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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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!
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!
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
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.
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
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!
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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:
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
hawkowl is technically new to the Matrix Core team but is already integrated and storming the codebase like an old pro. She and notafile have been ramping up on work to the make the Synapse codebase work with Python 3.
🔗matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now set up your homeserver using the official Matrix Synapse Docker image
Using this Ansible playbook is probably the easiest way to set up a fully-functioning Matrix homeserver on your own machine. The setup includes Matrix Synapse and some related services required to actually make it useful (automatically-managed HTTPS; STUN/TURN server for audio/video calls; Postgres database for Synapse; optionally riot-web; optionally Amazon S3 storage support)
my personal problem was:
i didn't want to open up registration for everyone
i didn't want to register every account manually and have to worry about seeing passwords etc
now i can just share a link, e.g:
https://zeratax.github.io/matrix-registration/demo.html?token=JargonGingerYankee
and my friends can register.
these token can be restricted as one time usable only or by an expiration date.
Last week dendrite was filtering events from user's into separate queues for each application service to eventually be given. Sending these events requires batching them up into transactions and then sending them to an HTTP endpoint on the application service. I'm happy to report that from today, that functionality is now implemented, along with graceful handling of both server and application service downtime.
Fractal got the beginning of a revamped directory (from one of our GSoC interns), as well as misc bugfixes and performance improvements. It has also been added to Damned lies, the GNOME platform for translations.
Riot is undergoing a visual redesign, thanks to Jouni Helminen. Take a look at the redesign work on the Riot blog. The changes are not radical, but will help standardise and modernise the Riot interface. Early feedback I've seen has been mostly positive.
The user can now change the following settings: Avatar, display name, add and remove email addresses and phone numbers. Also, they can see the homeserver and their own MXID. We will probably make some more small changes on the way to make the UX as good as we possibly can.
Fractal was featured in Fedora Magazine this week, just a little introduction. I notice the article barely introduces matrix: not sure if that's an oversight or a belief that the audience will already know it!
Still posting about spec proposals. To get involved in the spec development process, take a look at the Matrix Spec Change Proposals page to find out what's happening, read the proposals, then talk about it in #matrix-spec:matrix.org. One proposal looking for attention and a good place to start:
🔗Interactive Key Verification: Spec proposal from uhoreg
Folks are already accepting the new policies - thanks.
We're going to start requiring acceptance to access the matrix.org server on Tuesday (May 29th).
We're already receiving our first GDPR requests… :|
Erasure and Right-to-be-forgotten work (Phase 2) is next up so we can action the requests in a timely manner.
It looks like we will go ahead on removing MXIDs on events as a Phase 3 (although for now we do warn people that this is effectively a technical limitation of Matrix, albeit one that we're working on).
Big E2E progress from mujx, developer of the nheko client on his project mtxclient. As of this week, mxtclient is able to decrypt group events. When writing (that is, sending encrypted messages) is complete, the idea is to migrate this work back to nheko, though mujx points out this library could be used in any client.
JonTheNiceGuy produced a helpful video describing how to use bridges for IRC, Slack and Telegram, showing the difference between the different bridges. I found this to be really clear and well-paced for following the many practical details of bridging. Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNEzgYRLj8g
"finished edit passing between Discord and Matrix, as well as support for discord's custom emojis (though UX is a bit manual until TravisR's proposal goes through ?)"
This small tool will take the local part of the room ID created by the Matrix<>Facebook Messenger bot once the friend has joined it, identify th friend, and grab their avatar and display name to set the room's.
betz runs the https://hackerspaces.be/ matrix server and has this week, inbetween repairing his Synapse install, been working on a project called matrixboard. This tool is used to output the last five messages from a given room to displayed as HTML, the idea being to display output from a specific room as a website widget. You can see an example using #matrix-devhere.
The idea of using the room state to encapsulate bot data per-room was well received, discussion in #TWIM:matrix.org suggests this is an estabilished practice for some developers.
No general GSOC round-up this week, &Adam shared the news that GSOC-student Zil0's first PR towards E2E in matrix-python-sdk landed on master. These PRs are working from efforts previously contributed by pik.
Work continues in the Ruma space. This week saw the release of
ruma-events0.10.0: ruma-events contains Serializable Rust types for the events in the Matrix specification. 0.10.0 sees a major update with code provided by mujx, and contains many breaking changes.
f0x has started work on a tool to help migrate accounts - including across homeservers. Right now he's working on the GUI, but check out progress at https://github.com/f0x52/matrix-migrate.
As part of my master's thesis, I wrote the DSN Traveller bot, which is crawling the matrix federation to measure the shape and size of the matrix network, and how distributed it currently is. The bot is already in a smaller number of rooms for testing, and will join the remaining rooms over the next days. All details at https://dsn-traveller.dsn.scc.kit.edu/, room at #dsn-traveller:dsn-traveller.dsn.scc.kit.edu.
Anoa is on the case, having joined the core team on Monday - Dendrite is already sending events to ASes! Meanwhile APwhitehat is hacking away on his GSoC projects!
Last week I promised an update on the state of the various GSOC projects in the Matrix Ecosystem. There is activity happening but other than what's been discussed above we'll wait a week or two for more detailed updates.
As always, if you have things to say, projects to advertise, or anything else, ping me or visit #TWIM:matrix.org. I'm keen to get everyone included and keep this community enthused about all the work going on in the Matrix ecosystem.
martinkrafft presented about Matrix at wossat a New Zealand Open Source show and tell meetup. His talk can be seen here, and focuses on the benefits of Matrix for users.
As you may have seen from the previous blog post, we have a new drive to advance the Matrix Specification itself. Part of this is https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals, which lists all the spec change proposals we've accumulated so far, and describes the flow for getting new proposals merged. There is a new room, #matrix-spec:matrix.org for discussion, please join if you want to get involved in this process. Check out the page and the blog post for more detail.
Next up: try to turn some of the many WIP proposals into Spec PRs...
A major topic at the Hackfest was a discussion of splitting the Fractal client into two UIs for the different behaviours of messaging apps. For anyone interested in product design thinking this is a genuinely fascinating topic. I encourage you to read "Banquets and Barbecues", Tobias' excellent coverage of the latest thinking. The different chat personas are very well explained and the post brings up some of the immediate technical challenges too.
Max reports on mxisd, a Federated Matrix Identity server for self-hosted Matrix infrastructures:
mxisd v1.1 RC1 is out, addressing various privacy issues and being more GDPR-friendly overall. Testing and feedback from the community is very much appreciated
Rust-based Ruma has new activity, starting with the release of ruma-api-macros 0.2.0. This moves ruma-api-macros from dependency on hyper to using types from the http crate. This will give more flexibility about library and framework choices for ruma-client-api and ruma-client.
Lots of excitement at the variety of independent clients and servers able to interact over the matrix protocol. The images above show The Construct (server) and gomuks (client), and then mxhsd and Fractal. A fundamental part of matrix is to be an open protocol, so it's great to see entirely independent implementations liaising together! While implementing mxhsd, Max has been documenting spec omissions in a branch of the spec - we're hoping he will contribute these back!
Honourable mention for mujx, who was sending messages with nheko and Ruma a year ago!
Half-Shot - 4th June
...and one more community member, hopefully (just sorting paperwork currently!)
Heads up that we're consciously trying to hire a mix of folks from the Matrix community as well as those outside it - and avoid hiring the whole community, both to ensure diversity of viewpoint & experience in the core team, and also to avoid cannibalising folks who working on their own commercial projects on top of Matrix. We'd prefer Matrix to be as decentralised and heterogenous as possible, needless to say - and instead try to support folks in building on Matrix without hiring them into the core team (where we'd expect them to focus on the core project for everyone's benefit). This may change once we have Matrix set up as a separate foundation, once we've got out of beta, of course.
#matrix-spec:matrix.org is a new room dedicated to discussions on specific matrix spec proposals, as part of the process we're building around contributing to the matrix spec.
The talk of the town in Strasbourg this week was the arrival of Fractal Hackfest 2018! Event is still ongoing, and I'm sure they will provide a report of the progress on https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/Fractal2018, though Alexandre kindly sent us a photo of the group in action
Wonderful things are happening and being discovered regarding IoT and Home Automation. uhoreg was the first to point us to tinloaf's project to build a Matrix Chatbot component for Home Assistant:
This component allows you to send messages to matrix rooms, as well as to react to messages in matrix rooms. Reacting to commands is accomplished by firing an event when one of the configured commands is triggered.
Enthusiasm for this work led to jfred discussing his past adventures in Matrix, including a component for sibyl, 'a python chatbot with a focus on XBMC' allowing Matrix communication.
All this excitement led to Cadair creating #homeautomation:cadair.com, which has started a more thorough discussion. I'm eager to see more non-chat applications of Matrix, #twim:matrix.org came up with others with projects in progress.
It's worth noting that we feel that GDPR is an excellent piece of legislation from the perspective of forcing us to think more seriously about our privacy – it has forced us to re-prioritise all sorts of long-term deficiencies in Matrix (e.g. dependence on DNS; improving User Interactive authentication; improving logout semantics etc). There's obviously a lot of work to be done here, but hopefully it should all be worth it!
TravisR has also been thinking about GDPR, and how it relates to his Voyager bot. In his words:
TWIM: I've mostly been working on figuring out how GDPR affects t2bot.io for the last couple weeks. One of the things running on t2bot.io is Voyager - a bot that tries to join rooms it sees mentioned in people's messages, graphing them on https://voyager.t2bot.io. With the increase in talk about GDPR and more bots starting to wander the federation, the recurring topic of whether Voyager should change its approach to finding and listing rooms.
With the current approach, Voyager reads messages and tries to find room aliases to try and join. Individual people can opt-out of this tracking to stop Voyager from reading/parsing their messages (opting back in at a later time, if desired). The room moderators can kick or ban the bot to completely remove their room from the graph, and can invoke a 'soft kick' if they'd like to have their room remain listed, but don't want the bot in the room. Voyager will make sure to only show information for public rooms and will update the graph if the room flips between public and private.
If anyone has feedback on how this approach could be improved (or if it should be left as-is), please come by #voyager:t2bot.io on matrix to start the conversation.
I was surprised and excited to learn that a Russian translation of the Matrix FAQ has been produced by a group of Russian-language users. ma1uta reported:
There are a several Russian-speaking users spontaneously decided to unite and help Matrix. We created a room where translated FAQ using the embedded etherpad widget. Some of us are here: Magnolia and Fenneko is a Good Girl for example. Anybody can join to us #perevodators:matrix.org and helps. We accept any help. Preview: https://ma1uta.github.io/index.html
They've provided a PR which I will presently merge (though of course, as I don't speak Russian I will need to trust that it's really a translation of the FAQ!)
Ananace reports that work has begun on a Matrix SDK for Ruby 'with a design based heavily on the Python one'. Doing a lot of sysadmin work, Ananace has been working a lot with Ruby, and also wants to get going using the SDK to write bots.
Public catalog for matrix rooms announced: matrixstats.org. The place where you can find a lot of rooms and sort them by ratings or categories. Presented rooms are collected from different homeservers; some of rooms have detailed statistics. The homeservers itself can be explored without the registration. The project is currently in beta stage, so some features may be missing. We would be glad to receive any feedback and ideas for further improvement. Additional info available at https://matrixstats.org/about, related discussions at #matrixstats:matrix.org.
Much-needed work has begun to classify and present the spec proposals for the Matrix specification. We've tagged up the all the issues in GitHub, new page will appear on matrix.org at the start of next week if I can just stop preening the generator.
Another week, another article on the front page of Hacker News. The author is focused more on Riot than Matrix, still it's great knowing how much interest there is in the wild.
Happily, I was at an unrelated event in London earlier in the week, and had my first IRL experience meeting someone who already knew (and then enthused) about the project. Feels good.
Do you have a suggestion for this series? What could we be doing more of? I have a nascent plan to do 'deeper' conversations with people or projects that aren't necessarily in the normal run of things, but are interesting uses of Matrix. Does this sound like something you'd want to read on a Friday afternoon? Drop a line in #twim:matrix.org or ping benpa.
Ever modest, tulir has been tearing through issues and fixes over on gomuks. I'm quite excited to have a matrix-native console client getting up to speed so fast.
One of the riot developers, luke has a fun side-project called Journal, this being a blogging platform built on matrix.
Says Luke:
The big news this week being that I'm going to redesign the interface to focus on the personal blog use-case, optimising for easy setup and easy blog post sharing.
And hopefully push a 1.0 release that I'd be happy to use as my own personal blog.
Worth noting that the linked project page (Journal) is itself a blog using journal (the url might give you a hint of this!)
There are several changes moving this project along, but checking out the change list I can see there were a bunch of contributors to thank, (eeeeeta, Sorunome, TravisR), which is super-cool to see.
This week kitsune has been focused on 'GTAD (Generate Things from API Description)', which is a code generator for C++, taking API description in Swagger/OpenAPI as it's source. Now at version 0.5, apparently GTAD
can generate correct buildable (and runnable) code to convert data structures used in CS API between JSON and C++ - for the entirety of CS API calls. That basically means that libqmatrixclient gains (so far low-level) C++ CS API for all calls in The Spec and will follow updates to it.
This is super-exciting, especially as we are going to see discussion and progress on the spec...
Loads of work happening to build the Spec Proposals website, tracking workflow for all the proposals in flux and putting them into a formal RFC-style process. It should help community participation in the spec process massively whilst we finalise the longer term governance model for Matrix.org
Also looking at publishing formal roadmaps for Synapse, Dendrite and Riot (at last!) - we have them internally these days but need to just chuck them up on the web and maintain them.
This section is scraped manually from #newrooms:matrix.org, though there has not been much activity there this week. Meanwhile, there are a couple of rooms suggested by Creak which deserve some love:
Amber Brown of the Twisted project will be joining the Matrix core team in a few weeks. She'll be focusing on Synapse implementation work, and will bring a lot of Python experience with her. Having someone working full time on synapse will increase others bandwidth for homeserver and spec work.
