Plus a number of bugfixes within Synapse and fixes for spec compliance issues.
As ever, our warmest thanks to to our contributors for sharing their time, effort and expertise with the project. We look forward to seeing your work in the wild, come the 1.57 release proper on Tuesday the 19th of April.
On develop, we have been powering through a number of different tasks:
another spurt of work to get complement (finally!) testing Synapse in worker mode.
Speaking personally, my efforts to manage Synapse's dependencies using poetry are coming to a close. As I write this, I've just submitted my last (planned!) PR for this project. It's been several months in progress now, and there were many moving parts; some unexpected bugs in poetry and even one in pip; plus a heck of a lot of CI config to change and understand. My sincere thanks to the broader Synapse team for their help in getting the last batch of changes made, reviewed and merged. Once this is all said and done I hope we'll all reap the benefits of
a stabler CI pipeline,
reproducible virtual environments in our docker and debian images, and
Hey webhook-consuming-people! The hookshot webhook bridge 1.5.0 update has now been released. This release is a bit softer than 1.4.0, containing some smaller features and bugfixes. Thanks to everyone who contributed!. The highlights are:
Allow specifying msgtype for generic webhook transformations. (#282)
Add new GitHubRepo config optionnewIssue.labels which allows admins to automatically set labels on new issues. (#292)
Allow priority ordering of connection command handling by setting apriority: number key in the state event content. (#293)
After a long and arduous journey, LorenDB's dbus interface for Nheko got finally merged. Currently this allows you to list rooms as well as switch between them. In the future we might add simple messaging support, so that you can automatically send messages into specific rooms using scripts. The API is disabled by default, since it is not authenticated. Enable it at your own risk!
Another long standing PR, that finally got merged, was MTRNord (they/them)'s support for pretty power level formatting. Nheko can now tell you what changed in a power level instead of just telling you that it changed. This should make them much more accessible to users, that don't like looking at the raw event source all the time (weird, eh?).
The image viewer should also be more reliable now and notification counts should be correct after a restart.
We have also been playing around with qt6 support. At this point we have a working Qt6 branch, with a few functional regressions:
No voip (gstreamer has no Qt6 support yet)
No drop shadows on buttons
No switchable color schemes
So far Qt6 looks pretty great and seems to fix a lot of the minor annoyances.
We are also still looking for some student or interested individuum to take part in the Google Summer of Code and improve the call support in Nheko! Deadline is drawing close, so if you intend to apply, better work on your proposal quickly! If you need any feedback for your proposal, feel free to DM me and ask me to review it/questions. I'm looking forward to someone applying! <3
Anyway, merry christmas everyone or whatever you are celebrating this weekend!
We will inform users in the next release that we will no longer support iOS12 and 13. It will be effective the release after, i.e. April 25th.
We had a big drop on UTDs (Unable to Decrypt errors) since 1.8.8.
We are setting up the ElementX-iOS project to rewrite the Element-iOS app. It will be based on SwiftUI and the Matrix Rust SDK. The roadmap is available here.
We may experience some delays in shipping the app through the Android PlayStore as we are in discussions about whether not decrypted messages should be reportable
Cleanup to the SDK API has landed on develop - this will help with generating API documentation and migrating to the Rust SDK
Exciting news this week; the Threads Beta is live on all platforms! If you haven’t seen Threads yet, head to Settings > Labs and check it out.
Please note; If your homeserver doesn’t yet support threads functionality you may not see the beta, or your experience will be degraded. If this applies to you, you’ll see a warning message before you activate Threads.
The team is continuing to squash bugs and improve performance, we’ve also started working on the next improvements…
Notifications and badges are top of mind for us next. We need to ensure accuracy of badge counters and consistency between platforms (if you use more than one). We’re looking at this now so keep your eyes peeled for our upcoming MSCs.
libolm 3.2.11 has been released. This release mainly features improvements to the Objective-C and Java bindings, but also fixes building of the documentation, which was broken for quite a while. For more details, see the release notes.
A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.
Over the last two weeks, we have been busy working towards the 0.6.0 crates.io release of Ruma. If things go to plan, it should be published in the coming weeks (but no promises). That means mostly finishing some large refactorings, but we also got some bug fixes in, as well as a number of convenience functions for working with certain events:
HASSkbot can be used to control an action in Home-Assistant via Matrix reactions.
It's an Opsdroid bot, which reacts to a home-assistant entity state change (like person leaving a zone) and asks for confirmation in Matrix if it should run additional home-assistant automation.
Matrix reactions are used for confirming or canceling an action.
benpa is back in town and I can't keep silence: here is a small update on Honoroit - v0.9.6 comes with "stable spaces" support that will work with new versions of element (yes, even on Element Android from F-Droid).
DWeb Camp is a gathering hosted by Internet Archive and volunteers dedicated to Decentralized/Distributed web projects. Previously it happened in 2019, and Matrix had some presence there.
Maybe people from Matrix projects and/or Matrix.org will be there this year?
That's all I know 🏁
Come back next week for a much restored TWIM! With Matrix Live, Spec updates, Dept of Ping and so on. :D
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
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.
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been largely looking at proposals which are at or near FCP in an effort to get them through the last stages of the process. We're also thinking about what the next release (v1.3) looks like and when we'll end up putting it out into the world. If you have MSCs which you'd like included, please stop by the #sct-office:matrix.org on Matrix with your suggestions - if they're near enough, we'll try to get them in.
Random MSC of the week
The script has elected MSC3391: Removing account data as the random MSC this week. It's a small but interesting MSC which helps clean up account data on the server when it's no longer needed, though how this sort of removal gets represented to clients can be a challenge. It's currently missing an implementation if someone is looking for a medium complexity contribution this weekend 😉
The Chart
So many MSCs are in the open state, which is why we're continually looking at merging MSCs which are ready to go.
This week, we've released Synapse 1.56! It includes only a couple of new features but quite a few bug fixes and internal improvements. One of the main changes included in this version is that Synapse will now refuse to start if configured with open registration with no verification (e.g. email, recaptcha, etc). This is an attempt at reducing the likelihood of spam across the federation, as most cases of abuse we've observed over time usually involves the attacker(s) finding homeservers with open registration and automatically creating a lot of accounts on them in order to evade sanctions.
This version of Synapse also deprecates the groups/communities feature of Matrix. This is a feature we introduced back in 2017, and was the predecessor of Matrix spaces. But now that it has been mostly replaced by spaces, we have decided to retire this feature, which we thank dearly for its 4 years of good and loyal service to the federation.
Read all about this, and more, in the release announcement on the Matrix.org blog! 🙂
This week we released Dendrite 0.8.0, which is primarily a feature release, and then Dendrite 0.8.1 which fixes an emergency bug. It's also a recommended upgrade if you are running a Dendrite deployment. It includes:
Support for presence has been added
Presence is not enabled by default
The global.presence.enable_inbound and global.presence.enable_outbound configuration options allow configuring inbound and outbound presence separately
Support for room upgrades via the /room/{roomID}/upgrade endpoint has been added (contributed by DavidSpenler, alexkursell)
Support for ignoring users has been added
Joined and invite user counts are now sent in the /sync room summaries
Queued federation and stale device list updates will now be staggered at startup over an up-to 2 minute warm-up period, rather than happening all at once
Memory pressure created by the sync notifier has been reduced
The EDU server component has now been removed, with the work being moved to more relevant components
It is now possible to set the power_level_content_override when creating a room to include power levels over 100
/send_join and /state responses will now not unmarshal the JSON twice
The stream event consumer for push notifications will no longer request membership events that are irrelevant
Appservices will no longer incorrectly receive state events twice
Hello webhook fans! As teased last week, configuration widgets have landed in hookshot! 1.4.0 now contains all you need to setup your very own webhooks without having to leave the comfort of your GUI. The plan is for widgets to be greatly expanded over the new few releases to support more services. Eventually, this work is going to propagate out to other matrix.org bridgey projects 🌉.
The full feature list for this release looks a bit like:
Add support for configuring generic webhooks via widgets. (#140)
Show the closing comments on closed GitHub PRs. (#262)
Webhooks created via !hookshot webhook now have their secret URLs sent to the admin room with the user, rather than posted in the bridged room. (#265)
Automatically link GitHub issues and pull requests when an issue number is mentioned (by default, using the # prefix). (#277)
Small exception: Matrix->KT replies don't yet work in KT "open channels" yet.
Ability to create a portal by inviting a KT puppet to a DM
Note that this currently only works for KT direct chat channels that already exist & have been active recently.
Connection resilience between the Python and Node components of the bridge
i.e. If the Node component ever exits & restarts, the Python component will reconnect to it automatically. This helps both with deployment (since it allows the components to be started in any order) and crash tolerance (since a Node crash & restart no longer requires a manual restart of the Python component)
Clear warnings when receiving a KT message that the bridge doesn't yet support
At this point, the bridge should be fairly usable now. Very soon I'll open a Matrix-bridged KT channel to act as a public stress-test!
Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.
Release v1.11.0 🥳
Fixed retry behavior on startup to wait for HS startup
Ignore TAGMSG messages from IRC server
Fixed HTML messages not working as commands
Fixed room aliases in messages dropping the message completely
Upgrade to Mautrix 0.15
Just your typical bug fix release but this release also breaks support for homeservers not supporting the "v3" API path so if you run Synapse 1.47 or older the bridge will not start. Sorry.
Thunderbird is a free open-source email, calendar & chat app.
The latest Thunderbird beta finally has Matrix support enabled by default. Get Thunderbird beta now to try it out.
There have been many improvements to the Matrix implementation since the last update, including:
Syphon is a Matrix client with heavy emphasis on privacy and ease of use; currently in open alpha.
Hi all 👋.
We released 0.2.13 this week mainly fixing an annoying bug that could cause messages sent while a configured proxy server was down to be re-sent multiple times once the proxy came back online. If you use a proxy with Syphon, this update is highly recommended!
In addition, this release will only show the option to use hidden read receipts if the feature is supported by your server.
Finally, a range of translation updates and improvements are included in this release.
More changes are coming soon, including a (currently work-in-progress) implementation of MSC2228 (self destructing events). As far as we know, we're on track to be the first user-facing implementation of this MSC, putting Syphon on the bleeding edge of Matrix!
Thanks to the awesome polyjuice client, Nheko now supports MSC3700, which slightly improves privacy in encrypted rooms. It also lead to us fixing issues with the secure symmetric secret storage, where some clients use a different base64 encoding than recommended in the spec, which could make unlocking the secrets with a recovery key or passphrase fail. And we also improved the key queries on initial login, which would sometimes fail to_device messages with a warning, that the device is unknown.
As a small feature, you can now close the currently open room using Ctrl-W, spaces are not treated as DMs under some circumstances anymore, you should get a less confusing error message than 500 when entering an invalid alias now and lots of fixes to the translations.
Thank you, LorenDB, Apurv and Mikaela for the contributions!
Have released the SDK, v0.0.10 with custom tiles support. Calls and theming are getting closer, the latter we were planning to release this week but hit a blocker for theming support in develop mode, so we'll have to postpone to next week.
Considering dropping support for iOS12 - this will impact 0.9% of sessions. Requiring iOS 13 or newer will allow us to use SwiftUI libraries.
You will be able to opt in to threads in the next release (currently in testing), alongside updates to room preview on long press in room list, ability to share any location and support for more languages
Release candidate 1.4.11 is currently available on the PlayStore if you are a tester. Should be pushed to production next Monday! F-Droid publication is in progress too. Learn more about the full release content here: https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/releases
Add banner to timeline when location sharing is running. Live Location Sharing (a.k.a. LLS) is still a work in progress and not available in the Element app yet.
Improved unit test coverage (especially around login with MXID)
Improved how threads look in the main timeline
Add notification for users to opt in to threads
Polishing around spaces to bring them into line with latest designs
Hotfix for leaving all rooms in a space without leaving the DMs. The hotfix is included in the release candidate 1.4.11.
We are considering modifying our rules to format source code. We will try to limit the impact on forks, but it will not be easy.
Since last time, we've made a lot of small quality-of-life improvements, but a few changes that stand out are:
We've improved support for offline PWA usage.
We've improved caching of space contents, reducing the number of times that we need to hit the spaceHierarchy endpoint and improving performance.
We've moved to a more in-the-spirit-of-the-spec way of handling hidden annotations: these are now represented by rooms with an m.space.parent event, and no correpsponding m.space.child event in the resource-space.
We've added a modal for viewing image messages at full-size.
Number 4 works nicely with my teaching-assistant-bot (built with matrix-bot-sdk, mathjs, and chartjs), which helps me visualize information about student activity.
Matrix highlight saw some "under the hood" changes this week, in particular a refactor to rely less on the Chrome/Firefox extension API. This should make it possible (in theory, and with some more work) to run Matrix Highlight on pages without installing anything! Aside from the obvious, I think that there are additional use cases opened up by this change; one such case I have in mind is as a commenting system on a site (a la cactus comments, but with the ability to highlight page snippets!).
In the process of all of this, I've spent some time running Matrix Highlight in Firefox. I've encountered no issues during this time, so it seems like the tool is usable from FF, too.
Trixnity 2.0.0-RC1 has been released.
This release candidate contains many breaking changes due to a large refactoring, which allows us to share a lot code between server and client implementations of the Matrix APIs.
Yes, that means Trixnity can be used to implement a matrix server!
We also made some progress to make the client module (with all the high level logic) multiplaform. This is the only module, which does not support Kotlin/Native and Kotlin/JS yet.
There are many other features (like client-side notifications!), which has been added. See the changelog for more details:
features/improvements:
clientserverapi-server: new module for server-side REST endpoints of the Client-Server-API (Server-Server-API will follow soon)
olm: libolm is bundled into trixnity-olm jars
client: push notification support (push rules are evaluated)
client: introduce helpers to get complete timeline as flow (no more complicated loops to get the timeline)
client: allow subscribing to all timeline events -> really helpful for bots with e2e support
client: allow to sync once (e. g. for push notifications)
client: content field of TimelineEvent gets also set for unencrypted events
client: public access to keys
clientserverapi-model: allow custom field in pusher data
Polyjuice Client Test is a testing tool for Matrix clients. Since the last TWIM update,
two new tests have been added: key history sharing (MSC3061) and no plaintext sender key (MSC3700).
more clients endpoints have been implemented or stubbed. This has improved compatibility with some Matrix clients, and reduced noise in the logs.
the deployment at https://test.uhoreg.ca/ now automatically runs the latest version from git. This Matrix-based continuous deployment is powered by another personal side-project, which will be revealed in the future.
the UI is now significant less ugly (unless you hate purple, in which case you may find it more ugly).
#polyjuice:uhoreg.ca now exists for discussing anything related to the Polyjuice project
Dept of Ping 🏓
Dept of Ping will return!
That's all I know 🏁
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
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.
There's been lots of new MSCs this week! Three of them - those regarding state restrictions and subkeys - are related to the ongoing live location sharing work that Element is currently working on. See MSC3672 for the current state of the spec work for that feature.
Otherwise the spec core team has been reviewing a flurry of MSCs this week. This includes MSC3383 (Include destination in X-Matrix Auth Header), MSC3700 (Deprecate plaintext sender key) and MSC2246 (Asynchronous media uploads). Exciting things in the pipeline!
Another MSC in the sphere of moderation, and one that aims to put moderation control more in the hands of room admins rather than homeserver admins. A similar MSC in this realm is MSC3215 (Aristotle), which aims to send event reports to room admins, rather than homeserver admins that may not even have control over the malicious user.
In case you missed it, we've released the first release candidate for Synapse 1.56 on Tuesday. This one includes a couple new module-related features, but also quite a few bugfixes and internal improvements. I'll talk about this in more details next week when Synapse 1.56 gets properly released, but the key points of this release is that Synapse will now refuse to start if it's configured with unsafe registration settings (i.e. open registration without any form of verification) as well as if it's running against a PostgreSQL database with the wrong locale values. Have a look at the upgrade notes for more information about this.
Apart from that, the team still continuing work on the two main topics I've been mentioning in previous weeks: fast room joins and integrating poetry. The latter is getting reeeally close to the finish line now, as the pull request has recently entered the review stage. So watch this space for more exciting news on this topic!
That's all for this week, catch you all next time 🙂
MMR v1.2.12 is out now with a bunch of added features, removal of in-memory cache (per last release's deprecation notice), and some bug fixes.
Most notable are some added/improved support for JPEG XL, HEIF, and HEIC thumbnails, content ranges support (allowing the ability to skip to a part of a video), and a way to make the logs a bit quieter.
Give it a go and report issues to the issue tracker 🙂
It feels like one of these comes out nearly every month, which probably means we're doing something right! This release takes a step back and fixes quite a few of our more longstanding bugs and fixes many nits here and there. Please read the change notes carefully as some APIs have moved around and your load balancers / config may need adjusting. One final note is that this release drops support for Node 12, making the minimum version Node 14.
Once again, thanks to the wider Matrix community for filing bugs and submitting PRs, it's very much appreciated!
More updates! This week the bridge library itself gets a major update. We've made a few breaking changes, notably we now expect target homeservers to at least be Matrix v1.2 compatible. Also, this release brings the new "Provisioning and Widgets API" which allows developers to start creating HTTP APIs for their bridges which work for both provisioning mode (shared secret tokens) and widget API style (authenticating via Matrix OpenID token sharing). This stuff is still a little experimental, but it's starting to power our new experiments in the bridge world.
Media messages, both from or to KakaoTalk, are now supported! The biggest exceptions are inbound files & stickers. The latter may be a hard sell to get working, due to how KT manages stickers, but I'll look into it some more before giving a concrete answer.
The bridge is also now responsive to disconnects, like when you log in from another KakaoTalk desktop client (since the bridge mimics the desktop client, and KT only allows one desktop client to be logged in at a time!). Luckily, not all KakaoTalk APIs rely on the same connection that chatting does, meaning that some functionality can continue to work even when "disconnected". The bridge now takes advantage of this, meaning that profile-management commands (currently just the list-friends command) will work even if you get disconnected from chats for whatever reason.
The bridge is drawing ever closer to "good enough" status... Please give it a try if curious!
Heyo, we released a hotfix release for the IRC bridge this week. This fixed a rather nasty
regression where the bridge would kick everyone from the Matrix side when a Matrix ban
list is updated. People who aren't using the new ban lists feature don't need to upgrade.
Please check out https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.33.1 for more details
1.0 is a big number and a step not taken lightly. But Nheko has been in development for half a decade and we think it is time to take a step forward! As such we worked hard to fix readability issues in the app. Your messages should now be readable on any theme, because we send the first half as white text and the second half as black text (thank you, rrogalski for the contribution). For accessibility reasons this is enabled by default. We also added an improved typing indicator. Sometimes it is hard to notice when a message is too long, as such we gradually adjust the background color the longer the message gets. It also helps a lot, if you have a bad theme and can't read the text against the background color. Just enter a few characters and the background will change, so the messages should become readable. But that is not all! We all know some people have a harder time seeing colors than others. So for accessibility we also slowly rotate the screen, so that even if your display is monochrome, you don't miss out. Please see the attached video for a demo or check out our release candidates here and here.
Before this month we also rewrote the room creation dialogs to be less confusing. We now have separate dialogs for direct chats and group chats, which should cut down confusion between the options by a lot. You can also now edit the topic and name of a room inline and Malte added a jump to bottom button. On mobile you can also now drag to the sides to reply. Last but not least, you can now knock on rooms from Nheko using /knock or if an invite failed because you were not allowed to join a room and you can add a reason to room joins, leaves, invites, knocks and everything. Some of those features require the server to support Matrix v1.1, so make sure you update your servers to use them.
NeoChat now has a KRunner plugin thanks to work done by Nico (not the one from Nheko 🙂). This allows plasma users to search for and open matrix rooms directly from their desktop. You will be able to enable it from the KRunner settings after the next release.
Snehit changed the room preview to no longer show markdown characters, fixing a few situations where this would be unexpected.
On the end-to-end encryption side, we're currently working on implementing device verification.
This week I have something really exciting to report. We moved Fractal-next to the main development branch. This means that we now have nightly flatpak builds[1], so users can already try out the new version of Fractal without having to build it from source. This will also give use much more feedback and many more bug reports, hopefully not too many :) Note that this isn't a release and the software should still be considered unstable.
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
Voice rooms are now known as video rooms! We’ve landed some new designs to help make the experience more coherent, and bring them out of ‘prototype’ status.
Threads! From next week you’ll be able to turn on threads in all versions of Element but for a sneak preview you can head to Labs in Develop or Nightly and access Message Threading from there.
We’re continuing to work on our updated search experience: we are going to be merging the people and room search dialogs into the new search experience and adding filtering. Expecting work to start early next week.
Along with some feature work in Labs, the team is hard at work closing issues and clearing pesky bugs.
Our latest release is a hotfix (1.8.10) resolving a crash that occurred when uploading a photo via the camera in the timeline.
Following a team discussion and input from all areas we’ve decided to change how we launch new languages in Element. We’ll soon be moving to an automatic rollout model meaning, if there’s any amount of a language available, and it’s set as your preference, you’ll see it in the app.
Previously we’d wait until hitting the 80% mark and then manually push the translation. This leaves too much room for us to forget, or restricts access to those languages hanging around the 70% mark…
Other things we’ve been working on this week include; improving the new user experience, and starting to prototype with the layout for the app.
We released spaces on iOS this week! Where you could only view spaces before, you can now create and manage them from your phone. We have more improvements planned for the next release.
The Android team has been determined over the past weeks to improve our internal process, increasing efficiency and quality of building and deploying. With that in mind, we’ve recently published a guide for PRs on our Android Repo. It’s still a draft right now but if you want to know more about our approach, read it here.
In terms of building we’re continuing on our path of improving the quality of the app by focussing on bugs and UI issues.
We’re also working on improving our new user experience to make it easier for newbies to get up and running on Element Android!
matrix-streamchat got it's first proper release, after some battletesting by another streamer :D
https://git.pixie.town/f0x/matrix-streamchat/releases/tag/0.0.2
hosted instance is also available at https://streamchat.pixie.town
Matrix Highlight got an update this week. I've switched the highlighting widget to use a shadow DOM, which means styles from the page don't affect styles from the extension itself. This used to affect quite a lot of pages, but shouldn't be much of a problem anymore!
A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.
Support for vodozemac as an alternative to libolm has been merged, and enabled by default 🎉
A bug around invitations to previously-left rooms was fixed
There was also a decent amount of internal cleanup / developer experience work, so if you previously tried to contribute but ran into weird IDE bugs or code inconsistencies, make sure to check back. The same goes for sliding sync, which has been making decent progress – stay tuned!
I'm doing a talk about Matrix at the ACCU Conference on Saturday 9th April. Recordings of talks will be available soon after the conference, and tickets are still available to be there live in person or online! Here's the talk summary:
The Matrix network provides messaging (like WhatsApp or Slack) that offers all the features you expect, but without centralised control: it's an open standard, and anyone can run a server. The servers link together, so you can talk to other people even if they use a different server (kind of like email).
In the first half of this session, we will explore the basics of the protocol: making simple HTTP requests to send and receive messages, and discuss some of the interesting distributed-systems issues that make writing a server exciting.
In the second half we will explore the fact that messaging is only one potential use of this network, and look into some examples of other real-time use cases that are in active development, taking note of how these use cases benefit from the real-time and distributed nature of the network.
There was some silence lately on this, but activity is picking back up.
Mainly, the project is getting rewritten. Why? Well, I learned from the issues and ran into issues with the framework used. There are going to be various changes to the architecture (like no more SSR, no nextjs, pwa support and more).
Feel free to follow https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-art/pull/121 for progress.
Another big thing that's going to change is that I am working on a complete redesign. While I am still fairly early in the iterations, I wanted to share the first art direction Matrix Art is going to go. The main changes are that I try to have an art language which distinguishes it from the other proprietary players, as well as compensating for the fact that Matrix Art has a much lower volume of images on it's feed. Please be aware that this is way before the first round of polish. :)
If you want to connect with matrix-art please join the room: #matrix-art:nordgedanken.dev or follow/star the github project :)
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.
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.
This MSC proposes some much-desired practical and usability fixes to the "Well-Known" discovery method for Matrix homeservers. This is part of the system that enables homeserver's to "delegate" their homeserver address (your Matrix ID is @alice:example.com, but your homeserver is listening for requests on homeserver.example.com).
Well-known for homeserver delegation was introduced a number of years ago, and since then some friction has arisen from various implementations. This MSC aims to address a collection of them!
Hey everyone! This week we've released Synapse 1.55, which includes a bunch of new features, performance improvements and bugfix. If you're using Mjolnir to moderate your rooms, and/or synctl to manage your homeserver, this release also introduces a few changes you definitely want to be aware of, head over to the announcement on the matrix.org blog for more!
Yesterday, we noticed a compatibility issue with a newly released version of Jinja, which is the tool we use in Synapse to render e-mail and web templates. We've quickly put out Synapse 1.55.2 to address this - so if you were unable to start Synapse because of it just update and you should be fine 🙂
Note that this doesn't apply to deployments of Synapse using the matrixdotorg/synapse Docker image or Debian packages from packages.matrix.org since they are already using a compatible version of Jinja.
Apart from that, work continues towards integrating Poetry with Synapse, which should prevent this kind of issues from happening in the future, and on improving room join times.
This week brings yet more bugfixes & stability to DMs: now, there should be no trouble sending messages into a KakaoTalk DM that hasn't been active for a few days.
The other major improvements are:
A command for listing your KakaoTalk friends list, appropriately named list-friends
Receiving images from KakaoTalk
I had hoped to finish support for sending images from Matrix by today, but I couldn't quite crack it in time--either KakaoTalk changed their API for sending media messages, or I'm doing something wrong 🙃
Nonetheless, the bridge is rapidly approaching a state of being usable!
A little over a year has passed since our last update, but we're not dead! On the contrary, Syphon has seen some significant improvements over the last year both in terms of features and project structure; the project is more alive than ever before, and we're really excited to share some updates!
Core Team
Syphon now has a core team, consisting of @ereio:matrix.org (creator of Syphon), @ed:geraghty.london, @dnisbetjones:mozilla.org, and @0x1a8510f2:0x1a8510f2.space (me)! With some of the workload now being shared, we're hoping Syphon will grow even faster with less time needed to review and merge PRs, triage and fix bugs, evaluate and implement features and answer support requests.
Cross-platform Availability
Syphon has been steadily expanding its list of supported platforms over the past year:
@ed:geraghty.london worked hard to bring Syphon to Windows with full feature parity, including (currently unofficial) Windows builds of Syphon.
I've been busy creating a flatpak for Syphon which is available on Flathub.
Regular and official ARM64 builds are also planned soon, with the first manual one already released. Once the CI infrastructure is properly set up, these will be included for every release and the flatpak will receive ARM64 support too!
Releases
Between 0.1.7 (21 Mar 2021) and 0.2.12 (23 Mar 2022), 21 releases were published. Of course, too much changed to list everything, but here are some highlights:
Multi-account support 🎉
Media messages 🎉
Markdown support 🎉
Message editing 🎉
Key import and export 🎉
App lock with encryption 🎉
HTTP proxy support 🎉
Theme tweaks
3pid auth support
EXIF data removal from sent images
System brightness setting
Various customisation options
(Unencrypted) chat message search
Ability to deactivate an account
Countless new translations
Massive performance improvements
Numerous bug fixes (including encryption and SSO)
Lots of refactoring and cleanup
Many of these would not have been possible without our awesome contributors.
Translations
We have also received many contributions in the form of translations and Syphon now supports, at least partially, 26 languages. Of these, 6 languages are fully or almost fully translated. To deal with all the incoming translations, there is now also an official Weblate page for Syphon.
All of these translations are submitted by volunteers and we're really grateful for their contributions in making Syphon more accessible to an international audience.
Syphon Space
We also now have an official Syphon space which we use for support, development discussion or just friendly offtopic chat. Come join us if you like at #syphon-space:matrix.org!
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.
SchildiChat-Android now has more styles of message bubbles! So if you prefer the Schildi-bubbles over the Element ones (which you can use too in SchildiChat if you want), you can now also select between bubbles with or without tail, and select some more round bubbles than what we had previously, which was a highly requested feature!
If you wonder what makes SchildiChat special except for the different design now that Element has bubbles as well: it's hard to describe in a couple of short sentences, as it's mostly in the details.
So if you are interested in a list of things that we did on Android, I wrote up some aspects here.
Note however that this list is usually not really kept up-to-date, and there might already be some things that are now outdated since I added them.
However, it might give you some general ideas of what SchildiChat has to offer :)
Hello folks, quick update on what major things happened in Fractal-next the last two month. The most exciting addition is definitely the SSO support we merged this week and therefore we could close a 2 years old issue.
Timeline
You can now send files via drag-n-drop and via the file send button to a room. It also includes a nice preview for Images.
The timeline now shows audio messages with a small inline player.
Fractal-next lets you now remove messages you sent
Session verification
During first login, Fractal checks if the user hasn't started session verification from another client before offering to start a new one
The QrCode scanning is now spec compliant, and asks for user's confirmation after scanning.
We dropped screenshot support for QrCode scanning, since it makes the UX worse without adding any real benefit.
Room details
The room details show now the members of the room including the power level
Login
Fractal-Next now supports SSO 🎉️
We implemented auto-discovery of the homeserver via .well-known
Sorry that I was a little bit silent in the last weeks. So much stuff to do...
If you haven't heard it yet (because I have not made it that much public yet) there are experimental video calls in FluffyChat now. You need to enable them first under Settings > Chat and then you can try them out. They should be fully compatible with the Element video calls. But be aware that they are very unstable at the moment and may let your app crash.
FluffyChat 1.3.1 has been released
This release contains a lot of updated translations and bugfixes. I'm very excited about the new keyboard shortcuts from TheOneWithTheBrain. Also in your stories you can now pick the background color and the size of the picture. This is still a little bit experimental but I will share of course update the stories MSC asap.
Thanks to all contributors and translators.
Changelog:
Allow app to be moved to external storage (Marcel)
Translated using Weblate (Arabic) (Mads Louis)
Translated using Weblate (Basque) (Sorunome)
Translated using Weblate (Basque) (—X—)
Translated using Weblate (Chinese (Simplified)) (Eric)
Translated using Weblate (Czech) (Sorunome)
Translated using Weblate (Dutch) (Jelv)
Translated using Weblate (English) (Raatty)
Translated using Weblate (French) (Anne Onyme 017)
Translated using Weblate (Galician) (Xosé M)
Translated using Weblate (German) (Maciej Krüger)
Translated using Weblate (Indonesian) (Linerly)
Translated using Weblate (Irish) (Graeme Power)
Translated using Weblate (Persian) (Anastázius Darián)
Translated using Weblate (Russian) (Nikita Epifanov)
Translated using Weblate (Swedish) (Joaquim Homrighausen)
Translated using Weblate (Turkish) (Oğuz Ersen)
Translated using Weblate (Ukrainian) (Ihor Hordiichuk)
Update proguard rules to a more modern setup (MTRNord)
chore: Minor story viewer fixes (Krille Fear)
chore: Remove story line count and make answering to stories online (Krille Fear)
[[https://github.com/alphapapa/ement.el][Ement.el]], a Matrix client for Emacs, has learned to create new rooms and invite users to rooms. Feedback is appreciated; see our chat room, [[https://matrix.to/#/#ement.el:matrix.org][#ement.el:matrix.org]], or the issue tracker on the repo.
Threads will be released behind a labs flag in the next release and enabled by default in the Release Candidate (RC) from 5th April
If you’re using an older version of Synapse (<v1.55.0) you might experience compatibility problems with stable prefixes. After upgrading Element to v1.18.0 unstable threads will be moved to the main room timeline
Groups have been deleted on develop. It has also landed alongside other fairly major changes so please definitely report issues if you see them
Continuing work to remove skinning from the application. This is a fairly major change to how everything works under the hood, so when it lands please report any issues with the app as most will be subtle and therefore might be missed.
Currently expected to land on or about April 5th
Component replacement will still be possible (and this will be documented)
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
Thread list is now ordered by last reply
Fixes for the room list counter
Last stretch of threads acceptance testing before releasing to beta
Iteration to the new search dialog to integrate people & public rooms search into the new experience.
Element 1.8.7 was released on the App Store after delays with the review: we’ve made ignoring users easier and now suggest a Matrix ID when using “Sign in With Apple” to resolve the issue.
Space creation and management will be available in the next release, due next week.
We had some issues with publishing releases to TestFlight so the latest release candidates haven’t been updated publicly - we have been testing them internally so releases will not be delayed
If you are looking for a docker container with just the auto compressor for linux amd64/arm64 in it, her you go: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/rust-synapse-compress-state
The theme of the episode is "analytics and privacy". We will have guests from the awesome non-profit Exodus Privacy to shed some light on analytics: what can your apps know about you and how you can get better informed.
Nad from Element will give us the perspective from the other side: as a vendor, does it make sense to use analytics? Are there better alternatives? Is there a way to do it right?
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.
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've mostly been working on our existing projects. Unfortunately this means little to report this week, but if there's something that needs out attention then please mention it in #sct-office:matrix.org 🙂
Things have been relatively quiet on the P2P front recently as we have been working on fixing bugs in Dendrite, but we will be releasing build 94 of the P2P demos for iOS and for Android soon, which feature new fair queuing in Pinecone. This should help to reduce congestion from single nodes. It also includes all of the latest Dendrite updates.
Hello everyone. It's been a quieter week for the Synapse team---many of us are away this week.
We released Synapse 1.55.0rc1 yesterday, a little later than usual. A full release is still planned for the coming Tuesday (22nd March). Please note that this release breaks compatibility with Mjolnir 1.3.1 and earlier. Administrators using Mjolnir should ensure it is upgraded before upgrading Synapse to 1.55.0rc1.
Experimental support for using Twisted's asyncio reactor. If this is feasible, it might allow us to leverage tools and libraries for Python's growing asyncio ecosystem.
Please feel free to try it out and let us know how you get on: either in the #synapse:matrix.org or on GitHub if you encounter any unexplained problems. As ever, many thanks to all contributors involved.
Behind the scenes we've been working on a few longer-term projects:
Continued support for threading (MSC3440) and the mechanism which supports it, relations (MSC2674).
Performance investigations: we're looking at getting better profiling information; and seeing if we can reclaim CPU cycles by cancelling processing when a requester terminates their request early.
Hopefully we'll see these plans come to fruition over the coming weeks.
This week brings some bugfixes to DMs, and general improvements to the way channels are synced on startup.
I've also written some setup instructions to assist anyone wanting to try this bridge out for themselves!
As for bugs, I just stumbled upon a big one just now: if a KakaoTalk channel hasn't had activity for a few days, sending a message in its Matrix portal may crash. This happens because of the KakaoTalk API's apparent eagerness in forgetting about inactive channels (IIRC content that's a few weeks old is deleted from their servers, for privacy reasons), and the likely fix is for the bridge to use the right API calls to trigger those channels back into an active state before trying to interact with them.
Once that's fixed, the next thing I'll get out of the way (for the sake of completeness) is the web-based login interface, which all of the other mautrix-python bridges support (and is quite nice for privacy-conscious users that would rather send their KakaoTalk passwords directly to the bridge, instead of through a Matrix homeserver).
After that, I'll work on contact searching & inviting contacts to group chats or DMs.
After our release last week, of course all the bugreports came out of the woodworks. As such we fixed issues with device ids being set incorrectly after SSO, screensharing, overlapping in the reply popup and UIA flows without fallback support like https://github.com/devture/matrix-synapse-shared-secret-auth showing up as UIA stages. Key backup is also now enabled by default (if it has the correct signatures and everything), various layouting fixes and more.
We'll probably make a bugfix release in the next few days.
I have been working on integrating MSC3575: Sliding Sync into Element-Web. This is a pretty large endeavour but there has been a lot of progress on it already!
There now exists a JS-SDK PR to add the core bits of Sliding Sync (along with E2EE/to-device extensions), and a React-SDK branch which adds the Labs flag, config.json section for the proxy URL, and sets up room subscriptions when you select a room. The net result?
This is still early days: you cannot scroll the room list yet and there's still many outstanding issues to fix before it can land on mainline, but it's at the stage where it's almost ready for people to try out. Watch this space...
Continuing with the removal of the skinning layer, instead recommending module replacement - please talk to us in #element-dev:matrix.org if this is a surprise.
Continued removal of Groups/Communities - we’re expecting it to land this week (for release on about April 11th).
Continuing development of live location sharing.
We’ve reduced tsc errors by 70% in react-sdk unit tests!
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
We're working on a prototype for voice rooms, which are persistent voice chats similar to Discord's voice channel feature. Expect this to receive more attention and polish over the coming weeks
Threads are now using the stable prefix m.thread and are currently undergoing acceptance testing. We’re hoping to launch it out of labs in the next few weeks.
We’re currently at the last mile of testing for space creation & space management on iOS. Thanks to everyone who helped with community testing last week!
We’re currently on track to merge and ship these changes at the end of this month.
Once released, Element on all platforms will have parity across the core spaces feature set!
1.4.4 has dropped across all channels, we've had some promising early feedback that the storage/RAM usage is starting to decrease, as always thanks for the reports and keep them coming! Full release notes available in the usual place
Threads are levelling up and becoming driven by MSC3440, increasing their reliability and cross device consistency. If you're already using threads we'll automatically migrate them for you in the next release 1.4.6
Live location sharing work has started! Soon you'll be able to share and receive location updates in real time
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
Our metaverse-on-matrix project is progressing quickly!
Robert and Nate have been working on updating the Third Room demo to use the latest bitECS and threecs work as well as moving rendering and game update loops off the main thread!
Bruno has been porting Native Group VoIP to Hydrogen SDK which Third Room will use for both spatial voice chat and DataChannels
Ajay has a working scaffold of the early UI concepts paired with Hydrogen SDK to incorporate the room list and chat views.
More design work is happening as well, here's our latest from Rian
Want to purge a space recursively? Matrix Wrench now has a button for that. It will try to fetch a list of all sub spaces and rooms and offer you to delete them via the Synapse Admin API.
Also, you can now knock on rooms and the room lists allow to navigate to a room page by clicking on a room ID.
Next up will likely be searchable lists for rooms and users as well as other usability and layout improvements. The goal is to have a nice-looking, stable v1.0 release for its anniversary on 13th June. I'm looking for help with design and documentation.
A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.
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.
Keeping in step with our quarterly spec releases, the release of Matrix v1.3 is expected to land sometime early Q2 2022. This release will include Threads (as defined by MSC3440), as well as a number of other MSCs which land in the meantime.
Speaking of other MSCs, client developers should be aware of upcoming work to support live and static location sharing in the ecosystem. A notice on the subject has been posted today in the Matrix Client Developers room.
This MSC makes the case for allowing linking to MXC content by using of an <a> tag in the HTML-formatted formatted_body field of a m.room.message. As MXC urls could contain HTML files, it could be rather useful to link directly to them, as you would any other webpage. Your client would then translate this to an http/s URL which can be used to view/navigate to the file.
We've released Synapse 1.54! It includes quite a lot of nice improvements, including around URL previewing, and new callbacks for third-party modules. Check out the release announcement for more info on all this goodness.
We've also landed more of the ground work to improve the time it takes for new servers to join big rooms, which Rich was talking about last week. Aside from this, we're continuing the effort towards switching Synapse to use Poetry, which will enable reproducible builds for Synapse. These are some very exciting projects which will be maturing in the coming weeks, so watch this space!
Missed last weeks update, but my charts rolled along regardless. Currently serving; element-web 1.10.6 and matrix-synapse 1.54.0 (and matrix-media-repo 1.2.10)
The basics of the bridge are now ready! Backfilling, message sending, and message receiving are now implemented...albeit quite buggy and untested.
For anyone curious to try it out, installation follows the same general steps as tulir's Python-based mautrix bridges, plus a backend Node module that must be launched before the Python component of the bridge. I'll write a README with proper setup instructions soon!
Just note that for the time being, updates to the bridge may invalidate its database!!. I won't guarantee stable DB upgrades until the bridge's early growing pains have settled down.
Reminder that my KakaoTalk ID is fair-mw if anyone wants to help me test things out 🙂
👋 I'm happy to finally reveal the side project I've been working on - SmallTalk, a tiny native android matrix client focused on chatting with family and friends!
I've been wondering, how small can you make a functional native android matrix client? So far 1.7mb! (*when served from an app bundle)
Features
E2E encryption (including importing Element E2E keys)
Merged room and DM list
Message bubbles
Push notifications
Currently in closed beta whilst ironing bugs, improving error handling and adding basic features like accepting invites, however apks are available on github for eager testers!
Our MSC 3440 completed its final comment period this week which is a super exciting move forwards for our team! We are now using a stable prefix and server-side support for Threads so the whole experience should be much better.
The team is hard at work fixing bugs so that we can launch with as much confidence in our solution as possible.
If you’ve been using Threads whilst in Labs, please keep giving feedback and raising any issues you may find.
The next app store release is delayed due to some flows that do not match Apple guidelines - we’ll be updating the Apple SSO default values and introducing “Decline & Block” to invitations.
This week we checked-in on our language status and updated some things; We now support Ukrainian.
We’re working hard at updating the activity indicators in the app. While we work on the performance and load times in general we want to enable users to go about their tasks without being blocked by the activity indicator. The new indicator sits towards the top of the screen and should be out of the way for most tasks, whilst still informative. Let us know what you think!
The iOS team are also improving the onboarding experience for new users; aiming to make Matrix account creation as simple as possible.
We’re continuing on our path to increase the quality and usability of the app; the next release is v1.4.4 (already available for beta testers!) includes things like moving the typing indicator from the top bar to the bottom of the timeline.
We are also improving our PR process. In particular we want to reduce the time the submitters have to wait to get a review.
Our onboarding flow is being updated. We want new users to have a simple and straight-forward experience when they’re creating an account.
We are happy to announce that Cinny now support all the features of Spaces — a way to group rooms in Matrix. This means that you can now create new spaces from client, add rooms or subspaces inside them or manage the added rooms.
We have also made our unique feature of Pinning spaces to sidebar more easy and organized. With this option all the spaces and subspaces will be visible at one place and you can select the one you want to pin or remove.
One more unique feature we added with update is the Categorized subspaces, what this do is make all the subspaces inside a space appear as categories. This is helpful when there are deep nested spaces inside a space and breadcrumb is pain to navigate back and fourth. Keep in mind that this ignore the nesting of subspaces and all of them will appear under mainspace, but nice thing is that you can select which subspace you want to categorized and which not.
Another exciting update related to spaces is the Drag-and-Drop. Earlier there was no option to reorder pinned spaces but now with DnD you can reorder them as you like.
Apart from spaces this update also include option to drag and drop files, ||sending spoiler||, desktop notification and viewing event source. (Thanks to @ginnyTheCat for these amazing additions.)
Full changelog is available at: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny/releases/tag/v1.8.0
Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in
Join our channel at: https://matrix.to/#/#cinny:matrix.org
Github: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@cinnyapp
In the last two weeks we've made some UX improvements:
The PDF viewer now has nicer tooltips
The width of sidepanels is now adjustable
Searchbars now have hints to help find the keyboard shortcut
Error messages are now displayed more uniformly
Populus-viewer now has an icon
Failed messages are now indicated, with the option to resend
Fixed some bugs:
room avatars should now update more quickly
highlights should always display immediately after joining a new discussion
And added a service worker, for a better offline experience.
Finally, we've opened a new draft MSC (just a stub at the moment) to create a format for annotations on text documents. So... matrix annotations as a vim plugin? The future is bright 😎
As always, if you're interested in this work, or in the future of annotation and scholarship on matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.
Matrix Streamchat got it's first alpha release, and was successfully set up + used by someone else this week
Recorded a little demo video on the setup with OBS: https://youtu.be/HmJ3XwJXB7I, and implemented the GUI for configuring the chat's settings and looks, to then copy the link into an iframe (embedded chat) or OBS (overlay).
Gatho.party is a replacement for Facebook Events for small social gatherings. I've used it for a number of parties and received great feedback, and I'm seeing others are starting to use it too 🎉
To receive confirmations of attendance you can either:
Use the included Matrix bot to automatically sync RSVP emoji reactions in a linked Matrix room (great
for your friends on Matrix or in a bridged Signal chat)
Send a unique one-click RSVP links to you friends without Matrix (eg. Instagram DMs, SMS)
And as of this week, guests can "self serve" and add their own RSVP via the unique event link, so you can just drop the event link in a Facebook Messenger chat or iMessage group
(without email or phone verification at the moment, so hosts will need to moderate if
their guests go rogue and add multiple fake names!)
Other recent improvements are:
Ability to delete guests
Improved call to action and copy text for when a guest with a "magic" link is prompted to RSVP
Confetti animations when your guests RSVP via the Gatho website as "Going"
I'm currently testing an experimental chat embed using Matrix Live so your guests not on Matrix can optionally see your linked Matrix room - I've found some of my friends join Matrix after seeing this so they can join the action!
I'm keen to eventually use Cactus Comments once I figure out a bit of Elm and have more spare time so that non-Matrix guests can post too.
The Gatho website and bot is open source (AGPL-3.0) on Github, PRs and Github issues are very welcome! It's built using Next.js in Typescript.
I'd love to hear your feedback! Join the Matrix room at https://matrix.to/#/#gatho-events:matrix.gatho.party
Polyjuice Client Test is a tool for testing Matrix clients by creating a predefined environment for each test. Since the last time it was mentioned in TWIM,
more tests have been added: a test for basic end-to-end encryption message sending and receiving, symmetric key backup (MSC3270), and key withheld codes (MSC2399). More tests (and improvements to existing tests) to come.
the UI has improved a bit. Sorry, it's still ugly, but slightly less so. Also, now you can search through the tests.
I am now running a publicly-accessible instance of it at https://test.uhoreg.ca/ so you can test your clients without having to set it up yourself. This instance is stable-ish, in that it should always be available, but may be restarted randomly, in which case you may need to re-start your tests.
If you are looking for a docker container with just the auto compressor for linux amd64/arm64 in it, her you go: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/rust-synapse-compress-state
hello! wanted to show a small matrix web client made with unminified js/html/css & web components (wip++)
https://libli.org/
https://gitlab.com/sctlib/libli + https://gitlab.com/sctlib/matrix-room-element
looking forward feedback comments or anything,
cheers & viva la matrix!
for now it only uses default matrix messages, and it is read only, so users have to login/register/CRUD through element (or any other client)
the idea would be to give back users control on their data, allow them to "collect" (individually or as group), any type of content, gathered into matrix room
For now, the client is making HTTP requests to matrix API, to fetch the data of a (public) room, all message & state events.
it also give a "clean URL" libli.org/room:server.tld so users can access their "profile" (chat room) easily (just like a twitter, instagram, medium) page
Following Element's recent announcement of location sharing with support for self-hosted map tile server, I went ahead and set up one, and have written a blog post about it, explaining how to go a little further than the currently published guide, and with Ansible scripts included.
*> https://wrily.foad.me.uk/self-host-a-matrix-map-server
Andy Balaam wrote a blog post explaining extensible events - it shows simple examples of what message events look like now, and how they change with extensible events. It also covers the abbreviated forms of m.message: m.text and m.html, which can make it somewhat more confusing to understand.
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.
t2bot.io - a public integrations network for Matrix - has passed 1 Million known rooms and 8.3 Million bridged users. 10,000 of these rooms are attributed to Voyager (a bot which actively goes out to find rooms to map Matrix, with the map currently down for maintenance), leaving the remaining ones either bridged, previously bridged, or using a different integration offered by t2bot.io for free.
The 8.3 Million users are mainly Discord and Telegram users which have been brought over to Matrix through bridges. The stats say "excluding Twitter-bridged" because there's 424,832 old accounts from back in the day when t2bot.io had a free Twitter bridge available. To further break this down, about 6.8M are Telegram users (12% of Telegram) and 1.3M are Discord (<1% of Discord).
For perspective, t2bot.io has about 569 Million events stored in its database and sees approximately 30 thousand people bridged daily from the wider world into Matrix through its bridges.
This post is just a milestone update, but it also serves as a reminder that running your own server/bridges is also possible. In fact, it's even recommended to have better control over your own data and avoid latency issues that large providers, like t2bot.io, can unintentionally introduce. Synapse is relatively easy to set up with minimal sysadmin knowledge (guide), and there's always paid offerings like Element Matrix Services (for home and also for fun) and Beeper for a richer bridging experience than t2bot.io can feasibly provide.
It is to be noted that eQualitie has set-up public Matrix and Element instances for Ukrainian people who are struggling right now. If you are in Ukraine or are in touch with Ukrainian people who need secure communications, you can show them https://kyiv.dcomm.net.ua, https://odessa.dcomm.net.ua, or https://kharkiv.dcomm.net.ua depending on their location so they get instructions on how to create an account on Matrix and stay in touch
MSC3575 Sliding Sync work is progressing, and a number of new features have been added to the MSC with implementations in the built-in web client in the proxy. A list of changes include:
spec/proxy: the ability to filter the room list by room name.
spec/proxy: Aninitial flag on the room to distinguish between updates and the initial sync for a given room. This can be used as a hint to clients to determine if they should update/replace their local data for that room.
proxy: more efficient algorithm for determining overlapping sets of ranges, resulting in fewer bytes over the wire when scrolling.
proxy: the client implementation now supports sending basic text messages as well as issuing/join,/invite,/leave commands.
proxy: the client implementation now has a developer HUD which tracks the Tx/Rx bytes as well as a visual representation of the sliding window.
The net result is a basic but incredibly low bandwidth syncing client: 60.79KB to download an entire initial sync on matrix.org. Further improvements will be done on the client to make sure it doesn't scale with the number of rooms on the user's account (it currently does because it naively adds a placeholder for each room in the list) to ensure it remains extremely snappy and a vision for what Sliding Sync can do in practice, right now. Please continue giving feedback on MSC3575 or in #sliding-sync:matrix.org as the API is still in development and will change depending on what clients require.
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.
Heads up! You may have noticed some changes to the matrix-org/matrix-doc github repository this week. The first major one being that it no longer exists!
We have separated it out into two repositories:
matrix-org/matrix-spec - the source text of the spec. Issues and pull requests filed here should relate to the source of the spec.
matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals - all Matrix Spec Change proposals. New MSCs should be filed against this repository as pull requests. Issues should not be filed against this repository (and no, the issue tracker cannot be disabled, as it would cause transferred issue link redirects to 404).
The primary motivation for this was to separate concerns of interacting with matrix-org/matrix-doc. Those interacting with the spec's source would have to wade through long-lived spec proposals, while those only interested in spec proposals would need to filter out spec source files and other issues and PRs related to them. This also helps writing tooling against the repo either as it no longer needs to filter MSCs via issue labels.
Existing links to matrix-doc should be automatically redirected by github to the right place. MSC authors and developers should update their git remote settings to point to the new repos.
What happened in detail to achieve this was:
matrix-doc was renamed tomatrix-spec-proposals
matrix-spec was created
All files other than the "proposals" folder were transferred frommatrix-spec-proposals tomatrix-spec
All open issues frommatrix-spec-proposals were transferred tomatrix-spec
Further details are available here: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/927
This MSC asks for the simple change of adding a "destination" field to the Authorization header of federation requests. This would have the benefit of allowing reverse proxies - potentially handling traffic for multiple homeservers - to know where requests should be sent. Or for forward proxies, which could validate outgoing requests from a homeserver before they're sent.
There is currently some discussion on the fundamental idea of the MSCs, which will need to be resolved first before it can move forwards.
Quite a varied bag this week! Firstly we cut a release candidate for Synapse 1.54.0, which we hope to release next week. As ever, testing and feedback is much appreciated.
Our switch to Poetry for dependency management has come a few steps closer, by removing tox from our Continuous Integration, and converting some of our ad-hoc scripts to proper Python entry points.
Meanwhile we've been continuing to knock out blockers to improving room join speeds, including better exception handling and logging, and some exciting work to reduce wasted work when a client disconnects while we're still processing a request.
We've also been taking a wider look at performance problems, such as slow /sync and /login times.
I have been asked by numerous people over months if there are any kind of graphs comparing Synapse and Dendrite. Up until now, my answer has been "as far as I know, no". However, this got me thinking whether I can use Complement to engineer some kind of performance testing infrastructure. After hacking on it for a day or two, I can now share some of the work I've done in this area. There now exists two new binaries in the Complement repo: perftest and perfgraph. The former will run some tests and output a .json file. The latter will consume these files to generate .svg graphs. The tests performed include:
Creating a bunch of rooms with different users. (currently 10 users and 50 rooms)
Joining a bunch of rooms with different users.
Sending messages into rooms with different users. (currently 100 messages)
Doing an initial sync for all users.
Updating the display name of all users.
Doing an incremental sync for all users.
The metrics are collected using docker stats. This means the entire container is measured, not just the homeserver binary (e.g any daemons or assistive processes are included in the metrics) and includes:
CPU time consumed
Memory consumed
Bytes transmitted/received
Disk read/writes
Time taken
Here are some results:
This was a surprising find and probably indicates that Dendrite has a memory leak somewhere when creating events. However, the fun doesn't stop there. We can also use this tool to compare different versions of the same homeserver:
This allows us to quantify any performance improvements we've been working on, and you can clearly see how we're being more efficient with CPU in newer versions. But the fun doesn't stop there either. We can also compare different flavours of the same version of a homeserver:
You can quantify the cost of running sqlite or postgres for your particular installation.
Care must be taken when interpreting results. Lower doesn't always mean better. For example, a low readout on "create_users" may be a cause for concern as it might indicate that the server is not hashing passwords correctly (e.g using bcrypt/scrypt which are designed to consume CPU/memory). Servers which don't implement all of the specification will also be abnormally low on CPU/memory (e.g not having to calculate unread counts or handle push notifications naturally means less work to do so less resources consumed). Furthermore, these tests do not yet test federation, so expensive remote joins are not measured (remote joins require the joining server to check signatures, hashes, etc of a lot of events which doesn't happen for local servers). That being said, I have hopefully illustrated how useful this tool can be for both server developers trying to improve their software and server admins who want to use the right server for their hardware. The graphs are still a work-in-progress and there's a lot more that can be done in this area beyond a few days work, but it's a start.
Today we've released Dendrite 0.6.5 which contains early push notification support as well as a number of fixes and improvements. This release includes the following changes:
Early support for push notifications has been added, with support for push rules, pushers, HTTP push gateways and the /notifications endpoint (contributions by danpe, PiotrKozimor and tommie)
Spaces Summary (MSC2946) is now correctly supported (when msc2946 is enabled in the config)
All media API endpoints are now available under the /v3 namespace
Profile updates (display name and avatar) are now sent asynchronously so they shouldn't block the client for a very long time
State resolution v2 has been optimised further to considerably reduce the number of memory allocations
State resolution v2 will no longer duplicate events unnecessarily when calculating the auth difference
The create-account tool now has a -reset-password option for resetting the passwords of existing accounts
The /sync endpoint now calculates device list changes much more quickly with less RAM used
The /messages endpoint now lazy-loads members correctly
Read receipts now work correctly by correcting bugs in the stream positions and receipt coalescing
Topological sorting of state and join responses has been corrected, which should help to reduce the number of auth problems when joining new federated rooms
Media thumbnails should now work properly after having unnecessarily strict rate limiting removed
The roomserver no longer holds transactions for as long when processing input events
Uploading device keys and cross-signing keys will now correctly no-op if there were no changes
Parameters are now remembered correctly during registration
Devices can now only be deleted within the appropriate UIA flow
The /context endpoint now returns 404 instead of 500 if the event was not found
SQLite mode will no longer leak memory as a result of not closing prepared statements
Spec compliance, as measured by Sytest, currently sits at:
Client-server APIs: 76%, up from 65% last time
Server-server APIs: 95%, up from 94% last time
As always, you can join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite discussion and announcements.
Hey folks, I'm back from holidays and I'm proud to say that hookshot is kicking out release after release. This release is especially large and contains a bounty of new features and fixes. Of note are:
JIRA Datacenter (On Premise) is now supported.
You can now configure fine grained permissions for users on the bridge by userId, homeserver domain or room membership (think spaces).
Generic webhooks has sprouted a versioned API, with v2 allowing for finer control over the output.
GitHub connections now include the closing comment when issues and PRs are closed.
GitHub connections will also notify a room when an existing issue has been relabled to one filtered by that room.
Figma now uses MSC3440 for comment threads.
But seriously go check out the release, there is way more there than I can include in this TWIM post. Happy webhookin, matrix gang!
In case you did not know, Hookshot can be installed via spantaleev's Ansible playbook. In addition to updates for this new release, the role has recently gotten some improvements and fixes by the community, so in case you had issues before, now is the time to try again!
P.S oh and I almost forgot, we rehomed to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-hookshot. This doesn't change much, other than some redirects in your browsers cache.
Allows anyone to run github commands in rooms. User part of the room listed can actually go and create connections to anywhere (we use it internally at $work), and then there is a final random user who gets those permissions because they refuse to join that room :p
Released v1.10.5 and also v1.10.6 as a hotfix for a crash
Surveyed users and collated feedback from search result ordering for improvements to the new search experience (enable it in Settings -> Labs in production)
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
Pin drop location sharing has been added
Fixed message ordering issues in threads
Fixed threads discovery when scrolling back in a room
Added a couple of new ways to access pinned messages, in the room header and info panel
Improved the reliability of pinned messages with edits
Making progress on the registration flow by setting name and avatar
In development:
We will be trying out Spaces on iOS at 16:00 UTC / 17:00 CET on Tuesday, 8th of March. Head over to #element-community-testing:matrix.org to hear the latest on all testing sessions!
Live location sharing has started
In labs:
An option to use the last member avatar and name in the timeline
a very simple invite-accepting bot as part of matrix-streamchat to more easily facilitate peeking into rooms over federation.
You run one on your guest-access enabled homeserver, invite it to your remote room, and now all guest accounts from your server know they are in fact allowed to publicly read the room over federation without joining themselves. https://git.pixie.town/f0x/matrix-streamchat/src/branch/main/autojoin-bot
Work on having a setup page for the bot was added which allows to easily add the bot to your room (sets up permissions and invites the bot as required)
Added support for a state event which tells the widget about "who is the bot?" and "which lists does this bot monitor?" Which also allows you to use the widget without being in the banlist room yourself. (See https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-moderation-widget#use-a-state-event-to-allow-showing-relevant-lists-only-in-the-dropdown for more information)
Element Call has entered beta! Head over to https://call.element.io (formerly matrixvoip.dev) to play with in-browser native Matrix voice/video calling powered by MSC3401, supporting all webrtc-capable mobile & desktop browsers. See all the details over at https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-element-call/
Offers high quality video calls with around 6 or 7 participants as a small & simple, standalone app that allows anyone to drop into a video conference easily.
This is beta - please file bugs at https://github.com/vector-im/element-call/issues and be aware that currently all participants need good bandwidth
This is the first implementation of MSC3401: a spec for secure, federated voice and video conferences.
Integrations into other clients are coming soon, Hydrogen is working on it right now
We’ll also be developing a server to mix media streams so calls can scale up to much larger number of participants. The server will only ever see your encrypted media, so calls will stay secure and confidential.
A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.
We're back (to TWIM)! Here's some highlights from the past few months:
Stronger types for some things:
Base64 which ensures you always decode / encode with the appropriate base64 dictionary [@jplatte]
TransactionId which is simply a little more explicit than String and easier to generate a random instance of [@jplatte]
Stable support for lots of previously-unstable functionality that got stabilized upstream as part of the Matrix specification releases v1.1 and v1.2 [@zecakeh]
More fine-grained feature flags for MSC implementations (before: everything behind unstable-pre-spec, after: most things behind dedicated unstable-mscXXXX features) [@zecakeh]
All of these changes are available in version 0.5.0 which was released about two weeks ago.
Additionally, @zecakeh recently started implementing extensible events and doing some pretty heavy internal refactoring that will make our release process faster and hopefully make contributing to Ruma easier as well.
With all these changes we're very close to supporting all of Matrix v1.1 (and Matrix v1.2 too!), with the only major omission being Secure Secret Storage and Sharing (SSSS). Some work on that was done as far back as last year's GSoC but it was blocked on a medium-sized refactoring of how we handle account data. I'm planning to get that over the finish line over the next weeks.
I'm working on a little hobby project, The Matrix Scribe.
The Matrix Scribe helps us re-post or transcribe messages into matrix that we received from somewhere else, posing as different ghost users to represent the original authors.
Scribe will post this:
Ann I'm Ann.
Bob Hello! I'm Bob.
when I write this to @scribe-bot:
@julian /scribe as Ann
@julian I'm Ann.
@julian /scribe as Bob
@julian Hello! I'm Bob.
That is an illustration of the goal. The output part works already; the bot part isn't implemented yet.
Why?
I want to encourage people to experiment and play with extending Matrix in creative ways.
As a building block for myself towards building more usual matrix bridges. Scribe is the input half of the matrix half of a bridge, so literally one quarter of a typical matrix bridge.
I hope that I myself and maybe some other people will find Scribe fun or useful in itself.
a simple bot https://github.com/borisrunakov/maubot_azuracast built with maubot, that you can use to request data from your azuracast self hosted instance. It's not much but ok...
I'll be speaking at the new HYTRADBOI conference (29 Apr) about building collaborative, open software on Matrix. All of the talks sound super interesting, highly recommended! 😄 The talks will be public after the conference as well.
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.
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.
MSC3440 continues to be the focus on much review as the proposal inches towards entering final comment period.
Otherwise both MSC3589 (room version 9 as the default room version) and MSC3582 (remove m.room.message.feedback) merged this week. The former brings with it updated versions for rooms as they continue to be created across the federation, whereas the latter is simply a nice clean up to the existing spec :)
This MSC aims to introduce a set of generic administrative APIs for Matrix homeservers, starting with those that could potentially be useful for user moderation.
There has long been talk of adding administration APIs akin to Synapse's Admin API to the spec, in part to reduce the number of tools that are specifically created for it, and thus can only be used with Synapse.
This week we released Synapse 1.53.0! This release adds support for sending to-device messages to application services, adds a background database update to purge account data for deactivated users, and adds more features to improve performance and stability, as well as bugfixes and improved documentation. Check out the release notes here.
In addition to the release, work continues on improving the performance of room joins-progress is being made! Finally, we began the process of switching over Synapse to use Poetry for dependency management-keep your eyes peeled for more information on that project as it develops.
This week we released Dendrite v0.6.4 which contains a significant number of improvements and fixes. It includes the following:
All Client-Server API endpoints are now available under the /v3 namespace
The /whoami response format now matches the latest Matrix spec version
Support added for the /context endpoint, which should help clients to render quote-replies correctly
Accounts now have an optional account type field, allowing admin accounts to be created
Server notices are now supported
Refactored the user API storage to deduplicate a significant amount of code, as well as merging both user API databases into a single database
Guest registration can now be separately disabled with the new client_api.guests_disabled configuration option
Outbound connections now obey proxy settings from the environment, deprecating the federation_api.proxy_outbound configuration options
The roomserver input API will now strictly consume only one database transaction per room, which should prevent situations where the roomserver can deadlock waiting for database connections to become available
Room joins will now fall back to federation if the local room state is insufficient to create a membership event
Create events are now correctly filtered from federation /send transactions
Excessive logging when federation is disabled should now be fixed
Dendrite will no longer panic if trying to retire an invite event that has not been seen yet
The device list updater will now wait for longer after a connection issue, rather than flooding the logs with errors
The device list updater will no longer produce unnecessary output events for federated key updates with no changes, which should help to reduce CPU usage
Local device name changes will now generate key change events correctly
The sync API will now try to share device list update notifications even if all state key NIDs cannot be fetched
An off-by-one error in the sync stream token handling which could result in a crash has been fixed
State events will no longer be re-sent unnecessary by the roomserver to other components if they have already been sent, which should help to reduce the NATS message sizes on the roomserver output topic in some cases
The roomserver input API now uses the process context and should handle graceful shutdowns better
Guest registration is now correctly disabled when the client_api.registration_disabled configuration option is set
One-time encryption keys are now cleaned up correctly when a device is logged out or removed
Invalid state snapshots in the state storage refactoring migration are now reset rather than causing a panic at startup
Sytest compliance is up slightly:
Client-server APIs: 67%, up from 65%
Server-server APIs: 95%, same as before
As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite-related chat!
Here are the first steps for a bridge to KakaoTalk! The bridge is based on mautrix-python (having used mautrix-facebook as a starting point--there's still plenty of Facebook-specific code in there), with the backend handled by node-kakao (connected via RPC, as there seems to be no Python API for KakaoTalk!).
The bridge doesn't do much yet; all it can do is log in & sync your list of chats (if that). But it's under rapid development & decent momentum, so hopefully it will be usable soon!
For anyone brave enough to try it out, its setup steps are very similar to that of any of the Python-based mautrix bridges (though Docker is currently unsupported).
We made a small release that just is compiled against the new mtxclient version to fix an issue with servers announcing support for Matrix v1.1 or higher. We strongly recommend you update before the next Synapse stable release is out.
Apart from that Nheko now has support for hidden read receipts (thanks to symphorien, see MSC2285). ZenWalker updated our usage of deprecated gstreamer APIs. Malte has been spending a lot of effort on improving the scrolling experience on the PinePhone as well as allowing to search on mobile. Forwarding should now work properly again as well as calling on mobile and we fixed a small memory leak when opening some dialogs.
“Twosday” wasn’t the only exciting thing happening this week. Take a peek at everything else we had going on…
Coming to a Poll near you…
From next week’s releases, you’ll discover two new updates on polls! First off, you’ll be able to edit a poll as long as no one has yet voted on it - which is great if you create a poll and realise you’ve made a small mistake. Even better, there’s now a new type of poll: ‘closed polls’ don’t show any results until the poll has ended, to keep the surprise.
Location Sharing
Location Sharing is now available by default for users on all platforms, except desktop (where you can receive but not send locations). Check it out!
The next stage is live location sharing and ‘pin dropping’, expect more soon.
Threaded Messaging
Designed to make catching up on rooms easier, and to keep the main timeline as clutter free as possible, Threads are nearly here.
You can try Threads out on all platforms - you’ll find them in Labs. This feature is experimental; let us know your feedback, and report any bugs as we continue to improve.
Community testing
We will be looking at search result ordering on Web as part of the new search experience at 17:30 UTC / 18:30 CET on Tuesday, 1st of March
We’re also hoping to test Threads on mobile devices towards the end of the week, join the testing room to get involved!
The EleWeb team has been working on Spaces, Threads, and defects this week.
We are starting to look at batched updates, which could be bringing performance improvements to us.
On the process improvement side, we are looking at test coverage and process improvements around PR submission. Don’t be surprised if our developers start a conversation around tests when you submit your next PR 🙂
V1.10.5 release candidate is available and release is expected to go out on Monday, 28th February.
And don’t forget; the new and improved search experience is available. It’s in Beta so turn it on, try it out, and send us your feedback!
We will be talking to the community about planned improvements in the next Community Testing Session on Tuesday over in#element-community-testing:matrix.org
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
Improvements to Threads reliability are happening everyday. We’re also making some tweaks to the user experience details, like dragging and dropping files into the Thread panel.
Next week’s release (1.8.3) includes changes and improvements we’ve made to our overall app experience by closing some pesky UI defects.
This week we’ve also been working on improving the reliability of our Labs features. If you’ve turned on Threads or Bubbles in Labs you may have experienced app slow downs or crashes. In the next version, these will be minimised.
Spaces on iOS are also getting some attention at the moment and we’re hoping to improve the user experience of Spaces on Mobile.
The next release of Android (1.4.2) includes support for “@ room” and other usability defects you might have seen before… Fixes include steadying the notification badge in the room list, adding the correct interactions on bottom sheets, and opening a DM from the Space member list.
We’ve also been working on upgrading the voice message experience, adding improvements like scrubbing! Keep sending voice notes and let us know what other improvements we should make.
Our onboarding flow is also getting a new lick of paint. We want new users to our platform to have a simple and straight-forward experience when they’re creating an account.
Over at Populus-Viewer, we're continuing to refine the UX, for maximum focus, efficiency and enjoyment. Since last time we've:
Reworked the mobile view controls into a sidebar design.
Improved the generation of highlight rectangles.
Made sure that LaTeX and code listings are always displayed nicely
Made it possible to modify text selections within a PDF using the keyboard
Added "one-click" links for onboarding new users into a particular server, SSO flow and PDF collection.
We've also had some bug fixes related to federation, and had some of our first ever (maybe the first on matrix - first in the history of the universe?) federated social annotation sessions.
Populus-Philarchive
Populus-Philarchive, our proof-of-concept discussion overlay for preprint archives, now incorporates an OAI-PMH harvester, so it can aggregate OAI bibliographic metadata, and use that data for room creation and discovery. The implementation is pretty general, so it should be easy to tweak for any archive that supports OAI-PMH.
MSC3574
MSC3574 - marking up resources got some love this week, as we added a proposal for serializing annotations on matrix that ought to be compatible with the w3c web annotation data model. This paves the way for interoperability between the matrix annotation ecosystem and services like hypothes.is, and hopefully will make matrix a compelling option even for institutions where compliance with existing web standards is a must.
As always, if you'd like to chat about any of these developments, come visit us at #opentower:matrix.org !
The Circles beta on iOS continues inching toward a public release later this Spring.
This week I added support for infinite scrolling on timelines. (Previously, scrolling the timelines was very clunky -- the user had to manually tap a button to "Load More" every 10-15 posts.)
Also added a confirmation dialog when the user attempts to leave a group.
On Android, the prototype is coming along nicely, thanks to the efforts of our new developer Taras:
The login screen works
Currently working on implementing the timeline of social posts for groups
In the last 2 weeks, I increasingly had to learn how to moderate rooms properly, which brought up a lack of nice Mjölnir gui for me.
Due to that, I just started to write one.
It is at the time of writing still fairly young.
The current features are:
An overview of the ban list data the user is in (Not for the specific Mjölnir currently. Also requires a user to have joined the list room)
A quick form to ban a person
A form to redact someone or a message
Planned features are:
Support for showing MSC1929 information if available
Writing a patch for Mjölnir, so the widget can know which banlist the bot watches, so only relevant lists show up.
Editing the banlist (aka unbanning)
Adding support for more advanced features like deactivation of users and removal of media on the matrix-media-repo.
Covering most of Mjölnir's commands
Redact on ban and similar utilities you might want while banning.
Small getting started (it is simple :D)
To use it, you simply can add it to your Mjölnir Admin room by putting /addwidget https://moderation_widget.nordgedanken.dev?room_id=$matrix_room_id (the variable will get replaced automatically) in the message bar and pressing enter. The widget runs entirely client side, so this is not sending any events to my server. If you still are concerned due to the big amount of permissions asked, you can just build it yourself and host it.
You know what would be embarrassing? If changing the version number of something broke Nheko... Well, completely unrelated, mtxclient 0.6.2 is out now which fixes an issue where it would aggressively validate that version numbers started with an 'r'. Otherwise that release is API and ABI compatible, so if packagers could pick that up as a bugfix release into stable releases, that would be great!
A small update was released, merging 2 month old PRs.
The changes are mainly features being now deactivated because we did not actually use them and fixing the example in one case. No updates to dependencies.
0.4.0
Dependencies have been updated to the newest versions.
The distribution-provided Debian packages for Synapse will only be provided for Bookworm (in testing/unstable) and Bullseye (in bullseye-backports). If you’re still using Buster (through buster-backports-sloppy), consider switching to Bullseye or, alternatively, to packages provided by the Synapse upstream. 1.52.0 is the last version to be provided for Buster through the backports repository.
I saw an interesting (to me) reMarkable telegram bot somewhere. But I prefer matrix and node.js was more difficult to deploy on embedded. So I wrote a reMarkable matrix bot in Go. https://gitlab.com/ptman/remarkable-matrix
Looking for a bot to manage events and feedback from your community?
MCM an information bot. It manages the flow of information between community leaders and their community.
It aggregates messages from community members in several ways.
A @ mention. You can mention the bot with a message.
A Direct Message. Members of your community can message this bot privately.
hash tags. Using hash tags members of your community can send messages tagged to go to a specific back room.
You as an administrator of the bot can send timed announcements to any room using the built in matrix administration interface.
You can also manage tags, add and remove admin of the bot, add automatic replies and more. All from the comforts of your Matrix client.
Hello everyone! It's me, not-anoa, here with your weekly spec update. I finally got the scripts to run which means you get a proper update once again (yay).
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.
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been looking at unblocking MSC3440: Threads so it can make a smooth journey into acceptance. This involves quite a lot of work to ensure that the features we're concerned about are addressed, but so far the FCP progress on it is looking good.
We're also spending a bunch of time working out what room version 10 looks like to try and fix some usability issues with join rules and general maintenance of things like power levels. The hope is that in time for Matrix 1.3 we'll have v10 out (but not made default) for folks to experiment with.
Random MSC of the week
Your random MSC is MSC2974: Widgets: Capabilities re-exchange. I swear it was actually random and only after running the script exactly once. The MSC is interesting because it allows widgets (a feature working its way into the general spec, slowly) to ask for more permissions when they need them. This ensures the widget doesn't need to ask for everything at startup (which is more likely to mean that it gets rejected), and that it can maintain a clean security state during normal operation.
One day it'll probably make it into the spec as part of the larger widget movement, but first we need to get widgets into the spec properly.
The Graph
Numbers only mean so much, and graphs show progress. Here's the breakdown of MSCs over time:
Of note
If you look carefully at the OpenAPI viewer, you might notice a dropdown for not-client-server APIs 👀. There's still work to be done to bring on the missing APIs, but this is in a place where it can be experimented with. Thanks to Alexandre Franke for getting this over the line :)
This week we've released Synapse 1.53.0rc1, which includes a bunch of new features, improvements, and other niceties... But more on that next week when we release Synapse 1.53.0 🙂 As usual, we're super grateful for anyone that helps us test release candidates by running them with their homeservers! Please report any breakage or feedback in #synapse:matrix.org
Apart from this we have been continuing our experimentations with Poetry to better manage our dependencies in our Python projects after we switched Sydent to it last week. We're already starting to see improvements off the back of this work, such as automated security PRs and an opportunity to centralise our automated workflows to better reuse them in our projects (see https://github.com/matrix-org/backend-meta). We look forward to bringing all this goodness to Synapse soon!
And my Helm Chart updates are still happening, also now listed on Artifact Hub for easier discovery. This week saw several element-web updates, finally ending on 1.10.4
Is using Nheko a bit of a pain on your PinePhone? Do you just want bubbles in your chat app, not raw lines of text? Does Nheko waste too much space on timestamps and other metadata for messages?
Well, I am assuming Malte was annoyed by that or similar reasons. But in the end, they did spend a lot of effort reorganizing the way Nheko layouts messages so that people can have bubbles. This should make Nheko feel much more at home on the PinePhone and it seems like they are doing even more to make Nheko a great experience on mobile devices! But just look at it yourself:
If you are scared now and you think: "This is not the Nheko I came to love!", don't worry, all of this is optional. You can play around with the different avatar sizes as well as the bubbles themselves. You can even make Nheko look like it always looked!
There will be some regressions though. If you want to contribute, it would help a lot if you test those changes and report issues that you find! <3
Apart from that, there were also a lot of other bugfixes and cleanups by various contributors. You can also hide events by type now. If you don't want to see stickers or when someone joins a room, just disable that in the room settings! Tastytea implemented that. Long usernames should now also no longer overflow the profile pages and you can reset the state for a single room using the /reset-state /command. This is helpful when updating Nheko to use widgets, but Nheko just threw those events away (or pinned messages or other state events).
The new search experience came out this week, you can enable it in Beta to try it out! We are collecting feedback from users to inform upcoming improvements.
We’re working hard on smashing bugs and reducing the number of defects.
Along with closing bugs, we’re working hard on adding finesse to our app and removing some of those “papercut” issues that users experience.
Keep your eyes peeled for updates and let us know what you think!
Our first time user experience is being updated also. We’ve introduced new splash screens to help introduce Element. Don’t panic! You can skip straight to “sign-in” if this isn’t for you.
A new spinner is here… While we work on the speed and performance of the app we’ve introduced a new spinner that does not get in your way while you work.
Bugs and Papercuts… Our app is getting some love from our developer team as we try to reduce confusion and simplify flows throughout the app.
Keep an eye out for any small changes and let us know what you think!
Creating a new account in Element can be intimidating for new users, especially those who aren’t familiar with Matrix. We’re introducing new screens and simplifying our questions so that users can sign up with confidence!
If you have any feedback, or want to share your thoughts on our first time user experience, get in touch.
A new layout option hit our app this week: Message Bubbles! If you’re used to seeing inbound messages on the right, and outgoing messages on the left this might be for you. You can access the new appearance option from Settings.
I wrote a small web app thing that can download, decrypt and display Matrix media in a browser. The goal is to use it in the Android SMS bridge for sending attachments that are too big for MMS, but it might be useful for other things too.
Currently it consists of the web frontend, a maubot plugin to generate links, and a small server that stores file metadata (so the URLs just contain the decryption key and a short ID to find the metadata on the server). I'll probably continue working on the exact URL format to make it shorter and to encrypt the metadata, and maybe also add an alternative mode where all info is included in the URL to make the server component optional.
I worked on adapting the NixOS module for Synapse to support worker deployments. It's a great reproducible deployment method, and super easy to configure. My module is perhaps less quality than the rest of the chain, but it's pretty neat to define your whole Matrix deployment like this: https://git.pixie.town/f0x/nixos/src/branch/synapse-workers/nodes/cosmos/containers/synapse-workers.nix#L60 and have Nix figure out all the systemd units and nginx routes that have to be added
Full Nix code for the module is at https://git.pixie.town/f0x/nixos/src/branch/synapse-workers/common/modules/synapse
pictured is the ping stat for a little test deployment with 8 federation senders :P
matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports installing the matrix_encryption_disabler Synapse module (details here), which homeserver admins can use to prevent End-to-End-Encryption from being enabled by users on their homeserver. The popular opinion is that this is dangerous and shouldn't be done, but there are valid use cases for disabling encryption discussed in this Synapse issue.
Pushed 234 updates and enhancements to the automation framework used as the service core
Integrated 17 additional components to the matrix stack
Developed 5 bots and tools to extend matrix capabilities
Installed 92 new matrix servers
Helped 172 people and organizations to achieve their goals in the matrix
Posted 74 updates in the announcements room
Some history:
the project (not service yet) started on February 12, 2021
the first installed server was etke.cc itself (yes, etke.cc homeserver is a customer of etke.cc service from the day 1)
the second installed server was a chatbot, that uses matrix as a platform to interact with users across different chat networks (Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, etc.) - one API to rule them all.
After a few years, matrix-room-directory-server has finally gotten an upgrade to modern times. Intended to eventually be a standalone directory server (making vanity aliases possible, but otherwise not functional as a homeserver), it currently only supports overriding the federation /publicRooms endpoint.
The changes made today are to replace the old, broken, appservice-backed approach with a space-backed approach. You can see this in action on t2bot.io: querying the room directory over federation will hit the room directory server, which is watching #directory:t2bot.io in the background to determine which rooms to serve.
Hay y'all. I created a blog post about how to host element and matrix .well-known files using cloudflare pages that I thought might be worth sharing. Have a few kinks to work out regarding CORS (might need to clean my browsers cache) though.
https://minecraftchest1.wordpress.com/2022/02/17/hosting-element-and-matrix-well-known-files-with-cloudflare-pages/
https://matrix.to/#/#minecraftchest1-blog-matrix-elemet-cloudflare:matrix.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.
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.
MSC3440 (threading) continues to move forward with a proposed final comment period this week. As a really useful feature in Matrix, it's great to see it getting closer to landing in the spec.
In a similar vein, MSC3613 (combinatorial join rules) had a proposed final comment period. The intention of this is to be a simple mechanism for resolving the "it's not possible to have both a restricted and knock room" situation - as both introduced mutually exclusive join rules. This MSC will likely serve as the basis of a new room version whenever it lands.
This MSC makes the case for allowing widgets to be created in private rooms by default. The actual spec for it is blocked behind having widgets in the spec (see this tracking PR if you're interested).
As noted in the PR though, this MSC could build on the existing im.vector.modular.widgets unstable prefix for widgets in order to create an implementation for this feature. It does not appear to have happened yet though.
Hello, TWIM! This week we released Synapse 1.52, which includes new Admin APIs for monitoring federation status and immediately retrying failed connections, as well as for reporting on rooms shared between two homeservers. We've also fixed / improved media previews for sites like Reddit. Plus lots more fixes / refactors / improvements under the hood.
This is a smaller release as it's coming off of our FOSDEM sprint, but we look forward to getting back to more regularly-sized and featureful Synapses this month.
Notably, we've been experimenting with Poetry to better manage Python dependencies in our applications (Synapse, Sygnal, and Sydent). We just switched Sydent over this week and are working out the kinks in our CI and build pipelines. We're looking forward to bringing this consistency to Synapse next month!
Yesterday we released Dendrite 0.6.3 which is a primarily bug fix release. It contains the following changes:
Initial support for m.login.token
A number of regressions from earlier v0.6.x versions should now be corrected
Missing state is now correctly retrieved in cases where a gap in the timeline was closed but some of those events were missing state snapshots, which should help to unstick slow or broken rooms
Fixed a transaction issue where inserting events into the database could deadlock, which should stop rooms from getting stuck
Fixed a problem where rejected events could result in rolled back database transactions
Avoided a potential race condition on fetching latest events by using the room updater instead
Processing events from /get_missing_events will no longer result in potential recursion
Federation events are now correctly generated for updated self-signing keys and signed devices
Rejected events can now be un-rejected if they are reprocessed and all of the correct conditions are met
Fetching missing auth events will no longer error as long as all needed events for auth were satisfied
Users can now correctly forget rooms if they were not a member of the room
As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more Dendrite-related discussions!
NeoChat 22.02 is out with the possibility of sharing files directly from NeoChat to other apps and services (Nextcloud, Imgur, email, ...). We also added support for minimizing the application to the system tray on startup and you can now label accounts to better organize them if you are using the multi-account feature. Aside from that, we spend some time fixing many small bugs and paper cuts reducing the total amount of open bug reports by 20%.
We've release 0.2.26. You can now create rooms and direct messages with Hydrogen. There's also a bug fix in this release for replies not loading in e2ee rooms under certain conditions.
Welcome to another week of TWIM at Element! Here’s our updates:
Polls and Location Sharing
Polls is now out of labs, and available in the composer for all users with the latest app versions.
Location sharing is available on the mobile apps. For now you will need to enable it in settings in order to see the composer icon and send your location. As of next week’s releases it will be enabled by default on all platforms.
Threads
Threads aims to reduce cross-talk on the timeline by moving side-convo’s to the right panel. If you want to try it out, it's available in Labs on Web today and in Labs on Mobile from next week!
We’ve been working on improving the stability and speed of threads across platforms.
Community Testing
Join#element-community-testing:matrix.org to join us for future testing sessions!
Metaspaces have landed! Giving users a new way to display favourites, DMs and rooms outside of other spaces. Switch these on in Quick Settings at the bottom left of your app.
New and improved Search! We’re pleased to move the new search experience into Beta. Head to Settings > Labs to access it.
Those of you using Nightly or Develop will see the new experience by default.
Provide feedback on your experience directly from the Search window.
On Web we’ve also been chasing away some bugs, specifically desynced memberlist and stale display names.
In Labs (Enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or Nightly)
Thanks to everyone who tested the maximised widgets feature which was recently added to Element Web. It received a sudden burst of attention as part of the FOSDEM conference. 😄 This week we've been fine tuning the feature to ensure it works for more workflows, and we've also cleaned up various associated widget bugs. In particular, in the develop version of Element Web, the pin and maximise actions are more consistent accessible, so you can toggle between pinned and maximised if e.g. you're in a conference room and temporarily want the stream widget to be larger while still having access to the chat timeline.
Next week we'll be focusing more on our Matrix-native collaborative document plans.
The next update of iOS (1.8.0) will have improved emoji reactions and location sharing will be on by default!
We will also be releasing fixes to the incorrect scrolling on the timeline and home screen sorting.
Work on a Rust prototype is also underway. We’re excited to learn about the opportunities and advantages of this approach as we start to learn and experiment.
In Labs
From next week Threads will be available in Labs on Mobile. Switch it on and try it out!
Beeper is a universal chat app built on top of Matrix. We've created 12+ open source Matrix bridges and integrated them into an easy to use all-in-one service which does not require setting up your own homeserver.
We’re excited to announce that as of today we are now out of Beta! We have been hard at work and we’re now ready to be sharing Beeper with a lot more people, starting first with the people we’ve built up on our waitlist.
For more details and demos on the current state of Beeper, including our recently rebuilt and relaunched iOS app, check out the update on our blog: https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-update-4-out-of-beta or watch the video below.
The new version contains two new features around the Synapse Admin API, making someone a room admin and listing all unencrypted media URLs.
I've had some good ideas on how to make Matrix Wrench cover more use cases while staying simple for both users and me as a developer. New components allow me to add new API endpoints in as little as 7 lines. So far this only applies to simple endpoints without parameters, like joining and leaving a room, but it can be expanded to more endpoints because of how similar all Matrix endpoints are. Props to the Spec! 🙌
Trixnity is now on version 1.1.7. Since 1.1.0 we have fixed many bugs and added some improvements and features. Our reference client runs amazingly reliable and fast thanks to Trixnity 🚀
Version 1.1.1 released
This was a quick bugfix release for a finding by jeffcasavant, in which joining a room with a predecessor, the bot could crash. Thanks Jeff!
If you missed it last week, I published a template / demo stock reporting bot you can find here: https://github.com/WesR/Halcyon-stock-bot . Short and sweet, this little bot should be a great starting point if your looking into making a bot. Make sure to also checkout the library itself for more examples, and usage information https://github.com/WesR/Halcyon.
I'm always looking for more feedback, and love to see what people are working on. Come hangout with us in the Halcyon room: https://matrix.to/#/#halcyon:blackline.xyz
We have been using Matrix as a chat solution for the attendees of our biannual conference (KIF) and for new students during the introduction week, as well as Pretix to register attendants. Up until now the process to invite attendees to the corresponding Matrix Rooms and Spaces involved some curl and jq magic as well as manual intervention to connect both.
We have now replaced said manual process with a Pretix plugin that invites registered attendees to a configurable Matrix Room or Space. This plugin is now available on the Pretix marketplace or directly from its repository.
I'm excited to share a side-project I've been working on for the last ~3 months: Gatho (http://gatho.party) - a web app for hosting small gatherings.
Gatho is perfect as a replacement for Facebook Events for small social gatherings. I'm a 24 year old Australian who recently deleted Facebook - I've used Gatho for a few parties now and the guests have loved it!
Gatho includes a Matrix bot which, when added to a room, can synchronise RSVP emoji reactions to a linked Gatho event! See gatho.party/getting-started to hear how the Matrix synchronization works.
You can also create one-click RSVP links to send to your friends - no matter which chat/social app they use!
It's fully GDPR compliant and multi-region with an EU server and database, and uses NextAuth.js for passwordless authentication.
The Gatho website and bot is open source (AGPL-3.0) on Github, PRs and Github issues are very welcome! It's built using Next.js in Typescript.
The ping room has been upgraded to room v9. During the 452 days the previous (v6) ping room was alive, it received a total of 735997 org.matrix.dummy_events and 604459 m.room.message events.
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.
