R Midhun Suresh: Right Sidebar for Hydrogen client
R Midhun Suresh from the Mar Baselios College of Engineering & Technology in Trivandrum, India will be working on Hydrogen this summer, mentored by Bruno Windels. He will be working on adding a right panel to the room view, including a member list and room information. He will be blogging at https://midhunsureshr.github.io throughout the project.
Devin Ragotzy: Ruma's Automated Checks
My name is Devin Ragotzy. I am a student at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, studying computer science. I was lucky enough to work last summer on Ruma and have continued to contribute to the project. I was accepted to work on Ruma's automated checks project, mentored by Isaiah Inuwa, Jonas Platte, Timo Kösters. The goal of the project is to create a linter capable of enforcing Ruma-specific style and practices. I hope to get this tool to a working state by the end of this summers GSoC!
Abhinav Krishna C K: First-Class Email Bridge
Abhinav Krishna C K from NSS College of Engineering in Palakkad, India will be working on Building First-Class email bridge for Matrix this summer mentored by Half-Shot and tulir. This will enable Matrix to be connected with Email by translating incoming SMTP traffic to Matrix messages, and then bridging Matrix messages back into emails.
Frinksy: Extend Ruma's API coverage
My name is Adam Blanchet, and I am a student from the University of York in the UK.
I am happy to say that I have quite a few mentors: Isaiah Inuwa, Jonas Platte, Timo Kösters and Nico from Nheko.
My project is to extend Ruma's API coverage. I'll be doing a few things: finishing coverage of the Identity Service API, adding the "knock" feature to Ruma and finishing the implementation of QR code verification. If time allows it I will also work on implementing other MSCs or features such as "Event notification attributes and actions". I hope that my work will help enable other Rust-based Matrix projects, such as Conduit and Fractal, to implement more features.
Timo added:
Hello, I am Timo Kösters. I study Computer Science in Germany and spend most of the remaining time developing Conduit, a Matrix homeserver built on top of Ruma. I use Ruma all the time and will be mentoring Adam Blanchet to make it even better.
Vladyslav Hnatiuk: PyQuotient
My name is Vladyslav Hnatiuk, I'm a student of Vienna University of Technology and my project is PyQuotient.
The aim is to simplify creating of a Matrix Qt-based clients in Python by providing Qt-based SDK and avoid writing a large part of functionality manually. And to not reinvent the wheel PyQuotient will be bindings for the existing library libQuotient that provides SDK for Matrix for C++ applications. I'll be mentored by kitsune, the author of libQuotient and also libQuotient-based Matrix IM client Quaternion. I hope PyQuotient will facilitate the development of Matrix clients in Python with Qt, and it will be a small contribution to the promotion of Matrix, especially in Python world.
kitsune added:
If this experience proves to be successful, there’s a good chance Quaternion will eventually switch to Python.
Callum Brown: Token Authenticated Registration
Hi there, I'm Callum, a Londoner who'll be starting a physics degree in September. For GSoC I'll be working on adding Token Authenticated Registration to Matrix. This will allow homeserver admins to restrict who can sign-up by requiring a token to be submitted during registration. I run a small homeserver for friends and family, but don't have the resources to make registration public, so I have wanted this feature integrated into Matrix servers and clients for quite a while! I'll be working with Nico, anoa, and red_sky to write an MSC, implement the server side in Synapse, and the client side in Nheko. Thanks to the mentors and Matrix.org for the opportunity to work on this!
You can follow along with this project's progress throughout the program at https://calcuode.com/matrix-gsoc/.
Nico, mentor added:
Nico here, one of the Mentors. Personally I am super excited about this project! I have been using Matrix for a while now and I think Nheko is pretty good by now. But there is still a barrier, if I want my friends and family to use Matrix: They can't easily sign up! I have tried creating them accounts and telling them to change their passwords, having a dedicated registration page or just telling them to just use a different server, but nothing of that made me happy and it added friction to the already hard process of getting someone to try a new messenger! As such I am super excited for this, because it will make signing up your friends and family to your personal instance, without it having to be public, sooooo much simpler!
Jaiwanth: Exporting Conversations From Element
Jaiwanth Vemula from the IIT Kharagpur University in India will be working on Exporting Conversations in Element this summer, mentored by Michael (t3chguy). This work will enable users to easily export their conversations for archival or sharing, this is a feature which has been missed in Element for a very long time!
Alejandro Domínguez: Fractal: Multi account support
Kai A. Hiller: Fractal NEXT
Students become Mentors
I asked: how many of those who are mentors this year have ever been GSOC students? The answer is that this year four of the mentors were once GSoC students themselves!
Last week the UK government published a draft of the proposed Online Safety
Bill,
after having initially introduced formal proposals for said bill in early
2020.
With this post we aim to shed some light on its potential impacts and explain
why we think that this bill - despite having great intentions - may actually
be setting a dangerous precedent when it comes to our rights to privacy,
freedom of expression and self determination.
The proposed bill aims to provide a legal framework to address illegal and
harmful content online. This focus on “not illegal, but harmful” content is at
the centre of our concerns - it puts responsibility on organisations
themselves to arbitrarily decide what might be harmful, without any legal
backing. The bill itself does not actually provide a definition of harmful,
instead relying on service providers to assess and decide on this. This
requirement to identify what is “likely to be harmful” applies to all users,
children and adults. Our question here is - would you trust a service provider
to decide what might be harmful to you and your children, with zero input from
you as a user?
Additionally, the bill incentivises the use of privacy-invasive age
verification processes which come with their own set of problems. This
complete disregard of people’s right to privacy is a reflection of the
privileged perspectives of those in charge of the drafting of this bill, which
fails to acknowledge how actually harmful it would be for certain groups of
the population to have their real life identity associated with their online
identity.
Our view of the world, and of the internet, is largely different from the one
presented by this bill. Now, this categorically does not mean we don’t care
about online safety (it is quite literally our bread and butter) - we just
fundamentally disagree with the approach taken.
Whilst we sympathise with the government’s desire to show action in this space
and to do something about children’s safety (everyone’s safety really), we
cannot possibly agree with the methods.
Back in October of 2020 we presented our proposed approach to online safety -
ironically also in response to a government proposal, albeit about encryption
backdoors. In it, we briefly discussed the dangers of absolute determinations
of morality from a single cultural perspective:
We now find ourselves reading a piece of legislation that essentially demands
these determinations from tech companies. The beauty of the human experience
lies with its diversity and when we force technology companies to make calls
about what is right or wrong - or what is “likely to have adverse
psychological or physical impacts” on children - we end up in a dangerous
place of centralising and regulating relative morals. Worst of all, when the
consequence of getting it wrong is criminal liability for senior managers what
do we think will happen?
Regardless of how omnipresent it is in our daily lives, technology is still
not a solution for human problems. Forcing organisations to be judge and jury
of human morals for the sake of “free speech” will, ironically, have severe
consequences on free speech, as risk profiles will change for fear of
liability.
Forcing a “duty of care” responsibility on organisations which operate online
will not only drown small and medium sized companies in administrative tasks
and costs, it will further accentuate the existing monopolies by Big Tech.
Plainly, Big Tech can afford the regulatory burden - small start-ups can’t.
Future creators will have their wings clipped from the offset and we might
just miss out on new ideas and projects for fear of legal repercussions. This
is a threat to the technology sector, particularly those building on emerging
technologies like Matrix. In some ways, it is a threat to democracy and some
of the freedoms this bill claims to protect.
These are, quite frankly, steps towards an authoritarian dystopia. If Trust &
Safety managers start censoring something as natural as a nipple on the off
chance it might cause “adverse psychological impacts” on children, whose
freedom of expression are we actually protecting here?
More specifically on the issue of content moderation: the impact assessment
provided by the government alongside this
bill
predicts that the additional costs for companies directly related to the bill
will be in the billions, over the course of 10 years. The cost for the
government? £400k, in every proposed policy option. Our question is - why are
these responsibilities being placed on tech companies, when evidently this is
a societal problem?
We are not saying it is up to the government to single-handedly end the
existence of Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation (CSAE) or extremist content
online. What we are saying is that it takes more than content filtering, risk
assessments and (faulty) age verification processes for it to end. More
funding for tech literacy organisations and schools, to give children (and
parents) the tools to stay safe is the first thing that comes to mind. Further
investment in law enforcement cyber units and the judicial system, improving
tech companies’ routes for abuse reporting and allowing the actual judges to
do the judging seems pretty sensible too. What is absolutely egregious is the
degradation of the digital rights of the majority, due to the wrongdoings of a
few.
Our goal with this post is not to be dramatic or alarmist. However, we want to
add our voices to the countless digital rights
campaigners,
individuals and organisations that have been raising the alarm since the early
days of this bill. Just like with coercive control and abuse, the degradation
of our rights does not happen all at once. It is a slippery slope that starts
with something as (seemingly) innocuous as mandatory content scanning for
CSAE content and ends with authoritarian surveillance
infrastructure.
It is our duty to put a stop to this before it even begins.
Twitter card image credit from Brazil, which feels all too familiar right now.
As many know, over the years we've experimented with how to let users locate
and curate sets of users and rooms in Matrix. Back in Nov
2017
we added 'groups' (aka 'communities') as a custom mechanism for this -
introducing identifiers beginning with a + symbol to represent sets of rooms
and users, like +matrix:matrix.org.
However, it rapidly became obvious that Communities had some major
shortcomings. They ended up being an extensive and entirely new API surface
(designed around letting you dynamically bridge the membership of a group
through to a single source of truth like LDAP) - while in practice groups
have enormous overlap with rooms: managing membership, inviting by email,
access control, power levels, names, topics, avatars, etc. Meanwhile the
custom groups API re-invented the wheel for things like pushing updates
to the client (causing a whole suite of
problems). So clients
and servers alike ended up reimplementing large chunks of similar
functionality for both rooms and groups.
And so almost before Communities were born, we started thinking about whether
it would make more sense to model them as a special type of room, rather than
being their own custom primitive.
MSC1215 had the first
thoughts on this in 2017, and then a formal proposal emerged at
MSC1772 in Jan 2019. We
started working on this in earnest at the end of 2020, and christened the new
way of handling groups of rooms and users as... Spaces!
Spaces work as follows:
You can designate specific rooms as 'spaces', which contain other rooms.
You can have a nested hierarchy of spaces.
You can rapidly navigate around that hierarchy using the new 'space summary'
(aka space-nav) API - MSC2946.
Spaces can be shared with other people publicly, or invite-only, or private
for your own curation purposes.
Rooms can appear in multiple places in the hierarchy.
You can have 'secret' spaces where you group your own personal rooms and
spaces into an existing hierarchy.
Today, we're ridiculously excited to be launching Space support as a beta in
matrix-react-sdk and matrix-android-sdk2 (and thus Element Web/Desktop and
Element Android) and Synapse
1.34.0 - so head
over to your nearest Element, make sure it's connected to the latest Synapse
(and that Synapse has Spaces enabled in its config) and find some Space to
explore! #community:matrix.org
might be a good start :)
The beta today gives us the bare essentials: and we haven't yet finished
space-based access controls such as setting powerlevels in rooms based on
space membership
(MSC2962)
or limiting who can join a room based on their space membership
(MSC3083) -
but these will be coming asap. We also need to figure out how to implement
Flair on top of Spaces rather than Communities.
This is also a bit of a turning point in Matrix's architecture: we are now
using rooms more and more as a generic way of modelling new features in
Matrix. For instance, rooms could be used as a structured way of storing
files (MSC3089);
Reputation data
(MSC2313) is stored in
rooms; Threads can be stored in rooms
(MSC2836); Extensible
Profiles are proposed as rooms too
(MSC1769). As such,
this pushes us towards ensuring rooms are as lightweight as possible in Matrix -
and that things like sync and changing profile scale independently of the
number of rooms you're in. Spaces effectively gives us a way of creating a
global decentralised filesystem hierarchy on top of Matrix - grouping the
existing rooms of all flavours into an epic multiplayer tree of realtime data.
It's like USENET had a baby with the Web!
For lots more info from the Element perspective, head over to the Element
blog.
Finally, the point of the beta is to gather feedback and fix bugs - so please
go wild in Element reporting your first impressions and help us make Spaces as
awesome as they deserve to be!
Synapse 1.34.0 is now available, and it's loaded with new features and performance improvements.
Note: This release deprecates and replaces the room_invite_state_types configuration option. If you've customized that for your homeserver, please review the Upgrade Notes.
We've also marked the v1 room deletion Admin API as deprecated. Instead of sending a POST to a path ending in /delete, administrators are encourage to instead send an HTTP DELETE to /_synapse/admin/v1/rooms/<room_id>. Thanks to ThibF for implementing this (#9889).
Spaces
The highlight of this release is support for Spaces, now that MSC1772: Matrix Spaces has merged into the Matrix spec!
Synapse also has support for MSC2946: Spaces Summary and MSC3083: Restricting room membership based on space membership, but these are off by default as they're still under development. To enable these experimental MSCs, set experimental_features: { spaces_enabled: true } in your homeserver configuration. These are enabled on the matrix.org homeserver, and we encourage you to experiment with Spaces there and let us know in the Spaces Feedback Room if you encounter any issues.
Memory and Caching
Memory consumption and caching have been a major focus of the Synapse team this quarter, and we've made significant strides:
Synapse has a new gc_min_intervalconfiguration option with reasonable defaults to prevent Python's garbage collector from running too frequently and thrashing when a large homeserver has its collection thresholds set too low.
For debugging, Synapse can optionally track the memory use of each LruCache.
We have a few more tricks up our sleeves; to learn more about how we're planning to improve the memory cost of joining large rooms, check out last week's Matrix Live.
Other Fixes and Improvements
We've also landed significant improvements to:
Sending events when Redis is available (#9905, #9950, #9951)
Joining large rooms when presence is enabled (#9910, #9916)
Prevented cross-account m.room_key_request messages from being delivered (#9961, #9965)
Incorrectly applied room creation / invitation rate limits to users and app services which should have been exempt (#9968)
The health check on our Docker images now responds more quickly upon successful startup thanks to improvements by maquis196 (#9913), and for especially privacy-conscious homeservers, device names can now be shielded over federation thanks to a contribution by aaronraimist (#9945).
So a token for @example:matrix.org might look like:
syt_ZXhhbXBsZQ_KfJetOcLWEKCvYdKnQLV_0i3W80
Existing tokens remain valid; this is just for new tokens. We hope the new format reduces network overhead while also making it easier identify misplaced tokens in logs and repositories.
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 aaronraimist, maquis196, and ThibF.
Some combination of me, Kegan, Bruno and neilalexander have been working on v3 of the CS /sync API. (Today's /sync API in matrix is v2; v1 was the old /events API). We're not yet at the point of publishing a draft or MSC, but it's coming soon. It's really exciting work which flips Matrix around so that sync scales independently of the number of rooms you're in - and it's at last possible to write rich clients which only ever sync the bare minimum data needed to work: i.e. lazy loading eeeeeeeeverything. Watch this space :)
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
There's been activity from the Spec Core Team on a number of different MSCs, such as MSC3189 (per-room/space profile data). Additionally a spec PR for Matrix URI schemes has been getting feedback and is moving forward at a quick pace! There was also some feedback from the team on MSC2448 (blurhashes) which I'll get around to answering shortly 🙂.
Otherwise I think this week was a bit implementation-heavy for the team (the Spec Core Team is a task in addition to our full-time jobs). Hopefully next week will grant us more of a breather.
Hello TWiMmers! The bulk of our update is in Matrix Live today, so go check out the video above ☝️ to hear about how we're reducing the amount of memory it takes to join large rooms, and why joins take so much memory in the first place.
Otherwise, we're mainly getting ready for the public debut of Spaces as a beta feature, but more on that next week... 😉
Oh, and before we go: please make sure your Synapse is up to date! We released 1.33.2 on Tuesday, which contains a low severity security fix.
Another installation of the regularly scheduled Kubernetes Helm Chart updates (and another bump of the deprecated Synapse image). Now up to Synapse 1.33.2 and Element Web 1.7.27.
matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.
This week was spent on stability improvements & bug fixes.
Calling for testers!
The bridge is at a point where it's mostly usable, but it still has quite a few blindspots. If anyone is willing to try it out & report issues, it would be a great help!
Last time, we updated you on starting DM conversations with Gitter users from Matrix. Now we have the other side of this complete! From Gitter, you can now start a one to one conversation with someone you see from Matrix 😀
Just hover over their avatar to bring up the user popover, then press the "Chat privately" button. 🗣
Goooooooood afternoon folks and happy Friday! This week we're announcing the 0.26.0 release of the matrix-appservice-irc bridge which contains precious goodies:
You can now disable the kick behaviour of the bridge on Matrix users if you are running a personal bridge, so losing your IRC connection no longer results in a kick.
You can now remove bridges from rooms by using the admin room, so no need to use the provisioning API or modify the DB.
We've added a new feature to allow you to specify bridge options on a per room basis using room state. At the moment you can modify the limits of the automatic pastebin system but more features like reply formats are to come!
As always please come tell us about it in #irc:matrix.org and make sure to check out the new docs if you get a bit stuck.
Dept of Clients 📱
Hydrogen
A minimal Matrix chat client, focused on performance, offline functionality, and broad browser support. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/
Hydrogen can now leave rooms and forget archived rooms. URLs are now also clickable in the timeline. Get the full details in the release notes!
Element Clients
Updates from the teams
Web
Element Web 1.7.28 is up on staging, targeting Monday for release.
New spaces Beta (new way of grouping rooms and people)
Added support for slash commands working in edits
On develop:
Voice messages are nearing completion - enable the labs flag and give it a go :)
Performance improvements to app startup time. Let us know if you run into any issues!
iOS
1.3.7 is available on TestFlight. It should be on the App Store on Monday. Spaces are not yet available on Element-iOS but the app offers minimal support. The release contains a fix for background crashed due to PushKit
At the platform level, we are still improving stability and performance:
Decryption operations to be moved outside the main thread
More robust on initial sync
etc
Android
1.1.7 is in open testing via playstore beta channel, Release candidate for Monday. Contains support for spaces beta, several improvements on attachment (video, compression…), as well as a bunch of bug fixes. All details here https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/releases/tag/v1.1.7
Delight
“Spaces are coming” (I had heard something about that - BP)
This release fixes a denial of service issue (CVE-2021-29471) where evaluating specially crafted push rules could lead to excessive CPU load. Server administrators are encouraged to upgrade.
The first iteration of visually representing the data gathered by Server Stats Discoverer (traveler bot) is now publicly available at https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/
It for now is only a graph of room relations but in the future is supposed to be extended for a server based graph as well as a Table to search your room within.
Be aware that the page is best viewed and used on desktop. Clicking a Room Node will open a new tab with the matrix.to link. If this fails this might be because of no canonical alias being available.
For the developers the data can be taken from https://serverstats.nordgedanken.dev/relations The format currently is only available in the d3js format but in the future that API also will be extended for different usecases.
For any feedback like accessibility issues or other issues please reach out to me either via DM or in #server_stats:nordgedanken.dev
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
A reminder that #sct-office:matrix.org is available to communicate directly with the Spec Core Team. A clarification from the last edition of TWIM is that this room is intended to be a low-traffic room solely for asking about the status of a/your MSC, rather than the Spec process or anything else. There is however #matrix-spec-process:matrix.org for discussion of the Spec process, and #matrix-spec:matrix.org for discussion of the Matrix spec and MSCs in general.
Otherwise the Spec Core Team has been doing a little bit of house-keeping. For those that have been living under a rock, Spaces is an upcoming feature intended to replace the old Groups/Community stuff with a much-improved implementation. And one that will actually make it into the spec! We've closed all old groups-related MSCs as they are now obsolete.
Additionally we've been giving some feedback on MSC2946 (Spaces Summary) which is another part of the Spaces puzzle (and is still a blocker for the release of the feature), as well as MSC3079 (Low Bandwidth CS API) which allows Matrix to operate on resource constrained devices and networks. Yours truly has also been making some PRs (one, two) to help clarify the Spec process.
It's a release! Synapse 1.33 is out, and we plan to release a security patch for it on Tuesday, May 11th. This follows our previous discussion where we committed to trying to decouple routine security updates from our regular feature releases.
Read the release notes for details, but the big news is that we finally have experimental support for moving presence off of the main process. We're still testing it, but we hope it will allow instances that need presence to more easily scale out.
In last week's TWiM we shared a graph of Synapse's memory use when joining Matrix HQ for the first time. In particular, we saw a spike to 1.4 GB before settling at 800 MB.
In the week since producing that graph, we've managed to nearly eliminate the spike, halving it to 760 MB. After backfilling history, the room settles at around 650 MB:
These changes are still a work in progress, but we hope to get them merged into Synapse in time for the 1.35 release on June 1st.
I wrote a patch for synapse, that reduces the size of almost empty incremental syncs by 50% (30% if you include http headers). If you are a client developer, you may want to test your client against a synapse with that patch applied, since it broke quite a few clients, that relied on synapse sending empty fields. While synapse sends empty fields, other server implementations, like conduit, don't, so fixing any issues here will help with portability across different server implementations too. With a bit of hope this patch can actually be applied in a few weeks to the official synapse, but it was backed out from the next RC because of the breakage. So if you can, please test your client, which you are developing, against the following PR and fix any issues you experience from it: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/9919
The regular updates for my Helm charts (and still deprecated Synapse image) have been pushed, for Synapse 1.33.0/1 and the Matrix Media Repo 1.2.8. (technically last week, but it was after friday, so I'm throwing it in again)
The initial alpha version of Brooklyn is now public, which means you can now (try to) use mautrix-imessage on a jailbroken iOS device for iMessage bridging. Setup instructions are on docs.mau.fi: https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/imessage/ios/setup.html
Brooklyn was developed by ethanrdoesmc. It's an app/tweak that handles communicating with iMessage and runs mautrix-imessage as a subprocess for the Matrix side. The initial alpha supports basic text and media message bridging. Sending and receiving tapbacks, replies, read receipts and typing notifications will also be supported in the future.
Heisenbridge the bouncer style Matrix IRC bridge has seen numerous updates in the past week:
Identd implementation to get verified usernames on IRC
TLS support for IRC connections
IRC excess flood prevention with a buffer
Proper long message splitting from Matrix to IRC
Retry support for Matrix requests to work around homeserver downtime/restarts
Minor fixes to ghosting issues and some other stuff. This will be the last big update for a while as it has mostly stabilized enough for daily use.
More testers are still welcome to get the remaining issues ironed out so if you need to connect to unbridged and unplumbed networks and run your own homeserver it would be an excellent time to try it out.
Experimental support for call bridging has landed. Now you can call phone numbers right from Matrix, with partial support for MSC2746. A few things to keep in mind:
The bridge is still in alpha -- I wouldn't trust it for anything secure at the moment. I would love to hear feedback from tests, though!
If you tried any of the earlier versions, you will need to re-run the link command since I made some breaking changes. Sorry.
The IRC bridge matrix-appservice-irc has a new release candidate. The upcoming version 0.26.0 will include many features and bug fixes. Here are three highlights:
Allow third-party bridged users to change their nickname with the self-serve command !irc nick anothername (thanks vranki)
Allow room moderators and bridge admins to unlink rooms using the !unlink command
Add support for specifying the paste bin limit in room state with the org.matrix.appservice-irc.config event type.
Please test it and flag any issues you have upgrading:
In this release we have mostly focused on bugfixing and stability. We have switched to the new Flutter 2 framework and have done a lot of refactoring under the hood. The annoying freezing bug should now be fixed. Voice messages now have a new backend which should improve the sound quality and stability. There is now a more professional UI for editing aliases of a room. Users can now see a list of all aliases, add new aliases, delete them and mark one alias as the canonical (or main) alias. Some minor design changes and design fixes should improve the overall UX of the app exspecially on tablets.
Version 0.30.0 will be the first version with arm64 support. You can download binaries from the CI and we will try to publish it on Flathub. Together with the new Linux Desktop Notifications feature, this might be interesting for the Librem 5 or the PinePhone. Sadly I don't own one of these very interesting devices. If you have one, I would very like to see some screenshots of it! :-)
Fluffychat update: Native Fluffychat Linux build now works well on aarch64 devices!
If you want to try the binary from CI, keep in mind that GDK_GL=gles needs to be set to force it to use the OpenGL ES. Flatpak build on Flathub already has it set up and works out of the box.
Some distributions can have issues with input fields and virtual keyboard, making it look like the input is set up as right-to-left. To my understanding, it's an issue of certain older GTK versions with Flutter.
Nice sticker
Nheko
Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE and intends to be full featured and nice to look at
Nheko now should stop showing you actions, that you can't do anyway, because that is confusing and useless. This includes the following and more:
Invite members, if you have no invite permissions.
Delete messages, if you don't have redaction permissions.
Send a message, reply to one, edit one and more, if you can't even send the message!
Tell us, if we missed something or we removed an action, that you actually have permissions to do!
Apart from that we also started working on some of the features for the next major release. That release will mostly focus on bringing End-to-End-Encryption out of beta. As a first step, Nheko now shows if a message was sent from a verified device or not. This has 3 different trust levels:
green: The message is from a device you verified. Either by device verification or cross signing.
greyish: The message is from an unverified device, but that user has never rotated their master signing key and has cross-signed that device. As such we can probably assume, that this is a trusted device. For extra safety, you should of course verify that user, but if it is just an internet personality you will never meet, you trust you are speaking to the right party anyway and can't really verify them anyway, since you don't know how they look either! We don't want to prompt users with red warning signs in such cases, which will lead to them not doing verification properly, because they just want the red marks to go away. Many people are also not interested in the MITM aspects of E2EE. We think this is an okay tradeoff, but any feedback is welcome of course! This is basically Trust On First Use (TOFU), if you heard that term before.
red: The device is not verified. This can have a few reasons. Either we verified the user, but they didn't verify that device. Or we didn't verify that user and they have changed their master key at some point. Or the signatures for that device are wrong, etc. If you see such a device, you should probably investigate, why that is the case.
These are some biggish changes, so if you experience issues, tell us in #nheko:nheko.im!
Hot on the heels of our previous announcement and building on the fresh foundations of our rewrite, Julian got busy on room history. It now appears when a room is selected in the sidebar! To make that selection easier, room filtering in the sidebar has been implemented by new contributor Veli Tasali. Once a room is selected and displayed, messages can even be sent to them! Sounds like we’re done and the client is ready… SHIP IT! Not really though, as it’s still very basic, but at least the bare minimum to make it actually usable is now here.
Finally Veli also helped us get the docs for fractal-next published, lowering the barrier to entry for other new contributors. They are available at https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/fractal/fractal/.
We’ve been shepherding MSC1772 into the spec which has now exited final comment period and merged!
Alongside, we’ve also been iterating on the Spaces implementations all round in preparation for wider testing soon, which has included
Iterating on filtering on Web to filter all Spaces
Iterating on logic for showing notification badges to avoid single DMs spawning multiple badges
Iterating on ‘Home’ to instead behave more like ‘All’
Iterating on implementations across the web, iOS, Android & Synapse to use stable prefixes
& lots of other small tweaks
Web
Element Web 1.7.27-rc.1 on staging
Added localisation support to the desktop layer (for menu items etc.)
Fixed encrypted search indexing on Windows
Hardware media keys are now ignored, so they'll go to other apps as intended
On develop
Calling architecture reworked to support multiple streams, please report any issues
1.7.27 release planned for Monday
iOS
1.3.6 is in review for the App Store. We have polished and fixed several issues on 1:1 and group calls. The release contains fixes for several bugs and crashes.
Very excited about the Spaces progress! Looks like everything that I found in recent testing is fixed!
Trixnity finally got released this week. It's a Kotlin multiplatform Matrix SDK for high level access to Client-Server API and Appservice API. It has all (and some more) features from matrix-spring-boot-sdk which is based on Trixnity now (an update for that will be released soon). Trixnity can currently be used on JVM and JS as platform (Native is not working yet). It is also very customizable by adding custom room and state event types.
I did a video a few months back trying to show the physical layout of Matrix over the years by looking at the phonehome stats and the number of active users per server (showing full-mesh edges between the top 100 servers, heatmapped by how busy the servers were at either end of the edge). There was a bug in the phonehome stats during 2017, but it's still fairly cool...
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.
Since the end of 2019, we have spent quite a bit of time thinking about and exploring different technologies whilst building various demos for P2P Matrix. Our mission for P2P Matrix is to evolve Matrix into a hybrid between today's server-oriented network and a pure P2P network - empowering users to have total autonomy and privacy over their data if they want (by storing it in P2P Matrix, by embedding their server into their Matrix client), while also letting users store their data in serverside nodes if they so desire.
The goal is to protect metadata much better (as users no longer have to depend on a server run by someone else to communicate), as well as drive new features such as account portability, multi-homed accounts, low-bandwidth Matrix and smarter federation transports - and provide support for internet-less mesh communication via Matrix which can also interoperate with the wider network. You can read more about it in our Introducing P2P Matrix blog post from last summer, or watch our FOSDEM 2021 talk where we previewed Pinecone. It's important to note that this has been a small but important long-term project for Matrix, and has been progressing entirely outside our business-as-usual work of improving the core protocol and reference implementations.
As the project has progressed, we've built a variety of prototypes using existing libraries (go-libp2p, js-libp2p and Yggdrasil), demonstrating what an early P2P Matrix might feel like if it were running on a mobile device, in the web browser and so on using such an overlay network. Each of these demos has taught us something new, and so in October 2020 we decided to take this knowledge to build an experimental new overlay network of our own.
Pinecone is designed to provide end-to-end encrypted communications between devices, regardless of how they are connected to one another, in a lightweight and self-arranging fashion. The routing protocol is a hybrid, taking inspiration from Yggdrasil by building a global spanning tree, but rather than forwarding all traffic using the spanning tree topology, we use it as a bootstrap routing mechanism for a line/snake topology, ordered by their ed25519 public keys, which we have affectionately named SNEK (Sequentially Networked Edwards Key) routing.
Nodes seek out their closest keyspace neighbours on the network and paths are built between these pairs of nodes, similar to how a Chord DHT functions, populating the routing tables of intermediate nodes in the process. These paths are then used to forward traffic without having to perform up-front searches, allowing for very fast connection setups between overlay nodes. These paths are resilient to network topology changes and handle node mobility considerably better than any other name-independent routing scheme that we have seen — early results are very promising so far. We have also been experimenting with a combination of the μTP (Micro Transport Protocol) and TLS to provide stateful connection setup, congestion control and end-to-end encryption for all federation traffic carried over the Pinecone network.
If Pinecone works out, our intention is to collaborate with the libp2p and IPFS team to incorporate Pinecone routing into libp2p (if they'll have us!) while incorporating their gossipsub routing to improve Matrix federation... and get the best of both worlds :)
Today we're releasing the source code for our current early implementation of Pinecone — you can get it from GitHub right now! It's very experimental still and not very well optimised yet, but it is the foundation of our latest mobile P2P Matrix demos, which support P2P Matrix over both Bluetooth Low Energy mesh networks, multicast DNS discovery within a LAN, and/or by routing through static Pinecone peers on the Internet:
Building a routing overlay is only the first step in the journey towards P2P Matrix. We will also be looking closely in the coming months at improving the Matrix federation protocol to work well in mixed-connectivity scenarios (rather than the full mesh approach used today) as well as decentralised identities, hybrid deployments with existing homeservers and getting Dendrite (the Matrix homeserver which is embedded into the current P2P demos) more stable and feature-complete.
The long-term plan could look something like this:
Most discussion around P2P Matrix takes place in #p2p:matrix.org, so if you are interested in what's going on, please join us there!
We plan to release 1.33.1 1.33.2 with a low severity security fix on Tuesday next week, and we're interested in your thoughts on decoupling routine security fixes from normal releases. Please weigh in on this discussion.
Note: We shipped 1.33.1 with a small dependency fix when installing Synapse via pip. A security release is still planned for Tuesday, which will now be 1.33.2.
If you use Synapse's optional account revalidation feature (see account_validity in config.yaml), you'll want to review the upgrading instructions as we've made a few small changes to the email templates it uses.
Synapse now has very experimental support for moving presence off of the main process. This has not yet been extensively validated, so please proceed with caution. We expect to get this to a point where we can confidently recommend it in the coming weeks.
Otherwise, this is another release focused on internals. We're driving toward a goal of reducing excess memory consumption when joining large or complex rooms, and most of our effort (aside from the presence work) has been focused on measurement, instrumentation, and experimentation for that.
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 rkfg, and ShadowJonathan.
The German IT platform Heise has conducted an interview with the university of Innsbruck which chose Matrix/Element over Microsoft Teams. Reasons: it's free, decentralized/federated, expandable and secure.
And the best thing: The federation across different institutions really works. I can still participate in project related chats with my former team @ETH_en while seamlessly supporting lectures at @uniinnsbruck. All out of one tool, one login. pic.twitter.com/6LXHcu7Jjf
Btw if anyone wanted to hear Krille and me live, we are live at the linux lounge now. It's in GERMAN! https://theradio.cc/blog/category/shownotes/linuxlounge/
Exciting! Possibly. For the lucky few who can understand it anyway!
If anyone did miss the opportunity to listen to the live stream: Here you can find the recording, with show notes, as well: https://rec.theradio.cc/item/ll244/
We were happy to have Krille and Nico with us. 🥳
(website in german as well as the stream recording)
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/proposals.
We've opened up a new room for MSC authors to come and ask about the MSC process, as well as for review and feedback on their MSC ideas over at #sct-office:matrix.org. If you're unsure what the next steps for your MSC are, or aren't sure whether an idea would make sense for inclusion in the Matrix Specification, then this room is the perfect place to ask about it. Come on by!
In terms of MSC work, Spaces remains one of the most active topics in the spec this week, with MSC1772 finally reaching Final Comment Period! A lot of work went into writing and reviewing the MSC, as well as crafting the implementation - so congratulations to everyone involved! Of course, any concerns can still be raised over the next 5 days by anyone before the proposal is ultimately merged to the spec.
There are a number of changes being merged to the spec as we move swiftly towards the next major Spec release. Those that have merged this week are:
Otherwise there's been a smattering of discussion and updates on various MSCs, such as MSC2730 (verifiable forwarded events), MSC2249 (requiring a user to be able to see an event to report it) and MSC2516 (voice messages).
Thanks for reading!
Also - knocking is now published to the unstable spec, check it out at: https://spec.matrix.org/unstable/client-server-api/#knocking-on-rooms
We've just released the first public P2P Matrix demo using the experimental Pinecone protocol. There are builds available for Android right now and iOS is following shortly via Testflight as soon as it passes Apple's beta review:
iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/Tgh2MEk6 (wait for build 73!)
If you enable the static peer in the peer-to-peer settings, you can join us in the #beachparty:3bf0258d23c60952639cc4c69c71d1508a7d43a0475d9000ff900a1848411ec7 room!
The demo will attempt to connect to other devices using Bluetooth Low Energy, even if internet connectivity isn't available. Local connectivity over Wi-Fi is also supported. It's still very rough around the edges and there are lots of bugs, but feel free to give it a go!
We expect to release 1.33 on Tuesday; more on that next week. But generally speaking, much of our development focus has been on profiling the memory usage of small homeservers joining large, highly-federated rooms for the first time. For example, we see a graph like this when joining Matrix HQ:
At a first pass, we're aiming to significantly reduce the initial spikiness of that graph, and we think#9910 will help with the subsequent slow ramp up in memory.
We've also been discussing how to balance our relatively rapid release cadence with managing low severity security issues. If you have any thoughts, preferences, or relevant experiences to share, please comment here!
Announcing a new bouncer style Matrix IRC bridge to bridge the gap between IRC and Matrix in a way that's easy to configure and manage by homeserver administrators for small scale deployment.
Meet Heisenbridge https://github.com/hifi/heisenbridge 🥳 (it's a Breaking Bad reference 🤦)
It's written in Python and started off as an experiment if it's possible to create a somewhat well performing stateless IRC bridge that's practically almost zero configuration. It quickly found a use case of being able to join !channels on IRCnet that hasn't been possible in the past.
Intended target audience are people who run their own homeserver and would like to transition from a combination like ssh+irssi to pure Matrix (with weechat-matrix, of course!) but still keep IRC close without losing the "fine details" of the protocol that happens when plumbing a room properly.
As the bridge is written by someone who doesn't really know Python help is much appreciated in the form of filing issues, sending pull requests or just discussing about it on Matrix to tell how you would like to use it!
matrix-puppeteer-line: A bridge for LINE Messenger based on running LINE's Chrome extension in Puppeteer.
Updates:
Inbound read receipts! But with a view caveats:
Receipts are only fetched for the "most recently active" room.
Example: if you send a message in room A, then room B, receipts will only be fetched for room B and not room A, until you (or someone else, from LINE) posts in room A.
This will be fixed in the next update. I have an idea for some Puppeteer trickery to get it working.
Read receipts in group chats are bridged as annotations (reactions) instead of "real" read receipts, until all members of the chat have read a message.
This is because LINE's read receipts for group chats don't tell show who read a message, but only how many people a message was read by.
To capture this in Matrix, instead of sending read receipts for a group chat message, the bridge puts a reaction of "Read by #" on it, with "#" matching how many people read the message so far. Once everyone in the chat has read a message, the reaction is removed and a "real" receipt is sent for all users.
Internal changes to message syncing that should hopefully make inbound messages more reliable, or the very least improve code maintenance.
Hey there, it is your friendly neighborhood cat client! Pardon, chat client!
Jedi18 implemented forwarding of messages. Just select a message and press Alt-F or use the context menu to send a message to the room you select in the popup! This encrypts and decrypts messages and media appropriately, but be aware that sending an encrypted file to an unencrypted room uploads the file unencrypted. (In all other cases the media is not uploaded again.)
Furthermore matrix.to links are now rewritten to matrix:-URIs internally. This means joining rooms and such should now work the same across both of them. It also makes navigation to events work now and even has a shiny highlight effect now! You can also create links to events now from the context menu. These are generated as matrix.to links, since currently the onboarding experience should still be better. Once the next version of the matrix.to website gets deployed, you can even just click there to open the event in Nheko! (Instead of having to copy a /join command).
Since "Copy link to event" was confusing to people and AppAraat opened his present box, only to realize it did not contain "Copy link location", we implemented that too as well as a copy action, to copy the event body for good measure. I hope everyone who got confused will forgive me!
Apart from that we also updated our screenshots on https://nheko-reborn.github.io/ (and all AppStream based store pages) to be higher resolution and reflect the current design. Furthermore we fixed the login on conduit homeservers and that no rooms were shown, if the server didn't support the groups API.
We rewrote the room managing code moving it from QML to C++ and unify how we manage rooms in NeoChat. This allowed us to support the matrix-URIs scheme, making it possible to open rooms and show user information when clicking on a matrix: link in your browser. Sverin Saji improved the look of the typing indicator and Jan Blackquill improved the keyboard navigation.
1.3.5 has been published to the App Store on Monday.
We have been polishing the new VoIP design this week. It should be merged into develop early next week and released in the App Store the week after.
We want to focus on code quality. We set up GitHub actions in our 3 repos. They run both unit tests and integration tests. We need to fix some of our 600+ tests in the SDK but we now have a CI able to complain about test failures.
Android
The Spaces have landed on Element Android, on the develop branch. We are working to stabilize the feature before the release in beta next week.
In parallel, we are working to stabilize the whole application, and provide a better support on Android 11.
Also it will be possible in the next release to compress video before sending, which is a very expected feature.
Hydrogen
A minimal Matrix chat client, focused on performance, offline functionality, and broad browser support. https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web/
I announced this project last week. It's exactly what it sounds like: A puppetting bridge to puppet a telephone number from Matrix. It's currently pre-alpha and not ready for use on public-facing HSes.
Not too much has happened in the last week as I've been a bit busy. The main thing is that there's now a dev branch where outbound voice calls work. Other than the 2014 SIP experiment, I think this is the first bridge to make voice calls work?
I hope having a reference VoIP bridge can help pave the way for more VoIP bridging. I'm already looking into how code can be generalized for other bridges. For example, I've opened an issue in matrix-bot-sdk to add helper classes and stuff for VoIP support. I'd be curious to see how other bridge builders think this could be accomplished. 👀
If you're interested in PSTN bridging specifically, there's a room for that.
If you're interested in VoIP bridging in general, there's a room for that, too
Dept of Services 🚀
etke.cc - like Element Matrix Services, but on your servers, under your control and without restrictions
Some context: I like how simple EMS allows you to setup the Matrix homeserver, but it lacks any internal tuning or customization ability. Do you want more? OK, setup it yourself and try to stay normal while trying to configure coturn to properly run in docker cluster. Because of that, I did a service where you can order initial setup and configuration of homeserver (yes, with coturn in docker cluster!) and with full control of customization and fine-tuning of manual configuration (website even has step-by-step guide how the process works).
It's based on the amazing spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy with additional stuff like system security hardening and maintenance
Source: https://gitlab.com/rakshazi/matrix-ansible/
It contains basic security stuff like ufw and fail2ban, system maintenance like updating packages, cleanup of old logs and docker images, configuration of swap, some additions like absurdly simply healthcheck page and website deployment to base domain. Documentation may be found in readme files for each role
The FLOSS Matrix hosting system built on AWX, it enables you to manage multiple Matrix servers for many clients in both a commercial or non-commercial context. We are currently doing a free giveaway of on-premises server plans, if you're an experienced user or Matrix admin you can receive a free on-premises subscription and hopefully provide us with some feedback.
Some of you might already have seen that bot show up in rooms. To clear up some confusion around it I will briefly explain what it does and what it is supposed to do:
What does it do?
The Bot is simply existing to do the same task as Matrix Traveler (bot) already did for years now. It joins rooms, listens for an alias, tries to join it.
The main difference between these 2 bots is that my bot also searches for aliases in old messages.
What does it save?
It only saves the relations between rooms. This means it knows which room was posted where. It doesn't know who posted it, when it was posted, why it was posted or any other content of messages.
However due to matrix' nature it does need to get the data once onto a synapse to read trough it. This means it has the data on my synapse. (Running in helsinki at hetzner).
What can I do if I do not want it?
The easiest way is to just ban it. It will fully forget that room.
Kicking works too but it might again join if it gets found again.
Where is the source?
The source code is available at https://git.nordgedanken.dev/MTRNord/server_stats/-/blob/main/src/bot/mod.rs
For further questions feel free to join #server_stats:nordgedanken.dev
Also note this bot is still very early in development which is why it does not respond to you yet on any commands. This will be added in the near future as well as a readme in the repository
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.
