This Week in Matrix

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

🔗Spec

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

🔗Clients

🔗Riot web

Some exciting things on Riot Web this week!

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

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

More news on the redesign to come soon!

🔗nheko 0.5.3 released

nheko 0.5.3 was released this week. From the changelog:

Features

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

Improvements

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

🔗Seaglass builds being generated

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

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

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

🔗Quaternion

kitsune has been working on Quaternion:

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

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

🔗Palaver

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

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

🔗Riot mobile

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

🔗neo client

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

🔗Matrique

Black Hat has been working on Matrique:

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

🔗SDKs and such

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

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

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

🔗Ruby SDK v0.0.3

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

🔗mautrix-appservice-go

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

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

🔗Synapse

No release this week, but Synapse has been progressing:

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

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

🔗Matrix support now in ntfy

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

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

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

🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

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

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

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

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

🔗Riot Translations

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

🔗Giveth

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

For some more context:

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

The current giveth-bot:

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

🔗mautrix-telegram

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

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

🔗"The End of GSOC"

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

🔗OggCamp

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

🔗We'll meet again…

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

🔗Community Guides Index

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

🔗Clients

🔗Seaglass

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

Seaglass has had many updates, including:

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

🔗Quaternion: new redacted message handling options

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

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

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

🔗Fractal GSOC write-ups

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

🔗Riot

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

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

🔗Spec status

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

🔗APIs and SDKs

🔗Gene, minimalistic client-server api for Matrix

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

🔗Ruby Matrix SDK

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

🔗Telegram Puppeting on t2bot.io with mautrix-telegram

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

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

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

🔗Informo project releases SaltStack states

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

They introduce the Informo project:

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

🔗Synapse 0.33.2

Synapse 0.33.2 is out now:

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

Latest synapse is now available on Debian thanks to andrewsh.

🔗Room Tagging

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

🔗FIN

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

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

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

We'll meet again!

🔗Spec Progress

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

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

— Travis Ralston (@turt2live) August 3, 2018

Some points of note regarding current proposals:

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

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

• MSC1426/MSC1421 Discussion about the review process itself

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

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

🔗Python SDK -> Python 3 ?

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

🔗Clients

🔗Riot/Web 0.16

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

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

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

🔗nheko 0.5.2

Also now available on flathub!

Go download nheko and check out the 0.5.2 release notes.

New features just in the last week or so:

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

Plus lots of improvements and bug fixes.

🔗libQMatrixClient and Quaternion

kitsune has been working on resend functionality:

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

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

🔗Matrique

Black Hat announces a Flatpak repo for Matrique:

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

🔗Fractal 3.29.6

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

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

🔗Neo

Incremental improvements to Neo from fox:

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

🔗Riot/Mobile

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

🔗Updates on IRC bridges from Half-Shot

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

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

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

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

Before:

After:

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

🔗Matrix for Grafana, and more from Ananace

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

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

🔗Synapse

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

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

🔗Decentralised Web Summit & Matrix Live

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

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

🔗mautrix-telegram now supports double puppeting

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

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

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

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

🔗Coffee and the FAQBot

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

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

🔗New Discord Bridge Maintainer

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

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

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

🔗Bruno unit tests

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

🔗Fractal 3.29.5

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

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

🔗Ananace: Grafana webhook for Matrix notifications

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

🔗Quaternion / libQMatrixClient support local echo

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

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

Too bad indeed!

🔗Riot/Web

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

🔗Riot/Mobile

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

🔗Synapse

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

🔗Dendrite

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

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

— Matrix (@matrixdotorg) July 27, 2018

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

🔗Spec

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

🔗We'll meet again…

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

🔗Spec Updates!

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

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

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

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

🔗nheko 0.5.x

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

🔗Plasma

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

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

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

🔗kitsune, live on stage

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

🔗GTAD pulls in description and summary fields from the API

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

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

🔗SimpleMatrix

MTRNord introduced us to SimpleMatrix:

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

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

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

🔗Tales of Half-Shot and his many Bridges

🔗Arrival of the Discord DMs

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

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

🔗Half-Shot fixes the Foonetic IRC bridge

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

🔗Synapse

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

🔗Riot

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

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

🔗State Resolution Special... Matrix Live!

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

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

🔗Quaternion

kitsune:

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

🔗neo

f0x is working on Neo again:

added emotes, working localecho and /rainbow

rainbows :D

🔗matrix-logger

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

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

🔗Matrique client progress

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

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

I love that all clients include rainbow messages.

🔗fluffychat for Ubuntu Touch

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

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

🔗Riot/Web

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

🔗Riot/Mobile

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

🔗Synapse 0.32.2 available

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

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

🔗Spec

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

🔗Dendrite

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

🔗AS

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

🔗E2E

• UISI stats
• Device list syncing
• Encrypted backup

🔗Debian Packages

andrewsh has packaged synapse 0.32.2 for Debian

uhoreg has packaged quaternion 0.0.9.2 for Debian

🔗That's all folks

Watch Matrix Live below, and see you next week!

🔗matrix-synapse for Docker and k8s

Ananace has been working on configuration files for Synapse:

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

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

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

TravisR:

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

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

🔗Debian packaging

andrewsh:

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

🔗Google Summer of Code

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

🔗apwhitehat is working on Dendrite

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

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

We still need to figure out pagination for backfill API.

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

On the same topic, anoa says:

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

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

🔗Zil0 is working on E2E in the Python SDK

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

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

🔗koma, kotlin client

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

sideboat:

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

🔗Synapse

Neil says:

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

🔗Riot

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

Otherwise:

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

🔗Self-reference

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

🔗Welcome

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

🔗koma

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

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

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

🔗dialogflow connector

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

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

🔗mautrix-telegram

tulir:

New stuff in mautrix-telegram:

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

🔗jmsdk

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

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

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

🔗matrix-appservice-voip

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

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

Next steps:

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

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

🔗transform

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

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

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

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

🔗dsn-traveller source code released!

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

From Florian:

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

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

🔗E2E for Python SDK

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

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

🔗Fractal

From Tobias:

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

🔗Riot

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

🔗New Rooms

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

🔗And so…

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

[Ben is away today, so this week's edition is compiled again by Matthew]

🔗libQMatrixClient 0.3.0.2 and Quaternion 0.0.9.2

kitsune writes:

libQMatrixClient 0.3.0.2 has been released - no new features, just small fixes including one for an unlucky typo preventing 0.3.0.1 from generating .cpp files with GTAD.

Quaternion 0.0.9.2 is out, another step towards 0.1. Aside from bugfixes and using the latest libQMatrixClient, it features an entirely new timeline layout similar to that of Riot (the old one is still around too). Also, you can now change some settings through the menu rather than by editing a configuration file or registry - including switching timeline layouts on the fly!

🔗Loading Artist sticker packs!

TravisR says:

The Official Loading Artist sticker pack got added to Dimension ?

It also got added to Modular (aka Scalar), the default integration manager for Riot :)

🔗releasetracker

Ananace writes:

Decided to actually start pushing code I've been slowly prodding at for the last while, ever since starting the Ruby Matrix SDK in fact. Working on a Sibbell like system that tracks new releases on GitHub projects, posting them into a specified Matrix room.

The release tracker now tracks both full releases and just regular tags, though only one or the other at the moment.

Spun up a proper room for the release tracker, in case people want to help development / feel like using hosted alpha-level software more than running it themselves. #releasetracker:kittenface.studio

🔗jeon and jmsdk updates

ma1uta writes about his jeon Java HS, jmsdk and Matrix spec work:

I reorganized my projects and extracted the sdk from the api. So, today I have one project for the api (https://github.com/ma1uta/jeon), another for the sdk (https://github.com/ma1uta/jmsdk) but last is very early and non-usable.
Also I covered the code with the swagger-annotation and now I can generate the swagger schema from the code. There is an example: https://github.com/ma1uta/jeon/blob/master/client-api/generated/swagger-ui/swagger.json
And there is an example of the spec was generated from swagger: https://ma1uta.github.io/matrix-api.html (plain and without sorting or grouping, I'll maybe fix it).
Everyone can ask me in the #jeon:matrix.org (matrix api) or #mxtoot:matrix.org (matrix-mastodon bridge).
Then I want to cover the remaining api (appservice, push, identity but not federation because it isn't completed yet), write sdk (client, bot). And publish api and sdk on the maven central repository.

🔗CI/CD for Plasma!

Nico gives updates on Plasma, the new Scala/Akka homeserver:

I've setup CI/CD for plasma HS. Now every time a push occur on the repo, the pipeline builds and deploys a plasma HS instance on a test server.
This test instance is reachable at http://matrix.beerfactory.org:9000. For now it is very modest and can only reply to a few C2S endpoints like GET /_matrix/client/versions. POST /_matrix/client/r0/login and POST /_matrix/client/r0/register are also available for testing registration and login flow. POST /_matrix/client/r0/createRoom is also available with the TEST_TOKEN auth token value, but it's only a mock.
I'm now working on implementing the concept of room servers: each room will be managed by a dedicated room server (an actor), so they get fault tolerance and scalability by default (through akka clustering).
There's also a dedicated room for this project : #plasma:beerfactory.org

🔗matrix-python-sdk 0.3.2

&Adam says:

v0.3.2 of matrix-python-sdk released. See the github release for list of changes. (v0.3.0 and v0.3.1 are substantially the same with small formatting errors). There are a lot of hugely annoying bugs fixed in this one, so upgrading soon is recommended.

There's also been a lot of work on adding E2E to the python-sdk from Zil0 and his GSoC project!

🔗gomatrixclient

Black Hat writes:

I am currently writing a high-level API on top of gomatrix. As gomatrix is suitable for bots but not for clients, I decided to write a layer above it. (The motivation is to provide a backend for Matrique) It will have similar API as libqmatrixclient, but in Golang. It is currently under heavy development, and API breaking changes are frequent. Sources are available in Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/b0/gomatrixclientP.s. It is a library for writing clients in Golang. But it also provides useful APIs for basic functions, e.g. getting avatars.

🔗Fractal 3.29.1

Tobias says: New Fractal release 3.29.1, which includes a Eisha's new image viewer [implemented as part of GSoC]!

It looks like this (screenshot being a screenshot of, uh, last week's screenshot, for maximum fractalception...)

🔗Terraform Provider

TravisR writes:

I've been working on a Terraform provider for matrix. It is still a work in progress, however I plan to have the basics completed in the coming days. The provider gives you the opportunity to create users, rooms, and other objects on your homeserver, making your homeserver part of your infrastructure. This could be useful for people who want to set up a monitoring room, or for setting up default rooms on a homeserver instance. In particular, this provider will be used by the monitor bot (see last week's post) to set up the test homeservers for seeing how the bot scales with increased server counts. Source and information available on Github: https://github.com/turt2live/terraform-provider-matrix

🔗mxtoot 0.4.3

ma1uta says:

I've fixed a few bugs and added some new commands (show status by id and show n-last statuses), and now mxtoot 0.4.3 (Matrix-Mastodon bridge) can send public, private, unlisted and direct messages. There are 4 features left to go:

• show, add and remove follows;
• show threads;
• show notification, public and federated lines (and optionally merge them with the home timeline);
• show account info by id.

Also I think to implement a bridge Matrix-ActivityPub as S2S. For example, a room - is a ActivityPub's actor. Room participants is a bot corresponds to actors you follow to. Room timeline is a Inbox+Outbox. Reactions is a likes/favorites. Pinning message is a boost. Replies will be very useful.

🔗mautrix-telegram now puppets via user-specific relay bots!

tulir sneaks in at the last minute with:

mautrix-telegram now supports logging in with your own bot. It means that you can look almost like a real user and even use direct messages without logging in with your real Telegram account!

🔗And finally...

On the core team it's been an irregular week; as mentioned in last TWIM we spent most of it in workshops working through spec issues as part of the mission to finally get to an 'r0' stable release of the spec across all APIs - not just the Client/Server API.  The majority of this was spent making up for lost time on the S2S API, analysing its various holes and designing solutions to them.  Things are looking promising - we're keeping the work under wraps though given the potential for abuse, although we should see more gaps being fixed in the coming days.  Meanwhile we're aiming to get the r0 stable release out by the end of August.  We also unblocked a few longstanding MSCs (.well-known URIs and media limits), although in the end the S2S stuff took priority.  On the client side we did a lot of design sessions on Riot/Mobile (working out how the new app design should work on Mobile - watch this space for details!) and also how to speed up app launch (the concept of Hybrid Sync; somewhere between an initial sync and an incremental sync - basically an initial sync which can be interrupted in order to let the user use the app whilst the initial sync is still ongoing) - we'll write up the notes and publish these asap.

We also announced the Open Governance work which we've been doing in order to extend control of the Matrix spec to properly include the wider Matrix community - the plan is to get the Matrix.org Foundation legal entity set up roughly around the same time as the r0 release of the spec in August, and formally decouple control of the Matrix spec from New Vector (the company we set up last year to hire the core team).

We'd also like to welcome mujx (developer of nheko) and kitsune (developer of Quaternion and libQMatrixClient) to the new core team as we start trialling the new governance structure (which mainly amounts at this point to getting review approvals on spec proposals and changes from the relevant domain experts on the new team).  This brings us to a full complement for the team: Erik (servers), richvdh (servers, crypto & clients), Dave (clients & push/identity) and uhoreg (crypto, general) from the current core team; and Anoa (servers, AS API), TravisR (integrations, AS API; acting with Dimension hat on), mujx & kitsune from the community.

Otherwise, spec work has taken priority over writing software, with the exception of: APwhitehat doing as much federation work in Dendrite as part of GSoC as the current unstable state of the API allows; Michael (t3chguy) has been blitzing through P1 Riot/Web issues.  Next week should be back on the normal (if not better!) trajectory however.  No Matrix Live this week however, as we're all exhausted.

🔗GSOC Updates

With the first evaluation date coming up, let's take a look at what some of the GSOC students have been working on.

🔗Zil0 on the matrix-python-sdk

I am working on implementing end-to-end encryption in the Python SDK. As of now, I have done a good part of the encryption and decryption work with Olm and Megolm, enough to allow communicating with Riot in an encrypted room. My next goals include device list tracking and key persistence, which are the main steps left before the implementation starts being usable in a real environment.

🔗apwhitehat on Dendrite

My aim is to achieve feature completion on Dendrite. Have got lots of help from anoa, for which I'm very grateful.

Features worked on this month:

• we made a transactions cache/table for idempotency. So now dendrite will not reprocess events as far as client-server api is concerned.
• added request authentication function which recognises an application service user (partially landed.)
• username auto generation, which let's you register without username (will be used for guest access later.)
• We also added a tokens library based on macaroons, however we might not be using it anytime soon. Since it's been known to be very problematic (on synapse).
• Other small bug fixes not big enough to mention.

🔗Clients

We are rich in client announcements this week!

🔗palaver

Arne has announced v0.1.0 of Palaver:

More news from the JVM-world: I've just released the first Alpha version (v0.1.0) of Palaver, a Desktop client written in Kotlin: https://github.com/MrCustomizer/palaver/releases/tag/v0.1.0. As backend it uses the matrix-java-sdk, the GUI is written in TornadoFX, a Kotlin-Wrapper for JavaFX. The room for this client is #palaver:matrix.localtoast.de. The current features are listed in the changelog: https://github.com/MrCustomizer/palaver/blob/v0.1.0/CHANGELOG.md. And there is a little demo video on youtube, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuGuxAPuRIM.

I enjoyed this video enough that I'm embedding it here:

🔗matrique returns

Black Hat is working on Matrique:

a matrix client using golang and QtQuick controls 2. It is not ready...Yet. PRs and issues are welcomed!

🔗neilalexander has a new macOS Client: seaglass

neilalexander has begun work on "seaglass", a client for macOS using matrix-ios-sdk, he's only just begun, but for now see the screenshot below:

🔗kitsune: GTAD and libQMatrixClient

kitsune has announced GTAD v0.6 and libQMatrixClient v0.3. We've covered GTAD before, but I think it's worth including this note from the readme:

GTAD (Generate Things from an API Description) is a generator of code from a Swagger/OpenAPI specification. Initially made to generate marshalling/unmarshalling C++ code for Matrix CS API, it can be extended to support other API descriptions and other programming languages with static type checking.

kitsune regarding the GTAD 0.6 release:

A new version of API code generator, GTAD, 0.6, has been released today, adding support of variant types, proper dealing with definitions referencing other files ($ref) and more options to override schema names - even defined inline. Most importantly, GTAD has got extensive README.md that describes (most of) the things needed to start writing your own templates! As usual, kitsune will be happy to help those who would like to try it (both with C/C++ projects and other languages).

libQMatrixClient has been benefiting from GTAD over the last 4 months or so - but this is the first release where GTAD is stable and feature-complete enough to be shared with other projects.

#gtad:matrix.org is the new room for GTAD chat and support.

and libQMatrixClient 0.3:

A new version of libQMatrixClient, 0.3, comes out this weekend. This is the first libQMatrixClient release to include (almost) all CS API requests and supplementary (non-event) definitions, thanks to GTAD 0.6. Notably, it now includes jobs to register users, manage devices and keys on the server (no local key management yet - E2E work has just begun). This version also gains centralised request error handling so that clients could deal with problems in a unified way, and support "Consent not given" errors of GDPR fame, so that client authors could automatically open consent pages. You can also trigger logging out of all devices through libQMatrixClient thanks to a very recent addition to CS API spec from TravisR.

🔗Fractal

Last week we linked to Julian's blog notes on the User Settings panel - this has now landed in Fractal master.

🔗nheko

nheko v0.4.3 is now available, from the release notes:

• Overdue fixes for some regressions with regard to widget height introduced in the previous two releases
• The matrix id will be shown on hover on the display name.

🔗riot-web

Riot-web: released an RC for 0.15.5. This RC includes some small bugfixes.

🔗riot-android

We have been working on Riot stability: fixing crashes and adding more tools to control code quality The community on android adds a more readable display of keys and a floating actions menu is coming.

🔗riot-ios

Working on perf. On stability too (like killing build warnings). Users can now re-request keys when they have UTCs.

🔗Other projects

🔗anoa on dendrite

We've got a shiny new application service component which runs as a separate process (if you're doing multiprocess dendrite) that handles all outbound communication to application services. Last week I got event sending working. This week I'm hooking up an internal API for other components (roomserver, c-s api) to talk to the app service component, as we occasionally need to ping AS's to ask about existence of rooms or users. Getting those two endpoints covered is the goal of this week.

🔗ma1uta Full Spec Implementation in Java

ma1uta appeared with an extremely ambitious piece of work. His goal:

I want to create a full spec's implementation on java (all 5 specification). After that I want try to write a homeserver (2 variants: distributed on java+kafka and simple which can run on a light vps). But it's a long-term goal.

So far work has begun on an implementation of the Matrix API in Java:

https://gitlab.com/ma1uta/jeon - another java implementation of the matrix api (client-server, server-server, application server, push server, identity server) using jax-ws. It corresponds the specification on https://matrix.org/docs/spec. On the next step I want dive deep into synapse to parse it's api and fill the gaps of the spec with sending pull request. May be I will write something like a TCK (test compatibility kit).

And an SDK for which there is a sample bot for mastodon:

Also this project has a very early sdk (client, bot). I will fix it after finishing works with the spec. https://gitlab.com/ma1uta/mxtoot - matrix-mastodon bridge. With this bridge you can invite a bot and read your home mastodon's timeline, post messages, reply and boost messages.

There are rooms to follow progress on these projects:

• #mxtoot:matrix.org for Matrix-Mastodon bridge.
• #jeon:matrix.org for Matrix implementation on java.

Also find updates on Mastodon: [email protected]

🔗The Continuing Adventures of Half-Shot and the Discord Bridge

Half-Shot has been at work on matrix-appservice-discord, and has made a v0.2.0 release! Looong feature list below is taken from https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-appservice-discord/releases/tag/v0.2.0:

• Support Node v10
• Option to disable @here and @everyone on the bridge - Permission based mentions coming soon.
• Sending large files over the Discord limit now sends them as URLs
• Added support for external and animated emoji - Thanks @Sorunome!
• Initial support for m.sticker
• Sender avatars are now thumbnailed - Thanks @turt2live
• Support for message edits. Thanks @anoadragon453
• Support for custom and animated discord emoji parsing M->D. Thanks @anoadragon453
• Throw discord.js logs into our logging to help debug connection issues
• Warn when turning on encryption that the bridge will no longer work.
• Clarify where to specify protocols in the registration config. Thanks @anoadragon453
• Add attachments into the event store and fix up some of our Inserts. Thanks @eeeeeta
• Fail if the event.content.url is not present.

+ lots of testing and fixes

🔗t3chguy matrix-search including e2e

t3chguy, straight out of exams, went back to working on matrix-search, now with a working release, including e2e chats!

a local Full Text Search engine for Matrix, which will index the events locally and then provide a search api interface for matrix clients to query it matrix-search mimics the standard /search API

toml has already been looking at this and has created a docker container for it: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-search/tree/toml#to-run-in-a-docker-container

🔗Ananace on Kubernetes

Switched the Kubernetes-oriented Synapse image over to running on the official one as a base, seems to still work quite well. Even if there were some issues at first due to Alpine and busybox.

I've been building slightly specialized Synapse docker images since 0.25.1 - and running them on my Kubernetes cluster at home. Moved them to being based on the official images now instead of building them on CentOS as I used to.

🔗Synapse 0.31.0 and 0.31.1 released

Changes for Synapse 0.31.0

• Most notable change from v0.30.0 is to switch to python prometheus library to improve system stats reporting. WARNING this changes a number of prometheus metrics in a backwards-incompatible manner.
• There are still many changes being made relating to the Python 3 migration.

For Synapse 0.31.1

v0.31.1 fixes a security bug in the “get_missing_events“ federation API where event visibility rules were not applied correctly.

andrewsh has been packaging synapse for Debian.

🔗Guides index

I'm going to start making a list of guides from around the web to be linked from https://matrix.org. If you have, or know of, useful guides relating to matrix, please let me know or share in #twim:matrix.org.

🔗New rooms

• mentioned above, from ma1uta:
  • #mxtoot:matrix.org for Matrix-Mastodon bridge.
  • #jeon:matrix.org for Matrix implementation on java.
• #gtad:matrix.org is kitsune's room for gtad.
• #palaver:matrix.localtoast.de for Palaver discussion

🔗other points of interest

• things are happening with doorman but I have not checked in for some time
• tulir mentioned that https://github.com/Dhole is working on a matrix Go client and an e2e lib
• Coffee migrated to Gitlab, including: https://gitlab.com/Matrixcoffee/matrix-client-core
• Naming things is hard. neilalexander's previously nameless client and Matrique both came under discussion for naming issues.
• benpa just discovered VS Code markdown preview and can't believe the time he wasted before

🔗The end is nigh...

And here it is. As you may have noticed, I'm leaning much more toward quoting wherever possible, rather than trying to paraphrase. The aim is to keep the content authentic and community-driven, rather than a narrative from one fairly naive observer. The risk is it makes the post awkward to read as it switches voice too frequently. Come to #twim:matrix.org and let me know if you have opinions on this.

Check out Matrix Live: