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This Week In Matrix – 2018-04-27

27.04.2018 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

🔗Big News

🔗GSoC students

Google Summer of Code acceptees were announced, and we're really excited to have FIVE Matrix-related projects to look forward to!

Three of the students will be mentored by matrix.org folk, and two more will work on Fractal under the GNOME org.

🔗Fractal Hackfest 2018

Fractal Hackfest 2018 will take place next month in Strasbourg, hosted by Epitech. They'll be planning a roadmap for the year, and working on their current focus areas.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/Fractal2018

🔗Coverage of French Matrix adoption

After the blog post on matrix.org yesterday, lots of attention developed around the news. Take a look at this Hacker News thread with lots of discussion, which has stayed on the front page for nearly 24 hours, and a megathread on Reddit/r/linux: nearly 1000 upvotes and growing.

🔗Project Updates

🔗Clients

🔗libqmatrixclient

kitsune reports a new release of libqmatrixclient, v0.2.1, this is mostly a bugfix release, fully backwards-compatible with v0.2. Check out the release notes for details.

kitsune - https://github.com/QMatrixClient/libqmatrixclient - #qmatrixclient:matrix.org

🔗Quaternion

Staying in QMatrix-land, there is a pre-release of Quaternion available. Take a look at v0.0.9, improvements include "redactions, file downloading, room creation and settings editing, better timeline visualisation and much more"!

kitsune - https://github.com/QMatrixClient/Quaternion - #qmatrixclient:matrix.org

🔗neo

f0x has been beavering away on neo, and has announced that Alpha 0.01 is available now. neo is a webclient in React, it feels really light and fast. I asked f0x about the uptick in work, and he mentioned he got started with React recently, but likes it a lot.

f0x - https://github.com/f0x52/neo/ - #neo_client:matrix.org

🔗Fractal

Fractal released 0.1.27 with many new features and bugfixes. Lot's going on but I'm most excited to see Markdown support land.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/fractal - #fractal-gtk:matrix.org

🔗Bots

🔗matrix-trello-bot

Says TravisR: "I've whipped together a simple Trello notification bot for matrix: matrix-trello-bot. Future plans include the ability to create/update/delete cards and more granular control of what is notified about. Currently it acts very similar to how the Github notifications bot works."

TravisR - https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-trello-bot - #trellobot:t2bot.io

🔗Others

🔗Matrix DSL

MTRNord is working on a "matrix DSL", basically a config file language that generates a project Template in multiple languages. The project is just now at the discussion stage, so join #matrix_dsl:matrix.ffslfl.net to check out what's going on. (DSL = Domain Specific Language.)

MTRNord - #matrix_dsl:matrix.ffslfl.net

🔗urllib-requests-adapter

Says Coffee: "urllib-requests-adapter has been updated to work with matrix-python-sdk 0.2.0. urllib-requests-adapter is a lightweight replacement for requests and its dependencies, currently standing at 126 SLOC."

Coffee - https://github.com/Matrixcoffee/urllib-requests-adapter

🔗mxisd

mxisd, the Identity Server from kamax, saw a v1.0.2 release, following the big one-point-zero last week. Changes include de-duplicated directory search results, plus bugfixes.

Max - https://github.com/kamax-io/mxisd

🔗matrix-stfu

Missed this one last week, but matrix-stfu from xwiki is a message filtering tool released recently, it can "mass remove everything which was said by a particular user in a particular room". XWiki use matrix as their internal chat system for the ~30 people at the company.

xwiki - https://github.com/xwiki-labs/matrix-stfu - #xwiki:matrix.xwiki.com

🔗Riot/Web

  • We're committing to 2-weekly releases come what may, to avoid another massive gap like the one between 0.13 and 0.14.
  • RCs will get cut starting from Wednesday; actual release then happens on the Monday having given folks a chance to test the RC on /staging (and to iterate on the RCs).
  • Obviously this is flexible if we need to rush out fixes sooner.
  • On that note, 0.14.2-rc1 was cut on Wednesday! Please test it at riot.im/staging. It's mainly bugfixes but also the full relayering between riot-web and matrix-react-sdk.
  • Dave's working on finally hooking in Jitsi as the default conferencing system
  • t3chguy's been working on Replies, which continue to look awesome
  • Next up: E2E cross-signing (at last!!!!)

🔗Riot/Mobile

  • New releases are out! Mainly preparing for sticker viewing and trying to fix the Android push notification situation. PLEASE TELL US IF YOU ARE STILL HAVING ANDROID PUSH NOTIFICATION PROBLEMS!
  • Lots of review of Android by Benoit - adding in Kotlin support as of today and establishing a formal roadmap for Android work (we'll show the blog post when we have it)
  • Lots of Matrix-for-French-Government stuff.

🔗Synapse

  • Synapse 28.0 was released! A major bump mainly thanks to lots and lots of contributions from the wider community.
  • Massive experimental work on GDPR in progress - doing the thought experiment of pseudonymising MXIDs throughout Matrix on a per-room basis so that it's possible to redact MXIDs in the event of a “right-to-erasure” GDPR event. Rich vdH is leading the work.
  • The good news is that introducing an MXID abstraction layer like this could help us enormously with some of Matrix's longest-term architectural issues - i.e. account migration and portability; improving on PERSPECTIVEs for managing server identity; future support for P2P Matrix; solving the domain name reuse problem; etc.
  • The bad news is that it would obviously be a very significant change to the Matrix spec, although we'd be doing it in such a way which minimises impact to client implementers and keep the CS API looking as similar as possible.
  • We're not sure whether we need to rush this through or not yet; still waiting for final GDPR clarification from lawyers, but it feels like this might be a good opportunity to force us to finally tackle some of these harder problems.
  • Meanwhile, Erik's Delta State Resolution algorithm work is continuing well; we're hoping to finish & merge it asap in order to get back headroom on the server.
  • Thankfully the matrix.org synapse itself has been relatively stable this week, other than being completely overloaded causing Freenode to be almost unusable.
  • We've started using Ansible in production, although the playbooks need some iteration before we're fully happy to announce them & recommend folks use them as an official way of running Synapse in production.

🔗try-matrix-now

There is a update out on try-matrix-now, matrix.org's central listing of projects. Try filtering and see whether benpa mangled the metadata for your project. Submit any changes as markdown PRs on the repo.

🔗Spec

benpa is currently working on a Proposals page for the Spec to properly stack spec proposal status, at last!

🔗Articles around the web

🔗Riot: A Distributed Way of Having IRC and VOIP Client and Home Server

uhoreg pointed to some charming coverage over on https://itsfoss.com: Riot: A Distributed Way of Having IRC and VOIP Client and Home Server, by Shirish. The article covers some details about riot-web and the open source ethos of Matrix, but my favourite quote by far:

"Without Matrix, Riot would be like a body without a soul."

Shirish - https://itsfoss.com/riot-desktop/

🔗Service notifs with Matrix

Half-Shot shared an article he wrote, Service notifs with Matrix, about using Matrix and Riot to deliver automated notifications to different types of end-user at his company.

Half-Shot - https://dev.to/halfshot/service-notifs-with-matrix-3fb5

🔗New Rooms roundup

  • #matrix_dsl:matrix.ffslfl.net As mentioned above, MTRNord is looking at creating a DSL for matrix. In his words: "A room to discuss about making a Matrix DSL to allow non coders to write simple as and bots. I would love to see some people discussing about syntax with me as this is my very first DSL and very first time trying JetBrains MSP. Anyone with Ideas what it should allow to do and how to have the syntax a welcome to join (and people who want to follow of course too)"
  • #trellobot:t2bot.io (from above) TravisR: "a discussion/developer room for Matrix Trello Bot (https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-trello-bot). This is a bot that notifies rooms of changes to tracked Trello boards, similar to how the Github bot works. Future enhancements include being able to create, update, and delete cards from within Matrix."

🔗Lastly...

Matrix Live - Season 2, Episode 17: Apr 27th is now available!

This Week in Matrix is printed fresh every week! There will be another post before you know it, so if you'd like to be included join us in #twim:matrix.org and let us know what you've been working on. See you next week!

This Week In Matrix - 2018-04-20

20.04.2018 00:00 — This Week in Matrix — Ben Parsons

🔗Project Updates

🔗Drupal matrix_api module

Updated the Drupal matrix_api module to pass the auth token as a header instead of as a GET param... the GET param was leaking the token if there was an http exception thrown.

(John) - https://cgit.drupalcode.org/matrix_api

🔗mxisd

v1.0.0 has been released and is now stable, making it the first community Identity server and first open federation one.

(Max) - https://github.com/kamax-io/mxisd

🔗nheko

0.3.x of nheko was released! There is progress towards e2e encryption in mujx/mtxclient. Once this encryption is working there, it can eventually be included in nheko.

(mujx) - https://github.com/mujx/nheko

🔗Fractal

Fractal 0.1.26 was released this week, which includes an animated scroll to bottom animation, fixed MacOS compilation, and bug fixes. Since then markdown support and many other commits have been spotted...

https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/fractal/

🔗libqmatrixclient

kitsune released 0.2 of libqmatrixclient a couple of weeks ago, which he says is "the first one more or less functional and stable"!

Highlights include redactions support, files transfer (both ways), rooms creation, account data (tags, direct chat flags). Also there are a few things making libqmatrixclient clients stand out compared to, e.g., Riot: one can set per-room names/avatars, and also the best estimate for the number of unread messages can be taken from the library and shown in the client application."

(kitsune) - https://github.com/QMatrixClient/libqmatrixclient

🔗matrix-monitor-bot

#monitorbot:t2bot.io is a bot to measure latency between homeservers (as perceived by users).

It's able to report metrics to Prometheus and has it's own built-in dashboard (see https://lag.t2bot.io/ for some horrendous times). In the coming weeks it'll become more production-ready, however in the meantime if people are looking to help iron out the scalability issues, please run an instance on your homeserver.

(TravisR) - https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-monitor-bot

🔗uMatriks

thrrgilag wrote on behalf of uMatriks, to say that v0.10 was published to the openstore this last week which now includes unread counts for rooms. Those not already familiar, uMatriks is a native matrix client being developed for Ubuntu Touch.

https://github.com/uMatriks/uMatriks

🔗Construct

There looks to be lots of activity on Construct (jzk's fork of the charybdis ircd which adds in a C++ homeserver implementation) based on the commit log at https://github.com/jevolk/charybdis. jzk's work there has been highlighting some of synapse's nastier problems (e.g. thundering presence bugs), and it looks like the federation support is progressing steadily, including handling EDUs (presence & typing data). (jzk) - https://github.com/jevolk/charybdis

🔗matrix-puppet-maxs

tyler shared his "horrifying" project, for people that want to use Matrix to send an SMS via an XMPP bridge to their Android phone, in order to provide SMS and call notifications inside Riot.

(tyler) - https://github.com/tfreedman/matrix-puppet-maxs

🔗matrix-register-bot

krombel built a bot to have a two step registration to synapse, check it out:

(krombel) - https://github.com/krombel/matrix-register-bot

🔗picard

Cadair reported that he and SolarDrew have written a bot to bridge a whole slack team into a matrix community. It basically handles all the room admin for you including:

  • Invite the slack bot to the channel
  • Creating matrix rooms
  • Setting users as admins
  • Setting room name and room avatar and as publicly joinable
  • Setting up the link with the slack AS
  • Creating and adding rooms to the community
  • Inviting all members of the community to the rooms
It does these things on a 1 min cron, to pick up new channels as they are created on the slack side.

(Cadair) - https://github.com/SolarDrew/skill-picard

🔗opsdroid connector

Cadair also mentioned that picard uses the opsdroid connector for matrix, also written by himself and SolarDrew, and has had recent updates.

(Cadair) - https://github.com/opsdroid/connector-matrix

🔗matrix-python-sdk

Release v0.2.0 of the python sdk. Highlights from this release are a workaround for https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/3054 and use of connection pooling via a requests session.

(&Adam) - https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-python-sdk

🔗matrix-twitch-bridge

MTRNord is at the early stages of working on a twitch bridge for Matrix, written in golang.

(MTRNord) - https://github.com/Nordgedanken/matrix-twitch-bridge

🔗IdleRPG

remaeus wrote in to say "we (+rpg:verse.im) just launched an initial build of #idlerpg:verse.im (now also available at #idlerpg:matrix.org) — an automated RPG that rewards you for staying online (via the presence API). It's an initial test case for prototyping out a bot framework called "doorman" with multi-service support, but focused on Matrix as we are using it as a "backbone" for our p2p app framework."

(remaeus) - https://github.com/FabricLabs/doorman

🔗URI protocol scheme

kitsune started working on a design proposal for the Matrix URI scheme, with the ultimate goal to have the scheme passed through IANA so that we're no worse than IPFS and others. The document is here (alpha quality but comments are already welcome): https://docs.google.com/document/d/18A3ZRgGR-GLlPXF_VIHxywWiX1vpMvNfAU6JCnNMVuQ/edit

There is also a spec proposal room: #uri-scheme-proposal:matrix.org.

(kitsune)

🔗Riot/Web

  • The Great Relayering landed - almost all of Riot/Web's code is now gathered together in one sensible place (matrix-react-sdk). No more duplicate PRs or CSS & JS living in different repos!
  • Folks with open PRs against the riot-web repository will need to reopen them against matrix-react-sdk (or more likely, merge them into their existing equivalents on matrix-react-sdk)
  • Michael (t3chguy's) Replies work has almost landed and is looking fantastic!
  • Next up: improving test coverage slightly; fixing regressions in 0.14; and a few other minor bits and bobs before we land 0.15.

🔗Riot/Mobile

  • New releases on the horizon for both iOS & Android
  • Welcomed Benoit to the Android team, acting as lead android dev!
  • Finalising all new UX for configuring push notification permissions…
  • Final touches for Sticker viewing (including animated stickers!)
  • Fix embarrassing crash on iOS on certain shapes of Riot/Web URLs...
  • Supporting French Government Matrix activity

🔗Synapse

  • Operational firefighting continues: stopping malformed events from impacting federation; investigating thundering herds of presence EDUs; trying to keep Freenode joins from lagging;
  • Meanwhile, Erik has been working hard on the problem of Incremental State Resolution (the big algorithmic win which could massively improve HS performance, especially for Synapse); this is looking promising and has ended up taking the form of a formal mathematical proof that the proposed algorithm works: https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/v1/download/jki.re/hSmkLkFGVUnrXjtYcjsCUsyS (aka https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/3122) is where that's happening! Warning: contains maths.
  • ...and also wrote a Rust testjig for state resolution to help reason about it: https://github.com/erikjohnston/rust-matrix-state
  • Official Ansible playbook repository dev is progressing on the develop branch at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ansible thanks to massive work from Michael K. We'll blog properly about this when ready for use in earnest.
  • Dave has been doing an interesting experiment in syncing user profile data from HSes into ISes (useful for folks running a private federation with its own IS who want to use the IS as a global user directory); almost complete - we'll see how this goes.
  • GDPR work is in progress. We're seeing how far we can push the envelope on improving privacy, including a very interesting thought experiment on pseudonyimsing MXIDs to provide 'perfect' right-to-erasure. vdH is on the case. Warning: this may well require a major federation protocol bump if we go through with it.
  • More Python3 port PRs are landing from NotAFile - thanks! They're getting slightly lost behind everything above.

🔗Dendrite

  • Still stuck behind Synapse work.
  • Barring disasters we have at least 2 new folks starting fulltime in the core team (both synapse & dendrite) to help backend progress at the end of May however!
  • Lots of PRs coming in from APWhitehat though - thanks!!

🔗Spec

  • uhoreg has been looking at the .well-known URI proposal again
  • Spec work on the core team is currently stuck behind Riot/Web and Synapse work, sadly, on the basis that burning implementation problems are more visible and harming to the project than burning spec problems.

🔗Matrix in the News

Tom's Hardware provided a great article on about Matrix in the French Government.

Next INpact produced two articles, one from last week introducing a project from the French government to use an open messaging platform, then a follow up provided an extremely thorough story covering Riot & Matrix following the announcement of the French Government encrypted messaging project. (Article is in French, but will Google Translate nicely!)

Huge thank you to nouts who produced a great intro to Riot and Matrix! Check it out! (Note that is also in French.)

🔗New Rooms roundup

🔗And Finally...

Check out Matrix Live, now available at https://youtu.be/EstVaVUWkdw

Thanks for reading the very first This Week in Matrix! There will be another post next week, so if you'd like to be included join us in #twim:matrix.org. See you next week!