One thing you might not know is that TWIM bot is a space traveler, sent by the Matrix scientists to explore that zone called “The Possibilities”. The #twim:matrix.org room is a portal to its energy tank, and we had received a distress signal!
To help the TWIM explorer fulfil its mission, we asked the Matrix community to fuel it with news before it crashed into space debris made of aggregated ignorance!
This week again, the community has been very active and explored many possibilities of the Matrix universe!
Matrix Live 🎙
For this week’s Matrix Live my guest is Amandine and we’re discussing how Element and 50 other organisations are trying to shape the future of EU’s law for more interoperability. Bonus point: we have a double bridge demo with Matrix, Slack and Telegram!
Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️
FOSDEM!
This year, the Matrix.org Foundation is excited to host the first ever Matrix.org Foundation and Community devroom at FOSDEM. A full day of talks, demos and workshops around Matrix itself and projects built on top of Matrix. Read (and answer to) our Call for Partipactions!
A group of Finnish Matrix admins have set up a free homeserver for Finnish public called pikaviestin.fi (literally instant messenger dot fi). It offers a bunch of bridges and registration requires an e-mail address in one of Finnish e-mail providers or organizations. We welcome all Finns to register there and help decentralize Matrix. Support room can be found at #aula:pikaviestin.fi
That’s a fantastic initiative! Kudos to all the sysadmins involved!
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.
The end of the year is drawing to a close. Thus many of the Spec Core Team members are focusing on implementation in order to meet deadlines. Review is still occurring though! As above, we have MSC3419 (allow guests to send more event types). This was born out of next-generation VoIP work, but it should have a positive impact on improving the guest experience in Matrix on the whole.
Otherwise work is still ongoing by Bruno and others on untangling the aggregations MSCs, specifically MSC2675 and MSC2676.
And finally, Alexandre Franke has PR’d some work to allow for matrix.org’s OpenAPI spec to be widely available, meaning anyone with a Swagger (or other OpenAPI viewer) client can easily pull it and start sending requests against a Matrix homeserver. Fun times!
I want to start by drawing attention to a blog post which we published today: Type coverage for Sydent: motivation. This the first in a series of three articles discussing what we’ve learned from making Sydent pass the mypy type checker in strict mode. Improving type coverage across Synapse, Sygnal, and Sydent has been a major focus of the backend team at Element for the past few months, and we think we’ve learned a few useful things in the process.
This week we also released Synapse 1.48 with loads of internal improvements, new Admin APIs, better alignment with the Matrix 1.1 spec, and more. We’re planning one more release for the year, 1.49 on December 14th, and then we’re taking a break until Synapse 1.50 on January 11th.
Importantly: Synapse 1.49 will be the last release to support Python 3.6, PostrgreSQL 9.6, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic) — if you’re reliant on any of these platforms, please ensure you have plans to upgrade.
Let us know what you think of the article (and the Synapse release!), and we’ll see you next week!
Sydent is the reference Matrix Identity server. It provides a lookup service, so that you can find a Matrix user via their email address or phone number (if they have chosen to share it).
I’ve just published a blog post (part one of three) about our efforts to improve Sydent’s type coverage. It should hopefully be of interest to anyone who works with Python or is interested in static analysis more generally.
In the vein of Gitter feature parity on Matrix, we’ve made the first steps towards a better public static archive. We merged an experimental implementation of MSC3030 into Synapse which lets you use the unstable /timestamp_to_event client API endpoint go from a given timestamp to the closest event ID. This will allow us to implement a calendar jump to date interface to be able to navigate to any day in the rooms history. Our first target to add the jump to date UI in is Hydrogen since we plan to server-side render Hydrogen for the actual public static archive as well.
To enable the MSC3030 unstable API endpoints in Synapse, add experimental_features -> msc3030_enabled: true to your homeserver.yaml:
GET /_matrix/client/unstable/org.matrix.msc3030/rooms/<roomID>/timestamp_to_event?ts=<timestamp>&dir=<direction>
{
"event_id": ...
"origin_server_ts": ...
}
Also as part of MSC3030, when you use the client API endpoint, if your homeserver sees that the closest event it has locally in the database is next to a gap in the history, it will go out and ask other federated homeservers what they have as the closest event instead.
GET /_matrix/federation/unstable/org.matrix.msc3030/timestamp_to_event/<roomID>?ts=<timestamp>&dir=<direction>
{
"event_id": ...
"origin_server_ts": ...
}
*—
MSC2716 to import batches of historical messages is still marching along getting some polishing passes and strengthening the assertions in the Complement tests to make sure things are going absolutely correctly. It’s also good to see Beeper utilizing it and catching a fewbugs along the way 💪.
Dept of Bridges 🌉
Hookshot
Half-Shot reports very late, to the great despair of TWIM’s editor:
Hookshot gets provisioning!
Stop the press. This is a last minute TWIM. We’ve been beavering away on matrix-hookshot. It’s gained many features in the last week, but the big thing is that hookshot has gained the ability to provision connections over a provisioning API, which means it should hook nicely into Dimension (and other integration managers, in the future)!
Other notable features are:
Support for multiple webhooks per room
Support for the username/text fields on an incoming webhook (slack style)
Named webhooks, so each hook now has a sensible displayname
The ability to spawn GitHub actions from rooms using the !gh workflow run command
Lots of new supported events from GitLab, such as reviews and tag pushes
Hosted documentation (so all of the above is easy to setup), it’s a bit in progress atm.
We’re aiming for a release very very soon, hopefully in the next week or so!
SchildiChat is a fork of Element that focuses on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list for both direct messages and groups, which is a more familiar approach to users of other popular instant messengers.
In a new release being published just now we added the possibility to mark rooms as unread also on Web/Desktop (using MSC2867, huge thanks to @alangecker for his PR on Element Web!).
This has already been implemented in SchildiChat-Android and is now enabled on both by default.
We finally figured out what caused the issues with the flatpak on GNOME, especially on Arm. It should now work properly, if you use Flathub. On the Pinephone (and other systems, that don’t set a locale/use the C locale), timestamps should now not be needlessly long anymore. Redactions got a face-lift to distinguish them better from normal messages. We added a workaround for Synapse not allowing you to leave a banned room. We now delete the room from the room list permanently if Synapse returns “unknown room” when trying to leave it. Spaces can now show the entire hierarchy in the sidebar (if you pull it out) and you can navigate to subspaces by clicking on them in the roomlist, even if you collapsed the space hierarchy in the sidebar.
Today we have released FluffyChat 1.0.0 with a whole new design, a lot of bug fixes and huge performance improvements.
New design
The new design has bigger message bubbles with fancy shadows and bigger fonts. The contrast has been improved and some elements, like the time on every single message bubble, are now hidden by default. But they are not gone! Detailed message information are now accessible in the new message info page, where we not also can see the message type and the timestamp, but also the whole JSON source code of each timeline event.
Spaces
Spaces have got a lot improvements and bug fixes. They have moved to the bottom bar of the chat list (while this bottom bar is still hidden if you have not joined any space yet). The multi account switcher have instead been moved to a top left drop-down menu. So we finally got rid of the drawer, which seems to be a deprecated material design feature anyway. This new UX makes spaces much easier to use. You can long press on them to go to the space settings and long press on any chat in the chat list, to add or remove a chat to (or from) a space.
We still have no support for the spaces summary API though so we don’t have yet the ability to discover new rooms inside of a space but this feature might land soon in the Matrix Dart SDK.
Multi Account
FluffyChats multi account is still in beta but got a lot of bug fixes as well. You are now able to sort your accounts in “bundles” which can be very handy. The new account switcher button gives you a much better overview over your connected Matrix accounts now.
Performance
We did a lot refactoring under the hood in our Matrix Dart SDK and have improved our in-app database a lot. On the web it now uses IndexedDB natively while it tunes all database transactions on all platforms. This leads to the fastest FluffyChat experience we ever had and makes the app finally kinda usable with bigger accounts on all platforms. The room list is now lazy loaded which speeds up the app start (especially with multi account enabled) a lot.
Choose your own primary color
This was a long requested feature. You can now choose your favorite color to style your FluffyChat for your needs:
What will you choose? Let me know in the comments. I mostly like blue on my Ubuntu desktop.
New major version?
Ahhh by the way… What does it mean that we now have FluffyChat 1.0.0? It does NOT mean that the previous versions were not yet stable or ready for daily use. It just means that we make so many changes at once that we thought, bumping the first digit of our pseudo-semver version string might make sense. We totally messed up our versioning and are now going to do it better. Promised!!
What’s next?
We are often asked: What is the roadmap of FluffyChat?
Well… we still don’t have a clear roadmap and might never have. FluffyChat is completely driven by volunteers. But what I can say that we would like to do in the next months is:
Better QA -> We would like to write some integration tests, push release candidates before new releases and involve everyone in testing them to offer the best stability possible.
Native video calls -> Yes! There will soon land support for native video calls in the Matrix Dart SDK and we are going to implement this in FluffyChat.
Stories -> Like you might know from SnapChat, WhatsApp or Instagram, stories are little messages you can send to all of your contacts and which will disappear after 24 hours. I would really like to implement this in FluffyChat!
Better notifications for iOS
Deeper support for spaces
Knocking feature
Drag&Drop for web
But as I said this is what we would like to do. We can’t give any warranties on anything. We can only do our best. But you can help us if you like (You don’t have to).
On Web, work continues on notifications and integration with homeserver APIs to improve user experience.
On Mobile, link sharing has been added and work is about to start on notifications.
Polls
Polls are nearly ready! If you enable this feature in labs, you can create a poll with several options, and people can vote on it.
We’re working on the finishing touches, and the first version of polls will be available in a release (on Element Desktop, Web, Android and iOS) within a few weeks.
Community testing
We closed 34 encryption bugs which had been resolved by improvements to the workflows and user interfaces.
Due to the overwhelming success with bug squash sessions in the last few weeks, we are making these a regular feature. Our next session will be on Thursday 9 December at 17:00 UTC.
Trixnity, a multiplatform Matrix SDK written in Kotlin, has grown up since the last release 6 month ago! It has it first release candidate for v1.0.0!
If you don’t heard about Trixnity: Trixnity aims to be strongly typed, customizable and easy to use. You can register custom events and Trixnity will take care, that you can send and receive that type.
The most exciting thing is the new trixnity-client module. It provides a high level client implementation and allows you to easily implement clients for Desktop, Mobile and Web. You just need to render data from and passing user interactions to Trixnity. The key features are:
exchangeable database
fast cache on top of the database
E2E (olm, megolm)
verification
room list
timelines
user and room display name calculation
asynchronous message sending without caring about E2E stuff or online status
media support (thumbnail generation, offline “upload”, etc.)
redactions
At the moment, Trixnity only supports JVM in all modules, but JS and Native will follow soon (to be exact: when Kotlin 1.6.10 and ktor 2.0.0 is released). I also implemented the module trixnity-olm, which implements the wrappers of libolm for Kotlin JVM/JS/Native.
Cross signing is one of the next big features, I want to implement.
I’m exploring the matrix-rust-sdk on my live stream every week. I’m working on a simple Rust bot for Matrix. Come watch me struggle with the compiler on PeerTube or Twitch every wednesday at 14:00 UTC!
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
matrix.awesomesheep48.me
1042
2
0x1a8510f2.space
1076
3
dendrite.s3cr3t.me
4405
The Adventures of TWIM bot continued
Following the late reports of the spec and hookshot updates, TWIM bot’s ship went into hyperspeed. Our dear bot lost control of the ship and we lost its signal. We’re doing our best to contact it and hope it’s safe!
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.
