This Week in Matrix

Matrix Live 🎙

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

Loads of coverage is available, take a look!

English

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

Dutch

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

German

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

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa offered:

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

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

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

New MSCs:

• MSC3291: Muting in VoIP calls

• MSC3289: Room version 8

• MSC3288: Add room type in store invite

• MSC3286: Media spoilers

Spec Core Team

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

Spec Updates

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

sorunome has been working on MSC2545:

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

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

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

callahad told us:

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

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

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

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace announced:

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

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-puppeteer-line

Fair told us:

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

---

This week brings plenty of usability improvements:

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fractal

Alexandre Franke announced:

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

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

Giuseppe offered two nice additions to the login view:

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

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

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

Element Clients

Delight team

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

VoIP

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

Web

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

iOS

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

Android

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

Šimon Brandner shared some images of the new VoIP UX:

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

Beeper update

Tulir said:

Desktop

• New keyboard shortcuts:

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

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

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

Bridges

LinkedIn

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

Android SMS

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

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

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

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruby

Ananace told us:

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

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

Dept of Bots 🤖

Hebbot (This Week in X bot)

Felix told us:

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

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

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

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

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

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Matrix Plugin for OctoPrint

Cadair offered:

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

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

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

Matrix in the News 📰

Matrix & IRC | Size & Stability

Gwmngilfen said:

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

New Public Rooms 🏟️

Beyond Chat

Ryan reported:

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

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

Dept of Welcomes 👐

VoIP

Robert Long announced:

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

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

Final Thoughts 💭

Room of the week

timokoesters offered:

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

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

---

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

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

---

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

Royal Navy using Matrix!

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

— Element (@element_hq) July 23, 2021

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	envs.net	358
2	maunium.net	432
3	sorunome.de	461.5
4	kapsi.fi	547
5	boba.best	566.5
6	trolla.us	767.5
7	heitkoetter.net	952.5
8	aria-net.org	1035
9	konqi.work	1186
10	roeckx.be	1696

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	conduit.supercable.onl	173
2	dendrite.nordgedanken.dev	184
3	matrix.org	322
4	dendrite.neilalexander.dev	398.5
5	conduit.rs	1451.5

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa announced:

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

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

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

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

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Closed MSCs:

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

Spec Updates

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

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

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

Google Summer of Code 2021: first evaluations complete!

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

Alexandre Franke added:

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

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

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander told us:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since the release, we've been working on:

• Completing key notary support

• Fixing state_default for power levels in gomatrixserverlib

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

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

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

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

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

• Appservice APIs: 52%

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

Synapse

callahad told us:

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

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

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

Registration management for Token Authenticated Registration

callum told us:

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

See also Matrix Live with Callum last week.

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace said:

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

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-puppeteer-line

Fair said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

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

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

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

Other bugfixes:

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

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

• No more reply fallback in the room list.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Element Clients

With updates supplied by the teams

Delight team

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

Web

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

Android

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

Hydrogen

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

Bruno said:

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

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

PyQuotient

Aksem told us:

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

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

Also, a small video with the client in action.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

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

Nik offered:

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

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

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

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

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

Asked about the regularity of these events, Nik replied:

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

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Cactus Comments 🌵

carl announced:

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

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

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

• Feature: Include comment section id in room name.

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

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

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

• Internal: Pin sub-dependencies.

• Internal: Heavy linting in CI.

All these changes are available from version 0.5.0.

Demo: https://cactus.chat/demo

Matrix room: #cactus:cactus.chat

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

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

Dept of Guides 🧭

New business-oriented guide to using Matrix and Element

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

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

Schuyler "Rocky" Reidel added:

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

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

Final Thoughts 💭

Room of the week

timokoesters told us:

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

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

---

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

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

---

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

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	envs.net	517
2	kif.rocks	552
3	maunium.net	652
4	synapse.clippyco.com	677.5
5	maescool.be	697
6	utzutzutz.net	788
7	kapsi.fi	789
8	liberta.casa	831.5
9	trolla.us	855
10	nordgedanken.dev	1106

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite.nordgedanken.dev	89
2	construct.supercable.onl	197
3	pc.koesters.xyz:6167	217.5
4	conduit.rs	566
5	dendrite.neilalexander.dev	729
6	dendrite.s3cr3t.me	856
7	dendrite01.fiksel.info	872.5

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Ansible Community considers Matrix

Gwmngilfen offered:

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

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa told us:

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3270: Symmetric megolm backup

• MSC3269: An error code for busy servers

• MSC3267: Reference relations

• MSC3266: Room summary

• MSC3265: Login and SSSS with a Single Password

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

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

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

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

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit

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

timokoesters said:

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

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

• LRU cache for deserialized PDUs

• More efficient state res by only fetching events it needs

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Neil Alexander said:

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

We will stay highly tuned!

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad offered:

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

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

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

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace said:

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

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-puppeteer-line progresses

Fair reported:

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

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

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

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

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Element Clients

Updates provided by the teams!

Delight team

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

VoIP

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

Web

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

Android

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

SchildiChat

SpiritCroc reported:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nheko

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

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

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

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

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

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Opsdroid 0.23

Cadair offered:

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

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

Dept of Bots 🤖

home-assistant-bot release v2.0.1

Oleg announced:

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

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

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

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Server_Stats Statistical Data

MTRNord offered:

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

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

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

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

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

Dept of Guides 🧭

Matrix Bot inside of a Docker Container

krazykirby99999 announced:

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

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

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

New Public Rooms 🏟️

Room of the week

timokoesters told us:

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

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

---

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

Biggest room: #mathematicsq&a:matrix.org

"For questions about any part of maths!"

---

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

Final Thoughts 💭

Cadair offered:

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

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	envs.net	477
2	kapsi.fi	568.5
3	trolla.us	708.5
4	matrix.debian.social	735
5	rollyourown.xyz	747
6	semisol.dev	767
7	boba.best	771.5
8	matrix.sp-codes.de	784
9	shortestpath.dev	871.5
10	nordgedanken.dev	872

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite.neilalexander.dev	602.5
2	dendrite.s3cr3t.me	803.5
3	dendrite01.fiksel.info	831.5
4	conduit.rs	2172.5

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

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

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

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

Beeper update

Tulir reported:

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

Desktop

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

• Merged upstream Element additions like voice messages.

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

iOS

• Released Beeper iOS to Testflight.

Android

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

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

Bridges

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

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

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

Dept of Spec 📜

MSC state changes:

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

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

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

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad announced:

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

Otherwise, Synapse 1.37 highlights include:

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

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

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

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

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

Check out the blog post for more.

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

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

Dept of Bridges 🌉

LinkedIn <-> Matrix Bridge

sumner reported:

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

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

matrix-puppeteer-line update

Fair reported:

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

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

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

Discussion:

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

Matrix Adapter for WebThings 0.4.0

Christian told us:

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

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

Dept of Clients 📱

NeoChat

Carl Schwan announced:

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

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

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

FluffyChat

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

krille said:

FluffyChat 0.33.0 has been released.

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

Features

• redesigned settings

• Updated translations - thanks to all translators

• display progress bar in first sync

• changed Linux window default size

• update some dependencies

Fixes

• Favicon on web

• Database not storing files correctly

• Linux builds for arm64

• a lot of minor bugs

Nheko

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

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) offered:

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

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

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

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

Have a nice weekend everyone! ♥

Fractal

Alexandre Franke told us:

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

Element Clients

Updates sent by the teams

Delight team

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

Web

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

iOS

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

Android

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

Vocie messages!

kazv

tusooa reported:

kazv is a matrix client based on libkazv.

Talk to us on #kazv:tusooa.xyz .

Updates

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

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

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

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-bot-sdk v0.5.19

TravisR announced:

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

Dept of Ops 🛠

Matrix Navigator 0.1.2

Christian told us:

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

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

Dept of Services 🚀

GoMatrixHosting v0.5.1 🚀

Michael told us:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dept of Bots 🤖

Mjolnir

TravisR offered:

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

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

Dept of Guides 🧭

Matrix Limits

Ryan said:

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

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

Self hosting your own Matrix server on a Raspberry Pi

Peter Roberts announced:

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

Public Rooms News 🏟️

Matrix Science Reading Group

Florian said:

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

German Element translation feedback

Libexus announced:

Hallo deutschsprachige Matrix-Community!

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

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

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

---

Hello German-speaking Matrix community!

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

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

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

Room of the week

timokoesters told us:

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

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

---

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

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

---

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

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	envs.net	497
2	fluse.duckdns.org	653
3	m.scd31.com	802.5
4	maescool.be	803
5	helderferreira.io	828
6	nevarro.space	842
7	tilde.fun	842
8	fslhome.org	952
9	fosil.eu	987.5
10	queersin.space	1241

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite.nordgedanken.dev	246
2	dendrite.neilalexander.dev	578
3	dendrite01.fiksel.info	1459
4	jloa.ovh	1586

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

• Valere presents the latest Spaces UX
• Neil Alexander shows off P2P progress
• ChristianP shows Matrix Navigator
• Eric Eastwood (Gitter fellow!) shows off MSC2716 (message history batches)
• Rich vdH presents Jaeger for Synapse profiling
• Bruno presents reactions in Hydrogen

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Room of the week

timokoesters said:

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

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

---

This week's space is: RPG

Biggest room: #D&D:matrix.org

"Casual chat about Dungeons & Dragons, tabletop RPG, OSR, DM tips, player stories, world building, and more."

---

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

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa told us:

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

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3173: Expose stripped state events to any potential joiner
• MSC2778: Providing authentication method for appservice users

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC3255: Use SRV record for homeservers discovery by clients

Spec Updates

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.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit

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

timokoesters reported:

After some more work on swappable database backends, I worked on a few small features:

• User directory improvements (show remote users and appservice puppets)

• /state endpoint

• /event_auth endpoint

• Filter our room directory based on the search term

• /search over multiple rooms

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

anoa said:

Knock, knock TWIM! It's a new week, and I'm filling in for Dan today to bring you an update on Synapse's latest progress!

Hot off the heels of Synapse 1.36.0’s release last week, we’ve put out 1.37.0rc1! It includes the long-awaited “room knocking” feature (note that no clients currently support knocking), a completely reworked pluggable modules interface and experimental support for backfilling history into rooms. With knocking support in, this means Synapse now has support for room v7!

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!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

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.

YunoHost

Mamie offered:

YunoHost is an operating system aiming for the simplest administration of a server, and therefore democratize self-hosting.

Synapse integration had been updated to 1.34.0 (1.35.1 available in branch testing)

Element Web integration had been updated to 1.7.28 (1.7.29 available in branch testing)

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Gitter

Eric Eastwood offered:

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. It's still early days on this before we can actually use it on Gitter. Here is a proof of concept to get your juices flowing:

Dept of Clients 📱

Hydrogen

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

Bruno said:

Released Hydrogen 0.2.0 with:

• support for receiving and sending reactions ❤👍🚀
• adds a right panel with basic room information, thanks to @MidhunSureshR! Watch this space in the near future for more functionality soon.

Loving Hydrogen right now. It's fast and works great! See Bruno present reactions as one of the Matrix Live demos (scroll up)

NeoChat

Carl Schwan announced:

In terms of code, this week we didn't 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 KDE's chat apps: NeoChat for Matrix, Tok for Telegram and Kaidan for XMPP, KDE Connect and Spacebar for SMS, ... 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 today... and looking forward to this E2EE news!

Fractal

Alexandre Franke announced:

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 “Explore” 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
  • We’ve also added labs flags to Web & Android to test a few different things, in particular
    • Toggling ‘Home’ to show all rooms, or only rooms which don’t belong to Spaces
    • Toggling to not show People in Spaces
  • Please try them out! After living with a different config for a few days, we’d 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
• Fix a bug where the wellknown was no more fetched
• Device dehydration is available in the SDK
• Still good progress on voice messages

Quaternion

kitsune offered:

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 🔐

New paper: “Key Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees”

Florian offered:

Here is a scientific paper for all interested in decentralized end-to-end encryption cryptography protocols, like Matrix' Megolm, or the MLS future of Matrix: The preprint “Key Agreement for Decentralized Secure Group Messaging with Strong Security Guarantees” 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 “Matrix”) 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.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Quotient

kitsune reported:

Last week's 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

Polyjuice Client is a Matrix library for Elixir

uhoreg said:

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).

Dept of Ops 🛠

synadm 0.30

jojo said:

Hello dear Synapse Admins, synadm v0.30 is out. lt seems I was in "story telling mode" already when I wrote the release notes yesterday. That should perfectly suit a TWIM article as well 🙂 So there you go, copy/pasted from https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm/releases/tag/v0.30 with love:

New

synadm finally got some nicely rendered documentation pages hosted at https://synadm.readthedocs.io.

"Login as a user" admin API support:

• synadm user login <user id>

• Have a look at the new command's docs

New subcommand matrixsupporting execution of regular Matrix commands. As a first shot a command to issue any Matrix API call has been implemented:

• synadm matrix raw endpoint/url -m post -f data.json

• synadm matrix raw endpoint/url -m put -d '{"key1": "value1"}' --prompt

• The new command's docs

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.

The second command below matrix is:

• synadm matrix login <user id>

• The new command's docs

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

Improved

The README has been updated to point to the nicely rendered docs recently published at https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/develop/usage/administration/admin_api/index.html

Notes

Update via PyPI or git as described in the update chapter: https://github.com/JOJ0/synadm#update

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

Matrix Navigator v0.1.1

Christian said:

Matrix Navigator aims to be a replacement for curl when querying and mutating room states, including permissions.

• Plenty of fixes (reminder, this is still alpha software)

• Allows to join, leave rooms and inviting users.

• New wide-screen layout

• Errors are now shown in input fields or alerts.

https://matrix-navigator.chrpaul.de

Code and roadmap: https://gitlab.com/jaller94/matrix-navigator

Dept of Services 🚀

Thoughts on Matrix account ownership

Thib told us:

with the change of policy we deployed on GNOME's 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 is... maybe! In this post I cover the differences between personal account, organisation-owned account, the importance of segregating activities on Matrix... and why this may change with Portable Identities in the future

https://blog.ergaster.org/post/20210622-owning-your-matrix-account/

Dept of Jobs 💰️

Tchap are hiring!

Thib reported:

the French government deployed Tchap, an instant messaging based on Matrix. They are looking for tech and processes oriented people to improve the service.

https://beta.gouv.fr/recrutement/2021/06/15/tchap-devops.html (🇫🇷) https://beta.gouv.fr/recrutement/2021/06/15/charge.ou.chargee.de.deploiement.html (🇫🇷)

Final Thoughts 💭

Andy reported:

I know this isn't 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 don't appreciate email enough, and in the comments there were some mentions of matrix as the counterpart for messaging:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/o6cs4l/comment/h2s5dcz/

Actually I think this is very interesting. Worth taking a read to understand how people not already using Matrix might see the world.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	maunium.net	517
2	int21.dev	520
3	matrix.sp-codes.de	607
4	trolla.us	615
5	aria-net.org	765
6	vonderste.in	812.5
7	heitkoetter.net	832
8	lily.flowers	991
9	thomcat.rocks	1237.5
10	kittenface.studio	1559

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite01.fiksel.info	1300.5
2	weber.world	2473

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Talking to Half-Shot about Libera Chat IRC bridging.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

GNOME community loves Matrix

Thib reported:

The GNOME community loves Matrix and wants it to grow! That's why it's closing registrations on its instance. What? Yes, we want both to provide the best experience for our community and to be a good citizen in the Matrix universe.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa said:

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

MSC Status

Closed MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3234: Send currently open room in client to bots

Merged MSCs:

• MSC2732: Olm fallback keys

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3173: Expose stripped state events to any potential joiner (merge)

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3246: Audio event/waveform representation in extensible events

• MSC3245: Voice messages (using extensible events)

• MSC3244: Room version capabilities

Spec Updates

Feedback from the Spec Core Team has landed on MSC3244: Room version capabilities, MSC3083: Restricted room membership and a myriad of others. Travis has stormed in with MSC3245: Voice messages via Extensible Events and MSC3246: Audio event/waveform representation in extensible events and as a result MSC1767: Extensible Events has gotten some love.

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.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

callahad offered:

This week's big news is the release of Synapse 1.36 which completely eliminates memory spikes when joining rooms! I'll let the "Joining Matrix HQ" 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.

We'll 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! Let's upgrade to 1.36 this weekend!

synapse-media-proxy

f0x said:

Actively deployed to pixie.town's 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

https://git.pixie.town/f0x/synapse-media-proxy

autodiscover-server-configuration

Got an update after realizing that maunium.net's horrible but technically correct server discovery didn't get handled correctly yet https://www.npmjs.com/package/@f0x52/autodiscover-server-configuration

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace told us:

This week sees another installation of the regular Kubernetes updates, bumping the Synapse chart and image to 1.36.0

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Heisenbridge

hifi offered:

Heisenbridge roundup!

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 there's 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

Half-Shot told us:

Hola everyone! Today we're 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!

Watch Matrix Live for more from Half-Shot.

matrix-puppeteer-line

Fair reported:

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

Even more read receipt improvements are here! In summary, with the magic of MSC2409, the bridge shouldn't ever "view" 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 didn't 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 "placeholder" 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 doesn't have a "Read" marker on it yet.

Once that is taken care of, I'll consider the bridge to be in beta! 🎉

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

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Element Clients

Updates from the teams

Delight team

• Spaces:
  • The highly requested drag & drop for reordering of Spaces has entered RC, expect it soon
  • New settings to setup aliases for spaces will also land in next release
  • Ongoing work to improve team spaces with restricted rooms.
  • We have a plan for iOS

Web

• 1.7.31 RC on staging
  • Various tweaks and improvements to the Spaces beta experience
  • Added room intro warning when E2EE is not enabled
  • Improved message forwarding UI
  • Improved timeline reflow and room list filter performance
• On develop
  • First version of web perf metrics dashboard available, updated for each commit to develop
  • Fixed reply thread perf regression which was sending lots of /context/undefined requests
• In flight
  • Continuing to improve application performance
  • Working on Apple silicon desktop builds
  • Working on translation mismatch errors
  • 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: we're 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 “Security Phrase” and “Security Key”
• 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.

NeoChat

Carl Schwan said:

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 week's "This Week in Linux" podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaPWx_z_50s Don't 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. It's 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.

krille offered:

FluffyChat 0.32.0 is out now 💪 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.

[pioneer] told us:

Here's 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

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

We've 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 haven't joined yet. Creating and modifying spaces is also still work in progress until we figure out a proper design for it.

Nheko also now supports deeplinking using the matrix:// scheme

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Matrix Dart SDK

krille offered:

The Dart language now has a new SDK for Matrix developed and maintained by famedly.com and published here:

https://pub.dev/packages/matrix

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.

kazv

tusooa offered:

kazv is a matrix client based on libkazv.

Talk to us on #kazv:tusooa.xyz .

Updates

We got an AppImage build for x86-64 GNU/Linux systems. Feel free to try -))

https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/kazv/-/jobs/452/artifacts/browse

Dept of Ops 🛠

Matrix Navigator

Christian announced:

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. It's not looking fancy yet but already proved useful for many of the matrix.org IRC support requests.

https://matrix-navigator.chrpaul.de/ (statically hosted)

https://gitlab.com/jaller94/matrix-navigator (license not yet decided)

Dept of Bots 🤖

maubot/gitlab

Tulir told us:

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.

It's already in use in #nheko:nheko.im and Beeper's internal commit log room. It's unfortunately not yet available on t2bot.io, because I'm 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 🗣️

Interoperability event hosted by, and featuring, Matrix

Denise offered:

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

Registration is free here: https://openforumeurope.org/event/a-new-business-model-for-the-internet-how-a-strong-digital-markets-act-can-enable-smes-to-deliver-a-better-internet/

NB this event took place earlier in the week, but we still wanted to honour it!

Message à Caractère Informatique

Brendan Abolivier announced:

I've been invited to appear in the latest episode of Clever Cloud's tech podcast Message à Caractère 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!

The episode, which is in French (sorry non-French speakers!), is available here: https://www.clever-cloud.com/fr/podcast/episode48/

Perhaps to pique (French word?) our interest Brendan Abolivier added:

(if anyone's curious about the autonomous car hacking, which I found particularly interesting, the paper we were discussing is in english https://spqrlab1.github.io/papers/ji-poltergeist-oakland21.pdf 😛)

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Server_Stats

MTRNord said:

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.

As a side effect also https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/spaces now found 3x the rooms as before.

Also the webpage got a big overhaul which brings a lot more mobile phone friendliness :) So you can finally properly use it on your phone as well.

Another change is that tombstoned rooms now get filtered from the list to keep it clean.

For developers a API reference is now available at https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/api

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.

For people usings the /servers api endpoint there is also now a include_members option. This means https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/servers?include_members=true

now also gives unique servers based on known members.

Dept of Guides 🧭

A Matrix bot created with Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib!

krazykirby99999 reported:

This bot is written with short, easy to understand Python code. Try writing your own bot with Python and Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib!

https://simple-matrix-bot-lib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples.html#a-rock-paper-scissors-bot

This project is also a bot in itself, but I believe it is a great form of documentation, hence Guides section.

Easy guide to joining Matrix

Bram told us:

After having tried to convince several people to join the Matrix, my main conclusion is that it's 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, I've written a quick guide that should help people without a programming background join the Matrix. I'm 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

Matrix in the News 📰

German universities survey

Remember the survey of German universities we reported on a few weeks ago? There is now an english-language version of the results available.

Wired article now online

Cat announced:

Remember the Wired article we spotted in the print edition and got a blurry picture of? It has now made it onto their website. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/matrix-encrypted-messaging-app-governments

Final Thoughts 💭

Room of the week

timokoesters reported:

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

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

---

This week's room is: #calibre:mailstation.de

"People reading eBooks usually know Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/), one of the most prominent ebook management solutions by Kovid Goyal. We've had an "unofficial" (as in: Kovid doesn't like real-time communications :) ) channel on what used to be freenode that I've moved to Libera and which is - of course! - bridged to #calibre" ~Philantrop

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, send a Matrix message in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	envs.net	441
2	kapsi.fi	613
3	trolla.us	614
4	aria-net.org	1080
5	matrix.org	1081
6	fosil.eu	1083.5
7	thomcat.rocks	1092
8	1in1.net	1168
9	matrix.sp-codes.de	1310
10	imninja.net	1349

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite.thomcat.rocks	3593
2	dendrite01.fiksel.info	3906.5

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Room of the week

timokoesters said:

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

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

---

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

"Share your artwork and drawings and chat about it. You don't have to be good!"

---

If you want to suggest a room for this section, send an email to

roomoftheweek@koesters.xyz or a Matrix message in #roomoftheweek:fachschaften.org

Yep, go ahead and email your suggested Matrix room-of-the-week to Timo!

Dept of Spec 📜

kegan said:

MSC3079: Low Bandwidth CS API now has an experimental implementation containing a proxy server and mobile bindings! In addition, there's 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.

anoa said:

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

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2778: Providing authentication method for appservice users (merge)
• MSC2732: Olm fallback keys (merge)

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3234: Send currently open room in client to bots

Spec Updates

Mostly Spaces and E2EE work this week. New spec release is still in the works.

Graph will return in a future edition!

Dept of P2P 👥

Pinecone

Neil Alexander told us:

I have spent quite a bit of time lately working on Pinecone network convergence for P2P Matrix. There's still quite a bit to do in order to call Pinecone "complete", 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!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit

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

timokoesters told us:

Hello! The last two weeks I mostly tried to make our database backend swappable so we don't 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:

https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/issues/74

• Feature: Swappable database backend

• Improvement: Don't apply push rules for users of other homeservers

• Fix: is_direct now works for locally invited users

• Fix: Deactivated accounts are now actually deactivated (-> performance improvements for appservice puppets)

synapse-media-proxy

f0x offered:

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 Synapse's /_matrix/media routes. I don't 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 :)

https://git.pixie.town/f0x/synapse-media-proxy
synapse-media-proxy now has a room at #synapse-media-proxy:pixie.town

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad reported:

🚪 Knock, knock... It's Friday!

After over a year of work and over a hundred commits, we're now one major step closer to supporting MSC 2403: Add "Knock" 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 — we need to implement room version 7 for that — but the remaining work is minimal¹ compared to what it took to get to this point. 🙂 Major kudos to Sorunome, Anoa, and Clokep for their work on both the spec and implementation.

Otherwise we're looking forward to releasing Synapse 1.36 early next week, and we have some great things in store... but I'll not spoil them today! 🤫

From everyone on the Synapse team, have a great weekend!

¹: Well, on the server-side at least. No clients support knocking, yet...

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace reported:

This week too comes with an update on the Helm Charts I'm maintaining, with an update of element-web to 1.7.30

Docker-based development environment for Matrix

psrpinto wrote:

Hi folks. Some time ago I asked here about any projects that provided a local Matrix "node" through docker, and it seemed not much existed in that space, so I went ahead and created the following repo:

https://github.com/Automattic/matrix-env

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 🙇

Thanks uhoreg for passing this on! Looks like a really useful way to get a local env running

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Libera.chat IRC bridge work continues

Half-Shot reported:

Hi folks, just a quick update on the Libera.chat bridge situation. We're 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.

• We're midway though our #matrix* Freenode to Libera channel/bridge migrations.

• FOSDEM has been migrated over

• We're still working through our backlog of migration requests from users, a lot of you phoned in!

We're still continuing to rapidly work on the bridge, with a release expected on Monday 🤞. For any of you who aren't 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.

I'm hoping we'll 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!

IRC Bridge 0.27.0-rc1 leaps out of the gate

Half-Shot offered:

Hi bridge followers, today we've released 0.27.0-rc1 of the IRC bridge containing a huge number of changes following all the work we've been doing on libera.chat. Notable things to call out in this release are:

• We've 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. (We're 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.

Please report bugs as you see them to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc, and let's all pray this will be a smooth release :)

matrix-puppeteer-line

Fair offered:

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

Read receipt improvements are here! They are in temporary branches until they've been tested for stability:

• The better-receipts-dm branch contains some smarts to prevent Puppeteer from having to "view" a LINE DM chat in order to sync it, which would make the contact you're DMing think you've read their messages when it was really Puppeteer that "saw" them. However, this doesn't 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 you've 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 doesn't have a "Read" 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.

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

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

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

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) reported:

I've 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 I'll 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

• We’re making good progress on the ability to re-order Spaces on Web & Android, expected to land soon!
• We’re 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
• We’ve also been working on adding pagination to the Space Summary API on Synapse
• Meanwhile, we’re 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 grey… We will also do the same work on TextAppearance.

NeoChat

Carl Schwan said:

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.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

libQuotient

kitsune reported:

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!

Tobias Fella added:

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 🙂

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Server_stats

MTRNord announced:

Changes

• Server now uses warp instead of actix-web

• /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 🏳️‍🌈 and poljar for helping to archive these improvements and hinting where improvements were possible to be made :)

Dept of Guides 🧭

A guide for creating simple Matrix bots with Python and Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib

krazykirby99999 told us:

https://simple-matrix-bot-lib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart.html

Simple-Matrix-Bot-Lib allows anyone who needs a bot in a Matrix Room to do so without having to spend unnecessary time learning a complex framework!

https://i.imgur.com/xL4ZBO3.png https://i.imgur.com/UFsJMzS.png

Dept of Grants 💰️

Code Lutin grant program

numéro6 told us:

If you live in France (or eurozone) and your Matrix-related project need some funds, you may candidate to the 2021 #MécénatCodeLutin grant program for FLOSS by Code Lutin. Candidates may fill the dedicated form before july 8th.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	kapsi.fi	531
2	maunium.net	678.5
3	trolla.us	881
4	siika.solutions	915
5	matrix.sp-codes.de	991
6	imninja.net	1110
7	aria-net.org	1152.5
8	fosil.eu	1169
9	shortestpath.dev	1918.5
10	kittenface.studio	2221

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite01.fiksel.info	760
2	weber.world	1944.5

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Wired UK feature article

Wired UK have published a feature on Matrix in their print edition this month. We'll be sure to link to it when it's made available online!

German-universities poll

jfkimmes shared:

I just learned that in a poll of 89 universities in Germany, Matrix ranked third place in the chat category already.

The source is in only available in German, unfortunately: https://zenodo.org/record/4817795

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.

Oleg clarified:

The evaluation was "which solution are you using".

Florian added:

The Instant Messaging part starts at slide 15, the first chart on that slide is "which solution do you use", the second is "How content are you with the solution?", with Matrix having the best average of all solutions, namely ~8.8/10.

also JCG:

What's also noteworthy: Those using matrix are the happiest with the solution

\o/

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa offered:

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3231: Token authenticated registration

• MSC3230: Spaces top level order

• MSC3226: Per-room spell check

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

This week the Spec Core Team has been reviewing various Spaces MSCs, most recently MSC3230 (Space ordering). We're 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.org's 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, we've attempted to split the work up over multiple people in order to get it done quicker. Slowly but surely...

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad said:

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 we've landed many of the prerequisites to eliminating RAM spikes on room joins.

• 📚 We have new docs! 📚 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!)

Catch you next Friday! 👋

synapse-media-proxy

f0x announced:

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.

comparison with matrix-media-repo

While they both implement Matrix' media endpoints, they serve rather different niches, where matrix-media-repo fully decouples the media repo aspect, my proxy cooperates with Synapse's filesystem and database, to speed up operation while ultimately making it a seamless drop-in and removal process.

also :P

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

And another weekly installment of Kubernetes Helm Chart (and deprecated Docker image) updates, tracking the Synapse releases this week (1.35.0/1).

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Heisenbridge demo video

hifi shared this great demonstation video of Heisenbridge:

Half-Shot hit us late with a pair of updates:

Security release for the matrix-appservice-irc and matrix-appservice-bridge library

Hello. This week we've 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 you've likely seen over the last few days, we're 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 it's in beta by going to #<foo>:libera.chat, but we're 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

Fair reported:

matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's 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 aren't in your LINE friends list (This was harder than it sounds...!)

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 doesn't make your > LINE contacts think you actually read that message). Once that is done, I'll consider the bridge to be in beta.

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

Dept of Clients 📱

Thunderbird Matrix support

freaktechnik announced:

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 won't destroy your account's state, it's 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.

We're 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 "Beta Channel" to "Nightly Channel". 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 "Show Accounts" dialog, right clicking the account and selecting "Copy Debug Log". 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.

Also, check out Matrix Live!

NeoChat

Carl Schwan announced:

NeoChat 1.2, our third major release, was released this week bringing many improvements to the timeline and text input component. If you missed it, you can read the announcement here: https://carlschwan.eu/2021/06/01/neochat-1.2-bubbles-better-text-editing-and-more/ and we even have a nice release video :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lcH4tm6uTk

Other than that, we started working on an integration with KDE web shortcuts functionality to quickly search selected text on the web: https://invent.kde.org/network/neochat/-/merge_requests/279.

Nheko

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

Callum, our GSoC student, after spending some time on Synapse, had now his first go at Nheko's 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. He's 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.

I'll leave you with some words, that you may have heard a few times already: "Watch this space for next weeks update!"

Fractal

Alexandre Franke reported:

A dozen merge requests have been integrated in our fractal-next branch since last week.

Amongst the more trivial changes, Julian made sure rooms are added to the sidebar in batch (!737) to improve performances, added in-app notifications for invite errors (!760), added a menu entry to leave rooms (!769), and implemented display of user and room avatars (!770). We also gained a right-click-menu entry to display event sources thanks to Kévin (!766).

Element Clients

Updates provided by the teams.

Delight team

• We’re continuing progress on implementing Blurhash on Web & Android to improve the image loading experience, especially on low bandwidth
• On Spaces, we’ve started working on the ability to drag and drop to re-order Spaces, along with improving adding aliases to public Spaces

Web

• 1.7.30 RC on staging
  • Improved layout performance in the timeline and room list
  • Refined the message action bar UI
• Continuing to improve application performance
  • Recent focus on minimising browser layout work when things change
  • Reducing DOM size
• Working on Apple silicon desktop builds

iOS

• 1.4.0 is available on the public TestFlight. We expect to make it available on the App Store on Monday. It has:
  • Performance improvements
  • Crash fixes
  • New languages: Esperanto, Portuguese (Brazil), Kabyle, Norwegian, Swedish, Japanese and Welsh.
  • There are some API breaks in MatrixSDK due to those performance improvements.
  • We have now a MXLog module with log levels! It is now possible to disable all logs from MatrixSDK
• We continued to work on performance and stability and will continue to for the coming sprint period: https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/milestone/55

Android

• 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 do...

Hydrogen

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

Bruno announced:

Released Hydrogen 0.1.56 this week, with redactions. In the meantime, I've 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.

Here's a sneak preview of reactions (with slow network to show off the local echo animation):

kazv

tusooa reported on kazv:

kazv is a matrix client based on libkazv. Talk to us on #kazv:tusooa.xyz.

Updates

I guess it's a long time from our last twim. Here's what is going on in that time:

• We used fluent for translations. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/kazv/-/merge_requests/1
• We supported read and save client state. https://lily.kazv.moe/kazv/kazv/-/merge_requests/2
• 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)

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix @ FrOSCon this year

Oleg said:

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 don't 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. 😉

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 it's your first talk or workshop some free of charge coaching is included. 😉

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. 👍️

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.

Get in touch

If you want to take part please contact @oleg:fiksel.info (or oleg@fiksel.info) ASAP to add you to the Dev Room participants list.

BTW: we also have a #FrOSCon:fiksel.info room

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Circles

cvwright reported:

• Set up a new (virtual) EU homeserver in Frankfurt, so European folks can join the beta starting next week

• Use StoreKit to detect when a user is in Europe and should therefore use the EU homeserver, both for GDPR and to minimize latency

• Made some progress toward supporting m.video messages

• Experimented with using the new iOS photo picker to better protect users' privacy Homepage: https://kombuchaprivacy.com/circles/ Source code: https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios

You can also support circles on Kickstarter.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	lama-corp.space	492
2	trolla.us	526
3	int21.dev	569
4	fosil.eu	727
5	d0.ee	728
6	nordgedanken.dev	740.5
7	feneas.org	805.5
8	maescool.be	1073.5
9	matrix.sp-codes.de	1077
10	coffespot.com	1490

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite01.fiksel.info	1152
2	dendrite.s3cr3t.me	1386
3	weber.world	8297.5

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

A classic "Matthew & Amandine" episode. This week: Spaces, Reputation, Low-Bandwidth, P2P & more!

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa gifted us with:

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

MSC Status

Lots of new MSCs appearing this week!

New MSCs:

• [WIP] MSC3219: Space Flair
• MSC3217: Soft kicks
• MSC3216: Synchronized access control for Spaces
• Draft: MSC3215: Aristotle - Moderation in all things
• MSC3214: Allow overriding m.room.power_levels using initial_state

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

The Spec Core Team is working towards finalising the remaining spec PRs and the new spec release process. Good news is there's only one final spec PR to go! Bad news is it's probably going to be one of the hardest :)

Otherwise the team was pleased to see that noticeable progress is being made on the MSC backlog. But that doesn't mean we get to rest on our laurels!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad said:

We have interns! In addition to Matrix.org's participation in Google Summer of Code, Element has funded two Outreachy interns to work on backend projects, and we're overjoyed to welcome the following folks to Matrix:

• Shay (Outreachy) is focused on modernizing Sydent and Sygnal, our reference implementations of a Matrix Identity Server and a Matrix Push Gateway respectively.
• Meenal (Outreachy) is helping us improve Complement, and modern replacement for SyTest, our homeserver integration test suite.
• Callum (GSoC) is working on adding support for restricting homeserver registration to users with pre-shared invite codes.

Welcome Callum, Meenal, and Shay!

We're also working to unify and standardize the module API which is used to extend Synapse, and your feedback would be very welcome. Similarly, if you have any experience with adding custom modules to Docker images or Debian packages and have thoughts on how we should best support that (or just examples of projects which do that well), please weigh in at #9944.

Lastly, we're looking forward to the release of Synapse 1.35 which will bring significant improvements to memory use during room joins, but that's for next week. 😉

A very warm welcome to all of our Outreachy interns and Google Summer of Code students this year! You can see the full list of GSoC students in our Google Summer of Code 2021 blogpost.

synapse-media-proxy

f0x announced:

I've been working on a smart media worker/proxy, to offload initial spikes in traffic for homeservers behind slower network uplinks.

There's a <remote> component that sits on a small vps, handling the upload and download endpoints (and soon, thumbnails), with an in-memory cache to quickly respond to requests. Media still gets forwarded to the <local> component where it gets stored in Synapse's media folder with an accompanying database entry, so all media is still stored long-term in the way Synapse expects it to be, so the proxy can be removed at any point.

Currently not production ready but you're welcome to snoop around the repo :)

https://git.pixie.town/f0x/synapse-media-proxy

Seems like quite a useful project! Other adventures in splitting out the media server from the homeserver include TravisR's matrix-media-repo project.

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust.

timokoesters reported the latest updates since last week:

• Feature: Implement /claim

• Feature: Handle incoming to-device events

• Feature: Implement /query

• Improvement: Faster signing key storage

• Improvement: Documentation for Appservices

• Fix: State resolution bugs

• Fix: Respond to unauthorized PDUs with FORBIDDEN

• Fix: Forward errors from remote servers (e.g. unsupported room version)

Timo also shared with us a milestone dashboard for Conduit being production-ready: https://gitlab.com/famedly/conduit/-/milestones/3. It's exciting to see the multi-implementation Matrix homeserver landscape really beginning to take shape!

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace announced:

Another weekly Kubernetes Chart update, this time only for element-web though - which was updated to 1.7.29.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

libera.chat IRC network news

Half-Shot tells us:

Hey folks, some of you (well, frankly most of you) wanted to hear about our plans for libera.chat. I've been hard at work this week building a brand new bridge which is hosted on the libera.chat homeserver and it's nearly ready to go. We're just making a few final preparations before taking it out of beta, but it's currently available as a portaling bridge. You can currently reach any channel on libera.chat by joining #<channel_name>:libera.chat. You can also add the homeserver to your room directory in your Matrix client to search all the bridged rooms.

We're also hanging out in #libera-matrix:libera.chat, if you have any questions. Of course, the bridge is proving to be very popular so please be patient :)

Definitely one of the most sought-after Matrix bridges lately. Props to Half-Shot, Libera.Chat and everyone else for getting it all together in such short notice.

Heisenbridge Updates

hifi told us:

Plumbing IRC channels 🧑‍🔧

Somewhat experimental feature that has landed this week is the ability to use single puppeting in a public Matrix room to bridge IRC channels.

This support comes through a new PLUMB admin command for network rooms that will ask the bridge bot to join a public Matrix room and an IRC channel.

On IRC side there will be only a single user/bot that will relay messages from Matrix users. This is a stop-gap between fully puppeting Matrix users on IRC and doesn't need explicit permission from an IRC network to use by channel operators as long as bots are allowed.

On Matrix side puppets will join and leave based on their presence on the IRC channel. The bridge bot does not need any special permissions in a room as it doesn't do permission synchronization so it can be kept without any power levels.

Unplumbing a room is as simple as kicking the bridge out and it will take the puppets with it.

As this is a fairly new feature it does have some rough edges so feedback is greatly appreciated.

With all this said, if you're in the need to bridge any IRC channel on any network with little friction, Heisenbridge should have you covered!

SASL support 🔒

If you're using Heisenbridge to connect to Libera.Chat from a network block that has SASL enforcement enabled (like some VPS providers) you can now configure SASL credentials to authenticate at connection time to bypass this restriction.

This only implements SASL PLAIN for now. Certificate authentication may be looked at in the future.

But that's not all

• Identd will now always provide a unique ident for everyone

• Improved detection for stalled connections

• IRC user ghosting issues fixed for good 🤞

• Server TLS cert checking fixes, self-signed support

• Initial bridge DM invites should go through more reliably

• QUIT command to leave from all networks in one go

• Automatic Docker Hub images from master (amd64 and arm64)

In addition Heisenbridge is now featured on matrix.org 🥳

matrix-puppeteer-line Updates

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

Fair offered:

This week brings a variety of assorted bugfixes & feature improvements in the testing branch. Included are:

• Support for m.sticker events for LINE stickers (with an option to use m.image if preferred)

• Clear resolution of LINE emojis, and a config option to scale them (since they're tiny by default)

• Less frequent re-downloading of already-seen LINE stickers/emoji (there are limits to this, but it's still an improvement)

• Option to disable syncing LINE stickers/emoji (in case re-hosting LINE imagery is a liability)

• More reliable message syncing (should never get "Decrypting message..." or invisible images/stickers/emoji anymore)

• Fix crashes during inbound message & read receipt syncing of multi-user rooms

Like last time, testing is much appreciated 😀

Remaining big tasks are:

• Rework message syncing so that receiving a message doesn't require "viewing" the LINE chat in the Puppeteer-controlled browser, which will make LINE send a read receipt even though you may not actually have read the message yourself (I mentioned this a while ago; it's still a todo)

• Support for multiple bridge users at once (A public instance of the bridge will only be considered once multi-user support is ready)

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

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

Dept of Clients 📱

NeoChat Updates

NeoChat is a Matrix client written using KDE technologies, most notably the Kirigami UI framework.

Carl Schwan reported:

The past few weeks have been busy with fixing bugs. As a result, we plan to release NeoChat 1.2 next week. You can help by testing the Flatpak beta version of NeoChat: flatpak install https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/org.kde.neochat.flatpakref.

Aside from bug fixing, Tobias worked a bit on E2EE encryption in Quotient and Noah added a fancy typing indicator.

Nheko Updates

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

AppAraat told us:

• I added mnemonic shortcut keys to the context menu. Now you can react and reply even faster! (Thanks Nico for all the guidance :))

• Nheko is now available on the Chocolatey package manager for Windows, yay!

FluffyChat Updates

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

krille announced:

FluffyChat 0.31.1 has been released with a lot of bug fixes, stability improvements, minor redesigns and a lot of refactoring under the hood.

Feature

• Cute animation for hiding the + button in inputbar

• Improved chat bubble design and splash animations

• Zoom page transition on Android

• SSO is now an option even if the server supports password login

Fixes

• "Pick an image" button in emote settings doesn't do anything

• Emoji picker

• Status bar and system navigation bar theme

• Open URIs and receive sharing intent on iOS

• SSO on iOS

• Workaround for iOS not clearing notifications

• Send read markers

Fractal Updates

Fractal is a Matrix client written in Rust, and one of the first to use the matrix-rust-sdk!

Alexandre Franke offered:

Since last week, a couple things landed in fractal-next. Julian added support for accepting/rejecting invites (!754/#759). Kévin did an internal restructuring of how we handle the SyncResponse in !759. The visible consequence for users is that room categories (also known as tags) are updated directly in Fractal when the user changes it from an other client. He also switched from comrak to ruma’s markdown in !756. It shouldn’t have any impact for users, but should mean less code in the end on our side and more consistent code as well.

Element Client Updates

Crafted by the Element teams.

Delight

• Spaces: We’ve been listening to, investigating, triaging and organising feedback from the beta so far. There’s a lot to get through, but thanks to everyone who has submitted feedback in-app in Element so far! The insight has been invaluable and is instrumental in shaping up our next milestones.
• Papercuts: We’re also organising and fixing small issues throughout Element, biasing for highly visible issues which have the greatest impact and reach, affectionately titled ‘papercuts’. Expect more info on these soon, but for now a fun one to highlight is we’re implementing blurhash on Web & Android (with iOS to follow soon after) to improve previewing and viewing images, especially when on low bandwidth.

Web

• 1.7.29 released
  • Improved startup performance by focusing decryption on recent rooms
  • Fixed reaction duplication
• Sorting out why we sometimes see "missing translations" hopefully for good this time
• Continuing to improve application performance
• Started work on Apple silicon desktop builds

iOS

• We continued to work on technical subjects:
  • Stabilisation and performance improvements
  • New logging system. It will be possible to disable all logs for MatrixSDK, MatrixKit and Element-iOS
  • The code that manages application navigation in Element-iOS has been updated. It will allow us to add a slide menu to display things like user spaces.

Android

• Element Android 1.1.8 has been released on the beta track of the Google PlayStore. It will probably be pushed to production at the beginning of next week. The Android matrix SDK2 has also been released.
• This week, we implemented the ability to change the network when looking in the room directory. Also gitter.im has been added to the default network list. See some screenshots in https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/pull/3419
• Lots of improvements regarding Spaces have also landed to develop.
• Besides that, we are still fixing issues and perform regular maintenance on the project

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

autodiscover-server-configuration

f0x said:

I forked autodiscover-client-configuration to implement the Server-Server counterpart of getting the API endpoint from a server_name.

Package published on NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@f0x52/autodiscover-server-configuration

Repository: https://git.pixie.town/f0x/autodiscover-server-configuration.git

Dept of Services 🚀

GoMatrixHosting is a SaaS Matrix hosting platform.

Michael reported:

We are finally open for business. Start your own Matrix service today with GoMatrixHosting!

https://www.gomatrixhosting.com/2021/05/23/gomatrixhosting-is-here/

And quite soon after:

GoMatrixHosting v0.4.7 has arrived!

• reinvented database purging section, separated final shrinking that causes downtime.
• fixed AWX issue causing rust-synapse-compress-state section to not execute.
• added more reliable script method of generating the total room list.

Check us out on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/GoMatrixHosting/

Or come say hello at: #general:gomatrixhosting.com

Cactus Comments 🌵

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

Asbjørn reported:

Web Client v0.10.0 is out!

• Allow commenting with Markdown.

• Pluralize time units properly.

• Enforce maximum nesting depth of 100 when sanitizing org.matrix.custom.html-formatted messages.

/ipns/latest.cactus.chat is updated to point to the latest release, so sites linking there should already be using the new version.

Come play with the demo: https://cactus.chat/demo

Join our Matrix room: #cactus:cactus.chat

Beeper Update

Beeper is a Matrix client and service that makes it easy to connect all your digital communications in one place.

Eric Migicovsky told us:

Been a while since our last update! The biggest development is that we've hired some fantastic members of the community including SpiritCroc from SchildiChat to work on Beeper Android and Kilian from Nio to work on Beeper iOS.

• Beeper Desktop reached 2.0.0 with much improved performance and UI. Video Walkthrough

• Released Beeper Android to Play Store

• Switched domains from Beeperhq.com to the shiny new beeper.com

Projects in the works

• Beeper iOS (SoonTM)

• Adding Infinite backfill to all bridges.

• Improvements to iMessage bridge (adding tapbacks and reply support)

We are hiring React, iOS, Android and SRE/Devops engineers. If you're interested, send me a DM! 100% remote, we'll hire you anywhere you are.

Eric's Matrix ID is @eric:beeper.com. Reach out if you're interested in getting involved!

Dept of Bots 🤖

Airlock, the space invite bot

Robin announced:

If you want to use spaces to run an invite-only community, but can't wait for knocking and restricted room membership to make their way into a stable room version, you may be interested in Airlock, a very simple bot that I wrote to automatically invite people to a space's rooms and subspaces when they join.

It requires zero configuration—just invite the bot to your space and all of the rooms and subspaces within it, make sure it has invite permissions, and you're good to go! You're welcome to use my hosted version @airlock:townsendandsmith.ml, or run it yourself.

It's great to see people building useful tools to bridge the gap as Spaces inches closer out of beta.

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Host your blog on Matrix

evol told us:

About a month ago I came up with the idea that it would be interesting to use Matrix as an API for a blog. Sometime later it turned out that it's possible, and one thing led to another, and now I have a blog hosted on Matrix 😃

Long story short, the blog is a space and each post is a room within that space. This allows you to read the posts in your Matrix client of choice and also have discussions right underneath the content.

You can read more details on how it's done on the blog itself (incl. links to ugly code on my Github): https://evolved.systems/hosting-a-blog-on-matrix/. If you want to chat about this, join #blog:evolved.systems !

Longtime readers may remember Luke Barnard's take on the concept of Blogs built on Matrix back in 2019 with Journal. It's really exciting to see a modern version of this concept - and using Spaces no less!

Server_Stats Updates

Server_Stats is a project to make statistics about the Matrix network neatly catalogued and browsable.

MTRNord said:

Space List

The tool now has a separate list for rooms that are spaces at https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/spaces this allows you to find Spaces easily and fast :)

Other Updates

• A bug in the sdk combined with appservices did initially have for some rooms the ban not recognized. This is now fixed and those rooms are hidden again from the API. Sorry for the inconvenience.

• Safari should now also work after fixing a setting.

Check out the Source at: https://github.com/MTRNord/server_stats or join the room at #server_stats:nordgedanken.dev for questions :)

Circles

Circles markets itself as a private, end-to-end encrypted social network built on top of Matrix.

farribeiro announced:

Good news folks

The Circles beta is open source

https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios

It's AGPL for now

But automatically transitions to dual-license under AGPL / Apache 2.0 when 'Murica turns 250 years old. (July 4, 2026, for my international friends)

I love seeing Matrix projects dipping into the social networking sphere. It's an untapped market!

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	rollyourown.xyz	534
2	maunium.net	548.5
3	trolla.us	746
4	matrix.sp-codes.de	750
5	xethos.net	760
6	blackline.xyz	952.5
7	fab.network	1010
8	lo.hn	1096
9	dendrite.foxomy.com	1125
10	3icn.net	1220

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite01.fiksel.info	935
2	dendrite.foxomy.com	1154.5
3	dendrite.s3cr3t.me	3392

That's all I know 🏁

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

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Spec 📜

Spec

anoa reported:

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

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3202: Encrypted appservices

MSCs with proposed Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs entered proposed FCP state this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC2876: Allowing widgets to read events in a room

Merged Spec PRs

• Deprecate verifications that don't begin with a request

• Change space's valid order range to 0x7E

Spec Updates

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 🏢

Synapse

Synapse is a popular homeserver written in Python.

callahad offered:

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: I'd encourage you to read the release announcement for those.

But more than anything, we're hard at work realizing the room-join memory improvements we talked about in last week's 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.

See you next week! 🚀

Conduit

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

timokoesters said:

Here are some Conduit news!

• Feature: Handle incoming read receipts over federation

• Feature: Send read receipts over federation (MVP done)

• Improvement: Make UIAA (user-interactive authentication API) work like in Synapse (this gives us better client support)

• Refactor: Sending code refactored to make EDUs over federation possible

• Fix: Remove old presence events when restarting Conduit

• Fix: Array bounds bug in server_server.rs

• Fix: Power level content override adds to the default event instead of replacing it

Homeserver Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace said:

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.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

libera.chat IRC network news

Half-Shot offered:

Howdy folks! I'm 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 📱

Element Client Updates

Submitted by the teams

Delight

• Spaces are now live! 🚀 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
• We’d love your feedback! Either submitted in app or in #spaces-feedback:matrix.org
• Read the full blog post

Web

• 1.7.28 released
  • New spaces Beta (new way of grouping rooms and people)
  • Added support for slash commands working in edits
• 1.7.29-rc.1 on staging
  • Improved startup performance by focusing decryption on recent rooms
  • Fixed reaction duplication
• Continuing to pursue application performance generally
• Improving day to day developer experience with more TypeScript conversion

iOS

• 1.3.9 has been published on the app store
• 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.

Fractal

Alexandre Franke offered:

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 priority…).

• 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.

Last but not least, new contributor Raatty implemented room name and topic display in the header bar.

Hydrogen

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

Bruno announced:

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 "Linux Tips & Tricks" channel.

https://odysee.com/@BrodieRobertson:5/nheko-reborn-lightweight-native-matrix:8

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Ruma

Ruma is a set of Rust library crates around Matrix

jplatte offered:

We've been quiet in the past weeks, but certainly not due to lack of activity! So many awesome things have happened, I don't even know where to start. I guess I'll go chronologically:

We published so many new crate releases. Most of our crates didn't see non-alpha releases for almost a year and now we've 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! I'm super excited that we're now enabling client authors to take spaces into account, even if "taking into account" 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.

We're swapping out ruma-signatures' crypto library. Since ring, which is what we've been using so far, doesn't currently support cross-compilation to WASM, there's 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.

We're 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).

Apart from that,

• @132ikl fixed a bug with unsetting avatar URLs

• @abhikjain360 added email validation endpoints to ruma-identity-service-api

• @132ikl fixed a small bug in our release automation

• @Frinksy added helpers to construct the fallback for rich replies

• @132ikl improved event relation support for encrypted events

• @jplatte (that's me) made ruma-client independent of the underlying HTTP client library

• @abhikjain360 added phone number validation endpoints to ruma-identity-service-api

• @gnieto fixed a small serialization bug in ruma-federation-api

• @DevinR528 cleaned up our crate manifest files

• @zecakeh added a TagName type for m.tag events (+ followup API improvement)

• @DevinR528 enabled a set of lints across the entire project

• @jplatte integrated the state-res crate into our monorepo

• @gnieto improved the error handling for HTTP request construction

• @zecakeh cleaned up our non-room event enums

• @ShadowJonathan improved some code examples in our documentation

• @poljar added support for remaining to-device key verification events

• @jplatte replaced uses of SystemTime with custom timestamp types

• @poljar added support for v1 of the QR verification events and methods

• @DevinR528 added code generation for redaction methods on our event content enums

• @zecakeh improved our markdown to formatted message helper functions

• @timokoesters added (unstable) master_keys and self_signing_keys support to the federation-api get_keys response

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

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

Slavi told us:

Thanks to Aaron Raimist, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports Hydrogen - a new lightweight matrix client with legacy and mobile browser support.

By default, we still install Element, as Hydrogen is still not fully-featured. Still, people who'd like to try Hydrogen out can now install it via the playbook.

Additional details are available in Setting up Hydrogen.

Also...

Thanks to Toni Spets (hifi), matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports bridging to IRC using yet another bridge (besides matrix-appservice-irc), called Heisenbridge.

To get started, see our Setting up Heisenbridge bouncer-style IRC bridging documentation.

Dept of Services 🚀

etke.cc updated

Aine reported:

etke.cc updates

etke.cc is "spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy as a service" and we got some updates:

• New services: miniflux, wireguard, languagetool, email service for you domain (based on awesome Migadu) and consultations

• Website redesign - made with ❤ ourselves instead of old generic template

• announcements room migrated to public room without encryption, but with invites and previews

Dept of Bots 🤖

Community -> Space Bot

TravisR said:

If you're 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 it'll go off and make your Space.

The bot doesn't 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 you're having problems getting it going, and #help:t2bot.io would be glad to assist you if the t2bot.io deployment doesn't 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.

Cos offered:

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 decomission) and making tombstones to point room to a new one. https://github.com/vranki/hemppa

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

raspberry-noaa-v2 matrix support

Cadair said:

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. It's 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 🌧️

Server_Stats Voyager Project

MTRNord announced:

The Project now has a proper webpage at https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/ !

Newly added Features are:

• A List of all the rooms that are found

• 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 isn't 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 "server_stats bot made no change" 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.

The issue can be followed at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/10021

midnight from cvwright

cvwright offered:

This might be of interest for TWIM. It's 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

https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/midnight

Dept of Built on Matrix 🏗️

Circles, new social network on top of Matrix

cvwright offered:

Circles is a new project to build an E2E encrypted social network on top of Matrix. https://www.kombuchaprivacy.com/circles/ https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cvwright/circles-a-secure-social-app-for-friends-and-family

It's really early days for this project, but please check it out!

Final Thoughts 💭

farribeiro reported:

The fedora project is discussing which domain to take in https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/so-what-domains-should-we-use-for-our-matrix-server/29842

Un-burying the lede: Fedora are making the jump to Matrix!

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	the-apothecary.club	463.5
2	fosil.eu	539
3	helderferreira.io	545.5
4	trolla.us	579
5	zheng.fi	639
6	alra.uk	702
7	feline.support	759.5
8	thomcat.rocks	770
9	jae.fi	777.5
10	roeckx.be	1033

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	lankolol.de	392.5
2	zemos.net	2251

That's all I know 🏁

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