitsune is talking about the long road to 0.0.9.4:

libQMatrixClient 0.5.1.2 has been released, with all the remaining bugfixes for Quaternion 0.0.9.4 that's coming any day soon now. The release notes are here: https://github.com/QMatrixClient/libqmatrixclient/releases/tag/0.5.1.2

Quaternion 0.0.9.4 RC3, the last one before the release that will happen in the nearest days, is out. Release notes can be found at https://github.com/QMatrixClient/Quaternion/releases/tag/0.0.9.4-rc3. Translators, you literally have hours to add your translations for 0.0.9.4!

neo

I reimplemented the matrix sdk into Neo, so it works nicer. Colors and font look nicer (base16-tomorrow, Open Sans), and there's text message sending, with localecho!
I also fixed a bug where react would recycle displayname-components across rooms, attributing them to the wrong messages

a video at https://lain.haus/_matrix/media/v1/download/lain.haus/VfshWRfaNUnpGQbdkyYczxvd

Go test Neo at: https://neo.lain.haus/neo

matrix-registration update

ZerataX:

it's been a long while, but I've finally come around to improving on matrix-registration
For those of you, who have forgotten what this project is about, it basically lets you invite people to your homeserver with tokens, e.g. https://homeserver.tld/register?token=DoubleWizardSky
This whole update was about making the project more user friendly.
I made a new default registration page that requires 0 setup and you can install the project right from pypi with pip, so you don't even need to clone the repo any longer.
check a live example here: https://chat.dmnd.sh/register
and to play around with the api you can can go over to the github page: https://zeratax.github.io/matrix-registration/demo.html?token=ColorWhiskeyExpand
channel: #matrix-registration:dmnd.sh
github: https://github.com/zeratax/matrix-registration

Video available here.

matrix-media-repo now has s3 support

matrix-media-repo now has s3 (and s3-like) support, making it easier to archive older media or use minimal disk space. See the new datastores option in the config and the admin docs ( https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-media-repo/blob/master/docs/admin.md#datastore-management ) for more information.

Dimension

Dimension has been updated to more safely handle when upstream integration managers (like Scalar) are offline. Instead of crashing or breaking in various ways, it'll report which integrations are not accessible.
As well, due to recent events, if you use matrix.org bots or bridges in Dimension then go the the admin section and log everyone out using the red button. Dimension caches upstream tokens and isn't smart enough to realize that they are no longer valid, which means they need clearing. Clients should automatically handle getting new tokens in the background.

Riot iOS

Interactive device verification is still in progress

Update WebRTC and Jitsi libs (in progress)

Riot Android

*We are finalizing SAS device verification feature *We are preparing a release to fix some issues

RiotX (Android)

We can now clear the cache of the application (Riot legacy feature)

Sync filter has been implemented

François is working on thumbnail of video (upload and preview) in the timeline

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 2019-04-05

05.04.2019 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

Matrix Live S3E20 FluffyChat creator Krille on Matrix, Ubuntu Touch and Matrix-for-Healthcare

Synapse, the road to 1.0

Neil, Synapse overlord:

Last week we carried on with Synapse 1.0 work, in particular server key signing validity, a config option to verify federation certificates to support MSC1711 and support for 3PID unbinding APIs (MSC1915). Outside of that we've been thinking about how to improve room upgrades for private rooms and landed the preparatory work for a refactor of the room directory.

Coming up next, we'll continue to bash out 1.0 blockers, Hawkowl has started work on optimising for small hosted homeservers, and anoa will be working on the new super fast room directory. Finally Erik has started work on aggregations support so clients will be able to offer things like edits and reactions ?

https://www.arewereadyyet.com/ is now just shy of 64%, keep going.

Dendrite

Dockerfile for sytest running against Dendrite approved. Close to being able to run Dendrite against sytest. Also using sytest's new test white/blacklist functionality to include a list of tests that Dendrite is known to pass in the repo. When people make new PRs that allow Dendrite to pass new tests, they can also append the names of the tests to the testfile to help automatically track Dendrite's improving progress. Look forward to seeing further progress post Synapse 1.0.

libQMatrixClient 0.5.1 released,

libQMatrixClient 0.5.1 is out! This is a minor release with bugfixes and small improvements, a base for Quaternion 0.0.9.4, RC of which is coming this weekend. Full release notes here

and to follow up:

Quaternion 0.0.9.4 Release Candidate is available for all those who don't need a "release" seal of approval to use applications. Get out, grab it, report bugs that could still sneak in: https://github.com/QMatrixClient/Quaternion/releases/tag/0.0.9.4-rc. A separate call out to translators - it's a great moment to teach Quaternion a few more phrases in your language!

.NET Core Synchrotron