This week we’ve been working on getting our brand new room directory implementation ready, creating a new Synapse installer, and creating a TURN server testing tool. We’ve also been pushing on with the privacy project and fixing up some bugs and perf issues.
Next week it’s all about getting the room directory out of the door, shipping the installer and continuing on with the privacy project. We are in the early stages of a project designed to reduce the load caused by outbound SSL connections, it is looking very promising. We’re also going to give the sqlite->postgres porting script some love as well as working on some message retention ideas, and also ways to reduce the meta data we store.
the adding portal rooms to user-specific communities feature that appeared in mautrix-whatsapp and mautrix-hangouts last week is now also available in mautrix-facebook
The gitter bridge is back to working order again today! We've made changes so that Gitter side admins can now issue a !matrix kick|ban name command to evict users who are causing issues, rather than relying on reports or matrix side admins.
The matrix-appservice-bridge library also saw its 1.10.0 release this week, which has experimental support for bridge errors and also has a bugfix related to room upgrades.
We’ve also been continuing the work on the new message composer implementation. Features are still missing, but this has now landed behind a labs flag on /develop. We’d be especially interested in feedback whether typing with an IME (Chinese, Japanese, …) works better than before.
I've hosted a version of riot with the changes from https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/3251 (for math support) built in so that people can test/use it if they want. It can be found at https://www.pigeon.digital — please do let me know about any bugs you may find!
there is now a room specifically for the LaTeX fork hosted on www.pigeon.digital where you can leave any feedback, report any bugs, or ask for any help: #pigeon.digital:matrix.org
If you would like to support me, you can do so via Liberapay and Patreon!
🔗'matrixcli', new client enables Matrix as a unix util
Very interesting project: matrixcli is a versatile command line client using the matrix-python-sdk. It's not a conventional IM client, rather it exposes access to Matrix rooms so you can pipe to them as you would other Unix utils.
Neo's refactoring is almost done, with the latest changes being css-modulesifying the old stylesheet
We're also looking for nice domain name suggestions, to house the soon to be redesigned project page
The GSoC is soon coming to the end this year and I'm happy no announce that receiving of the encrypted messages PR is here! https://github.com/quotient-im/libQuotient/pull/346
A significant amount of work still needs to be done (session storage, sending messages, device handling, attachments). And I'm interested to implement it after the summer period since I've already dived into the subject :)
Here's the small demo of the receiving messages process: https://youtu.be/gGykLh4mVDg
Jojii created a new Java-based implementation of the Matrix CS API: Matrix-ClientServer-API-java, they call it "A small and simple java API for the Matrix ClientServer Protocol".
For people looking for a rather flexible ansible role just for synapse, https://gitlab.com/famedly/ansible/synapse got your back. You can use it to deploy synapse with pip or docker, depending on what you prefer for your host. It's an actively maintained fork of https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ansible-synapse, which has been archived recently and was unmaintained for a while before that. It's just been updated to v1.3.1 too.
This increases the number of services/protocols that the playbook can setup bridging for to 8: Telegram, Whatsapp, Facebook, Google Hangouts, IRC, Discord, Slack and Email.
Learn more in Bridging other networks.
🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy gets support for all Synapse config options
Just built a quick maubot plugin to add a /health endpoint to maubot, so that database failures and other brokenness can be tracked and dealt with appropriately.
privacy; IS and IM permissions and management. Hashed lookup API. Metadata cleanup (GCing redactions; deleting media; history retention); TURN management
aggregations paused
FTUE next up
Cross-signing
Immutable DMs
...then communities
RiotX
0.3 came out last week - handles DMs; lots of polishing; reduces the APK down to ~10MB!
Bridges
moving stuff into proper managed infrastructure
bifrost should be back soon?
gitter kept breaking but we're actually working with their team to fix that
working out how to automate deploying them on modular hosts
Progress for Dendrite this week has been a bit starved due to ongoing privacy work from the backend team. However it continues to move forwards with the excellent help of cnly reviewing and merging PRs.
We had 3 authors have pushed 5 commits to master and 6 commits to all branches. On master, 14 files have changed and there have been 298 additions and 121 deletions.
Also this week was some work from cnly on refactoring gomatrixserverlib and exposing some more of its internal constants to deduplicate code between itself and Dendrite.
Finally, we had some more work on an unmerged PR from cnly, which adds some internal query APIs for which servers are currently joined to a room, for use by other components later down the line.
No new Sytests are passing this week. We’re still currently at 172 tests passing out of 761 tests in total.
Synapse 1.3.0 was released - check out the blog post.
contains performance improvements to reduce disk I/O and reduce RAM usage. We’ve been running it on matrix.org for a week or so and are really pleased with the results.
mautrix-telegram got some fixes to bugs that appeared during the move to mautrix-python. It also got a manhole similar to the one in synapse, which gives admins access to an interactive Python shell inside the bridge while it's running.
The main part of the manhole (server and repl) is in mautrix-python, so you can expect the feature to appear in mautrix-facebook, mautrix-hangouts and possibly maubot in the future.
mautrix-whatsapp and mautrix-hangouts can now automatically add rooms to a user-specific community to help with filtering. mautrix-facebook is also getting that feature in the near future.
mautrix-facebook now has a search command, which means you can now actually initiate conversation with facebook users.
STUN fallback server for assisting with voice & video call negotiation (only used when your homeserver is not configured with it’s own TURN server) changed from Google to Matrix.org server and a prompt has been added to request permission before using the fallback server
Many small steps towards supporting user choice of identity servers and integration managers, including no identity server at all
Users can now download artifacts from my gitlab account since I got an SDK container from CoDerus running, cross compiling to Sailfish-RPMs in the Gitlab-Ci.
But my programming progress on master looks a bit silent because I swap to matrix-nio.
Rewrite the list view partially to handle lists with several types of items more efficiently. The message list has text messages, images, membership updates, etc. Each type needs to be rendered differently, but items of the same type could reuse GUI components when they scroll into and out of view.
Since the coming 1.3.0 release is bringing along a whole bunch of perf improvements, (and I want to test them out on my IO starved setup) I'm building K8s optimized images of the RCs. Only the debian version of the image though.
They expanded:
It's basically the regular docker image, only with some changes to make it fit nicer in Kubernetes
And there's no Helm chart at the moment, was poking at that for a bit but took a break from building one as I - back then - had trouble with the amount of data that had to be generated
You can only have one Synapse pod at any given time, as it's not scalable. Though you can scale it with workers (as I do myself)
Database-wise, I'm personally running three node HA clusters using Stolon
We run a public instance on Permaweb.io for everyone to join. We’re a large community of developers focusing on the decentralized web, with lots of channels dedicated to IPFS. In fact, we even host Riot on IPFS! We make full use of Matrix’s bridging capabilities, to Discord, IRC, Slack, Gitter and Telegram too! Come join us at #general:permaweb.io or register at https://riot.permaweb.io/ (or any other compatible client) and say hi!
Anton (@antonivan:matrix.org) is working at Matrix Towers this summer for work experience. He's been learning about Matrix and matrix-bot-sdk:
This week I made a Notification/Remind-Me-Bot using Travis's bot sdk, it took me 1 and half days, and is able to - set reminder, check reminder, cancel reminder, set interval reminder, cancel interval reminder. It is also able to store multiple reminders and cancel them using the numbers 1 - ∞ . Here is a link to my Github repo - https://github.com/joakimvonanka/Matrix-Remind-me-bot
He's also thinking of writing a guide to creating presentations:
If someone is interested on an efficient way of creating presentation using only open source tools I'm planing to write an article on that.
Small spoiler: matrix is one of them 😉
This week, I have been mostly thinking about... merch. We blew the cache on stickers, so if you are waiting for stickers specifically and have not heard from me, that is probably why. Please contact me with any questions!
Yes, it's true: Official Matrix Merch is available now. There are stickers, t-shirts and hoodies all available now, go and claim yours from https://shop.matrix.org.
I will be doing a talk on Matrix this weekend (tomorrow) at the annual Free Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) in Sankt Augustin (Germany).
If you are around - come by and get some awesome [matrix] stickers! =)
This week’s stats for Dendrite are in! 4 authors have pushed 11 commits to master and 11 commits to all branches. On master, 48 files have changed and there have been 676 additions and 146 deletions.
Very old PRs from CromFR have been updated and finally merged! These lay the groundwork for providing filters across various API endpoints (used in search, /sync, etc)
We also have a number of PRs that were moved forward but not merged. Add auth fallback endpoint (our oldest PR at the moment!) which we mentioned last week is so very close, but not quite there in time for this TWIM.
In terms of passing Sytests, Dendrite now passes 172 tests, up from 167 last week. This is out of 761 tests in total. So just a small bump (0.6%), but note that things that are crucial for Dendrite development at the moment, such as federating, only cover a small subset of tests, so each passing one can bring us much closer to getting Dendrite usable day-to-day.
The big news this week we’ve landed some massive DB improvements (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5706) which should make message sending on matrix.org (and any other server) feel noticeably snappier. :) It'll be in the next release.
Work continues on our installer to make it easier to configure Synapse and we’ll be looking for some community feedback rsn. The room directory revamp is now very close and we hope to have something live on matrix.org in about a week.
Finally we’re working on improving the efficiency of smaller instances sending messages into large rooms, we’re still at the design stage, but it will make a huge difference for anyone self hosting.
matrix-room-directory-server ( #matrix-room-directory:t2bot.io ) is less experimental than the key server but is still very early days. Currently it only offers the ability to manipulate the federated public room directory for your server, but in future it is planned to be its own standalone directory server (room aliases without having to run a whole homeserver). Check it out by searching the t2bot.io room directory from your client.
I love getting updates from yuforia - they've been consistently working on Continuum for some time, and by increments are making a great client.
Reuse the ListView of messages across different rooms to reduce memory usage
(Experimental) Remember and refocus the last read message, making it easier to go through all unread messages while switching chat rooms freely.
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!
🔗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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
TwoPRs 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 :)
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'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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
🔗Opportunities available for paid Matrix-related work
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.
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.
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.
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.
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! 😀
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.
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.
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
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.
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"
<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>
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.
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 ☝️
...
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.
...
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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'"
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.
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.
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 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
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.. 😈
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.
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
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)
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.
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.)
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.
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
🔗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
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
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."
🔗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
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 manyPRs 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!
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.
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.
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)
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.
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!
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!
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
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:
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.
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
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/
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)
🤔 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.
⁉️ 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.
