Andrew Morgan

Matrix Live 🎙

A classic "Matthew & Amandine" episode. This week: Spaces, Reputation, Low-Bandwidth, P2P & more!

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa gifted us with:

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.

MSC Status

Lots of new MSCs appearing this week!

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3219: Space Flair
• MSC3217: Soft kicks
• MSC3216: Synchronized access control for Spaces
• Draft: MSC3215: Aristotle - Moderation in all things
• MSC3214: Allow overriding m.room.power_levels using initial_state

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

The Spec Core Team is working towards finalising the remaining spec PRs and the new spec release process. Good news is there's only one final spec PR to go! Bad news is it's probably going to be one of the hardest :)

Otherwise the team was pleased to see that noticeable progress is being made on the MSC backlog. But that doesn't mean we get to rest on our laurels!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad said:

We have interns! In addition to Matrix.org's participation in Google Summer of Code, Element has funded two Outreachy interns to work on backend projects, and we're overjoyed to welcome the following folks to Matrix:

• Shay (Outreachy) is focused on modernizing Sydent and Sygnal, our reference implementations of a Matrix Identity Server and a Matrix Push Gateway respectively.
• Meenal (Outreachy) is helping us improve Complement, and modern replacement for SyTest, our homeserver integration test suite.
• Callum (GSoC) is working on adding support for restricting homeserver registration to users with pre-shared invite codes.

Welcome Callum, Meenal, and Shay!

We're also working to unify and standardize the module API which is used to extend Synapse, and your feedback would be very welcome. Similarly, if you have any experience with adding custom modules to Docker images or Debian packages and have thoughts on how we should best support that (or just examples of projects which do that well), please weigh in at #9944.

Lastly, we're looking forward to the release of Synapse 1.35 which will bring significant improvements to memory use during room joins, but that's for next week. 😉

A very warm welcome to all of our Outreachy interns and Google Summer of Code students this year! You can see the full list of GSoC students in our Google Summer of Code 2021 blogpost.

synapse-media-proxy

f0x announced:

I've been working on a smart media worker/proxy, to offload initial spikes in traffic for homeservers behind slower network uplinks.

There's a <remote> component that sits on a small vps, handling the upload and download endpoints (and soon, thumbnails), with an in-memory cache to quickly respond to requests. Media still gets forwarded to the <local> component where it gets stored in Synapse's media folder with an accompanying database entry, so all media is still stored long-term in the way Synapse expects it to be, so the proxy can be removed at any point.

Currently not production ready but you're welcome to snoop around the repo :)

https://git.pixie.town/f0x/synapse-media-proxy

Seems like quite a useful project! Other adventures in splitting out the media server from the homeserver include TravisR's matrix-media-repo project.

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust.

timokoesters reported the latest updates since last week:

• Feature: Implement /claim

• Feature: Handle incoming to-device events

• Feature: Implement /query

• Improvement: Faster signing key storage

• Improvement: Documentation for Appservices

• Fix: State resolution bugs

• Fix: Respond to unauthorized PDUs with FORBIDDEN

• Fix: Forward errors from remote servers (e.g. unsupported room version)

Timo also shared with us a milestone dashboard for Conduit being production-ready: https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/milestones/3. It's exciting to see the multi-implementation Matrix homeserver landscape really beginning to take shape!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace announced:

Another weekly Kubernetes Chart update, this time only for element-web though - which was updated to 1.7.29.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

libera.chat IRC network news

Half-Shot tells us:

Hey folks, some of you (well, frankly most of you) wanted to hear about our plans for libera.chat. I've been hard at work this week building a brand new bridge which is hosted on the libera.chat homeserver and it's nearly ready to go. We're just making a few final preparations before taking it out of beta, but it's currently available as a portaling bridge. You can currently reach any channel on libera.chat by joining #<channel_name>:libera.chat. You can also add the homeserver to your room directory in your Matrix client to search all the bridged rooms.

We're also hanging out in #libera-matrix:libera.chat, if you have any questions. Of course, the bridge is proving to be very popular so please be patient :)

Definitely one of the most sought-after Matrix bridges lately. Props to Half-Shot, Libera.Chat and everyone else for getting it all together in such short notice.

Heisenbridge Updates

hifi told us:

Plumbing IRC channels 🧑‍🔧

Somewhat experimental feature that has landed this week is the ability to use single puppeting in a public Matrix room to bridge IRC channels.

This support comes through a new PLUMB admin command for network rooms that will ask the bridge bot to join a public Matrix room and an IRC channel.

On IRC side there will be only a single user/bot that will relay messages from Matrix users. This is a stop-gap between fully puppeting Matrix users on IRC and doesn't need explicit permission from an IRC network to use by channel operators as long as bots are allowed.

On Matrix side puppets will join and leave based on their presence on the IRC channel. The bridge bot does not need any special permissions in a room as it doesn't do permission synchronization so it can be kept without any power levels.

Unplumbing a room is as simple as kicking the bridge out and it will take the puppets with it.

As this is a fairly new feature it does have some rough edges so feedback is greatly appreciated.

With all this said, if you're in the need to bridge any IRC channel on any network with little friction, Heisenbridge should have you covered!

SASL support 🔒

If you're using Heisenbridge to connect to Libera.Chat from a network block that has SASL enforcement enabled (like some VPS providers) you can now configure SASL credentials to authenticate at connection time to bypass this restriction.

This only implements SASL PLAIN for now. Certificate authentication may be looked at in the future.

But that's not all

• Identd will now always provide a unique ident for everyone

• Improved detection for stalled connections

• IRC user ghosting issues fixed for good 🤞

• Server TLS cert checking fixes, self-signed support

• Initial bridge DM invites should go through more reliably

• QUIT command to leave from all networks in one go

• Automatic Docker Hub images from master (amd64 and arm64)

In addition Heisenbridge is now featured on matrix.org 🥳

matrix-puppeteer-line Updates

matrix-puppeteer-line is a bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.

Fair offered:

This week brings a variety of assorted bugfixes & feature improvements in the testing branch. Included are:

• Support for m.sticker events for LINE stickers (with an option to use m.image if preferred)

• Clear resolution of LINE emojis, and a config option to scale them (since they're tiny by default)

• Less frequent re-downloading of already-seen LINE stickers/emoji (there are limits to this, but it's still an improvement)

• Option to disable syncing LINE stickers/emoji (in case re-hosting LINE imagery is a liability)

• More reliable message syncing (should never get "Decrypting message..." or invisible images/stickers/emoji anymore)

• Fix crashes during inbound message & read receipt syncing of multi-user rooms

Like last time, testing is much appreciated 😀

Remaining big tasks are:

• Rework message syncing so that receiving a message doesn't require "viewing" the LINE chat in the Puppeteer-controlled browser, which will make LINE send a read receipt even though you may not actually have read the message yourself (I mentioned this a while ago; it's still a todo)

• Support for multiple bridge users at once (A public instance of the bridge will only be considered once multi-user support is ready)

Discussion: #matrix-puppeteer-line:miscworks.net

Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-puppeteer-line/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

NeoChat Updates

NeoChat is a Matrix client written using KDE technologies, most notably the Kirigami UI framework.

Carl Schwan reported:

The past few weeks have been busy with fixing bugs. As a result, we plan to release NeoChat 1.2 next week. You can help by testing the Flatpak beta version of NeoChat: flatpak install https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/org.kde.neochat.flatpakref.

Aside from bug fixing, Tobias worked a bit on E2EE encryption in Quotient and Noah added a fancy typing indicator.

Nheko Updates

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

AppAraat told us:

• I added mnemonic shortcut keys to the context menu. Now you can react and reply even faster! (Thanks Nico for all the guidance :))

• Nheko is now available on the Chocolatey package manager for Windows, yay!

FluffyChat Updates

FluffyChat is the cutest cross-platform matrix client. It is available for Android, iOS, Web and Desktop.

krille announced:

FluffyChat 0.31.1 has been released with a lot of bug fixes, stability improvements, minor redesigns and a lot of refactoring under the hood.

Feature

• Cute animation for hiding the + button in inputbar

• Improved chat bubble design and splash animations

• Zoom page transition on Android

• SSO is now an option even if the server supports password login

Fixes

• "Pick an image" button in emote settings doesn't do anything

• Emoji picker

• Status bar and system navigation bar theme

• Open URIs and receive sharing intent on iOS

• SSO on iOS

• Workaround for iOS not clearing notifications

• Send read markers

Fractal Updates

Fractal is a Matrix client written in Rust, and one of the first to use the matrix-rust-sdk!

Alexandre Franke offered:

Since last week, a couple things landed in fractal-next. Julian added support for accepting/rejecting invites (!754/#759). Kévin did an internal restructuring of how we handle the SyncResponse in !759. The visible consequence for users is that room categories (also known as tags) are updated directly in Fractal when the user changes it from an other client. He also switched from comrak to ruma’s markdown in !756. It shouldn’t have any impact for users, but should mean less code in the end on our side and more consistent code as well.

Element Client Updates

Crafted by the Element teams.

Delight

• Spaces: We’ve been listening to, investigating, triaging and organising feedback from the beta so far. There’s a lot to get through, but thanks to everyone who has submitted feedback in-app in Element so far! The insight has been invaluable and is instrumental in shaping up our next milestones.
• Papercuts: We’re also organising and fixing small issues throughout Element, biasing for highly visible issues which have the greatest impact and reach, affectionately titled ‘papercuts’. Expect more info on these soon, but for now a fun one to highlight is we’re implementing blurhash on Web & Android (with iOS to follow soon after) to improve previewing and viewing images, especially when on low bandwidth.

Web

• 1.7.29 released
  • Improved startup performance by focusing decryption on recent rooms
  • Fixed reaction duplication
• Sorting out why we sometimes see "missing translations" hopefully for good this time
• Continuing to improve application performance
• Started work on Apple silicon desktop builds

iOS

• We continued to work on technical subjects:
  • Stabilisation and performance improvements
  • New logging system. It will be possible to disable all logs for MatrixSDK, MatrixKit and Element-iOS
  • The code that manages application navigation in Element-iOS has been updated. It will allow us to add a slide menu to display things like user spaces.

Android

• Element Android 1.1.8 has been released on the beta track of the Google PlayStore. It will probably be pushed to production at the beginning of next week. The Android matrix SDK2 has also been released.
• This week, we implemented the ability to change the network when looking in the room directory. Also gitter.im has been added to the default network list. See some screenshots in https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/pull/3419
• Lots of improvements regarding Spaces have also landed to develop.
• Besides that, we are still fixing issues and perform regular maintenance on the project

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

autodiscover-server-configuration

f0x said:

I forked autodiscover-client-configuration to implement the Server-Server counterpart of getting the API endpoint from a server_name.

Package published on NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@f0x52/autodiscover-server-configuration

Repository: https://git.pixie.town/f0x/autodiscover-server-configuration.git

Dept of Services 🚀

GoMatrixHosting is a SaaS Matrix hosting platform.

Michael reported:

We are finally open for business. Start your own Matrix service today with GoMatrixHosting!

https://www.gomatrixhosting.com/2021/05/23/gomatrixhosting-is-here/

And quite soon after:

GoMatrixHosting v0.4.7 has arrived!

• reinvented database purging section, separated final shrinking that causes downtime.
• fixed AWX issue causing rust-synapse-compress-state section to not execute.
• added more reliable script method of generating the total room list.

Check us out on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/GoMatrixHosting/

Or come say hello at: #general:gomatrixhosting.com

Cactus Comments 🌵

Cactus Comments is a federated comment system for the open web built on Matrix.

Asbjørn reported:

Web Client v0.10.0 is out!

• Allow commenting with Markdown.

• Pluralize time units properly.

• Enforce maximum nesting depth of 100 when sanitizing org.matrix.custom.html-formatted messages.

/ipns/latest.cactus.chat is updated to point to the latest release, so sites linking there should already be using the new version.

Come play with the demo: https://cactus.chat/demo

Join our Matrix room: #cactus:cactus.chat

Beeper Update

Beeper is a Matrix client and service that makes it easy to connect all your digital communications in one place.

Eric Migicovsky told us:

Been a while since our last update! The biggest development is that we've hired some fantastic members of the community including SpiritCroc from SchildiChat to work on Beeper Android and Kilian from Nio to work on Beeper iOS.

• Beeper Desktop reached 2.0.0 with much improved performance and UI. Video Walkthrough

• Released Beeper Android to Play Store

• Switched domains from Beeperhq.com to the shiny new beeper.com

Projects in the works

• Beeper iOS (SoonTM)

• Adding Infinite backfill to all bridges.

• Improvements to iMessage bridge (adding tapbacks and reply support)

We are hiring React, iOS, Android and SRE/Devops engineers. If you're interested, send me a DM! 100% remote, we'll hire you anywhere you are.

Eric's Matrix ID is @eric:beeper.com. Reach out if you're interested in getting involved!

Dept of Bots 🤖

Airlock, the space invite bot

Robin announced:

If you want to use spaces to run an invite-only community, but can't wait for knocking and restricted room membership to make their way into a stable room version, you may be interested in Airlock, a very simple bot that I wrote to automatically invite people to a space's rooms and subspaces when they join.

It requires zero configuration—just invite the bot to your space and all of the rooms and subspaces within it, make sure it has invite permissions, and you're good to go! You're welcome to use my hosted version @airlock:townsendandsmith.ml, or run it yourself.

It's great to see people building useful tools to bridge the gap as Spaces inches closer out of beta.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Host your blog on Matrix

evol told us:

About a month ago I came up with the idea that it would be interesting to use Matrix as an API for a blog. Sometime later it turned out that it's possible, and one thing led to another, and now I have a blog hosted on Matrix 😃

Long story short, the blog is a space and each post is a room within that space. This allows you to read the posts in your Matrix client of choice and also have discussions right underneath the content.

You can read more details on how it's done on the blog itself (incl. links to ugly code on my Github): https://evolved.systems/hosting-a-blog-on-matrix/. If you want to chat about this, join #blog:evolved.systems !

Longtime readers may remember Luke Barnard's take on the concept of Blogs built on Matrix back in 2019 with Journal. It's really exciting to see a modern version of this concept - and using Spaces no less!

Server_Stats Updates

Server_Stats is a project to make statistics about the Matrix network neatly catalogued and browsable.

MTRNord said:

Space List

The tool now has a separate list for rooms that are spaces at https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/spaces this allows you to find Spaces easily and fast :)

Other Updates

• A bug in the sdk combined with appservices did initially have for some rooms the ban not recognized. This is now fixed and those rooms are hidden again from the API. Sorry for the inconvenience.

• Safari should now also work after fixing a setting.

Check out the Sourse at: https://github.com/MTRNord/server_stats or join the room at #server_stats:nordgedanken.dev for questions :)

Circles

Circles markets itself as a private, end-to-end encrypted social network built on top of Matrix.

farribeiro announced:

Good news folks

The Circles beta is open source

https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios

It's AGPL for now

But automatically transitions to dual-license under AGPL / Apache 2.0 when 'Murica turns 250 years old. (July 4, 2026, for my international friends)

I love seeing Matrix projects dipping into the social networking sphere. It's an untapped market!

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	rollyourown.xyz	534
2	maunium.net	548.5
3	trolla.us	746
4	matrix.sp-codes.de	750
5	xethos.net	760
6	blackline.xyz	952.5
7	fab.network	1010
8	lo.hn	1096
9	dendrite.foxomy.com	1125
10	3icn.net	1220

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite01.fiksel.info	935
2	dendrite.foxomy.com	1154.5
3	dendrite.s3cr3t.me	3392

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Don't forget that Matrix Live is also available in podcast form. Search for "Matrix Live" wherever you get your podcasts.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Gitter Enters the Matrix

Half-Shot reported:

Gitter is joining the Matrix ecosystem!

It's true! Element has acquired Gitter from GitLab and will be implementing Gitter's current chat features in Matrix, before rebuilding Gitter as a Matrix client! Before all that however, the first step is to build a proper, modern bridge between the two networks, replacing the old one that's been around for years.

The full spectrum of news is:

• The Matrix.org blog post
• The Element blog post
• The Gitter blog post
• Techcrunch article
• ChangeLog Podcast episode w/ Matthew Hodgson from Matrix and Sytse "Sid" Sijbrandij from GitLab

And if you'd like to chat with your fellow Matrix and Gitter users, there's a bridged room already set up at #gitter:matrix.org!

Welcome to the community, Gitter! 🎉

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa reported:

Spec

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2788: Room version 6 as the default room version (merge)
• MSC2414: Make reason and score parameters optional for reporting content (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC2801: Make it explicit that event bodies are untrusted data

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, after dropping off MSC2414 in the FCP bucket, we're heading back for another big swing at widgets. MSC2774 (widget ID URL parameter), MSC2765 (widget avatars) and MSC2790 (modal widgets) are the focus for this week 🙂

Matrix URIs

kitsune told us:

being totally shook up about the Gitter announcement for a good part of the week, I completed the work on MSC2312 (it's about Matrix URIs, ICYMI) and it hopefully won't be long before it becomes the actual standard to share Matrix coordinates in popular web browsers. Ok, who am I kidding - before Matrix clients get on with adoption.

This will allow people to post links to Matrix rooms/messages/users and when clicked will open right in your favourite Matrix client. Super convenient and great for adoption!

Dept of P2P 👥

iOS P2P Demo

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go. It is currently serving as the basis for peer-to-peer Matrix experiments

Neil Alexander announced:

Build 38 of the iOS P2P Demo, as built using Element iOS and Dendrite, has been submitted to TestFlight and will hopefully be available for testers shortly (pending Apple approval)! It features lots of updates in the Dendrite backend which should hopefully make it more reliable.

If you have an iPhone or iPad and enjoy things that sometimes work, join the TestFlight here!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Neil reported:

This week we put out a new release candidate -1.21.0rc2

Highlights include

• Add experimental support for sharding event persister. (#8294, #8387, #8396, #8419)

• Add experimental prometheus metric to track numbers of "large" rooms for state resolutiom. (#8425)

• Add prometheus metrics to track federation delays. (#8430)

• Fix messages not being sent over federation until an event is sent into the same room. (#8230, #8247, #8258, #8272, #8322)

• Fix a regression in v1.21.0rc1 which broke thumbnails of remote media. #8438

Aside from that we are working on moving background processes away from the main process, actually getting the event persister sharding onto matrix.org and trying to improve Synapse stability generally.

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander said:

Dendrite is nearing beta! Today we will be cutting a candidate 0.1.0rc1 version after a week of hunting and fixing bugs. We are on track to release version 0.1.0 next week, at which point we will be inviting people to try installing and using Dendrite!

Changes this week include:

• Initial sync is fixed after a bug caused us to fall back on incremental sync

• The Content-Type HTTP header is now handled properly when MIME-formatted

• Internal API calls over HTTP in polylith mode now use their own HTTP client with higher timeouts

• Dendrite now tries harder to find missing auth events, using fetcher workers

• Dendrite no longer falls back on /state unnecessarily, which was the cause of a major memory leak and high CPU usage

• Federation HTTP calls now include the User-Agent header

• The event depth field is now ignored in the federation API

• We now report the password change capability properly (thanks bn4t!)

• Registration flows now include the completed field after a failure (thanks Lesterpig!)

• A bug in the previous event updater in the roomserver has been fixed

• A bug where we didn't check our own old verify keys when verifying event signatures is fixed

• A bug where we didn't handle event ID domains being different to the event origin in earlier room versions has been fixed

• TLS fingerprints have been removed

Spec compliance is unchanged:

• Client-Server APIs: 56%, same as last week

• Server-Server APIs: 77%, same as last week

Recently, we updated some of our documentation and created a whole new set of easy first issues and medium to hard issues for contributors.

If contributing to Dendrite sounds like something you would be interested in, please take a look at these issues and join us in #dendrite-dev:matrix.org! There's also #dendrite:matrix.org for general Dendrite chat and updates and #dendrite-alerts:matrix.org for release notifications and important alerts.

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo reported:

• Fix bug leading to many requests at the same time due to error in waiting code

• Implement /query/profile over federation

• Start work on /invite over federation

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

The Construct

Jason reported:

This week in Matrix Construct supports aarch64 (ARMv8) architectures. The experience has been phenomenal, with performance exceeding all expectations. Last week I wrote about all new vector code inside Construct using SSE through AVX-512 hardware acceleration in servers; that same code is now accelerated by SVE (Scalable Vector Extensions) on ARM architectures when you compile with clang.

This result is important: ARM virtual machines are offered at a significantly lower price compared to x86 from the same vendor. The systems are cheaper, require less power, but generally perform worse. The trick is to optimize the software for the weaker hardware. The benefit allows, for example, Matrix server hosts running Construct to make th eir profit margin from the lower TCO, getting more out of every computing cycle.

Construct is available at https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct and don't forget to idle and idle #construct:zemos.net.

Synapse Deployment 📥️

YunoHost

Pierre announced:

YunoHost is an operating system aiming for the simplest administration of a server, and therefore democratize self-hosting.

Synapse integration had been updated to 1.19.3 (1.20.1 available in branch testing)

Element Web integration had been updated to 1.7.7 (1.7.8 available in branch testing)

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-signal

Tulir said:

I made a Signal bridge using signald.

Currently it supports bridging messages, reactions and signal read receipts. End-to-bridge encryption also exists (mautrix-python does all the work there). The bridge can be linked as a secondary device and possibly even registered as the main device, but I didn't actually test registering yet. Setup instructions are currently somewhat non-existent, but it's mostly the same as my other bridges plus signald as a separate daemon.

The repo is https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-signal and the room is #signal:maunium.net

He then popped up again a few days later to say:

After the initial announcement earlier this week, I implemented a few of the missing features like media bridging, and even added setup instructions.

The speed at which Tulir writes bridges scares me sometimes.

mx-puppet-discord

mx-puppet-discord is a (double)puppeting and relay bridge for discord, based on mx-puppet-bridge

sorunome said:

mx-puppet-discord got updated to the newest discord.js version, meaning you have to update if you want to continue to operate it, due to discord having changed their gateway url!

mx-puppet-discord now also supports the intent stuff, so be sure to update by 7th oct

If you run mx-puppet-discord (like I do), make sure to update by October 7th or it will stop working!

Bridges do Hackertoberfest

Half-Shot reported:

Hey folks, I wanted to give another shoutout to say that we are still accepting PRs as part of hacktoberfest. Contributing 4 PRs will get you a T-Shirt (sadly not a Matrix one). Obviously, please ensure your PRs are meaningful (no copyright adjustments, typo fixes).

You can work on any issue, but we've highlighted some issues that would be perfect for newcomers over at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Ahacktoberfest and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-slack/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Ahacktoberfest

Cadair reported:

In the hope of expanding the number of people contributing to the matrix-appservice-slack repo I have spent a chunk of my morning improving the issue descriptions and labelling up issues. If you are interested in fixing a little annoyance with the slack bridge or just fancy writing some typescript see the good first issue label on the repo.

matrix-appservice-slack 1.6.0 rocks the block

Half-Shot reported:

The matrix.org team are delighted to bring you the latest in Slack bridging technology. Do not let the

minor version bump fool you, this release is packed with the good stuff. The headline feature is that our phase 1 encryption feature has landed and is free for users to experiment with. Head over to the

docs to see how to set this up.

There have been other notable changes, such as:

• New configuration options to allow or deny some channels from being bridged.

• Support removing reactions from Slack and Matrix messages.

• Add onboarding message for new users when puppeting is enabled, to encourage them to puppet.

• Improved feature documentation

(and many many bugfixes)

You can read the release information over at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-slack/releases

Looking forward to seeing all the new Hacktoberfest contributors! 🎃

Dept of Clients 📱

fluffychat

sorunome offered:

Fluffychat 0.19.1 has been released!

Features

• Implemented ignore list

• Jump to events in timeline: When tapping on a reply and when tapping a matrix.to link

• Display messages with up to 10 emotes or emoji bigger

• New design for the chat list and message bubbles

• Implement reactions

• Implement password change

• Implement deactivate user account

Fixes

• Timeline randomly resorting while more history is being fetched

• Automatically request history if the "load more" button is on the screen

Hydrogen

Bruno said:

More browser compatibility work this week, making Hydrogen run IE11 on Windows 7, and on Safari on macOS and iOS (still with some caveats). Also fixed several bugs:

• fix for unable to open session after a synapse bug manifested itself

• prevent the app locking up when you start the app with previously unsent messages

• fix sync errors being reported as "null" in the banner

• handle timeout during initial sync (important for large accounts) (although I have seen 1 report that this still isn't fixed, please report if you can't login with a large account)

SchildiChat for Android

SpiritCroc said:

SchildiChat's codebase has been updated to Element 1.0.8!

Furthermore, there have been a few design updates:

• Media items (pictures, videos, stickers) are no longer displayed in message bubbles

• Bigger stickers

• Avatars are now hidden in direct chats (when using dual-side message bubbles)

Finally, Schildi doesn't crash anymore if somebody sends an empty message.

SpiritCroc also mentioned some relevant links!

• website: https://spiritcroc.de/schildichat-android

• repo: https://github.com/SpiritCroc/SchildiChat-android

• room: #schildichat-android:matrix.org

Element-iOS

Manu announced:

1.0.14 is in on the release path. It has:

• Room: Differentiate wordings for DMs

• Room: New room details screen

• Add Estonian support

• Polishment in several areas and many bug fixes

Full changelog:

https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/releases/tag/v1.0.14 https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/releases/tag/v1.0.13

Element Web

Neil announced:

This week released v1.7.8

Highlights include

• Secure Backup has been moved out of the registration flow to a toast when you first encounter an E2EE room, which simplifies the new user experience

• Added options to hide various UI features when hosting a custom Element

Aside from that we continue to improve on widget support for resizable widgets, modal widgets and generally making widgets better.

We are also continuing to work on instrumenting the app, improving mobile support for matrix.to and making jitsi calling more reliable.

Element Android

benoit told us:

Element Android: Version 1.0.8 is now available on the stores, it fixes issues with verification and PIN code among other issues (see https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/releases/tag/v1.0.8 for more details). Now we are working on improving performance when sending messages to rooms, and also improving global UX, especially of the home (rooms list). Search messages (in clear rooms for the moment) is coming soon, and it will be also possible to filter the room members list.

We will also spend some time on the new Android SDK, https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-android-sdk2, which is for the moment a quick extract of what we have in Element Android. We have to take care of it as a real product now: document it properly, set up CI, export Javadoc, develop a sample app, etc.

Element for Nextcloud

Gary Kim reported:

Element for Nextcloud v0.6.11 has been released this week. The new version comes with various bug fixes, dependency upgrades, and an upgrade to Element Web v1.7.8. The version is also compatible with Nextcloud 20 which is being released soon.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma

iinuwa told us:

Over the past couple of weeks, we've received PRs for all of the remaining federation endpoints, and all but one have already been merged!

Now that the end is in sight, we're turning our focus elsewhere. We're working on cleaning up and fixing a few bugs in our event signing code and soon will create tracking issues for filling out the Identity Service API.

Dept of Services 🚀

t2bot.io

TravisR reported:

t2bot.io has crossed 1M monthly active users

All of these users are Telegram/Discord users that have been brought into Matrix over the last 30 days. This doesn't appear to be a temporary spike either: over the last 8 weeks t2bot.io has been hovering at 900-950 thousand monthly active users, up from 600-700 thousand. Record-setting traffic levels have also been achieved, with matrix.org being able to keep up for the first time in a long while.

Overall it's a good sign to see so many communities making the jump to Matrix and sticking around ❤️

Dept of Bots 🤖

zabbix-matrix

progserega told us:

I added zabbix-bot to my zabbix-matrix repo, which can get information about current problems from zabbix-server and send it to matrix user. https://github.com/progserega/matrix_zabbix

In our company we use it for get current situation and https://github.com/progserega/im_sender_service for sending events from zabbix.

I've found that having your systems reporting in a room while you chat around it can be really productive. Props to supporting yet another monitoring platform!

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Jitsi E2EE Calls using Olm

While 1-1 calls benefit from end-to-end encryption due to WebRTC, Jitsi group calls have always only benefitted from transport encryption.

A while ago Jitsi announced that they were adding E2EE to Jitsi. But did you know that it's using Matrix's Olm encryption under the hood? It's currently available as an experimental feature on https://meet.jit.si!

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	fairydust.space	368
2	blob.cat	543
3	nuclearlimes.co.uk	580
4	nuclearlemons.uk	889
5	conduit.rs	912.5
6	mailstation.de	1075
7	matrix.org	1092
8	test.zemos.net	1123
9	shortestpath.dev	1251.5
10	chatcloud.net	1338.5

We also now have a room where the ping bots are only hosted on non-Synapse servers! See the scoreboard below.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	conduit.rs	104
2	settgast.org	154
3	construct.grin.hu	182
4	blob.cat	209
5	grin.hu	324.5
6	dendrite.neilalexander.dev	367
7	test.zemos.net	379
8	maunium.net	448.5
9	conduit.nordgedanken.dev	476
10	inferiorlattice.com	592

Final Thoughts 💭

XKCD 2365

Alexandre Franke told us:

XKCD made another strip about messaging systems and I’m outraged to see that Matrix has been left out of it.

Not to worry though, we've fixed it up!

TWIM authorship

I hope you enjoyed this week and last's TWIM editions! Benpa will return next week for more of your regularly scheduled programming. Ciao!

That's all I know 🏁

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

Hello all, and welcome to this week's addition of This Week in Matrix! Matrix is an open network protocol for secure, decentralized communication on the web.

My name is Andrew (aka anoa), and I'm a Synapse developer at Element. Thanks to Ben for letting me take over the reins of TWIM for this week! I'll actually be doing the same for next week as well, so please adjust your clocks to Anoa Nonstandard Time accordingly.

With that out of the way, let's jump right in!

Matrix Live 🎙

It's demos week again. This time around we've got the following lineup:

• Michael shows off all the new widget goodies coming to Element Web!
• Bruno shows off Hydrogen's new encrypted session backup support!
• Ismail details the new room creation flow on Element iOS!
• Jorik presents his work on revamping the UX of https://matrix.to that he completed for his second summer internship at Element!
• Hubert fixes another class of failure-to-decrypt messages edge case with Device Dehydration!
• Half-Shot closes off with the tale of Encrypted Bridges!

Don't forget that Matrix Live is also available in podcast form, if you're into that sort of thing. Search for "Matrix Live" wherever you get your podcasts.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa (hey that's me!) told us:

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• MSC1960: OpenID information exchange with widgets

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC2790: Modal widgets (acquiring user input from a widget)
• MSC2788: Room version 6 as the default room version
• MSC2787: Portable Identities
• MSC2785: Event notification attributes and actions
• [WIP] MSC2783: Homeserver Migration Data Format
• MSC2782: Pushers with the full event content
• MSC2781: Deprecate the (reply) fallbacks in the Matrix specification

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been rather busy with implementation, so we'll be continuing on with the same focus as last week. As a reminder, that's MSC2414 (making reason and score optional on reports).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go.

Neil Alexander announced:

This week has mostly been spent trying to improve stability and to fix bugs ahead of the beta release, which is so far still planned to go ahead in the next two weeks.

Changes this week include:

• Room version 6 is now the default for newly created rooms

• Soft-fail of events that aren't allowed by the current room state is now implemented

• Support for configuring old_verify_keys has been added to the Dendrite config

• Correct formatting for signing key IDs is now enforced in the configuration

• Initial support for peeking over federation (MSC2444) is in progress and it "even works!" (thanks Matthew!)

• Federated joins will now continue being processed even if the client gives up on the join due to a HTTP timeout

• Backoff code has been refactored a bit more, and now correctly affects device list syncing

• /make_join now errors correctly if a federated user tries to join a room which all members have left

• A bug where a single user could start multiple simultaneous federated joins to the same room has been fixed

• Some initial (but unfinished) support for the /key/v2/query notary endpoint has been added

• Signature verification has been updated to not fail if the event origin field is missing (although it still requires a signature from the domain of the sender field)

• A number of places where we use SQL transactions have been updated with safe wrappers (thanks samcday!)

• A couple of error codes on invite endpoints for room version 6 JSON violations have been fixed

Spec compliance has improved slightly for federation:

• Client-Server APIs: 56%, same as last week

• Server-Server APIs: 77%, up from 74% last week

As always, if contributing to Dendrite sounds like something you would be interested in, please feel free to join us in #dendrite-dev:matrix.org ! There's also #dendrite:matrix.org

Synapse

Neil offered:

This week we released 1.20.0 (and 1.20.1) highlights include shadow banning support and including unread message counts in the sync response. This will help client developers and is a precursor to improving notification support.

We’ve also been looking at adding monitoring to get a better sense of which rooms are most expensive from a state resolution perspective, we also want a better way to track federation lag.

Up next we’ll move all background tasks away from the main process and try it out on matrix.org, we are hoping for a 10-15% saving in CPU. Event persistence sharding, specifically the new stream token format is on hold slightly while we work on a nasty race condition on start up of the event persister. We hope to get back to the main sharding project next week.

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo announced:

• Respect SRV record when sending requests over federation
• Don't send new requests to servers if we are already waiting
• Implement get_missing_events
• Bug fixes and code cleanup

We also started work on a system that retries failed or blocked requests after some time.

Thanks to everyone who supports me on "Liberapay" (https://liberapay.com/timokoesters) or Bitcoin!

The Construct

Jason reported:

This week in Matrix concludes a summer of Construct where several transformative rounds of optimization took place. I'd like to talk about these achievements and why they are important for future directions.

Over the summer, Construct introduced new vector extensions to the project. As server software, our primary target is the datacenter which (for now) is dominated by x86 hardware. The latest features of x86 chips include AVX-2, AVX-512, and on-die GPU. These advancements are important because they help mitigate current limitations of hardware, such as the cubic relationship between a processor's frequency and its power consumption. These limitations mean that CPU cores aren't completing more cycles-per-second every iteration of their development -- they're not getting much faster.

The problem with threads is that they can introduce a lot of complications to a project. Construct is able to forego multi-threading as a network server because it is primarily IO-bound. The benefits to a single-thread design in both performance and simplicity cannot be overstated. This is why Construct stands to benefit the most from features which allow more work to be accomplished at every individual computing cycle.

Construct undertook several endeavors over the summer which directly leverage platforms featuring SSE, AVX, AVX-512, etc. As an added bonus, our approach is designed to effortlessly port to ARM's Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) as it becomes available (inside datacenters too!). Our focus has been JSON, Unicode, and finally Base64. Detailed explanations for each of these will need to be discussed in their own posts, but in summary:

• Matrix specifies a canonical form of JSON which is not necessarily the same as the JSON the server receives. Therefor it is imperative that Construct is liberal with what JSON it accepts and correct with its transformation into canonical JSON. Over the summer, a portion of Construct's canonical transform received some optimization to go beyond the default method of character-by-character read-modify-write. As seen in [1], a streaming hardware-accelerated transform now processes at least 16 characters at a time (with more possible) without forward branching except for the parts where transformation needs to occur. One of these transformations is UTF-16 to UTF-8 surrogate conversion, which leads into the second endeavor.

• Construct introduced a completely branch-free Unicode toolset in [2]. Among the functions offered is a custom transform of UTF-16 surrogate pairs to UTF-8 sequences. Using the new vector registers, Construct can transform two UTF-16 surrogates in parallel to output two UTF-8 sequences, or two UTF-16 surrogates in a pair to output one UTF-8 sequence. Unfortunately, these specific functions were written at fixed vector widths, so more work needs to be done to really take advantage of the widest hardware. Each surrogate is 6 bytes, and a surrogate pair is 12 bytes; therefor we cannot make use of the last 4 bytes of a 16 byte vector. However, with a little more work this approach can be extended to a 64 byte vector, capable of decoding 5 surrogate pairs and 10 individual surrogates in parallel!

• Professor Daniel Lemire recently published a paper about fast Base64 from hardware acceleration in [3]. This approach is extremely elegant on the 64-byte-wide AVX-512 system. Prior to Construct's implementation of this in [4], the Boost library base64 encoding and decoding took roughly 20 and 25 cycles per character respectively. Our implementation on the same system, an old system with only SSE2 (not even AVX-512!) yields 5 and 6 cycles per character!

All of this helps lay a foundation for Construct to introduce Federated Media Rooms sometime in the future. Currently, Construct stores media in a separate database. Recently there's been work on a separate branch at [5] which stores actual file block inside events using Base64. It is for this reason sub-cycle and branchless JSON parsing and Base64 encoding is essential for maximum performance. The result is worthwhile, as the latency for querying the media database is slower than parsing and decoding the event content already in-hand.

That's all for today. Construct is available at https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct and don't forget to idle and perform #construct:zemos.net / #construct:maunium.net

Thanks!

1. https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct/blob/563f833ab325f27ff9e71af61af427fb02812f90/ircd/json.cc#L3483

2. https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct/blob/563f833ab325f27ff9e71af61af427fb02812f90/ircd/utf.cc

3. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.05109

4. https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct/blob/563f833ab325f27ff9e71af61af427fb02812f90/ircd/b64.cc

5. https://github.com/jevolk/charybdis/tree/federated_media_rooms

It's really exciting to see Homeserver development ramping up from all angles, and nice that the protocol warts are slowly getting ironed out in the process.

Synapse Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace told us:

Before I forget (more) about it, I pushed the 1.20.0 tag for my K8s-optimized container image as well as my Helm chart.

YunoHost

Pierre reported:

YunoHost is an operating system aiming for the simplest administration of a server, and therefore democratize self-hosting.

Synapse integration had been updated to 1.19.3 (1.20.0 available in branch testing)

Element Web integration had been updated to 1.7.5 (1.7.7 available in branch testing)

dacruz21/matrix-chart

Typo Kign announced:

Thanks to Arkaniad, v2.7.0 of my Matrix Helm chart for Kubernetes is released with support for exporting Prometheus metrics. It pairs well with the Synapse Grafana dashboard.

More Kubernetes

Ananace said:

And just pushed the 1.20.1 tag too for my K8s-optimized container image as well as my Helm chart.

Third-Party PowerPC and ARM64 support for Synapse

andreas announced:

The synapse docker image from AVENTER (https://www.aventer.biz), does support PowerPC (ppc64le) and ARM64 architecture now. But at the moment only under the docker tag "ppc". https://hub.docker.com/r/avhost/docker-matrix/tags?page=1&name=ppc We will be happy to get feedback.

As a Synapse developer, it's great to see the community making personal and enterprise Matrix deployments more accessible!

Dept of Clients 📱

FluffyChat

sorunome told us:

Fluffychat 0.19.1 has been released!

Features

• Implemented ignore list

• Jump to events in timeline: When tapping on a reply and when tapping a matrix.to link

• Display messages with up to 10 emotes or emoji bigger

• New design for the chat list and message bubbles

• Implement reactions

• Implement password change

• Implement deactivate user account

Fixes

• Timeline randomly resorting while more history is being fetched

• Automatically request history if the "load more" button is on the screen

Sorunome briefly mentioned afterwards that there is no 0.19.0 due to some accidental messed up tagging, and that it was easiest to just call the new version 0.19.1.

Element Web

Neil offered:

This week we put out a new release candidate 1.7.8-rc.1 highlights include:-

• Secure Backup has been moved out of the registration flow to a toast when you first encounter an E2EE room, which simplifies the new user experience

• Added options to hide various UI features when hosting a custom Element ...along with various smaller fixes.

Aside from that the work to improve the widget experience continues with modal widget next on the agenda.

Next week we will continue to improve widgets and add some more instrumentation into the app.

Hydrogen

Bruno said:

Released 0.1.0 (and 0.1.1) this week with read-only session backup enabled 🎉 Also doing more work to make Hydrogen work on IE11 on Windows 7 (it does already for Windows 10), Safari and other browsers where you get TransactionInactiveError during login, hope to release that soon.

I need to give Hydrogren a shot myself, the quick speeds and low RAM usage are really attractive.

Element-iOS

Manu offered:

This week, room settings have been updated with a new intermediate screen. The codebase saw the introduction of an AppCoordinator (in swift) which will help us to have a better control on navigation within the app AND to use swift from end to end.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Polyjuice Client 🧙

uhoreg told us:

Polyjuice Client v0.3.0 has been released. This release includes many breaking changes. ("Breaking" in the sense of API changes, rather than the sync process suddenly failing to work, which was already featured in a previous release.) This release also includes many changes, such as the client managing more bookkeeping, detecting if it got logged out, and supporting more Matrix features. See the release notes for more information.

Igor

uhoreg reported:

Igor is a bot framework for Elixir. Igor v0.2.0 has been released. The main change is updating it to use Polyjuice Client 0.3.0.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix-Architect

erdnaxeli announced:

Hi!

I present you a new project I've been working on for some time. It's a bot that allows you to use the admin API through matrix, by typing commands to the bot. The inspiration comes from the OperServ-like bots that allow IRC operators to administrate an IRC server.

The bot exposes some of the available admin APIs and aims to provide some more high level commands by combining different APIs. There is currently one "high level command", !room garbage-collect, which allow you to purge from your HS all rooms without local users.

The project is written in crystal and is my first project in this language. It should be stable in normal conditions, but don't hesitate to fill issues. A Docker image is provided for more convenience.

I hope you will find this project useful 🙂

https://github.com/erdnaxeli/matrix-architect

People administering their Synapse deployment through Matrix itself! How deep does the rabbit hole go?

Songwhip bot

Tulir reported:

benpa wanted a bot that replies with a songwhip.com link whenever someone sends a music link (youtube, spotify, apple music, etc), so I wrote a small maubot plugin to do that: https://github.com/maubot/songwhip

It's available at @songwhip:maunium.net

I'm also desperately in need of this for the 10 open.spotify.com links that get thrown at me every week. Thanks Tulir!

Cyberbot

jj reported:

There's a new bot! Cyberbot.

It supports E2EE and can be easily extended with Python plugins. Can be used e.g. for GitLab notifications, automated user invites, room creation, and of course can be programmed to react to any message posted in a room.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

matrix-gotify

sorunome said:

Soru made a new thing, matrix-gotify. It is a gotify plugin to receive matrix notifications. This means, you can now receive matrix push notifications on your android phone self-hosted without the need of google services! That is why putting the full event in the push notification is actually not a privacy leak in this case.

This plugin could also be used to receive push notifications on any other kind of device that gotify supports.

Please note that this is independent of any matrix client - you don't even need to run one to be able to use this!

I asked whether an OpenPush-like solution be built on top of this , and Sorunome responded that someone had already started working on just that! https://github.com/gotify/android/pull/115

This would allow other matrix clients on your phone to get their push notifications through your gotify client, instead of needing to run a process each. Great for battery life without proprietary Google blobs!

Homeservers on-the-go

js got Synapse running in a car on a German highway:

the setup is a cigarette lighter to 2x 230V converter, one being used to power the RockPro64, the other being used to power my notebook. My notebook is connected to the hotspot from my phone, while also being connected to a USB ethernet, the other end of which is plugged into the RockPro64.

The notebook then acts as a gateway, as well as SSHing to a tiny VPS with -R, to get a public port, and forwarding that traffic to the RockPro64.

Maybe one day we'll all have an embedded Synapse homeserver in our cars. P2P E2EE car comms anyone?

Matrix VoIP Tester

reivilibre announced:

https://github.com/matrix-org/voip-tester

I have been through the perils of setting up a TURN server and having VoIP continue to fail, whilst spending hours scratching my head and staring at Wireshark without getting anywhere. When I was given free reign over project choice last year during my internship, I chose to start a tool that tests your homeserver's VoIP configuration, hoping it would be useful to both me and the community at large.

It saw some progress but I never managed to iron out some of the 'last few things' or put a pretty front on it — until about 2 weeks ago, when I got some more time to do it.

There are known issues — such as the scores being very arbitrary, wrong and misleading; it crashes Chromium every time (on my machine) and it completely misbehaves in Brave Browser (on my machine). It may also not be the prettiest (but hopefully it is at least somewhat inoffensive). I hope to work on these annoying issues soon.

I have deployed a test instance at https://test.voip.librepush.net — it can be tried in a WebRTC-supporting browser (probably Firefox if you want half a chance). Please don't take it to heart if you get a Fail or Poor score — it's probably not your fault. :)

Oliver was interning with us at Element this Summer. Fixing up and releasing this VoIP tester was part of it, but he's still working on it in his spare time even though his internship has finished :)

Through this I found out that I forgot to turn on my turnserver on my homeserver again. Thanks Oliver!

Dept of Guides 🧭

German-Language Guide for Getting Start with Matrix

Samuel told us:

I started an article series about Matrix on my german blog. The goal is to make it easier for new users to get started with Matrix. https://blog.sp-codes.de/werde-teil-der-matrix-matrix-teil-1/

Guides like these are the essential entrypoints to a project for a lot of users. The more, in different languages, the merrier!

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	thomcat.rocks	896
2	matrix.vgorcum.com	965
3	conduit.rs	1226.5
4	neko.dev	1232
5	kif.rocks	1396
6	chatserver.ca	1533.5
7	jauriarts.org	1949.5
8	settgast.org	2328
9	vkane.cz	2419
10	conduit.nordgedanken.dev	2519

Ping Graphs by Timo™️

timo told us:

Here we look at how fast ping bots respond.

I changed the formatting of the plot a bit to make it more readable. Note that it is now using a log scale which allows us to see more data at the same time.

Non-Synapse Ping Room

Tulir reported:

Now that we have multiple somewhat federating Matrix homeserver implementations, I decided to make a ping room where all the echo bots are hosted on second-gen homeservers: #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net. Synapse users are still allowed to join and !ping, but all the pongs will come from non-Synapse servers.

Based on observations in that room so far, the new server implementations don't like eachother very much.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	conduit.rs	110
2	pc.koesters.xyz:59003	162
3	cd.mau.dev	162.5
4	maunium.net	181
5	c.mau.dev	238
6	dendrite.neilalexander.dev	370
7	conduit.nordgedanken.dev	427
8	inferiorlattice.com	592
9	matrix.org	1294
10	grin.hu	3560.5

Final Thoughts 💭

• Magnus Svensson was left speechless by the amazing projects that we got to see this week.

That's all I know 🏁

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

On April 14th, the Spec Core Team conducted a long-overdue retrospective about the things that were working in the Matrix Spec Proposal process, and those that were not.

The most glaring item on the list was the sluggish pace that many Matrix Spec Changes (MSCs) take throughout the proposal process, as well as the general lack of activity from the Spec Core Team members on proposals that have not yet started a Final Comment Period.

We deeply apologize for the frustration this has likely caused many MSC authors, and want to shed some light on the reasoning behind it, and what we plan to do to prevent leaving authors in the dark about why there may be no Spec Core Team activity on their proposal.

Proposal Triaging

There are currently 136 open MSCs that have yet to undergo Final Comment Period (FCP), 75 of which are marked as proposal-in-review, and 20 that have a FCP proposed. Relative to the 65 MSCs that have ever been closed, this is a lot of outstanding ideas, features and maintenance changes.

The Spec Core Team itself is made up of 8 members, each of which have separate full-time jobs. All team members are well-placed to be on the team given their wide breadth of knowledge across the Matrix ecosystem, however the majority are some of the most busy pushing forward Matrix's reference implementations - without which, Matrix will unquestionably fail. This limits the amount of MSCs that the team can effectively work on at a given time.

The team understands that there are MSCs that provide incredibly useful features, such as support for LaTeX in messages or the ability to "knock" on rooms, and would undoubtedly like to see them land at some point.

But there is also a large backlog of MSCs that provide even more fundamental fixes and additions to the protocol that the team needs to prioritise. These include things like cross-signing devices, the communities rewrite and finally merging reactions and edits into the spec.

While we announce what MSCs we're focusing on during a given week during TWIM, it's not as clear which items we're looking to pull from the backlog next. To help tackle this, and to help keep us honest, we've begun putting each MSC into either "feature", "maintenance", or "core" buckets. This materialises in the form of github tags, which can be used to filter the list of MSCs like so: feature, maintenance, core. For a given timespan, we’ll pick a track and pull MSCs out of that category when possible. More information about MSC categories are now detailed on the proposals page.

As for the next 6 to 12 months, we plan to work on items from the “core” category. We need to get Matrix to a point where it can compete with other, proprietary chat protocols and items in "core" are decidedly the proposals that will take us the furthest in that direction. This doesn't mean we won't occasionally look at an MSC in a different category, but it will heavily influence our prioritisation.

Future

We'll try this approach out over the next few months and see how it goes. The next Spec Core Team retro will occur in the middle of May, where we will review the process once again.

For now, if you have any feedback please come and chat with us in #matrix-spec:matrix.org :)

It’s that time of year again! Matrix.org is once again participating in the Google Summer of Code program. We have been allocated four student slots by Google this year, and narrowing the 18 proposals we received down to just four was a very difficult task.

In the end, we have decided on the following four students and their proposed projects:

Alexey Andreyev’s proposal involves adding end-to-end encryption to libQMatrixClient for future support in Qt/libQMatrixClient-based clients such as Quaternion and Spectral. They will be mentored by kitsune, lead developer of libQMatrixClient, and our own end-to-end encryption expert, uhoreg.

Kai Hiller’s proposal for more reliable third-party protocol bridges includes adding the ability to notify the user when a message fails to reach its final destination despite being accepted by the bridge. Half-Shot.

Eisha Chen-yen-su’s proposal for Matrix Visualisations aims to “develop a tool which will visualise the event Directed Acyclic Graph data structure which describes the conversation history in a room. It will be a real-time visualisation of the DAG of a given Matrix room, as seen from the perspective of one or more HomeServers (HSes).” They state that “this tool will be useful for debugging or administration of Matrix HSes by making people able to easily see how the federation process works”. They have already posted prototypes of their tool in #gsoc:matrix.org, and it’s all written in Rust! Which makes their mentor, erikj, very happy.

And finally, Cnly’s proposal for working towards completion of Dendrite’s Client-Server API. The proposal also touches on general improvements to the codebase and increasing test coverage. Cnly will be mentored by babolivier and anoa.

Congratulations to the selected students. We look forward to participating with you on completing your project over the course of the summer holidays.

If your proposal was not selected, do not give up hope! Being an active member of the Matrix community and having a deep understanding of the ecosystem and its projects is a big part of what we look for when choosing candidates. If you stick around, you have a strong chance of being chosen in a subsequent year.

We will not be sharing individual’s proposal documents, but students are free to share them as they please.