Friday already? Did this week already happen? It looked like the spacetime continuum was broken and we didn’t know who did it. We needed witnesses to solve the case: did things really happen this week? And the witnesses showed up! A huge thanks to everyone in the Matrix community who reported their progress, and to everyone currently working on making awesome projects around Matrix!
The case is closed: the week has not been stolen from us. Time appears to have wings, and flies faster than we had anticipated.
Matrix Live 🎙
A very very dense and exciting wrap up of what’s happening these days in the Matrix space by Matrix Foundation co-founders Matthew & Amandine! Matrix is stepping up a gear with blazing fast Sync v3, Threading Support, VoIP, VR, a new release of the Spec, always more monthly active users, a full security audit and progress on P2P.
Here’s your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
This week we finally, finally had one of the aggregation-related MSCs, MSC2674 (event relationships) enter final comment period! This MSC, along with several others, document the stuff that powers message edit, reactions, the upcoming threading and polls MSCs, and much more! So it’s really great to see the MSCs start to actually land.
Speaking of threading MSC3440 has had a good amount of review from the Spec Core Team last week. Threading in Matrix has been a long awaited feature for chat applications - as well as helping extend the flexibility of Matrix as a data structure even further. The MSC relies on both MSC2674 and MSC2675 (or a modified version of it), so the latter will be an area of focus for review for next week.
This is definitely a feature that I would love to have for chat. Note that this MSC proposes marking a room as unread, rather than a specific point in the room’s timeline. This is intentional as noted in the document, as the latter is more complicated, as it intersects with sending out read receipts to other users.
When we release the fix, the changes will be publicly known and bad actors will have the ability to deduce the vulnerability. Most servers don’t run release candidates, so releasing the fix in an RC will mean there’s a larger window for an attacker to exploit the problem. Internally, there will be an RC deployed to test homeservers and eventually matrix.org. This means we’ll be able to confidently recommend the upgrade to server administrators.
And that’s the very reason we have dedicated security releases, instead of just rolling the security fixes into a feature release. The security release doesn’t contain anything new apart from the security fix so it minimizes the chance of things going wrong.
Keep your servers up to date, and your users safe, administrators!
Implement “best effort” basic IRC moderation in plumbed rooms if bot has ops on IRC
Allow configuring topic sync for plumbs (IRC<->Matrix or one way)
Allow using forward slash (/) as MXID separator for IRC ghosts
Bump max mautrix version to <0.12
Small fixes
Plumb moderation! If the bridge bot has ops on IRC it will do its best to map kicks and bans (regarding IRC users) from Matrix. This definitely isn’t perfect and is meant as a convenience.
Topic synchronization is now configurable for plumbs as well to make it possible to share the same topic between an IRC channel and a plumbed Matrix room. Default is still off and it requires the bridge bot to have enough PL to work.
The separator for IRC ghosts can now be changed to forward slash (/) from the default underscore (_). This happens by modifying the regex in the registration file. Only do this for new installations and it will cause all IRC users to duplicate in rooms who you can’t remove and probably other bad side effects as well. The default may be changed in the future.
There were lots of refactoring issues so I hope I fixed all of them 🙈.
As always, thank you everyone, who contributed. There were over 30 authors this release! If you haven’t tried Nheko in a while, give it a whirl. Lots of stuff changed, some things might not even have been mentioned in TWIM! I put the first few lines of the changelog below for your convenience:
Highlights
Somewhat stable end to end encryption 🔐
Show the room verification status
Configure Nheko to only send to verified users
Store the encryption keys securely in the OS-provided secrets service.
Support online keybackup as well as sharing historical session keys.
Crosssigning bootstrapping 🔄
Crosssigning is used to simplify the verification process. In this release
Nheko can setup crosssigning on a new account without having to use a
different client.
Nheko now also prompts you, if there are any unverified devices and asks you to verify them.
Room directory (Manu) 📂
Search for rooms on your server and other servers. (Prezu)
If their topic interests you and it has the right amount of members, join
the room and the discussion!
Custom sticker packs 🐈⬛
Add a custom sticker picker, that allows you to send stickers from MSC2545.
Support creating new sticker (and emote) packs.
You can share packs in a room and enable them globally or just for that
room.
Token authenticated registration (Callum) 🎫
Sign up with a token to servers, that have otherwise disabled registration.
This was done as part of GSoC and makes it easier to run private servers for
your family and friends!
Features
Support email in registration (required on matrix.org for example)
Warn, if an @room would mention the whole room, because some people don’t like that.
Support device removal as well as renaming. (Thulinma)
Show your devices without encryption support, when showing your profile.
(Thulinma)
Move to the next room with unread messages by pressing Alt-A. (Symphorien)
Support jdenticons as a placeholder for rooms or users without avatars.
(LorenDB)
We fixed regressions reported on our previous release candidates. Sorry for the delay but the current release candidate 1.6.8 should be available on the App Store on Monday
The work to replace Matomo by PostHog has been resumed
We are still working on making the MatrixKit obsolete
Space creation / invites: will start design and code review starting next week
Start space management integration in rooms
Element Android
Secure and independent communication for Android, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-android:matrix.org!
Voice message draft is currently under active development. We want the feature to work well before we release it, and it was an opportunity to rework the whole feature, to improve its architecture.
after the Miounne update posted a minute ago here is another one, and it’s about time: Time To Matrix (ttm) got v1.4.0 release!
Time To Matrix is a time-like command that will send end of an arbitrary command output and some other info (like exit status) to matrix room.
With new release, following things were added:
arch linux AUR package
automatic room alias resolving, so you can use #ttm:etke.cc instead of !XODRhTLplrymaFicdK:etke.cc
help message and human-readable errors
option to change message type (m.text or m.notice)
option to omit plaintext and send only html-formatted message (to get some more space for log)
option to override message type to m.notice if the command exits with non-zero exit code (by default m.text is sent, so you will get m.notice on failure)
simplematrixbotlib is an easy to use bot library for the Matrix ecosystem written in Python and based on matrix-nio. Version 2.3.0 adds support for additional configuration via config files and other methods. Currently, there is only one setting that can be changed, however many existing and future features will be able to be enabled or disabled via this config.
New feature: if a user on your homeserver reports abuse, Mjölnir may now show the abuse report in your moderation room and offer you two-click moderation options. This feature is considered a preview for the time being.
Performance improvements for protections that need to lock back in the history of a room, decreasing the number of cases in which we could end up timing out.
Many improvements to testing.
Note: Any rumor of a v1.2.0 Docker image borked by yours truly is sadly true. There should be no risk in 1.2.0 but, to be on the safe side, if you have updated to 1.2.0, please update to 1.2.1.
That’s one feature I’ve wanted for a while, and it’s going to make moderation a lot easier! Thanks Mjolnir teams for keeping us safe!
Today I want to showcase you MinesTRIX. MinesTRIX is a decentralized social media based on matrix.
The goal is to create a privacy respectful social media using the power of matrix while trying to be as simple as possible.
Two Objectives
Showing that matrix could be used to build such a system.
An important note on the interesting projects using Matrix for the login: those are community projects, and there are MSCs in the works to “do it right” at the Spec level!
The direction we’re headed in the Matrix spec core team is instead towards replacing Matrix’s current auth mechanisms with normal Open ID Connect (rather than wrapping our own OIDC-like thing, as we do today) - as per https://github.com/sandhose/matrix-doc/blob/msc/sandhose/oauth2-profile/proposals/2964-oauth2-profile.md The common login flow would then be for users to be authed by their server using a trusted OIDC identity provider, rather than ever trusting arbitrary clients with their credentials.
I have compiled a list of public homeservers available for registration, since previous such efforts to make these homeservers more discoverable fell through. This list serves as a sanitized version of the asra.gr list, with only homeservers intended for public consumption included. It is a static list and does not include pings, but rather than focusing on the technical aspect, my list has an emphasis on the written rules of a homeserver, which I believe to play a larger role in the Matrix experience. Hope this can spark other efforts in maintaining a better list!
That’s one very useful list of hand curated servers! The transparency about the inclusion criteria is very much appreciated. Good job!
Hi everyone! Did you ever feel lost in the Matrix world? The room directory is big, but it’s still hard to find something you like. Or are you a room moderator, but there is not much activity in your room because it doesn’t have enough users?
This is why I want to share rooms (or spaces) I find interesting.
Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.
Rank
Hostname
Median MS
1
dendrite.nordgedanken.dev
485
2
sspaeth.de
648.5
3
devnullsystem.org
874.5
4
dendrite.neilalexander.dev
943
5
matrix.awesomesheep48.me
1016.5
6
0x1a8510f2.space
5969
That’s all I know 🏁
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
The Foundation needs you
The Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit and only relies on donations to operate. Its core mission is to maintain the Matrix Specification, but it does much more than that.
It maintains the matrix.org homeserver and hosts several bridges for free. It fights for our collective rights to digital privacy and dignity.
