This Week in Matrix

Matrix Live 🎙

We forgot to mention that Doug is also the creator of Watch the Matrix! https://github.com/pixlwave/Watch-The-Matrix This allows you to use your Apple Watch as a native client (rather than through another iDevice)

These fellows all recently started to work for Element, and (claim!) to enjoy it. Element are HIRING, so if YOU think think you'd like to apply, check out https://apply.workable.com/elementio/ for current listings and details of how to apply.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Conduit Beta released

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

timokoesters announced:

We finally did it! We released Conduit Beta: https://conduit.rs/release-0-2-0, we even made it to the Hacker News frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2021-09-02

This is huge news for us and hopefully we will see a lot more Conduit instances pop up in the near future.

Thanks everyone!

Congratulations to Timo and the gang, you're making superb progress!

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa said:

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3368: Message Content Tags

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3375: Room version 9.
• MSC2582: Remove mimetype from EncryptedFile object

Obsolete MSCs:

• MSC3226: Per-room spell check

Abandoned MSCs:

• MSC3125: Limits API — Part 5: per-Instance limits

• MSC3073: Role based access control

• [WIP]MSC3066: Retrieve as redacted

• MSC3059: Limits API — Part 3: Federated rate limiting

• MSC3053: Limits API — Part 2: per-Room limits

• MSC3052: Sample events

• MSC3021: Limits API — Part 1: per-User limits

• MSC2929: Interaction events

• MSC2880: extend event and state API to allow sending to all rooms

• MSC2875: room descriptions

• MSC2834: Media IDs as hashes

Spec Updates

You may be wondering: what's up with all of these abandoned MSCs?? The answer is that the matrix-org/matrix-doc repo changed its base branch to main to help preserve the git history since the spec website rewrite. In doing so, all PRs were automatically updated to the new base branch by github... except those that were coming from deleted users and repos. Those ones were simply closed!

But as they seemed to be have been effectively abandoned by their authors, it was more of a cleanup than an accident. However, if your MSC was affected by this change and you would like to continue it, please contact someone in the #matrix-spec-office:matrix.org and we'll help you out.

Random Spec of the Week

The random spec of this week is... MSC2448: Using BlurHash as a Placeholder for Matrix Media!

MSC2448 defines a way for clients to include a "blurhash", or a short, textual representation of a blurred version of an image, inside events which other clients can show while waiting for thumbnails to download from media servers. This replaces the potentially blank space while an image's thumbnail is loading with a (IMO) beautiful alternative!

Yes I wrote this MSC... but I swear it's what the script picked! We do not question the script!!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

callahad said:

Two big notes this week:

1. Synapse 1.41.1 is out and it contains patches for two security vulnerabilities which could inappropriately disclose private room metadata to unauthorized users on a participating homeserver. Please upgrade.

2. Room Version 9 is coming in Synapse 1.42 next week. This version fixes an oversight in which event fields are protected from redaction in room version 8, making it possible for restricted rooms to break if a join event is redacted. Because event IDs are based on the redaction algorithm, we can't fix this without creating a new room version.

   In the interest of compatibility across the federation, Synapse 1.42 will still instruct clients to create restricted rooms using room version 8. Synapse 1.43, scheduled for release on 21 September, will begin instructing clients to use room version 9 instead.

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace announced:

And yet again another week of Kubernetes updates, my Helm Charts now have element-web on 1.8.2 and matrix-synapse on 1.41.1

Dept of Bridges 🌉

GitHub Discussions in Matrix

Half-Shot told us:

Hey folks! I had some spare time today so I've invested it into the matrix-github bridge. The latest work is GitHub discussions support. It's still needs a bit more testing / minor feature implementation, but I leave you with a screenshot below of how it currently integrates spaces!

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

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

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) told us:

We had a race between 3 Translators this week. All 3 of them were trying really hard, so in my opinion every placement is a first place, buuuuuut Thulinma actually came first by bringing the Dutch translation from 5% to 100%. A few hours later Priit came in as a close second updating the Estonian translation to 100%. ISSOtm noticed that and tried to catch up which resulted in a 3rd place finish for the French translation. Now I understand the excitement people feel watching others compete in sports without having to do anything themselves!

red_sky (nheko.im) meanwhile fought a much more difficult enemy, Apple documentation and code signing! To be honest, I expected him to be beaten, but Nheko's DMGs are now actually properly signed and notarized. So if you are on macOS, you should now see less ugly warnings when installing Nheko. All nightlies building of the master branch are signed as well as our future releases.

In more community contributions, resolritter fixed the right click menu not working on replies. So you can copy a link from a reply now by right-clicking it without having to scroll up. Thulinma fixed window alerts not working when using conduit, because Conduit does not implement the /notifications endpoint Nheko uses and he helped me debug and fix device lists not showing up when using Conduit as well as sessions always getting rotated in "Send encrypted messages to verified devices only" mode.

In our work to stabilize E2EE we also now require a proper secrets daemon running on Linux (and other platforms, but there it is always provided by the OS). This is used to store the pickle key as well as the cross-signing secrets, so that an attacker can't read the from the config file. We already used such a daemon before, but we failed silently and we didn't use it for the pickle key until now. So if this prevents you from running Nheko, please open an issue so that we can work on a solution. Those APIs can be really fickle so additional testing and feedback would help us out a lot!

Also exciting is that Nheko now supports playing encrypted audio and video files without storing a temporary unencrypted copy on disk as well as animated images like WebP and GIF! It took us a while to figure out a proper solution, but now you can send animated stickers and you will finally be able to understand why other people were lauging at still images. (We also had to fix some bugs in our sticker editor, where we didn't add the mimetype to the sticker info for that.)

Some more embarrassing news, I didn't know I was a moderator in #conduit:fachschaften.org, so I happily pinged everyone in the room while discussing room mentions. To prevent that from happening in the future, Nheko now shows a red warning above the message input if you will be pinging the whole room to give you time to reconsider. If that is not enough to stop me from doing that, we might require confirmation before sending such messages in the future, but so far this seems to work. Pinging everyone by accident can really scare you and composing a message in Matrix shouldn't be scary!

I hope I didn't forget anything and please make sure you check out Conduit, since they are doing a great job in revealing bugs in Nheko!

FluffyChat

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

krille announced:

FluffyChat 0.39.0 has been released

This release fixes a bug which makes it impossible to send images in unencrypted rooms. It also implements a complete new designed new chat page which now uses a QR code based workflow to start a new chat.

• feat: Dismiss keyboard on scroll in iOS

• feat: Implement QR code scanner

• feat: New design for new chat page

• feat: Use the stripped body for notifications and room previews

• feat: Send on enter configuration for mobile devices

• fix: Prefix of notification text

• fix: Display space as room if it contains unread events in timeline

• fix: missing null check

• fix: Open matrix.to urls

• fix: Padding and colors

• fix: Sharing invite link

• fix: Unread bubbles on iOS

• fix: Sending images in unencrypted rooms

Element Clients

Updates from the teams.

Delight team

• Testing and polishing of Spaces.

Web

• Released Element Web 1.8.2
• We’ve added an early, incomplete prototype of Threads to Labs
• Bug fixes

iOS

• App startup has been improved by x3 by lazy loading room messages and read receipts
• Element-iOS is now iOS12 minimum. Code have been cleaned up
• URL preview is still in progress but it should be available in the next release, 1.5.3
• SwiftUI: There is now a target to run the Xcode project without the MatrixSDK to speedup SwiftUI preview. This is the first piece for the coming new screen templates

Android

• Working on upgrading Android Gradle Plugin to 7.0.2 and other dependencies.
• Set up GitHub actions and reduce the number of tasks run by Buildkite
• Spaces PRs are merged one by one to develop, the feature will be available in the coming releases
• Working on crypto: dehydrated devices, Olm fallback keys

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib

krazykirby99999 offered:

Version 2.1.0 Released!

This version of the simplematrixbotlib package adds the ability to send messages formatted in markdown via the bot.api.send_markdown_message() method. Example usage is shown below:

#### Respond to all messages from users with a hello world message that involves markdown formatting

import simplematrixbotlib as botlib

creds = botlib.Creds("https://home.server", "user", "pass")

bot = botlib.Bot(creds)

@bot.on_message_event

async def hello_world_md(room, message):
    match = botlib.MessageMatch(room, message, bot)

    markdown_message = "# Hello World from [simplematrixbotlib](https://github.com/KrazyKirby99999/simple-matrix-bot-lib)!"
    if match.is_not_from_this_bot():

        await bot.api.send_markdown_message(
            room_id=room.room_id,

            message=markdown_message)

bot.run()

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Circles

cvwright announced:

Circles is a project to build a secure, end-to-end encrypted social network, using Matrix as the foundation.

News

We're getting very close to a real App Store launch. The latest beta release this week is 0.98 This version might be The One! So please, if you haven't tried Circles in a while, give this one a shot. Also please share the link with any friends and family who you think might be interested. The current signup token has plenty of slots for everyone.

If you want to see some activity in your circles, invite me to follow your Community circle and I'll invite you to follow back. I'm @cvwright:kombucha.social.

WARNING

If you've been using Circles with your own (non-Kombucha) server, you probably DO NOT WANT this version. Support for bring-your-own-server will return very soon after our App Store launch.

Latest updates

• Broke and then re-enabled new account signup. Thanks to everyone who helped diagnose this one, and sorry if you were unable to sign up using a recent build.

• Fixed a weeks-old bug where posting a message into a circle would then send you back to your list of all your social circles. Big thanks to Yosef for bringing this to my attention.

• Fixed a bug in recent 0.9x builds where the Matrix rooms underlying circles and groups were being created with invalid encryption parameters. If you've been unable to post anything, this is the likely culprit. The fix is to update to the latest build, then delete your old circles/groups and create new ones.

• We have a new icon. It's blue! I was worried that Apple might think the old icon looked too much like the Apple Photos icon.

• New and improved interface for managing your account information. Added support for changing your password and for deactivating your account. I hope you never want this last one, but Apple requires it for apps that allow you to create accounts.

• Removed support for Markdown formatting in posts and image captions. This is a sad one, but unfortunately the performance of the open source library that we were using for Markdown just wasn't up to the task. On the bright side, our timelines load much more quickly now, and the scrolling should be much smoother. Look for Markdown support to return with the release of iOS 15 later this year.

• Another update to the Recent Activity list. Now it should refresh itself automatically if/when it initially comes up empty.

• Improved layout and usability on iPad.

CoMatrix - Constrained Matrix

tobi reported:

The CoMatrix project enables the usage of the Matrix protocol (more precisely Matrix Client-Server API) for constrained IoT devices via CoAP and CBOR in a constrained network (e.g. a 802.15.4/6LoWPAN network).

CoMatrix provides a gateway, which ports Matrix to CoAP/CBOR/(DTLS). This gateway communicates with constrained IoT devices on one side via CoAP+CBOR and translates to the Matrix protocol on the other side (i.e. HTTP+JSON). CoMatrix also provides a client library (for RIOT-OS) which is a starting point to implement CoMatrix clients (for constrained devices) which are able to interact with Matrix homeservers via the gateway.

Currently CoMatrix supports the following features:

• Sending of messages to a Matrix room

• Receiving the last message of a Matrix room

• User registration at a Matrix Synapse HS

• Joining a Matrix room upon invitation

• Login of a user at a Matrix Synapse HS

• Logout of a user at a Matrix Synapse HS

More information:

• Project website: https://comatrix.eu/

• Code repository: https://gitlab.com/comatrix/comatrix

• CoMatrix will be presented at RIOT Summit 2021 (online; free registration) on 10.09.2021 at 11:30 AM (UTC+0): https://summit.riot-os.org/2021/

pipeline-runner receives jobs over Matrix

thejhh offered:

I have made a small 120k pipeline-agent software (including all dependencies except NodeJS v8) which can run on multiple platforms (including OpenWRT) and takes pipeline work over the Matrix protocol. In the end it's going to be used to setup things like VPN connections between gateways.

We also have a commercial web portal almost published where one can create web apps and configure pipelines to process the results. And yes, the portal also uses Matrix as its persistent storage -- it was implemented using my Matrix CRUD Repository from last week :)

The agent software (pipeline-runner) is open source and has zero (0) runtime dependencies except NodeJS, and available from here: https://github.com/sendanor/pipeline-runner -- It's still in early development, though.

Final Thoughts 💭

Room of the week

timokoesters reported:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

---

This week's room is: #music-discovery:matrix.org

"Discover music through peers - Please write a small description of your discoveries. No uploads of non-free music please. For discussions and chat please visit the room's sibling #musicdiscussion:matrix.org "

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, tell me in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

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.

#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.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

These Hydrogen news leave me breathless!

Bruno also shared the news about the latest release:

Hydrogen 0.2.7 with Single Sign-on and well-known lookup also got released this week

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa told us:

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3361: Opportunistic Direct Push

• MSC3360: Server Status

• [WIP] MSC3359: Delayed Push

• MSC3356: Add additional OpenID user info fields

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2918: Refresh tokens (merge)
• MSC2582: Remove mimetype from EncryptedFile object (merge)

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

MSC2582 (Removing mimetype from EncryptedFile object) was one of those MSCs that were relatively small, but had been languishing for ages. Partly because it required client implementations to update, but also partly because one needed to go in after a while and actually confirm that all known clients had updated. @uhoreg took up the mantle on his own to do so, and as a result this MSC has hit FCP and is soon to be merged. Thank you!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is MSC3262: aPAKE authentication!

Alongside MSC2957 and MSC3265, this MSC is requesting a better way of communicating one's password to the homeserver without sending it in plaintext (over TLS, hopefully).

Remember that this is only done in exchange for an access token, which is then used for all subsequent requests. Still though, I can see the merit!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

callahad told us:

Synapse 1.41.0 is out! Check the release announcement to find out about all of the details, including progress on MSCs, great new Admin APIs, and the ability to handle the /createRoom endpoint on workers. As mentioned in last week's TWiM, Synapse 1.41 uses MSC3244: Room version capabilities to tell clients that they can and should use Room Version 8 when creating restricted rooms. The future is here!

We've also stopped publishing Debian packages for Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy).

⚠️ We expect to publish a security release Synapse 1.41.1 on Tuesday, 31 August which fixes two moderate severity issues.

Lastly, the Synapse team would like to extend a warm welcome to Sean Quah, who joined Element's backend team this week. Welcome, Sean!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

And yet again this week sees another update to my Helm Charts, with matrix-synapse bumped to 1.41.0

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

This Ansible playbook is meant to easily let you run your own Matrix homeserver.

Slavi said:

Thanks to Alexandar Mechev, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now install the beeper-linkedin bridge for bridging to LinkedIn Messaging.

This brings up the total number of bridges supported by the Ansible playbook to 20.

Dept of Clients 📱

FluffyChat 0.38.0 has been released

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

krille offered:

This release adds more functionality for spaces, enhances the html viewer, adds a brand new video player and brings some improvements for voice messages. Thanks to everyone involved!

Please note: It will take some days until it arrives in all appstores.

All changes:

• change: Nicer design for selecting items

• change: Placeholder at username login field should be just username

• chore: cleanup no longer used translation strings

• chore: switch image_picker back to upstream

• chore: update flutter_matrix_html

• chore: Update matrix sdk to 0.3.1

• feat: Add option to not autoplay stickers and emotes

• feat: Add remove rooms to and from spaces

• feat: Add video player

• feat: Cupertino style record dialog

• feat: Display amplitude

• feat: Implement official emoji translations for emoji verification

• feat: Nicer displaying of verification requests in the timeline

• fix: Allow fallback to previous url if there is no homeserver on the mxid domain

• fix: Correctly size the unread bubble in the room list

• fix: Design of invite rooms

• fix: Disable autocorrect for the homeserver url field

• fix: Disable broken audioplayer for web

• fix: Display loading dialog on start DM

• fix: Dont add/remove DMs to space

• fix: Empty timelines crashing the room view

• fix: excessive CPU usage on Windows, as described in https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/78517#issuecomment-846436695

• fix: Joining room aliases not published into the room directory

• fix: Keep display alive while recording

• fix: Load space members to display DM rooms

• fix: Make translations use plural forms

• fix: Re-add login fixes with the new SDK

• fix: Reply with voice messages

• fix: Report content localizations

• fix: Requirements when to display report event button

• fix: too long file names

• fix: Try different directories on all kind of errors thrown for hive store

• fix: Use plural string in translation

• fix: use vrouter.toSegments

• fix: Wait for sync before enter a room a user has got invited

• fix: wallpaper on linux

• fix: Wrap login form into AutofillGroup

Cinny v1.2.0

ajbura said:

Cinny is about to get one month old 🎉 (on 28th) and v1.2.0 is out with the following changes:

Features

• Added support for sending reactions.

• Added support for message editing.

• Display names suggestions for auto completion are available after typing @.

• You can now see read receipt of messages.

• Replaced commonmark with micromark, which means now you can send properly formatted tables and images with links.

• Non kick leave messages are also visible now.

• Added support for displaying stickers sent from other clients.

Bugs

• Fixed no known servers issue upon joining channels.

• Fixed crashes on bad media data.

• Fixed inconsistent display names in people drawer.

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

Sailtrix

hengyedev told us:

Sailtrix is a matrix client for SailfishOS.

Here is a list of developments this week:

• Added more time intervals for checking notifications

• Added an option to disable notifications when the app is closed

• Avatars for rooms and members are now rounded

• Uploading files now sends mimetype in the info object for increased compatibility with some bridges

• Use qsTr for most QML strings

• Fixed a bug where matrix: URLs with # in them would not launch

• Fix a bug where the local echo message would appear when editing

These changes have been released in Sailtrix 1.3.1, available on OpenRepos.

Discussion: #sailtrix:matrix.org

GitLab: https://gitlab.com/HengYeDev/harbour-sailtrix OpenRepos: https://openrepos.net/content/hengyedev/sailtrix

NeoChat

Carl Schwan said:

This week Tobias implemented blurhash in NeoChat for a smoother image loading experience. Tobias also continued working on E2EE and this past week his focus was on decrypting encrypted files.

Ement.el

alphapapa said:

Ement.el, a Matrix client for Emacs, gained some more improvements this week:

• Multi-account support was merged, so you can now use multiple accounts at the same time. You can even be in the same room in two different accounts, at the same time, in side-by-side windows (which is useful for testing). (Note that existing users will need to log in again, because the format of the saved-session file changed.)

• Rooms you have been invited to now show up in the rooms list, and you can join them by clicking a button in the room's buffer.

• Encrypted rooms now display a warning in the header and suggest that users consider using Pantalaimon.

• Membership events are now formatted more usefully, similar to Element's style.

• Completion for room and user names and IDs is implemented using standard Emacs commands and bindings (i.e. C-M-i by default).

• The last-read marker may be jumped to, even if it's at an earlier event that has not yet been retrieved.

• Emotes (i.e. /me-style messages) can be sent by pressing e.

• Timestamps in the room list are shaded according to how "hot" (i.e. recently updated) the room is (see screenshot).

• Various small fixes and enhancements.

Feel free to join us in #ement.el:matrix.org!

Nheko

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

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) said:

Nheko now supports uploading to online key backup and warns you before enabling it, that we don't recommend using the asymmetric version. If you update to one of the current builds (and or the next version), you will also experience a bit longer load times on first startup. That is because we force-cleared the cache to be able to handle the new goodies like spaces and sticker/emote-packs. In the best case, everything is seamless.

We also had contributions by various people:

• resolritter cleaned up that while tab moved you down most popup lists, it didn't move up when shift was pressed.

• Harmathy extended the FAQ to answer commonly asked questions like "Does Nheko support E2EE" or "What commands are supported". Don't worry, we know most of you won't read that and will still answer that question when you undoubtedly come asking it again. We just can now be even more passive aggressive than just pointing at the right wiki page. Instead we will point at the FAQ now, which will point at the wiki!

• thombles made the emoji completer behave more nicely. Instead of jumping to the bottom left corner before closing, it will now just close. It should also now behave correctly when selecting text.

• alfasi updated the install instructions for Gentoo.

I'm not sure we have ever seen that many new faces contributing to Nheko in a week, I'm pretty happy to see that!

Fractal

Busy week in Fractal land! It is the end for GSoC, but it’s not really over. While some merge requests from our interns are still ongoing, Julian merged a bunch of them. On Kai’s side, the long awaited Room details are finally here. Alejandro, on the other hand, landed code to get display name and avatar of accounts at startup.

Circles

cvwright offered:

Circles is a project to build a secure, end-to-end encrypted social network on top of Matrix. The iOS app is currently in the final stages of beta testing in preparation for a 1.0 release.

Updates this week include:

• Fixed a bug that prevented some new users from registering. If you tried to sign up last week but the email validation failed, please give it another try with the latest build.

• Cleaned up the "Home" tab for a simpler, cleaner look.

• Fixed a bug where the summary of recent activity was failing to load on app startup. Also added a manual "refresh" button as a fallback.

If you would like to try the latest Circles beta (v0.93), you can get it from Apple here

Element Clients

Updates from the teams

Delight team

• Room version 8 was marked as the preferred version for MSC3083 restricted rooms on matrix.org and in Synapse 1.41, released this week. This means Element clients can now show UI to create restricted rooms within a Space, and prompt users to upgrade rooms if necessary when making them restricted.
• Improvements to the performance of the room summary API.
• Lots of testing of Spaces in anticipation of it leaving beta.

VoIP

• Fix cases where a call ringtone would continue even after the call was answered.
• Add active speaker indicators when a user in a call is currently talking.
• Working on showing call duration in call tiles.

Web

• We’ve released 1.8.2 RC3 which includes fixes to windows font rendering, blur hashing and accessibility improvements, and other bugs.
• Our internal threads prototype is in code review.
• This week, we’ve been doing more work on threads, fixed some more cross-signing bugs, iterating on more compact replies, and investigating our process for translations.

iOS

• Continue to work on URL preview.
• App Navigation improvement: Continue to work on room navigation.
• Account notification settings are now available.
• Voice message rendering and playback fixes have been made.
• We added a banner to advertise that iOS 11 will be dropped soon.
• Room creation: prevent room duplication on creation.
• Media upload sizing: Continue to improve media size selection.

Android

• We are still improving the experience with Spaces
• Notifications setting will be updated in the next release, with the ability to get notified when keywords are included in any message (only on un-encrypted rooms for now)
• Working on Olm fallback key support
• Besides that we are fixing bugs across the application and the SDK. We have fixed the issue of crashing when opening a room on devices running API 21. The fix will be in the next release.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma

Ruma is a set of Rust library crates around Matrix

jplatte reported:

It's been so long since our last update that I couldn't possibly list all of the individual changes, but here's a rough overview of the work since then (three months ago):

There's been loads of bug fixes, many compatibility improvements and at least one large refactoring. We've been much faster about releasing changes to crates.io after ruma 0.1.0, now we're already at ruma 0.4.0 (!); the changes needed to upgrade are really not that significant though. Notable areas of improvement are

• UIAA: No more stringly-typed auth type + map of properties. The AuthData enum that holds the authentication information clients send to servers now has one variant for every auth type defined in the spec.

• Event relations: These used to be serialized wrongly for encrypted events and were only (de)serializable as part of a larger event (making using them in custom ways impossible). Both of these issues were fixed.

Additionally, the GSoC coding period is over and our students have both written a blog post summarizing their work: API Coverage project (Adam Blanchet), Tooling project (Devin Ragotzy)

If you want more detailed updates about Ruma, please watch our repository's GitHub releases, since nobody in the project currently wants to write regular blog posts or TWIM updates (if you are interested in changing that, get in touch over at #ruma:matrix.org).

libQuotient

kitsune reported:

This week a new stable version of libQuotient, 0.6.8, has been released. While the main focus has been fixing bugs and sustaining the codebase, one significant highlight is that read receipts and fully read markers are distinguished now, which should improve interaction with other clients that has been treating them differently for quite some time now. This version is anticipated to become the base of the upcoming Quaternion 0.0.95.

Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib

krazykirby99999 offered:

Version 2.0.0 Released!

The second major version of the simplematrixbotlib package has been released. It is available from Github and PyPi.

Example usage is shown below:

#### echo.py
#### Example:

#### randomuser - "!echo example string"
#### echo_bot - "example string"

import simplematrixbotlib as botlib

creds = botlib.Creds("https://home.server", "echo_bot", "pass")

bot = botlib.Bot(creds)
PREFIX = '!'

@bot.listener.on_message_event

async def echo(room, message):
    match = botlib.MessageMatch(room, message, bot, PREFIX)

    if match.is_not_from_this_bot() and match.prefix() and match.command("echo"):

        await bot.api.send_text_message(

            room.room_id, " ".join(arg for arg in match.args())
            )

bot.run()

You can find the quickstart here.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

MatrixCrudRepository.ts

thejhh said:

I made an experimental Matrix-based persistent storage CRUD repository: https://github.com/sendanor/matrix/blob/main/MatrixCrudRepository.ts

Final Thoughts 💭

Room of the week

timokoesters told us:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

---

This week's room is: #terminal-gaming:matrix.org

"Channel dedicated to games running in terminal environment (or one that looks like terminal) As long as the game could be easily ported to terminal, it belongs here :) Telegram: t.me/cligaming"

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, tell me in #roomoftheweek

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.

#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.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Half-Shot's bridge notes this week

• GSOC! abbyck/Abhinav's email bridge
• Bridge team has been busy, on the EMS side we've released Signal/WA for early bird testing.
• Landmark changes in bridge libraries: we've released 3.0.0-rc1 of matrix-appservice-bridge. Both the IRC bridge and the Gitter bridge have tested it with great results.
• Tadzik has been making massive gains on the IRC bridge, formatting tweaks and bugs being nailed.
• Finally, I have a car!

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa reported:

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3348: Server-Server Room based extensible communication

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

Don't be mistaken by the rather empty list above, there were many PRs to the contents of the spec flying around this week! These include some further contributions from lukaslihotzki, some clarifications from dkasak and some spec contributions and tooling documentation additions from richvdh. Also a clarification from uhoreg.

Thank you to everyone for your PRs!

Otherwise, there has been a small amount of activity across the spectrum of MSCs this week. One MSC to call out is https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3283, which could do with some more input from the wider community.

Random MSC of the week

And finally, something fun. I've written a small script to pick a random MSC that people may or may not want to have a look at.

And this week we've got 🥁...

MSC2437: Store tagged events in Room Account Data!

Have a look if you haven't already, or take another look again if you have 😀

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Neil Alexander said:

This week, we tagged the v0.5.0 release candidate, which contains two major advancements on the encryption front: support for server-side key backups and support for cross-signing. The addition of these features makes Dendrite significantly more user-friendly, as it is now possible to log out or share keys across devices without losing your conversations.

We'll be aiming to finalise this release next week. Stay tuned in #dendrite:matrix.org for more details.

Sytest compliance currently sits at:

• Client-server APIs: 65%, up from 61% last time

• Server-server APIs: 92%, same as last time

Those sytest numbers!! Might be time to start playing with dendrite?

Synapse

callahad said:

We are on track to release Synapse 1.41 next week. This version will use an unstable property proposed by MSC3244: Room version capabilities to advertise to clients that they may create restricted rooms using Room Version 8, despite the default room version remaining at 6 for the time being.

This strikes a balance between the broad compatibility of an older default room version, while still making newer features available when requested at room creation time. However, from next week you are more likely to encounter v8 rooms, so please do ensure your homeserver is running at least 1.40.

I'd also like to tip my hat to Element employee Olivier, who has put in the work to ensure that tagged Sygnal releases are automatically built and uploaded to Docker Hub via GitHub Actions. Thanks, Olivier!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

This week too sees updates to my Helm Charts, with element-web being bumped to 1.8.0 - and then subsequently 1.8.1

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Heisenbridge roundup!

hifi said:

Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.

• Automatic queries (DM rooms) from IRC users can now be disabled and a query opened manually if needed (messages appear in network rooms)

• Plumbs can now be set to not do disambiguation or ZWSP injection

• Small cleanups and fixes

Heisenbridge is now considered stable and v1.0.0 has been released! 🍻 🥳

Focus is shifting to v2.0.0 which will be a major refactor. The 1.x series will at least receive bug fixes if not features. Do note that if you are using the master branch or latest tag for Docker it may cause a breaking change in the future when the work starts being merged. Highly suggest moving to version tags regardless of the deployment method. If you are using matrix-docker-ansible-deploy it has been updated to v1.0.0 as of writing so pulling the latest master there is advised.

Thanks!

matrix-appservice-irc

tadzik said:

This week brought the release of 0.30.0, which includes

• Better formatting of long messages and code blocks – thanks 14mRh4X0r!

• Quality of life improvements to admin room command handling

• Numerous documentation improvements

• And more!

More goodies coming Soon[tm], so watch this space :)

matrix-appservice-bridge 3.0.0 is now in RC

Half-Shot told us:

If the car wasn't enough, I bring more news! Our matrix.org bridge library, matrix-appservice-bridge has had a total shakeup. Version 3.0.0-rc1 is out and with it comes the migration from the matrix-js-sdk to the matrix-bot-sdk. This is a massive change underneath that should result in faster performance, better typings and hopefully lower memory footprints too.

I'd encourage everyone using this library to update and see how well it works for you! The IRC and Gitter bridges have already experimented with this change and have seen good results, so I look forward to hearing feedback :)

(See details about the referenced car below and in Matrix Live above)

Dept of Clients 📱

Fractal

Alexandre Franke reported:

Fractal updates three weeks in a row? 😱

Kai was on fire this week 🔥 with 5 (❗️) new merge requests that all landed! The highlights are that rooms are now sorted by activity and room members now have a power-level property. The other ones (!815, !816, !817) are maintenance and code quality related.

Julian Hofer also contributed a code quality change by making every subclass use Default.

Shout out to Julian Sparber, who’s still busy with his upstream work in the Rust SDK, and managed to review and merge all the above contributions.

Sailtrix

hengyedev said:

This week, I released Sailtrix v1.3 on OpenRepos.

New features:

• Notification functionality

• matrix: URI scheme support

• Tab based layout

• Sorting rooms by activity

• Fixed a bug where editing in encrypted rooms did not appear correctly

• Avatars and display names are displayed for direct message rooms.

Matrix: #sailtrix:matrix.org

OpenRepos: https://openrepos.net/content/hengyedev/sailtrix GitLab: https://gitlab.com/HengYeDev/harbour-sailtrix

NeoChat

Carl Schwan reported:

This week Janet improved receiving files in NeoChat. Now downloading a file can be stopped, a file type icon is displayed and it looks better! Other than that Felipe Kinoshita made some small visual improvements to the day separator in the timeline and Tobias continued working on E2EE inside Quotient.

Tomorrow Tobias and I will be doing a small presentation/demo of NeoChat at frOSCon in German. It's online so you don't have any excuse to not watch it: https://programm.froscon.de/2021/events/2711.html

Nheko

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

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) told us:

• Nheko now shows you the verification status of all devices in a room as well as in the memberlist. This is important so you can tell, if an unverified device may get access to a message, if you send it. You can always disable sending messages to unverified devices for extra peace of mind.

• callum's work on Token Authenticated Registration got merged! 🎉

• manu's room directory (finally) got merged. This means you can now discover public rooms on your server and join them by clicking the room directory button, that Nheko had for 3 years but was disabled until now! Support for the room directories of other servers as well as filtering by network should come in the future.

• There is now an "Allow them in" button on pending knocks in the timeline, joins via room membership in a different room now tell you, what user's server was used to sign off on the join and you can set a room to restricted or knock only. (You currently can't change the list of allowed servers though).

• Dialogs should now have a close button again on Windows, the emoji search field now clears on closing the emoji picker and we added a workaround for stickers not showing on Element iOS, because iOS can't display stickers without a thumbnail, even if a thumnail makes no sense for stickers. (We just copy the sticker url into the thumbnail url.)

• Nheko can now download encryption keys from online key backup. Uploading to online key backup will come soon(tm).

• If you are interested, I will talk about Nheko tomorrow (21.08. starting 16:10) at FrOSCon in the Matrix dev room. Make sure you check out the other talks too, if you speak German! https://programm.froscon.de/2021/events/2706.html

Phew, that was a mouthful.

Element Clients

Updates from the teams

Delight team

• This week, our web, iOS and Android engineers are all enjoying some time off.
• On backend, we’ve completed pagination of the Spaces Summary. This week, we’ve been looking at performance improvements to the Summary API.
• We intend to mark room Version 8 as the preferred version for MSC3083 restricted rooms on matrix.org and in Synapse 1.41 (due for release next week) via MSC3244. Once this change is made, Element clients will show UI to create restricted rooms within a Space, and prompt users to upgrade rooms if necessary when making them restricted.
• Our design team is exploring some tweaks on how to make Spaces a little bit clearer and easier to understand.

Web

• We released 1.8.1 which fixed some regressions with calls - sorry for any failed calls!
• Work on our threads prototype continues. We’re hoping to have something to look at internally next week.
• Sentry submission support has been added to Rageshakes. We expect to enable this on https://app.element.io next week.
• We’ve been fixing some bugs around cross-signing, Windows font rendering, and image blur hashing.
• Our new triage process has been published on the wiki.

iOS

• Element Alpha work is complete. This is a new app for internal testing. A QR code is available on every PR like this one to install the build on a device. Only devices registered in the Element Apple Developer account can install this app.
• Improved notification content: No more “Message” notification.
• Fixed some timeline layout issues.
• Media upload sizing: We added a prompt when sending video to select the resolution of the sent video. Media size prompt can be disabled in settings.
• URL preview work has started.
• App Navigation improvement: Working on room navigation to prepare the ground for threading.
• On the performance side, we are working on room messages lazy loading to improve application speed.

Android

• Fix authenticated jitsi not working in release (proguard issue)
• Handle call ended reasons (busy, invite timeout).
• Working on Olm fallback key support
• Work on call ui and call tiles is finished, waiting to be reviewed
• Start working on extracting API client from the SDK

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Polyjuice Client 🧙

uhoreg said:

Polyjuice Client v0.4.2 has been released. This release features more functions for creating messages, including file and media messages (thanks to multi prise), replies, reactions, and edits. Polyjuice Client can also now be considered a serious Matrix library as it has a new function to generate rainbow-coloured messages! 🌈 Multi prise has also added support for registering a new user, redacting messages, and searching the user directory.

Polyjuice Util v0.2.1 (an Elixir library for Matrix features that can be used on both the client-side and server-side) was also recently released. The main feature for this release is support for handling Matrix URIs, and supports mxc:, matrix.to, and matrix:-style URIs.

Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib

krazykirby99999 reported:

Version 2 of Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib will release very soon. It is complete in all but the documentation. If you would like to try version 2 early, you can find it on a branch of the git repository here https://github.com/KrazyKirby99999/simple-matrix-bot-lib/tree/v2.

Some of the changes are shown below:

These changes are only some of the most important changes between versions 1 and 2, and there are more changes in addition to these. I apologize for the delays in releasing version 2.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Mjolnir

TravisR told us:

Mjolnir v0.1.19 is out now with a voice message protection built-in (ideal for public communities where voice messages can't be easily moderated) and updates to the shutdown room command to support modern Synapses. Check out !mjolnir protections after upgrading, and visit #mjolnir:matrix.org for help and support.

Audio/Voice Message Prevention Maubot Plugin

MTRNord told us:

Since element now landed voice message support I build a small maubot plugin which prevents audio and voice messages as those cannot yet get restricted by power level.

It starts by warning you via replies, after a configured amount of warnings goes over to kicking and after a certain amount of kicks it will ban you in the room the event was sent in.

The counter is global so if a user in room A runs out of warnings and the same user sents a voice message in room B where the bot is present the bot will ban the user also in room B without further warnings.

Source at: https://github.com/MTRNord/maubot-audio-preventer

This plugin is already running on my maubot at @mjolnir:nordgedanken.dev

Middleman

jaywink reported:

New version of Middleman, the helpful relay bot in the middle. Version 0.2.0 in addition to various smaller changes and fixes, enables sending out messages from the command room to any room the bot is in, supports relaying notices (so you can command other bots using the Middleman bot 🤖) and adds support for flagging certain rooms as "mention only", in which case only mentions are relayed.

Find Middleman here: https://github.com/elokapina/middleman

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix-Dev Room @ FrOSCon (virtual) is already tomorrow!

Oleg said:

This weekend we are organising a Matrix Dev-Room at the FrOSCon with some quite interesting talks (in German 🇩🇪):

• Community update, Spaces, Matrix in Germany (schools, health sector) and more

• How to deploy a Matrix server using Ansible

• Matrix as a part of open education platform

• Matrix Clients (Neochat, Nheko, FluffyChat)

• Beyond chat - using Matrix for non-chat applications

• Using (Opsdroid) bots in Matrix (with NLU/AI)

Take a look at the conference schedule and join us at #FrOSCon:fiksel.info!

FrOSCon will be a virtual event and it's free! See you tomorrow!

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Half-Shot's car

Half-Shot said:

Howdy folks, it's been aaaaages since I've done mad little project but I had some LEGO and was bored on a Sunday. I present to you matrix-poweredup! This is a little bot that connects to any LEGO PoweredUp devices (using the node-poweredup library). You can then start controlling the motors via Matrix, and have the sensors report back into the Matrix room. It's currently limited to a RC buggy I picked up over the weekend but it's very extendible. It also includes a web application to control things via a gamepad, if that's your bag.

There will be a little demo at the end of Matrix Live, so watch this space

Server Stats

MTRNord reported:

Some updates on the serverstats project:

As a few of you noticed the pages are currently down due to some mess that happened (not going into detail on purpose here).

The pages however will soon come back. I am now using the time they are down to improve the code and some pages on it. So dont be worried it is not dead but it will come back as soon as I get those changes done 🙂

Circles

cvwright reported:

Circles is an iOS app for end-to-end encrypted secure social networking and sharing, built on top of Matrix. Its goal is to provide a safe and convenient way for close friends and families to share things that they wouldn't post publicly -- e.g. for parents to safely share pictures of their kids. You can also use it to share updates with your friends, without a creepy advertising company data mining every word.

Circles features include:

• Social "wall"-like functionality and timeline of friends' posts for each of your social circles, e.g. Friends, Family, Neighbors, Coworkers, etc.

• Private groups

• Encrypted photo galleries

Recent updates to the Circles beta include:

• Support for use with any Matrix homeserver, including a new encrypted recovery and key backup mechanism that should be compatible with other Matrix clients like Element. (Please note: For use with standard Matrix accounts, be sure to select "Advanced options" at login and enter your passphrase for key backup / recovery.)

• Emoji reactions

• Markdown formatting for text posts and image captions

• Better support for larger screens (iPad)

The latest beta build of Circles (v0.91) is available from Apple on TestFlight

Dept of Guides 🧭

Digital Justice

Bram said:

As a hobby, I built a website called Digital Justice. It's a website that explains in layman's terms what certain digital topics are (like data sovereignty, software autonomy and abandonware continuity) and why those topics matter.

I'll also write several articles related to digital rights. For now, there's three articles: one that explains how to join Matrix, one that explains how and why the government should strive towards decentralization, and one that explains why users should consider using Matrix instead of Signal.

The website may be a bit too simple for privacy gurus who know their stuff, but it's meant as an accessible resource to help people understand why privacy matters. Feel free to use the website as a resource, share the RSS feed or use it as a FAQ to your colleague who doesn't understand why you're so adamant on using an open communication protocol.

If you'd like to see something corrected or would like to add something to the website, the source code's here and you can always contact me through the website.

Final Thoughts 💭

Room of the week

timokoesters told us:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

---

This week's room is: #physics:matrix.org

"Friendly Physics Related Discussion Talking Point: LIGO & Hawking's area theorem https://tinyurl.com/nzuaaepv Book Club 22nd August 15:00 BST | Bishop & Goldberg (manifolds) | Book Club Site: https://tinyurl.com/2sn9upx2 +stardust:matrix.org"

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, tell me in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

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.

#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.

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 📜

Spec

anoa offered:

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:

• MSC3338: Adding iframe specifics to preview json

• MSC3325: Upgrading invite-only rooms

• MSC3316: Add timestamp massaging to the spec

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3289: Room version 8

Closed MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC2359: E2EE VoIP Conferencing

Spec Updates

Work on Spaces continues with MSC2946 (Space Summary API), specifically revolving around how to paginate the summary. This has called into question how pagination across Matrix works in general, which is a prime target for refactoring - perhaps an upcoming consistent pagination MSC? :)

Otherwise, as listed above, MSC3289 (room v8) has merged! It brings with it the ability to grant the ability to join a room based on one's membership in another room. While the was originally conceived for allowing users that are part of one Space to be allowed to join rooms, it has been built upon in other creative ways. Such as in MSC3325, where it could be used to make room upgrades more seamless!

And finally, a special thanks to Lukas Lihotzki for all of their spec PRs this week. They're been stellar!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad reported:

Big news! Synapse 1.40 is out and it comes with support for Room Version 8! Version 8 includes "restricted rooms" which are only visible and joinable by members of a specific Space (or via direct invitation). This finally makes it useful to use Spaces as containers for private rooms, like you might with a company, guild, or open source community. Once invited to the parent Space, members can join and discover the otherwise private rooms within. No more /invite spam every time you bring someone on board!

Also: If you've received any push notifications in Element Android or Element iOS this week, they've come via our shiny new stateless release of Sygnal! If you haven't received expected push notifications on those platforms this week... please alert us immediately. 😉

Lastly, Element is overjoyed to welcome David Robertson to the Synapse team. Welcome aboard, David!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace reported:

And this week too keeps on going with the regular Kubernetes Helm Chart updates, this time bumping matrix-synapse to 1.40.0.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Gitter

Eric Eastwood reported:

Exciting update this week on the MSC2716 front for backfilling historical messages into existing rooms! All of the big pieces are now merged for full-fat federated historical messages in Synapse 💪

MSC2716 was also consolidated and updated to propose the /batch_send implementation we're using in Synapse. There is also a plan for how this can be backwards compatible with existing room versions so no need for those pesky room upgrades. This will help us be able to jump in early and use this for Gitter as soon as the new event types become stable. Go jump in on MSC2716 to give feedback and read up on the details 😀

Dept of Clients 📱

Cinny v1.1.0

ajbura said:

It has been almost two weeks since we have launched Cinny and here is what we have done in these days:

Features

• You can now decrypt message history by importing encryption keys.

• We now support few commands along with emoji autofill and our unique go-to commands.

• You can send messages with markdown. (This message is sent from Cinny)

• It now supports replying messages and message deletion.

• It now shows MXID on hover over display name.

• You can now see who reacted on message by hovering over reaction.

• Channels/rooms can be joined by alias.

Bugs

• Fixed login issue on servers that don't support delegation.

• Fixed login issue related to non-compliant localpart. (Thanks to phildenhoff)

• Fixed invalid password issue. (Thanks to Troplo)

You can 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

Ement.el

alphapapa offered:

Ement.el, a Matrix client for Emacs, continues to improve. Some of the changes in the past week:

Additions

• Messages may now be written in Org-mode syntax (a format similar to but more powerful than Markdown). Internally, it's automatically converted to HTML and sent as the message's formatted body. This supports nearly any HTML feature that Org-mode can export to, including rich text, bulleted and numbered lists, and even tables (this message is being written directly in Org syntax; see a table of new bindings at the end of this list).

• An optional pop-out compose buffer makes writing and editing long messages easier (also being used for this message).

• Read/fully-read marker lines are now displayed after the last read message, and these are synced with the server and other clients. These lines can also be placed with a command, making it easy to return to a certain event later, even on other clients.

• Usernames at the beginning of messages may optionally be colored to match the addressee's username. This especially helps following conversations in busy rooms.

• Ement.el is confirmed to work with Pantalaimon, the E2EE-aware reverse proxy, making encrypted rooms work transparently. Once Pantalaimon is installed and configured, connecting through it with Ement.el is trivial, and this step is documented in the readme.

Improvements

• Per-user displayname and message colors have improved (and configurable) contrast ratio with the background color.

• Reactions are sorted by the number of users who have sent each one.

• Unread rooms are displayed more prominently in the room list.

• New default bindings make it quick to jump to the mentions and notifications buffers.

• Sync timeouts are handled more gracefully and Ement.el re-syncs automatically.

• Various minor fixes and enhancements.

And here's the new-bindings table, written directly in Org syntax and sent automatically as HTML:

Binding	Command
S-SPC	Scroll up
M-SPC	Move to last-read marker
C-k	Delete message
M-g M-l	Switch to room list buffer
M-g M-m	Switch to mentions buffer
M-g M-n	Switch to notifications buffer

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

Fractal

Alexandre Franke announced:

Fractal updates two weeks in a row? 😱

In our fractal-next branch, Julian tweaked the style of the ugly “this is an early development version, here be dragons” warning, while GSoC intern Kai did a couple maintenance tasks: he updated some documentation and fixed clippy warnings.

The stable branch also saw some activity, with new contributor 🎉 Amanda fixing two bugs (#392, #803) with a single merge request, sorting out our handling of <p> tag trimming.

Element Clients

With updates from the teams!

Delight team

• The tool for migrating communities to spaces in Element Web has been completed
• Lots of accessibility support for Spaces in Element Web
• Preparing Element Web to take Spaces out of Labs
• Pagination of the spaces summary now works for local rooms, we're continuing work on fetching data over federation.
• On iOS, we’re working on exploring rooms and browsing users in a space

Web

• v1.8.0-rc1 is available on https://staging.element.io/
• Work on threads continues - we are narrowing down on a first prototype based on treating chained replies as threads
• We’ve spiked support for Sentry which will give us more insights into how the app is working in the wild
• Support for hot module reloading for React components, following last week’s work on CSS hot reloading
• Improved the look and feel of image blur hashing by adding some animations

iOS

• The release candidate 1.5.1 is available for testing on TestFlight. Voice messages are enabled by default
• Towncrier is now enabled on all of our 3 repositories
• Reaction count got a fix. Please rageshake if you see unexpected count
• Notifications content has been fixed or improved
• Element alpha is almost finished. This is a new app that we will use for internal testing. There will be a QR code on every PR like this one to install the build on a device. This device must be part of our ad-hoc device list
• On the performance side, the incremental sync has been improved and merged on develop. Next is lazy loading room messages

Android

• We made 2 releases this week: 1.1.16 to fix a regression that prevented sending messages in e2ee rooms and 1.2.0 with voice messages enabled by default
• Voice messages have been improved before the release
• We continued to update the call UI with call tiles in the timeline

Sailtrix

hengyedev said:

Sailtrix is a matrix client for SailfishOS.

Here's a summary of Sailtrix development this week:

• Added notifications support

• Changed the layout to use tabs

• Added display of timestamps to messages

• Display names are shown for direct messages.

• Messages sent by the same user in succession are grouped

Join us in #sailtrix:matrix.org . GitLab: https://gitlab.com/HengYeDev/harbour-sailtrix

Download at OpenRepos: https://openrepos.net/content/hengyedev/sailtrix

Nheko

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

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) reported:

You now get notified, if someone reuses a megolm session index, because that in theory could be used by an attacker to send seemingly verified messages. We also now render decryption errors more nicely and users can now explicitly request decryption keys (in addition to the automatic key requests in the background that already existed). We also fixed an issue, that could corrupt the database when using the flatpak and if you lost your network connection, Nheko should now reconnect faster instead of potentially waiting 17 minutes for a TCP timeout. The storage for cross-signing secrets should now be more reliable, you can close image popups with the "Escape" key, close the current room by double clicking it and a few more miscellaneous bugfixes.

You can track the remaining E2EE bits, before we declare our E2EE support as stable, in this comment now: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/issues/23#issuecomment-894689158

Dept of Bots 🤖

Hebbot

Felix reported:

I released Hebbot v2.0 (the matrix bot which generates the thisweek.gnome.org blog posts)

https://github.com/haecker-felix/hebbot/releases/tag/v2.0

It has learned how to handle images / videos, and can now insert them directly into the rendered markdown. Creating new posts has been significantly simplified and now makes even less work for the author. For example, Hebbot now automatically generates a command to quickly download all images/videos at once.

Maybe other communities are interested in creating a "This Week in X" blog as well👀?

Maubot-Pocket

jaywink offered:

I find "read it later" services like Pocket extremely useful, but fail hard at actually keeping my read it later list at a sane level. For me it's hard to maintain the list and actually read through things as choosing which one to process feels overwhelming due to the amount of items.

Randomization to the rescue! I made a Pocket plugin for Maubot which gives me a random article from my list and allows me to easily archive it. Now I don't need to decide which article to pick, the computer does that for me!

Source code and info: https://github.com/jaywink/maubot-pocket

Ps. Maubot is truly awesome as a bot system, well documented and easy to develop on 😻

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix @ Bornhack 2021 ⛺

carl reported:

Bornhack is a 7 day outdoor tent camp where hackers, makers and people with an interest in technology or security come together to celebrate technology, socialise, learn and have fun.

This year, Asbjørn and I are hosting a couple of events related to Matrix:

• A workshop on getting started developing for Matrix

• A lightning talk about Cactus Comments

• A meetup for Matrix users

If you attend Bornhack, please come by and say hi! If you are thinking about attending, don't hesitate to reach out and ask us anything 🌵⛺

Final Thoughts 💭

Room of the week

timokoesters reported:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

---

This week's room is: #gamedev:matrix.org

"game development"

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, tell me in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

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.

#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.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Hello TWIM!

I'm taking over hosting This Week In Matrix again to give Ben a well-deserved break. Your favourite TWIM host will of course be back next week, but in the mean time, let's see what Matrix goodness has happened this week!

Matrix Live 🎙

It's demo week again this week! We've got three great demos to share with you this month:

• Robert, the latest addition to the Matrix VoIP team, gives us a sneak peek at his experiments with implementing native full mesh video calls in Matrix
• Gil, from the Element iOS team, gives us an update on the implementation of Spaces in the app
• and finally Ryan, who's been exploring ways to use Matrix beyond chat, shows us his shiny new full stack integration test solution for Matrix client and servers

And I hear there might also have been a bonus demo that managed to sneak its way lower down this post 😉

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Ansible community adopts Matrix

Gwmngilfen said:

The Ansible community has adopted Matrix as an official place to chat (alongside IRC). We'll be updating our documentation in the near future, but our rooms all have aliases already - add "ansible.im" to your directory search, or join #space:ansible.im if you're in the Spaces beta. See you there!

Super psyched to welcome the Ansible community to Matrix!

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa told us:

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3309 - Simple counters

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3289: Room version 8 (merge)

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC2771: Bookmarks

• MSC3306: Counting unread messages

• MSC3302: Stories via To-Device-Messaging

Spec Updates

Work on the new spec release continues, and the infrastructure side of it is making progress. Once its in place, there are a few more changes to the spec content, before it'll be ready. Watch this space!

Room version 8 is due to land soon - which will bring restricted rooms to the masses. This is most useful in the context of Spaces, which allows granting access to rooms in a space based on a user's membership of that space (or another space!).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

callahad said:

Today in not-Synapse news, we're getting ready for a new release of Sygnal, our reference implementation of a Matrix push notification gateway, early next week. The most significant change is that Shay, one of our Outreachy interns, has determined that Sygnal can function completely statelessly, removing the need for a SQLite or PostgreSQL database. This clears the path for proper horizontal scaling and high availability deployments of Sygnal.

On the Synapse side of the world, MSC3289: Room version 8 entered Final Comment Period (FCP) and we expect it to be merged into the Matrix spec over the weekend. If that occurs, we'll be on track to include support for this room version in Synapse 1.40 next week. Tune in next week to find out how that went!

Conduit

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

timokoesters announced:

Hey everyone, I want to release the first major version of Conduit in a few weeks and I need your help!

Almost all features are on the master branch already, so please try to deploy your own Conduit now and try to find bugs. See https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit

State res has been tested a lot, so it's okay to join any public rooms (room version 6 preferred).

The barebones DEPLOY.md is the easiest and most tested way to install Conduit. We also have docker images, but I think the documentation still needs to be improved (please contribute if you can!)

Please open a gitlab issue for any problem you run into.

Thanks!

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Microsoft Teams puppet bridge

neil told us:

mx-puppet-teams is a new Microsoft Teams (Chat) bridge built on the mx-puppet-bridge platform. The bridge does not require admin privileges on the MS Teams side, so can be used by any user with access to Teams. It's currently using the public Microsoft Graph API, which comes with some limitations, but feature support is being improved.

Focus is currently on Chats (one to one, group chats, etc) rather than the main Teams rooms.

Still a fair amount of work to do, but it would be great to get feedback and comments from anyone who is interested.

Thanks!

Dept of Messengers 📱

The list of Matrix clients is getting larger and larger! And it's not only chat clients anymore! So I thought I'd experiment a bit this week by splitting them in two categories: messengers and non-chat clients. Let us know how you like this format in #twim:matrix.org.

FluffyChat

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

krille said:

FluffyChat 0.36.0 has been released.

This release only targets minor design improvements and bug fixes.

All changes:

• design: Make unread rooms in the list more visible

• design: Move pinned icon in title

• feat: Rate limit streams so that large accounts have a smoother UI

• feat: Display the room name in room pills

• feat: Increase the amount of suggestions for the input bar

• feat: Tapping on stickers shows the sticker body

• fix: Windows CI builds

Sorunome also added:

Heya, we are very grateful for all the awesome translators helping us translate FluffyChat! Unfortunately, we aren't the best at managing such a huge effort as translating such a large app into so many different languages. As a result, suggestions went un-reviewed on weblate for long, people weren't able to submit translations, etc. We are very sorry for that, but want to work on fixing that! As, well, we are only really programmers with little time, we thought of asking for help from the community (you all!)! That is why we are looking for a translation manager for FluffyChat. No programming experience at all is required, it'd mostly be about managing our weblate and answering translation-related questions. If you are interested, please plop into our room #fluffychat:matrix.org and say so! (And ping Sorunome if you don't get answers). Looking forward to a where translations are managed better, and thank you again for everyone who did bite through all this and contributed translations so far!

So if you're into translations and want to help, feel free to let them know!

Nheko

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

Nico told us:

This week I added a sticker/emoji pack editor to Nheko. This means you now don't need to create packs manually in /devtools anymore, but you can create and edit packs much more conveniently. There are still some rough edges, but we expect to sort those out in the near future. Make sure you check out the demo video I recorded!

Furthermore LorenDB has been busy porting more of the remaining dialogs to Qml, dialogs should now float properly on Wayland and have a proper close button on KDE. We also fixed a few more encryption bugs, which means we should be able to mark E2EE as stable in Nheko soon and we cleaned up old cruft in the codebase.

And if that's not enough for you, since it's demo week, Nico's also showing off Nheko's brand new sticker goodness!

Ement.el

alphapapa announced:

Ement.el, a new Matrix client for Emacs, continues to gain new features: deleting messages, showing room avatars, adding to reactions by clicking them, and new "mentions" and "notifications" buffers that show messages from multiple rooms in a single window. You can even reply to messages from any room in the Notifications buffer, which makes it easy to follow multiple rooms at once, rather than having to switch between rooms. (Room: #ement.el:matrix.org)

NeoChat

NeoChat is a desktop chat client for Matrix. It uses Kirigami to provide a convergent user interface on desktops (KDE Plasma, GNOME, Windows, and other desktops) and phones (Plasma Mobile and Android).

Tobias Fella told us:

This week, we merged a few fixes related to login, logout and account switching making NeoChat crash less during those operations. Currently, we are working on a nice ways to show location events and adding the possibility of sending those events

Element clients

Updates from the teams

Delight team

• MSC3289 has entered FCP, adding support for Room Version 8, which includes support for MSC3083 (Restricting room membership based on membership in other rooms).
• We’ve been working on a tool for migrating communities to spaces, which will be available in Element Web
• We’re adding pagination to the Spaces Summary API to improve support for spaces with large numbers of rooms when browsing Spaces room lists
• On iOS, we’ve been working on suggesting Spaces in room lists

VoIP

• Mute status signalling now landed on develop! Thanks again to Simon.

Web

• Voice messages! They’re out on develop.element.io and planning to go out for release soon. Let us know if you run into any issues, or have suggestions on how to make it better.
• Made Improvements to our changelog automation, which should lead to much more joyous changelogs
• We merged initial client-side support for Posthog analytics, adhering to the user’s existing analytics opt-in preferences
• Support for CSS hot reload, which has incrediblised working on Element’s styling for designers and engineers
• Some iteration and bug fixing to image blur hashes and message bubbles
• Full steam ahead on threading, we have a backend for it in js-sdk

iOS

• Same thing for voice messages as web ^
• We started discussions (and experimenting) about SwiftUI for new features. Minimal target version is 11 but some new features, like notifications for keywords, users and rooms completion, etc, will be available for devices running iOS 13 (maybe 14).
• We have updated our contributing guide (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/blob/develop/CONTRIBUTING.md)
• We adopted Towncrier to manage our change logs. Check the contributing guide above for the rules we defined and how we use towncrier across our 3 iOS repositories
• Blank notifications (“Message”) are being fixed and improved. There will still be a fallback notification content but it should happen less often. In this case, we will display “Notification”
• In parallel, we are continuing working on performance improvements. We still target an instant start for XL accounts (with thousands of rooms)

Android

• Same thing for voice messages as web ^ + fixed a rare crash
• We fixed a regression that blocked message sending in an encrypted room. A new release is in progress
• We fixed some notifications issues

Release of Sailtrix 1.2

HengYeDev said:

Sailtrix is a Matrix client for SailfishOS supporting basic end-to-end encryption. This week I've released its third iteration. Here's a list of features:

• Logging in with username and password

• Reading the past messages in a room (currently limited to loading 30 at a time)

• Messages with basic formatting can be read (bold, italic, etc)

• Sending messages

• Sending messages in reply

• Editing messages

• Deleting messages

• Starting direct messages

• Ignoring and unignoring users

• Viewing and downloading of images

• Viewing of audio and video

• Downloading files

• Sending files

• Accepting invites

• Public room directory

• Creating Rooms

• Basic end-to-end encryption support (Late Alpha State)

• All sensitive information including messages are encrypted at rest with Sailfish Secrets

You can download Sailtrix at https://openrepos.net/content/hengyedev/sailtrix

Discussion takes place at our matrix channel at #sailtrix:matrix.org

GitLab Repository: https://gitlab.com/HengYeDev/harbour-sailtrix

Fractal

Fractal is a GTK Matrix Client written in Rust.

Alexandre Franke announced:

Two weeks ago I told you about our interns presenting at GUADEC. A video recording is now available. They kept busy in the meantime, with Alejandro landing work on display names and avatars (!801 and !802), and Kai working on room sorting in the sidebar.

New contributor 🎉 enterprisey brought back unlocking of the secret service collection and fixed the use of RUST_BACKTRACE in our manifest.

Hydrogen

A minimal Matrix chat client, focused on performance, offline functionality, and broad browser support. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/

Bruno told us:

In my absence, the rest of team Hydrogen has been hard at work to bring you the ability to send replies, thanks to Daniel, and to open the member panel when clicking through from the member list, thanks to Midhun. If all goes well, this should get released tonight. Next up, Midhun will start working on SSO login support, a feature a few people have asked about in the past 🎉

Mirage

Mirage is a fancy, customizable, keyboard-operable Matrix client written in Qt/QML and Python. Currently in alpha and available on Linux.

miruka announced:

0.7.2 release

Added

• Navigation keybinds:

  • Keys.quit keybind to exit the application, unbound by default

  • Keys.earlier_page and Keys.later_page keybinds to navigate the pages/chats history, Ctrl+H/Left and Ctrl+L/Right by default

  • Mouse button 4/5 can now be used to navigate the history

  • General.wrap_history setting, affects the behavior of history navigation

  • Keys.Rooms.Direct section, allowing keybinds to jump to specific rooms

  • Keys.Rooms.oldest_unread/latest_unread to jump to the room with the oldest or newest unread message, by default Ctrl(+Shift)+U

  • Keys.Rooms.oldest_highlight/latest_highlight, same as above but only considers rooms where you've been mentioned/replied to/etc, by default Ctrl(+Shift)+H

• Ignoring users:

  • Ignore option in the context menu for room members

  • Ignore option when rejecting invites

  • Editable ignored users list in account settings

  • Invites and messages from ignored users are silently discarded. Their display name, avatar and presence are removed. They will also always be placed at the bottom of the room member list.

• Status messages history in the left pane account context menu, and auto-suggestion for the status field. The number of saved entries can be controlled with Presence.saved_status.

• "Add another account" entry in the top left settings menu

• Copiable room ID field in the room settings pane

• Back button in account settings and server browser when the window is too narrow to show the side panes

• Escape key handling in the account settings, server browser and add chat pages

• Support for rendering HTML <hr> lines (markdown ---) in messages

Changed

• Keybinds:

  • Keys.messages.clear_all default keybind is now Ctrl+Shift+L

  • Keys.Account.AtIndex keybinds will consistently move to the corresponding account settings, instead of skipping to the first room if the account is expanded in the left pane

  • Keys.messages.open_links_files(_externally): ignore matrix.to user and room mention links

• Presence:

  • Allow using the invisible mode on servers not supporting presence, which will still prevent sending typing notifications and read marker updates

  • Restore any previously set status message when reconnecting after being offline, unless another one has been set from a different client

  • Render set status message striked out while invisible/offline to indicate that it isn't being broadcasted

• Error popup:

  • Multiple unexpected errors will be combined into a single popup, instead of opening a new one for every error

  • Report button now links to Github issues

  • More details shown for matrix errors

• Messages:

  • Require a space after the # for markdown titles

  • Render matrix.to URL in messages as shorter hyperlinks

• Left pane rooms:

  • Last message display: shorten long "In reply to..." prefixes for the message to be shown as "↩ <name>: <reply>"

  • Show the inviter for invites where the room has an explicit name/alias set

• Leave, decline invite and forget room options are merged into an unified popup

• Raise default General.tooltips_delay from 0.5 to 0.7s

• Updated headers UI navigation arrow icons

• Misc UI text changes for shortness and consistency

Fixed

• Fix error popup appearing when invalid room events appear in syncs

• Fix parsing of URL in messages containing some special characters

• Left pane rooms last message display: fix > quote right after another quote not getting colored

• Fix the forgetting rooms feature

• Fix rendering status messages containing HTML-unsafe characters

• Fix chat bottom bar for invited/left rooms glitching at certain sizes or not properly updating when the room's state changes

• Prevent theme animationDuration property from affecting the speed of loading spinners, progress bars, server ping indicators and image rotation button cooldown

• Hopefully fix account presence stuck flickering between two states

---

The backend.errors.MatrixError: (200, None) error occurring on Synapse 1.38+ servers should be fixed by the latest matrix-nio commit, which is included in the new Mirage appimage and flatpak. For manual installs, make sure to run pip3 install --user -Ur requirements.txt again before rebuilding. For packagers, the commit will be present in nio 0.18.5, which will be officially released before tomorrow.

Dept of Non-Chat Clients 💻️

TheBoard

Timo K. announced:

A collaborative whiteboard based on the [matrix] protocol. github

A lot has happened this week. The biggest task was the switch to a proper build system (the project now is based on yarn and webpack). This gave the opportunity to do lots of refactoring and code cleanup. Additionally there is now a spec for the whiteboard events which got implemented this week. For the ones who are curious, here is the file: spec

There are also a couple of new features and fixes. Most notably:

• The Text tool was added. Text in different colors and sizes can be added to the whiteboard.

• The Image tool was added. Images are uploaded and than rendered on the canvas (not yet published but will be available in a couple of days)

• The styling was improved. There are less gray areas which I did not like and the corners are less round.

• And the repository got a lot of love with more details in the readme and better code/folder structure.

• There is now also a matrix room for feedback, issues and ideas: #TheBoard:matrix.org

Feel free to try it at: https://toger5.github.io/TheBoard/ (preferable not with your main matrix account)

Circles

cvwright offered:

Circles is an iOS app for end-to-end encrypted secure social networking and sharing, built on top of Matrix. Its goal is to provide a safe and convenient way for close friends and families to share things that they wouldn't post publicly -- e.g. for parents to safely share pictures of their kids.

Recent updates to the Circles beta include:

• Support for use with any Matrix homeserver

• Emoji reactions

• Markdown formatting for posts and photo captions

• Better support for larger screens (iPad)

The latest beta build of Circles (v0.90) is available from Apple on TestFlight

They've also added:

NOTE 1 - If you're using an existing account, you'll need to tap the "Advanced Options" on the login screen so you can give it your password for SSSS / encrypted key backup / recovery / etc. Otherwise Circles will try to use a login password that it generates with MSC 3265 so it can do everything safely using just a single password.

NOTE 2 - Circles is NOT RECOMMENDED for use on an account that you're already using for Matrix chat, for the above reason and more. If you do this, prepare to see lots of extra, weird rooms in Element / Fluffy / Nheko / whatever chat client you're using. Also if you decide to try this anyway, please let me know how it goes. :-)

NOTE 3 - Circles is not available yet in France. Sorry. I gotta update my encryption compliance documentation with Apple.

If you want to know more about this project, feel free to join #circles:matrix.org!

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Version 1.6.0 of Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib is released!

krazykirby99999 announced:

Changes:

• Feature: Sending images is now possible via bot.api.send_image_message. An example and more information about this can be found here.

• Fix: There was a bug in which the bot would print the join message twice. This is now patched.

Notes:

• Version 2.0.0 of Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib will be available on pypi soon with incompatible changes, so make sure to specify the version of Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib in your dependencies to simplematrixbotlib >= 1.6.0, < 2.0.0 until your code is compatible with the new syntax. Check TWIM next week to learn more about the new changes.

mautrix-*

Tulir offered:

I moved all the mautrix bridges and libraries to a fancy new org: https://github.com/mautrix

GitLab and/or Docker haven't invented redirects yet, so docker registries are split: the old dock.mau.dev/tulir/mautrix-* paths will keep working for old versions, but new images will be at dock.mau.dev/mautrix/*.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Kubernetes

Ananace announced:

This week continues the regular K8s updates, with my Helm Charts seeing updates for element-web to 1.7.34 as well as a fix for handling IPv6 in the well-known listener for Synapse.

Dendrite Helm chart

And because Synapse started feeling a bit lonely being the only one with a Helm chart, s7evink offered:

Well, Hi there TWIMers :P

I've been working on a helm chart for Dendrite (polylith/monolith (untested)), since i was sick of creating a single deployment for each component. For now it's working as expected, but since I'm pretty new to creating helm charts, please let me know if there's something wrong/bad practice.

NOTE: Polylith is not yet supported by the developers!

Shout out to Ananace, for the awesome helm chart for Synapse, which was my inspiration! :)

Rejoice! Now Dendrite aficionados have even more ways to enjoy our next-generation homeserver!

mxadm

Jez (he/him) told us:

I've released mxadm, a small CLI tool for Matrix room admin that I've been working on for a few weeks; more details here: https://erambler.co.uk/blog/introducing-mxadm/

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Matrix (Server) Statistics

MTRNord announced:

This is part of the server_stats project

Part of the ServerStats Project is to use the data to build various charts. This project is currently still in progress to be written using RLang.

This week new is a World Map of IP based locations of Matrix Servers. Be ware that the coordinates are quite rough due to the quality of the free maxmind databases used. The map data gets updated every 12h.

Also the website for those statistics got fully overhauled to feel more modern.

Check it out at https://stats.serverstats.nordgedanken.dev or the Source at https://github.com/mx-serverstats/server_stats_web_statistics

Dept of Guides 🧭

Matrix/Element Help Documentation

~creme announced:

envs.net (@cblte:envs.net and @creme:envs.net) has forked the TU-Dresden matrix/element help documentation - https://doc.matrix.tu-dresden.de/en/ (used hugo ssg).

Our fresh help page can be found at: https://matrix-help.envs.net/ and now uses a simpler ssg called mkdocs.

We decided to fork the existing documentation of the TU-Dresden to make it easier to use. In addition, the project envs.net already uses mkdocs for its existing documentation.

The link to the Git repository can be found directly on the page. We look forward to improving it in the future and would also appreciate your help.

Feel free to use this documentation for yourself and create your own fork.

Final Thoughts 💭

Room of the week

timokoesters offered:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

---

This week's room is: #plaintextaccounting:matrix.org

"Doing accounting with plain text"

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, tell me in #roomoftheweek

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.

#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.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Let's learn about PyQuotient with Vlad and Alexey.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Element raises $30M as Matrix explodes!

At first when I read the headline I was scared - explodes? How can I protect myself from this explosion? After a moment of reading this huge news, however, I was relieved - Matrix has exploded in popularity, and Element have all new funding to keep driving the ecosystem forward. Let's go!

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa announced:

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• There were no new MSCs created this week.

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3083: Restricting room membership based on membership in other rooms

Spec Updates

While a quiet week for MSC state changes (shown above), there's still plenty of work and collaboration happening!

Spaces work marches forward as MSC3083 has been merged - allowing for users to join a room in a space based on their membership in a space. We think this will really help with the management of Spaces that contain lots of rooms that are otherwise invite-only.

Otherwise MSC3291 (Muting in VoIP calls) has been receiving positive feedback this week!

Finally, MSC3289 (room v8) is ticking along as the implementation is tested in Synapse and Complement tests.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad told us:

Synapse 1.39.0 is out!

Of all the pull requests we landed, my hat is off to MadLittleMods and his Graphviz prowess in #10250, which moves us one step further down the path toward MSC2716: Incrementally importing history into existing rooms. Mmm. Graphs.

But back to Synapse! You should check out the release announcement, but the bulk of the work this cycle went into internal cleanups. Synapse should also be slightly more performant, reliable, and should log fewer spurious errors. Of note, ShadowJonathan did a lot of work with pyupgrade and com2ann to move the entire codebase to more modern Py3.6+ conventions and inline type annotations; thanks, ShadowJonathan!

Synapse 1.39 also continues our march toward unifying Synapse's interface for extension modules, and we've now exposed plugin hooks for the account_validity option, and experimentally implemented hooks for third party event rules.

Lastly, special thanks to kroeckx who has submitted 17 pull requests against our SyTest test suite in the past month, mainly arising from running SyTest against Conduit. Thank you!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

matrix 1-click app

j3s (he/him) offered:

Hello! This week, I created a matrix 1-click app on the DigitalOcean marketplace. It's basically a pre-baked droplet image that is pre-configured with synapse, element-web, caddy, postgres, plus some setup and moderation tools. My intent was to make self-hosting a Matrix system as easy as pointing some DNS records and running a single script. It makes a lot of sense for smaller, more casual Matrix homeservers, and can serve as a good starting point! It also includes some small utility scripts - ./reset-password, ./new-user, etc.

Secrets like the postgres password and registration password are generated on first boot, there's no sensitive data baked into the image. Of course, it would be nice to be able to verify this - the source code used to build the image is being open sourced. I'm just waiting for some internal processes to finish. It will show up at https://github.com/digitalocean/marketplace-matrix somewhat soon!

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Heisenbridge

hifi announced:

Heisenbridge roundup!

Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.

• Lazy joining of IRC users (see below)

• Keep nick feature has been added

• Bridge aliveness can be tracked from bridge bot presence

• Ident replies can be customized by the admin for all users, default to mxid hash

• Pillifying IRC nicks has been improved

The biggest impact feature this time around is configurable lazy joining IRC users which improves the experience of joining massive IRC channels by not flooding the homeserver with join events. This is now the default and can be changed globally by the bridge admin or overridden per room by users.

Many fixes here and there. Still a few issues left before 1.0 and a lot of testing.

Thanks!

Dept of Clients 📱

Announcing Matrix client Cinny 1.0.0

ajbura reported:

Cinny is a web-based matrix client focusing primarily on simple, elegant and secure interface.

The story started when a friend of mine introduced me to matrix and even after his help it was too difficult for me to get around with Element. I guess it was because Element is too different from other popular chat apps. Then I tried to find a good alternative for web but no success.

That's when me and my friend thought about creating Cinny. For the few weeks we were doing it for fun but when we shared a screenshot of the prototype, the response from people was surprising and that's when things got interesting. We got to know that a lot of people out there are looking for a simple and modern client and so we started building it.

Screenshot on Chrome desktop (see below)

Features

Cinny support the following features:

• Login/logout and registration of accounts

• Four different themes

• Basic alphabetically sorted channel list with unread notification indicator

• Creating channels and joining/leaving public channels

• Creating Direct messages

• Inviting users to channel and basic user list

• Sending text messages, emojis and attachments

• Support viewing edited messages, reactions, replies, attachments and markdowm

• Read receipt for latest messages and typing notifications

• History scroll and button for quickly scrolling to bottom in room timeline

• Channel topic, join, leave, kick, ban, avatar/nick changes in room timeline

• Sending/receiving encrypted text messages and attachments

You can 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

Cinny is astounding. A client appears to us nearly fully-formed and looks great while doing it!

Ement.el

alphapapa announced:

Many improvements have been made to Ement.el, a new Matrix client for Emacs. Ement.el can now send and display images, replies, and reactions, as well as edit sent messages. It also supports desktop notifications, configurable by the user to pop up for mentions or for all rooms with open buffers. (Room: #ement.el:matrix.org)

Something something expands until it reads... Matrix?

Element Clients

Updates from the teams

VoIP

• 1:1 screen sharing is now merged and on develop! Please give it a try and report bugs - plan is for it to go out in the release after next (ie. two weeks from Monday). Huge thanks to Simon for working on this.
• Simon also has PRs up for mute status signalling, done via MSC3291
• Fixing the bug where the buttons in a call don’t work in full screen mode

Web

• v1.7.34-rc.1 is out (maybe even .2 by the time you read this) - full release planned for Monday
• Continuing to figure out a plan of attack for threading
• Looking at message bubble feedback & fixing bugs
• Also looking at fixing blurhash bugs

iOS

• The coming release, 1.4.8, which is available on TestFlight, supports voice messages. The feature is under a labs setting. DM and room tabs now contain only rooms. Local contacts and the public rooms directory can be found elsewhere in the UI. Full changelog at https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/releases/tag/v1.4.8.
• We continue to make good progress on papercuts (https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/milestone/58) and the overall app stabilisation.

Android

• Release candidate 1.1.15 is getting prepared. It will include voice messages, under a lab flag.
• Some bugs on the crypto part have been fixed, it should improve the performance on e2e rooms.

FluffyChat v0.35.0 has been released

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

krille reported:

This release introduces stickers and a lot of minor bug fixes and improvements.

All changes:

Feature

• Add sticker picker [205d7e8]

• Also suggest username completions based on their slugs [3d980df]

• Nicer mentions [99bc819]

• Render stickers nicer [35523a5]

• Add download button to audio messages [bbb2f43]

• Android SSO in webview [befd8e1]

Fixes

• Reset bootstrap on bad ssss [b78b654]

• Hide stickers button when there is not sticker pack [b71dd4b]

• Download files on iOS [a8201c4]

• Record voice messages on iOS [4c2e690]

• cropped sticker [a4ec2a0]

• busy loop due to CircularProgressIndicator [15856e1]

• Crash on timeline [a206f23]

• typo on website [00a693e]

• Make sure the aspect ratio of image bubbles stays the same [a4579a5]

• Linux failing on attempting to open hive [76e476e]

• Secure storage [0a52496]

• Make sure the textfield is unfocused before opening the camera [6821a42]

• Close safariviewcontroller on SSO [ba685b7]

Refactor

• Rename store and allow storing custom values [b1c35e5]

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma

iinuwa announced:

This summer's gone by so fast it feels like it's only been a week! Here's a summary of what's happened with Ruma the past few weeks:

We have had a productive summer with our two Google Summer of Code students, Adam Blanchet and Devin Ragotzy. Adam finished implementing the last of our Identity Service API endpoints, bringing us to 100% implementation of all the Matrix API endpoints! (And we promise there are no bugs because "Rust," right?)

Besides improving the Matrix ecosystem, Devin has been helping the Rust ecosystem at large by writing some Clippy lints to improve our codebase and upstreaming his additions.

Read more here: https://www.ruma.io/news/gsoc-2021-intro/.

Dept of Ops 🛠

maubot-ldap-inviter

David Mehren offered:

I made maubot-ldap-inviter, a maubot plugin that (surprisingly) invites users into Matrix rooms, according to their membership in LDAP groups.

We are switching from RocketChat to Matrix in the next round of a software engineering course where students work on software projects in small groups.

RocketChat has a LDAP sync, which we previously used to auto-add students and tutors to the chatrooms they need to be in (global announcement room, helpdesk, chat for their group etc.). As there was no such feature for Matrix, I built the bot over the last few days.

It's still somewhat specific to our LDAP setup, but if anyone wants to use the bot and has questions, just open an issue in the repo!

Dept of Services 🚀

Mother Miounne from etke.cc

Aine reported:

Mother Miounne is here

At etke.cc we suffered long enough with 2 things - order form on website and invites on private matrix servers.

No more suffering! Because now the Mother Miounne exists and it does 2 things (for now): handles of web/html forms (sends it to matrix room) and handles invite tokens (integrates with matrix-registration)

We use it as backend of etke.cc service for some time, but still consider it as unstable, so try it yourself, hope it can help you 😉

PS: #miounne:etke.cc - matrix room with news & discussions

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix @ FrOSCon 2021 (virtual)

Oleg reported:

Great news! Matrix Dev-Room and Matrix booth are approved! 🎉

We are currently creating a schedule and we have open slots for talks and workshops!

If you like to present your topic or just help out please contact me (@oleg:fiksel.info) (or [email protected]) now! Language is preferably German, but English is also ok.

See you at #FrOSCon:fiksel.info 😉

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

TheBoard

Timo announced:

This is a personal project I started a couple of weeks ago. I was dreaming of a good open source solution for OneNote or GoodNotes far a long time. There are already great projects, likeXournal++ and Whitebophir. But, they do not include the extent of possibilities to flexible host, collaborate and structuring the notes I have wished for.

Recently, I was thinking about the exact requirements I wanted for such a whiteboard:

• Real time synchronization (cloud storage)

• Authentication/account infrastructure (to invite and collaborate on one whiteboard)

• Adding/Removing ppl to a whiteboard

• Reliable hosting (when having cloud storage, I don't want to trust a one-man project to continue hosting. And a lot of ppl won’t self-host.)

• Structuring whiteboards in categories

• Viewing history and display which part has been drawn by which person

• Annotating other whiteboards with new layers

• Hosting for media like PDF's and images

Looking at this list, Matrix was such an obvious choice. I could comment every point but basically with: "A whiteboard should be a Matrix room" everything is said.

TheBoard (probably not the final name) is exactly that. The frontend is not done yet, but already in an okay looking and usable state.

Before trying it out: It takes really long to log in with an account with lots of rooms. So, I highly recommend to NOT use your main Matrix account. Additionally, it is necessary to tag rooms as whiteboards. (really un-intuitive UX that will be improved) But for now the + button needs to be pressed and a (empty (not necessary but recommended) AND UNENCRYPTED) room needs to be selected.

UPDATE I just (on Friday) finished initial spaces support to categorize the whiteboard in notebooks (aka spaces). They can only be create within a matrix client that supports spaces. But they will be displayed properly in TheBoard. (see screenshot)

Any problems, ideas and feedback is highly welcome as a github issue or in the matrix channel #TheBoard:matrix.org.

TLDR:

This project is whiteboard (similar to OneNote) which is

using Matrix as its backend. All your drawings are stored in matrix rooms on your matrix server and are accessible to anyone who is invited.

Try It out at: https://toger5.github.io/TheBoard As always: use at your own Risk

Join the matrix channel at: #TheBoard:matrix.org Github: https://github.com/toger5/TheBoard

graph.settgast.org updated

Chris announced:

Thanks to the awesome https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev project by MTRNord my small server version history graph now contains more of the matrix fediverse: We went from ~3000 to over 5000 active visible homeservers on https://graph.settgast.org/

Two superb projects combining forces! I've long been a fan of Chris' graphs for tracking the growth of the server ecosystem.

Matrix in the News 📰

Famedly in the news!

uhoreg offered:

Famedly in the news! https://e-health-com.de/details-news/messenger-am-uk-frankfurt-ermoeglicht-simultane-ueberfuehrung-von-chats-in-die-patientendokumentation/

Final Thoughts 💭

Happy Sysadmin day! 🥳

Oleg made us aware:

Let's use this day to thank your Matrix home server admin! Especially folks managing Matrix.org and all the public bridges! ❤️

(If you are hosting yourself then you can tap yourself on a shoulder for doing a great work 😁)

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.

#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.

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

This week gematik announced they will use Matrix for their interoperable instant messaging standard.

Loads of coverage is available, take a look!

English

• https://www.zdnet.com/article/germanys-healthcare-system-is-using-this-open-source-standard-for-encrypted-instant-messaging/
• https://thestack.technology/matrix-germany-healthcare/
  • see also https://thestack.technology/element-messenger-matrix-protocol-one-to-watch/

Dutch

• https://tweakers.net/nieuws/184736/duitse-gezondheidsinstellingen-gaan-onderling-communiceren-via-matrix-protocol.html

German

• https://www.heise.de/news/Matrix-Messenger-fuers-deutsche-Gesundheitswesen-6144988.html
• https://www.golem.de/news/videochat-deutsche-gesundheits-it-wechselt-auf-matrix-2107-158334.html
• https://stadt-bremerhaven.de/gematik-ti-messenger-setzt-auf-das-matrix-protokoll-als-basis/

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa offered:

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

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3083: Restricting room membership based on membership in other rooms (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC3291: Muting in VoIP calls

• MSC3289: Room version 8

• MSC3288: Add room type in store invite

• MSC3286: Media spoilers

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week,

Spec Updates

Room Version 8 has been proposed as part of MSC3289! This intends to include the new "restricted" room version from MSC3083, which allows access to a room based on one's membership in another room, as is most useful for features related to Spaces.

sorunome has been working on MSC2545:

Sorus Image Packs MSC2545 is taking shape more and more! While barely anything happened on the actual MSC itself, nheko recently implemented a sticker picker based on it, and there is a PR for fluffychat for a sticker picker, too, finally making stickers interoperable between clients of different vendors!

Here's a video of fluffychats sticker picker in action: https://gitlab.com/famedly/fluffychat/uploads/26382317e2424d7566eb18e102ddd6cb/fluffy-sticker-picker.webm

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

callahad told us:

🚨 Yesterday we published Synapse 1.38.1 which mitigates a client bug triggered by changes to /sync responses in 1.38.0. Specifically, new Element Android sessions were unable to decrypt messages in end-to-end encrypted conversations.

⚙️ Otherwise, we've been doing quite a lot of internal / infrastructure work. Notably, we've completed the move from three separate CI systems to just one: GitHub Actions. We're also, for the first time, publishing Debian packages for our Release Candidates. We hope these changes move us towards a more reliable and seamless release process.

We'll have a lot to talk about re: Synapse 1.39 next week, but until then, enjoy the weekend! 🏖

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace announced:

And this week too has brought updates to my Helm Charts, with element-web being updated to 1.7.33 and matrix-synapse to 1.38.1

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-puppeteer-line

Fair told us:

A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.

---

This week brings plenty of usability improvements:

• There is now the list-contacts bot command to--you guessed it!--list the Matrix puppets of all of your contacts.

• It's now possible to sync a chat with a LINE user by inviting their Matrix puppet to a DM, instead of having to wait for someone to send you a message in LINE for the bridge to auto-sync it. This is especially useful with list-contacts.

• LINE group chats that haven't been used recently are now included in the set of chats that get bridged on a sync operation.

• The number of chats to sync at startup time & on-demand is now configurable, as a bridge config setting & a parameter to the sync command, respectively.

These changes make it possible to sync LINE chats/groups that previously may not have gotten synced, due to the intricacies of how LINE on Chrome handles chat history (especially on first use of the bridge).

---

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

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

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

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) told us:

LorenDB has rewritten the invite dialog as well as the memberlist in Qml. This means they work now much more reliably and show the users in appropriate colors and a few other small improvements.

Apart from that, Nheko now has support for sending stickers! This is based on Sorunome's awesome MSC2545, so no integration manager is needed and it is trivially easy to share your sticker packs (just invite someone into the same room!). You can use stickers from your account data or upload stickers into a room so every room member can use it. If you found a sticker pack you like, you can enable a pack from a room globally by going into Nheko's room settings. You can check my current preferred set of stickers here: matrix:r/nico's-stickers:neko.dev

Currently you can't edit a sticker pack yet from Nheko. Support for that will come in the near future. Until then you can use either FluffyChat, Element's DevTools or my hack to import Telegram sticker packs into a room. Note that Nheko's sticker pack support is incompatible with integration server based sticker packs like the one Element uses. On the other hand, you don't need an integration manager to use them! Custom emote support based in the image packs MSC is coming in the future to Nheko too.

Furthermore we fixed some bugs to move E2EE in Nheko out of Beta. We are close now and we have a plan!

That's all, don't get your hands too sticky!

Fractal

Alexandre Franke announced:

It’s been three weeks already since our last update and we have a fair amount of new things to report.

As I write this, our interns Alejandro and Kai are at GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference, presenting during the interns lightning talk. The former has submitted a couple of merge requests (!793 and !794) that were necessary for the UI to accommodate his upcoming multi-account work. The latter has provided a view for when no room is selected. As for their mentor, Julian, he changed member loading so it only happens once a room is opened, to improve performances. He also changed Matrix event handling to use SyncRoomEvent, which paves the way for display of various message types in the timeline of a room.

Giuseppe offered two nice additions to the login view:

• in the form, one can now type enter to login (it previously required to click on the button in the headerbar)

• errors are now displayed, providing useful feedback on why the login may have failed.

And to conclude this summary, we welcome 🎉 newcomer Veli Tasalı who fixed a papercut I reported: when typing long messages, buttons next to the message entry were expanding along with the entry and now they keep nicely aligned.

Element Clients

Delight team

• We’ve been shepherding MSC3083 into FCP to improve private spaces
• We’ve also been working on restricted room support in Synapse and Element Web & Android
• We’ve been improving onboarding experiences for Spaces, improving 3pid invites on Android, improving email invites and making matrix.to aware of spaces
• On iOS, we’ve finished the first implementation of Space navigation which we can share soon!
• We’re also figuring out what’s missing to mature Spaces enough to exit beta

VoIP

• Call event tiles for 1:1 calls merged, for better summaries of call history.
• 1:1 screen sharing ready to merge!
• Looking at bug where jitsi calls stay always-on-screen even when hung up.

Web

• Released v1.7.33
• Message bubbles PR merged!
• Updated desktop to electron 13, complete with new n-api build of seshat (thanks, Poljar!)
• More work on changelog tooling

iOS

• We cancelled the release of 1.4.6 because of the discovery of high profile bugs or crashes . We will release 1.4.7 on the App Store on Monday. Those releases contain mainly bug fixes and papercuts
• Voice messages are almost there. They are on develop under a LABS settings. They should be part of the next release candidate next Wednesday.
• There are several papercuts in progress: URL preview, decryption of notifications content by default, removal of local contacts from the DM room list tab, removal of the room directory from the group room list, etc to list the major ones.

Android

• Release 1.1.14 which fixes an important issue regarding message decryption is live on the PlayStore, on the beta channel, and will be in production quite soon. A patch has been applied to matrix.org to fix the problem.
• Beside that, we are still polishing the spaces and voice messages

Šimon Brandner shared some images of the new VoIP UX:

Naturally the screen sharing feature will allow you to share your own screen, rather than Šimon's!

Beeper update

Tulir said:

Desktop

• New keyboard shortcuts:

  • Navigating room list with arrow keys when there's no room open (and esc to close the current room)
  • Global shortcut to open Beeper

• Rooms are opened where you left off (like Telegram, WhatsApp, etc) instead of at the bottom

• Updated unread room indicators: a colored circle around the room avatar (screenshot here)

Bridges

LinkedIn

We've integrated the LinkedIn bridge into Beeper. The bridge is in beta and is generally ready for use. Since the last update, we moved it to GitLab, added a Docker image, and implemented reaction and redaction handling in both directions! We also fixed a bunch of bugs across the board to improve reliability.

Android SMS

The Android SMS bridge mentioned in the last update is progressing. It should be ready for self-hosted use in a few weeks, so our next update will probably include that.

Related to the SMS bridge, I've made mautrix-syncproxy, which is a microservice to do the /syncing required for end-to-bridge encryption (to-device events and such) in the cloud and forwarding the data to the normal appservice transaction endpoint. When combined with mautrix-wsproxy, it allows the SMS bridge to only have a websocket connection, which uses significantly less battery than a HTTP request every 30 seconds. The sync proxy partially implements MSC3202 and the to-device part of MSC2409 (partially because it only does individual users rather than all appservice-owned users).

We're hiring React, iOS, Android and SRE/Devops engineers. If you're interested, check out https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/beeper or DM Eric Migicovsky.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruby

Ananace told us:

Just tagged and pushed version 2.4.0 of the Ruby SDK, along with an updated image for the example bot. This version adds support for the Matrix URIs as well as some basic spaces functionality, it also fixes some errors due to the removed empty /sync fields in Synapse 1.38.0

Feel free to drop by #ruby-matrix-sdk:kittenface.studio for any questions or comments.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Hebbot (This Week in X bot)

Felix told us:

Several GNOME contributors and I have been following TWIM and really enjoyed the concept. Since open source is about stealing sharing ideas, we wanted to deploy something similar for GNOME.

I gave this room's beloved twim-o-matic a try and fiddled a bit with the code. But I soon found that it is too specialised for matrix.org. That's when I decided to write a project agnostic TWIx bot based on matrix-rust-sdk called Hebbot!

Here is how it looks in practice with a companion website for GNOME. If you’re interested in how it looks behind the scenes, have a look at this blog post which explains how it works.

I released a first version on July 17, but I’m already working on making it smarter for a next release. In the meantime you can already use it for your project!

Love it, though I wish twim-o-matic had more of my attention! Maybe we can retire it and use Hebbot..?

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Matrix Plugin for OctoPrint

Cadair offered:

This week I have developed a new plugin for OctoPrint which is a tool for controlling and monitoring 3D printers, which sends notifications about your prints and status of your 3D printer to matrix. The existing OctoSlack plugin also has Matrix support but fell foul of the /sync response changes in Synapse 1.38, and also sent the images from the camera to Matrix as inline images rather than m.image events, so they didn't render on some clients.

My new plugin can send messages on most events supported by OctoPrint, but the core events which are configurable through the OctoPrint web UI are print started, paused, completed and failed as well as print progress notifications. If you want Matrix notifications for your 3D prints, you can install the plugin through the official OctoPrint plugin repository or by installing from the GitHub repository. If you have any feature requests or pull requests, contributions to the plugin are very welcome.

Here is a preview of a print progress notification from something I was printing last night:

Matrix in the News 📰

Matrix & IRC | Size & Stability

Gwmngilfen said:

Following on from my post about how I'd like to convince Ansible to move to Matrix, I looked into the relative sizes of the networks, took a look at the active users in our channels, and even took a shot quantifying bridge restarts and netsplits to assess relative stability. Check it out here

New Public Rooms 🏟️

Beyond Chat

Ryan reported:

A new Beyond Chat room (#beyond-chat:matrix.org) has been created! This room is meant for discussing various projects that build on Matrix for use cases beyond chat, such as collaborative documents, blogs, generic key-value databases, tools for thought, etc. Please join if these topics interest you. 😄

The Beyond Chat chat room is where Ryan chats about uses of Matrix beyond chat

Dept of Welcomes 👐

VoIP

Robert Long announced:

Hey everyone, my name's Robert Long. I've just joined Element last week and I'm coming in to work on the VoIP team. This week I started working on full mesh video conferencing and I'm super excited to share more as the work progresses!

Welcome Robert! Can't wait to see progress here. We'll even bring back the Dept of VoIP :D

Final Thoughts 💭

Room of the week

timokoesters offered:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

---

This week's room is: #godot:feneas.org

"A very helpful and friendly place for general discussion or questions pertaining to the FOSS Godot game engine and using it to make games, whether one is just beginning to learn or wish to discuss more advanced aspects of game (or Godot) development."

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, tell me in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

Royal Navy using Matrix!

Amazing to see @Navy_Innovation showing off low-bandwidth @matrixdotorg decentralised comms to 1SL (Head of the @RoyalNavy) using Titanium: our CivTAK Matrix plugin. At this rate Matrix is on track to become the common language across the entire public sector!⚓️📻🇬🇧 https://t.co/UDIA2GBVm9

— Element (@element_hq) July 23, 2021

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.

#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.

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 📜

Spec

anoa announced:

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3283: Expose enable_set_displayname in capabilities response
• WIP: MSC3277: Scheduled messages

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• MSC2674: Event Relationships
• MSC3245: Voice messages (using extensible events)

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3282: Expose enable_set_displayname in capabilities response
• MSC3279: Expose enable_set_displayname in capabilities response

Spec Updates

Several members of the Spec Core Team reviewed MSC2674 (Event relationships) this week in order to help push along the efforts to finally ship aggregations in the spec. Otherwise MSC3245 (voice messages via extensible events) is moving along with final comment period proposed this week. The implementation in Element Web in reportedly working well, helping to prove the spec in practice. And finally, MSC3277 (scheduled messages) which appeared over the weekend to try and allow for scheduling events to send later in Matrix (and all the fun edge cases that come with it).

Thanks to everyone who submitted, read and reviewed MSCs this week. It takes people to move this stuff forward!

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

Google Summer of Code 2021: first evaluations complete!

We heard from Callum last week, and will have more reports in future, but for now just know that all seven GSoC projects are progressing well. To remind yourself of this year's projects, see the list provided by Google or our welcome blog post.

Alexandre Franke added:

I reckon you can count the two Fractal interns as well. :)

Reckon you're right pardner! We'll look forward to a roundup of the work done for Fractal too.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander told us:

In case you missed it, we released Dendrite 0.4.0 on Monday and wrote a blog post about it! It's taken us a little while to get to this release, but it includes a number of quality-of-life improvements and changes that will significantly reduce the amount of resources needed to run a Dendrite server. The full changelog is available on GitHub and many juicy details in the aforementioned blog post, but at a high level this release includes:

• All-new state storage, designed to reduce the amount of disk space that the roomserver takes up to store room state by aggressively deduplicating state blocks and snapshots

• Improved appservice support, with a number of bridges now working with Dendrite

• Shared secret registration (using the same API shape as Synapse)

• Optimisations in the federation API /send and /get_missing_events endpoints to reduce memory usage

• Improved state resolution v2 performance when dealing with power level events

• Per-room queuing to reduce head-of-line blocking on the roomserver input API

• Lots of bug fixes around invites, registration, sync and media, and 5 panics fixed

Since the release, we've been working on:

• Completing key notary support

• Fixing state_default for power levels in gomatrixserverlib

• Resolving some issues around rejecting invites, particularly when the remote server is not available

• Reducing the cost of checking if the local server is in a given room

Since our last update, our Sytest compliance numbers have been on the rise again, taking us ever closer to our goals:

• Client-server APIs: 61%, up from 60% last time

• Server-server APIs: 92%, up from 80% last time

• Appservice APIs: 52%

As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for general Dendrite chat, and #dendrite-dev:matrix.org if you are interested in contributing!

Synapse

callahad told us:

The big news of the week is the release of Synapse 1.38, which converts several integer columns to bigint, allowing Synapse to process more than 2 billion (231) events. Which, incidentally, matrix.org did last week 📈:

But that's not the only thing new in Synapse 1.38. We also landed the ability to set an expiry time on cache entries, allowing you to reclaim memory from infrequently accessed caches. Configuring this to "1h" on matrix.org has already yielded a noticeable reduction in overall memory use 📉:

We'd encourage you to read the full announcement for more — See you next week 👋!

Registration management for Token Authenticated Registration

callum told us:

Another short update about my GSoC project, this time about the Synapse admin API for managing tokens. https://calcuode.com/matrix-gsoc/2021-07-16_admin-api.html

See also Matrix Live with Callum last week.

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace said:

This week too brings updates to my Helm Charts, with Synapse having been updated to 1.38.0.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-puppeteer-line

Fair said:

A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.

Docker is now supported, via Dockerfiles that actually work now! But for the time being, Docker images must be built manually, as I am yet to deploy a Docker registry for prebuilt images.

Also, sample systemd service unit configuration files are now available, courtesy of @lecris:lecris.me 🙂

For more info on all of this, see SETUP.md.

What I'm working on next is a bot command to list all of your LINE contacts & groups (similar to mautrix-whatsapp's list <contacts|groups>), and the ability to sync a LINE DM by inviting a contact to a Matrix DM. This will allow messaging LINE contacts that the bridge didn't yet create a portal for.

And please, feel free to try out this bridge! It should be serviceable for day-to-day usage now. I still won't be able to host a public instance of it for a while, though (as it is fairly hefty due to having to run Chrome), so you'll have to self-host if you want to try it.

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

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

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

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) told us:

This week we fixed bugs. Switching room should now be quite a bit faster again and once Qt 6.3 is released with some important bugfixes, scrolling in Nheko should be super smooth. (We can't enable that flag yet, because of 3 bugs in the item pooling code in Qt.)

Other bugfixes:

• Inline images sometimes wouldn't show, but now inline emotes and images should render once they are loaded! (This took me a year to figure out)

• You can now send edits in encryted rooms again, if they are a reply to an event.

• No more reply fallback in the room list.

• At some point timed out verification requests started showing up on startup. That regression is fixed now.

• Fix rooms not showing up after login because we were off by one.

• Fix some cases where the loading spinner wouldn't stop animating and as such consistently use CPU, when a room is open.

• Cache db transactions to reduce allocations and memory zeroing when loading a room or scrolling.

• Fix some edge cases in the blurhash decoding, that could lead to brownish image previews.

• Fix accepting an invite not placing you in the joined room.

Element Clients

With updates supplied by the teams

Delight team

• We’ve been shepherding through MSCs to improve private spaces, namely MSC3083 (Restricting room membership based on space membership)
• Meanwhile, we’re also implementing outstanding polish, planning steps for Spaces to exit beta

Web

• v1.7.33-rc.1 now up for testing on https://staging.element.io/ with support for blurhash, draggable picture-in-picture view for calls
• Contributing to element web? There are new labels and magic keywords for pull requests to show better information in the changelogs. See the contributor guide for more detail.
• Do you use the master branch of element web or any of the web projects? Please let us know - it may go away soon.

Android

• Still polishing the voice message feature: add support for Android 5, improve timeline rendering, improve animation in the composer, support for RTL language
• Work on the account notification settings

Hydrogen

A minimal Matrix chat client, focused on performance, offline functionality, and broad browser support. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/

Bruno said:

Still working on getting a big update out today with rendering of formatted messages and a brand new member list in the right panel!

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

PyQuotient

Aksem told us:

First news about Python bindings for libQuotient, C++ Qt-based Matrix SDK

After a month of hard work, we(I as GSoC student and kitsune as mentor) have bindings with tests for almost all core classes and also initial version of the demo client, in which you can log in with a password or SSO, the server you enter is resolved automatically and also after successful login data is being synchronized. There is also a possibility to log out. So this part is on the same level as in Quotient.

Also, a small video with the client in action.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Hack'n'Sun, the partially-Matrix-based summer tinkering camp

Nik offered:

Over the first weeks of July, Teckids e.V. held their annual summer camp for kids between 9 and 15 years. This year, after we started introducing Matrix and Element as a chat platform from September 2020 onwards, the camp was heavily relying on the platform for various parts.

Before the camp started, we invited all 90 participants to a chat room to get together, share a bit about what they expect, already did with coding and technical stuff, talk about what food they'd like to have for the barbecue, and stuff like that. Many of them engaged in the discussion, and started exploring Element (before you ask, yes, we hat a lot of snow and party poppers 😛!). Some got really excited that they could even change or add features to Element, or ask for such changes – we had to promise to hold a session where we find out how to add one new animation to Element. Unfortunately, Element is developed on GitHub, so the potential young contributors are locked out by the exclusive Terms of Use there. We are trying to reach out to Element HQ to find a solution.

During the camp, verifying crypto sessions using emojis again made for a good party game to get to know each other (like, find the kid a nickname belongs to on the camp site, start verification, and compare emojis – a lot of fun that we, again, did not even have to start, because someone always finds out about it and asks what it is about).

Now that everyone got to know Matrix for chatting, in one of our workshops, the participants discovered that not only people, but also devices can send messages, and react to replies – in that workshop, the kids built a chat-ops IoT door beel (for their tent on site, or room at home). They soldered a circuit board to fit an ESP (MicroPython) micro controller on, and coded a small program (using templates with differing complexity levels), defining what the door bell should send when a button is pressed, on what messages to react, and the like. We produced a fun video about the project (German audio, English subtitles): https://eduvid.org/videos/watch/20a50c25-ecb4-48c0-9b13-de2548f290d4?subtitle=en . The (minimal and somewhat buggy) MicroPython client library is published as µtrix.

Now, sadly, the event is over, and we slowly see (as expected, only a part of the) participants moving over to our long-term project chatrooms; we will start clearing the virtual camp site chatroom during the weekend to make room for a new group.

Asked about the regularity of these events, Nik replied:

We are still experimenting with our new camp formats. As bad as it all is, COVID caused a lot of innovation here because we were forced to leave the known roads we normally travelled, and now we are starting to integrate all that new stuff (like really embracing Matrix) into outdoor and presence events. I think we are on a really good way with it, and surely I will keep posting updates that might be of interest for the greater community.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Cactus Comments 🌵

carl announced:

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

This week, I'm reporting the changes to our backend service since it last appeared on

• Feature: Restrict which users can interact with cactusbot (contributed by Karmanyaah Malhotra in MR !3).

• Feature: Include comment section id in room name.

• Bugfix: Malformed events no longer cause a crash loop.

• Bugfix: Users can no longer register a site without a name.

• Hotfix: Mitigated timeouts under heavy load with a temporary LRU cache.

• Internal: Pin sub-dependencies.

• Internal: Heavy linting in CI.

All these changes are available from version 0.5.0.

Demo: https://cactus.chat/demo

Matrix room: #cactus:cactus.chat

Introductory blog post: https://cactus.chat/blog/hello-cactus-comments/

Source code: https://gitlab.com/cactus-comments

Dept of Guides 🧭

New business-oriented guide to using Matrix and Element

The Reidel Law Firm from Galveston, Texas have produced an excellent business-oriented guide to using Matrix and Element. As they announced in a blog post last month:

Reidel Law Firm remains committed to providing top notch legal services in Franchise Law, International Trade Law, and Business Law while maintaining accessibility, (one of our Firm’s core values) to our clients, colleagues, and friends of the firm. Utilizing our own secured chat platform allows us to be in communication with our clients around the world while maintaining the utmost in data security and client privacy.

Schuyler "Rocky" Reidel added:

I believe in Matrix+Element and encourage my clients and law firms to get ahead of the curve or get left behind and become irrelevant. Email has to die, its just the worst. Also, I forgot to note earlier that the guide is copyright free. I hope other business owners will use and revise it for their own uses.

Strong words! You can find the guide from Reidel on their website.

Final Thoughts 💭

Room of the week

timokoesters told us:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

---

This week's room is: #formula1:matrix.org

"The pinnacle of motorsport! We're in an exciting time in Formula 1 with a close championship and exciting battles. Come hang out and chat about the upcoming race in Silverstone on July 18th!"

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, tell me in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

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.

#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.

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 Status of Matrix 🌡️

Ansible Community considers Matrix

Gwmngilfen offered:

I'm the Principal Data Scientist for the Ansible Community. We're hoping to switch to Matrix as our primary platform in the near future, and I've just written up my thoughts on why that's a good idea, what the consequences might be, and where we go from here. Find it at https://ansible.github.io/community/posts/matrix_and_ansible.html

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa told us:

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3270: Symmetric megolm backup

• MSC3269: An error code for busy servers

• MSC3267: Reference relations

• MSC3266: Room summary

• MSC3265: Login and SSSS with a Single Password

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

A concrete plan has been drafted for publishing the new spec release, and is currently undergoing execution. This release will include many changes that have built up since the last release (back before the new spec redesign even), as well as the new Matrix Global Version Number scheme. Look forward to it dropping soon!

Otherwise Bruno has been hard at work continuing to push forward the various aggregation MSCs (1 2 3 4). MSC3083 (restricted room memberships) is being updated as part of finalising the new Spaces feature as well as MSC2716 (history import).

As well as lots of new MSCs as listed above. Busy times!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit

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

timokoesters said:

The last two weeks I worked on a few very big optimizations. We also almost finished sqlite support for Conduit, which is slower than sled in benchmarks, but has much better RAM usage characteristics.

• Batch up and cache /sync responses for when clients time out

• LRU cache for deserialized PDUs

• More efficient state res by only fetching events it needs

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Neil Alexander said:

Rumours of Dendrite's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Stay tuned for more updates very soon.

We will stay highly tuned!

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad offered:

Big(int) news! This week Matrix.org processed its 2^31st event, exceeding the range of a PostgreSQL integer column for the first time. This caused a bit of a scramble in the aftermath of last week's spam attack, as we had a few integer columns in our schema which we needed to convert to bigint. Fortunately, we were able to complete the change sufficiently in advance (#8255), and also took the opportunity to audit other columns and sequences in the database which could conceivably overflow. Synapse 1.38, due out next week, will automatically migrate homeservers when they upgrade. We run the migration as a background task, so homeservers should continue functioning as normal throughout, though they may use a bit more disk and memory, especially when rebuilding indexes for the new bigint column.

We're also starting to hone in on our team's goals for this quarter, and it's looking like our primary focus will be on improving room join speeds. Wish us luck!

Lastly, we're overjoyed to announce that @reivilibre, a former intern on the backend team, joined Element this week! We can't wait to see where he helps us take Synapse!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace said:

This week too gets a Helm Chart update, with element-web having been updated to 1.7.32

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-puppeteer-line progresses

Fair reported:

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

This week was spent on adding proper support for LINE user joins/leaves (though invites/kicks are still a TODO), bug fixes, and ease of deployment. Docker and systemd setups will be ready shortly.

And this bridge should soon be listed on https://matrix.org/bridges/, if it isn't already 🙂 Thanks madlittlemods (Eric Eastwood) for accepting the PR!

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

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Element Clients

Updates provided by the teams!

Delight team

• Spaces:
  • iOS development is progressing, some (dev) can see spaces in the left panel
  • Wrapping up work on new settings for restricted rooms, and UI to promote the feature to space admins
  • Maintenance and bug fixing.

VoIP

• Improvements to in-call designs on Android
• Dial pad improvements about to land on web

Web

• Working on performance testing on large accounts to catch slowdowns and generally improve app performance
• More under-the-hood TypeScript conversion
• Message bubbles experiment almost ready to land!
• Working on universal macOS builds for the desktop app

Android

• Element Android 1.1.12 is now live on the PlayStore, will be available on F-Droid soon
• We are polishing the voice message feature
• Also we are progressing well on the RustSDK integration

SchildiChat

SpiritCroc reported:

SchildiChat is a fork of Element that focuses on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list for both direct messages and groups, which is a more familiar approach to users of other popular instant messengers.

There are two announcements that we can share with you this week:

• SchildiChat for Android is back in the Google Play Store! Users who have previously installed the release using our own F-Droid repo will be able to update without the need to re-install. All previous ways to install the app will remain available as well.

• You can now help us translate SchildiChat using Weblate! Note that this only contains SchildiChat-specific translations, we continue to use Element's translations where possible.

Apart from that, we have mainly been focusing on smaller improvements and fixes, while staying up-to-date with new Element releases.

For more information about SchildiChat, feel free to visit our website or check out our source code!

Also, feel free to join our Matrix rooms, which you can find in the new SchildiChat space: #schildichat:matrix.org

Nheko

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

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) told us:

Spaces work is making progress. Some rooms can now be previewed. To improve that situation, I wrote an MSC to preview specific rooms. Alternatively we will try to get the previews for the few rooms you aren't joined to from the space summary API, currently we are just fetching the existing state. You can also now join previewed rooms and the design of joining invites was adapted to match it.

red_sky☄️ went through the pain of fixing the Windows builds after we changed our http backend last week. So if you want to try it out, you can test it on Windows. We also replaced the old, boring spinner with an animated Nheko logo. If you see that a lot and think it is Nheko's fault, don't hesitate to open an issue! But in most cases it will probably be your server. Sadly no screenshot of how the spinner looks like, my server is too fast and taking a proper screenshot is too much effort because of that. ;p

We also fixed an issue with updating device lists in the develop version of Nheko. If you were using the nightlies, now is a good time to update! In more E2EE news, symmetric megolm backup fixes the issues I had with the online key backup, so looking forward to implementing that.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Opsdroid 0.23

Cadair offered:

The latest release of opsdroid is out with various fixes which can be seen in the changelog. The main point to note for matrix users is that older versions of matrix-nio (the matrix client library used by opsdroid) did not support the synapse change to omit optional fields from sync. Therefore if you are using our docker images you will need to update to 0.23 to get a container with the newest matrix-nio included.

The other change which is relevant to matrix users is that Oleg has added support for version 2 of the Rasa NLU framework, so you can once again do open source, self hosted natural language bots.

Dept of Bots 🤖

home-assistant-bot release v2.0.1

Oleg announced:

This release adds a fix for compatibility with Synapse >= v1.38.0

This bot is based on opsdroid bot framework and aims to control actions in home-assistant via Matrix.

Feel free to come by at #home-assistant-bot:fiksel.info 😉

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Server_Stats Statistical Data

MTRNord offered:

Thanks to Gwmngilfen I touched RStudio and toyed a little with some data as well.

You can find some graphs over at https://github.com/MTRNord/server_stats_r_statistics/blob/main/scripts/rooms_members.md

For the first graph the credit fully goes to Gwmngilfen :)

The second one is in log scale for both axis but essentially the same :)

This is obviously currently very spare but I hope to add more statistics when I understand R lang :) This is in fact my first time doing something with R so my skillset is limited :)

Dept of Guides 🧭

Matrix Bot inside of a Docker Container

krazykirby99999 announced:

Run Matrix Python bots inside of Docker Containers with Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib and Docker!

This is a guide for isolating and running your Matrix bot within a Docker container. It is also applicable to bots written using other libraries and languages.

https://simple-matrix-bot-lib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage-with-docker.html

New Public Rooms 🏟️

Room of the week

timokoesters told us:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

---

This week's space is: #mathematics-on:matrix.org

Biggest room: #mathematicsq&a:matrix.org

"For questions about any part of maths!"

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, tell me in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

Final Thoughts 💭

Cadair offered:

In meta twim news, the twim updates bot (which posts in #twim_updates:cadair.com) has been upgraded to opsdroid 0.23 and now correctly keeps the formatted body when an event is edited.

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.

#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.

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 Status of Matrix 🌡️

We missed it at the time, but wanted to share in TWIM. Terence Eden, noted UK technologist, shared a thorough, compelling argument for the UK Government to use Matrix as a foundation for the digital workplace.

This is a long read, but a detailed argument. Also please note that this is was produced for the purpose of an MSc course of study, it was not commissioned for any other purpose, as the preamble makes clear.

Next, a high billing for Beeper this week, who have been working hard and getting product out!

Beeper update

Tulir reported:

It's been a month since our last update. A lot of the work since then has been on making everything more reliable, but we've also added new features to our clients and started making some new bridges.

Desktop

• Added thread UI for Slack-bridged rooms. Internally they're just replies like before, but the client will intelligently collapse replies in Slack rooms into threads.

• Merged upstream Element additions like voice messages.

  • Also merged some features that aren't in Element yet, like Giphy integration.

iOS

• Released Beeper iOS to Testflight.

Android

• Added grouping rooms by chat network based on the m.bridge state event. The UI is similar to spaces, but they're not actual Matrix spaces (yet).

• Added support for Android 11's "conversation" notifications.

Bridges

• Android Messages is turning out difficult to reverse-engineer to a sufficiently reliable level, so we're building a new SMS bridge into our Android app. It'll also be available as a standalone open-source app, which already exists at https://gitlab.com/beeper/android-sms (but doesn't have any setup instructions yet).

• We've funded development of a LinkedIn bridge. sumner will post a more detailed update about that.

We're hiring React, iOS, Android and SRE/Devops engineers. If you're interested, check out https://angel.co/company/beeperhq or DM Eric Migicovsky.

Dept of Spec 📜

MSC state changes:

• "MSC3262 aPAKE authentication" was created.
• "MSC2918: Refresh tokens" was proposed for FCP

Bruno has been working on aggregations as part of his work for Hydrogen. He reported:

I've been cleaning up the relations MSCs, finding a balance between documenting the current state and not losing track of community concerns. I've started with MSC 2674 which is the very basic format of relations, and will move on to annotations/reactions (MSC 2677) next week.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad announced:

We're pleased to announce the release of Synapse 1.37.1 this week, which includes mitigations for the recent distributed spam attack across the public Matrix network. We advise upgrading as soon as possible.

Otherwise, Synapse 1.37 highlights include:

• A new, generic interface for extension modules (See this week's Matrix Live for more info!)

• Completed server-side support for MSC2403: Add "knock" feature and Room Version 7.

• An experimental implementation of MSC2716: Incrementally importing history into existing rooms (#9247) as part of Element's work to fully integrate Gitter into Matrix.

• A more nuanced implementation of Synapse's optional user-interactive authentication ("UIA") grace period (#10184).

...and a bunch of smaller bug fixes and performance improvements.

Check out the blog post for more.

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

Got another week of Helm Chart updates, with the Synapse chart getting a bunch of worker improvements and additional configurability, as well as being updated to first 1.37.0 and then 1.37.1

Dept of Bridges 🌉

LinkedIn <-> Matrix Bridge

sumner reported:

I'm excited to announce that I started working on a new bridge for bringing LinkedIn messages to Matrix! It's currently in the early stages of development and not production-ready. The current feature set includes: backfill from LinkedIn, user name and profile picture sync, message sending from Matrix -> LinkedIn, and real-time message puppetting from LinkedIn -> Matrix. There's much more to come, and you can join #linkedin-matrix:nevarro.space for updates. Development is being funded by Beeper, and is being designed with integration into Beeper as it's primary goal. However, the bridge is open source (Apache 2.0) and will be available to self-host. The source code is here: https://github.com/sumnerevans/linkedin-matrix.

Great work from Sumner! Glad to see people have the option to bridge their LinkedIn messages!

matrix-puppeteer-line update

Fair reported:

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

Better LINE->Matrix read receipt bridging is now supported in the testing branch! The bridge now checks all LINE chats (not just the most recently-used one) to see if messages you sent have been read (in LINE). This works by cycling through all LINE chats where the final message is posted by you and doesn't have a "Read" marker on it yet (or for multi-user chats, if your last message hasn't been read by everyone in the room).

With that, I'll consider the bridge to be in Early Beta! 🎉 I'm now testing the bridge for myself to iron out a few kinks, and am preparing a PR to the matrix.org webpage to have this listed on https://matrix.org/bridges/.

Discussion:

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

Matrix Adapter for WebThings 0.4.0

Christian told us:

This addon for the WebThings gateway lets you send Matrix messages when your IoT fridge is empty – or whatever you have connected to your gateway.

The update fixes predefined messages getting sent to the default room and is the first to be tested against gateway version 1.0.0. https://gitlab.com/webthings/matrix-adapter or in the addon list of your WebThings gateway

Dept of Clients 📱

NeoChat

Carl Schwan announced:

This week, NeoChat gained support for a Global Menu on Plasma and macOS. Aside from that, we fixed a few crashes.

But the biggest news of the week is that we will get funding from NLNet to implement E2EE support in Quotient and NeoChat as part of their grants to improve the internet. We will report on our progress on that front here!

This is terrific news, big thanks to NLNet for making this choice!

FluffyChat

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

krille said:

FluffyChat 0.33.0 has been released.

Just a more minor bugfixing release with some design changes in the settings, updated missing translations and for rebuilding the arm64 Linux Flatpak.

Features

• redesigned settings

• Updated translations - thanks to all translators

• display progress bar in first sync

• changed Linux window default size

• update some dependencies

Fixes

• Favicon on web

• Database not storing files correctly

• Linux builds for arm64

• a lot of minor bugs

Nheko

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

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) offered:

Hello World! I am here to bring you Nheko news!

We merged the Spaces branch, which means Nheko master can now show some spaces. Peeking unjoined rooms, nesting spaces and creating them should be coming soon. We are also looking into how to fit knocking into the UI (we already rendered incoming knocks in the timeline for a while).

You can also now edit still pending messages, which should help if your server is slow and you notice a typo. The edit will then get queued and be sent as soon as the server acknowledges they received the original message. Apart from that there have been some improvements to the readability of the room list and some other UI elements.

Last but not least, we switched out our entire http backend from Boost to Curl. For that I wrote a simple wrapper around Curl. This fixes about 10 issues around connection shutdown, brings proxy support, http/2 and http/3 support and in general makes Nheko crash less and reduces latency a LOT! This will obviously cause some pain for packagers, but I hope it isn't too bad. Some of the issues this fixes only had 2 digits in our bugtracker and one was even filed by benpa!

Have a nice weekend everyone! ♥

Fractal

Alexandre Franke told us:

Chris tweaked the UI in various places. It’s a lot of small details that together make for a smoother experience. I encourage you to read the details in the description of !782. This is the only MR that landed since last week, but our people have been hard at work nonetheless. Kai blogged about his journey working on the search bar of doom and Alejandro shared his own struggle. In the meantime, Julian’s work has mostly happened upstream in matrix-rust-sdk.

Element Clients

Updates sent by the teams

Delight team

• Spaces:
  • Research: We’ve been reaching out to people to walk us through how they use Spaces now and what they’d like to see different to help us learn and iterate;
  • Restricted room access: Some good progress towards shipping improved team spaces

Web

• v1.7.32-rc.1 is on https://staging.element.io/ in advance of release on Monday - please test!
• Some major progress on conversion to TypeScript, finding some bugs along the way. The main source of the element-desktop project is now fully converted to TypeScript!
• A styled player component for the audio messages feature, available in the labs section.

iOS

• v1.4.4 (https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/releases/tag/v1.4.4) is available in TestFlight. It should be on the App Store on Monday
• It contains a bug fix for Single Sign-On (SSO)
• We started to attack some papercuts. Expect more in the coming weeks.

Android

• We are actively implementing the highly expected voice message feature!
• A release candidate v1.1.12 will be available during the week-end
• We are focusing to fix some crashes, to improve the stability of the application

Vocie messages!

kazv

tusooa reported:

kazv is a matrix client based on libkazv.

Talk to us on #kazv:tusooa.xyz .

Updates

0. @tusooa:tusooa.xyz fixed a thread-safety issue that caused crashes. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/kazv/-/merge_requests/6

1. We now have a new developer @nannanko:tusooa.xyz . She implemented a login failure prompt for kazv. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/kazv/-/merge_requests/4

You can get the current AppImage build at https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/kazv/-/jobs/611/artifacts/browse .

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-bot-sdk v0.5.19

TravisR announced:

v0.5.19 of the matrix-bot-sdk is out now with fixed power level checking (with an added utility function), improved default error logging, and a typo fix in reply creation. Check it out, and visit #matrix-bot-sdk:t2bot.io for help & support.

Dept of Ops 🛠

Matrix Navigator 0.1.2

Christian told us:

It's an alpha-stage webapp for developers to replace curl for room state administration.

This week I added features for better member management, including kick, ban and unban. https://gitlab.com/jaller94/matrix-navigator

Dept of Services 🚀

GoMatrixHosting v0.5.1 🚀

Michael told us:

Exciting new update, we can now wireguard an on-premises server from just about anywhere and make it work with the AWX system. This is useful when your server doesn't have a static or public IP address, or when some other networking issue prevents you from running a Matrix service on it.

Follow of on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/GoMatrixHosting

Or come say hello on Matrix: #general:gomatrixhosting.com

* Add '00 - Create Wireguard Server' template for AWX admin to provision Wireguard servers that on-premises servers can use to connect.

* Subscription involved can view an additional '0 - {{ subscription_id }} - Provision Wireguard Server' template.
* Add /docs/Setup_Wireguard_Server.md guide.

* Add onboarding script for Windows 10 users.
* Raise maximum download size to 200MB.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Mjolnir

TravisR offered:

Mjolnir is a moderation bot for communities on Matrix. It helps with a lot of the actions covered by the moderation guide, including capabilities to apply bans from other trusted communities. It's still a bit terse in its documentation, but if you're looking for a featureful moderation bot then it's worth a go.

In related news, Mjolnir v0.1.18 is out with a couple quality of life fixes - if you've been bothered by the log spam, it's now fixed :)

Dept of Guides 🧭

Matrix Limits

Ryan said:

I started a tiny repo to collect various limits and related factoids about the Matrix specification and implementations. I hope that distilling and summarising such things at glance will make it easier to see what is and is not possible.

If you know of more that should be listed, please contribute! 🙂

Self hosting your own Matrix server on a Raspberry Pi

Peter Roberts announced:

@ed:selfhostingblog.com of theselfhostingblog.com has written a guide on getting started with Synapse on a Raspberry Pi using Docker Compose. You can read it here.

Public Rooms News 🏟️

Matrix Science Reading Group

Florian said:

Together with J. Ryan Stinnett, I created the 🔖 #matrix-science-reading-group:dsn.tm.kit.edu for exchange of and on scientific papers, books and related resources on all things Matrix: Topics ranging from peer-to-peer broadcast overlay networks over conflict-free replicated data types to end-to-end encryption. Investigating security, performance, deployability, or whatever else is interesting, by methods from observation over simulation to formal verification. 🎓️ Please join if you want to read about papers that might not be Matrix-related enough to make it into TWIM, or want to engage in the discussion. 😊 The resulting papers are collected at: https://github.com/jryans/awesome-matrix#research

German Element translation feedback

Libexus announced:

Hallo deutschsprachige Matrix-Community!

#element-uebersetzung-feedback:matrix.org ist ein Raum für Feedback zur deutschsprachigen Übersetzung aller Element-Clients.

Hast du einen Fehler gefunden, ist etwas unklar oder hast du ein Anliegen an uns? Dann schreibe es gerne hier hinein!

Jederzeit willkommen sind natürlich auch neue Übersetzerinnen und Übersetzer. Joint dazu einfach #element-translation-de:matrix.org, #element-translations:matrix.org und lest euch den Translation Guide durch.

---

Hello German-speaking Matrix community!

#element-uebersetzung-feedback:matrix.org is a room for feedback about the German translation of Element.

Have you found a mistake, is something unclear or do you have a suggestion? Please write it there!

Also, we are always happy about new translators (for all languages!). Just join #element-translations:matrix.org and have a look at the translation guide on how to get started!

Room of the week

timokoesters told us:

Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it's still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn't have enough users?

This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.

---

This week's room is: #fossmaintainers:matrix.org

"A public space for Free/Open Source Software maintainers to swap notes and discuss their craft. Inspired by https://github.com/github/maintainerweek, all maintainers welcome!"

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, tell me in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

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.

#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.

That's all I know 🏁

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