Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR reports

Hey all, it's been a holiday for much of the team this week, so from the plane of Maple trees I present to you the 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

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3604: Room Version 10

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3816: Clarify Thread Participation (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC3828: Content Repository CORP Headers
• MSC3827: Filtering of /publicRooms by room type

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been working on getting Matrix 1.3 out the door and generally working towards a better process for handling releases alongside critical proposals for the protocol. The goal is to be able to ship these major features while reducing the risk of a release falling behind. Watch this space for more details as this should result in MSCs getting through the process a little bit quicker.

For Matrix 1.3, we're targeting Thursday, June 16th, 2022 as our release date, though this comes with a small asterisk: we're looking to land quite a lot of stuff so might have to adjust the date once more as needed. We do feel reasonably confident in the date though - watch for blog posts titled Matrix 1.3 in the coming weeks.

Random MSC of the week

The script has chosen MSC2846 - Decentralizing media through CIDs as your random MSC this week. The MSC raises an interesting question about how to make media more akin to events in Matrix. If you're interested in this area, take a read of it and the related MSCs.

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

Encrypted Search for Matrix

burgers says

Hey there, I'm Aditya Rajput (aka BURG3R5), a sophomore at IIT Roorkee, India. This summer I'll be working on implementing encrypted Search in Matrix rooms. More details about this project can be found here. Once a week, I'll be blogging about my progress (plus some neat stuff I find during research) in this blog. Technical discussion and more frequent updates can be found in the public room #encrypted-search:matrix.org.

While writing my GSoC proposal, I'd already made some progress w.r.t. the actual code required for this project, and my preliminary implementation can be found here.

Looking forward to working in this ecosystem with you all!

Kazv Project

nannanko announces

Hello everyone, my name is nannanko. From today, I will officially participate in GSoC to contribute code to the Kazv Project. I hope I can get along well with you all.

3rd Party Authorised Room Membership

kuries says

Hey there! I'm Binesh Munukurthi, a Computer Science student from India. I'll be working on the 3rd Party Authorised Room Membership project for this year's GSoC.

This project aims to develop an application that has the ability to delegate membership of a room based on a user’s interaction with other third party services. For more details on what I'll be implementing, please refer to the link

I'll be posting my weekly updates here If you are interested in knowing more about the project's progress, feel free to join the public room #matrix-cerberus:cadair.com.

I look forward to spending a wonderful summer with you all! Thanks!

NeoChat

flyingcakes announces

Hi! I'm Snehit Sah. I will be contributing to KDE's Matrix client, NeoChat, during GSoC. I will add Spaces support to the application. My progress can be followed at my blog. Hoping for a fun stay!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Shay says

This week was a short one, but work continues on fast room joins, testing Synapse with workers on Complement, and increasing the efficiency of Synapse with regard to database i/o. In addition, we released v1.60.0 (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases), which includes

• work to reduce the possibility of database corruption
• a fix to a bug introduced in Synapse 1.60.0rc1 that would break some imports from synapse.module_api

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

Till reports

This week we released Dendrite 0.8.7! This is a highly recommended update since it fixes some fairly large bugs:

• Support added for room version 10
• A number of state handling bugs have been fixed, which previously resulted in missing state events, unexpected state deletions, reverted memberships and unexpectedly rejected/soft-failed events in some specific cases
• Fixed destination queue performance issues as a result of missing indexes, which speeds up outbound federation considerably
• A bug which could cause the /register endpoint to return HTTP 500 has been fixed

As always, please feel free to join us in the #dendrite:matrix.org room for more discussion!

Dept of Clients 📱

Quadrix

JFA announces

Quadrix is a single-codebase, multi-platform project, using the meanwhile deprecated ReactXP framework (Microsoft's answer to Flutter), which compiles to iOS, Android, and web/Electron. The Quadrix apps are available in the main app stores for mobiles and desktops (including Snapcraft and Flathub). Repo is at https://github.com/alariej/quadrix. Would be great to have a few people test the apps and leave feedback in the repo or in the (still empty) #quadrix:matrix.org room!

Important: Quadrix doesn't support E2EE yet, but it's on the TODO.

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Ștefan says

• Our prototypes for a new app layout are going well. Just a few people have early access in order to give us feedback to ensure we’re building a new layout that works for everyone. Watch this space!
• We’ve been working on improving our onboarding flow so that users signing up for Matrix and Element find it much easier. This work is making great progress.
• Live location sharing is also making great progress and is quickly approaching the beta phase
• On the ElementX front we’ve been busy adopting async/await, introducing state machines, a new design kit component and hooking up crash reporting and sentry.io

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

Manu reports

• We are a bit late on the release candidate. We want to fix a performance regression when switching spaces. It will be available early next week.
• We have merged the UnifiedPush PR from P1gP1g. We are doing some adjustments but users will be able to choose their push distributor soon.
• The prototypes that are with a small group of early access tester are going down a storm - we’re getting lots of great feedback that will help to build a new app layout that works for all.
• Our improvements to the first time user experience are nearly ready for testing and shipping! We’re hoping to make our onboarding experience a lot simpler for folks that are creating an account.

Cinny (website)

Cinny is a Matrix client focused on simplicity, elegance and security

Lozenge reports

Cinny v2.0.4

What's changed

• Fix emoji autocomplete in some cases
• Hide verify button if Cross-Signing is not enabled
• Add support for building docker image for linux/arm64
• Fix drag-n-drop not working in desktop app
• Add dev-tools to production builds of desktop app
• Fix copy-paste not working on macOS in desktop app
• Flatpak package for the desktop app

Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in/ · Join our channel at: #cinny:matrix.org · Github: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny · Twitter: https://twitter.com/@cinnyapp

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

The last two weeks have been focused mainly on nuts-and bolts improvements to user experience, rather than any big new pieces of functionality. We've:

1. Added upload previews for PDFs and audiovisual media, so you can confirm you're uploading the right thing before creating a discussion.
2. Added a method to precompute PCM data for more accurate waveforms in audiovisual-media-based discussions.
3. Allowed for join rules and annotation visibility to be modified separately in settings
4. Added support for URLs linking directly to particular events

As always, if you're interested in social annotation on matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org!

Dept of VoIP 🤙

Element Call (website)

Native Decentralised End-to-end Encrypted Group Calls in Matrix, as a standalone web app

Matthew reports

We've had breakthroughs this week on implementing a native Matrix SFU (selective forwarding unit) which speaks MSC3401, thanks to Sean DuBois - all round WebRTC superstar, project lead for the Pion WebRTC implementation for Go, and author of WebRTC for the curious.

Sean generously contributed an initial proof of concept to show how you'd build an MSC3401 SFU using Pion at https://github.com/matrix-org/sfu-to-sfu - which (I think?) is the first time that the first implementation of a major core MSC has been contributed from outside the core team. Huge thanks to Sean to setting the ball going on this - the current PoC demonstrates not just SFU capability but also the decentralised cascading architecture which makes MSC3401 unique. The initial PoC speaks a 'test jig' version of MSC3401 hooked up to a simple web client for experimentation, but Matthew's now experimenting with adding genuine Matrix support to it via mautrix-go, and hooking up Element Call to speak to it.

Adding SFU support to Element Call will mean that we can support more than ~7 simultaneous calls - and with MSC3401-style decentralised cascading, we should be able to support hundreds or even thousands. There's lots of work remaining here, but the ball is now rolling. For more info about SFUs and MSC3401, check out Matthew's CommCon 2021 talk (which was what prompted Sean's implementation work here!)

Separately, we've been running Element Call on staging with E2EE enabled for the last few weeks, and should be releasing the first major Element Call update next week. And once SFUs land, then Element Call can exit beta - watch out Zoom!

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

libolm (website)

uhoreg announces

libolm 3.2.12 has been released. The main update in this release is that the olm_sas_calculate_mac_fixed_base64 is now exposed in all the official bindings, so that MSC3783 can be implemented. Aside from that, there have been some minor fixes and improvements. See the changelog for more information.

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben says

While most of the work in the background continues (Sliding-Sync PoC, Wasm+NodeJS support, UniFFI macros), the first few parts surface through the cracks and show themselves in new PRs: basic wasm web-js and nodejs support has landed with more APIs, tests and documentation on the way; the Sliding Sync PoC has been upgraded to the latest JSON layout and now provides a first set of reactive API via FFI, too. Furthermore this week has seen a bunch of cleanups, simplifications and clarifications around the OlmMachine and crypto types, and we're fixing a bug in the state store, where not all data has been properly encrypted in the past.

👉️ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.

Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart and maintained by Famedly

Henri Carnot announces

Dart Matrix SDK : Version 0.9.9

This week, the team released version 0.9.9. In this new version, we added a search function to allow searching for an event in database and on server through several requests to the /messages endpoint.

There was also some work on updating the image size when generating thumbnail, which allow saving a bit of calculation when sending events. If using a custom resizer make sure to update the resize response as here.

We also did some refactor with the event sender getter. The getter result is now a future to allow requesting the member event to the server if we cannot find it in memory, to help fix the issue when the user was not found in memory.

Finally, a quick helper function (client.waitForSync) was added. It allows you to wait for a room to appear in (left, join, invited) section of the sync response.

See you next time ;)

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix Community Manager (website)

The highly configurable message aggregation and filtering bot for matrix!

Sleuth announces

Only a small update this week. One new feature and some much needed Ansible improvements.

Pipes move messages from one room to an other. Useful if you are in important rooms but only want to monitor a single room. The Ansible role can now manage more aspects of MCM. Mainly in the post setup phase. The major one being if you run into encryption errors for any reason you can run the playbook with the fix tag and it will generate you a new device ID and encryption store.

• Pipes move all messages from one room to an other.
• Adding a filter now uses the room the command was sent from by default if the roomid is not specified.
• Ansible role now has tags for start, stop, configs, fix and all.
• Ansible role backs up the configuration.toml file to prevent the possibility of data loss.

Gitlab releases Come chat on Matrix

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	the-apothecary.club	450
2	envs.net	462
3	polarbear.army	473
4	alemann.dev	504
5	aria-net.org	530.5
6	conduit.rs	618
7	tilduke.org	643.5
8	almum.de	662
9	keks.club	731
10	quyo.de	879

#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	conduit.rs	294.5
2	dendrite.matrix.org	305
3	dendrite.neilalexander.dev	387
4	conduit.grich.sk	433
5	foxo.me	465
6	rustybever.be	512
7	cry.is	521
8	kszczot.pl	527

That's all I know 🏁

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

Hi folks,

We just wanted to take a moment to welcome Rocket.Chat to Matrix, given the recent announcement that they are switching to using Matrix for standards-based interoperable federation! This is incredible news: Rocket.Chat is one of the leading open source collaboration platforms with over 12 million users, and they will all shortly have the option to natively interoperate with the wider Matrix network: the feature has already landed (in alpha) in Rocket.Chat 4.7.0!

We’d like to thank the whole Rocket.Chat team for putting their faith in Matrix and joining the network: the whole idea of Matrix is that by banding together, different independent organisations can build an open decentralised network which is far stronger and more vibrant than any closed communication platform. The more organisations that join Matrix, the more useful and valuable the network becomes for everyone, and the more momentum there is to further refine and improve the protocol. Our intention is that Matrix will grow into a massive open ecosystem and industry, akin to the open Web itself… and that every organisation participating, be that Rocket.Chat, Element, Gitter, Beeper, Famedly or anyone else will benefit from being part of it. We are stronger together!

Rocket.Chat’s implementation follows the “How do you make an existing chat system talk Matrix?” approach we published based on our experiences of linking Gitter into Matrix. Looking at the initial pull request, the implementation lets Rocket.Chat act as a Matrix Application Service, effectively acting as a bridge to talk to an appropriate Matrix homeserver. From chatting with the team, it sounds like next steps will involve adding in encryption via our upcoming matrix-sdk-crypto node bindings - and then looking at ways to transparently embed a homeserver like Dendrite, sharing data as much as possible between RC and Matrix, so Rocket.Chat deployments can transparently sprout Matrix interoperability without having to run a separate homeserver. Super exciting!

You can see a quick preview of a Rocket.Chat user chatting away with an Element user on matrix.org via Matrix here:

So, exciting times ahead - needless to say we’ll be doing everything we can to support Rocket.Chat and ensure their Matrix integration is a success. And at this rate, they might be distinctly ahead of the curve if they start shipping Dendrite! Meanwhile, we have to wonder who will be next? Nextcloud? Mattermost? Place your bets… ;)

--Matthew

Update

Aaron from Rocket.Chat just published an excellent guide & video tour for how to actually set up your Rocket.Chat instance with Dendrite to get talking Matrix!

Hey everyone! Thib is out today, so I'll be exceptionally hosting TWIM in his stead this week. Let's have a look at what's been going on in Matrix-land!

Open Tech Will Save Us #16 🎙

The 16th edition of our virtual meetup Open Tech Will Save Us happened this week! This edition featured a few very interesting projects:

• Quentin and Maximilien from Deuxfleurs are creating Garage, a robust and distributed storage backend that can run on old computers. Who can use it? Why? And when should I not use it? Let's find out!
• Nathan from the Guardian Project is working with wind, butter, and rasperries to provide applications and messaging to people in low-connectivity areas. A fascinating dive off the grid.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

andybalaam says

Matrix's Outreachy intern for this summer has been chosen! Usman is starting in early June, and will be working on experiments with Starring Messages! He will be blogging every two weeks, so look out for more updates.

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) reports

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

New MSCs:

• MSC3825: Obvious relation fallback location
• MSC3824: Login/register indication on SSO redirect
• MSC3823: A code for account suspension

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3604: Room Version 10 (merge)

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

The upcoming release of Matrix v1.3 is still in the works, but near! Expect a solid release date to be announced next week.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2872: Move the widget title to the top level of the definition!

A bite-size MSC which aims to clean up the definition of a widget state event... by moving the "title" field to the root of the state event, alongside the existing "name" field.

This MSC needs someone to write an implementation in at least one homeserver and client to move forwards. Perhaps that someone could be you?

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

squah reports

This week we cut two release candidates for Synapse v1.60, which include:

• New config options to limit the total memory usage of Synapse.
• The ability to reload cache factors of a running Synapse instance using SIGHUP.
• A new module callback to handle federation spam.
• Experimental support for MSC3787: Allowing knocks to restricted rooms and MSC3818: Copy room type on upgrade.
• Many bug fixes and internal improvements!

Meanwhile work continues on fast room joins and testing Synapse with workers on Complement. We'd like to remind readers that the fast room joins feature is highly experimental right now and we do not recommend enabling it on production homeservers just yet.

Synapse admin scripts (website)

Pierre announces

Morning, maybe it's usefull for someone else, I just published my admin scripts for synapse. It's still WiP but it make some basic stuff that I needed in my organisation :

• System notify users (all users/users from a list, specific user)
• delete sessions/devices not seen for X days
• purge the remote media cache
• select rooms with various criteria (external/local/empty/created by/encrypted/cleartext)
• purge history of theses rooms
• shutdown rooms

https://git.fout.re/pi/matrixadminhelpers

It's my first python project, so the code may not structured as it should, I'm still learning, and it's early alpha :)

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander says

This week we released Dendrite 0.8.6 which contains a number of fixes and tweaks:

• Room versions 8 and 9 are now marked as stable
• Dendrite can now assist remote users to join restricted rooms via /make_join and /send_join
• The sync API no longer returns immediately on /sync requests unnecessarily if it can be avoided
• A race condition has been fixed in the sync API when updating presence via /sync
• A race condition has been fixed sending E2EE keys to remote servers over federation when joining rooms
• The trusted_private_chat preset should now grant power level 100 to all participant users, which should improve the user experience of direct messages
• Invited users are now authed correctly in restricted rooms
• The join_authorised_by_users_server key is now correctly stripped in restricted rooms when updating the membership event
• Appservices should now receive invite events correctly
• Device list updates should no longer contain optional fields with null values
• The /deactivate endpoint has been fixed to no longer confuse Element with incorrect completed flows

As always, please feel free to join us in the #dendrite:matrix.org room for more discussion!

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

Desktop client for Matrix using Qt and C++17.

Nico announces

We added a way to edit permissions in Nheko now. It is an unconventional drag and drop dialog, where you drag users and permissions between different roles. We are hoping that this will make powerlevels easier to understand. Be careful when trying it, the wrong powerlevels might make your room unusable. Now... the bad part about that is, that powerlevels add around 50-100 new strings to translate... Help is appreciated! <3

Nheko now also supports fallback keys, which should make E2EE more reliable after long periods of being offline and you can send images by pressing enter again. The privacy screen is also now fixed for separate room windows and our flatpak supports more image formats.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Danielle announces

• On Element Web this week we’ve smashed some bugs including those around Threads.
• Threads work continues as we’re aiming to improve the notifications and read receipts to improve the experience.
• Continuing to make improvements to our automated tests.
• The team is driving to complete the work needed to move our new search experience out of Beta. We think this new search is easier to use and helps folks to find what they’re looking for faster.
• We’re also making improvements specifically for new users, this will include a new home screen, watch out for those!

In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):

• Video rooms; We’re ironing out some of the details to polish the experience

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Ștefan reports

• This week we’ve fixed a crash, and a few bugs; specifically the bug where some rooms were missing from the room list.
• On the iOS team generally we’re working towards a Sentry.io integration for better crash reporting to help us with this in the future.
• Live location sharing and other features are making great progress.
• Our new first time user experience will be ready for feedback soon!
• ElementX has been refactored to adopt Swift’s new structured concurrency.

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

adam says

• This week we added emoji14 support so if you want to hide 🫣 , salute 🫡 , or melt 🫠 for your friends, you’ll soon be able to! 🫶 (for Android 12 and above, or devices that support emoji14)
• We’re getting ever nearer to a new sign up flow for new users. Our flow today can be confusing and complex, especially when all you want to do is chat with friends. We’ve been working on simplifying the flow and we’ll announce a community testing session very soon!
• Also new this week, we’ve opened up a new layout of the app to a small selection of folks. These 15 people will trial the new layout for us, providing feedback along the way. We’ll be opening it up to more feedback soon.

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle reports

Hello and happy Friday!

Threads

• Threads are still in progress as we continue to make progress on the notifications and sort/ordering work that remains.
• In order for notifications to work better, we need read receipts to be updated. We’ve got several MSCs ongoing, along with a few Proof of Concepts (PoCs) to move us forward.
  • MSC3771: Read receipts for threads
  • MSC3772: Push rule for mutually related events
  • MSC3773: Notifications for threads
• With that we’ve also updated some layouts and completed some bug fixes, on all platforms.

Community testing

• Keep your eyes peeled on #element-community-testing:matrix.org for more info on our next testing sessions.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict says

Trixnity 2.1.0 has been released. It includes support for Server-Server-API endpoints (client and server) and fetching missing TimelineEvents in client. The latter is used for fragmented timelines: If you want to show a timeline starting from any EventId and RoomId (e. g. from unread marker), Trixnity will try to fetch missing TimelineEvents from server. If you reach TimelineEvents, that are already saved in the local database, the timeline fragments are merged magically 🧙

Ruma (website)

A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.

Kévin Commaille announces

Since our last update from about a month ago, we had two bugfix releases:

• Ruma 0.6.2 added methods to get the current room powerlevels from a StrippedPowerLevelsEvent and to get a user's membership whether the state event is redacted or not, and added a missing export to track member changes.
• Ruma 0.6.3 fixed the serialization and deserialization of events with a dynamic event_type and added convenience constructors for logging in with a UserIdentifier.

We have also landed a bunch of internal work:

• Improvement in our macros, notably to support unstable prefixes for event types.
• Some cleanup like removing some dead code, removing unnecessary PartialEq implementations, and fixing missing feature flags.
• The minimum supported rust version is now 1.59 and we use the Rust 2021 Edition.
• We started to refactor our tests to have more helpful failure messages.

And there are of course new fixes and features for our next release:

• Make sure that push rules don't apply to the user's own events
• Add support for MSC3700: Ignore content.sender_key
• Implement MSC3381: Polls

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben reports

The majority of changes we've seen over the last week, where minor fixes in style, squashing of bugs and CI improvements as most work is currently happening in the background on Sliding Sync, mobile and UniFFI support. But there have been two additions worth mentioning: first, we've improved on the autojoin example for appservices, and secondly we've merged a community contribution to make resolving of room-alias more handy.

👉️ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.

Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart.

Henri Carnot announces

This week, the team released version 0.9.7.

This week, we migrated to Matrix Api Lite 1.0.0, our simple wrapper around the matrix API endpoints and data models. This means we are now using the v1.2 Matrix spec 🎉.

Also, support for HiveCollections as Database provider was added now that our patches to hive were accepted upstream. And we now provide a way to dump and restore the client local database.

Finally, we fixed a bug with where reactions were not properly discarded from the cache and some bugs in our e2e tests.

See you next time ;)

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

saces reports

Matrix User Meetup Berlin

Next Matrix user meetup 1.6.2022, 8 pm @ c-base

Meet other matrix users, chat about Matrix, the rest, and everything else, discuss your Matrix ideas, sign each other in persona, and maybe spice the evening with a good mate or beer.

Also when the bbq is lit you may wish you brougth your favorite item :)

Every first Wednesday of the month in the c-base at 8pm ('til the next pandemic).

Matrix room: #mumb:c-base.org

Dept of Rockets 🚀

uhoreg shared with us a press release from Rocket.Chat announcing their work on interoperability with Matrix. It is super exciting to see another big player join the ecosystem. Watch this space next week for more announcements!

Dept of Ping 🏓

Thib is out this week, therefore so are the ping stats in TWIM (don't worry, they'll be back next week!).

You can still go check them out yourself in #ping:maunium.net and #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net!

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Social Good 🙆

Thib says

Element has signed the open letter of the Global Encryption Coalition, of which we are members of. We are working with them to push back against any intrusive measures that could compromise the privacy of users.

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) reports

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

New MSCs:

• MSC3821: Update the redaction rules, again
• MSC3820: Room version 11
• MSC3819: Allowing widgets to send/receive to-device messages
• MSC3818: Copy room type on upgrade
• MSC3817: Allow widgets to create rooms

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC3267: Reference relations
• MSC3604: Room Version 10
• MSC2676: Message editing 🎉
• MSC3816: Clarify Thread Participation

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3787: Allowing knocks to restricted rooms

Spec Updates

Some new MSCs popping up this week around widgets, room types, fixing notifications with threads and room version 11! Though note that the last one currently serves as a means for the Spec Core Team to publicly track what should be included in room version 11, and is by no means is its content considered final.

The Spec Core Team are currently focused on room version 10 and getting Matrix v1.3 out the door soon. There's also been some discussion on MSC2676: Message editing this week, with the intention of finally landing that in the spec. Thanks to richvdh for driving the charge there.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC1902: Split the media repo into s2s and c2s parts!

Homeservers currently make use of Client Server Media APIs to pull media from other homeservers over federation. This has worked for a long time, but is a bit of a confusing blur of the lines between client<->server and server<->server traffic. It also makes it difficult to require different authentication rules for clients versus servers.

This MSC aims to help clean that up. Take a look if you're interested!

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

Thib says

It's May 20, and Google has announced the results for its Summer of Code program.

This year the Matrix.org Foundation participated, and we could be granted the five slots we asked for!

• Jayesh Nirve is giong to work on WebRTC support for FluffyChat, mentored by Krille
• nannako is going help handling multimedia files in kazv, mentored by tusooa
• Aditya Rajput will implement encrypted search for Matrix, mentored by cvwright
• Munukurthi Binesh is going to work on 3rd Party Authorised Room Membership, mentored by Cadair
• r0hit2005 will work on updating the implementation of VoIP support, mentored by Nico

Many thanks to all the candidates, we had some very strong proposals this year.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Brendan Abolivier announces

This week we released Synapse 1.59, which features a bunch of niceties including new features, bug fixes and performance improvements. Read all about it, including increased flexibility for workers and improvements on push rules, on the matrix.org blog!

Aside from this, the team is still hard at work and focusing on making Synapse better, among other things by looking at improving performances on room join and decreasing memory usage.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot (website)

A multi purpose multi platform bridge, formerly known as matrix-github

tadzik says

matrix-hookshot 1.7.0 is out

Last week new version of Hookshot came out starring the following changes:

• Docker images can now be built cross-platform. Thanks Paul for getting arm64 builds going!
• Improved GitLab push hook formatting: markdown commit hashes, link "N commits" to the list of commits, if there are more commits than can be shown only link instead, and show committer unless a single person committed and pushed
• RSS feed support got a configuration widget: now need for using bot commands anymore! (though they are still supported)
• Added widgets.openIdOverrides option to help developers test configuration widgets locally
• Fixed regression where GitHubRepo and GitLabRepo connection config options were not being honoured

and more! Visit #hookshot:half-shot.uk to follow the development in real-time.

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

Last week's testing updates are now in master!

Also included:

• Better error handling: if the backend hits an error that causes your connection to KT chats to be dropped, the bridge should notify you about it (not that it should ever happen in the first place, but you never know!)
• Better logging: the Node module can be configured to print the arguments of RPC commands received from / sent to the Python module. The example Node config includes a default set that should be helpful for general debugging.
• Room metadata bridging: setting an Open Chat title & topic from Matrix should work now!
  • Setting the title of a Direct Chat should work too, but topics remain unbridged (since KT Direct Chats don't have topics/descriptions)
• Defensive error handling: Attempts to add a non-friend user to a DM will be refused by the bridge, since KT only allows Direct Chats between friends
  • KT does allow "1:1 Open Chats" between non-friends, but those aren't bridged yet

Also, testing adds support for joining KakaoTalk rooms from Matrix, either by joining an existing portal or providing an Open Chat URL to the bot with a join command. ...However, I've been unable to test this, since KT is stingy about whom it allows to join Open Chats! So please give this a try if you can.

In other news, this bridge is now listed on Matrix.org! 🥳 Thanks Thib !

Also, for the time being, I will be taking a hiatus from this bridge & the LINE bridge, as I'll be quite occupied for the foreseeable future on account of having joined Element 🤩!! (The bridges aren't paused forever--I just have to work out the details of their future before making any promises I can't keep 🙂)

Special thanks to all those who have given feedback & advice on these bridges, and to Beeper for having sponsored their development ❤️

---

• Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net
• Testing room: #kakaotalk-bridge-testing:miscworks.net / https://open.kakao.com/o/gjGQFuae
• Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

matrix-appservice-discord (website)

A bridge between Matrix and Discord.

Half-Shot announces

Hello! Just a notice to say that the `matrix-appservice-discord project has kindly been adopted by the matrix.org foundation, which means that hopefully there will be a lot more time available to maintain it than when it was my personal project! We expect to have a new update for you (the first one in 1.5 years) very soon! If you've got any questions about this, please feel free to ask in the usual spots like #discord:half-shot.uk.

Happy bridging!

Heisenbridge (website)

Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.

hifi says

Release v1.13.0 🥳

• Read default port and listen address from config url (@BtbN)
• Improvements to pillifying IRC nicks, again
• Fixes for AUTOQUERY not always working correctly
• Allow anyone to use STATUS command to get their own status
• Filter control characters only for plumbs so people can send garbage to IRC if they wish from Matrix
• Support for converting IRC color codes to Matrix (@tjaderxyz)
• Fixed compose docker Synapse configuration for registration
• Improved Python 3.10 compatibliy (@BtbN)
• Hidden room to hide joins using restricted rooms join rule (@BtbN)

Some cool stuff this time around! Aside from many bug fixes this release has two great new features: IRC message colors and hiding invites from channels.

IRC colors are enabled by default and are rendered how your Matrix client sees fit. They can be disabled per network if needed.

Hiding joins works with room v9 restricted join rules feture to allow IRC ghosts to join rooms without an invite from the bridge bot first. This clears some clutter and may even make joining a bit faster in the long run - we will see. This feature is disabled by default and needs to be enabled by the bridge administrator as it is consiered a "labs" feature for now.

Go and get a Dell from GitHub, PyPI or matrix-docker-ansible-deploy!

Thanks!

Dept of Clients 📱

Neochat (website)

A client for matrix, the decentralized communication protocol

Tobias Fella says

In the last weeks, we've landed a few smaller features and papercut fixes in NeoChat:

• Urls will now more often be shown as links
• A couple of input processing bugs have been fixed, which lead, among others, to fewer broken ASCII emojis :)
• Clicking on a notification will now properly open NeoChat even on wayland 🥳
• Users can now disable sending typing notifications

We're also making progress on the end-to-end encryption support where we hopefully will soon have news from libQuotient's side.

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat says

Threads

• Finished private read receipts (in review), which is needed to proceed with read receipts for threads (MSC3771)
• Continue work on implementing push rule for manually related events (MSC3772)
• Notifications for threads (MSC3773) is blocked on the two MSCs above
• Layout tweaks and bug fixes on all platforms

Community Testing

• We ran 47 different tests on this week’s RC and found 20 defects/potential improvements
• We are inviting community testers to take part in the Android and iOS app layout experiments
• For more info on our next testing sessions (sync or async), you can join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

kittykat says

• Improved logging Jitsi errors for video call issues
• Added option to ignore user when reporting spam
• Made lots of improvements to our automated tests
• Show metaspaces even when there are no real spaces joined
• Add shortcut to get to the explore space page more easily via the space avatar in the left panel
• Remove invites from breadcrumbs
• Fall back to untranslated strings rather than showing error for missing translations
• Improve lightbox (image viewing when you click on an attached file or profile pic)
• Improve email verification dialog on registration page
• In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
  • Minor improvements to copy and layout for video rooms, and improve removing stuck devices
  • More polishing of context menus

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Ștefan says

Element iOS

• We have a release candidate available that squashes quite a few problematic bugs
• Mention pills have been improved and are now better than ever
• Work is continuing on the new authentication flows and live location sharing
• Launching home layout experiment next week

Element X

• The iOS FII crate is now being checked on the CI and has been merged into the main RustSDK branch
• We're making progress on crash reporting tools and rage shakes
• Starting on adopting Swift's async/await throughout the project

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

benoit says

• Launching spaces layout experiments next week
• Release 1.4.16 is out. Should be available in production at the beginning of next week. Sadly this release will not be available on F-Droid.
• FTUE screens are nearly finished. We are implementing the latest ones. For instance Email input and validation.
• Also still working on the integration of the crypto Rust SDK. We are at a point of fixing the remaining issues.

Cinny (website)

Cinny is a Matrix client focused on simplicity, elegance and security

Lozenge says

Cinny v2.0.3 - What's changed

• Add the ability to focus on paste
• Add allowCustomHomeservers config option
• Fix crash in a room without m.room.create state event
• Fix message edit isn't reflected in the reply
• Fix join room with alias
• Fix crash on leaving room

Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in/ · Join our room: #cinny:matrix.org · Github: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny · Twitter: https://twitter.com/@cinnyapp

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr says

In the last two weeks, populus-viewer has seen some exciting changes:

• Blurhash support, following MSC2448: Using BlurHash as a Placeholder for Matrix Media
• A redesigned landing page, and general CSS overhaul
• An improved layout algorithm for bartabs in PDF margins
• Support for video annotations, following MSC3775: Markup Locations for Audiovisual Media

Here's a demo video of video annotation, and a screenshot of the new landing page:

Dept of Widgets 🧩

Mjolnir Widget (website)

A widget for moderating with mjolnir. Highly WIP. Use at your own risk!

MTRNord (they/them) reports

Hi, just some small update this week:

• Philantrop 🏳️‍🌈 pointed out the widget was missing the room ban type, which is now added to the widget.
• The ban list view now also shows the room id of the room the ban is from. (it will get extended to be an alias at some point. This is planned)
• Dependencies have been updated.

Check it out at https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-moderation-widget or join #mjolnir-widget:nordgedanken.dev if you have any questions.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben says

Post release (we have release 0.5.0 last week) the main focus was on minor fixes and bigger features we had pending but didn't want to merge before. Aside from a few documentation and other minor fixes - among others switching to resolver v2 or more accurate power_level calculation - the biggest merge was around the FFI interface for Apple (iOS and Mac), which we have initial support for now 🎉.

The main work is currently happening behind the scenes, while we prepare for the upcoming tasks - like WASM and NodeJS support for the crypto-crate and work on UniFFI. We are also hardening our processes for improved security and risk management around our code base, dependencies and the potential to ship binaries.

👉️ We are very happy about the influx of people, who joined our developer community questions since the release. We'd like to take this opportunity again to invite anyone else interested in hacking on matrix in rust to check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.

Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart and maintained by famedly.com

Henri Carnot reports

Matrix Dart SDK : Version 0.9.6

This week, the team released version 0.9.6.

This release brings various bug fixes. We fixed cache corruption with fragmented timeline, and we now gracefully handle invalid recent emojis states.

Also, we now properly update the user lastActiveAgo on presence event updates and not when opening a room.

Finally, we moved the MSC2835 support into its own extension.

See you next time ;)

Dept of Services 🚀

Samuel Philipp says

We are proud to announce that Ossrox is now listed as a hosting provider on matrix.org! 😍 We offer Matrix Home Servers via https://ossrox.org - for the time being only in the German-speaking area. We are dedicated to hosting open-source software and also offer other services in the messaging, groupware and web meeting segments. If you got any questions, just reach out to us at #public:ossrox.org.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

addanno says

Hello Matrix friends. We have recently launched an online learning platform that has Element at its core. We added some great features such as annotations for both course material and web pages. Here is an overview video of what we are doing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY3safwbllQ

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	envs.net	441.5
2	thewords.faith	482
3	almum.de	551
4	lw1.at	661
5	matrix.org	768
6	aria-net.org	897
7	quyo.de	963
8	mindlesstux.com	970
9	shortestpath.dev	1205
10	phorcys.net	1395

#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	conduit.grich.sk	179
2	grin.hu	702
3	cry.is	705
4	sspaeth.de	1174

That's all I know 🏁

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

Synapse 1.59 is out! Let's see what's new in this version.

Generic worker types

When Synapse instances are subject to high load, it can be useful to use workers to balance the load more effectively. Workers are separate processes that can take some of the load off the main Synapse process, and allow the homeserver to scale more effectively.

In the past, Synapse only provided a specific set of types of workers, each capable of handling a specific set of operations. For some time now we have been working on allowing more flexibility around worker configuration, which started all the way back in Synapse 1.12.0 with the introduction of a generic worker application type.

Synapse 1.59 furthers this work by deprecating the synapse.app.appservice and synapse.app.user_dir worker application types. Homeserver administrators should change the configuration of instances using these types to the generic synapse.app.generic_worker application type, and use the notify_appservices_from_worker and update_user_directory_from_worker to delegate application service and user directory work (respectively) to a worker.

See the upgrade notes for more information on this change.

Push rules

Push rules allow Matrix clients to define notification rules on a homeserver. One often reported issue with notification in Matrix is the fact that notifications are sent out when server ACLs, which define which server(s) can and cannot interact in a room, change. This is especially annoying during big waves of abuse, as there might be multiple servers that need to be banned from rooms, thus causing a lot of unneeded notifications.

Synapse 1.59 now supports silencing server ACL updates, by implementing the new push rule documented in MSC3786. However, since this MSC hasn't been incorporated into the spec yet, this behaviour is disabled by default in Synapse: see the implementation pull request for more information on turning it on.

Synapse 1.59 also allows third-party modules to validate and change the actions associated with an existing push rule via the Module API. This is helpful for modules wishing to, for example, configuring specific notification settings when new users register.

Everything else

As of Synapse 1.59, Synapse will not communicate the name of devices over federation (unless configured otherwise), in order to better preserve user privacy. See the upgrade notes for more information.

Also note that we have issued a patch release for 1.59 (1.59.1) which fixes a long-standing bug that started to bite a good amount of server administrators. Server admins that are looking into upgrading their instance to Synapse 1.59 are recommended to upgrade to 1.59.1 rather than 1.59.0.

See the full changelog for a complete list of changes in this release. Also please have a look at the upgrade notes for this version.

Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including (in no particular order) Beeper, Dirk Klimpel, Šimon Brandner, henryclw and Andrew Do.

Hi all,

It’s been quite a while since our last independent E2EE review, and so we’re incredibly proud to present an entirely new independent security audit of vodozemac, our next generation native Rust implementation of Matrix’s Olm and Megolm E2EE protocols. The audit has been conducted by Least Authority, who specialise in comprehensive audits of security-sensitive decentralized technologies - and we are very grateful to gematik, who kindly shared the costs of funding the audit as part of their commitment to Matrix for healthcare in Germany.

This audit was a bit of a whirlwind, as while we were clearly overdue an audit of Matrix’s E2EE implementations, we decided quite late in the day to focus on bringing vodozemac to auditable production quality rather than simply doing a refresh of the original libolm audit. However, we got there in time, thanks to a monumental sprint from Damir and Denis over Christmas. The reason we went this route is that vodozemac is an enormous step change forwards in quality over libolm, and vodozemac is now the reference Matrix E2EE implementation going forward. Just as libolm went live with NCC’s security review back in 2016, similarly we’re kicking off the first stable release of vodozemac today with Least Authority’s audit. In fact, vodozemac just shipped as the default E2EE library in matrix-rust-sdk 0.5, released at the end of last week!

The main advantages of vodozemac over libolm include:

• Native Rust - type, memory and thread safety is preserved both internally, and within the context of larger Rust programs (such as those building on matrix-rust-sdk). This is particularly important given the memory bugs which libolm sprouted, despite our best efforts to the contrary.
• Performance - vodozemac benchmarks roughly 5-6x faster than libolm on typical hardware
• Better primitives - vodozemac is built on the best practice cryptographic primitives from the Rust community, rather than the generic Brad Conte primitives used by libolm.

Also, we’ve finally fixed one of the biggest problems with libolm - which was that the hardest bit of implementing E2EE in Matrix wasn’t necessarily the encryption protocol implementation itself, but how you glue it into your Matrix client’s SDK. It turns out ~80% of the code and complexity needed to securely implement encryption ends up being in the SDK rather than the Olm implementation - and each client SDK ended up implementing its own independent state machine and glue for E2EE, leading to a needlessly large attack & bug surface.

To address this problem, vodozemac is designed to plug into matrix-sdk-crypto - an SDK-independent Rust library which abstracts away the complexities and risks of implementing E2EE, designed to plug into existing SDKs in any language. For instance, Element Android already supports delegating its encryption to matrix-sdk-crypto; Element iOS got this working too last week, and we’re hard at work adding it to Element Web too. (This set of projects is codenamed Element R). Meanwhile, Element X (the project to switch Element iOS and Element Android to use matrix-rust-sdk entirely) obviously benefits from it too, as matrix-rust-sdk now leans on matrix-sdk-crypto for its encryption.

Therefore we highly recommend that developers using libolm migrate over to vodozemac - ideally by switching to matrix-sdk-crypto as a way of managing the interface between Matrix and the E2EE implementation. Vodozemac does also provides a similar API to libolm with bindings for JS and Python (and C++ in progress) if you want to link directly against it - e.g. if you’re using libolm for something other than Matrix, for example XMPP, ActivityPub or Jitsi. We’ll continue to support and maintain libolm for now though, at least until the majority of folks have switched to vodozemac.

In terms of the audit itself - we recommend reading it yourself, but the main takeaway is that Least Authority identified 10 valid concerns, of which we addressed 8 during the audit process. The remaining two are valid but lower priority, and we’ll fix them as part of our maintenance backlog. All the issues identified are excellent valid points, and we’re very glad that Least Authority have added huge value here by highlighting some subtle gotchas which we’d missed. (If you write Rust, you’ll particularly want to check out their zeroisation comments).

So: exciting times! Vodozemac should be landing in a Matrix client near you in the near future - we’ll yell about it loudly once Element switches over. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please head over to #e2ee:matrix.org.

Thanks again to gematik for helping fund the audit, and to Least Authority for doing an excellent job - and being patient and accommodating beyond the call of duty when we suddenly switched the scope from libolm to vodozemac at the last minute ;)

Next up: we’re going to get the Rust matrix-sdk-crypto independently audited (once this burndown is complete) so that everyone using the matrix-sdk-crypto state machine for Matrix E2EE can have some independent reassurance too - a huge step forward from the wild west of E2EE SDK implementations today!

– Matthew

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

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

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3815: 3D Worlds
• [WIP] MSC3814: Dehydrated devices with SSSS
• MSC3813: Obfuscated events

MSCs with Proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs had final comment period proposed this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3787: Allowing knocks to restricted rooms (merge)

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3790: Register Clients

Spec Updates

The Spec Core Team has decided to not include MSC3440 (threading via m.thread relations) specifically in the upcoming Matrix v1.3 release. We previously stated that it would be in v1.3, but there's a few unproven MSCs (namely MSC3773 (notifications for threads)) which make it feel improper to put threads into the spec at this stage. We're aiming for a future (very near) spec release to contain threads, assuming we can get enough of the feature landed. This is a very similar approach to what we did with Spaces: while the core feature existed as FCP-concluded for a while, we wanted to give some other MSCs a chance to land before writing it up formally.

As a follow-on from this, any implementations that are currently assuming "v1.3" spec support translates to threading support should note the following:

• Clients which are pre-emptively checking for v1.3 in /versions should stop doing that. Look for org.matrix.msc3440.stable as an "unstable" feature flag instead.
• Servers which offer MSC3440's behaviour should expose it on stable endpoints and expose org.matrix.msc3440.stable for clients to detect.
• Optionally, clients and servers can drop support for the org.matrix.msc3440 (truly unstable) flag, given clients & servers should have already upgraded.

At the spec level, we'll still be writing up MSC3440's dependencies (aggregations and friends), but will notably be missing MSC3440 specifically in v1.3. If folks can update their clients urgently, it would be massively appreciated!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2596: Proposal to always allow rescinding invites!

A simple change to the auth rules to help prevent an edge case where one is able to invite a user, but not disinvite them as the latter requires a separate permission. The MSC attempts to solve this by always allowing the cancellation of invitations you've sent.

A small MSC, but one with some open threads still. Perhaps a good opportunity to go in and clean it up!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

squah says

Hello everyone. This week the team cut a release candidate for Synapse v1.59, which includes:

• New module API support for editing push rules.
• Experimental support for MSC3266, federated room summary and MSC3786.
• Updates to support for MSC2285, hidden read receipts.
• Many bug fixes and internal improvements!

Meanwhile, the core team has looking at caches and memory usage: Erik has been looking at ways to reduce the memory usage of small servers, Shay's been adding some exciting new config options to limit the total memory usage of Synapse and David's added the ability to reload the cache factors of a running Synapse instance via SIGHUP.

In parallel, Olivier's been doing groundwork to reduce replication traffic for workerised Synapse deployments, Andrew (anoa) has been looking at media retention policies and work continues on faster room joins.

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

neilalexander reports

This week we've actually made two releases — Dendrite 0.8.4 and Dendrite 0.8.5 — which are both primarily targeting performance and bug fixes.

We've also released our new living documentation, which is available at https://matrix-org.github.io/dendrite/, which features new installation instructions and documents that will be helpful to Dendrite server administrators. We will be writing more documentation and expanding this over time.

Changes include:

• The built-in NATS Server has been updated to version 2.8.2
• Monolith deployments will no longer panic at startup if given a config file that does not include the internal_api and external_api options
• State resolution v2 now correctly identifies other events related to power events, which should fix some event auth issues
• The latest events updater will no longer implicitly trust the new forward extremities when calculating the current room state, which may help to avoid some state resets
• The one-time key count is now correctly returned in /sync even if the request otherwise timed out, which should reduce the chance that unnecessary one-time keys will be uploaded by clients
• The create-account tool should now work properly when the database is configured using the global connection pool
• Fixes a regression introduced in the previous version where appservices, push and phone-home statistics would not work over plain HTTP
• Adds missing indexes to the sync API output events table, which should significantly improve /sync performance and reduce database CPU usage
• Building Dendrite with the bimg thumbnailer should now work again (contributed by database64128)

As always, feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more Dendrite-related discussion.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair reports

Most of this week's fixes are in the testing branch, so try it out!

• Ability to DM your own KakaoTalk puppet
• Fix to the problem of needing to DM a puppet twice to start chatting with them
• Fixes to leaving KakaoTalk chats from Matrix (via the !kt leave bot command)
• Nicer output of the whoami command, to make it easier to click on your own KakaoTalk puppet to DM it

Coming soon:

• Proper support for setting an Open Chat title & topic from Matrix
• Support for joining KakaoTalk rooms from Matrix, either by joining an existing portal or providing an Open Chat URL to the bot with a join command

---

• Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net
• Testing room: #kakaotalk-bridge-testing:miscworks.net / https://open.kakao.com/o/gjGQFuae
• Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

Dept of Clients 📱

Ement.el (website)

Matrix client for Emacs

alphapapa announces

Ement.el, a Matrix client for [GNU Emacs](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs], received some more updates this week:

Additions

• New Transient-based command menu for room buffers, bound to ?.
• New command ement-list-members, which lists all members in a room.
• Member completion now completes from all members in a room (rather than only those whose messages have been seen).
• Power-level events are displayed.
• Grouped membership events have tooltips showing each member's individual event.
• When usernames are colorized, message bodies may optionally be colorized in a less intense shade of the same color, so they are easily distinguished yet easy on the eyes (and, of course, the shading is customizable).

Changes

• When displaying usernames in the margin, names that are wider than the margin are abbreviated, with the full name in the tooltip.

Fixes

• Typing notifications (recently broken--oops!).
• Sending direct messages marks new direct rooms as direct rooms.
• Event notifications for rooms not displayed in a buffer.

As always, feel free to join us in #ement.el:matrix.org.

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

Danielle announces

Hello and welcome to another Element TWIM!

Threads

• We’re still hard at work improving the Threads Beta experience for y’all. Starting with Notifications and UI polish.
  • We’ve fixed some visual bugs on all of our platforms this week
  • We’re continuing work on MSCs for improvements to read receipts, push rules, and thread notifications in general.

Community testing

• Next week, we are planning to test:

  • Video rooms
  • And the new release candidate

• We have a new consent form for testers to fill in! For more info on our next testing sessions (sync or async), you can join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Danielle reports

• We’ve improved how messages are deleted, along with other defects. Some of our favourite improvements include:
  • Fixed room history visibility when you have keys to decrypt messages
  • Improvements to viewing long room topics
  • A number of UI tweaks and polishes including improved layout to the settings
  • Fix the way pills look
• The team is actively moving tests to Cypress; You can find the latest test runs here

In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):

• Video Rooms! Turn them on and try them out, we’re continuing to squash bugs
• We added a “copy link” option to the context menu
• Removed some of the older features from labs
• Improved ordering in the new search dialog

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Ștefan says

• The newest version of the app (1.8.14) was released on Monday! In this release we’ve made a bunch of improvements and bug fixes, check it out here
• 💊 We also merged an initial version of mention pills and are working on ironing out edge cases. Exciting!
• There’s good progress on the new authentication flows and live location sharing, both of which we’re looking forward to sharing and testing with you soon.
• On the ElementX front we're nearly done with the DevX setup and are working towards using the latest Rust SDK
  • unit and UI test runs on the CI and Codecov.io coverage reports
  • swiftlint, danger-swift and sonarcloud.io checks for code quality
  • automatic generation of PR builds, published on diawi
  • scripts for importing and reusing localizable strings from Android
  • towncrier changelogs and more

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

Danielle reports

• We’ve been working on smashing bugs, improving stability, and reducing crashes.
• Our first time user flow is progressing - we’re starting to test the new authentication flow internally and will be asking for help testing this soon.

Cinny (website)

Cinny is a Matrix client focused on simplicity, elegance and security

ajbura says

Cinny v2.0.0: Session verification and other e2ee features

Features

• Redesign app/user settings
• Add support to manage cross-signing and key backup
• Add support to manage sessions
• Add Session verification by emojis
• Add recently used section to emoji board
• Add LaTeX / math input and rendering support
• Add notification sounds
• Add sound on incoming invites
• Sort DM's by activity
• Sort search results by activity
• Improve jump to unread button
• Replace confirm and prompt with custom dialogs
• Adapt to different device widths
• Native application using Tauri

Bugs

• Fix loading on older browsers
• Fix crash on load and room creation on dendrite
• Fix can't open spaces from public room list
• Fix max power level in room permissions
• Fix incorrect custom html crashing app
• Fix crash on unable to getContent of tombstoned room
• Don't enable e2ee for bridged platform

See release at: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny/releases/tag/v2.0.0

Cinny for desktop

Since this release, we are also shipping a desktop app of Cinny for Windows, MacOS and Linux. You can download the app for your platform from https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny-desktop/releases

Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in/ Join our channel at: #cinny:matrix.org Github: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny Twitter: https://twitter.com/@cinnyapp

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Matrix Client-Server SDK for Rust

ben reports

The Rust Matrix team is very excited to announce the next major release Matrix SDK 0.5 "stores and native crypto", now available for everyone by adding matrix-sdk = "0.5.0" to their dependencies in their Cargo.toml. This first major release in about 8 months brings significant changes many have been waiting for:

• Better, safer, native-er crypto: matrix-sdk 0.5 ditches libolm in favor of Vodozemac, the completely fresh rust-native re-implementation of the crypto crate. It has also been audited, the report of which is scheduled to be released soon.
• Store revamp: the entire cache storage infrastructure for crypto and state has been restructured to allow for full plug-ability, with even the two default supported backends, sled and indexeddb both being separate crates now. And as a matter of fact, a community-driven sql implementation has already been published as beta (with postgres and sqlite support) by charlotte 🦝.
• WebAssembly; both of these changes also allow us to finally make WASM a Tier 1 supported target for the SDK. Not only does it build and even use the browser native indexeddb for permanent storage, we also have CI tests ensuring nothing will break this support going forward.
• Features, Features and Process: there's plenty more features and bug fixes in this release, e.g. native thumbnail generation support, as well as changes on our processes going forward.

For more details, check out the Release Notes.

Sidenote: If you want to contribute, or just learn Rust by actually doing it, we recommend taking a look team at the help wanted issues in our repo.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Buscarron (website)

Web forms (HTTP POST) to matrix

Aine announces

Buscarron v1.1.0 is here

Buscarron is the new backoffice of the etke.cc and its main feature is to receive web forms (HTML/HTTP POST) and convert them into (encrypted) matrix messages.

So, what's new?

• Email confirmation after form submissions with Postmark
• Templates support for redirect URLs
• Automatically ban spammers, scanners and bots

Check out the source code and say hi in #buscarron:etke.cc

Dept of Bots 🤖

Who's In This Room Matrix Bot

Jake C says

If you use Matrix with the Signal bridge (or any bridge) with relay mode enabled, your guests have probably experienced the confusion where they don't know who else (on Matrix) is in the chat as only Matrix can double-puppet.

When this bot is added to a Matrix room, it will announce:

• Who the room members are when a new Signal user joins;
• When a Matrix user joins or leaves, who that Matrix user was.

I built it just this afternoon using the excellent matrix-bot-sdk, but it's in Typescript and has plentyful unit tests!

I don't currently have a public bot, but if anyone is interested please join #whos-in-this-room-bot-discussion:jakecopp.chat and say hello!

PRs for adding support for other chat apps (basically identifying which bridge from the puppeted username) are very welcome! https://github.com/jakecoppinger/whos-in-this-room-matrix-bot

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

J. Ryan Stinnett says

The videos from the HYTRADBOI conference a few weeks back are now publicly available, in case anyone was curious but couldn't make the conference. I gave a talk about building collaborative, open software on Matrix. The whole conference was great, so I recommend browsing the schedule for videos that may interest you. 😄

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

uhoreg reports

Loomio, an open source collaborative decision making tool, now supports integrating with Matrix rooms using their chatbot. They previously supported other (lesser) chat systems, but have recently added support for Matrix.

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	envs.net	451
2	loang.net	576
3	jameskitt616.one	842.5
4	aria-net.org	857
5	jeroenhd.nl	892
6	mindlesstux.com	983
7	shortestpath.dev	1014
8	quyo.de	1345
9	matrix.nicfab.it	1571
10	halogen.city	1599

#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	jameskitt616.one	171
2	loang.net	307
3	foxo.me	540
4	cry.is	763
5	kszczot.pl	777.5
6	dendrite.matrix.org	844.5
7	beckmeyer.us	851.5
8	dendrite.neilalexander.dev	1225.5
9	schuwi.science	1620
10	sspaeth.de	1978

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) reports

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

New MSCs:

• MSC3787: Allowing knocks to restricted rooms
• MSC3786: Add a default push rule to ignore m.room.server_acl events
• MSC3782: Matrix public key login spec
• MSC3780: Knocking on action=join
• MSC3779: "Owned" State Events
• MSC3775: Markup Locations for Audiovisual Media
• MSC3773: Notifications for threads
• MSC3772: Push rule for mutually related events
• MSC3771: Read receipts for threads

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC3787: Allowing knocks to restricted rooms

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

"Wowza, that's a lot of new MSCs!" I hear you say. This is actually a listing of the last 3 weeks, as it was pointed out to me that the last 3 editions of TWIM have not all features an MSC status update - which means some MSCs may not have necessary made it into the limelight.

As such, here's those from this past week, as well as the ones that were missed!

Spec Updates

It's that time of the year again - a new Spec release is on the horizon! Matrix v1.3 is expected to land sometime this month, and will include:

• MSC3440 (threads) + related MSCs
• MSC3787 (knock+restricted join rules)
• MSC3604 (room version 10)
• Any other MSCs which have so far been accepted, but not yet made it into the spec.

MSCs which land between now and v1.3 might get incorporated if easy enough, though chances are they'll slip to v1.4 (expected next quarter).

On top of that, the other bit of news is that the proposal-in-review label has now been removed from the matrix-spec-proposals repo and thus all MSCs. This doesn't mean your MSC is no longer in review! We simply found the label redundant along with the other labels in the process (it was attached to all MSCs which hadn't been accepted/merged yet, which means very little) and thus we decided to remove it to reduce noise.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2881: Message Attachments!

This MSC has actually been potentially(?) superseded by MSC3382. In short, both look to provide a solution to the problem of attaching (multiple!) images to messages, such that clients can display an album of images in a single event in the timeline.

Check it out if you're interested in introducing such a feature!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

Synapse v1.58.0 was released this week! Check out the v1.58 blog post for the full scoop, but the highlights are:

• Our Docker images and Debian packages are now built from a dependency lockfile courtesy of Poetry. Props to David for leading the charge on this multi-week epic.
• An experimental implementation of MSC3383 has been contributed by @Bubu and @jcgruenhage at Famedly, which will help with proxying federation traffic, amongst other uses.
• An experimental implementation of MSC2815 has been merged, which allows room moderators to view redact event content for the purposes of moderation. This was contributed by @tulir at Beeper.
• Device list updates are now asynchronous thanks to Erik, leading to much faster login times for accounts in big rooms.
• plus many other bug fixes and improvements!

We also released a v1.58.1 patch shortly afterwards to address an issue with the Debian packages on some configurations. Server admins not using the Matrix.org Debian packages do not need to install this patch release.

Otherwise, ongoing work from the core team continues with Sean and Rich working on faster room join performance, Olivier pushing forwards on testing Synapse with workers in Complement, while Erik has been tackling general performance work.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot (website)

A multi purpose multi platform bridge, formerly known as matrix-github

Half-Shot reports

Hey folks! We're announcing our 1.6.0 release for matrix-hookshot today. More features in this release: tadzik has gotten involved and given us support for RSS feeds in this release. You can check out how to get going with those in our hosted documentation.

The highlights this time around are:

• Add RSS/Atom feed support (#315)
• Add support for GitLab in the widgets configuration UI. (#320)
• Send a notice when a GitLab merge request gets some review comments. (#314)
• Add new !hookshot gitlab project command to configure project bridges in rooms. See the docs for instructions. (#321)
• New hookshot_connection_event(_failed) metrics for tracking successful event handling. Reinstate matrix_* metrics which were previously not being recorded. (#312)

matrix-appservice-kakaotalk (website)

A Matrix-KakaoTalk puppeting bridge.

Fair announces

This week brings another round of big improvements & new features!

Features & fixes include:

• Fixes to Docker support & the documentation for setting it up
• Changes to the login flow
  • The bridge can now be configured to enforce a login flow that more closely matches the official KakaoTalk desktop client's, and to better warn you when a new login will kick out another one of your KT sessions. This will hopefully prevent the bridge from getting KT accounts banned!
• Backfilling for KT->Matrix read receipts
• Commands for adding/removing KakaoTalk friends
• Commands to edit your KakaoTalk ID & mark it as shared or hidden
• Matrix->KT DM creation, i.e. the ability to create a new DM with a KakaoTalk user from within Matrix
  • This might fail on the first attempt at creating a DM. If it does, try re-inviting the KakaoTalk puppet to the room.
• Many stability & correctness improvements

With the combination of friends list curation & DM creation support, it should now be possible to connect with KT contacts entirely from Matrix! Simply add some friends, list them, and invite a listed friend to a 1:1 room!

---

• Discussion: #matrix-appservice-kakaotalk:miscworks.net
• Testing room: #kakaotalk-bridge-testing:miscworks.net / https://open.kakao.com/o/gjGQFuae
• Issue page: https://src.miscworks.net/fair/matrix-appservice-kakaotalk/issues

matrix-appservice-irc (website)

Node.js IRC bridge for Matrix

Half-Shot announces

Hi folks, note that today (Wednesday) we released a high security update for the matrix-appservice-irc bridge. Please update to 0.34.0 as soon as you can.

Dept of Clients 📱

Thunderbird (website)

Thunderbird is a free open-source email, calendar & chat app.

freaktechnik reports

This week we released Thunderbird Beta 101.0b1. It includes a bunch of bug fixes for the Matrix implementation and shows reactions as system messages, so you know when someone gives you a 👍️.

Nheko (website)

Desktop client for Matrix using Qt and C++17.

Nico reports

Someone on Twitter complained that no chat client works like MSN anymore, where you could have separate windows for each chat. So for MSN compatibility we added that. (It is a bit experimental still, expect some stuff to not work or crash)

Bulbu also went through a lot of effort to add a second set of emoji shortcodes to Nheko. Those should be more familiar to people coming from other platforms or clients while the old shortcodes are available still as well. We also saw a lot of progress on the Finnish, Chinese, Indonesian and Russian translations, animated images should work properly in the image viewer again, buttons for opening the member list are now clearly marked with a people icon next to them. The memberlist is also now search- and sortable.

Anyway, have a look at how important multiple windows are:

FluffyChat (website)

Krille Fear reports

FluffyChat 1.4.0 has been released with a lot of bug fixes, performance improvements and new designs. Take a look at the new designed sign up screen, which also now supports recommended homeservers from joinmatrix.org

Krille Fear reports

Full changelog:

• design: Display icon for failed sent messages (Krille Fear)
• design: Display own stories at first place and combine with new stories button (Krille Fear)
• feat: Add "Show related DMs in spaces" settings (20kdc)
• feat: Better image sending experience (Krille Fear)
• feat: Display event timestamp if selected (Krille Fear)
• feat: Faster image resizing (Krille Fear)
• feat: Groups and Direct Chats virtual spaces option (20kdc)
• feat: New onboarding design (Krille Fear)
• feat: Onboarding with dynamic homeservers from joinmatrix.org (Krille Fear)
• feat: Play audio messages in stories (Krille Fear)
• feat: Use native imaging for much faster thumbnail calc on mobile (Krille Fear)
• feat: add Dockerfile for nginx/web builds (TheOneWithTheBraid)
• feat: allow to create widgets (TheOneWithTheBraid)
• feat: remove diacritics (henri2h)
• feat: irish language support (Graeme Power)
• feat: Enable screensharing on Mobile
• feat: support AppImage builds
• feat: Improve spaces design
• fix: Android theme is not auto updating when system theme changes (Krille Fear)
• fix: Chat view becomes gray for a second on sending reaction (Krille Fear)
• fix: Don't request new thumbnail resolution on every window resize (Samuel Mezger)
• fix: Dont display own failed-to-send events in stories (Krille Fear)
• fix: Hide markdown in chat list preview and local notifications (Krille Fear)
• fix: Hide pinned events if event is not accessible or loading (Krille Fear)
• fix: Image sending (Krille Fear)
• fix: Make audioplayer waveforms thinner and better clickable (Krille Fear)
• fix: Some story layout bugs (Krille Fear)
• fix: Widgets dialog crashes (Krille Fear)
• fix: login form supports switching fields via tab (Philip Molares)

Ement.el (website)

Matrix client for Emacs

alphapapa announces

Ement.el has received several updates since the last time it was mentioned in TWIM:

Additions

• A new room list command, ement-taxy-room-list, shows rooms grouped "smartly" (and programmably). (It will be made the default soon; until then, call the command to use it.)
  • The new room list shows unread-notification/highlight counts, similar to Element.
• Basic support for spaces:
  • Rooms (and spaces) can be added to and removed from spaces.
  • Rooms are listed under their spaces in ement-taxy-room-list.
• Reactions can now be toggled off (i.e. redacted) by clicking them, like in Element.
• Command ement-room-send-file allows uploading non-image files to rooms, and file messages are now displayed usefully, so the files can be downloaded or viewed.
• Command ement-ignore-user ignores and unignores users.
• Command ement-tag-room adds and removes favourite, low-priority, or custom tags on rooms.
• Command ement-room-occur allows searching messages in a room buffer, similar to Emacs's occur command (i.e. it locally searches already-received messages).
• Membership events are now coalesced by default, similar to Element (especially helpful in large public rooms, like bridged IRC rooms, where join/part spam can be overwhelming).
• "In reply to" links in replies, as well as other matrix.to links, can be activated in a room buffer to go to the linked message.
• Mentions in outgoing messages are HTML-linkified (aka "pilled"), like Element.
• Generated avatars for rooms that have none, similar to Element. (Only displayed in ement-taxy-room-list for now.)
• Option ement-shr-use-fonts (disabled by default, which prevents HTML messages from being displayed in a different font).
• Faces for favourite/low-priority rooms.
• Redacted messages that are still known locally are now displayed with a strikethrough (after reconnecting, their content will be unknown).
• When images are disabled, image messages are presented as clickable URLs, so they can still be viewed.
• Some events, like membership events and images, are displayed alongside a vertical bar to help distinguish them from normal messages.
• Even "hotter"-looking timestamps for rooms updated in the last hour.

Changes

• Refactored notification system. Now easier to configure (see M-x customize-group RET ement-notify RET).

Fixes

• Improved error handling when looking up homeserver hostnames and .well-known URIs.
• Improved error handling when processing malformed events.
• "Elemental" display style (not used by many users, apparently).

Come join us in #ement.el:matrix.org!

Element (website)

Everything related to Element but not strictly bound to a client

kittykat announces

Element

Decryption

• Progressing through implementing sharing keys for past messages (MSC3061)
• Improved UTD (Unable to Decrypt) analytics to gather more insight on the most common errors faced by users

Community testing

• Thank you all who joined the async community testing sessions.
• We tested 51 cases and found 16 issues and potential improvements this week in the RC (release candidates) between all platforms
• Next week, we are planning to test:
  • New search experience on Web
• For more info on our next testing sessions (sync or async), you can join us at #element-community-testing:matrix.org!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

madlittlemods (Eric Eastwood) reports

In this months demos (also shown off at the top of the TWIM post), Eric showed off a proof of concept to anonymize your screenshots so you can easily include more context when submitting logs or bug reports without worrying where the bug occurred. The current concept will color block all of the text on the page to still maintain the structure of the app but completely hide the content itself.

This still has a ways to go before it's integrated in Element under the click of a button so if anyone wants to take over or give feedback, go comment on the issue, https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/9615. If you want to use the anonymization now, you can manually run the JavaScript snippet from the issue in the browser devtools.

This mode could even be further extended further to include event_id labels in the corner of each message to easily correlate the logs to the screenshot.

Happy screenshotting!

kittykat reports

• Continuing with UI polish and MSCs for releasing threads out of Beta:
  • MSC3771: Read receipts for threads
  • MSC3772: Push rule for mutually related events
  • MSC3773: Notifications for threads
• We are testing out Sonarcloud, you’ll see comments from the sonarcloud bot in new PRs about bugs, vulnerabilities and other inconsistencies that it has found
• Our first time user experience is getting some attention in Web. We’re working on simplifying a user’s first session as we know it can be pretty daunting
• As part of our efforts to improve PR review times, we have put together some guidance on how to choose a good issue to work on
• There have been some bug fixes and improvements around ending Jitsi calls
• In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
• Check out this week’s Matrix Live for a preview of video rooms :)

Element iOS (website)

Secure and independent communication for iOS, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-ios:matrix.org!

Manu says

• We’re thinking about new ways to give flexibility on the Home screen - watch this space!
• The new Create Account flow is being implemented, currently we’re working on the captcha and T&Cs pages
• Fix several crashes like when searching or when clicking bottom bar twice
• Improve interaction with spaces which are in a space
• ElementX-iOS
  • We are going to share more and more about ElementX-iOS, a complete rewrite of the Element-iOS app using matrix-rust-sdk. We made a prototype last quarter. The result was so promising that we want to go full steam on it
  • We are finishing the setup of the project to have a good developer experience
  • Then, we will attack user stories listed in this board that target the personal message use case
  • Watch the today TWIM video with Stefan, Manu and Thib for more details

Element Android (website)

Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!

benoit announces

• Work is moving forward with our proposals for a new app layout, we’re excited to share it with you
• Our Create Account experience is still being updated, we’re currently working on ensuring that the Sign-in pieces work as expected
• Fixed a number of crash bugs around calls, launching app and space list
• Notifications have have been improved so that there is a noise for every notification which is received when they are enabled, in line with how web and iOS work
• On the SDK side, we are working to improve / clarify / document the public API. It’s still in progress, but the generated API documentation is already visible here: https://matrix-org.github.io/matrix-android-sdk2/

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Populus Viewer (website)

A Social Annotation Tool Powered by Matrix

gleachkr reports

Over the last two weeks, the theme in populus-viewer development has been permissions:

1. The settings menu for rooms has been redesigned
2. It's now possible to assign and remove standard roles (admin and moderator) from populus viewer
3. It's now possible to set power levels for standard events and actions from populus viewer
4. It's now possible to ban and unban using the membership management modal
5. Redacting the messages of others is now exposed as an action for those with that permission.

Besides that, I've been having some fun on the css-overhaul branch reorganizing some design elements, and centralizing the color CSS in a few variables, opening the way for things like a dark mode and user-definable themes. Here's a peek at the new milder and more welcoming default look:

gleachkr says

The permissions work now has us at one thousand commits. Here's to the next thousand! 🎉 As always, if you want to learn more, follow project progress, or talk about the future of social annotation on matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.

Matrix Wrench (website)

Matrix Wrench is a web client to tweak Matrix rooms.

ChristianP announces

Matrix Wrench 0.7.0

I'm working on a few features for Wrench's anniversary on 13th June. Here's a bug fix for storing identities and a new button to check your membership status in a room.

• Added: A "Am I a member?" button tells your membership state in a room.
• Fixed: Unchanged identities got deleted from localStorage when editing identities twice.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict says

After a few release candidates and weeks later, we released Trixnity 2.0.0 today! It contains many breaking changes due to a large refactoring, which allows us to share a lot code between server and client implementations of the Matrix APIs. This means, that Trixnity can be used to implement matrix servers in addition to application services and clients!

Trixnity finally has support for Kotlin/JS. You can implement a browser client or even better: multiplatform client. Support for Kotlin/Native will follow soon (e. g. for iOS clients). Right now, there is no trixnity-client-store implementation for JavaScript (e. g. IndexedDB), so you need to stick with InMemoryStore at the moment.

Besides notification support (push rules are evaluated), we introduced helpers to get the complete timeline as Kotlin-Flow (no more complicated loops to get the timeline). You can even subscribe to all timeline events, which is really helpful to implement bots with e2e encryption support. Speaking of e2e encryption: libolm is bundled into trixnity-olm jars, so you don't need to build olm by your own anymore.

These are the most important features. For the complete changelog, have a look at the release candidates.

Matrix Dart SDK (website)

Matrix SDK written in pure Dart.

Henri Carnot [famedly] announces

This week the team released version 0.9.0 which contains new features and some refactoring as many deprecated endpoints were removed so make sure to use the new ones when doing the migration. Support for the Element recent emoji (io.element.recent_emoji) was added. A new method to get the last read marker was added. Lastly, the timeline logic was enhanced, and it's now possible to load the timeline at a specific event. So you can load the room to the last event and then paginate through the new events. When reaching the last event, the timeline will automatically allow new events to be added in the timeline when received.

See you next week ;)

Dept of Ops 🛠

Cadair announces

I have spent the day ignoring more important things and trying to have something to TWIM. I wrote (yet another) GitHub Action for sending build status to matrix rooms. This action looks at all the completed jobs in your workflow and posts a combined status for the workflow as a message and reactions for all the individual jobs, inspired by the maubot GitLab plugin.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Sundar

Hyperbased in Hyperspace says

Hello together. I made a generic bot, named Safed Sundarata, or Sundar in short, that should make it easy to get basic special functionality working. It has a lot of different functionality so you have an example code to work off of. The main motivation for this bot was to provide an !error <code> command for the developers in the ReactOS Matrix Rooms, which translates error codes to human readable text. Then of course i added other useful or fun commands to the bot. You want to read the Readme to find out more. This is the first time i ever wrote a bot, so feedback and corrections to the Source Code are highly appreciated. It is written in Go using the mautrix-go framework (thanks tulir and everyone who worked on this making it easy!). Even easier is to run and build it with go, no insane build system with broken dependencies required, which was the reason why i made it from scratch.

Mjölnir (website)

The moderation bot for Matrix

Gnuxie 💜🐝 announces

Mjölnir

We have released v1.4.2 of Mjolnir https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir/releases/tag/v1.4.2 which includes:

Bot:

• A new JoinWaveShortCircuit protection, thanks to Jonathan with https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir/pull/280. This protection can be used to detect a mass-join scenario and set the room to invite-only.
• Change of behaviour: Mjolnir will now apply server ACL and member bans to the most recently active rooms first (while syncing). The order was random before.
• The causes of errors at startup (e.g. via misconfiguration) have been made more clear.
• The image with the latest tag on dockerhub is now correctly in sync with the main branch.

Synapse Module:

• The python module version is now in sync with the current git tag.
• The Readme's example config has been fixed (thanks to Maranda ).

graim (website)

A bot to moderate communities bridged with Discord via matrix-appservice-discord

luphoria announces

I am releasing a brand new moderation bot, graim! This bot allows you to moderate communities that are bridged with Discord via matrix-appservice-discord. You can tie a Matrix account to a Discord account, and moderate both platforms seamlessly from either end! Graim supports one Discord server and as many Matrix rooms as you want, per instance. :) You can run it yourself from the Github - https://github.com/luphoria/graim You can join the matrix space, which is bridged to the Discord server

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

andybalaam says

I'm streaming every week live coding Rust and Matrix at https://twitch.tv/andybalaam and https://andybalaam.uk.to (Owncast). Feel free to join me as I write a Rust Matrix bot. I'm currently on a side quest to add Redis support to the matrix-rust-sdk crypto store. You can watch past streams at diode.zone/a/andybalaam.

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	maunium.net	271.5
2	envs.net	388
3	aria-net.org	472
4	matrix.nkrw.art	687
5	quyo.de	719
6	computerlie.be	809
7	magdeburg.jetzt	847.5
8	mindlesstux.com	877
9	alemann.dev	1008
10	fab.network	1196

#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	matrix.awesomesheep48.me	310
2	conduit.grich.sk	445
3	dendrite.s3cr3t.me	455
4	cry.is	579
5	foxo.me	738
6	beckmeyer.us	752
7	grin.hu	1142
8	sspaeth.de	1255.5
9	forlorn.day	1680
10	pohiijekpkd55sbbrcbufkner2wkq3lcv7ruyxwjsgimrb5acbiupead.ml	1813

That's all I know 🏁

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

Synapse 1.58 is out! Let's dive into this new release.

Poetry

If you've been reading the past few Synapse release announcements, you might have already heard about our efforts to integrate Poetry into Synapse. Poetry is a tool which manages dependencies of a Python project. Its killer feature is its lockfile, which explicitly pins all dependencies (direct and transitive) to a fixed version, even across multiple Python versions and platforms. See more about why we choose Poetry here.

During the past few months, we've been hard at work converting Synapse and its CI to use Poetry. The goal is to make our Docker images and Debian packages more reproducible and to provide a fixed, known-good environment for CI. This will help us to ensure the stability and security of Synapse installations.

Synapse 1.57's Docker image was the first to use Poetry; after a successful trial, this was extended to Synapse 1.58's Debian packages. Installations from PyPI using pip will not use the locked environment, though everyone is welcome to install from source using our lockfile.

Huge props to David from the Synapse team for leading the work on this front.

Everything else

This release of Synapse also includes performance improvements around sharing device list updates, which should greatly improve login times for large Matrix accounts.

Synapse 1.58 also features the implementation of two MSCs: MSC3383 to include a destination parameter in federation authentication headers, and MSC2815 which (if enabled) allows room moderators to see the content of a redacted event (as long as it hasn't already been deleted by the homeserver).

See the full changelog for a complete list of changes in this release. Also please have a look at the upgrade notes for this version.

Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including (in no particular order) Beeper, Dirk Klimpel, Famedly and Sami Olmari.

We've released updates to matrix-appservice-irc and our forked node-irc that it depends on to patch a High security vulnerability. It's advised to update to 0.34.0 as soon as possible.

The vulnerability allows an attacker to manipulate a Matrix user into executing IRC commands by having them reply to a maliciously crafted message.

Incorrect handling of a CR character allowed for making part of the message be sent to the IRC server verbatim rather than as a message to the channel.

If you are currently a matrix-appservice-irc user, exercise caution when replying to messages from untrusted participants in IRC bridged rooms until your bridge instance has been upgraded.

The vulnerability has been patched in node-irc version 1.2.1 and matrix-appservice-irc 0.34.0. You can get the release on Github.

The bridges running on the Libera Chat, OFTC and other networks bridged by the Matrix.org Foundation have been patched.

The vulnerabilities are tracked as GHSA-37hr-348p-rmf4 and GHSA-52rh-5rpj-c3w6.

Thank you, Val Lorentz for reporting this vulnerability.