Hey all,
Matrix 1.7 has just been released! The last spec release was about 3 months ago, keeping us on track for regular quarterly releases. Unlike Matrix 1.6 though, today’s release is packed with plenty of features, some of which we’d like to call out here. Not all implementations will have support for these features yet though, and that’s okay (expected, even).
Adding support for a spec release can be a significant body of work. Instead of implementations having everything ready for spec release day, the idea is that they gain support over the next few months. If you’re able, please help those projects get v1.7’s features.
Today, we see 15 MSCs achieve their formally adopted status. All of them bring forward some much-needed features to Matrix, and a few highlights are below. Read on to the full changelog for a complete overview, and for a sneak peak at what the Spec Core Team (SCT) is planning to look at for v1.8 👀
The media repo has been largely unchanged since it was first released in 2015 as r0.0.0 - the only change being the addition of URL previews in r0.3.0 (released in 2017). Thankfully, the folks over at Beeper have been busy changing this situation!
MSC3860 and MSC2246 are both available as of today in the spec, improving how much bandwidth media repos need to offer and fixing a long-standing issue where uploading large files can be a challenge. MSC3860, specified here as allow_redirect
, allows clients to opt-in to HTTP redirects on downloads, avoiding slowdowns from the server having to proxy and move the media twice. It’s particularly useful if your server uses a CDN like S3 to host media - just tell clients to go grab media directly from S3 instead.
Meanwhile, MSC2246 (largely specified here) gives clients an ability to upload their media after sending the associated event. The MSC was originally designed with bridges in mind, where message order and delays are very perceivable problems for users, however clients like Element X are thinking about using the feature to improve local echo on uploads as well. We’re excited to see uploads finally be reliable, and non-blocking for the conversation flow!
History would indicate that we’ve got several years to go before the next major improvement to media, but we’re looking to change that: MSC3916: Authentication for media, MSC4016: Streaming E2EE file transfers, and MSC3870: Upload direct to URL are all fairly promising MSCs we’re planning to take a look at in the next year or so.
Reactions have actually been in use for quite some time already, but the MSC struggled to make it into the spec formally. With Matrix 1.7 though, MSC2677 is merged.
MSC2677 was the last part of the MSC1849 saga, with MSC2674 (relationships) and MSC2675 (server-side aggregation) landing in Matrix 1.3, and MSC2676 (edits) landing in Matrix 1.4 back in September 2022. There’s still some work to be done in this area though, and certainly some quality of life improvements asking to be written up as MSCs - watch this space for progress on those fronts.
One of the best parts about writing an MSC is eventually seeing it released in the spec, and these folks saw their MSCs reach this milestone for the first time. Congratulations everyone, and please keep them coming!
In no particular order:
Anyone can contribute MSCs, improving the whole of Matrix for everyone. If you have an idea (or bugfix), check out the guidelines and let us know if you run into any questions in #matrix-spec:matrix.org on Matrix - we’re always happy to help.
The SCT aims to cut a release in the middle of each calendar quarter, largely to avoid most conflicts with regional holidays, and since Matrix 1.1 the releases have been getting less and less organic. Instead of looking at MSCs whenever they’re raised, the SCT has been aiming to hear about which MSCs will need looking at. This is a very subtle difference, but one that dramatically changes how the quarterly releases are structured.
With each spec release, the SCT has slowly been working towards a place where the majority of MSC work is thought about in advance, and Matrix 1.8 is another milestone along this journey. Over the next couple weeks we’ll be working on a roadmap based on the MSCs that are raised to us in the SCT Office room on Matrix, starting with the ideas we raised ourselves earlier in the year.
As of writing, our current plan for Matrix 1.8 includes:
While this doesn’t represent a commitment to have these MSCs merged, these are the areas that the SCT is likely to be thinking about for the next 3ish months. If you have MSCs that might be possible to merge before roughly August, let us know in the SCT Office room (even if those MSCs aren’t on-theme with the above - we still want to hear about them!).
Critically, our release planning does not just include MSCs that are on track for being merged. We are also aiming to track that a given MSC needs technical review (for example), or that it might be receiving attention external to the SCT (such as implementation). We’d love to hear what you’re working on so we can start bringing those MSCs to the top of the list - let us know in the SCT Office room.
As is the theme for this section, if you have any questions about what the release process looks like (or where a given MSC currently sits in the roadmap), let us know in the SCT Office room.
There’s so many more things than what we covered in this blog post - flip through the changelog below for a full idea of what’s landed. Special thanks to MichaelKohler, zecakeh, and Cadair for contributing clarification & bug fix PRs in this release - we greatly appreciate it!
POST /_matrix/media/v1/create
(#1499)PUT /_matrix/media/v3/upload/{serverName}/{mediaId}
(#1499)POST /_matrix/client/v1/login/get_token
(#1530)m.replace
(edit) events, as per MSC3925. (#1440, #1525)event_property_is
and event_property_contains
, as per MSC3758 and MSC3966. (#1464)m.annotation
relations (reactions), as per MSC2677. (#1475, #1531)m.mentions
property; the .m.rule.is_user_mention
and .m.rule.is_room_mention
push rules; and other notification behaviour, as per MSC3952. (#1508)limit
on a filter if one is not specified. (#1463)state_default
is 0 if there is no m.room.power_levels
event in a room. (#1479)token
parameter on /keys/query
endpoint. (#1485)dont_notify
and coalesce
push rule actions, as per MSC3987. (#1501)m.location
scheme by partially reverting f1f32d3. Contributed by @HarHarLinks. (#1507)knock_restricted
join rule to the m.room.join_rules
schema. (#1535)examples/minimal_pdu.json
. (#1454){key_id}
from /_matrix/key/v2/server/
. (#1473)age_ts
field from the reference hash calculation section. (#1536)/_matrix/identity/v2/store-invite
. (#1486)No significant changes.
Today we are issuing security releases of matrix-js-sdk and matrix-react-sdk to patch a pair of High severity vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-28427 / GHSA-mwq8-fjpf-c2gr for matrix-js-sdk and CVE-2023-28103 / GHSA-6g43-88cp-w5gv for matrix-react-sdk).
Affected clients include those which depend on the affected libraries, such as Element Web/Desktop and Cinny. Releases of the affected clients should follow shortly. We advise users of those clients to upgrade at their earliest convenience.
The issues involve prototype pollution via events containing special strings in key locations, which can temporarily disrupt normal functioning of matrix-js-sdk and matrix-react-sdk, potentially impacting the consumer's ability to process data safely.
Although we have only demonstrated a denial-of-service-style impact, we cannot completely rule out the possibility of a more severe impact due to the relatively extensive attack surface. We have therefore classified this as High severity and strongly recommend upgrading as a precautionary measure.
We found these issues during a codebase audit that we had previously announced in an earlier security release of matrix-js-sdk and matrix-react-sdk. The earlier release had already addressed a set of similar vulnerabilities that were assigned CVE-2022-36059 / GHSA-rfv9-x7hh-xc32 and CVE-2022-36060 / GHSA-2x9c-qwgf-94xr, which we had initially decided not to disclose until the completion of the audit. Now that the audit is finished, we are disclosing those previous advisories as well.
Greetings Matrix fans! We've published Synapse version 1.78 as the new stable release this week. Synapse admins are encouraged to upgrade to it at their convenience. Please take a look at the upgrade notes for any important information about upgrading.
Please note that Synapse 1.78.0 replaces the /_synapse/admin/v1/media/<server_name>/delete
admin API with an identical
endpoint at /_synapse/admin/v1/media/delete
. Please update your tooling to use the new endpoint. The deprecated version
will be removed in a future release.
In case you were unaware, Synapse has a command line export data command which allows administrators to export data for a specific user (you can read more about this command here). Synapse 1.78.0 updates this command adding account data to the user information that is returned by the export data command.
This version of Synapse also features a few changes to push rules, with implementations for MSC3758:
Add event_property_is push
rule condition kind,
MSC3966: event_property_contains
push rule condition, and the removal of the spurious dont_notify
action from the defaults for the .m.rule.reaction
pushrule. These changes empower end users to more fully customise their
notification rules - MSC3758 allows users to ask to be notified when a field in an event contains any type of value, rather
than only matching on strings, and MSC3966 provides crucial scaffolding for MSC3952: Intentional Mentions,
which aims to eliminate unintentional mentions and improve the experience of mentions in general.
Synapse v1.78.0 includes some fixes for faster-joins related bugs as we work out the kinks. Some of these include a fix for a bug introduced in Synapse 1.76.0 where partially-joined rooms could not be deleted using the purge room API, and a fix for a bug introduced in Synapse 1.75 where the portdb script would fail to run after a room had been faster-joined. We continue to work to polish faster joins, and thank everyone who filed an issue.
Finally, for those deployments using workers, v1.78.0 fixed a bug introduced in Synapse 1.76 where 5s delays would occasionally occur.
See the full changelog for a complete list of changes in the release. Also please have a look at the upgrade notes.
Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, including (in no particular order): jahway603, williamkray, 999lakhisidhu, hari01584, saddfox, dklimpel, realtyem V02460, and thezaidbintariq.
We are also grateful to anyone helping us make Synapse better by sharing their feedback and reporting issues, or helping with community support questions.
Greetings Matrix fans! We've published Synapse version 1.77 as the new stable release this week. Synapse admins are encouraged to upgrade to it at their convenience.
Mentioning other users on Matrix is difficult: it is not possible to know if mentioning a user by display name or Matrix ID will count as a mention, but is also too easy to mistakenly mention a user.
MSC3952 proposes a solution. Its idea is to make the mentioning explicit in the protocol using a dedicated event property, instead of relying on searching the body of the message as before.
Synapse now implements this as an experimental feature.
Have you ever been annoyed by a noisy notification that keep coming back, but you can't pinpoint
where it's coming from?
This is usually because edits to a message where you are mentioned (or that mention @room
) will
retrigger a noisy notification. That can be pretty annoying when the message is edited 10 times!
MSC3958 is here to solve that, and Synapse now implements it as an experimental feature.
Some iterative optimizations have been implemented that should make joining or leaving large rooms even faster, and should also improve sending message.
See the full changelog, for a complete list of changes in the release.
Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to these releases, including (in no particular order) icp1994, dklimpel, Fizzadar and realtyem.
We are also grateful to anyone helping us make Synapse better by sharing their feedback and reporting issues, or helping with community support questions.
Hey all,
Matrix 1.6 is out there! Like Matrix 1.5 back in November, this release is largely a maintenance update. Matrix 1.1 through 1.4 have been relatively major upgrades, so a little time between features doesn’t feel like a bad idea :)
As with all spec releases, we encourage implementations to gradually update over the next few months rather than have support for everything on release day - please be kind to the projects you use, and help them gain support if able.
Matrix 1.6 sees just 7 MSCs get merged, though this is to be expected from a maintenance release. Check out Matthew’s Matrix 2.0 talk at FOSDEM for an idea of what’s expected over the next few releases.
We’ve covered a couple of the MSCs below, but read on to the full changelog for the full picture.
It’s here! The time machine we’ve been waiting for!
Primarily part of the Gitter feature parity project (congratulations to the team going all-in on Matrix, by the way) to drive the Matrix Public Archive, the new API gives clients the ability to jump back in time to a nearby event. Being able to find something that was posted on a given day/week, but not being sure of which keywords to look for is a major usability improvement - many thanks to the Gitter team for making Matrix better!
Matrix is going voom
Synapse 1.76 enabled faster joins by default, and while there’s a lot of Python going into making joins as fast as possible, the specification side is a relatively small change at the moment: just don’t send as many events during joins (omit_members
).
There’s potentially more work on the horizon for making faster joins even faster and more robust, and some of that might involve spec work: keep an eye on Synapse releases and TWIM for updates as we make our way to faster joins in Matrix 2.0 :)
MSCs are how the spec changes in the way it does - adding, fixing, and maintaining features for the whole ecosystem to use. Check out the full changelog below, and the Spec Change Proposals page for more information on how these MSCs got merged (hint: they submitted a proposal, which anyone can do - take a look at the Matrix Live episode where Matthew covers the proposal process).
/rooms/<roomID>/timestamp_to_event
endpoint, as per MSC3030. (#1366)hkdf-hmac-sha256.v2
MAC method for SAS verification, as per MSC3783. (#1412)/context
always returns event
even if limit
is zero. Contributed by @sumnerevans at @beeper. (#1239)medium
. (#1417)/timestamp_to_event/<roomID>
endpoint, as per MSC3030. (#1366)/_matrix/federation/v2/send_join
to allow omitting membership events, per MSC3706. (#1393, #1398)/_matrix/federation/v2/send_join
should include heroes for nameless rooms, even when allowed to omit membership events, per MSC3943. (#1425)POST _matrix/federation/v1/user/keys/claim
response schema. (#1351)edu_type
in EDU examples. (#1383)No significant changes.
<content>
to content
in the OpenAPI files for content uploads. (#1370)Greetings Matrix fans! We've published Synapse version 1.76 as the new stable release this week. Synapse admins are encouraged to upgrade to it at their convenience. Please take a look at the upgrade notes for any important information about upgrading.
The big news is that faster joins for all has arrived! When joining a room for the first time, Synapse 1.76.0 will request a partial join from the other server by default. Previously, server admins had to opt-in to this using an experimental config flag.
Server admins can opt out of this feature for the time being by setting
experimental:
faster_joins: false
in their server config.
For everyone else, after a faster join Synapse considers that room "partially joined". In this state, you should be able to
Synapse has to spend more effort to complete the join in the background. Once this finishes, you will be able to
Practically, this means that the experience of joining a large room over federation should be greatly improved. In past versions of Synapse, joining a large room such as Matrix HQ over federation could take up to 30 mins. This time has been cut to ~20-30 seconds to partially join in the new release. Those of you who have been watching this know this has been a huge undertaking, big shout out to the team for getting it over the line! We're excited the community to try it, as always if you encounter any problems you are encouraged to file an issue.
Please note that Synapse has changed the format of the account data and devices replication streams (between workers). This is a forwards- and backwards-incompatible change: v1.75 workers cannot process account data replicated by v1.76 workers, and vice versa.
Once all workers are upgraded to v1.76 (or downgraded to v1.75), account data and device replication will resume as normal.
Room version 10 is now the default room version in Synapse 1.76.0. This room version builds on v9 to introduce a new
knock_restricted
join rule, allowing prospective members to more easily join such a room. The knock_restricted
join
rule allows for prospective members of a room to join either through knocking or through join_restrictions
, which allows
prospective members to join a restricted room based on whether they are a joined member of another room. You can read more
about restricted rooms here.
Synapse has added some new, default push rules for MSC3881-esque event types.
This allows for notifications from polls, ie when a poll starts or ends.
See the full changelog, for a complete list of changes in the release.
Synapse is a Free and Open Source Software project, and we'd like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed to these releases, including: katlol, thezaidbintariq, dklimpel, FSG-Cat, tjay27, emgrav, villepeh.
We are also grateful to anyone helping us make Synapse better by sharing their feedback and reporting issues, or helping with community support questions.