It’s another quarter and therefore another spec release! Matrix 1.2 was released back in February, and while a bit late in the quarter this time around we’ve still got some exciting additions coming to you in this release.
Like last time, the speed of these releases might feel a bit quick for developers: fret not if you’re still working on v1.1 or v1.2 implementations. We’re not expecting that implementations update as soon as a new spec release is published, but rather that the ecosystem gradually update over the course of the next few months. Implementations should be aiming for as close to realtime as they can get though, particularly considering v1.4 is expected to have some large features (more on that later on).
Matrix 1.3 sees 14 MSCs get merged, but we can’t possibly go into detail on them all here. We’ve picked some notable highlights and recommend the full changelog at the bottom for a complete idea of what’s been going on.
Aggregations and the relationships made along the way
It’s no secret that MSC1849-style server-side aggregation of related messages have been in the review backlog for a while. We ended up splitting MSC1849 down into more reviewable chunks like MSC2675, allowing us to finally land the first pieces into Matrix 1.3 today.
In the spec there aren’t currently any defined relationships which make use of aggregations or even the rel_type described by MSC2674, but we do expect that v1.4 of the spec will have support for at least threads (MSC3440) and edits (MSC2676), filling the gap. For now, we’ve decided that holding aggregations back until v1.4 doesn’t make a lot of sense, so we have launched them into the world as-is for custom relations or for clients & servers to prepare for what’s expected to be coming in v1.4 of the spec.
To further prepare for threads, we’ve also removed some restrictions of rich replies through MSC3676, thus allowing replies to be constructed with non-text messages like images. Check out the new rich replies module for more information.
Join if you can, or just knock
When we launched restricted rooms in Matrix 1.2 we noted that we forgot to handle a case where someone might want to support both knocking and restricted rooms at the same time. We’ve fixed that with a stop-gap join rule from MSC3787 in room version 10.
The new knock_restricted join rule allows the room to keep its desire to be restricted whilst also allowing members who do not meet the criteria to knock on the room instead. We’ll likely expand on this sort of mixing of join rules in proposals like MSC3386 down the line, however for now this should cover the gap in support. Next up: figuring out how to make encrypted room history available to these new joiners in a safe way.
A thread for next time
Originally planned for this release, MSC3440-style threads are anticipated to be ready for v1.4 (next quarter) with support for notifications and, of course, a whole new way to communicate in a room.
Threads are one of the more complicated features we’ve tried to land in recent history as it has a large impact on a wide variety of the spec: everything from event relationships (fixed in this release) to read receipts to push notifications needs to be worked out to build a system that not only users can understand, but also the developers trying to build it. With this massive surface area we just weren’t comfortable with adding threads to v1.3 as-is, given problems like notifications aren’t yet fully solved.
Alongside threads, we also anticipate that MSC2676-style message editing will be landing in v1.4, finally specifying how to update an event’s contents without having to redact & re-send. Although message editing has been supported for a long time in some clients, we're excited that it will finally become part of the official specification, meaning it can be implemented more widely. Messaging clients are encouraged to give the proposal an early read and possibly even attempt implementation if not already done to help us ensure the system is in a reasonable state for inclusion in the spec, though we do note that feature requests for edits will likely be deferred to a future MSC.
Keep an eye on This Week In Matrix for updates on what v1.4 is expected to include, and how things are progressing.
The full changelog
MSCs are how the spec changes in the way it does - adding, fixing, and maintaining features for the whole ecosystem to use. The blog post can’t cover them all, but that doesn’t make them any less important! 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).
Client-Server API
Deprecations
Deprecate the sender_key and device_id on m.megolm.v1.aes-sha2 events, and the sender_key on m.room_key_request to-device messages, as per MSC3700. (#1101)
Backwards Compatible Changes
Make from optional on GET /_matrix/client/v3/messages to allow requesting events from the start or end of the room history, as per MSC3567. (#1002)
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.
The release date for Matrix v1.3 has been set in stone for Thursday, June 16th 2022! Expect a blog post on the day detailing all of the new additions.
The bot that posts MSC updates in #matrix-spec:matrix.org and elsewhere has been switched from @mscbot:amorgan.xyz to @mscbot:matrix.org. The backend of the bot uses https://github.com/Informo/specs-bot/.
This is a proposal that adds a mechanism for homeserver administrators to define a password policy for users. This policy can decide rules such as a minimum password length, whether a digit is required, etc. This policy can be enforced by the homeserver when a user registers an account or changes their account password and is communicated to the client so that it can also be enforced locally.
Astute readers will possibly note that authentication in Matrix will eventually be replaced by OAuth2 (MSC2964). This will move operations like password policy enforcement from the homeserver to a separate authentication service, essentially removing the need to reinvent-the-wheel in a homeserver.
Registration, login and managing passwords and connected third-party IDs is often a complex part of a Matrix homeserver. Moving these out to a separate authentication service will both unlock new features (log in with Matrix!) as well as reduce the resources required to implement a Matrix homeserver.
Hey there, I am Rohit. I'll be participating in GSoC this summer, under the Matrix organization.
For my project, I'll be working on the desktop client, Nheko. Specifically, I aim to work on its VoIP Library and also on implementing and updating some of the features to concur to specification changes to the Matrix protocol, which include
Improved VoIP Signalling
VoIP Call Transfers
Muting Calls
I plan on starting a blog and hopefully will do so soon. In the meanwhile, if you want to know more about the project you can visit here and join the #nheko:nheko.im to participate in discussions.
Looking forward to learning and interacting with the community.
Work continues on speeding up federated room joins, improving testing, and reducing database i/o. In addition, some lovely features have been added:
Add new media_retention options to the homeserver config for routinely cleaning up non-recently accessed media.
Experimental support for MSC3772: Push rule for mutually related events.
Update to the check_event_for_spam module callback: Deprecate the current callback signature, replace it with a new signature that is both less ambiguous (replacing booleans with explicit allow/block) and more powerful (ability to return explicit error codes).
Add storage and module API methods to get monthly active users (and their corresponding appservices) within an optionally specified time range.
Support the new error code ORG.MATRIX.MSC3823.USER_ACCOUNT_SUSPENDED from MSC3823.
Add a configurable background job to delete stale devices.
Improve URL previews for pages with empty elements.
Allow updating a user's password using the admin API without logging out their devices. Contributed by @jcgruenhage.
This is in addition to quite a number of bugfixes!
This week we released Dendrite 0.8.8, which contains the following improvements:
The performance of state resolution has been increased significantly for larger rooms
A number of changes have been made to rate limiting:
Logged in users will now be rate-limited on a per-session basis rather than by remote IP
Rate limiting no longer applies to admin or appservice users
It is now possible to configure additional users that are exempt from rate limiting using the exempt_user_ids option in the rate_limiting section of the Dendrite config
Setting state is now idempotent via the client API state endpoints
Room upgrades now properly propagate tombstone events to remote servers
Room upgrades will no longer send tombstone events if creating the upgraded room fails
A crash has been fixed when evaluating restricted room joins
As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more discussion.
Hello friends. This week we bring you a security release for matrix-hookshot. Please ensure you have upgraded to at least 1.7.2, and have read the security advisory. Thanks!
The changes are as follows:
Add support for GitHub enterprise. You can now specify the URL via enterpriseUrl in the config file. (#364)
Add ability for bridge admins to remove GitHub connections using the admin room. (#367)
FluffyChat 1.5.0 has been released and will soon be in all stores. This release comes with a bunch of bugfixes and introduces the first iteration of a Material You based design. We also try to support Android 12 accent colors (while this does not seem to work yet). On other platforms, our own purple shape will stay the default.
I like the new Material You design while we needed to tweak it at some points. Also the dropdown menu misses some elevation but this is a known issue in the Flutter repo which will be fixed soon.
This is also the first build with Flutter 3 which should improve the performance a little bit. Unfortunately it brings some regressions. We are forced to ship a little bug with it: Sharing on iPads seems to be broken. I'm very unhappy with this situation but otherwise we would have ended up in different releases for different platforms. As there afaik are not that many iPad users out there, we decided to live with this compromise and ship a bugfix release asap.
Yeah... Flutter has a lot of pros but also a lot of cons. Every new release of this framework leads to the fear of new regressions. Shipping a new major release where basic stuff like "Sharing" is just broken, is totally stupid... but that's the decision of Google. :-P
We didn't want to wait to ship the new design and also we needed a new release to come back to F-Droid where FluffyChat wasn't available in the last weeks because of a ProGuard problem, which should be fixed now.
Threads is in Beta and progressing. We’re working hard setting up the foundational work needed to improve read receipts and notifications cross-platform.
Keep sending feedback and rageshakes as we’re also continuing to improve the UI and fix any bugs that are raised.
Community testing
We’re moving closer to getting the new search experience out of beta, thanks for all your help on testing so far.
Next up: Big regression testing session on Android, after the removal of communities/groups (Wednesday or Thursday TBC)
We’re continuing our bug fixing spree and the latest release has fixed some of the more significant problems we had
We’re working towards adopting a new notification filtering entitlement and we will soon be able to silence those pesky empty notifications
Our “Edit Home Screen Layout” experiment is running well and we hope to be sharing the results of the diary study and prototypes soon.
The new first time user experience is continuing to make good progress and is quickly approaching finalisation
We are now allowing account deactivation for users that signed up through SSO
On ElementX we have merged the new crash reporting service and we are starting to see reports come in. We’ve also successfully integrated an initial version of the DesignKit and added room filtering
1.4.19 is available and fixes some small bugs, including a fix for the regression surrounding space switching performance.
Our prototype study is nearly at a close - we’ve received a lot of great feedback on our suggested changes to the home screen and space switching interactions.
We’ve been working on integrating UnifiedPush for both Google Play and FDroid versions of our app.
The team is finalising the updates to the create account flow. It will be ready for testing soon.
This week we landed Element Call beta 2 (https://call.element.io) including a bunch of nice updates. First of all, everything is now end-to-end encrypted by default: not only the WebRTC streams but also the matrix signaling (It was consciously disabled in beta 1 for debugging purposes). Moreover, we have experimental support for spatial audio rendering. Give it a try — you can find it in the settings section. It's a lot of fun to play with and really supports immersion during a video call. This release also introduces a whole new experimental way of communicating: Walkie-talkie mode. In that mode, videos are disabled, and everyone is muted by default. To speak, press the ‘push-to-talk’ (PTT) button — takes me back to my childhood 🙂
For further details follow this blog post: https://element.io/blog/element-call-beta-2-encryption-spatial-audio-walkie-talkie-mode-and-more/
This week, the team released version 0.9.12. In this version, we updated our Matrix API Lite package, in which we fixed the issue with the room hierarchy endpoint with some improper parsing and wrong type coming from the generation of the spec Open API documentation.
We also did some housekeeping and renamed some methods and getter to make them explicit. For example, the futureSender getter is now an asynchronous method called fetchEventSender() to make it clear that calling this function may trigger an API call.
Possibility to override the supported Matrix spec version but we don't really recommend using it for production.
Here's a fun Matrix-based project for you, sponsored by yours truly and my employer FUTO.
The "Golden Tiger" senior capstone project team at Portland State University just delivered the results of two quarters's design and implementation work on a secure/private, self-hostable, end-to-end encrypted cloud security camera using Raspberry Pi's and Matrix. The idea of this prototype project was to provide similar functionality to commercial services like Ring or Nest, but without letting any nosy third party see inside (or around) your home.
The students' code is available on Github in two repos:
Hey all, it's been a holiday for much of the team this week, so from the plane of Maple trees I present to you the 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
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been working on getting Matrix 1.3 out the door and generally working towards a better process for handling releases alongside critical proposals for the protocol. The goal is to be able to ship these major features while reducing the risk of a release falling behind. Watch this space for more details as this should result in MSCs getting through the process a little bit quicker.
For Matrix 1.3, we're targeting Thursday, June 16th, 2022 as our release date, though this comes with a small asterisk: we're looking to land quite a lot of stuff so might have to adjust the date once more as needed. We do feel reasonably confident in the date though - watch for blog posts titled Matrix 1.3 in the coming weeks.
Random MSC of the week
The script has chosen MSC2846 - Decentralizing media through CIDs as your random MSC this week. The MSC raises an interesting question about how to make media more akin to events in Matrix. If you're interested in this area, take a read of it and the related MSCs.
Hey there, I'm Aditya Rajput (aka BURG3R5), a sophomore at IIT Roorkee, India. This summer I'll be working on implementing encrypted Search in Matrix rooms. More details about this project can be found here. Once a week, I'll be blogging about my progress (plus some neat stuff I find during research) in this blog. Technical discussion and more frequent updates can be found in the public room #encrypted-search:matrix.org.
While writing my GSoC proposal, I'd already made some progress w.r.t. the actual code required for this project, and my preliminary implementation can be found here.
Looking forward to working in this ecosystem with you all!
Hello everyone, my name is nannanko. From today, I will officially participate in GSoC to contribute code to the Kazv Project. I hope I can get along well with you all.
Hey there!
I'm Binesh Munukurthi, a Computer Science student from India. I'll be working on the 3rd Party Authorised Room Membership project for this year's GSoC.
This project aims to develop an application that has the ability to delegate membership of a room based on a user’s interaction with other third party services.
For more details on what I'll be implementing, please refer to the link
I'll be posting my weekly updates here
If you are interested in knowing more about the project's progress, feel free to join the public room #matrix-cerberus:cadair.com.
I look forward to spending a wonderful summer with you all!
Thanks!
Hi! I'm Snehit Sah. I will be contributing to KDE's Matrix client, NeoChat, during GSoC. I will add Spaces support to the application. My progress can be followed at my blog.
Hoping for a fun stay!
This week was a short one, but work continues on fast room joins, testing Synapse with workers on Complement,
and increasing the efficiency of Synapse with regard to database i/o. In addition, we released v1.60.0 (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases), which includes
work to reduce the possibility of database corruption
a fix to a bug introduced in Synapse 1.60.0rc1 that would break some imports from synapse.module_api
This week we released Dendrite 0.8.7! This is a highly recommended update since it fixes some fairly large bugs:
Support added for room version 10
A number of state handling bugs have been fixed, which previously resulted in missing state events, unexpected state deletions, reverted memberships and unexpectedly rejected/soft-failed events in some specific cases
Fixed destination queue performance issues as a result of missing indexes, which speeds up outbound federation considerably
A bug which could cause the /register endpoint to return HTTP 500 has been fixed
As always, please feel free to join us in the #dendrite:matrix.org room for more discussion!
Quadrix is a single-codebase, multi-platform project, using the meanwhile deprecated ReactXP framework (Microsoft's answer to Flutter), which compiles to iOS, Android, and web/Electron. The Quadrix apps are available in the main app stores for mobiles and desktops (including Snapcraft and Flathub). Repo is at https://github.com/alariej/quadrix. Would be great to have a few people test the apps and leave feedback in the repo or in the (still empty) #quadrix:matrix.org room!
Important: Quadrix doesn't support E2EE yet, but it's on the TODO.
Our prototypes for a new app layout are going well. Just a few people have early access in order to give us feedback to ensure we’re building a new layout that works for everyone. Watch this space!
We’ve been working on improving our onboarding flow so that users signing up for Matrix and Element find it much easier. This work is making great progress.
Live location sharing is also making great progress and is quickly approaching the beta phase
On the ElementX front we’ve been busy adopting async/await, introducing state machines, a new design kit component and hooking up crash reporting and sentry.io
We are a bit late on the release candidate. We want to fix a performance regression when switching spaces. It will be available early next week.
We have merged the UnifiedPush PR from P1gP1g. We are doing some adjustments but users will be able to choose their push distributor soon.
The prototypes that are with a small group of early access tester are going down a storm - we’re getting lots of great feedback that will help to build a new app layout that works for all.
Our improvements to the first time user experience are nearly ready for testing and shipping! We’re hoping to make our onboarding experience a lot simpler for folks that are creating an account.
We've had breakthroughs this week on implementing a native Matrix SFU (selective forwarding unit) which speaks MSC3401, thanks to Sean DuBois - all round WebRTC superstar, project lead for the Pion WebRTC implementation for Go, and author of WebRTC for the curious.
Sean generously contributed an initial proof of concept to show how you'd build an MSC3401 SFU using Pion at https://github.com/matrix-org/sfu-to-sfu - which (I think?) is the first time that the first implementation of a major core MSC has been contributed from outside the core team. Huge thanks to Sean to setting the ball going on this - the current PoC demonstrates not just SFU capability but also the decentralised cascading architecture which makes MSC3401 unique. The initial PoC speaks a 'test jig' version of MSC3401 hooked up to a simple web client for experimentation, but Matthew's now experimenting with adding genuine Matrix support to it via mautrix-go, and hooking up Element Call to speak to it.
Adding SFU support to Element Call will mean that we can support more than ~7 simultaneous calls - and with MSC3401-style decentralised cascading, we should be able to support hundreds or even thousands. There's lots of work remaining here, but the ball is now rolling. For more info about SFUs and MSC3401, check out Matthew's CommCon 2021 talk (which was what prompted Sean's implementation work here!)
Separately, we've been running Element Call on staging with E2EE enabled for the last few weeks, and should be releasing the first major Element Call update next week. And once SFUs land, then Element Call can exit beta - watch out Zoom!
libolm 3.2.12 has been released. The main update in this release is that the olm_sas_calculate_mac_fixed_base64 is now exposed in all the official bindings, so that MSC3783 can be implemented. Aside from that, there have been some minor fixes and improvements. See the changelog for more information.
While most of the work in the background continues (Sliding-Sync PoC, Wasm+NodeJS support, UniFFI macros), the first few parts surface through the cracks and show themselves in new PRs: basic wasm web-js and nodejs support has landed with more APIs, tests and documentation on the way; the Sliding Sync PoC has been upgraded to the latest JSON layout and now provides a first set of reactive API via FFI, too. Furthermore this week has seen a bunch of cleanups, simplifications and clarifications around the OlmMachine and crypto types, and we're fixing a bug in the state store, where not all data has been properly encrypted in the past.
This week, the team released version 0.9.9. In this new version, we added a search function to allow searching for an event in database and on server through several requests to the /messages endpoint.
There was also some work on updating the image size when generating thumbnail, which allow saving a bit of calculation when sending events. If using a custom resizer make sure to update the resize response as here.
We also did some refactor with the event sender getter. The getter result is now a future to allow requesting the member event to the server if we cannot find it in memory, to help fix the issue when the user was not found in memory.
Finally, a quick helper function (client.waitForSync) was added. It allows you to wait for a room to appear in (left, join, invited) section of the sync response.
Only a small update this week. One new feature and some much needed Ansible improvements.
Pipes move messages from one room to an other. Useful if you are in important rooms but only want to monitor a single room.
The Ansible role can now manage more aspects of MCM. Mainly in the post setup phase. The major one being if you run into encryption errors for any reason you can run the playbook with the fix tag and it will generate you a new device ID and encryption store.
Pipes move all messages from one room to an other.
Adding a filter now uses the room the command was sent from by default if the roomid is not specified.
Ansible role now has tags for start, stop, configs, fix and all.
Ansible role backs up the configuration.toml file to prevent the possibility of data loss.
We just wanted to take a moment to welcome Rocket.Chat to Matrix, given the recent announcement that they are switching to using Matrix for standards-based interoperable federation! This is incredible news: Rocket.Chat is one of the leading open source collaboration platforms with over 12 million users, and they will all shortly have the option to natively interoperate with the wider Matrix network: the feature has already landed (in alpha) in Rocket.Chat 4.7.0!
We’d like to thank the whole Rocket.Chat team for putting their faith in Matrix and joining the network: the whole idea of Matrix is that by banding together, different independent organisations can build an open decentralised network which is far stronger and more vibrant than any closed communication platform. The more organisations that join Matrix, the more useful and valuable the network becomes for everyone, and the more momentum there is to further refine and improve the protocol. Our intention is that Matrix will grow into a massive open ecosystem and industry, akin to the open Web itself… and that every organisation participating, be that Rocket.Chat, Element, Gitter, Beeper, Famedly or anyone else will benefit from being part of it. We are stronger together!
Rocket.Chat’s implementation follows the “How do you make an existing chat system talk Matrix?” approach we published based on our experiences of linking Gitter into Matrix. Looking at the initial pull request, the implementation lets Rocket.Chat act as a Matrix Application Service, effectively acting as a bridge to talk to an appropriate Matrix homeserver. From chatting with the team, it sounds like next steps will involve adding in encryption via our upcoming matrix-sdk-crypto node bindings - and then looking at ways to transparently embed a homeserver like Dendrite, sharing data as much as possible between RC and Matrix, so Rocket.Chat deployments can transparently sprout Matrix interoperability without having to run a separate homeserver. Super exciting!
You can see a quick preview of a Rocket.Chat user chatting away with an Element user on matrix.org via Matrix here:
So, exciting times ahead - needless to say we’ll be doing everything we can to support Rocket.Chat and ensure their Matrix integration is a success. And at this rate, they might be distinctly ahead of the curve if they start shipping Dendrite! Meanwhile, we have to wonder who will be next? Nextcloud? Mattermost? Place your bets… ;)
--Matthew
Update
Aaron from Rocket.Chat just published an excellent guide & video tour for how to actually set up your Rocket.Chat instance with Dendrite to get talking Matrix!
Hey everyone! Thib is out today, so I'll be exceptionally hosting TWIM in his stead this week. Let's have a look at what's been going on in Matrix-land!
Open Tech Will Save Us #16 🎙
The 16th edition of our virtual meetup Open Tech Will Save Us happened this week! This edition featured a few very interesting projects:
Quentin and Maximilien from Deuxfleurs are creating Garage, a robust and distributed storage backend that can run on old computers. Who can use it? Why? And when should I not use it? Let's find out!
Nathan from the Guardian Project is working with wind, butter, and rasperries to provide applications and messaging to people in low-connectivity areas. A fascinating dive off the grid.
Matrix's Outreachy intern for this summer has been chosen! Usman is starting in early June, and will be working on experiments with Starring Messages! He will be blogging every two weeks, so look out for more 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.
A bite-size MSC which aims to clean up the definition of a widget state event... by moving the "title" field to the root of the state event, alongside the existing "name" field.
This MSC needs someone to write an implementation in at least one homeserver and client to move forwards. Perhaps that someone could be you?
Meanwhile work continues on fast room joins and testing Synapse with workers on Complement. We'd like to remind readers that the fast room joins feature is highly experimental right now and we do not recommend enabling it on production homeservers just yet.
Morning,
maybe it's useful for someone else, I just published my admin scripts for synapse. It's still WiP but it make some basic stuff that I needed in my organisation :
System notify users (all users/users from a list, specific user)
delete sessions/devices not seen for X days
purge the remote media cache
select rooms with various criteria (external/local/empty/created by/encrypted/cleartext)
purge history of theses rooms
shutdown rooms
https://git.fout.re/pi/matrixadminhelpers
It's my first python project, so the code may not structured as it should, I'm still learning, and it's early alpha :)
We added a way to edit permissions in Nheko now. It is an unconventional drag and drop dialog, where you drag users and permissions between different roles. We are hoping that this will make powerlevels easier to understand. Be careful when trying it, the wrong powerlevels might make your room unusable. Now... the bad part about that is, that powerlevels add around 50-100 new strings to translate... Help is appreciated! <3
Nheko now also supports fallback keys, which should make E2EE more reliable after long periods of being offline and you can send images by pressing enter again. The privacy screen is also now fixed for separate room windows and our flatpak supports more image formats.
On Element Web this week we’ve smashed some bugs including those around Threads.
Threads work continues as we’re aiming to improve the notifications and read receipts to improve the experience.
Continuing to make improvements to our automated tests.
The team is driving to complete the work needed to move our new search experience out of Beta. We think this new search is easier to use and helps folks to find what they’re looking for faster.
We’re also making improvements specifically for new users, this will include a new home screen, watch out for those!
In labs (you can enable labs features in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
Video rooms; We’re ironing out some of the details to polish the experience
This week we added emoji14 support so if you want to hide 🫣 , salute 🫡 , or melt 🫠 for your friends, you’ll soon be able to! 🫶 (for Android 12 and above, or devices that support emoji14)
We’re getting ever nearer to a new sign up flow for new users. Our flow today can be confusing and complex, especially when all you want to do is chat with friends. We’ve been working on simplifying the flow and we’ll announce a community testing session very soon!
Also new this week, we’ve opened up a new layout of the app to a small selection of folks. These 15 people will trial the new layout for us, providing feedback along the way. We’ll be opening it up to more feedback soon.
Threads are still in progress as we continue to make progress on the notifications and sort/ordering work that remains.
In order for notifications to work better, we need read receipts to be updated. We’ve got several MSCs ongoing, along with a few Proof of Concepts (PoCs) to move us forward.
MSC3771: Read receipts for threads
MSC3772: Push rule for mutually related events
MSC3773: Notifications for threads
With that we’ve also updated some layouts and completed some bug fixes, on all platforms.
Trixnity 2.1.0 has been released. It includes support for Server-Server-API endpoints (client and server) and fetching missing TimelineEvents in client. The latter is used for fragmented timelines: If you want to show a timeline starting from any EventId and RoomId (e. g. from unread marker), Trixnity will try to fetch missing TimelineEvents from server. If you reach TimelineEvents, that are already saved in the local database, the timeline fragments are merged magically 🧙
A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.
Since our last update from about a month ago, we had two bugfix releases:
Ruma 0.6.2 added methods to get the current room powerlevels from a StrippedPowerLevelsEvent and to get a user's membership whether the state event is redacted or not, and added a missing export to track member changes.
Ruma 0.6.3 fixed the serialization and deserialization of events with a dynamic event_type and added convenience constructors for logging in with a UserIdentifier.
The majority of changes we've seen over the last week, where minor fixes in style, squashing of bugs and CI improvements as most work is currently happening in the background on Sliding Sync, mobile and UniFFI support. But there have been two additions worth mentioning: first, we've improved on the autojoin example for appservices, and secondly we've merged a community contribution to make resolving of room-alias more handy.
This week, we migrated to Matrix Api Lite 1.0.0, our simple wrapper around the matrix API endpoints and data models. This means we are now using the v1.2 Matrix spec 🎉.
Also, support for HiveCollections as Database provider was added now that our patches to hive were accepted upstream. And we now provide a way to dump and restore the client local database.
Finally, we fixed a bug with where reactions were not properly discarded from the cache and some bugs in our e2e tests.
Meet other matrix users, chat about Matrix, the rest, and everything else, discuss your Matrix ideas, sign each other in persona, and maybe spice the evening with a good mate or beer.
Also when the bbq is lit you may wish you brougth your favorite item :)
Every first Wednesday of the month in the c-base at 8pm ('til the next pandemic).
uhoreg shared with us a press release from Rocket.Chat announcing their work on interoperability with Matrix. It is super exciting to see another big player join the ecosystem. Watch this space next week for more announcements!
Dept of Ping 🏓
Thib is out this week, therefore so are the ping stats in TWIM (don't worry, they'll be back next week!).
Element has signed the open letter of the Global Encryption Coalition, of which we are members of. We are working with them to push back against any intrusive measures that could compromise the privacy of users.
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.
Some new MSCs popping up this week around widgets, room types, fixing notifications with threads and room version 11! Though note that the last one currently serves as a means for the Spec Core Team to publicly track what should be included in room version 11, and is by no means is its content considered final.
The Spec Core Team are currently focused on room version 10 and getting Matrix v1.3 out the door soon. There's also been some discussion on MSC2676: Message editing this week, with the intention of finally landing that in the spec. Thanks to richvdh for driving the charge there.
Homeservers currently make use of Client Server Media APIs to pull media from other homeservers over federation. This has worked for a long time, but is a bit of a confusing blur of the lines between client<->server and server<->server traffic. It also makes it difficult to require different authentication rules for clients versus servers.
This MSC aims to help clean that up. Take a look if you're interested!
This week we released Synapse 1.59, which features a bunch of niceties including new features, bug fixes and performance improvements. Read all about it, including increased flexibility for workers and improvements on push rules, on the matrix.org blog!
Aside from this, the team is still hard at work and focusing on making Synapse better, among other things by looking at improving performances on room join and decreasing memory usage.
Last week new version of Hookshot came out starring the following changes:
Docker images can now be built cross-platform. Thanks Paul for getting arm64 builds going!
Improved GitLab push hook formatting: markdown commit hashes, link "N commits" to the list of commits, if there are more commits than can be shown only link instead, and show committer unless a single person committed and pushed
RSS feed support got a configuration widget: now need for using bot commands anymore! (though they are still supported)
Added widgets.openIdOverrides option to help developers test configuration widgets locally
Fixed regression where GitHubRepo and GitLabRepo connection config options were not being honoured
Better error handling: if the backend hits an error that causes your connection to KT chats to be dropped, the bridge should notify you about it (not that it should ever happen in the first place, but you never know!)
Better logging: the Node module can be configured to print the arguments of RPC commands received from / sent to the Python module. The example Node config includes a default set that should be helpful for general debugging.
Room metadata bridging: setting an Open Chat title & topic from Matrix should work now!
Setting the title of a Direct Chat should work too, but topics remain unbridged (since KT Direct Chats don't have topics/descriptions)
Defensive error handling: Attempts to add a non-friend user to a DM will be refused by the bridge, since KT only allows Direct Chats between friends
KT does allow "1:1 Open Chats" between non-friends, but those aren't bridged yet
Also, testing adds support for joining KakaoTalk rooms from Matrix, either by joining an existing portal or providing an Open Chat URL to the bot with a join command. ...However, I've been unable to test this, since KT is stingy about whom it allows to join Open Chats! So please give this a try if you can.
In other news, this bridge is now listed on Matrix.org! 🥳 Thanks Thib !
Also, for the time being, I will be taking a hiatus from this bridge & the LINE bridge, as I'll be quite occupied for the foreseeable future on account of having joined Element 🤩!! (The bridges aren't paused forever--I just have to work out the details of their future before making any promises I can't keep 🙂)
Special thanks to all those who have given feedback & advice on these bridges, and to Beeper for having sponsored their development ❤️
Hello! Just a notice to say that the `matrix-appservice-discord project has kindly been adopted by the matrix.org foundation, which means that hopefully there will be a lot more time available to maintain it than when it was my personal project! We expect to have a new update for you (the first one in 1.5 years) very soon! If you've got any questions about this, please feel free to ask in the usual spots like #discord:half-shot.uk.
Read default port and listen address from config url (@BtbN)
Improvements to pillifying IRC nicks, again
Fixes for AUTOQUERY not always working correctly
Allow anyone to use STATUS command to get their own status
Filter control characters only for plumbs so people can send garbage to IRC if they wish from Matrix
Support for converting IRC color codes to Matrix (@tjaderxyz)
Fixed compose docker Synapse configuration for registration
Improved Python 3.10 compatibliy (@BtbN)
Hidden room to hide joins using restricted rooms join rule (@BtbN)
Some cool stuff this time around! Aside from many bug fixes this release has two great new features: IRC message colors and hiding invites from channels.
IRC colors are enabled by default and are rendered how your Matrix client sees fit. They can be disabled per network if needed.
Hiding joins works with room v9 restricted join rules feture to allow IRC ghosts to join rooms without an invite from the bridge bot first. This clears some clutter and may even make joining a bit faster in the long run - we will see. This feature is disabled by default and needs to be enabled by the bridge administrator as it is consiered a "labs" feature for now.
The main work is currently happening behind the scenes, while we prepare for the upcoming tasks - like WASM and NodeJS support for the crypto-crate and work on UniFFI. We are also hardening our processes for improved security and risk management around our code base, dependencies and the potential to ship binaries.
👉️ We are very happy about the influx of people, who joined our developer community questions since the release. We'd like to take this opportunity again to invite anyone else interested in hacking on matrix in rust to check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.
We are proud to announce that Ossrox is now listed as a hosting provider on matrix.org! 😍 We offer Matrix Home Servers via https://ossrox.org - for the time being only in the German-speaking area. We are dedicated to hosting open-source software and also offer other services in the messaging, groupware and web meeting segments. If you got any questions, just reach out to us at #public:ossrox.org.
Hello Matrix friends. We have recently launched an online learning platform that has Element at its core. We added some great features such as annotations for both course material and web pages. Here is an overview video of what we are doing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY3safwbllQ
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.
Synapse 1.59 is
out! Let's see what's new in this version.
Generic worker types
When Synapse instances are subject to high load, it can be useful to use workers
to balance the load more effectively. Workers are separate processes that can
take some of the load off the main Synapse process, and allow the homeserver to
scale more effectively.
In the past, Synapse only provided a specific set of types of workers, each
capable of handling a specific set of operations. For some time now we have been
working on allowing more flexibility around worker configuration, which started
all the way back in Synapse
1.12.0 with the
introduction of a generic worker application type.
Synapse 1.59 furthers this work by deprecating the synapse.app.appservice and
synapse.app.user_dir worker application types. Homeserver administrators
should change the configuration of instances using these types to the generic
synapse.app.generic_worker application type, and use the
notify_appservices_from_worker and update_user_directory_from_worker to
delegate application service and user directory work (respectively) to a worker.
See the upgrade
notes
for more information on this change.
Push rules
Push rules allow Matrix clients to define notification rules on a homeserver.
One often reported issue with notification in Matrix is the fact that
notifications are sent out when server ACLs, which define which server(s) can
and cannot interact in a room, change. This is especially annoying during big
waves of abuse, as there might be multiple servers that need to be banned from
rooms, thus causing a lot of unneeded notifications.
Synapse 1.59 now supports silencing server ACL updates, by implementing the new
push rule documented in
MSC3786.
However, since this MSC hasn't been incorporated into the spec yet, this
behaviour is disabled by default in Synapse: see the implementation pull
request for more information
on turning it on.
Synapse 1.59 also allows third-party modules to validate and change the actions
associated with an existing push rule via the Module
API.
This is helpful for modules wishing to, for example, configuring specific
notification settings when new users register.
Everything else
As of Synapse 1.59, Synapse will not communicate the name of devices over
federation (unless configured otherwise), in order to better preserve user
privacy. See the upgrade
notes
for more information.
Also note that we have issued a patch release for 1.59 (1.59.1) which fixes a
long-standing bug that started to bite a good amount of server administrators.
Server admins that are looking into upgrading their instance to Synapse 1.59 are
recommended to upgrade to 1.59.1 rather than 1.59.0.
See the full
changelog for a
complete list of changes in this release. Also please have a look at the
upgrade
notes
for this version.
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) Beeper, Dirk
Klimpel, Šimon
Brandner,
henryclw and Andrew
Do.
This audit was a bit of a whirlwind, as while we were clearly overdue an audit of Matrix’s E2EE implementations, we decided quite late in the day to focus on bringing vodozemac to auditable production quality rather than simply doing a refresh of the original libolm audit. However, we got there in time, thanks to a monumental sprint from Damir and Denis over Christmas. The reason we went this route is that vodozemac is an enormous step change forwards in quality over libolm, and vodozemac is now the reference Matrix E2EE implementation going forward. Just as libolm went live with NCC’s security review back in 2016, similarly we’re kicking off the first stable release of vodozemac today with Least Authority’s audit. In fact, vodozemac just shipped as the default E2EE library in matrix-rust-sdk 0.5, released at the end of last week!
The main advantages of vodozemac over libolm include:
Native Rust - type, memory and thread safety is preserved both internally, and within the context of larger Rust programs (such as those building on matrix-rust-sdk). This is particularly important given the memory bugs which libolm sprouted, despite our best efforts to the contrary.
Performance - vodozemac benchmarks roughly 5-6x faster than libolm on typical hardware
Better primitives - vodozemac is built on the best practice cryptographic primitives from the Rust community, rather than the generic Brad Conte primitives used by libolm.
Also, we’ve finally fixed one of the biggest problems with libolm - which was that the hardest bit of implementing E2EE in Matrix wasn’t necessarily the encryption protocol implementation itself, but how you glue it into your Matrix client’s SDK. It turns out ~80% of the code and complexity needed to securely implement encryption ends up being in the SDK rather than the Olm implementation - and each client SDK ended up implementing its own independent state machine and glue for E2EE, leading to a needlessly large attack & bug surface.
To address this problem, vodozemac is designed to plug into matrix-sdk-crypto - an SDK-independent Rust library which abstracts away the complexities and risks of implementing E2EE, designed to plug into existing SDKs in any language. For instance, Element Android already supports delegating its encryption to matrix-sdk-crypto; Element iOS got this working too last week, and we’re hard at work adding it to Element Web too. (This set of projects is codenamed Element R). Meanwhile, Element X (the project to switch Element iOS and Element Android to use matrix-rust-sdk entirely) obviously benefits from it too, as matrix-rust-sdk now leans on matrix-sdk-crypto for its encryption.
Therefore we highly recommend that developers using libolm migrate over to vodozemac - ideally by switching to matrix-sdk-crypto as a way of managing the interface between Matrix and the E2EE implementation. Vodozemac does also provides a similar API to libolm with bindings for JS and Python (and C++ in progress) if you want to link directly against it - e.g. if you’re using libolm for something other than Matrix, for example XMPP, ActivityPub or Jitsi. We’ll continue to support and maintain libolm for now though, at least until the majority of folks have switched to vodozemac.
In terms of the audit itself - we recommend reading it yourself, but the main takeaway is that Least Authority identified 10 valid concerns, of which we addressed 8 during the audit process. The remaining two are valid but lower priority, and we’ll fix them as part of our maintenance backlog. All the issues identified are excellent valid points, and we’re very glad that Least Authority have added huge value here by highlighting some subtle gotchas which we’d missed. (If you write Rust, you’ll particularly want to check out their zeroisation comments).
So: exciting times! Vodozemac should be landing in a Matrix client near you in the near future - we’ll yell about it loudly once Element switches over. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please head over to #e2ee:matrix.org.
Thanks again to gematik for helping fund the audit, and to Least Authority for doing an excellent job - and being patient and accommodating beyond the call of duty when we suddenly switched the scope from libolm to vodozemac at the last minute ;)
Next up: we’re going to get the Rust matrix-sdk-crypto independently audited (once this burndown is complete) so that everyone using the matrix-sdk-crypto state machine for Matrix E2EE can have some independent reassurance too - a huge step forward from the wild west of E2EE SDK implementations today!
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.
The Spec Core Team has decided to not include MSC3440 (threading via m.thread relations) specifically in the upcoming Matrix v1.3 release. We previously stated that it would be in v1.3, but there's a few unproven MSCs (namely MSC3773 (notifications for threads)) which make it feel improper to put threads into the spec at this stage. We're aiming for a future (very near) spec release to contain threads, assuming we can get enough of the feature landed. This is a very similar approach to what we did with Spaces: while the core feature existed as FCP-concluded for a while, we wanted to give some other MSCs a chance to land before writing it up formally.
As a follow-on from this, any implementations that are currently assuming "v1.3" spec support translates to threading support should note the following:
Clients which are pre-emptively checking for v1.3 in /versions should stop doing that. Look for org.matrix.msc3440.stable as an "unstable" feature flag instead.
Servers which offer MSC3440's behaviour should expose it on stable endpoints and expose org.matrix.msc3440.stable for clients to detect.
Optionally, clients and servers can drop support for the org.matrix.msc3440 (truly unstable) flag, given clients & servers should have already upgraded.
At the spec level, we'll still be writing up MSC3440's dependencies (aggregations and friends), but will notably be missing MSC3440 specifically in v1.3. If folks can update their clients urgently, it would be massively appreciated!
A simple change to the auth rules to help prevent an edge case where one is able to invite a user, but not disinvite them as the latter requires a separate permission. The MSC attempts to solve this by always allowing the cancellation of invitations you've sent.
A small MSC, but one with some open threads still. Perhaps a good opportunity to go in and clean it up!
In parallel, Olivier's been doing groundwork to reduce replication traffic for workerised Synapse deployments, Andrew (anoa) has been looking at media retention policies and work continues on faster room joins.
This week we've actually made two releases — Dendrite 0.8.4 and Dendrite 0.8.5 — which are both primarily targeting performance and bug fixes.
We've also released our new living documentation, which is available at https://matrix-org.github.io/dendrite/, which features new installation instructions and documents that will be helpful to Dendrite server administrators. We will be writing more documentation and expanding this over time.
Changes include:
The built-in NATS Server has been updated to version 2.8.2
Monolith deployments will no longer panic at startup if given a config file that does not include the internal_api and external_api options
State resolution v2 now correctly identifies other events related to power events, which should fix some event auth issues
The latest events updater will no longer implicitly trust the new forward extremities when calculating the current room state, which may help to avoid some state resets
The one-time key count is now correctly returned in /sync even if the request otherwise timed out, which should reduce the chance that unnecessary one-time keys will be uploaded by clients
The create-account tool should now work properly when the database is configured using the global connection pool
Fixes a regression introduced in the previous version where appservices, push and phone-home statistics would not work over plain HTTP
Adds missing indexes to the sync API output events table, which should significantly improve /sync performance and reduce database CPU usage
Building Dendrite with the bimg thumbnailer should now work again (contributed by database64128)
As always, feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more Dendrite-related discussion.
Ement.el, a Matrix client for [GNU Emacs](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs], received some more updates this week:
Additions
New Transient-based command menu for room buffers, bound to ?.
New command ement-list-members, which lists all members in a room.
Member completion now completes from all members in a room (rather than only those whose messages have been seen).
Power-level events are displayed.
Grouped membership events have tooltips showing each member's individual event.
When usernames are colorized, message bodies may optionally be colorized in a less intense shade of the same color, so they are easily distinguished yet easy on the eyes (and, of course, the shading is customizable).
Changes
When displaying usernames in the margin, names that are wider than the margin are abbreviated, with the full name in the tooltip.
Fixes
Typing notifications (recently broken--oops!).
Sending direct messages marks new direct rooms as direct rooms.
Event notifications for rooms not displayed in a buffer.
As always, feel free to join us in #ement.el:matrix.org.
The newest version of the app (1.8.14) was released on Monday! In this release we’ve made a bunch of improvements and bug fixes, check it out here
💊 We also merged an initial version of mention pills and are working on ironing out edge cases. Exciting!
There’s good progress on the new authentication flows and live location sharing, both of which we’re looking forward to sharing and testing with you soon.
On the ElementX front we're nearly done with the DevX setup and are working towards using the latest Rust SDK
unit and UI test runs on the CI and Codecov.io coverage reports
swiftlint, danger-swift and sonarcloud.io checks for code quality
automatic generation of PR builds, published on diawi
scripts for importing and reusing localizable strings from Android
Cinny v2.0.0: Session verification and other e2ee features
Features
Redesign app/user settings
Add support to manage cross-signing and key backup
Add support to manage sessions
Add Session verification by emojis
Add recently used section to emoji board
Add LaTeX / math input and rendering support
Add notification sounds
Add sound on incoming invites
Sort DM's by activity
Sort search results by activity
Improve jump to unread button
Replace confirm and prompt with custom dialogs
Adapt to different device widths
Native application using Tauri
Bugs
Fix loading on older browsers
Fix crash on load and room creation on dendrite
Fix can't open spaces from public room list
Fix max power level in room permissions
Fix incorrect custom html crashing app
Fix crash on unable to getContent of tombstoned room
Don't enable e2ee for bridged platform
See release at: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny/releases/tag/v2.0.0
Cinny for desktop
Since this release, we are also shipping a desktop app of Cinny for Windows, MacOS and Linux. You can download the app for your platform from https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny-desktop/releases
Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in/
Join our channel at: #cinny:matrix.org
Github: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@cinnyapp
The Rust Matrix team is very excited to announce the next major release Matrix SDK 0.5 "stores and native crypto", now available for everyone by adding matrix-sdk = "0.5.0" to their dependencies in their Cargo.toml. This first major release in about 8 months brings significant changes many have been waiting for:
Better, safer, native-er crypto: matrix-sdk 0.5 ditches libolm in favor of Vodozemac, the completely fresh rust-native re-implementation of the crypto crate. It has also been audited, the report of which is scheduled to be released soon.
Store revamp: the entire cache storage infrastructure for crypto and state has been restructured to allow for full plug-ability, with even the two default supported backends, sled and indexeddb both being separate crates now. And as a matter of fact, a community-driven sql implementation has already been published as beta (with postgres and sqlite support) by charlotte 🦝.
WebAssembly; both of these changes also allow us to finally make WASM a Tier 1 supported target for the SDK. Not only does it build and even use the browser native indexeddb for permanent storage, we also have CI tests ensuring nothing will break this support going forward.
Features, Features and Process: there's plenty more features and bug fixes in this release, e.g. native thumbnail generation support, as well as changes on our processes going forward.
Buscarron is the new backoffice of the etke.cc and its main feature is to receive web forms (HTML/HTTP POST) and convert them into (encrypted) matrix messages.
So, what's new?
Email confirmation after form submissions with Postmark
If you use Matrix with the Signal bridge (or any bridge) with relay mode
enabled, your guests have probably experienced the confusion where they don't know who else (on Matrix) is in the chat as only Matrix can double-puppet.
When this bot is added to a Matrix room, it will announce:
Who the room members are when a new Signal user joins;
When a Matrix user joins or leaves, who that Matrix user was.
I built it just this afternoon using the excellent matrix-bot-sdk, but it's in Typescript and has plentyful unit tests!
PRs for adding support for other chat apps (basically identifying which bridge from the puppeted username) are very welcome! https://github.com/jakecoppinger/whos-in-this-room-matrix-bot
The videos from the HYTRADBOI conference a few weeks back are now publicly available, in case anyone was curious but couldn't make the conference. I gave a talk about building collaborative, open software on Matrix. The whole conference was great, so I recommend browsing the schedule for videos that may interest you. 😄
Loomio, an open source collaborative decision making tool, now supports integrating with Matrix rooms using their chatbot. They previously supported other (lesser) chat systems, but have recently added support for Matrix.
Dept of Ping 🏓
Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.
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.
"Wowza, that's a lot of new MSCs!" I hear you say. This is actually a listing of the last 3 weeks, as it was pointed out to me that the last 3 editions of TWIM have not all features an MSC status update - which means some MSCs may not have necessary made it into the limelight.
As such, here's those from this past week, as well as the ones that were missed!
Spec Updates
It's that time of the year again - a new Spec release is on the horizon! Matrix v1.3 is expected to land sometime this month, and will include:
Any other MSCs which have so far been accepted, but not yet made it into the spec.
MSCs which land between now and v1.3 might get incorporated if easy enough, though chances are they'll slip to v1.4 (expected next quarter).
On top of that, the other bit of news is that the proposal-in-review label has now been removed from the matrix-spec-proposals repo and thus all MSCs. This doesn't mean your MSC is no longer in review! We simply found the label redundant along with the other labels in the process (it was attached to all MSCs which hadn't been accepted/merged yet, which means very little) and thus we decided to remove it to reduce noise.
This MSC has actually been potentially(?) superseded by MSC3382. In short, both look to provide a solution to the problem of attaching (multiple!) images to messages, such that clients can display an album of images in a single event in the timeline.
Check it out if you're interested in introducing such a feature!
Synapse v1.58.0 was released this week! Check out the v1.58 blog post for the full scoop, but the highlights are:
Our Docker images and Debian packages are now built from a dependency lockfile courtesy of Poetry. Props to David for leading the charge on this multi-week epic.
An experimental implementation of MSC3383 has been contributed by @Bubu and @jcgruenhage at Famedly, which will help with proxying federation traffic, amongst other uses.
An experimental implementation of MSC2815 has been merged, which allows room moderators to view redact event content for the purposes of moderation. This was contributed by @tulir at Beeper.
Device list updates are now asynchronous thanks to Erik, leading to much faster login times for accounts in big rooms.
plus many other bug fixes and improvements!
We also released a v1.58.1 patch shortly afterwards to address an issue with the Debian packages on some configurations. Server admins not using the Matrix.org Debian packages do not need to install this patch release.
Otherwise, ongoing work from the core team continues with Sean and Rich working on faster room join performance, Olivier pushing forwards on testing Synapse with workers in Complement, while Erik has been tackling general performance work.
Hey folks! We're announcing our 1.6.0 release for matrix-hookshot today. More features in this release: tadzik has gotten involved and given us support for RSS feeds in this release. You can check out how to get going with those in our hosted documentation.
Add support for GitLab in the widgets configuration UI. (#320)
Send a notice when a GitLab merge request gets some review comments. (#314)
Add new !hookshot gitlab project command to configure project bridges in rooms. See the docs for instructions. (#321)
New hookshot_connection_event(_failed) metrics for tracking successful event handling.
Reinstate matrix_* metrics which were previously not being recorded. (#312)
This week brings another round of big improvements & new features!
Features & fixes include:
Fixes to Docker support & the documentation for setting it up
Changes to the login flow
The bridge can now be configured to enforce a login flow that more closely matches the official KakaoTalk desktop client's, and to better warn you when a new login will kick out another one of your KT sessions. This will hopefully prevent the bridge from getting KT accounts banned!
Backfilling for KT->Matrix read receipts
Commands for adding/removing KakaoTalk friends
Commands to edit your KakaoTalk ID & mark it as shared or hidden
Matrix->KT DM creation, i.e. the ability to create a new DM with a KakaoTalk user from within Matrix
This might fail on the first attempt at creating a DM. If it does, try re-inviting the KakaoTalk puppet to the room.
Many stability & correctness improvements
With the combination of friends list curation & DM creation support, it should now be possible to connect with KT contacts entirely from Matrix! Simply add some friends, list them, and invite a listed friend to a 1:1 room!
This week we released Thunderbird Beta 101.0b1. It includes a bunch of bug fixes for the Matrix implementation and shows reactions as system messages, so you know when someone gives you a 👍️.
Someone on Twitter complained that no chat client works like MSN anymore, where you could have separate windows for each chat. So for MSN compatibility we added that. (It is a bit experimental still, expect some stuff to not work or crash)
Bulbu also went through a lot of effort to add a second set of emoji shortcodes to Nheko. Those should be more familiar to people coming from other platforms or clients while the old shortcodes are available still as well. We also saw a lot of progress on the Finnish, Chinese, Indonesian and Russian translations, animated images should work properly in the image viewer again, buttons for opening the member list are now clearly marked with a people icon next to them. The memberlist is also now search- and sortable.
Anyway, have a look at how important multiple windows are:
FluffyChat 1.4.0 has been released with a lot of bug fixes, performance improvements and new designs. Take a look at the new designed sign up screen, which also now supports recommended homeservers from joinmatrix.org
Ement.el has received several updates since the last time it was mentioned in TWIM:
Additions
A new room list command, ement-taxy-room-list, shows rooms grouped "smartly" (and programmably). (It will be made the default soon; until then, call the command to use it.)
The new room list shows unread-notification/highlight counts, similar to Element.
Basic support for spaces:
Rooms (and spaces) can be added to and removed from spaces.
Rooms are listed under their spaces in ement-taxy-room-list.
Reactions can now be toggled off (i.e. redacted) by clicking them, like in Element.
Command ement-room-send-file allows uploading non-image files to rooms, and file messages are now displayed usefully, so the files can be downloaded or viewed.
Command ement-ignore-user ignores and unignores users.
Command ement-tag-room adds and removes favourite, low-priority, or custom tags on rooms.
Command ement-room-occur allows searching messages in a room buffer, similar to Emacs's occur command (i.e. it locally searches already-received messages).
Membership events are now coalesced by default, similar to Element (especially helpful in large public rooms, like bridged IRC rooms, where join/part spam can be overwhelming).
"In reply to" links in replies, as well as other matrix.to links, can be activated in a room buffer to go to the linked message.
Mentions in outgoing messages are HTML-linkified (aka "pilled"), like Element.
Generated avatars for rooms that have none, similar to Element. (Only displayed in ement-taxy-room-list for now.)
Option ement-shr-use-fonts (disabled by default, which prevents HTML messages from being displayed in a different font).
Faces for favourite/low-priority rooms.
Redacted messages that are still known locally are now displayed with a strikethrough (after reconnecting, their content will be unknown).
When images are disabled, image messages are presented as clickable URLs, so they can still be viewed.
Some events, like membership events and images, are displayed alongside a vertical bar to help distinguish them from normal messages.
Even "hotter"-looking timestamps for rooms updated in the last hour.
Changes
Refactored notification system. Now easier to configure (see M-x customize-group RET ement-notify RET).
Fixes
Improved error handling when looking up homeserver hostnames and .well-known URIs.
Improved error handling when processing malformed events.
"Elemental" display style (not used by many users, apparently).
In this months demos (also shown off at the top of the TWIM post), Eric showed off a proof of concept to anonymize your screenshots so you can easily include more context when submitting logs or bug reports without worrying where the bug occurred. The current concept will color block all of the text on the page to still maintain the structure of the app but completely hide the content itself.
This still has a ways to go before it's integrated in Element under the click of a button so if anyone wants to take over or give feedback, go comment on the issue, https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/9615. If you want to use the anonymization now, you can manually run the JavaScript snippet from the issue in the browser devtools.
This mode could even be further extended further to include event_id labels in the corner of each message to easily correlate the logs to the screenshot.
We are testing out Sonarcloud, you’ll see comments from the sonarcloud bot in new PRs about bugs, vulnerabilities and other inconsistencies that it has found
Our first time user experience is getting some attention in Web. We’re working on simplifying a user’s first session as we know it can be pretty daunting
We’re thinking about new ways to give flexibility on the Home screen - watch this space!
The new Create Account flow is being implemented, currently we’re working on the captcha and T&Cs pages
Fix several crashes like when searching or when clicking bottom bar twice
Improve interaction with spaces which are in a space
ElementX-iOS
We are going to share more and more about ElementX-iOS, a complete rewrite of the Element-iOS app using matrix-rust-sdk. We made a prototype last quarter. The result was so promising that we want to go full steam on it
Work is moving forward with our proposals for a new app layout, we’re excited to share it with you
Our Create Account experience is still being updated, we’re currently working on ensuring that the Sign-in pieces work as expected
Fixed a number of crash bugs around calls, launching app and space list
Notifications have have been improved so that there is a noise for every notification which is received when they are enabled, in line with how web and iOS work
On the SDK side, we are working to improve / clarify / document the public API. It’s still in progress, but the generated API documentation is already visible here: https://matrix-org.github.io/matrix-android-sdk2/
Over the last two weeks, the theme in populus-viewer development has been permissions:
The settings menu for rooms has been redesigned
It's now possible to assign and remove standard roles (admin and moderator) from populus viewer
It's now possible to set power levels for standard events and actions from populus viewer
It's now possible to ban and unban using the membership management modal
Redacting the messages of others is now exposed as an action for those with that permission.
Besides that, I've been having some fun on the css-overhaul branch reorganizing some design elements, and centralizing the color CSS in a few variables, opening the way for things like a dark mode and user-definable themes. Here's a peek at the new milder and more welcoming default look:
The permissions work now has us at one thousand commits. Here's to the next thousand! 🎉 As always, if you want to learn more, follow project progress, or talk about the future of social annotation on matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.
I'm working on a few features for Wrench's anniversary on 13th June.
Here's a bug fix for storing identities and a new button to check your membership status in a room.
Added: A "Am I a member?" button tells your membership state in a room.
Fixed: Unchanged identities got deleted from localStorage when editing identities twice.
After a few release candidates and weeks later, we released Trixnity 2.0.0 today! It contains many breaking changes due to a large refactoring, which allows us to share a lot code between server and client implementations of the Matrix APIs.
This means, that Trixnity can be used to implement matrix servers in addition to application services and clients!
Trixnity finally has support for Kotlin/JS. You can implement a browser client or even better: multiplatform client. Support for Kotlin/Native will follow soon (e. g. for iOS clients). Right now, there is no trixnity-client-store implementation for JavaScript (e. g. IndexedDB), so you need to stick with InMemoryStore at the moment.
Besides notification support (push rules are evaluated), we introduced helpers to get the complete timeline as Kotlin-Flow (no more complicated loops to get the timeline). You can even subscribe to all timeline events, which is really helpful to implement bots with e2e encryption support. Speaking of e2e encryption: libolm is bundled into trixnity-olm jars, so you don't need to build olm by your own anymore.
These are the most important features. For the complete changelog, have a look at the release candidates.
This week the team released version 0.9.0 which contains new features and some refactoring as many deprecated endpoints were removed so make sure to use the new ones when doing the migration.
Support for the Element recent emoji (io.element.recent_emoji) was added. A new method to get the last read marker was added.
Lastly, the timeline logic was enhanced, and it's now possible to load the timeline at a specific event. So you can load the room to the last event and then paginate through the new events. When reaching the last event, the timeline will automatically allow new events to be added in the timeline when received.
I have spent the day ignoring more important things and trying to have something to TWIM. I wrote (yet another) GitHub Action for sending build status to matrix rooms. This action looks at all the completed jobs in your workflow and posts a combined status for the workflow as a message and reactions for all the individual jobs, inspired by the maubot GitLab plugin.
Hello together. I made a generic bot, named Safed Sundarata, or Sundar in short, that should make it easy to get basic special functionality working. It has a lot of different functionality so you have an example code to work off of. The main motivation for this bot was to provide an !error <code> command for the developers in the ReactOS Matrix Rooms, which translates error codes to human readable text. Then of course i added other useful or fun commands to the bot. You want to read the Readme to find out more.
This is the first time i ever wrote a bot, so feedback and corrections to the Source Code are highly appreciated. It is written in Go using the mautrix-go framework (thanks tulir and everyone who worked on this making it easy!). Even easier is to run and build it with go, no insane build system with broken dependencies required, which was the reason why i made it from scratch.
We have released v1.4.2 of Mjolnir https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir/releases/tag/v1.4.2 which includes:
Bot:
A new JoinWaveShortCircuit protection, thanks to Jonathan with https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir/pull/280. This protection can be used to detect a mass-join scenario and set the room to invite-only.
Change of behaviour: Mjolnir will now apply server ACL and member bans to the most recently active rooms first (while syncing). The order was random before.
The causes of errors at startup (e.g. via misconfiguration) have been made more clear.
The image with the latest tag on dockerhub is now correctly in sync with the main branch.
I am releasing a brand new moderation bot, graim! This bot allows you to moderate communities that are bridged with Discord via matrix-appservice-discord. You can tie a Matrix account to a Discord account, and moderate both platforms seamlessly from either end! Graim supports one Discord server and as many Matrix rooms as you want, per instance. :)
You can run it yourself from the Github - https://github.com/luphoria/graim
You can join the matrix space, which is bridged to the Discord server
I'm streaming every week live coding Rust and Matrix at https://twitch.tv/andybalaam and https://andybalaam.uk.to (Owncast). Feel free to join me as I write a Rust Matrix bot. I'm currently on a side quest to add Redis support to the matrix-rust-sdk crypto store. You can watch past streams at diode.zone/a/andybalaam.
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.
