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/proposals.
Matrix v1.7 has been given a release date of May 25th, right before the next TWIM! Expect a matrix.org blog post with all the details on the day.
Leading up to the release we've seen a number of great spec PRs appearing and being merged! Thank you to everyone for writing them (saving the SCT some time!) and to other reviewing on commenting. It's a huge help and the spec feels like it's chugging along at a blistering pace!
This MSC adds the ability for users who have previously joined a room to rejoin again. Typically this isn't desired in a public room setting, but it does specifically make sense in the case of a DM that you've left and want to return to without the other user needing to invite you. This case has specific implications for cases where there could be only ever one room between two users. Being able to rejoin it if the other user has disappeared is key!
Outside of the DM use case, this functionality can mostly already be achieved by using restricted rooms, where users of a given space/another room can always join your room. However, it would be nice to have the flexibility of allowing certain users to rejoin a room without needing another room to serve as proof of membership.
Is this something you're interested in? Do you have additional use cases? Feel free to check out the MSC and comment with your thoughts!
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/proposals/.
The Spec Core Team had another retro this week, and part of what we talked about was how most of the spec PR writing falls to just a few people. Starting this week, we're going to try and diversify that work across the Spec Core Team, both for reducing bus factor and increasing bandwidth of spec PRs. Hopefully the results of that will be noticeable!
For those that don't know, "SAS verification" refers to the act of two devices verifying each other through the use of Short Authentication Strings (SAS). This is the backbone of emoji verification when you verify with another user or one of your own devices.
It turns out that libolm, the olm and megolm encryption library, originally incorrectly encoded the base64 output of the message authentication code (MAC) calculation, which is a values that's passed between devices. Due to trying to maintain backwards-compatibility with older clients, this has not been fixed in newer clients yet.
This MSC proposes bumping the MAC algorithm identifier (which is agreed upon between devices when verifying) to a something new, which allows newer clients to know when to use the new or old (and incorrect) method of calculating the base64 encoding of MAC values.
As far as I can tell, this has no security implications. It's just unfortunate to have incorrect base64 encoding when interfacing with other, non-libolm, implementations of olm and megolm.
The Synapse team is hard at work making Synapse faster and leaner. Work continues
apace on faster room joins over federation, and it seems that the work might land
sooner rather than later, although there are no solid dates yet.
In other news, profiling work is being done to determine ways to hopefully increase
the speed of local room joins and DM creation. Stay tuned for more information in the future on that.
Finally, it was an RC release week. Synapse 1.65.0rc2 was released, and it contains some fun features and bugfixes. Check it out!
This week we released Dendrite 0.9.2 which contains the following updates:
Dendrite now supports history visibility on the /sync, /messages and /context endpoints
It should now be possible to view the history of a room in more cases (as opposed to limiting scrollback to the join event or defaulting to the restrictive "join" visibility rule as before)
The default room version for newly created rooms is now room version 9
New admin endpoint /_dendrite/admin/resetPassword/{userID} has been added, which replaces the -reset-password flag in create-account
The create-account binary now uses shared secret registration over HTTP to create new accounts, which fixes a number of problems with account data and push rules not being configured correctly for new accounts
The internal HTTP APIs for polylith deployments have been refactored for correctness and consistency
The federation API will now automatically clean up some EDUs that have failed to send within a certain period of time
The /hierarchy endpoint will now return potentially joinable rooms (contributed by texuf)
The user directory will now show or hide users correctly
Send-to-device messages should no longer be incorrectly duplicated in /sync
The federation sender will no longer create unnecessary destination queues as a result of a logic error
A bug where database migrations may not execute properly when upgrading from older versions has been fixed
A crash when failing to update user account data has been fixed
A race condition when generating notification counts has been fixed
A race condition when setting up NATS has been fixed (contributed by brianathere)
Stale cache data for membership lazy-loading is now correctly invalidated when doing a complete sync
Data races within user-interactive authentication have been fixed (contributed by tak-hntlabs)
This brings our current test compliance figures to:
Client-server APIs: 90%
Server-server APIs: 95%
As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite-related discussion.
What? Another week, another major release?
Yes, we want to make breaking changes obvious, and the bridge now requires Node.js 16+.
The release fixes the outdated yarn.lock file. Thanks to the package maintainers of NixOS to point this out! 👋
Furthermore, mentioning Matrix users in Discord got fixed.
And, for the fans of containers, we've re-added the release of Docker images. 🐳
The URL changed and we don't plan to update halfshot/matrix-appservice-discord on Docker Hub.
The image can be pulled from ghcr.io/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord:v3.0.0.
Nheko now shows you a pretty preview for rooms you are trying to join. This uses MSC3266, which you might need to enable in your synapse config, if you want to see more than the roomid of the room you are trying to join. It tries to fall back to the /hierarchy endpoint, but that won't work over federation.
Similarly you can now somewhat edit what rooms are in a space. I grew up with Windows 98, so this is a very nested right click menu. We are still discussing some of the wording choices for the options there, so if you have any opinions about it, feel free to give feedback about it! This is part of the bigger goal to be able to manage your communities from within Nheko, so stay tuned for more features coming in that area.
red_sky (nheko.im) also improved our notifications code on macOS. You can now disable the notification sound in the system settings, which for some reason requires badge permissions to show that option... macOS will always remain a mystery to us! Similarly we fixed the source text for notifications on Windows, which should now not show a stray %1 anymore as well as a few other cleanups.
Ever started a DM with someone, only to get distracted and leave them staring into an empty timeline wondering who you are and what you want. Well, it is no more! In this update new DMs will only notify the person you’re messaging once you’ve sent your first message.
That’s not the only exciting update in EleWeb/Desktop this week, including the newly extended voice messages! Instead of voice messages capped at 2 minutes, users are now able to send a voice note of up to 15 minutes long. Go forth and record 🎤
In upcoming releases we’re also looking at how to improve a user’s first few days in Element. We know that it can be daunting to stare at an empty screen and wonder how to get going, which is why we’ve designed and built a checklist for new users. This checklist will help them to get off the ground and messaging friends in no time.
In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
Threads improvements are still very much underway. We have a proof of concept (PoC) for improving notifications that we’re testing to ensure scalability and performance.
Our release this week was rejected by Apple. Their feedback? Our info.plist comments do not provide enough context as to why we’re asking for access to things like the camera, photos, or contacts. Never fear! We’ve updated our copy and we’re confident that it’s clearer than ever.
Also in the upcoming release:
Fixing the crashes that some users were running into when switching space.
The new in-app notifications now also appear in the notification centre
And a bug fix for the rare issue of sending duplicate images to a timeline when sending multiple photos
We’re also working on changing the layout of our mobile apps, and work is well underway on iOS. We’re excited to share these big changes with you so keep your eyes peeled on our socials and in other TWIM notes.
Join us over at #element-community-testing:matrix.org on Tuesday 16th August at 12:00 BST to try out the new app layout on iOS! There’s a little bit of setup required so check out the room ahead of time for instructions :)
In the upcoming Android release we’ve fixed some crashes; including where the app would crash if a user attempted putting non-ASCII characters in their MXID during account creation.
Biometric login is now disabled if the device you’re on does not support biometrics.
We’ve also been working hard on adding unit tests to increase coverage.
There’s work being done on the modularisation of languages that may help decrease the complexity of translation and move us towards a set of common strings between platforms.
Join us over at #element-community-testing:matrix.org on Tuesday 16th August at 15:00 BST to try out the new app layout on Android! There’s a little bit of setup needed so check out the room ahead of time for instructions 🙂
v2.1: Custom emojis and stickers (Birthday edition)
Hello everyone,
On July 28 project marked its one-year milestone. During this time it has grown at an unexpected rate, both in terms of development as well as popularity. This is great news, so let's celebrate that with this birthday edition.
In this update, we have added Custom emoji and sticker support to Cinny. Custom emoji and stickers were not in our roadmap but that's the surprise. Aren't they cool?
Apart from the emoji and stickers, there are tons of other features such as Blurhash, Mark entire space as read, user pills, and bug fixes. Check out the releasepage for a detailed changelog.
In the case of the roadmap, we are still on that, work on the "Rich input editor" is in progress and will come as the next release. Stay tuned for that!
A new version of the Ruby Matrix SDK has now been released, adding a new abstraction in the form of a Sinatra-inspired bot DSL, as well as general fixes and improvements. Making a Ruby-based Matrix bot can now be as simple as;
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'matrix_sdk/bot'
command(:praise, desc: 'Gives you praise', only: -> { room.user_can_send? client.mxid, 'm.reaction' }) do
room.send_notice "#{sender}, you tha' man!"
room.send_event 'm.reaction', {
'm.relates_to': {
rel_type: 'm.annotation',
event_id: event[:event_id],
key: '👍️'
}
}
end
Next weekend, Sat 20th and Sun 21st, FrOSCon will be taking place. It's a conference about open source software near Bonn, Germany.
There will be some program around Matrix, though I'm still looking for volunteers to help me with a stand and DevRoom.
For the stand we want a small group to explain Matrix to others. For the DevRoom we want some talks and workshops. Anyone's welcome to ask me for more info or to get involved.
Announcing matrix-locust, a new tool for load testing Matrix homeservers, based on the Python load testing framework Locust. It's very early days for this project, but we're already discovering some interesting results. There isn't an official tagged "release" yet, but anyone interested in this topic is encouraged to stop by #load-testing:matrix.org and say hello.
Have you ever felt lost in the Matrix world? Too many rooms and spaces to manage? Well, back by popular demand (with Timo's blessing), I present, The Room of the Week! Every week we strive to highlight a room or a space that we believe deserves attention for discussing interesting going on across the Matrix Network.
A place to discuss buying, brewing, and drinking everyone's favorite morning beverage of choice! I had no idea there was so much Nuance to this topic until I joined this room . For example, did you know there was a correct way to distribute coffee grounds when you first pour to ensure maximum flavor? Neither did I! Whether you are new to the world of coffee drinking, or a seasoned connoisseur of morning Joe, this room has something for everyone who loves coffee.
If you have a room you wish to see highlighted, join us at:
https://matrix.to/#/!bIyiUUnriVoHtYzuPS:fachschaften.org?via=chat.shawnsorbom.net&via=matrix.org&via=fachschaften.org
to get your favorite room of the week highlighted.
That's all I know 🏁
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
This week saw the merge of three MSCs from first-time MSC authors! MSC3818 (Copy room type on upgrade) from @Mikaela and both MSC3786 (Add a default push rule to ignore m.room.server_acl events) and MSC3827 (Filtering of /publicRooms by room type) from @SimonBrandner. Nice work to both of them!
A bundle of small quality-of-life changes to the .well-known server and client endpoints. Removing some ambiguities, replacing old and deprecated endpoints as well as a potential size cap suggestion.
Looks like a good contender for one to push over the line given a bit of review and response!
TWIM: someone in #matrix:matrix.org complained that the image in the spec section is always the same, so I made this gif (actually webp) out of all those images:
We've started work on our HG HomeServer written in pure TypeScript, compilable as a single JS file, with no dependencies except NodeJS. It's intended for a special use cases when Matrix is used as a backbone for custom apps. It's lightweight, minimal and for the moment isn't even planned to support full Matrix spec. We might make it possible to run it on browser later. https://github.com/heusalagroup/hghs
Another week, another release! Synapse 1.64.0 was released this week, featuring
a host of new features, bugfixes, and internal changes aimed at reducing memory usage,
increasing performance, and improving the developer experience. Check out the full list of changes
here. In addition, work continues on faster room joins. The goal gets closer every day!
This week we released Dendrite 0.9.0 and Dendrite 0.9.1. There are quite a few big changes, including an all-new caching model and several optimisations. This release also moves our baseline supported Go version up to Go 1.18.
The following changes are included across both releases:
Dendrite now uses Ristretto for managing in-memory caches
Should improve cache utilisation considerably over time by more intelligently selecting and managing cache entries compared to the previous LRU-based cache
Defaults to a 1GB cache size if not configured otherwise
The estimated cache size in memory and maximum age can now be configured with new configuration options to prevent unbounded cache growth
Added support for serving the /.well-known/matrix/client hint directly from Dendrite
Refactored membership updater, which should eliminate some bugs caused by the membership table getting out of sync with the room state
The User API is now responsible for sending account data updates to other components, which may fix some races and duplicate account data events
Optimised database query for checking whether a remote server is allowed to request an event over federation without using anywhere near as much CPU time (PostgreSQL only)
Database migrations have been refactored to eliminate some problems that were present with goose and upgrading from older Dendrite versions
Media fetching will now use the /v3 endpoints for downloading media from remote homeservers
HTTP 404 and HTTP 405 errors from the client-facing APIs should now be returned with CORS headers so that web-based clients do not produce incorrect access control warnings for unknown endpoints
Some preparation work for full history visibility support
Upgrades a dependency which caused issues building Dendrite with Go 1.19
The roomserver will no longer give up prematurely after failing to call /state_ids
Removes the faulty room info cache, which caused of a number of race conditions and occasional bugs (including when creating and joining rooms)
The media endpoint now sets the Cache-Control header correctly to prevent web-based clients from hitting media endpoints excessively
The sync API will now advance the PDU stream position correctly in all cases (contributed by sergekh2)
The sync API will now delete the correct range of send-to-device messages when advancing the stream position
The device list changed key in the /sync response should now return the correct users
A data race when looking up missing state has been fixed
The /send_join API is now applying stronger validation to the received membership event
Fixes a crash that could occur during event redaction
The /members endpoint will no longer incorrectly return HTTP 500 as a result of some invite events
Send-to-device messages should now be ordered more reliably and the last position in the stream updated correctly
Parsing of appservice configuration files is now less strict (contributed by Kab1r)
The sync API should now identify shared users correctly when waking up for E2EE key changes
The federation /state endpoint will now return a HTTP 403 when the state before an event isn't known instead of a HTTP 500
Presence timestamps should now be calculated with the correct precision
A race condition in the roomserver's room info has been fixed
A race condition in the sync API has been fixed
As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more Dendrite-related discussion.
This week has seen the usual updates to my Helm Charts - with element-web being updated to 1.11.2 and matrix-synapse to 1.64.0.
Additionally, the matrix-synapse chart now also allows for adding entirely custom .well-known data - along with an example on how to use that for MSC1929.
This bridge connects users on Matrix and Discord – or other platforms, if combined with other bridges.
Earlier this year the community bridge has been adopted by the Matrix.org bridge team to give it some attention.
Its most recent update dated back to December 2020 and some fixes waited for a new release.
Well, here it is! v2.0.0
Its breaking changes are the requirement of NodeJS 14 or newer and the usage of yarn instead of npm install.
Furthermore, the update introduces a changelog and rolls out the guidelines we use for developing other matrix.org bridges.
„Start DM only on first message“ has landed on develop. Changing the DM flow from invite → message to message & invite at the same time. If you want to see it live, join our testing session at 12:00 BST on Tuesday
Version 1.8.24 is available on the App Store with our new Sign Up and Sign In flows. The update is rolling out slowly and should be available to everyone by Monday.
The work on our new app layout is coming along nicely with much of it merged into the repo (but disabled behind a build flag).
In-app notifications will now also be delivered to Notification Centre.
Continuous improvements are being made to the Live Location sharing feature.
Integration tests are now run for every PR on matrix-ios-sdk more than doubling the reported test coverage!
1.4.31 is rolling out which includes the new and improved FTUE onboarding experience along with fixes for markdown lists no longer always starting from 1 and html entities showing up in messages.
The new app layout is starting to materialise with PRs available on github for anyone interested in having a sneak peek!
We’re continuing to make improvements to Live Location sharing and cross signing verification as well as investigating performance issues.
📰 You want updates more frequently and close to when they actually happen? Join our Effektio Matrix News room, discuss general aspect in our foyer or hang out with the devs in our tech channel.
After a short vacation, I've done some new work on populus-viewer. Most of this has been UX and bugfixes, but I've added one new feature that I wanted to share. MSC3775: Markup Locations for Audiovisual Media gives a spec for annotating audio and video on matrix, but it also allows you to annotate images. So, for completeness sake, I've added support for annotating image files in Populus! This might be useful for discussing publication layouts, product designs, or for teaching art history. So populus can now annotate: video, audio, images and pdfs.
As always, if you want to learn more, follow populus development, or discuss the future of decentralized social annotation on Matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.
matrix-widget-api v1.0.0 was released yesterday, reflecting the fact that we're not expecting any big changes to the library's architecture for the foreseeable future, and that it's more or less ready for wider use.
It also comes with a couple of new features ✨ for widget authors: Sending and receiving to-device messages with MSC3819, and getting TURN servers from the client with MSC3846. Together, these features enable some new complex use-cases, such as doing VoIP from inside a widget. See Matrix Live for a preview of what that looks like with Element Call! 📹️
This is as good a time as any to mention that matrix-widget-api doesn't have to just be for web-based apps. If you're building mobile apps with Matrix and want to make use of widgets, running matrix-widget-api inside a web view to liaison with the actual widget can make it a lot simpler to start supporting widget API features. If you're curious, watch Element iOS+Android for upcoming examples of this.
This week we've been building on the initial work on the pion call server (SFU) from Sean, and have made our very first call through it with Element Call! It's still very early and there's still lots of work to do, but this will allow Element Call to scale up to much higher numbers of people.
The VoIP team are also looking after widgets now, and in our quest to embed Element Call into the Element apps, we've hit the milestone of releasing matrix-widget-api 1.0.0. We're also making great progress towards embedding into Element Web.
This was also a week of fighting the ci. After the integration tests landed, coverage reporting broke and an investigation was kicked off to check whether llvm-cov is in a usable state for us by now (it is not), but a fix was found. We've also started regretting adding npm-based workflows in our repo, as we've found ourselves at the end of an upgrade bug and the saw CI failing without us changing anything :shakes_fist_at_sky: . A fix was found quickly by pinning a sub-dependency. On a similar note, we've postponed merging the kotlin bindings until the android team is back on it and available to answer some questions we have, and the wasm-js bindings showed build failures on CI, which the original author will have to take a look at after coming back from vacation - thus delaying crypto-js a bit further.
👉️ Wanna hack on matrix rust? Go check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at Matrix Rust SDK.
It's been a while since I've made an update on Polyjuice Client Test. Since the last update:
several more tests have been added
there have been some some front-end improvements
I've also improved the documentation, done some refactoring, and added some helper/utility modules to make things clearer. My goal is to make it easier for people who don't know Elixir to be able to read and write tests without running away screaming.
compatibility with some Matrix clients has been improved
added some functions to make it easy for tests to completely override Matrix endpoints
I'm also happy to say that Polyjuice Client Test has helped find bugs in some clients, which have since been fixed.
This week I'm showing off an early look at the Matrix public archive. As the name suggests, it acts as an archive of history for your world-readable Matrix rooms. This allows you to view historical content day-by-day and jump back years ago to see what your Matrix room was up to.
More importantly, it also allows Google to do the same thing so you’ll probably start finding Matrix content from your favorite search engine and be able to harness the massive knowledge base stored in Matrix. Imagine seeing Matrix logs instead of Stack Overflow answers when googling questions! The new portal into the Matrix ecosystem 🌌
Under the hood, we use the MSC3030 /timestamp_to_event endpoint to fetch the messages for a given day and then we sever-side render the events with the Hydrogen SDK. Re-using Hydrogen gets us pretty and native(to Element) looking UI and keeps the maintenance burden of supporting new event types in Hydrogen.
If you want to follow what’s going on and see how it's coming along, you can checkout the project on GitHub, https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-public-archive
I was able to to host a matrix-synapse server on termux app on an android device. I documented the process on termux-synapse github repo And started working on a script that automates the process (final commit is being currently tested before pushing).
It was a "for fun" type of thing. But I can see it being useful for people who do not have access to a raspberry pi (such as myself at the moment) to use as a small homeserver. It can hold up in 1 to 1 Direct Messages and in small rooms.
Have you ever felt lost in the Matrix world? Too many rooms and spaces to manage? Well, back by popular demand (with Timo's blessing), I present, The Room of the Week! Every week we strive to highlight a room or a space that we believe deserves attention for discussing interesting goings on across the Matrix Network.
A matrix space dedicated to finding all of the free open source games, engines, and assets in the Matrix world so that you don't have to. Helpfully organized, and well maintained, it is the Premier stop for open source gaming on The Matrix Network!
If you know of a room that you would like to see highlighted, please visit
https://matrix.to/#/!bIyiUUnriVoHtYzuPS:fachschaften.org to let us know of the room that you would like to spotlight.
That's all I know 🏁
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this
is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
It's true! Element has acquired Gitter from GitLab and will be implementing
Gitter's current chat features in Matrix, before rebuilding Gitter as a Matrix
client! Before all that however, the first step is to build a proper, modern
bridge between the two networks, replacing the old one that's been around for
years.
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, after dropping off MSC2414 in the FCP bucket, we're heading back for another big swing at widgets. MSC2774 (widget ID URL parameter), MSC2765 (widget avatars) and MSC2790 (modal widgets) are the focus for this week 🙂
being totally shook up about the Gitter announcement for a good part of the week, I completed the work on MSC2312 (it's about Matrix URIs, ICYMI) and it hopefully won't be long before it becomes the actual standard to share Matrix coordinates in popular web browsers. Ok, who am I kidding - before Matrix clients get on with adoption.
This will allow people to post links to Matrix rooms/messages/users and when clicked will open right in your favourite Matrix client. Super convenient and great for adoption!
Dept of P2P 👥
iOS P2P Demo
Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go. It is currently serving as the basis for peer-to-peer Matrix experiments
Build 38 of the iOS P2P Demo, as built using Element iOS and Dendrite, has been submitted to TestFlight and will hopefully be available for testers shortly (pending Apple approval)! It features lots of updates in the Dendrite backend which should hopefully make it more reliable.
This week we put out a new release candidate -1.21.0rc2
Highlights include
Add experimental support for sharding event persister. (#8294, #8387, #8396, #8419)
Add experimental prometheus metric to track numbers of "large" rooms for state resolutiom. (#8425)
Add prometheus metrics to track federation delays. (#8430)
Fix messages not being sent over federation until an event is sent into the same room. (#8230, #8247, #8258, #8272, #8322)
Fix a regression in v1.21.0rc1 which broke thumbnails of remote media. #8438
Aside from that we are working on moving background processes away from the main process, actually getting the event persister sharding onto matrix.org and trying to improve Synapse stability generally.
Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib
Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go
Dendrite is nearing beta! Today we will be cutting a candidate 0.1.0rc1 version after a week of hunting and fixing bugs. We are on track to release version 0.1.0 next week, at which point we will be inviting people to try installing and using Dendrite!
Changes this week include:
Initial sync is fixed after a bug caused us to fall back on incremental sync
The Content-Type HTTP header is now handled properly when MIME-formatted
Internal API calls over HTTP in polylith mode now use their own HTTP client with higher timeouts
Dendrite now tries harder to find missing auth events, using fetcher workers
Dendrite no longer falls back on /state unnecessarily, which was the cause of a major memory leak and high CPU usage
Federation HTTP calls now include the User-Agent header
The event depth field is now ignored in the federation API
We now report the password change capability properly (thanks bn4t!)
Registration flows now include the completed field after a failure (thanks Lesterpig!)
A bug in the previous event updater in the roomserver has been fixed
A bug where we didn't check our own old verify keys when verifying event signatures is fixed
A bug where we didn't handle event ID domains being different to the event origin in earlier room versions has been fixed
If contributing to Dendrite sounds like something you would be interested in, please take a look at these issues and join us in #dendrite-dev:matrix.org! There's also #dendrite:matrix.org for general Dendrite chat and updates and #dendrite-alerts:matrix.org for release notifications and important alerts.
This week in Matrix Construct supports aarch64 (ARMv8) architectures. The experience has been phenomenal, with performance exceeding all expectations. Last week I wrote about all new vector code inside Construct using SSE through AVX-512 hardware acceleration in servers; that same code is now accelerated by SVE (Scalable Vector Extensions) on ARM architectures when you compile with clang.
This result is important: ARM virtual machines are offered at a significantly lower price compared to x86 from the same vendor. The systems are cheaper, require less power, but generally perform worse. The trick is to optimize the software for the weaker hardware. The benefit allows, for example, Matrix server hosts running Construct to make th eir profit margin from the lower TCO, getting more out of every computing cycle.
Currently it supports bridging messages, reactions and signal read receipts. End-to-bridge encryption also exists (mautrix-python does all the work there). The bridge can be linked as a secondary device and possibly even registered as the main device, but I didn't actually test registering yet. Setup instructions are currently somewhat non-existent, but it's mostly the same as my other bridges plus signald as a separate daemon.
mx-puppet-discord got updated to the newest discord.js version, meaning you have to update if you want to continue to operate it, due to discord having changed their gateway url!
mx-puppet-discord now also supports the intent stuff, so be sure to update by 7th oct
If you run mx-puppet-discord (like I do), make sure to update by October 7th or it will stop working!
Hey folks, I wanted to give another shoutout to say that we are still accepting PRs as part of hacktoberfest. Contributing 4 PRs will get you a T-Shirt (sadly not a Matrix one). Obviously, please ensure your PRs are meaningful (no copyright adjustments, typo fixes).
In the hope of expanding the number of people contributing to the matrix-appservice-slack repo I have spent a chunk of my morning improving the issue descriptions and labelling up issues. If you are interested in fixing a little annoyance with the slack bridge or just fancy writing some typescript see the good first issue label on the repo.
The matrix.org team are delighted to bring you the latest in Slack bridging technology. Do not let the
minor version bump fool you, this release is packed with the good stuff. The headline feature is that
our phase 1 encryption feature has landed and is free for users to experiment with. Head over to the
More browser compatibility work this week, making Hydrogen run IE11 on Windows 7, and on Safari on macOS and iOS (still with some caveats). Also fixed several bugs:
fix for unable to open session after a synapse bug manifested itself
prevent the app locking up when you start the app with previously unsent messages
fix sync errors being reported as "null" in the banner
handle timeout during initial sync (important for large accounts) (although I have seen 1 report that this still isn't fixed, please report if you can't login with a large account)
Element Android: Version 1.0.8 is now available on the stores, it fixes issues with verification and PIN code among other issues (see https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/releases/tag/v1.0.8 for more details). Now we are working on improving performance when sending messages to rooms, and also improving global UX, especially of the home (rooms list). Search messages (in clear rooms for the moment) is coming soon, and it will be also possible to filter the room members list.
We will also spend some time on the new Android SDK, https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-android-sdk2, which is for the moment a quick extract of what we have in Element Android. We have to take care of it as a real product now: document it properly, set up CI, export Javadoc, develop a sample app, etc.
Element for Nextcloud v0.6.11 has been released this week. The new version comes with various bug fixes, dependency upgrades, and an upgrade to Element Web v1.7.8. The version is also compatible with Nextcloud 20 which is being released soon.
Over the past couple of weeks, we've received PRs for all of the remaining federation endpoints, and all but one have already been merged!
Now that the end is in sight, we're turning our focus elsewhere. We're working on cleaning up and fixing a few bugs in our event signing code and soon will create tracking issues for filling out the Identity Service API.
All of these users are Telegram/Discord users that have been brought into Matrix over the last 30 days. This doesn't appear to be a temporary spike either: over the last 8 weeks t2bot.io has been hovering at 900-950 thousand monthly active users, up from 600-700 thousand. Record-setting traffic levels have also been achieved, with matrix.org being able to keep up for the first time in a long while.
Overall it's a good sign to see so many communities making the jump to Matrix and sticking around ❤️
I added zabbix-bot to my zabbix-matrix repo, which can get information about current problems from zabbix-server and send it to matrix user. https://github.com/progserega/matrix_zabbix
I've found that having your systems reporting in a room while you chat around
it can be really productive. Props to supporting yet another monitoring platform!
Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️
Jitsi E2EE Calls using Olm
While 1-1 calls benefit from end-to-end encryption due to WebRTC, Jitsi group calls have always only benefitted from transport encryption.
A while ago Jitsi announced that they were adding E2EE to Jitsi. But did you know that it's using Matrix's Olm encryption under the hood? It's currently available as an experimental feature on https://meet.jit.si!
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. 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
fairydust.space
368
2
blob.cat
543
3
nuclearlimes.co.uk
580
4
nuclearlemons.uk
889
5
conduit.rs
912.5
6
mailstation.de
1075
7
matrix.org
1092
8
test.zemos.net
1123
9
shortestpath.dev
1251.5
10
chatcloud.net
1338.5
We also now have a room where the ping bots are only hosted on non-Synapse
servers! See the scoreboard below.
Hello all, and welcome to this week's addition of This Week in Matrix!
Matrix is an open network protocol for secure,
decentralized communication on the web.
My name is Andrew (aka anoa), and I'm a Synapse developer at Element.
Thanks to Ben for letting me take over the reins of TWIM for this week! I'll
actually be doing the same for next week as well, so please adjust your
clocks to Anoa Nonstandard Time accordingly.
With that out of the way, let's jump right in!
Matrix Live 🎙
It's demos week again. This time around we've got the following lineup:
Michael shows off all the new widget goodies coming to Element Web!
Bruno shows off Hydrogen's new encrypted session backup support!
Ismail details the new room creation flow on Element iOS!
Jorik presents his work on revamping the UX of https://matrix.to that he completed for his second summer internship at Element!
Hubert fixes another class of failure-to-decrypt messages edge case with Device Dehydration!
Half-Shot closes off with the tale of Encrypted Bridges!
Don't forget that Matrix Live is also available in podcast form, if you're into that sort of thing. Search for "Matrix Live" wherever you get your podcasts.
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been rather busy with implementation, so we'll be continuing on with the same focus as last week. As a reminder, that's MSC2414 (making reason and score optional on reports).
Dept of Servers 🏢
Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib
Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go.
This week has mostly been spent trying to improve stability and to fix bugs ahead of the beta release, which is so far still planned to go ahead in the next two weeks.
Changes this week include:
Room version 6 is now the default for newly created rooms
Soft-fail of events that aren't allowed by the current room state is now implemented
Support for configuring old_verify_keys has been added to the Dendrite config
Correct formatting for signing key IDs is now enforced in the configuration
Initial support for peeking over federation (MSC2444) is in progress and it "even works!" (thanks Matthew!)
Federated joins will now continue being processed even if the client gives up on the join due to a HTTP timeout
Backoff code has been refactored a bit more, and now correctly affects device list syncing
/make_join now errors correctly if a federated user tries to join a room which all members have left
A bug where a single user could start multiple simultaneous federated joins to the same room has been fixed
Some initial (but unfinished) support for the /key/v2/query notary endpoint has been added
Signature verification has been updated to not fail if the event origin field is missing (although it still requires a signature from the domain of the sender field)
A number of places where we use SQL transactions have been updated with safe wrappers (thanks samcday!)
A couple of error codes on invite endpoints for room version 6 JSON violations have been fixed
Spec compliance has improved slightly for federation:
Client-Server APIs: 56%, same as last week
Server-Server APIs: 77%, up from 74% last week
As always, if contributing to Dendrite sounds like something you would be interested in, please feel free to join us in #dendrite-dev:matrix.org ! There's also #dendrite:matrix.org
This week we released 1.20.0 (and 1.20.1) highlights include shadow banning support and including unread message counts in the sync response. This will help client developers and is a precursor to improving notification support.
We’ve also been looking at adding monitoring to get a better sense of which rooms are most expensive from a state resolution perspective, we also want a better way to track federation lag.
Up next we’ll move all background tasks away from the main process and try it out on matrix.org, we are hoping for a 10-15% saving in CPU. Event persistence sharding, specifically the new stream token format is on hold slightly while we work on a nasty race condition on start up of the event persister. We hope to get back to the main sharding project next week.
This week in Matrix concludes a summer of Construct where several transformative rounds of optimization took place. I'd like to talk about these achievements and why they are important for
future directions.
Over the summer, Construct introduced new vector extensions to the project. As server software, our primary target is the datacenter which (for now) is dominated by x86 hardware. The latest features of x86 chips include AVX-2, AVX-512, and on-die GPU. These advancements are important because they help mitigate current limitations of hardware, such as the cubic relationship between a processor's frequency and its power consumption. These limitations mean that CPU cores aren't completing more cycles-per-second every iteration of their development -- they're not getting much faster.
The problem with threads is that they can introduce a lot of complications to a project. Construct is able to forego multi-threading as a network server because it is primarily IO-bound. The benefits to a single-thread design in both performance and simplicity cannot be overstated. This is why Construct stands to benefit the most from features which allow more work to be accomplished at every individual computing cycle.
Construct undertook several endeavors over the summer which directly leverage platforms featuring SSE, AVX, AVX-512, etc. As an added bonus, our approach is designed to effortlessly port to ARM's Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) as it becomes available (inside datacenters too!). Our focus has been JSON, Unicode, and finally Base64. Detailed explanations for each of these will need to be discussed in their own posts, but in summary:
Matrix specifies a canonical form of JSON which is not necessarily the same as the JSON the server receives. Therefor it is imperative that Construct is liberal with what JSON it accepts and correct with its transformation into canonical JSON. Over the summer, a portion of Construct's canonical transform received some optimization to go beyond the default method of character-by-character read-modify-write. As seen in [1], a streaming hardware-accelerated transform now processes at least 16 characters at a time (with more possible) without forward branching except for the parts where transformation needs to occur. One of these transformations is UTF-16 to UTF-8 surrogate conversion, which leads into the second endeavor.
Construct introduced a completely branch-free Unicode toolset in [2]. Among the functions offered is a custom transform of UTF-16 surrogate pairs to UTF-8 sequences. Using the new vector registers, Construct can transform two UTF-16 surrogates in parallel to output two UTF-8 sequences, or two UTF-16 surrogates in a pair to output one UTF-8 sequence. Unfortunately, these specific functions were written at fixed vector widths, so more work needs to be done to really take advantage of the widest hardware. Each surrogate is 6 bytes, and a surrogate pair is 12 bytes; therefor we cannot make use of the last 4 bytes of a 16 byte vector. However, with a little more work this approach can be extended to a 64 byte vector, capable of decoding 5 surrogate pairs and 10 individual surrogates in parallel!
Professor Daniel Lemire recently published a paper about fast Base64 from hardware acceleration in [3]. This approach is extremely elegant on the 64-byte-wide AVX-512 system. Prior to Construct's implementation of this in [4], the Boost library base64 encoding and decoding took roughly 20 and 25 cycles per character respectively. Our implementation on the same system, an old system with only SSE2 (not even AVX-512!) yields 5 and 6 cycles per character!
All of this helps lay a foundation for Construct to introduce Federated Media Rooms sometime in the future. Currently, Construct stores media in a separate database. Recently there's been work on a separate branch at [5] which stores actual file block inside events using Base64. It is for this reason sub-cycle and branchless JSON parsing and Base64 encoding is essential for maximum performance. The result is worthwhile, as the latency for querying the media database is slower than parsing and decoding the event content already in-hand.
It's really exciting to see Homeserver development ramping up from all
angles, and nice that the protocol warts are slowly getting ironed out in the
process.
Thanks to Arkaniad, v2.7.0 of my Matrix Helm chart for Kubernetes is released with support for exporting Prometheus metrics. It pairs well with the Synapse Grafana dashboard.
The synapse docker image from AVENTER (https://www.aventer.biz), does support PowerPC (ppc64le) and ARM64 architecture now. But at the moment only under the docker tag "ppc". https://hub.docker.com/r/avhost/docker-matrix/tags?page=1&name=ppc We will be happy to get feedback.
As a Synapse developer, it's great to see the community making personal and
enterprise Matrix deployments more accessible!
Jump to events in timeline: When tapping on a reply and when tapping a matrix.to link
Display messages with up to 10 emotes or emoji bigger
New design for the chat list and message bubbles
Implement reactions
Implement password change
Implement deactivate user account
Fixes
Timeline randomly resorting while more history is being fetched
Automatically request history if the "load more" button is on the screen
Sorunome briefly mentioned afterwards that there is no 0.19.0 due to some accidental messed up tagging, and that it was easiest to just call the new version 0.19.1.
Released 0.1.0 (and 0.1.1) this week with read-only session backup enabled 🎉 Also doing more work to make Hydrogen work on IE11 on Windows 7 (it does already for Windows 10), Safari and other browsers where you get TransactionInactiveError during login, hope to release that soon.
I need to give Hydrogren a shot myself, the quick speeds and low RAM usage
are really attractive.
This week, room settings have been updated with a new intermediate screen. The codebase saw the introduction of an AppCoordinator (in swift) which will help us to have a better control on navigation within the app AND to use swift from end to end.
Polyjuice Client v0.3.0 has been released. This release includes many breaking changes. ("Breaking" in the sense of API changes, rather than the sync process suddenly failing to work, which was already featured in a previous release.) This release also includes many changes, such as the client managing more bookkeeping, detecting if it got logged out, and supporting more Matrix features. See the release notes for more information.
I present you a new project I've been working on for some time. It's a bot that allows you to use the admin API through matrix, by typing commands to the bot. The inspiration comes from the OperServ-like bots that allow IRC operators to administrate an IRC server.
The bot exposes some of the available admin APIs and aims to provide some more high level commands by combining different APIs. There is currently one "high level command", !room garbage-collect, which allow you to purge from your HS all rooms without local users.
The project is written in crystal and is my first project in this language. It should be stable in normal conditions, but don't hesitate to fill issues. A Docker image is provided for more convenience.
benpa wanted a bot that replies with a songwhip.com link whenever someone sends a music link (youtube, spotify, apple music, etc), so I wrote a small maubot plugin to do that: https://github.com/maubot/songwhip
It's available at @songwhip:maunium.net
I'm also desperately in need of this for the 10 open.spotify.com links that get thrown at me every week. Thanks Tulir!
It supports E2EE and can be easily extended with Python plugins. Can be used e.g. for GitLab notifications, automated user invites, room creation, and of course can be programmed to react to any message posted in a room.
Soru made a new thing, matrix-gotify. It is a gotify plugin to receive matrix notifications. This means, you can now receive matrix push notifications on your android phone self-hosted without the need of google services! That is why putting the full event in the push notification is actually not a privacy leak in this case.
This plugin could also be used to receive push notifications on any other kind of device that gotify supports.
Please note that this is independent of any matrix client - you don't even need to run one to be able to use this!
I asked whether an OpenPush-like solution be
built on top of this , and Sorunome responded that someone had already
started working on just that! https://github.com/gotify/android/pull/115
This would allow other matrix clients on your phone to get their push
notifications through your gotify client, instead of needing to run a process
each. Great for battery life without proprietary Google blobs!
Homeservers on-the-go
js got Synapse running in a car on a German highway:
the setup is a cigarette lighter to 2x 230V converter, one being used to power the RockPro64, the other being used to power my notebook. My notebook is connected to the hotspot from my phone, while also being connected to a USB ethernet, the other end of which is plugged into the RockPro64.
The notebook then acts as a gateway, as well as SSHing to a tiny VPS with -R, to get a public port, and forwarding that traffic to the RockPro64.
Maybe one day we'll all have an embedded Synapse homeserver in our cars. P2P E2EE
car comms anyone?
I have been through the perils of setting up a TURN server and having VoIP continue to fail, whilst spending hours scratching my head and staring at Wireshark without getting anywhere. When I was given free reign over project choice last year during my internship, I chose to start a tool that tests your homeserver's VoIP configuration, hoping it would be useful to both me and the community at large.
It saw some progress but I never managed to iron out some of the 'last few things' or put a pretty front on it — until about 2 weeks ago, when I got some more time to do it.
There are known issues — such as the scores being very arbitrary, wrong and misleading; it crashes Chromium every time (on my machine) and it completely misbehaves in Brave Browser (on my machine). It may also not be the prettiest (but hopefully it is at least somewhat inoffensive). I hope to work on these annoying issues soon.
I have deployed a test instance at https://test.voip.librepush.net — it can be tried in a WebRTC-supporting browser (probably Firefox if you want half a chance). Please don't take it to heart if you get a Fail or Poor score — it's probably not your fault. :)
Oliver was interning with us at Element this Summer. Fixing up and releasing
this VoIP tester was part of it, but he's still working on it in his spare
time even though his internship has finished :)
Through this I found out that I forgot to turn on my turnserver on my
homeserver again. Thanks Oliver!
Dept of Guides 🧭
German-Language Guide for Getting Start with Matrix
Guides like these are the essential entrypoints to a project for a lot of users. The more, in different languages, the merrier!
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. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.
I changed the formatting of the plot a bit to make it more readable. Note that it is now using a log scale which allows us to see more data at the same time.
Now that we have multiple somewhat federating Matrix homeserver implementations, I decided to make a ping room where all the echo bots are hosted on second-gen homeservers: #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net. Synapse users are still allowed to join and !ping, but all the pongs will come from non-Synapse servers.
Based on observations in that room so far, the new server implementations don't like eachother very much.
On April 14th, the Spec Core Team conducted a long-overdue retrospective
about the things that were working in the
Matrix Spec Proposal process,
and those that were not.
The most glaring item on the list was the sluggish pace that many Matrix
Spec Changes (MSCs) take throughout the proposal process, as well as the
general lack of activity from the Spec Core Team members on proposals that
have not yet started a Final Comment Period.
We deeply apologize for the frustration this has likely caused many MSC
authors, and want to shed some light on the reasoning behind it, and what we
plan to do to prevent leaving authors in the dark about why there may be no
Spec Core Team activity on their proposal.
Proposal Triaging
There are currently 136 open MSCs that have yet to undergo Final Comment
Period (FCP), 75 of which are marked as proposal-in-review, and 20 that have
a FCP proposed. Relative to the 65 MSCs that have ever been closed, this is a
lot of outstanding ideas, features and maintenance changes.
The Spec Core Team itself is made up of 8 members, each of which have
separate full-time jobs. All team members are well-placed to be on the team
given their wide breadth of knowledge across the Matrix ecosystem,
however the majority are some of the most busy pushing forward Matrix's
reference implementations - without which, Matrix will unquestionably fail.
This limits the amount of MSCs that the team can effectively work on at a
given time.
But there is also a large backlog of MSCs that provide even more fundamental
fixes and additions to the protocol that the team needs to prioritise. These
include things like
cross-signing devices,
the communities rewrite and
finally merging
reactions and edits into the spec.
While we announce what MSCs we're focusing on during a given week during
TWIM, it's not as clear which items we're looking
to pull from the backlog next. To help tackle this, and to help keep us
honest, we've begun putting each MSC into either "feature", "maintenance", or
"core" buckets. This materialises in the form of github tags, which can be
used to filter the list of MSCs like so:
feature,
maintenance,
core.
For a given timespan, we’ll pick a track and pull MSCs out of that category
when possible. More information about MSC categories are now detailed on
the proposals page.
As for the next 6 to 12 months, we plan to work on items from the “core”
category. We need to get Matrix to a point where it can compete with other,
proprietary chat protocols and items in "core" are decidedly the proposals
that will take us the furthest in that direction. This doesn't mean we won't
occasionally look at an MSC in a different category, but it will heavily
influence our prioritisation.
Future
We'll try this approach out over the next few months and see how it goes. The
next Spec Core Team retro will occur in the middle of May, where we will
review the process once again.
For now, if you have any feedback please come and chat with us in
#matrix-spec:matrix.org :)
It’s that time of year again! Matrix.org is once again participating in the Google Summer of Code program. We have been allocated four student slots by Google this year, and narrowing the 18 proposals we received down to just four was a very difficult task.
In the end, we have decided on the following four students and their proposed projects:
Alexey Andreyev’s proposal involves adding end-to-end encryption to libQMatrixClient for future support in Qt/libQMatrixClient-based clients such as Quaternion and Spectral. They will be mentored by kitsune, lead developer of libQMatrixClient, and our own end-to-end encryption expert, uhoreg.
Kai Hiller’s proposal for more reliable third-party protocol bridges includes adding the ability to notify the user when a message fails to reach its final destination despite being accepted by the bridge. Half-Shot.
Eisha Chen-yen-su’s proposal for Matrix Visualisations aims to “develop a tool which will visualise the event Directed Acyclic Graph data structure which describes the conversation history in a room. It will be a real-time visualisation of the DAG of a given Matrix room, as seen from the perspective of one or more HomeServers (HSes).” They state that “this tool will be useful for debugging or administration of Matrix HSes by making people able to easily see how the federation process works”. They have already posted prototypes of their tool in #gsoc:matrix.org, and it’s all written in Rust! Which makes their mentor, erikj, very happy.
And finally, Cnly’s proposal for working towards completion of Dendrite’s Client-Server API. The proposal also touches on general improvements to the codebase and increasing test coverage. Cnly will be mentored by babolivier and anoa.
Congratulations to the selected students. We look forward to participating with you on completing your project over the course of the summer holidays.
If your proposal was not selected, do not give up hope! Being an active member of the Matrix community and having a deep understanding of the ecosystem and its projects is a big part of what we look for when choosing candidates. If you stick around, you have a strong chance of being chosen in a subsequent year.
We will not be sharing individual’s proposal documents, but students are free to share them as they please.
