This is a long read, but a detailed argument. Also please note that this is was produced for the purpose of an MSc course of study, it was not commissioned for any other purpose, as the preamble makes clear.
Next, a high billing for Beeper this week, who have been working hard and getting product out!
Itās been a month since our last update. A lot of the work since then has been on making everything more reliable, but weāve also added new features to our clients and started making some new bridges.
Desktop
Added thread UI for Slack-bridged rooms. Internally theyāre just replies like before, but the client will intelligently collapse replies in Slack rooms into threads.
Merged upstream Element additions like voice messages.
Also merged some features that arenāt in Element yet, like Giphy integration.
iOS
Released Beeper iOS to Testflight.
Android
Added grouping rooms by chat network based on the m.bridge state event. The UI is similar to spaces, but theyāre not actual Matrix spaces (yet).
Added support for Android 11ās āconversationā notifications.
Bridges
Android Messages is turning out difficult to reverse-engineer to a sufficiently reliable level, so weāre building a new SMS bridge into our Android app. Itāll also be available as a standalone open-source app, which already exists at https://gitlab.com/beeper/android-sms (but doesnāt have any setup instructions yet).
Weāve funded development of a LinkedIn bridge. sumner will post a more detailed update about that.
Bruno has been working on aggregations as part of his work for Hydrogen. He reported:
Iāve been cleaning up the relations MSCs, finding a balance between documenting the current state and not losing track of community concerns. Iāve started with MSC 2674 which is the very basic format of relations, and will move on to annotations/reactions (MSC 2677) next week.
Dept of Servers š¢
Synapse
Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.
Weāre pleased to announce the release of Synapse 1.37.1 this week, which includes mitigations for the recent distributed spam attack across the public Matrix network. We advise upgrading as soon as possible.
Got another week of Helm Chart updates, with the Synapse chart getting a bunch of worker improvements and additional configurability, as well as being updated to first 1.37.0 and then 1.37.1
Iām excited to announce that I started working on a new bridge for bringing LinkedIn messages to Matrix! Itās currently in the early stages of development and not production-ready. The current feature set includes: backfill from LinkedIn, user name and profile picture sync, message sending from Matrix -> LinkedIn, and real-time message puppetting from LinkedIn -> Matrix. Thereās much more to come, and you can join #linkedin-matrix:nevarro.space for updates. Development is being funded by Beeper, and is being designed with integration into Beeper as itās primary goal. However, the bridge is open source (Apache 2.0) and will be available to self-host. The source code is here: https://github.com/sumnerevans/linkedin-matrix.
Great work from Sumner! Glad to see people have the option to bridge their LinkedIn messages!
matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINEās Chrome extension in Puppeteer.
Better LINE->Matrix read receipt bridging is now supported in the testing branch! The bridge now checks all LINE chats (not just the most recently-used one) to see if messages you sent have been read (in LINE). This works by cycling through all LINE chats where the final message is posted by you and doesnāt have a āReadā marker on it yet (or for multi-user chats, if your last message hasnāt been read by everyone in the room).
With that, Iāll consider the bridge to be in Early Beta! š Iām now testing the bridge for myself to iron out a few kinks, and am preparing a PR to the matrix.org webpage to have this listed on https://matrix.org/bridges/.
This addon for the WebThings gateway lets you send Matrix messages when your IoT fridge is empty ā or whatever you have connected to your gateway.
The update fixes predefined messages getting sent to the default room and is the first to be tested against gateway version 1.0.0.
https://gitlab.com/webthings/matrix-adapter or in the addon list of your WebThings gateway
This week, NeoChat gained support for a Global Menu on Plasma and macOS. Aside from that, we fixed a few crashes.
But the biggest news of the week is that we will get funding from NLNet to implement E2EE support in Quotient and NeoChat as part of their grants to improve the internet. We will report on our progress on that front here!
This is terrific news, big thanks to NLNet for making this choice!
FluffyChat
FluffyChat is the cutest cross-platform matrix client. It is available for Android, iOS, Web and Desktop.
We merged the Spaces branch, which means Nheko master can now show some spaces. Peeking unjoined rooms, nesting spaces and creating them should be coming soon. We are also looking into how to fit knocking into the UI (we already rendered incoming knocks in the timeline for a while).
You can also now edit still pending messages, which should help if your server is slow and you notice a typo. The edit will then get queued and be sent as soon as the server acknowledges they received the original message. Apart from that there have been some improvements to the readability of the room list and some other UI elements.
Last but not least, we switched out our entire http backend from Boost to Curl. For that I wrote a simple wrapper around Curl. This fixes about 10 issues around connection shutdown, brings proxy support, http/2 and http/3 support and in general makes Nheko crash less and reduces latency a LOT! This will obviously cause some pain for packagers, but I hope it isnāt too bad. Some of the issues this fixes only had 2 digits in our bugtracker and one was even filed by benpa!
Chris tweaked the UI in various places. Itās a lot of small details that together make for a smoother experience. I encourage you to read the details in the description of !782. This is the only MR that landed since last week, but our people have been hard at work nonetheless. Kai blogged about his journey working on the search bar of doom and Alejandro shared his own struggle. In the meantime, Julianās work has mostly happened upstream in matrix-rust-sdk.
Element Clients
Updates sent by the teams
Delight team
Spaces:
Research: Weāve been reaching out to people to walk us through how they use Spaces now and what theyād like to see different to help us learn and iterate;
Restricted room access: Some good progress towards shipping improved team spaces
Some major progress on conversion to TypeScript, finding some bugs along the way. The main source of the element-desktop project is now fully converted to TypeScript!
A styled player component for the audio messages feature, available in the labs section.
v0.5.19 of the matrix-bot-sdk is out now with fixed power level checking (with an added utility function), improved default error logging, and a typo fix in reply creation. Check it out, and visit #matrix-bot-sdk:t2bot.io for help & support.
Exciting new update, we can now wireguard an on-premises server from just about anywhere and make it work with the AWX system. This is useful when your server doesnāt have a static or public IP address, or when some other networking issue prevents you from running a Matrix service on it.
Mjolnir is a moderation bot for communities on Matrix. It helps with a lot of the actions covered by the moderation guide, including capabilities to apply bans from other trusted communities. Itās still a bit terse in its documentation, but if youāre looking for a featureful moderation bot then itās worth a go.
In related news, Mjolnir v0.1.18 is out with a couple quality of life fixes - if youāve been bothered by the log spam, itās now fixed :)
I started a tiny repo to collect various limits and related factoids about the Matrix specification and implementations. I hope that distilling and summarising such things at glance will make it easier to see what is and is not possible.
If you know of more that should be listed, please contribute! š
Self hosting your own Matrix server on a Raspberry Pi
@ed:selfhostingblog.com of theselfhostingblog.com has written a guide on getting started with Synapse on a Raspberry Pi using Docker Compose. You can read it here.
Together with J. Ryan Stinnett, I created the š #matrix-science-reading-group:dsn.tm.kit.edu for exchange of and on scientific papers, books and related resources on all things Matrix: Topics ranging from peer-to-peer broadcast overlay networks over conflict-free replicated data types to end-to-end encryption. Investigating security, performance, deployability, or whatever else is interesting, by methods from observation over simulation to formal verification. šļø Please join if you want to read about papers that might not be Matrix-related enough to make it into TWIM, or want to engage in the discussion. š The resulting papers are collected at: https://github.com/jryans/awesome-matrix#research
Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but itās still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesnāt have enough users?
This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.
āA public space for Free/Open Source Software maintainers to swap notes and discuss their craft. Inspired by https://github.com/github/maintainerweek, all maintainers welcome!ā
Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but itās still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesnāt have enough users?
This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.
Hereās 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.
Spaces work continues with MSC3083 (Restricted room memberships), which will include a new room version due to the new join_rule of `restricted. On the other side of things, MSC3245 (voice messages) and by extension extensible events, is moving as the implementation work is pushed forward. Lots of activity on MSC3215 (improved moderation tooling) as well which will no doubt prove to be invaluable as the Matrix network continues to grow.
Among those exciting updates, we also have the usual churn of bug fixes and improvements across the board. Many updates to the documentation as well as we lean into using the new Synapse documentation site more and more. Please help us test the RC if you can!
This week too sees some Kubernetes chart updates, with element-web being updated to 1.7.31 and matrix-synapse getting some fixes for envvars and mounts, as well as some improvements to the ingress support.
It has been several months since we last updated you on MSC2716 for backfilling historical messages into existing rooms but we made some big progress this week and merged an experimental Synapse implementation taking us one step closer to importing the massive archive of messages on Gitter over to Matrix! This iteration will only make the historical messages visible on the local homeserver but we have plans to make them federate in the next. Itās still early days on this before we can actually use it on Gitter. Here is a proof of concept to get your juices flowing:
In terms of code, this week we didnāt get much activity. The only noteworthy news is that we can now send spoilers, and use two new commands: /tableflip and /unflip thanks to Smitty van Bodegom.
Aside from that, we had 2 productive BoFs during Akademy 2021. The first one was about creating a library with shared chat visual components for KDEās chat apps: NeoChat for Matrix, Tok for Telegram and Kaidan for XMPP, KDE Connect and Spacebar for SMS, ā¦ The second BoF was more about NeoChat and Quotient and we discussed how to move forwards with some problems (e.g. non-hacky text input auto-completion) but also the roadmap around E2EE, Spaces and Widgets support. Speaking about E2EE, we will have some very good news to announce next week, stay tuned!
/me only learned about /tableflip and /unflip this todayā¦ and looking forward to this E2EE news!
In the past couple of weeks, Alejandro and Kai started the coding period of their GSoC internship and explained on their blogs what they will be working on. Their projects are respectively to add support for multiple accounts, and to bring Fractal Next to feature parity with current stable. Read more details on their blogs, and subscribe to them to keep informed as they go!
Julian managed to land the āExploreā view, our room directory. There may be some changes down the road, but it looks good for now:
Newcomer Giuseppe De Palma removed bashisms from our git hook because they were preventing him from contributing. They then went on to tweak the history style to remove the grey background around it. They also got rid of a papercut from the login form: before his intervention, users needed to provide the full homeserver URL with the http:// or https:// scheme prefix. It will now default to HTTPS.
We also did some housekeeping work that should improve the experience for people joining us on the Fractal Next fun. After being away for a while, Christopher Davis came back with a patch to add a couple more build related directories to our .gitignore. Julian cleaned up the pseudo-milestone description that we had in the README, now that we have a proper Gitlab milestone. And finally, I added a warning on the login screen to better reflect on the Work In Progress state of the branch.
Element Clients
Updates from the teams! Android will return next week.
Delight team
Spaces:
Drag and drop for reordering Spaces is now live on Android! And testable on develop for Web
Weāve also added labs flags to Web & Android to test a few different things, in particular
Toggling āHomeā to show all rooms, or only rooms which donāt belong to Spaces
Toggling to not show People in Spaces
Please try them out! After living with a different config for a few days, weād love to hear your feedback!
Web
1.7.31 released on Monday
Nightly builds of Element Desktop optimised for Apple silicon are now available for testing! Please give it a try and report any issues.
Added libera.chat to room directory on develop, staging, and app. It will appear in desktop builds as well next time they update.
On develop
Various CI tweaks and performance improvements
In flight
Adding large account performance tests
iOS
1.4.2 released on Monday. 1.4.3 with the fix on wellknown on Thursday
0.0.95 RC is out, available from the usual place at GitHub, and also as Flatpak from Flathub. The usual stabilisaton/bug fixing work, no new features compared to betas. This version is considerably better, and more stable, than 0.0.9.4 - packagers are welcome to push it as if it were the final release. Translators, please help to complete more languages: Polish is at 90%, Spanish almost 80%, and French just below 60% - you can make a difference!
Dept of Encryption š
New paper: āKey Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guaranteesā
Here is a scientific paper for all interested in decentralized end-to-end encryption cryptography protocols, like Matrixā Megolm, or the MLS future of Matrix: The preprint āKey Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guaranteesā by Weidner, Kleppmann et al., which will appear in the ACM CCS 2021 Conference, surveys existing centralized and decentralized end-to-end cryptography protocols, Olm/Megolm (labeled as āMatrixā) among them, and discusses why the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) IETF draft has its problems with decentralization. Following that, they come up with their own decentralized protocol, including a security and performance analysis. They improve asymptotic complexity when compared to Olm/Megolm, and the assumptions on the underlying communication layer are easily fulfilled by Matrix. They also discuss that the very good asympotic complexity of MLS cannot be reached for a decentralized end-to-end cryptography protocol.
Last weekās news actually, but libQuotient master branch can built with Qt 6 now, laying ground for the GSoC works on PyQuotient - Python bindings for libQuotient. The library has also been updated to follow the latest CS API specification, which means basic low-level support for knocking, with higher-level library API for it coming later.
Polyjuice Util is a library of Matrix functions for Elixir that can be used for both client-side and server-side applications. Polyjuice Util 0.2.0 has been released, which includes functions for common errors, handling identifiers, and for checking room permissions. Thanks to Nico for his contributions to this release. This release also contains some backward-incompatible changes. See the changelog for more information.
Polyjuice Client 0.4.1 has also been released, which uses the new Polyjuice Util release, and adds support for the whoami endpoint (thanks to multiprise).
Hello dear Synapse Admins, synadm v0.30 is out. lt seems I was in āstory telling modeā already when I wrote the release notes yesterday. That should perfectly suit a TWIM article as well š So there you go, copy/pasted from https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm/releases/tag/v0.30 with love:
Note that this is meant to be a convenience function in case a Synapse homeserver admin wants to quickly help users e.g set specific settings available via regular Matrix calls and not the Synapse admin API directly. Also note that it is not meant to replace the awesome Matrix CLI tools that are already out there. matrix-commander, matrixcli to mention just a few.
It implements a plain login on a Matrix server using username and password. It can even be used to retrieve a token for an admin user, e.g helpful for setting up fresh synadm installations. Read about it here
Thanks to the friendly people in #synadm:peek-a-boo.at for reviewing, testing, discussing functionality and giving advice. And for this release, a special thanks to @hpd:hpdeifel.de https://github.com/hpdeifel
with the change of policy we deployed on GNOMEās Matrix instance, it occurred to me that we had overlooked an important aspect in our relationship with Matrix: do we own our Matrix account? And the answer isā¦ maybe! In this post I cover the differences between personal account, organisation-owned account, the importance of segregating activities on Matrixā¦ and why this may change with Portable Identities in the future
the French government deployed Tchap, an instant messaging based on Matrix. They are looking for tech and processes oriented people to improve the service.
I know this isnāt TWIM-worthy, but I figured people in this room would find it interesting: yesterday there was a very popular post on reddit about how we donāt appreciate email enough, and in the comments there were some mentions of matrix as the counterpart for messaging:
Hereās 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.
Finally MSC3173: Expose stripped state events to potential joiners reached FCP this week, which is a step towards informing clients about the state of a room before they attempt to join or knock on it, which allows for nicer client UX when deciding whether you want to join a room or not.
This weekās big news is the release of Synapse 1.36 which completely eliminates memory spikes when joining rooms! Iāll let the āJoining Matrix HQā graph speak for itself:
We also fixed a few bugs with presence (especially over federation or on a worker process), and would strongly encourage you to upgrade.
Weāll spend the next few weeks on smaller changes as we prepare our Q3 goals, but we look forward to sharing those with you when we have them.
Happy weekend, TWiM!
Happy weekend to you too! Letās upgrade to 1.36 this weekend!
Actively deployed to pixie.townās Synapse now, and running very smoothly. Happy graphs show 91% of requests are handled without Synapse involved.
Also demonstrated the very seamless drop-in enable and disable, just changing the reverse proxy url back and forth from Synapse, and with this you could cautiously try this out for your own server, but stay in touch with #synapse-media-proxy:pixie.town
Heisenbridge is a bouncer-style Matrix IRC bridge.
Plumbing private/invite-only rooms is possible
IRC quit messages are visible as leave reasons
Nick changes are now displayed in leave reason instead of a notice
Prioritized Matrix->IRC queue for improved responsiveness while sending out a lot of messages
Improved AUTOCMD with multi-command support
Improved ZNC support with display of external messages by yourself
Improved plumbing message formatting: ZWSP in sender names, smarter truncation
IRC user displayname cases update if PRIVMSG source differs from current
New rooms respect cases of IRC nicks and channels
Conduit related fixes, thanks Peetz0r!
Channels with keys on IRCnet now rejoin correctly
Finally 100% working identd so it works on all tested networks
Cleaned up SASL support which makes server messages during authentication visible
Proper cleanup when leaving Heisenbridge rooms
Tiny bugfixes everywhere!
Currently working towards 1.0 release so mostly bug hunting and improving existing code and features.
Call for mutual help! The plumb feature needs more testing on busy IRC channels. If you need to plumb public Matrix rooms and IRC channels on any IRC network that does not have a public bridge available or just want to use a relaybot on IRC side for some reason hit me up on #heisenbridge:vi.fi and we can setup a test plumb, free of charge! Only requirements are that I can lurk around to monitor how it works and thereās nothing offensive on-topic.
In other news @warthog9 submitted an article to opensource.com how to use ZNC and Heisenbridge together to keep using your existing IRC bouncer with Heisenbridge as a client for it. Pretty cool stuff!
Thanks!
matrix-appservice-irc weights in at release 0.27.0
Hola everyone! Today weāre releasing the latest in bridge greatness, matrix-appservice-irc 0.27.0. This release contains the bulk of our work done for libera.chat. As always, thanks to the community for testing, writing up issues and creating PRs so that we can build better bridges to our friends on other networks.
The highlights are:
Username/password SASL authentication support. The bridge now lets you set a !username.
Bridge operators can now choose to block messages in the I->M direction while Matrix users are not joined to IRC as a privacy preservation technique.
You can now configure the bridge to publish rooms to the public room directory (rather than the appservice directory). The bridge can now also use the whole alias namespace (e.g. #foo:libera.chat -> #foo).
Numerous bug fixes and quality of life fixes!
This is now live on libera.chat, and will be live on the other bridges very soon!
matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINEās Chrome extension in Puppeteer.
Even more read receipt improvements are here! In summary, with the magic of MSC2409, the bridge shouldnāt ever āviewā a LINE chat on your behalf in order to sync a message (which would send a read receipt to your chat contacts, even though you didnāt read the chat yourself). For LINE messages that require viewing its chat in order to be bridged, like images/stickers (to get the image) and messages in multi-user chats (to know who sent them), the bridge instead sends a āplaceholderā message that gets updated with the real LINE message content when you view the placeholder. That way, the bridge will only view a LINE chat when you view its Matrix portal.
A few stability fixes have been pushed as well. Namely, sync should be less likely to accidentally skip chats.
Only one final read receipt improvement remains, for LINE->Matrix read receipt bridging (which I mentioned last week): to make the bridge check all LINE chats (not just the most recently-used one) to see if messages you sent have been read (in LINE). This will work by cycling through all LINE chats where the final message is posted by you and doesnāt have a āReadā marker on it yet.
Once that is taken care of, Iāll consider the bridge to be in beta! š
Starting work on message bubbles, building on existing work from the community
Fuzzy matching for the room list filter in progress
Coming soon
Voice messages: weāre in the testing stages and looking for feedback before they go live. Give it a go and let us know!
iOS
The new side menu and the new UI to join a room by alias are on develop.
The security settings screen has been updated to match the UX of element-web. The iOS app now uses the same wording for āSecurity Phraseā and āSecurity Keyā
Device dehydration now works in the SDK. We need to polish the work before merging the PR
Voice message is still progressing well. We need to figure out how we will deal with the ogg format on iOS. We also need to add a cache to improve performance in the audio (and encryption) processing
Android
Theme changes are now merged on develop and will be included in release 1.1.10. All the themes and styles have been moved to a dedicated gradle module. This is the first step to be able to develop new app features using dedicated modules. Other steps are required for us to be able to do that though (create a core module, etc.).
All the PlayStore descriptions have been pushed to the PlayStore using Fastlane, should be live soon. F-Droid already has the up to date translations for the store assets. Thanks to all the contributors on Weblate!
Release 1.1.10 will be prepared today. Expect it to be in production next week if everything is fine.
Last week was another busy week in NeoChat. Carl made the room list sidebar resizable and improved the responsive design of the settings pages.
Janet Blackquill implemented custom emojis using the im.ponies.user_emotes extension. For now auto-completion works, the custom emojis will be displayed in the emoji picker and lastly there is also an UI to add new emojis. We plan to implement more of the im.ponies MSC (custom stickers, sticker pack) soon :)
Smitty van Bodegom implemented spoilers and added /j and /leave alias for /join and /part. He also fixed the spellchecker trying to spellcheck commands like /rainbowme.
Oh and finally NeoChat was also featured on last weekās āThis Week in Linuxā podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaPWx_z_50s Donāt forget to follow us on Twitter @NeoChatKDE or Mastodon neochat@fosstodon.org, to get your latest news about NeoChat.
Akademy is also happening this weekend and next week. KDE is using Matrix and BigBlueButton for the conference. There will be a lot of talk, training and bofs. We have a bof the 22th June at 16th. Itās virtual and everyone is welcome to join and discuss with us NeoChat development.
FluffyChat
FluffyChat is the cutest cross-platform matrix client. It is available for Android, iOS, Web and Desktop.
FluffyChat 0.32.0 is out now šŖ and targets improved stability and a new onboarding flow where single sign on is now the more prominent way to get new users into the app.
This release also introduces a complete rewritten database under the hood based on the key value store Hive instead of sqlite.
This should improve the overall stability and the performance of the web version.
Hereās the FluffyChat subreddit, in order to provide more structured way of discussions, keep questions asked again and again in one place, and refer to older answers whenever the need is, as well as just to hang out https://www.reddit.com/r/fluffychat/
Nheko
Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at
Weāve slowly been adding spaces support. Nheko can now show your spaces in the sidebar, filter on them and show a (very basic) overview page for a space. We are still playing around with what to actually put there, allow you to expand and collapse subspaces in the sidebar and allowing you to peek into rooms in a space, which you havenāt joined yet. Creating and modifying spaces is also still work in progress until we figure out a proper design for it.
It provides a fully featured base for Dart and Flutter applications including E2EE, and Cross Signing. After more than 2 years of development we now declared it as stable. The Matrix Dart SDK (formerly known as famedly SDK) was initially a rewrite of the FluffyChat backend which was written in JavaScript. It came a long way since then and is now the base for the Famedly App and for the Flutter version of FluffyChat.
Hyper-targeted callback: Hey Naren, Famedly are the Matrix-using folk I was telling you about. This is the latest version of their Dart work and will be a great place to start building from.
Hi, I started a small, static webapp last weekend for viewing and modifying room states.
It can locally store multiple access tokens and helps debug and maintain room permissions.
Itās not looking fancy yet but already proved useful for many of the matrix.org IRC support requests.
The GitLab maubot plugin recently received major improvements to webhook handling. The Matrix messages now look much nicer (similar to the GitHub maubot plugin) and it also sends fancy reactions for CI status.
Itās already in use in #nheko:nheko.im and Beeperās internal commit log room. Itās unfortunately not yet available on t2bot.io, because Iām too lazy to write a migration script to copy data from the very old standalone gitlab bot written in Go.
In the future I might figure out some interoperability between the github and gitlab plugins so that I can also get CI reactions for my repos (which are primarily on github, but have CI on gitlab)
Dept of Events and Talks š£ļø
Interoperability event hosted by, and featuring, Matrix
Tomorrow Element will host an event alongside Protonmail, Open-Xchange and Open Forum Europe on the DMA and the topic of interoperability. This will be hosted on Matrix, based on the infrastructure first used during FOSDEM. The event will be livestreamed over on #interop-sme:matrix.org
Iāve been invited to appear in the latest episode of Clever Cloudās tech podcast Message Ć CaractĆØre Informatique, where we talked mostly about Matrix and decentralisation, but also about a bunch of other interesting things ranging from timbl minting his source code as an NFT to how to hack autonomous car with sound. It was loads of fun, thanks to them for the invite!
After some fixes the bot is now back in shape. This means that all Rooms should again have the correct names from now on and accept invites again. Be aware the bot currently doesnt support encrypted rooms.
Also if you use the apis please note that the content is gzip encoded. The server currently doesnt respect the Accept-Encoding Header.
On the side of internal changes is now that the retries are limited to 5 times instead the previously buggy amount. This should reduce join requests from my server drastically.
After having tried to convince several people to join the Matrix, my main conclusion is that itās too difficult for people. Apps that big tech companies produce are so simple that having to choose a client, choose (or set up) a homeserver and building bridges is too much of a push factor from the Matrix.
To help those people, Iāve written a quick guide that should help people without a programming background join the Matrix. Iām using this as a reference when people ask how they could join the Matrix, feel free to do this yourself as well: https://noordstar.me/b/how-to-join-matrix.md
Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but itās still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesnāt have enough users?
This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.
āPeople reading eBooks usually know Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/), one of the most prominent ebook management solutions by Kovid Goyal. Weāve had an āunofficialā (as in: Kovid doesnāt like real-time communications :) ) channel on what used to be freenode that Iāve moved to Libera and which is - of course! - bridged to #calibreā ~Philantrop
Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but itās still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room
moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesnāt have enough users?
This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.
MSC3079: Low Bandwidth CS API now has an experimental implementation containing a proxy server and mobile bindings! In addition, thereās a blog post explaining how to use this implementation to add low bandwidth support to your servers/clients! This implementation will use about 22% of the bandwidth that the normal CS API would use. Please be aware that low bandwidth Matrix is in its infancy and is subject to change without notice.
Hereās 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.
I have spent quite a bit of time lately working on Pinecone network convergence for P2P Matrix. Thereās still quite a bit to do in order to call Pinecone ācompleteā, but a network of 50 nodes now bootstraps entirely from cold much more quickly and converges on full end-to-end reachability in roughly 6 seconds. This is a significant improvement to before! Keep an eye out for future P2P Matrix demo builds using these new protocol changes.
This chart also represents interest in Pinecone over time!
Hello! The last two weeks I mostly tried to make our database backend swappable so we donāt need to rely on the sled database anymore. I was able to try out
rocksdb, but there were bugs in the rust bindings which required inefficient and unsafe workarounds.
If you know about other key-value databases that work better with Rust, please comment on the issue:
This week I implemented the remaining API route for URL previewing. Already has some nicer url preview results like showing images with Twitter posts and proper YouTube previews instead of the cookie wall text :)
With this, synapse-media-proxy should be a drop-in overlay for all Synapseās /_matrix/media routes.
I donāt really recommend using it in prod yet however, but I have a test instance that could use some responsible disclosure pentesting at https://media.pixie.town, please DM me @f0x:pixie.town if you find anything :)
After over a year of work and over a hundred commits, weāre now one major step closer to supporting MSC 2403: Add āKnockā feature, which allows users to request admission to rooms which would otherwise be invite-only. Specifically, last Wednesday we merged (#6739) which is an experimental implementation of the MSC, under an unstable prefix. Knocking is not available in any current room versions ā we need to implement room version 7 for that ā but the remaining work is minimalĀ¹ compared to what it took to get to this point. š Major kudos to Sorunome, Anoa, and Clokep for their work on both the spec and implementation.
Otherwise weāre looking forward to releasing Synapse 1.36 early next week, and we have some great things in storeā¦ but Iāll not spoil them today! š¤«
From everyone on the Synapse team, have a great weekend!
Ā¹: Well, on the server-side at least. No clients support knocking, yetā¦
Hi folks. Some time ago I asked here about any projects that provided a local Matrix ānodeā through docker, and it seemed not much existed in that space, so I went ahead and created the following repo:
Docker-based development environment for Matrix. Provides a local sandbox with the following pre-configured services:
synapse: the reference homeserver implementation
synapse-admin: homeserver admin UI
element: a web-based Matrix client
If this is something that would be useful to you, feel free to give it a try and send some feedback, either here or through GitHub issues. Thanks in advance! I hope this is helpful to some of you š
Thanks uhoreg for passing this on! Looks like a really useful way to get a local env running
Hi folks, just a quick update on the Libera.chat bridge situation. Weāre still rapidly working on the bridge, the milestone highlights for this week are:
Nearly 6k Matrix users are now connected to IRC and growing by the minute.
Weāre midway though our #matrix* Freenode to Libera channel/bridge migrations.
FOSDEM has been migrated over
Weāre still working through our backlog of migration requests from users, a lot of you phoned in!
Weāre still continuing to rapidly work on the bridge, with a release expected on Monday š¤. For any of you who arenāt in the know yet, you can start bridging to libera.chat by simply joining a channel like #libera-matrix:libera.chat or by searching the libera.chat room directory.
Iām hoping weāll be nearing the end of our journey on this bridge, and it will settle into a natural stable state over the coming days! Anyway, thanks everyone for your patience and we hope to see you on Matrix or IRC!
Hi bridge followers, today weāve released 0.27.0-rc1 of the IRC bridge containing a huge number of changes following all the work weāve been doing on libera.chat. Notable things to call out in this release are:
Weāve refactored the node-irc library to be typescripty and modern, rather than the quite old JS that it was.
SASL support for username/password auth has landed, which hopefully means a smoother login process for many. (Weāre aware of some issues around setting usernames, watch this space)
Allowing you to spin up the bridge with complete control over the alias namespace of a host (e.g. #libera:libera.chat links to #libera).
And finally, a privacy feature to block incoming IRC messages when Matrix users are not all joined which is requested by some IRC networks.
matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINEās Chrome extension in Puppeteer.
Read receipt improvements are here! They are in temporary branches until theyāve been tested for stability:
The better-receipts-dm branch contains some smarts to prevent Puppeteer from having to āviewā a LINE DM chat in order to sync it, which would make the contact youāre DMing think youāve read their messages when it was really Puppeteer that āsawā them. However, this doesnāt work for non-text messages (like images) or messages in group chats.
The better-receipts-msc2409 branch (which extends the above branch) uses MSC2409 to detect when you read a bridged message on Matrix, so it can tell Puppeteer to view it on LINE on your behalf. This will let your LINE contacts know when youāve read their messages.
After this, only a few read receipt improvements are left to be made:
Make Puppeteer check all LINE chats (not just the most recently-used one) to see if messages you sent have been read (in LINE). This will work by cycling through all LINE chats where the final message is posted by you and doesnāt have a āReadā marker on it yet.
Use MSC2409 to avoid having to view a LINE chat when syncing non-text messages (like images). The idea is to send a placeholder message that will get replaced with the real message (which requires Puppeteer to view the LINE chat) only when you actually view the placeholder.
Iāve been slowly refactoring the room and communities list to prepare it for spaces. This work is now mostly complete, changing ~4000 lines of code, of which 1500 just got deleted. All of the sidebars are now expandable and collapsible, so you can see the full name of your tags and communities and the lists should also update more dynamically now. Startup also only takes half as long as before on my system and Nheko uses 100MB less memory for my account. Next week Iāll probably add spaces to the communities list as well as the room list.
Apart from that LorenDB has been rewriting the member list as well as the invite dialog in Qml and manu has been making progress on the room directory. All of that seems to be coming along nicely and behave much more reasonably than the old versions. There has also been a lot of progress on the Italian and Esperanto translations as well as a few smaller bug fixes and performance improvements.
I hope we will make it to space next week!
Element Clients
Updates from the teams.
Delight, a team aiming to delight users
Weāre making good progress on the ability to re-order Spaces on Web & Android, expected to land soon!
Weāre also adding aliases to Space creation, to make it easier to share and onboard other users
On iOS, we recently merged a refactor with a new sidebar design which lays the foundations for iOS joining the Spaces beta
Weāve also been working on adding pagination to the Space Summary API on Synapse
Meanwhile, weāre also shepherding various MSCs through the spec process to improve private Spaces in the very near future
Web
1.7.30 released on Monday
On develop
Upgraded to React 17
First GitHub Actions pipeline for web
In flight
Continuing to improve application performance
Adding dashboard for performance benchmarks
Working on Apple silicon desktop builds
Working on translation mismatch errors
iOS
1.4.1 released on Tuesday on the App Store
The new side menu and voice messages are coming.
We are setting up Towncrier to avoid merge conflicts on our CHANGES files. Those conflict prevent Github Actions, our CI, from starting
We fixed several annoying bugs regarding VoIP and app stability
Android
Element Android 1.1.9 has been pushed to production
We are working with the design team on the dark and light themes, not forgetting the black theme, to ensure some coherence across the application and also to clean up some legacy code. There were too many shades of greyā¦ We will also do the same work on TextAppearance.
This week was a busy week for NeoChat. We added tons of cool stuff! We rewrote the setting page to add a bit of organization in the settings. This also pushed us to add new appearance options. You can now add a blur effect as background, change the color scheme of NeoChat and switch between bubbles and a more compact layout as you wish.
Another thing we worked on was spellchecking. NeoChat will now add a small red underline under misspelled words and will suggest corrections. This is using the Sonnet frameworks and will integrates perfectly with your personal dictionary from your other KDE apps.
Finally something we added two weeks ago but forgot to mention, we added a quick room switcher using the Ctrl + K shortcut.
Another small release - libQuotient 0.6.7 is out, fixing an issue causing NeoChat to not add rooms to the roomlist after joining. Thanks to Carl Schwan for hunting the problem down!
Apparently my work-in-progress end-to-end-encryption implementation for libQuotient was bad enough to cause performance problems on my homeserver (Sorry about that!). This should be fixed now š
/relations request instead of 10s now takes 2s overall
Added a /servers api endpoint which returns all servers based on the room_ids. (It splits of the server_name from room_ids and puts them into an array)
Bug Fixes
Aliases with emoji will now get recognized.
Thanks to jo , Nico , joepie91 š³ļøāš and poljar for helping to archive these improvements and hinting where improvements were possible to be made :)
Dept of Guides š§
A guide for creating simple Matrix bots with Python and Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib
However, the conclusion list (first table) may be understandable from context. It lists the top three solutions per category with their respective number of universities using it.
The Instant Messaging part starts at slide 15, the first chart on that slide is āwhich solution do you useā, the second is āHow content are you with the solution?ā, with Matrix having the best average of all solutions, namely ~8.8/10.
Hereās your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
This week the Spec Core Team has been reviewing various Spaces MSCs, most recently MSC3230 (Space ordering). Weāre also hoping to square away the aggregations MSCs (message editing, reactions, etc) once and for all, though this will likely take a concerted effort from a few members to pull off.
Finally MSC3231 is a (currently draft status) MSC from Callum, one of Matrix.orgās GSoC students this year! His project aims to allow native token-based registration to homeservers (the idea is so that you can generate a few tokens from your registration-disabled homeserver and hand them out to a few trusted friends and family members).
And finally, work still continues on finishing up the technical portions of the new release process for the spec. As mentioned last week, weāve attempted to split the work up over multiple people in order to get it done quicker. Slowly but surelyā¦
Dept of Servers š¢
Synapse
Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.
Hello from the Synapse team! A short update for a short workweek (thanks, bank holidays!):
Synapse 1.35 was released this week! The Spaces flag is on by default, a bunch of bugs were fixed, and weāve landed many of the prerequisites to eliminating RAM spikes on room joins.
š We have new docs! š Anoa converted our docs to build with mdbook (#10086), and you can now browse them at https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/! Check it out and let us know what you think. (Note: Not all of the pages have been converted from reStructuredText to Markdown yet, so some might render a bit strangely, but the structure is there!)
Another round of updates on my smart caching media proxy. After refactoring a lot (as always), I implemented thumbnailing! Now the only big feature left to add is url previewing.
I also have a test deployment configured on media.pixie.town now, so you can try fetching a bit of remote media through there, or view this submissions screenshot
metrics
Got started implementing a Prometeus /metrics endpoint, with a rudimentary Grafana dashboard for my test installation.
While they both implement Matrixā media endpoints, they serve rather different niches, where matrix-media-repo fully decouples the media repo aspect, my proxy cooperates with Synapseās filesystem and database, to speed up operation while ultimately making it a seamless drop-in and removal process.
Security release for the matrix-appservice-irc and matrix-appservice-bridge library
Hello. This week weāve released an update to the https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/ library containing a security fix for room upgrade handling. The security report will come later, but for now we advise anyone using the room upgrade handler feature to upgrade to 2.6.1. By the same token, we would also advise all IRC bridge admins to update their bridge to 0.26.1.
The Libera.chat bridge is still ongoing
Howdy folks. As youāve likely seen over the last few days, weāre still hard at work getting the final pegs in place for the libera.chat bridge. As usual, you can start using the bridge now while itās in beta by going to #<foo>:libera.chat, but weāre hoping to have the thing stable by next week. Catch us in #libera-matrix:libera.chat for the juicy gossip about it.
matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINEās Chrome extension in Puppeteer.
Send a bridge notice when getting unexpectedly logged out of LINE, to warn you to log in again.
Improve resiliency of LINE user avatar syncing.
Properly support syncing LINE rooms with participants who arenāt in your LINE friends list (This was harder than it soundsā¦!)
These changes (and ones before it) will be merged to master once I reorganize some messy commits.
The next big task is still to fix outbound read receipts (i.e. to make it so that the bridge syncing a message doesnāt make your > LINE contacts think you actually read that message). Once that is done, Iāll consider the bridge to be in beta.
Thunderbird now has Matrix support based on matrix-js-sdk enabled in the Nightly builds.
The star feature is probably that we support multiple Matrix accounts in the same client. Right now all your unencrypted rooms with text messages should work fine. While we think we wonāt destroy your accountās state, itās still recommended to use a testing account with it. During account setup, it will ask you for a password, even if the homeserver supports SSO. If you intend to log in through SSO, just leave the password field blank.
Weāre not quite at the point where we support all the things you love about chatting with Matrix. Many of the missing features and polish to make communication successful are tracked in this meta bug. The goal for that milestone is to enable Matrix in our Beta builds.
You can get a Thunderbird Nightly build at the bottom of thunderbird.net by switching from āBeta Channelā to āNightly Channelā. If you run into bugs with the Matrix integration, please report them through this form. When filing a bug, please include debug logs. You can copy the debug logs for the account by going to the āShow Accountsā dialog, right clicking the account and selecting āCopy Debug Logā. Note that the debug log may contain information from any of your conversations, so you might want to check the contents before posting it anywhere.
Callum, our GSoC student, after spending some time on Synapse, had now his first go at Nhekoās codebase. He implemented, that you can now just enter the server name on registration instead of the full URL. This means entering conduit.rs or matrix.org works now nicely, since those servers are actually hosted at a different URL. Heās now working on the Token Registration MSC, which he will implement in Synapse and Nheko, so exciting times ahead!
We also had a small contribution from pcworld, who fixed that if you only viewed the room list in the narrow layout, you would not get notifications for the last selected room.
Iāll leave you with some words, that you may have heard a few times already: āWatch this space for next weeks update!ā
1.1.8 has been released to production, and 1.1.9 has been released to beta on the PlayStore
We are currently working with the design team on the light and dark theme of the application, especially colors and text appearance. Lots of cleanup to doā¦
Released Hydrogen 0.1.56 this week, with redactions. In the meantime, Iāve been making good progress on reactions, which should hopefully get released early next week. Midhun has made good progress on the right panel, ironing out the last bugs.
Hereās a sneak preview of reactions (with slow network to show off the local echo animation):
A work-in-progress, but we are displaying some common event types; there are even chat bubbles (>w<) Check out a screenshot below: (yes, and we got a new logo)
On August 21-22 the annual Free and Open Source Conference (short FrOSCon) will take place. Usually the conference takes place in a German University of applied Sciences Bonn Rhine Sieg. This year it will be virtual. On the positive side - we donāt need to travel.
As German Matrix community grows this is a great opportunity to meet each other and hack together.
Matrix Dev Room
We are planing to do a virtual Dev Room this year. The idea is to exchange on the latest Matrix development and projects, get to know each other and drink <your_favorite_beverage> (virtually) together. š
To make it happen we need your help!
Dev Room is living from talks and workshops - this is your chance to present your Matrix project or to do a workshop!
Language: preferably German, but English is also ok
Submission is until 2021-06-11, but please give us feedback ASAP so we can create a plan now.
If itās your first talk or workshop some free of charge coaching is included. š
Also help in organizing the Dev Room (moderation, timekeeping) is needed.
Matrix Open Source booth
It was a great place to chit-chat and to get your in-depth answers regarding Matrix at FOSDEM this year. šļø
We also planing to have a virtual booth at FrOSCon.
We need your support in answering questions about Matrix or just to have a good time.
Hereās your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
Travis rolled out MSC3202 to aid in the quest for end-to-bridge encryption without having to rely on /sync. Otherwise the Spec Core Team has been reviewing MSCs and focusing on the last remaining spec PRs needed before cutting a new spec release. Watch this space!
Awesome to be able to VISIBLY see the progress in that graph!
Dept of Servers š¢
Synapse
Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.
The big news this week was the launch of Spaces, supported by the release of Synapse 1.34.0.
However, there were quite a few other fixes, improvements, and additions: Iād encourage you to read the release announcement for those.
But more than anything, weāre hard at work realizing the room-join memory improvements we talked about in last weekās Matrix Live, and we expect to have some exciting news to share next week. Concretely: the pull request to support incremental parsing of join responses was merged, and several pull requests (#10017, #10018, #10035) to simplify and slim down the code for verifying event signatures are in review.
And this week brings another instance of the regularly scheduled Kubernetes updates, with Element-web going to 1.7.28 and Synapse having been bumped to 1.34.0 on both the deprecated image and the chart.
Howdy folks! Iām sure many of you read the news about the new libera.chat IRC network starting up, and many of you also reached out (via pretty much every channel available) to ask about a potential bridge. libera.chat are doing a remarkably good job of getting spun up but are hyper busy with all the inbound users and need a bit more time, so in the meantime I would ask that everyone subscribe to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1324 to listen for changes as they happen.
The matrix.org bridge team are on the case! Expect news in the near future :)
Dept of Clients š±
Element Client Updates
Submitted by the teams
Delight
Spaces are now live! š Test them on Element Web, Desktop & Android (iOS is coming soon!)
In short, Spaces are a new way to group rooms and people together, and are slated to replace legacy groups/communities
Some performance improvements have been merged on develop:
Reduce the number of decryptions. A decryption takes about 5ms on iPhone X. On an account with 500 rooms this allows us to skip thousands of decryptions on an initial sync
Those decryptions do not happen anymore on the main thread
Android
Lots of dependency upgrade following the release with Space (1.1.7).
Next release candidate, 1.1.8 will also contain improvements on Spaces.
We have set up towncrier flow to better handle changelog generation.
Also Element Android project is now using GitHub actions, but it cannot run the integration tests for the moment.
As announced in the general Matrix GSoC post, we are lucky to get two interns this year again. Alejandro (whose previous work includes switching to matrix-rust-sdk for syncs) will implement multi-account support, while Kai (also a regular contributor by now) will help bring our application rewrite to the same functionality level as our current nightly and stable versions. Both projects will build on top of Fractal Next.
Julian came back from his vacation and immediately got quite busy reviewing and merging contributions from others. Kevin (also known as zecakeh) and him made good progress on several fronts:
Room handling was improved. We now keep track of whether the user joined them, left them, or has been invited to them, as well as their categories (favourites, low priorityā¦).
The sidebar uses these categories and now uses a single list with GtkFilterListModels instead of one list per category. The greatly simplifies code for things like moving a room from one category to another.
History style has been tweaked, state events and timestamps have been added.
Markdown can be enabled from the newly implemented popover and the message composer offers syntax highlighting, although a bug currently makes it so that sent messages are still not sent with a formatted_body.
A persistent state store is used to load rooms on startup while sync is in progress.
Released 0.1.53 with support for linking to room this week, which should allow to add Hydrogen to matrix.to soon. Also started working on redactions, which is useful in itself and also lays the foundations for reactions and edits coming next.
Nheko reviewed
Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at
Check out this flattering portrait of Nheko on the Brodie Robertson āLinux Tips & Tricksā channel.
Weāve been quiet in the past weeks, but certainly not due to lack of activity! So many awesome things have happened, I donāt even know where to start. I guess Iāll go chronologically:
We published so many new crate releases. Most of our crates didnāt see non-alpha releases for almost a year and now weāve finally reset that counter! Now you can depend on ruma 0.1 and get bug fixes and new functionality through cargo update without having to worry about breaking changes. Huge thanks to @zecakeh for automating our release process, without that this would have taken so much longer.
We got initial spaces support! Iām super excited that weāre now enabling client authors to take spaces into account, even if ātaking into accountā will initially just mean filtering out space rooms from their room lists. Code-wise, this was actually a relatively small change, with ruma-client-api receiving support for room types and ruma-events receiving support for the event types m.space.child and m.space.parent.
Weāre swapping out ruma-signaturesā crypto library. Since ring, which is what weāve been using so far, doesnāt currently support cross-compilation to WASM, thereās long been some interest to exchange it for something else for webbrowser homeserver experiments. A viable alternative library was identified a while ago and now @ShadowJonathan has taken on the task of implementing the switch.
In addition to unblocking the WASM usecase, this work revealed a bug in ring, which generated invalid PKCS#8 documents. We are pretty confident that once the switch away from ring (including a small compatibility shim to convert the invalid documents), a certain class of signature verification failures that Conduit has been getting will be fixed.
Weāre taking part in GSoC again. As you might have seen in the earlier blog post, two students are working on Ruma as part of GSoC this year: @Frinksy (for the first time) and @DevinR528 (for the second time).
By default, we still install Element, as Hydrogen is still not fully-featured. Still, people whoād like to try Hydrogen out can now install it via the playbook.
If youāre trying out all those cool Spaces (Element Blog) and have some old Communities/Groups hanging around, I have the bot for you.
spacebot makes quick work of the conversion by translating as much as possible to the Space structure. Simply DM the bot and say !convert +group:example.org and itāll go off and make your Space.
The bot doesnāt invite everyone from your Community to your Space, giving you a chance to configure the Space further before advertising it within your rooms.
The source can be found on GitHub if you feel like running your own or seeing how simple it is under the hood. #spacebot:t2bot.io is a great place to get help if youāre having problems getting it going, and #help:t2bot.io would be glad to assist you if the t2bot.io deployment doesnāt do the right thing.
P.S.: Spaces are currently considered Beta in Element, so they might not be perfect just yet. #spaces:riot.ovh is the room to join if you have questions about Spaces.
Hemppa
Hemppa the Bot is a multipurpose bot for writing modules super easily in Python.
Hemppa the bot is a general purpose Matrix bot written in Python. This week it gained two useful admin tools: Kick by wildcard (for cleaning up zombies after bridge decommission) and making tombstones to point room to a new one. https://github.com/vranki/hemppa
A little bit different, but matrix related, this week I added Matrix push support to the raspberry-noaa-v2 project. This is a project which runs on a raspberry pi to automate receiving, decoding and post processing of images over radio from weather satellites. Itās easy to build a cheap ground station for this with little more than a USB SDR dongle and a metal coat hanger. If you want to see the pictures I am decoding you can join #weather:cadair.com.
Cadair, living in the north of England, will only see this symbol unfortunately š§ļø
A list to find the links (either outgoing or incoming) for a room. So a 1 level deep view into the graph as a table.
An FAQ with some information about the project, known data issues and more
A websocket at wss://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/ws that allows you to get the updates directly pushed as soon as a room lands in the db. Effectively the fastest way to get data updates.
Planned features for the webpage
AR and VR Graphs
A Space Finder that allows you to find the discovered spaces
Be aware that this page is very new and therefor might have bugs. It also isnāt yet mobile optimized.
For questions, suggestions or fast updates check the #server_stats:nordgedanken.dev Room or for questions regarding issues with the bot in a specific room feel free to write a DM to MTRNord :)
Possible Bug that needs manual fixing
Due to a bug with my homeserver or synapse it happens for some rooms that synapse generates a lot of join events (Lots of āserver_stats bot made no changeā messages). If you see this please write a message to MTRNord so I can manually prevent my bot from trying to join the room over and over again as I cannot easily detect this kind of issue before joining.
This might be of interest for TWIM. Itās a little web app that supports token-based registration in the Matrix UIAA.
Sort of like matrix-registration, but aiming for compliance with the UIAA spec
R Midhun Suresh: Right Sidebar for Hydrogen client
R Midhun Suresh from the Mar Baselios College of Engineering & Technology in Trivandrum, India will be working on Hydrogen this summer, mentored by Bruno Windels. He will be working on adding a right panel to the room view, including a member list and room information. He will be blogging at https://midhunsureshr.github.io throughout the project.
Devin Ragotzy: Rumaās Automated Checks
My name is Devin Ragotzy. I am a student at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, studying computer science. I was lucky enough to work last summer on Ruma and have continued to contribute to the project. I was accepted to work on Rumaās automated checks project, mentored by Isaiah Inuwa, Jonas Platte, Timo Kƶsters. The goal of the project is to create a linter capable of enforcing Ruma-specific style and practices. I hope to get this tool to a working state by the end of this summers GSoC!
Abhinav Krishna C K: First-Class Email Bridge
Abhinav Krishna C K from NSS College of Engineering in Palakkad, India will be working on Building First-Class email bridge for Matrix this summer mentored by Half-Shot and tulir. This will enable Matrix to be connected with Email by translating incoming SMTP traffic to Matrix messages, and then bridging Matrix messages back into emails.
Frinksy: Extend Rumaās API coverage
My name is Adam Blanchet, and I am a student from the University of York in the UK.
I am happy to say that I have quite a few mentors: Isaiah Inuwa, Jonas Platte, Timo Kƶsters and Nico from Nheko.
My project is to extend Rumaās API coverage. Iāll be doing a few things: finishing coverage of the Identity Service API, adding the āknockā feature to Ruma and finishing the implementation of QR code verification. If time allows it I will also work on implementing other MSCs or features such as āEvent notification attributes and actionsā. I hope that my work will help enable other Rust-based Matrix projects, such as Conduit and Fractal, to implement more features.
Timo added:
Hello, I am Timo Kƶsters. I study Computer Science in Germany and spend most of the remaining time developing Conduit, a Matrix homeserver built on top of Ruma. I use Ruma all the time and will be mentoring Adam Blanchet to make it even better.
Vladyslav Hnatiuk: PyQuotient
My name is Vladyslav Hnatiuk, Iām a student of Vienna University of Technology and my project is PyQuotient.
The aim is to simplify creating of a Matrix Qt-based clients in Python by providing Qt-based SDK and avoid writing a large part of functionality manually. And to not reinvent the wheel PyQuotient will be bindings for the existing library libQuotient that provides SDK for Matrix for C++ applications. Iāll be mentored by kitsune, the author of libQuotient and also libQuotient-based Matrix IM client Quaternion. I hope PyQuotient will facilitate the development of Matrix clients in Python with Qt, and it will be a small contribution to the promotion of Matrix, especially in Python world.
kitsune added:
If this experience proves to be successful, thereās a good chance Quaternion will eventually switch to Python.
Callum Brown: Token Authenticated Registration
Hi there, Iām Callum, a Londoner whoāll be starting a physics degree in September. For GSoC Iāll be working on adding Token Authenticated Registration to Matrix. This will allow homeserver admins to restrict who can sign-up by requiring a token to be submitted during registration. I run a small homeserver for friends and family, but donāt have the resources to make registration public, so I have wanted this feature integrated into Matrix servers and clients for quite a while! Iāll be working with Nico, anoa, and red_sky to write an MSC, implement the server side in Synapse, and the client side in Nheko. Thanks to the mentors and Matrix.org for the opportunity to work on this!
Nico here, one of the Mentors. Personally I am super excited about this project! I have been using Matrix for a while now and I think Nheko is pretty good by now. But there is still a barrier, if I want my friends and family to use Matrix: They canāt easily sign up! I have tried creating them accounts and telling them to change their passwords, having a dedicated registration page or just telling them to just use a different server, but nothing of that made me happy and it added friction to the already hard process of getting someone to try a new messenger! As such I am super excited for this, because it will make signing up your friends and family to your personal instance, without it having to be public, sooooo much simpler!
Jaiwanth: Exporting Conversations From Element
Jaiwanth Vemula from the IIT Kharagpur University in India will be working on Exporting Conversations in Element this summer, mentored by Michael (t3chguy). This work will enable users to easily export their conversations for archival or sharing, this is a feature which has been missed in Element for a very long time!
Alejandro DomĆnguez: Fractal: Multi account support
Kai A. Hiller: Fractal NEXT
Students become Mentors
I asked: how many of those who are mentors this year have ever been GSOC students? The answer is that this year four of the mentors were once GSoC students themselves!
Some combination of me, Kegan, Bruno and neilalexander have been working on v3 of the CS /sync API. (Todayās /sync API in matrix is v2; v1 was the old /events API). Weāre not yet at the point of publishing a draft or MSC, but itās coming soon. Itās really exciting work which flips Matrix around so that sync scales independently of the number of rooms youāre in - and itās at last possible to write rich clients which only ever sync the bare minimum data needed to work: i.e. lazy loading eeeeeeeeverything. Watch this space :)
Hereās your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
Thereās been activity from the Spec Core Team on a number of different MSCs, such as MSC3189 (per-room/space profile data). Additionally a spec PR for Matrix URI schemes has been getting feedback and is moving forward at a quick pace! There was also some feedback from the team on MSC2448 (blurhashes) which Iāll get around to answering shortly š.
Otherwise I think this week was a bit implementation-heavy for the team (the Spec Core Team is a task in addition to our full-time jobs). Hopefully next week will grant us more of a breather.
Hello TWiMmers! The bulk of our update is in Matrix Live today, so go check out the video above āļø to hear about how weāre reducing the amount of memory it takes to join large rooms, and why joins take so much memory in the first place.
Otherwise, weāre mainly getting ready for the public debut of Spaces as a beta feature, but more on that next weekā¦ š
Oh, and before we go: please make sure your Synapse is up to date! We released 1.33.2 on Tuesday, which contains a low severity security fix.
Another installation of the regularly scheduled Kubernetes Helm Chart updates (and another bump of the deprecated Synapse image). Now up to Synapse 1.33.2 and Element Web 1.7.27.
matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINEās Chrome extension in Puppeteer.
This week was spent on stability improvements & bug fixes.
Calling for testers!
The bridge is at a point where itās mostly usable, but it still has quite a few blindspots. If anyone is willing to try it out & report issues, it would be a great help!
Last time, we updated you on starting DM conversations with Gitter users from Matrix. Now we have the other side of this complete! From Gitter, you can now start a one to one conversation with someone you see from Matrix š
Just hover over their avatar to bring up the user popover, then press the āChat privatelyā button. š£
Goooooooood afternoon folks and happy Friday! This week weāre announcing the 0.26.0 release of the matrix-appservice-irc bridge which contains precious goodies:
You can now disable the kick behaviour of the bridge on Matrix users if you are running a personal bridge, so losing your IRC connection no longer results in a kick.
You can now remove bridges from rooms by using the admin room, so no need to use the provisioning API or modify the DB.
Weāve added a new feature to allow you to specify bridge options on a per room basis using room state. At the moment you can modify the limits of the automatic pastebin system but more features like reply formats are to come!
As always please come tell us about it in #irc:matrix.org and make sure to check out the new docs if you get a bit stuck.
Hydrogen can now leave rooms and forget archived rooms. URLs are now also clickable in the timeline. Get the full details in the release notes!
Element Clients
Updates from the teams
Web
Element Web 1.7.28 is up on staging, targeting Monday for release.
New spaces Beta (new way of grouping rooms and people)
Added support for slash commands working in edits
On develop:
Voice messages are nearing completion - enable the labs flag and give it a go :)
Performance improvements to app startup time. Let us know if you run into any issues!
iOS
1.3.7 is available on TestFlight. It should be on the App Store on Monday. Spaces are not yet available on Element-iOS but the app offers minimal support. The release contains a fix for background crashed due to PushKit
At the platform level, we are still improving stability and performance:
Decryption operations to be moved outside the main thread
More robust on initial sync
etc
Android
1.1.7 is in open testing via playstore beta channel, Release candidate for Monday. Contains support for spaces beta, several improvements on attachment (video, compressionā¦), as well as a bunch of bug fixes. All details here https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/releases/tag/v1.1.7
Delight
āSpaces are comingā (I had heard something about that - BP)
The first iteration of visually representing the data gathered by Server Stats Discoverer (traveler bot) is now publicly available at https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/
It for now is only a graph of room relations but in the future is supposed to be extended for a server based graph as well as a Table to search your room within.
Be aware that the page is best viewed and used on desktop. Clicking a Room Node will open a new tab with the matrix.to link. If this fails this might be because of no canonical alias being available.
For the developers the data can be taken from https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/relations The format currently is only available in the d3js format but in the future that API also will be extended for different usecases.
For any feedback like accessibility issues or other issues please reach out to me either via DM or in #server_stats:nordgedanken.dev
Hereās your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
A reminder that #sct-office:matrix.org is available to communicate directly with the Spec Core Team. A clarification from the last edition of TWIM is that this room is intended to be a low-traffic room solely for asking about the status of a/your MSC, rather than the Spec process or anything else. There is however #matrix-spec-process:matrix.org for discussion of the Spec process, and #matrix-spec:matrix.org for discussion of the Matrix spec and MSCs in general.
Otherwise the Spec Core Team has been doing a little bit of house-keeping. For those that have been living under a rock, Spaces is an upcoming feature intended to replace the old Groups/Community stuff with a much-improved implementation. And one that will actually make it into the spec! Weāve closed all old groups-related MSCs as they are now obsolete.
Additionally weāve been giving some feedback on MSC2946 (Spaces Summary) which is another part of the Spaces puzzle (and is still a blocker for the release of the feature), as well as MSC3079 (Low Bandwidth CS API) which allows Matrix to operate on resource constrained devices and networks. Yours truly has also been making some PRs (one, two) to help clarify the Spec process.
Itās a release! Synapse 1.33 is out, and we plan to release a security patch for it on Tuesday, May 11th. This follows our previous discussion where we committed to trying to decouple routine security updates from our regular feature releases.
Read the release notes for details, but the big news is that we finally have experimental support for moving presence off of the main process. Weāre still testing it, but we hope it will allow instances that need presence to more easily scale out.
In last weekās TWiM we shared a graph of Synapseās memory use when joining Matrix HQ for the first time. In particular, we saw a spike to 1.4 GB before settling at 800 MB.
In the week since producing that graph, weāve managed to nearly eliminate the spike, halving it to 760 MB. After backfilling history, the room settles at around 650 MB:
These changes are still a work in progress, but we hope to get them merged into Synapse in time for the 1.35 release on June 1st.
I wrote a patch for synapse, that reduces the size of almost empty incremental syncs by 50% (30% if you include http headers). If you are a client developer, you may want to test your client against a synapse with that patch applied, since it broke quite a few clients, that relied on synapse sending empty fields. While synapse sends empty fields, other server implementations, like conduit, donāt, so fixing any issues here will help with portability across different server implementations too. With a bit of hope this patch can actually be applied in a few weeks to the official synapse, but it was backed out from the next RC because of the breakage. So if you can, please test your client, which you are developing, against the following PR and fix any issues you experience from it: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/9919
The regular updates for my Helm charts (and still deprecated Synapse image) have been pushed, for Synapse 1.33.0/1 and the Matrix Media Repo 1.2.8. (technically last week, but it was after friday, so Iām throwing it in again)
Brooklyn was developed by ethanrdoesmc. Itās an app/tweak that handles communicating with iMessage and runs mautrix-imessage as a subprocess for the Matrix side. The initial alpha supports basic text and media message bridging. Sending and receiving tapbacks, replies, read receipts and typing notifications will also be supported in the future.
Heisenbridge the bouncer style Matrix IRC bridge has seen numerous updates in the past week:
Identd implementation to get verified usernames on IRC
TLS support for IRC connections
IRC excess flood prevention with a buffer
Proper long message splitting from Matrix to IRC
Retry support for Matrix requests to work around homeserver downtime/restarts
Minor fixes to ghosting issues and some other stuff. This will be the last big update for a while as it has mostly stabilized enough for daily use.
More testers are still welcome to get the remaining issues ironed out so if you need to connect to unbridged and unplumbed networks and run your own homeserver it would be an excellent time to try it out.
Experimental support for call bridging has landed. Now you can call phone numbers right from Matrix, with partial support for MSC2746. A few things to keep in mind:
The bridge is still in alpha ā I wouldnāt trust it for anything secure at the moment. I would love to hear feedback from tests, though!
If you tried any of the earlier versions, you will need to re-run the link command since I made some breaking changes. Sorry.
The IRC bridge matrix-appservice-irc has a new release candidate. The upcoming version 0.26.0 will include many features and bug fixes. Here are three highlights:
Allow third-party bridged users to change their nickname with the self-serve command !irc nick anothername (thanks vranki)
Allow room moderators and bridge admins to unlink rooms using the !unlink command
Add support for specifying the paste bin limit in room state with the org.matrix.appservice-irc.config event type.
Please test it and flag any issues you have upgrading:
In this release we have mostly focused on bugfixing and stability. We have switched to the new Flutter 2 framework and have done a lot of refactoring under the hood. The annoying freezing bug should now be fixed. Voice messages now have a new backend which should improve the sound quality and stability. There is now a more professional UI for editing aliases of a room. Users can now see a list of all aliases, add new aliases, delete them and mark one alias as the canonical (or main) alias. Some minor design changes and design fixes should improve the overall UX of the app especially on tablets.
Version 0.30.0 will be the first version with arm64 support. You can download binaries from the CI and we will try to publish it on Flathub. Together with the new Linux Desktop Notifications feature, this might be interesting for the Librem 5 or the PinePhone. Sadly I donāt own one of these very interesting devices. If you have one, I would very like to see some screenshots of it! :-)
Fluffychat update: Native Fluffychat Linux build now works well on aarch64 devices!
If you want to try the binary from CI, keep in mind that GDK_GL=gles needs to be set to force it to use the OpenGL ES. Flatpak build on Flathub already has it set up and works out of the box.
Some distributions can have issues with input fields and virtual keyboard, making it look like the input is set up as right-to-left. To my understanding, itās an issue of certain older GTK versions with Flutter.
Nice sticker
Nheko
Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at
Nheko now should stop showing you actions, that you canāt do anyway, because that is confusing and useless. This includes the following and more:
Invite members, if you have no invite permissions.
Delete messages, if you donāt have redaction permissions.
Send a message, reply to one, edit one and more, if you canāt even send the message!
Tell us, if we missed something or we removed an action, that you actually have permissions to do!
Apart from that we also started working on some of the features for the next major release. That release will mostly focus on bringing End-to-End-Encryption out of beta. As a first step, Nheko now shows if a message was sent from a verified device or not. This has 3 different trust levels:
green: The message is from a device you verified. Either by device verification or cross signing.
greyish: The message is from an unverified device, but that user has never rotated their master signing key and has cross-signed that device. As such we can probably assume, that this is a trusted device. For extra safety, you should of course verify that user, but if it is just an internet personality you will never meet, you trust you are speaking to the right party anyway and canāt really verify them anyway, since you donāt know how they look either! We donāt want to prompt users with red warning signs in such cases, which will lead to them not doing verification properly, because they just want the red marks to go away. Many people are also not interested in the MITM aspects of E2EE. We think this is an okay tradeoff, but any feedback is welcome of course! This is basically Trust On First Use (TOFU), if you heard that term before.
red: The device is not verified. This can have a few reasons. Either we verified the user, but they didnāt verify that device. Or we didnāt verify that user and they have changed their master key at some point. Or the signatures for that device are wrong, etc. If you see such a device, you should probably investigate, why that is the case.
These are some biggish changes, so if you experience issues, tell us in #nheko:nheko.im!
Hot on the heels of our previous announcement and building on the fresh foundations of our rewrite, Julian got busy on room history. It now appears when a room is selected in the sidebar! To make that selection easier, room filtering in the sidebar has been implemented by new contributor Veli Tasali. Once a room is selected and displayed, messages can even be sent to them! Sounds like weāre done and the client is readyā¦ SHIP IT! Not really though, as itās still very basic, but at least the bare minimum to make it actually usable is now here.
Weāve been shepherding MSC1772 into the spec which has now exited final comment period and merged!
Alongside, weāve also been iterating on the Spaces implementations all round in preparation for wider testing soon, which has included
Iterating on filtering on Web to filter all Spaces
Iterating on logic for showing notification badges to avoid single DMs spawning multiple badges
Iterating on āHomeā to instead behave more like āAllā
Iterating on implementations across the web, iOS, Android & Synapse to use stable prefixes
& lots of other small tweaks
Web
Element Web 1.7.27-rc.1 on staging
Added localisation support to the desktop layer (for menu items etc.)
Fixed encrypted search indexing on Windows
Hardware media keys are now ignored, so theyāll go to other apps as intended
On develop
Calling architecture reworked to support multiple streams, please report any issues
1.7.27 release planned for Monday
iOS
1.3.6 is in review for the App Store. We have polished and fixed several issues on 1:1 and group calls. The release contains fixes for several bugs and crashes.
Very excited about the Spaces progress! Looks like everything that I found in recent testing is fixed!
Trixnity finally got released this week. Itās a Kotlin multiplatform Matrix SDK for high level access to Client-Server API and Appservice API. It has all (and some more) features from matrix-spring-boot-sdk which is based on Trixnity now (an update for that will be released soon). Trixnity can currently be used on JVM and JS as platform (Native is not working yet). It is also very customizable by adding custom room and state event types.
I did a video a few months back trying to show the physical layout of Matrix over the years by looking at the phonehome stats and the number of active users per server (showing full-mesh edges between the top 100 servers, heatmapped by how busy the servers were at either end of the edge). There was a bug in the phonehome stats during 2017, but itās still fairly coolā¦
Dept of Ping š
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.
The German IT platform Heise has conducted an interview with the university of Innsbruck which chose Matrix/Element over Microsoft Teams. Reasons: itās free, decentralized/federated, expandable and secure.
And the best thing: The federation across different institutions really works. I can still participate in project related chats with my former team @ETH_en while seamlessly supporting lectures at @uniinnsbruck. All out of one tool, one login. pic.twitter.com/6LXHcu7Jjf
If anyone did miss the opportunity to listen to the live stream: Here you can find the recording, with show notes, as well: https://rec.theradio.cc/item/ll244/
We were happy to have Krille and Nico with us. š„³
(website in german as well as the stream recording)
Hereās your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
Weāve opened up a new room for MSC authors to come and ask about the MSC process, as well as for review and feedback on their MSC ideas over at #sct-office:matrix.org. If youāre unsure what the next steps for your MSC are, or arenāt sure whether an idea would make sense for inclusion in the Matrix Specification, then this room is the perfect place to ask about it. Come on by!
In terms of MSC work, Spaces remains one of the most active topics in the spec this week, with MSC1772 finally reaching Final Comment Period! A lot of work went into writing and reviewing the MSC, as well as crafting the implementation - so congratulations to everyone involved! Of course, any concerns can still be raised over the next 5 days by anyone before the proposal is ultimately merged to the spec.
There are a number of changes being merged to the spec as we move swiftly towards the next major Spec release. Those that have merged this week are:
Otherwise thereās been a smattering of discussion and updates on various MSCs, such as MSC2730 (verifiable forwarded events), MSC2249 (requiring a user to be able to see an event to report it) and MSC2516 (voice messages).
Weāve just released the first public P2P Matrix demo using the experimental Pinecone protocol. There are builds available for Android right now and iOS is following shortly via Testflight as soon as it passes Appleās beta review:
If you enable the static peer in the peer-to-peer settings, you can join us in the #beachparty:3bf0258d23c60952639cc4c69c71d1508a7d43a0475d9000ff900a1848411ec7 room!
The demo will attempt to connect to other devices using Bluetooth Low Energy, even if internet connectivity isnāt available. Local connectivity over Wi-Fi is also supported. Itās still very rough around the edges and there are lots of bugs, but feel free to give it a go!
We expect to release 1.33 on Tuesday; more on that next week. But generally speaking, much of our development focus has been on profiling the memory usage of small homeservers joining large, highly-federated rooms for the first time. For example, we see a graph like this when joining Matrix HQ:
At a first pass, weāre aiming to significantly reduce the initial spikiness of that graph, and we think#9910 will help with the subsequent slow ramp up in memory.
Weāve also been discussing how to balance our relatively rapid release cadence with managing low severity security issues. If you have any thoughts, preferences, or relevant experiences to share, please comment here!
Announcing a new bouncer style Matrix IRC bridge to bridge the gap between IRC and Matrix in a way thatās easy to configure and manage by homeserver administrators for small scale deployment.
Itās written in Python and started off as an experiment if itās possible to create a somewhat well performing stateless IRC bridge thatās practically almost zero configuration. It quickly found a use case of being able to join !channels on IRCnet that hasnāt been possible in the past.
Intended target audience are people who run their own homeserver and would like to transition from a combination like ssh+irssi to pure Matrix (with weechat-matrix, of course!) but still keep IRC close without losing the āfine detailsā of the protocol that happens when plumbing a room properly.
As the bridge is written by someone who doesnāt really know Python help is much appreciated in the form of filing issues, sending pull requests or just discussing about it on Matrix to tell how you would like to use it!
matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINEās Chrome extension in Puppeteer.
Updates:
Inbound read receipts! But with a view caveats:
Receipts are only fetched for the āmost recently activeā room.
Example: if you send a message in room A, then room B, receipts will only be fetched for room B and not room A, until you (or someone else, from LINE) posts in room A.
This will be fixed in the next update. I have an idea for some Puppeteer trickery to get it working.
Read receipts in group chats are bridged as annotations (reactions) instead of ārealā read receipts, until all members of the chat have read a message.
This is because LINEās read receipts for group chats donāt tell show who read a message, but only how many people a message was read by.
To capture this in Matrix, instead of sending read receipts for a group chat message, the bridge puts a reaction of āRead by #ā on it, with ā#ā matching how many people read the message so far. Once everyone in the chat has read a message, the reaction is removed and a ārealā receipt is sent for all users.
Internal changes to message syncing that should hopefully make inbound messages more reliable, or the very least improve code maintenance.
Hey there, it is your friendly neighborhood cat client! Pardon, chat client!
Jedi18 implemented forwarding of messages. Just select a message and press Alt-F or use the context menu to send a message to the room you select in the popup! This encrypts and decrypts messages and media appropriately, but be aware that sending an encrypted file to an unencrypted room uploads the file unencrypted. (In all other cases the media is not uploaded again.)
Furthermore matrix.to links are now rewritten to matrix:-URIs internally. This means joining rooms and such should now work the same across both of them. It also makes navigation to events work now and even has a shiny highlight effect now! You can also create links to events now from the context menu. These are generated as matrix.to links, since currently the onboarding experience should still be better. Once the next version of the matrix.to website gets deployed, you can even just click there to open the event in Nheko! (Instead of having to copy a /join command).
Since āCopy link to eventā was confusing to people and AppAraat opened his present box, only to realize it did not contain āCopy link locationā, we implemented that too as well as a copy action, to copy the event body for good measure. I hope everyone who got confused will forgive me!
Apart from that we also updated our screenshots on https://nheko-reborn.github.io/ (and all AppStream based store pages) to be higher resolution and reflect the current design. Furthermore we fixed the login on conduit homeservers and that no rooms were shown, if the server didnāt support the groups API.
We rewrote the room managing code moving it from QML to C++ and unify how we manage rooms in NeoChat. This allowed us to support the matrix-URIs scheme, making it possible to open rooms and show user information when clicking on a matrix: link in your browser. Sverin Saji improved the look of the typing indicator and Jan Blackquill improved the keyboard navigation.
1.3.5 has been published to the App Store on Monday.
We have been polishing the new VoIP design this week. It should be merged into develop early next week and released in the App Store the week after.
We want to focus on code quality. We set up GitHub actions in our 3 repos. They run both unit tests and integration tests. We need to fix some of our 600+ tests in the SDK but we now have a CI able to complain about test failures.
Android
The Spaces have landed on Element Android, on the develop branch. We are working to stabilize the feature before the release in beta next week.
In parallel, we are working to stabilize the whole application, and provide a better support on Android 11.
Also it will be possible in the next release to compress video before sending, which is a very expected feature.
I announced this project last week. Itās exactly what it sounds like: A puppetting bridge to puppet a telephone number from Matrix. Itās currently pre-alpha and not ready for use on public-facing HSes.
Not too much has happened in the last week as Iāve been a bit busy. The main thing is that thereās now a dev branch where outbound voice calls work. Other than the 2014 SIP experiment, I think this is the first bridge to make voice calls work?
I hope having a reference VoIP bridge can help pave the way for more VoIP bridging. Iām already looking into how code can be generalized for other bridges. For example, Iāve opened an issue in matrix-bot-sdk to add helper classes and stuff for VoIP support. Iād be curious to see how other bridge builders think this could be accomplished. š
If youāre interested in PSTN bridging specifically, thereās a room for that.
If youāre interested in VoIP bridging in general, thereās a room for that, too
Dept of Services š
etke.cc - like Element Matrix Services, but on your servers, under your control and without restrictions
Some context: I like how simple EMS allows you to setup the Matrix homeserver, but it lacks any internal tuning or customization ability. Do you want more? OK, setup it yourself and try to stay normal while trying to configure coturn to properly run in docker cluster. Because of that, I did a service where you can order initial setup and configuration of homeserver (yes, with coturn in docker cluster!) and with full control of customization and fine-tuning of manual configuration (website even has step-by-step guide how the process works).
Itās based on the amazing spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy with additional stuff like system security hardening and maintenance
Source: https://gitlab.com/rakshazi/matrix-ansible/
It contains basic security stuff like ufw and fail2ban, system maintenance like updating packages, cleanup of old logs and docker images, configuration of swap, some additions like absurdly simply healthcheck page and website deployment to base domain. Documentation may be found in readme files for each role
The FLOSS Matrix hosting system built on AWX, it enables you to manage multiple Matrix servers for many clients in both a commercial or non-commercial context. We are currently doing a free giveaway of on-premises server plans, if youāre an experienced user or Matrix admin you can receive a free on-premises subscription and hopefully provide us with some feedback.
Some of you might already have seen that bot show up in rooms. To clear up some confusion around it I will briefly explain what it does and what it is supposed to do:
What does it do?
The Bot is simply existing to do the same task as Matrix Traveler (bot) already did for years now. It joins rooms, listens for an alias, tries to join it.
The main difference between these 2 bots is that my bot also searches for aliases in old messages.
What does it save?
It only saves the relations between rooms. This means it knows which room was posted where. It doesnāt know who posted it, when it was posted, why it was posted or any other content of messages.
However due to matrixā nature it does need to get the data once onto a synapse to read trough it. This means it has the data on my synapse. (Running in helsinki at hetzner).
What can I do if I do not want it?
The easiest way is to just ban it. It will fully forget that room.
Kicking works too but it might again join if it gets found again.
For further questions feel free to join #server_stats:nordgedanken.dev
Also note this bot is still very early in development which is why it does not respond to you yet on any commands. This will be added in the near future as well as a readme in the repository
Dept of Ping š
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.
