This Week in Matrix

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

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR:

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

🔗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!

🔗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

kitsune:

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!

🔗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

kitsune:

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

Half-Shot:

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

TravisR:

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!

🔗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"

kitsune:

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.

🔗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

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

🔗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!

🔗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

Half-Shot:

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

TravisR:

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

TravisR:

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!

🔗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,

kitsune:

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

Half-Shot:

This weekend I took a brief pause from doing matrix work, and then went back into it by finishing the feature set for the .NET Core Synchrotron. It's "feature complete" meaning all specced features of sync are in this branch, excluding legacy endpoints. There are a few bugs logged against it and it's really only useful as a super early test, while I fix some of the p1 bugs.

The federation sender continues to be reliable and stable, and we are prepping for the release of synapse 0.99.3 which made a few changes to the replication stream. For more info, please see https://github.com/turt2live/synapse-netcore-workers

🔗Pattle has now moved to Flutter

Wilko has officially discontinued the previous version of Pattle, and is focused on their Flutter SDK and new version of Pattle based on it:

After some silence here but a lot of development, Pattle has now moved to Flutter. The new app is available in the same F-droid repository, you can just update. Note that you will have to log in again. If there are issues with updating, try removing the old app and installing the new one.

Also note that this version is still very basic and does not have all features of the old Pattle unfortunately. The reason that I chose to already replace it on the repo is that the old app will not receive updates anymore.

The current features are logging in and an overview of all chats. What is new is that data is now stored locally, so you won't have to do an initial sync everytime you open the app (which was the case with old app). What's also new is that I've decided to use more red, because.. I like red.

There is still a lot to do! Please notify me of anything that you think is missing, even though some things may be obvious (sorting chats based on date, chat avatars), some may not be as obvious to me!

If you'd like to contribute, the new repo is here. Note that many contributions will probably start at the SDK level. Pattle uses my own Dart SDK, which you can find here.

There is at the moment a very specific bug in Flutter, where on Android 7.1 with release builds, the app crashes when building a list widget. If you use Android 7.1 (like me) and you crash after logging in, that's the reason. It seems I can't do anything about it, sorry.

🔗libaqueous (Matrix Dart SDK) and Aqueous client

Black Hat is continuing work on libaqueous, a Matrix Dart SDK.

Aqueous now comes with room categories and history messages support. Also, a lot of code refactoring is going on to change the backend store from plain json file to sqlite, which should improve the performance a lot. The room is at #libaqueous:encom.eu.org

🔗Riot Web

• Working towards bringing breadcrumbs out of labs
• Adding image preview to file upload UX
• Stability fixes for timeline
• Defending against issues introduced when using Riot Web on a machine which is running out of disk space

🔗Riot iOS

• Grouped notifications are coming! We have added some logs to track why the notification setting is sometimes disables (#2348).
• SAS device verification is still in progress but it should be released next week.

🔗Riot Android

• Three releases this week, to fix several bugs with the new EventStreamServiceX, and to fix issue with the Jitsi conference call (Riot.im 0.8.29). FDroid users should receive the upgrade soon.
• Users are happy with the new notifications!
• Valere is still working on SAS, we are reaching the end :).

🔗RiotX (Android)

• It's now possible to signout from RiotX.
• The whole setting screen has been imported from Riot, as well as the Themes and some other small features (launcher icon, etc.).
• Benoit is working on room creation, sdk side, and François is working on image upload.
• We should start to integrate new design from Nad next week.

🔗continuum (JavaFX desktop client)

yuforia has continued work on their client:

in continuum, moving storage of messages from plain text files to a database, simplifying code and improving performance

🔗neo

f0x:

Neo now has .well-known implemented for login :D
video showcasing the different outcomes:

🔗Synapse K8s images

Ananace has updated his k8s images for Synapse 0.99.3, and has been continuing work on other parts of the project:

I'll be writing a Helm chart for 1.0 as well, just haven't had time to do so yet.
I need to update all the references to TLS as well, as that's supposed to be left to kube-lego or cert-manager for a modern install

🔗Federation Tester

Brendan and anoa have been working on the Federation Tester:

Following up on last week's effort, a number of issues on the Matrix federation tester, both on the backend and the frontend side, have been fixed, including fixing certificate validity checks, not following CNAME records in SRV records, fixing display of the SRV lookup in the UI, preventing some crashes, and a few more.

All outstanding issues on both the federation tester's backend and its frontend that could have preventing people to test efficiently how their server is performing in the context of Synapse's 1.0 release have now been fixed and deployed on https://matrix.org/federationtester/.

🔗Synapse and Riot bounties

Aaron Raimist reports:

A few bounties have been added to Synapse and Riot recently to encourage community members to work on those projects. Although they aren't large enough to actually pay for development, I believe they can serve as a small push to help an already interested developer justify spending some time working on these projects.

• $400 bounty on threading in Riot thanks to GitHub user @fallerOfFalls, expires November 21, 2019
• $200 bounty to fixing stuck invites, expires on January 1, 2020
• $200 bounty to fix Riot forgetting the name of rooms, AKA the "Aaron and 5246 others" bug, expires on January 1, 2020

🔗Still more

pantalaimon has been seen in the wild, even appearing to run on Android. We'll get a little closer to the project and see how it's going in a future edition.

jj announced a new Python SDK for Matrix:

new, alpha quality, matrix python client for asyncio and with support for e2e encryption: https://github.com/SFTtech/aiomatrix
Polishing is needed but the basics do work already :)

L'autre from Calculate Linux announced that the project is now using Matrix for their communications, you can find their rooms in their newly created community: +list:calculate-linux.org.

George Lucas György Lukács Georg Lukas brutally skewered Matrix with an April Fool's post suggesting that yaxim, an XMPP client for Android, will begin to support Matrix.

Matrix listed as one of the "Top Ten Tools" for Open Science practitioners

the whole point of Matrix is that its a protocol which many different suppliers can use so you can avoid nasty lock ins

That is certainly an advantage!

🔗That's all I know

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

🔗Matrix Live

Tom & Matthew talk through the newly published Riot/Web roadmap! Be sure to read Tom's blog post which gets into his thinking for the roadmap too.

🔗Matrix.org homeserver notice

The matrix.org homeserver will be down for essential database maintenance between 12:00 and 12:30 UTC on 2019-04-01

🔗Synapse

Neil, Synapse overseer, reports on the acceleration towards 1.0:

We have much improved sytest support for Synapse worker mode, Hawkowl landed a brand new super fast super shiny user directory implementation, Brendan fixed a bunch of niggles in the federation tester and we finally got to the bottom of our sync caching bug that obscured accepting invites (thanks richvdh for sticking with it). Erik solved our presence spamming bug and anoa fixed some LDAP auth bugs and submitted a PR for certificate checking - one of our final blockers for Synapse 1.0. For all the latest checkout out our latest release candidate 0.99.3rc1.
Next week, we'll ship 0.99.3, we'll be looking at server key validity periods, adding a 3PID unbind API and starting work on tuning low powered Synapse installations.
https://www.arewereadyyet.com/ is still rising so keep banging to everyone you know that they ensure their federation certificates are valid.

🔗Pantalaimon

poljar gave this update on his new project Pantalaimon:

Pantalaimon is a new project that acts as a reverse proxy for clients to connect to. Once a client is connected Pantalaimon handles end to end encryption for the client transparently.
The project is only a week old but already at a working prototype phase. A demo can be found here: http://webmshare.com/play/Qn4wg

This is a huge gain! Use of this project, as you will see in the video, permits any Matrix client to support End-to-End encryption of messages, by handling encryption/decryption in a daemon rather than in the client.

Watch the video, and you'll see gomuks, which does not support encryption, chatting in an encrypted room. Also, go chat in #pantalaimon:matrix.org and get involved!

🔗Construct

Report from the Construct team:

The matrix Construct server has made significant progress this week implementing the 1.0 specification and is very close to a 1.0 release! Special thanks to our star tester Yan Minari and expert Matrix consultants Tulir and Max and C++ developers Jason of Zemos and Mujx of nheko for all their hard work to make this happen. The Construct now fully supports IPv6 and is ready to participate in fully end-to-to-end encrypted ipv6 networks like #yggdrasil:matrix.org and #cjdns:matrix.org.
This week also saw additions for .well-known support, m.fully_read and even DNS caching inside a matrix room shared between servers (which is really cool if you ask me).

I'd like to recognize our testers for their invaluable contributions this week, only a fraction of which are documented here: https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct/issues leading to the 1.0 release.

The Construct is written in C++ for maximum performance and scalability. It is the first fully federating server after the Synapse reference implementation. Your contributions in code and participation are essential to bring Construct to its upcoming release; get involved at https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct and in #zemos-test:matrix.org.

🔗Riot Web

From the team:

We've been upgrading and optimising our Jitsi instance so people should see more reliable video conference calls, especially if they avoid connecting from Firefox over poor connections.
We've been squashing scroll jumps (where the timeline pops out of position unexpectedly due to images loading, etc.). We've come up with a radical reimplementation of the timeline (which should be imperceptible, except it doesn't jump) - try it out on https://riot.im/develop now.

Bruno, who has been working on scroll functional for Riot deserves a call-out - scrolling in new Riot web works great, and he may now be the most qualified dev on scroll: anchor outside of Mozilla or Google…

You can now get all Riot updates from #riot-web-announcements:matrix.org, the official room of Riot web announcements! You can especially get this update, which was also featured on Twitter:

Attention Riot Web Admins! We reset Scalar tokens to address a potential security vuln. with some clients - if you run your own Riot instance please upgrade to at least v1.0.4 to keep using integrations (widgets, sticker picker, any bots and bridges configured through Scalar).

— Riot.im (@RiotChat) March 27, 2019

Please upgrade your Riot web instances!

Additionally, Notkea has packaged Riot desktop for NixOS.

🔗Riot iOS

Another case of UTD (https://github.com/vector-im/riot-ios/issues/2320) has been fixed. Some logs have been added to track push notifications that disabled themselves. SAS verification implementation is still in progress.

UTD = "Unable to Decrypt", messages as seen in Riot

🔗Riot Android

• Rework of EventStreamService, to fix many issues (crash) reported by users. The feature is available on the develop branch.
• Also we are trying to upgrade Jitsi library, to fix other errors reported by users.
• SAS verification implementation is still in progress.

Also, you may have already seen the use of Android 9-style notifications, featuring "Mark as read" + "Quick reply" buttons. This addition has started to make Riot Android my client of choice for burning through notifying rooms.

🔗RiotX (Android)

• Phase 1 started!
• Backporting RageShake feature, with better handshake detection.
• We are still fighting bug on the timeline rendering.

🔗nheko packaging

@adridg:matrix.org:

Quick note that nheko (v 0.6.3) is now packaged for FreeBSD as well. The C++ code was fine (we use Clang, that does trip up some people) but I have Opinions about the CMake code (in particular that the find code for nlohmann/json.hpp, lmdb++.h and tweeny.h could use a lot of work -- if I feel perky I may come up with a PR). Thanks for the good work!

🔗Dart SDKs

Black Hat has been using Dart and Flutter this week, and is making progress with an SDK and reference client:

I am trying to use libaqueous(Matrix Dart SDK) to create a cross-platform matrix client for Android and iOS.
Almost nothing works except Already a significant number of client features are available: login/logout, room list, basic timeline and message posting

Flutter is quite good for rapidly building mobile apps. ? Strong-typed json serialization/deserialization in Dart is a bit difficult at first, but I managed to solve that.
the repo is here, the SDK is here, and the room for discussion is at #libaqueous:encom.eu.org

Debug build apk from Gitlab CI is here

🔗Notes on manually upgrading rooms, from TravisR

TravisR has written a brief guide to manually upgrading rooms:

https://gist.github.com/turt2live/a99c8e794d6115d4ddfaadb72aabf063

Note that you generally won't need to do this.

🔗That's all I know

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

🔗Matrix Live with Kitsune

I chatted with Kitsune, maintainer of libQMatrixClient, Quaternion and Spec Core Team member. We talked about the history and future of these projects, platform preferences, the importance of decentralisation and more.

🔗Synapse and the road to 1.0

Neil, Synapse-dev wrangler #1:

Huge thanks to everyone who has helped increase the number of ‘1.0 ready' synapse installs. If you don't know what this means, see our blog. https://arewereadyyet.com reports > 60% adoption on a per server basis, and high 90s on a per user basis. We are now really close to being able to ship a 1.0 release candidate and start the 2 week countdown before releasing 1.0 proper.

This week we have focussed on performance, richvdh has been working on batching of outgoing read receipts and hawkowl shipped a much more performant implementation of user search. Erik has been putting the state compressor through its paces, he saw one room compress down to 1% of its original size. Andrew has been focusing on ensuring spec compliance on various Synapse endpoints and is currently looking at some bugs in the federation tester.

🔗NixOS-Synapse setup

Jonas Schürmann shared his config for Synapse on NixOS:

I open sourced my NixOS-Synapse setup: https://gitlab.com/MazeChaZer/nixops-servers/tree/master/matrix

#NixOS:matrix.org for more.

🔗Pattle, lots of progress and Dart SDK planned

Lots of news from Pattle, the project aiming to create clients for multiple mobile platforms. All quotes below from Wilko.

Pattle for Android now has an F-droid repository: https://fdroid.pattle.im/

It's the most up to date version straight from the pipeline, so not necessarily stable.

You can now scroll up and load history

As part of the project, Wilko also announced the intention to create a Dart SDK:

I'm currently working on a Matrix SDK for Dart, which will be used for the Pattle rewrite in Flutter. The reason for this is outlined here. To summarize: My goal for Pattle is to release for not only Android but also iOS and web, with a single code base. Other reasons include that Android native development is just bad, and the fact that I'm not too happy with the official Matrix Android SDK design and documentation. I will maintain and also add some features to the current version of Pattle, to try things out. The Flutter version will replace the native one once the features are in sync.

🔗Riot iOS

We've released a hotfix release 0.8.4 on App Store that fixes following issues:

• Unable to open a file attachment of a room message.
• Unable to share a file with whitespace in filename.

We are working on iOS 12 notifications features.

🔗Riot Android

• Improving new notification system
• Implementing SAS verification

🔗RiotX (Android)

• Setup CI
• Finishing Phase 0

🔗Dimension sticker packs

TravisR has introduced sticker packs for Dimension:

Dimension now has beta support for custom sticker packs. To create a sticker pack:

1. Start a conversation with @stickers:t2bot.io
2. Say !stickers newpack and follow the prompts.
3. Share the URL with your friends.

1. Make sure you're using Dimension as your integration manager.
   • Not sure if you are? Click the 4 squares in the top right of the room in Riot - if the dialog is titled "Dimension", you're all set :)
   • If you aren't, check out https://dimension.t2bot.io
2. Click on the smiley face to the right of where you type messages then the Edit button in the top right.
3. Paste the URL of the sticker pack into the box and click "Add Stickerpack".
4. Start using your new stickers.

These instructions are also available at https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-dimension/blob/master/docs/custom_stickerpacks.md as is the admin/operator guide for running your own sticker bot (you're not stuck with using t2bot.io unless you want to be).
Custom sticker packs are still beta while the proposals to share this with the wider Matrix ecosystem are still works in progress. This serves as a proof of concept to see how crazy of an idea it is to have stickerpacks-as-rooms (yes, they're just plain Matrix rooms under the hood) and what needs ironing out before moving ahead with the MSC.

🔗matrix-notification-profile-manager

Brendan has created a notification profile manager:

Over the past few weeks, I grew a bit fed up of always having to turn on and off every notification rule each time I'm having a slight change in what I'm working on or depending on what mood I was in (e.g. want to focus only on work-related stuff and nothing else, don't want to hear about work at all, somewhere in the middle, etc.), so I built a notification profile manager for Matrix. It's available both as a command line interface or a Go package in case people want to build on top of it.

It allows one to take a snapshot of their current notifications settings and save that as a profile, so that this profile can be applied later. It also allows one to delete a profile or list the existing profiles (more features to be added as time goes by). In order to make the whole thing interoperable with other projects building on top of the Go package, it also uses the user's account data on the user's Matrix homeserver to store profiles.

🔗neo v4: iris

F0x has recommenced development on the Matrix client Neo:

After discussion following https://cyberia.social/@foks/101785513826000032 I've resumed development on Neo. Suggestions are very much welcomed on the pad and mastodon thread
I'm implementing components one by one now, with just mocked events. Actual Matrix integration will come when the gui components are ready.

Neo is now partly integrated with matrix-js-sdk because I grew tired of having to write my own mock events. There's a basic authentication flow, with 0 error handling, and parsing of m.text and m.image events

Check out https://git.lain.haus/f0x/iris for the source code and see a working version at https://neo.lain.haus/neo

f0x also said:

it would be much appreciated to get some feedback on how I implemented matrix-js-sdk, had to do some weird stuff to make React update

I'll take a look but would love anyone with more experience of the SDK to get in touch with the f-man.

🔗solari[z|s]ed wallpaper

ma1uta shared this awesome Matrix wallpaper, created by @kolonsky:092918.xyz via https://linux.pictures/projects/solarized-dark-wallpaper

🔗mautrix-telegram 0.5.0 released

tulir is up again with his Telegram bridge:

mautrix-telegram 0.5.0 was released after I finally fixed the bug that was causing the bridge database to lock up. It turned out to be a single line of ORM usage that I had missed while converting everything to use SQLAlchemy Core. The full release notes are at https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-telegram/releases/tag/v0.5.0. I also released v0.5.1 to fix a bug that made the DBMS migration script not work and Python 3.5 compatibility. I wouldn't recommend using Python 3.5 though, I'm going to drop support for it some time after Debian 10 is released

🔗Shevski mentions Matrix on BBC Radio 4

Shevski from the #redecentralize organisation was interviewed on Radio 4, and mentioned Matrix:

Yesterday on @BBCRadio4 I talked about the problems of centralisation, how to regulate big tech, personal data stores and @redecentralize! You can listen online here: https://t.co/xGHK812lYa with #Web30 section starting 1:50 mins in ? (I'm from 7mins ish) #redecentralize pic.twitter.com/m0dazBH7Dk

— Irina (Ira) Bolychevsky (@shevski) March 22, 2019

🔗Extras

Scylla has been receiving regular updates, no release to report but the project keeps going. #scylla:riot.danilafe.com

This React Native client is not announced so don't look at it

My pal Doug shared his frustration with the broader state of the chat ecosystem after reading that teens now use Google Docs for their chat needs (and not the chat feature, the document itself!)

I love that you've got Amazon with their Alexa messaging, Apple in their own bubble with iMessage, Facebook doing chat 3-ways and Google trying 50 ways to do chat. And that's before you even get into things like Slack, Discord, Telegram, Riot, Line, WeChat etc etc. And then the current hot way to chat is in a document... I mean, how much money is being invested in trying to create the perfect chat solution?

For the record, we were chatting over Matrix…

🔗That's all I know

That's the news, if you have something to say, or something to add, then you should go to #twim:matrix.org and share it. If you have other projects to discuss, come share them. If you'd prefer to come quietly, my door is always open: @benpa:matrix.org.

See you here next week, and on Matrix!