It's been a year since Dendrite development picked up again and it's certainly been a busy one at that! We started off 2020 by sprinting to complete the FOSDEM P2P demo and, since then, we have continued to develop Dendrite into a more featureful and stable homeserver.
In October, we moved Dendrite into beta, and have since released a number of releases. We've also seen quite a lot of interest from the community, so I'm here today to write about some of the fun things that have been going on in Dendrite-land.
I'm happy to announce that we've finally deployed our own public Dendrite instance at dendrite.matrix.org! It's running the latest Dendrite code and is open for registration, so if you have been looking for an opportunity to play with Dendrite without hosting your own deployment, here's your chance!
There are still bugs and missing features, but overall the server is quite usable, so please feel free to register and try it and let us know how you get on.
This is the first deployment that we've built for any kind of scale, so we are cautious of the fact that there may be performance bottlenecks still. That said, over the last few weeks, a number of performance-improving changes have been merged, including:
We're optimistic that running this deployment will help us to identify scaling pain points and to make Dendrite leaner in the long run. Feel free to sign up and give it a spin! :-)
Since the beginning of the year, we've added a number of new features, including but not limited to:
...and of course entered Beta in October!
Of course, Dendrite also needs to be able to fulfill the promise of being a usable next-generation Matrix homeserver at the same time as being a sci-fi development platform. We have spent much of the last year working specifically on this. Today, Dendrite's Sytest compliance sits at:
As you can see, these are significant leaps in the numbers of tests passing against Dendrite.
We have been increasingly trying to use Dendrite for the development and testing of some new Matrix feature proposals. Recently we've seen early support added for Peeking (MSC2753) and there is work in progress on Peeking over Federation (MSC2444).
Peeking enables temporarily subscribing to a room for real-time events without joining the room. This will only be possible with rooms that are world-readable, but it reduces the overhead of looking into a room significantly as there is no need to update the room state for each peeking user/device.
In addition to that, we've also been working on Threading (MSC2836)
support, which is the gateway to building some pretty new and interesting Matrix
experiences. Twitter-like or Reddit-like social prototypes like this have traditionally
been difficult to build on top of Matrix as the m.reference
relation type from MSC1849
had never really been fleshed out.
Threading adds m.relationship
fields for embedding these relationships, and also
specifies an additional /event_relationships
API endpoint for finding other events
related to a given event in either direction. This makes it possible to build threads.
Dendrite has also been our primary development platform for P2P Matrix. This year we have released multiple P2P Matrix demos, including:
Each experiment teaches us more about potential issues that need to be resolved in order to bring P2P Matrix closer to being reality, and we are continuing to use Dendrite for this work. We'll be announcing more information in the New Year about our latest efforts and the Pinecone routing scheme that we are developing.
It's also worth highlighting that all of the other experimental work taking place right now, including Threading and Peeking, also work over P2P!
We'll be taking a short break for Christmas, but will then be continuing work on Dendrite in 2021, with the main aims being to add new features, improve spec compliance further, fix bugs and eventually exit beta. We'll also be continuing further experimental work in the P2P and Threading areas, as well as supporting the development of new MSCs such as Portable Identities (MSC2787).
We'd like to say thank you for the community support and interest, and also to send out a special thanks to our community contributors who have contribued a number of fixes and features in recent months! We always welcome code contributions via GitHub if you are an interested developer.
As always, stay tuned for more Dendrite updates either by joining us in #dendrite:matrix.org or by getting your regular dose of This Week in Matrix!
— Neil Alexander and Kegan