Yesterday the EU Parliament & Council agreed on the contents of the Digital
Markets Act - new legislation from the EU intended to limit anticompetitive
behaviour from tech “gatekeepers”, i.e. big tech companies (those with market
share larger than €75B or with more than €7.5B a year of revenue).
This is absolutely landmark legislation, where the EU has decided not to break
the gatekeepers up in order to create a more competitive marketplace - but
instead to “break them open”. This is unbelievably good news for the open
Internet, as it is obligating the gatekeepers to provide open APIs for their
communication services. In other words: no longer will the tech giants be
able to arbitrarily lock their users inside their walled gardens - there will
be a legal requirement for them to expose APIs to other services.
While the formal outcomes of yesterday’s agreement haven’t been published yet
(beyond this press release),
our understanding is that the DMA will mandate:
Gatekeepers will have to provide open and documented APIs to their
services, on request, in order to facilitate interoperability (i.e. so
that other services can communicate with their users).
These APIs must preserve the same level of end-to-end encryption (if any)
to remote users as is available to local users.
This applies to 1:1 messaging and file transfer in the short term, and
group messaging, file-transfer, 1:1 VoIP and group VoIP in the longer
term.
This is the best possible outcome imaginable for the open internet. Never
again will a big tech company be able to hold their users hostage in a walled
garden, or arbitrarily close down or sabotage their APIs.
So, what’s the catch?
Since the DMA announcement on Thursday, there’s been quite a lot
of yelling from some very
experienced voices that mandating interoperability via open APIs is going to
irrevocably undermine end-to-end encrypted messengers like WhatsApp. This
seems to mainly be born out of a concern that the DMA is somehow trying to
subvert end-to-end encryption, despite the fact that the DMA explicitly
mandates that the APIs must expose the same level of security, including
end-to-end encryption, that local users are using. (N.B. Signal doesn’t
qualify as a gatekeeper, so none of this is relevant to Signal).
So, for WhatsApp, it means that the API would expose both the message-passing
interface as well as the key management APIs required to interoperate with
WhatsApp using your own end-to-end-encrypted WhatsApp client - E2EE would be
preserved.
However, this does mean that if you were to actively interoperate between
providers (e.g. if Matrix turned up and asked WhatsApp, post DMA, to expose
an API we could use to write bridges against), then that bridge would need to
convert between WhatsApp’s E2EE’d payloads and Matrix’s E2EE’d payloads.
(Even though both WhatsApp and Matrix use the Double Ratchet, the actual
payloads within the encryption are completely different and would need to be
converted). Therefore such a bridge has to re-encrypt the traffic - which
means that the plaintext is exposed on the bridge, putting it at risk and
breaking the end-to-end encryption guarantee.
There are solutions to this, however:
We could run the bridge somewhere relatively safe - e.g. the user’s client.
There’s a bunch of work going on already in Matrix to run clientside
bridges, so that your laptop or phone effectively maintains a connection
over to iMessage or WhatsApp or whatever as if it were logged in… but then
relays the messages into Matrix once re-encrypted. By decentralising the
bridges and spreading them around the internet, you avoid them becoming a
single honeypot that bad actors might look to attack: instead it becomes
more a question of endpoint compromise (which is already a risk today).
The gatekeeper could switch to a decentralised end-to-end encrypted protocol
like Matrix to preserve end-to-end encryption throughout. This is
obviously significant work on the gatekeeper’s side, but we shouldn’t rule
it out. For instance, making the transition for a non-encrypted service is
impressively little work, as we proved with Gitter.
(We’d ideally need to figure out decentralised/federated identity-lookup
first though, to avoid switching from one centralised identity database
to another).
Worst case, we could flag to the user that their conversation is insecure
(the chat equivalent of a scary TLS certificate warning). Honestly, this
is something communication apps (including Matrix-based ones!) should be
doing anyway: as a user you should be able to tell what 3rd parties
(bots, integrations etc) have been added to a given conversation. Adding
this sort of semantic actually opens up a much richer set of communication
interactions, by giving the user the flexibility over who to trust with
their data, even if it breaks the platonic ideal of pure E2E encryption.
On balance, we think that the benefits of mandating open APIs outweigh the
risks that someone is going to run a vulnerable large-scale bridge and
undermine everyone’s E2EE. It’s better to have the option to be able to get
at your data in the first place than be held hostage in a walled garden.
Other considerations
One other complaint which has come up a bunch is around speed of innovation:
the idea that WhatsApp or similar would be seriously slowed down by having
to (effectively) maintain stable documented federation APIs, and figure out
how to do backwards compatibility for new features. It’s true that this will
take a bit more effort (similar to how adding GDPR compliance takes some
effort), but the ends make it more than worth it. Plus, if the rag-tag
Matrix ecosystem can do it, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that a
$600B company like Meta can figure it out too...
Another consideration is that it might make it too easy to build malicious 3rd
party clients - e.g. building your own "special" version of Signal which
connects to the official service, but deliberately or otherwise has security
flaws. The fact is that we're already in this position though: there are
illicit alternative clients flying around all over the place, and the onus is
on the app stores to protect their users from installing malware. This isn't
reason to throw the baby of interoperability out with the bathwater of
bootleg clients.
The final complaint is about moderation and abuse: while open APIs are good
news for consumer choice, they can also be used by spammers, phishers and
other miscreants to cause problems for the users within the gatekeeper. Much
like a mediaeval citadel; opening up your walled garden means that both good
and bad people can turn up. And much like real life, this is a solvable problem,
even if it’s unfortunate: the benefits of free trade massively outweigh the
downsides of having to police strangers more effectively. Frankly,
moderation and anti-abuse approaches on the Internet today are infamously
broken, with centralised moderation by gatekeepers producing increasingly
erratic results. By opening the walled gardens, we are forcing a much-needed
opportunity to review how to empower users and admins to filter unwanted
content on their own terms. There’s a recent write-up of the proposed
approach for Matrix at
https://element.io/blog/moderation-needs-a-radical-change/,
which outlines one strategy - but there are many others. Honestly, having to improve
moderation tooling is a worthwhile price to pay for the benefits of open
APIs.
So, there you have it. Hopefully you’ll agree that the benefits here outweigh
the risks: without open APIs we wouldn't even have the option to talk about
interoperability. We should be celebrating a new dawn for open access,
rather than fearing that the sky is falling and this is nefarious attempt to
undermine end-to-end encryption.
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
This MSC proposes some much-desired practical and usability fixes to the "Well-Known" discovery method for Matrix homeservers. This is part of the system that enables homeserver's to "delegate" their homeserver address (your Matrix ID is @alice:example.com, but your homeserver is listening for requests on homeserver.example.com).
Well-known for homeserver delegation was introduced a number of years ago, and since then some friction has arisen from various implementations. This MSC aims to address a collection of them!
Hey everyone! This week we've released Synapse 1.55, which includes a bunch of new features, performance improvements and bugfix. If you're using Mjolnir to moderate your rooms, and/or synctl to manage your homeserver, this release also introduces a few changes you definitely want to be aware of, head over to the announcement on the matrix.org blog for more!
Yesterday, we noticed a compatibility issue with a newly released version of Jinja, which is the tool we use in Synapse to render e-mail and web templates. We've quickly put out Synapse 1.55.2 to address this - so if you were unable to start Synapse because of it just update and you should be fine 🙂
Note that this doesn't apply to deployments of Synapse using the matrixdotorg/synapse Docker image or Debian packages from packages.matrix.org since they are already using a compatible version of Jinja.
Apart from that, work continues towards integrating Poetry with Synapse, which should prevent this kind of issues from happening in the future, and on improving room join times.
This week brings yet more bugfixes & stability to DMs: now, there should be no trouble sending messages into a KakaoTalk DM that hasn't been active for a few days.
The other major improvements are:
A command for listing your KakaoTalk friends list, appropriately named list-friends
Receiving images from KakaoTalk
I had hoped to finish support for sending images from Matrix by today, but I couldn't quite crack it in time--either KakaoTalk changed their API for sending media messages, or I'm doing something wrong 🙃
Nonetheless, the bridge is rapidly approaching a state of being usable!
A little over a year has passed since our last update, but we're not dead! On the contrary, Syphon has seen some significant improvements over the last year both in terms of features and project structure; the project is more alive than ever before, and we're really excited to share some updates!
Core Team
Syphon now has a core team, consisting of @ereio:matrix.org (creator of Syphon), @ed:geraghty.london, @dnisbetjones:mozilla.org, and @0x1a8510f2:0x1a8510f2.space (me)! With some of the workload now being shared, we're hoping Syphon will grow even faster with less time needed to review and merge PRs, triage and fix bugs, evaluate and implement features and answer support requests.
Cross-platform Availability
Syphon has been steadily expanding its list of supported platforms over the past year:
@ed:geraghty.london worked hard to bring Syphon to Windows with full feature parity, including (currently unofficial) Windows builds of Syphon.
I've been busy creating a flatpak for Syphon which is available on Flathub.
Regular and official ARM64 builds are also planned soon, with the first manual one already released. Once the CI infrastructure is properly set up, these will be included for every release and the flatpak will receive ARM64 support too!
Releases
Between 0.1.7 (21 Mar 2021) and 0.2.12 (23 Mar 2022), 21 releases were published. Of course, too much changed to list everything, but here are some highlights:
Multi-account support 🎉
Media messages 🎉
Markdown support 🎉
Message editing 🎉
Key import and export 🎉
App lock with encryption 🎉
HTTP proxy support 🎉
Theme tweaks
3pid auth support
EXIF data removal from sent images
System brightness setting
Various customisation options
(Unencrypted) chat message search
Ability to deactivate an account
Countless new translations
Massive performance improvements
Numerous bug fixes (including encryption and SSO)
Lots of refactoring and cleanup
Many of these would not have been possible without our awesome contributors.
Translations
We have also received many contributions in the form of translations and Syphon now supports, at least partially, 26 languages. Of these, 6 languages are fully or almost fully translated. To deal with all the incoming translations, there is now also an official Weblate page for Syphon.
All of these translations are submitted by volunteers and we're really grateful for their contributions in making Syphon more accessible to an international audience.
Syphon Space
We also now have an official Syphon space which we use for support, development discussion or just friendly offtopic chat. Come join us if you like at #syphon-space:matrix.org!
SchildiChat is a fork of Element that focuses on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list for both direct messages and groups, which is a more familiar approach to users of other popular instant messengers.
SchildiChat-Android now has more styles of message bubbles! So if you prefer the Schildi-bubbles over the Element ones (which you can use too in SchildiChat if you want), you can now also select between bubbles with or without tail, and select some more round bubbles than what we had previously, which was a highly requested feature!
If you wonder what makes SchildiChat special except for the different design now that Element has bubbles as well: it's hard to describe in a couple of short sentences, as it's mostly in the details.
So if you are interested in a list of things that we did on Android, I wrote up some aspects here.
Note however that this list is usually not really kept up-to-date, and there might already be some things that are now outdated since I added them.
However, it might give you some general ideas of what SchildiChat has to offer :)
Hello folks, quick update on what major things happened in Fractal-next the last two month. The most exciting addition is definitely the SSO support we merged this week and therefore we could close a 2 years old issue.
Timeline
You can now send files via drag-n-drop and via the file send button to a room. It also includes a nice preview for Images.
The timeline now shows audio messages with a small inline player.
Fractal-next lets you now remove messages you sent
Session verification
During first login, Fractal checks if the user hasn't started session verification from another client before offering to start a new one
The QrCode scanning is now spec compliant, and asks for user's confirmation after scanning.
We dropped screenshot support for QrCode scanning, since it makes the UX worse without adding any real benefit.
Room details
The room details show now the members of the room including the power level
Login
Fractal-Next now supports SSO 🎉️
We implemented auto-discovery of the homeserver via .well-known
Sorry that I was a little bit silent in the last weeks. So much stuff to do...
If you haven't heard it yet (because I have not made it that much public yet) there are experimental video calls in FluffyChat now. You need to enable them first under Settings > Chat and then you can try them out. They should be fully compatible with the Element video calls. But be aware that they are very unstable at the moment and may let your app crash.
FluffyChat 1.3.1 has been released
This release contains a lot of updated translations and bugfixes. I'm very excited about the new keyboard shortcuts from TheOneWithTheBrain. Also in your stories you can now pick the background color and the size of the picture. This is still a little bit experimental but I will share of course update the stories MSC asap.
Thanks to all contributors and translators.
Changelog:
Allow app to be moved to external storage (Marcel)
Translated using Weblate (Arabic) (Mads Louis)
Translated using Weblate (Basque) (Sorunome)
Translated using Weblate (Basque) (—X—)
Translated using Weblate (Chinese (Simplified)) (Eric)
Translated using Weblate (Czech) (Sorunome)
Translated using Weblate (Dutch) (Jelv)
Translated using Weblate (English) (Raatty)
Translated using Weblate (French) (Anne Onyme 017)
Translated using Weblate (Galician) (Xosé M)
Translated using Weblate (German) (Maciej Krüger)
Translated using Weblate (Indonesian) (Linerly)
Translated using Weblate (Irish) (Graeme Power)
Translated using Weblate (Persian) (Anastázius Darián)
Translated using Weblate (Russian) (Nikita Epifanov)
Translated using Weblate (Swedish) (Joaquim Homrighausen)
Translated using Weblate (Turkish) (Oğuz Ersen)
Translated using Weblate (Ukrainian) (Ihor Hordiichuk)
Update proguard rules to a more modern setup (MTRNord)
chore: Minor story viewer fixes (Krille Fear)
chore: Remove story line count and make answering to stories online (Krille Fear)
[[https://github.com/alphapapa/ement.el][Ement.el]], a Matrix client for Emacs, has learned to create new rooms and invite users to rooms. Feedback is appreciated; see our chat room, [[https://matrix.to/#/#ement.el:matrix.org][#ement.el:matrix.org]], or the issue tracker on the repo.
Threads will be released behind a labs flag in the next release and enabled by default in the Release Candidate (RC) from 5th April
If you’re using an older version of Synapse (<v1.55.0) you might experience compatibility problems with stable prefixes. After upgrading Element to v1.18.0 unstable threads will be moved to the main room timeline
Groups have been deleted on develop. It has also landed alongside other fairly major changes so please definitely report issues if you see them
Continuing work to remove skinning from the application. This is a fairly major change to how everything works under the hood, so when it lands please report any issues with the app as most will be subtle and therefore might be missed.
Currently expected to land on or about April 5th
Component replacement will still be possible (and this will be documented)
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
Thread list is now ordered by last reply
Fixes for the room list counter
Last stretch of threads acceptance testing before releasing to beta
Iteration to the new search dialog to integrate people & public rooms search into the new experience.
Element 1.8.7 was released on the App Store after delays with the review: we’ve made ignoring users easier and now suggest a Matrix ID when using “Sign in With Apple” to resolve the issue.
Space creation and management will be available in the next release, due next week.
We had some issues with publishing releases to TestFlight so the latest release candidates haven’t been updated publicly - we have been testing them internally so releases will not be delayed
If you are looking for a docker container with just the auto compressor for linux amd64/arm64 in it, her you go: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/rust-synapse-compress-state
The theme of the episode is "analytics and privacy". We will have guests from the awesome non-profit Exodus Privacy to shed some light on analytics: what can your apps know about you and how you can get better informed.
Nad from Element will give us the perspective from the other side: as a vendor, does it make sense to use analytics? Are there better alternatives? Is there a way to do it right?
Hi all, Synapse
1.55 is out! Let's
see the main talking points of this new release.
Update: After the initial release of Synapse 1.55, the developers of a
third-party tool (Jinja, which is the tool Synapse uses to render email and
web templates) released a new version of their project which proved
incompatible with Synapse. To address this issue, we have released Synapse
1.55.2.
Deployments of Synapse using the matrixdotorg/synapse Docker image or Debian
packages from packages.matrix.org are not affected as they are already using
a compatible version of the tool.
It's worth noting that the work we are doing to integrate
Poetry into Synapse (more on that a bit further
in this post) will, once completed, prevent this kind of issues from
happening.
Removing support for Mjolnir 1.3.1 and older
Administrators of large homeservers and communities will already be familiar
with Mjolnir, which is a tool designed
to help them moderate a large number of rooms in an efficient way. It includes a
bot as well as a Synapse module to better interface with the homeserver.
Due to a change in how we manage some of Synapse's internal utilities, this
release of Synapse breaks compatibility with Mjolnir versions 1.3.1 and older.
Homeserver administrators using Mjolnir and upgrading to Synapse 1.55 should
make sure they're running Mjolnir version 1.3.2 or later.
synctl is a tool provided as part of Synapse to run and manage your instance
and its workers (if any).
As part of our work to integrate Poetry in Synapse
(which in turn will enable a lot of cool things, such as reproducible builds),
we have recently moved the way we package this tool. As of this release,
homeserver administrators should stop invoking it using its direct path (e.g.
/path/to/synctl start), but should instead call it directly, e.g. synctl start.
This means homeserver administrators using synctl must make sure that the tool
is in their PATH. This is automatically done when installing and upgrading
Synapse using the matrixdotorg/synapse Docker image or Debian packages from
packages.matrix.org. When installing from a wheel, sdist, or PyPI, an
executable is created in your Python installation's bin directory.
This release also introduces new module callbacks, allowing homeserver
administrators to more efficiently review which users are able to deactivate
users and shutdown rooms. More information on that in Synapse's
documentation.
We have also started experimenting with using the native Python asyncio event
loop in Synapse which, if successful, would make it easier to use building
blocks from the Python ecosystem when adding new features to Synapse.
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) Dirk Klimpel,
Beeper, and
~creme.
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've mostly been working on our existing projects. Unfortunately this means little to report this week, but if there's something that needs out attention then please mention it in #sct-office:matrix.org 🙂
Things have been relatively quiet on the P2P front recently as we have been working on fixing bugs in Dendrite, but we will be releasing build 94 of the P2P demos for iOS and for Android soon, which feature new fair queuing in Pinecone. This should help to reduce congestion from single nodes. It also includes all of the latest Dendrite updates.
Hello everyone. It's been a quieter week for the Synapse team---many of us are away this week.
We released Synapse 1.55.0rc1 yesterday, a little later than usual. A full release is still planned for the coming Tuesday (22nd March). Please note that this release breaks compatibility with Mjolnir 1.3.1 and earlier. Administrators using Mjolnir should ensure it is upgraded before upgrading Synapse to 1.55.0rc1.
Experimental support for using Twisted's asyncio reactor. If this is feasible, it might allow us to leverage tools and libraries for Python's growing asyncio ecosystem.
Please feel free to try it out and let us know how you get on: either in the #synapse:matrix.org or on GitHub if you encounter any unexplained problems. As ever, many thanks to all contributors involved.
Behind the scenes we've been working on a few longer-term projects:
Continued support for threading (MSC3440) and the mechanism which supports it, relations (MSC2674).
Performance investigations: we're looking at getting better profiling information; and seeing if we can reclaim CPU cycles by cancelling processing when a requester terminates their request early.
Hopefully we'll see these plans come to fruition over the coming weeks.
This week brings some bugfixes to DMs, and general improvements to the way channels are synced on startup.
I've also written some setup instructions to assist anyone wanting to try this bridge out for themselves!
As for bugs, I just stumbled upon a big one just now: if a KakaoTalk channel hasn't had activity for a few days, sending a message in its Matrix portal may crash. This happens because of the KakaoTalk API's apparent eagerness in forgetting about inactive channels (IIRC content that's a few weeks old is deleted from their servers, for privacy reasons), and the likely fix is for the bridge to use the right API calls to trigger those channels back into an active state before trying to interact with them.
Once that's fixed, the next thing I'll get out of the way (for the sake of completeness) is the web-based login interface, which all of the other mautrix-python bridges support (and is quite nice for privacy-conscious users that would rather send their KakaoTalk passwords directly to the bridge, instead of through a Matrix homeserver).
After that, I'll work on contact searching & inviting contacts to group chats or DMs.
After our release last week, of course all the bugreports came out of the woodworks. As such we fixed issues with device ids being set incorrectly after SSO, screensharing, overlapping in the reply popup and UIA flows without fallback support like https://github.com/devture/matrix-synapse-shared-secret-auth showing up as UIA stages. Key backup is also now enabled by default (if it has the correct signatures and everything), various layouting fixes and more.
We'll probably make a bugfix release in the next few days.
I have been working on integrating MSC3575: Sliding Sync into Element-Web. This is a pretty large endeavour but there has been a lot of progress on it already!
There now exists a JS-SDK PR to add the core bits of Sliding Sync (along with E2EE/to-device extensions), and a React-SDK branch which adds the Labs flag, config.json section for the proxy URL, and sets up room subscriptions when you select a room. The net result?
This is still early days: you cannot scroll the room list yet and there's still many outstanding issues to fix before it can land on mainline, but it's at the stage where it's almost ready for people to try out. Watch this space...
Continuing with the removal of the skinning layer, instead recommending module replacement - please talk to us in #element-dev:matrix.org if this is a surprise.
Continued removal of Groups/Communities - we’re expecting it to land this week (for release on about April 11th).
Continuing development of live location sharing.
We’ve reduced tsc errors by 70% in react-sdk unit tests!
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
We're working on a prototype for voice rooms, which are persistent voice chats similar to Discord's voice channel feature. Expect this to receive more attention and polish over the coming weeks
Threads are now using the stable prefix m.thread and are currently undergoing acceptance testing. We’re hoping to launch it out of labs in the next few weeks.
We’re currently at the last mile of testing for space creation & space management on iOS. Thanks to everyone who helped with community testing last week!
We’re currently on track to merge and ship these changes at the end of this month.
Once released, Element on all platforms will have parity across the core spaces feature set!
1.4.4 has dropped across all channels, we've had some promising early feedback that the storage/RAM usage is starting to decrease, as always thanks for the reports and keep them coming! Full release notes available in the usual place
Threads are levelling up and becoming driven by MSC3440, increasing their reliability and cross device consistency. If you're already using threads we'll automatically migrate them for you in the next release 1.4.6
Live location sharing work has started! Soon you'll be able to share and receive location updates in real time
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
Our metaverse-on-matrix project is progressing quickly!
Robert and Nate have been working on updating the Third Room demo to use the latest bitECS and threecs work as well as moving rendering and game update loops off the main thread!
Bruno has been porting Native Group VoIP to Hydrogen SDK which Third Room will use for both spatial voice chat and DataChannels
Ajay has a working scaffold of the early UI concepts paired with Hydrogen SDK to incorporate the room list and chat views.
More design work is happening as well, here's our latest from Rian
Want to purge a space recursively? Matrix Wrench now has a button for that. It will try to fetch a list of all sub spaces and rooms and offer you to delete them via the Synapse Admin API.
Also, you can now knock on rooms and the room lists allow to navigate to a room page by clicking on a room ID.
Next up will likely be searchable lists for rooms and users as well as other usability and layout improvements. The goal is to have a nice-looking, stable v1.0 release for its anniversary on 13th June. I'm looking for help with design and documentation.
A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.
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.
Keeping in step with our quarterly spec releases, the release of Matrix v1.3 is expected to land sometime early Q2 2022. This release will include Threads (as defined by MSC3440), as well as a number of other MSCs which land in the meantime.
Speaking of other MSCs, client developers should be aware of upcoming work to support live and static location sharing in the ecosystem. A notice on the subject has been posted today in the Matrix Client Developers room.
This MSC makes the case for allowing linking to MXC content by using of an <a> tag in the HTML-formatted formatted_body field of a m.room.message. As MXC urls could contain HTML files, it could be rather useful to link directly to them, as you would any other webpage. Your client would then translate this to an http/s URL which can be used to view/navigate to the file.
We've released Synapse 1.54! It includes quite a lot of nice improvements, including around URL previewing, and new callbacks for third-party modules. Check out the release announcement for more info on all this goodness.
We've also landed more of the ground work to improve the time it takes for new servers to join big rooms, which Rich was talking about last week. Aside from this, we're continuing the effort towards switching Synapse to use Poetry, which will enable reproducible builds for Synapse. These are some very exciting projects which will be maturing in the coming weeks, so watch this space!
Missed last weeks update, but my charts rolled along regardless. Currently serving; element-web 1.10.6 and matrix-synapse 1.54.0 (and matrix-media-repo 1.2.10)
The basics of the bridge are now ready! Backfilling, message sending, and message receiving are now implemented...albeit quite buggy and untested.
For anyone curious to try it out, installation follows the same general steps as tulir's Python-based mautrix bridges, plus a backend Node module that must be launched before the Python component of the bridge. I'll write a README with proper setup instructions soon!
Just note that for the time being, updates to the bridge may invalidate its database!!. I won't guarantee stable DB upgrades until the bridge's early growing pains have settled down.
Reminder that my KakaoTalk ID is fair-mw if anyone wants to help me test things out 🙂
👋 I'm happy to finally reveal the side project I've been working on - SmallTalk, a tiny native android matrix client focused on chatting with family and friends!
I've been wondering, how small can you make a functional native android matrix client? So far 1.7mb! (*when served from an app bundle)
Features
E2E encryption (including importing Element E2E keys)
Merged room and DM list
Message bubbles
Push notifications
Currently in closed beta whilst ironing bugs, improving error handling and adding basic features like accepting invites, however apks are available on github for eager testers!
Our MSC 3440 completed its final comment period this week which is a super exciting move forwards for our team! We are now using a stable prefix and server-side support for Threads so the whole experience should be much better.
The team is hard at work fixing bugs so that we can launch with as much confidence in our solution as possible.
If you’ve been using Threads whilst in Labs, please keep giving feedback and raising any issues you may find.
The next app store release is delayed due to some flows that do not match Apple guidelines - we’ll be updating the Apple SSO default values and introducing “Decline & Block” to invitations.
This week we checked-in on our language status and updated some things; We now support Ukrainian.
We’re working hard at updating the activity indicators in the app. While we work on the performance and load times in general we want to enable users to go about their tasks without being blocked by the activity indicator. The new indicator sits towards the top of the screen and should be out of the way for most tasks, whilst still informative. Let us know what you think!
The iOS team are also improving the onboarding experience for new users; aiming to make Matrix account creation as simple as possible.
We’re continuing on our path to increase the quality and usability of the app; the next release is v1.4.4 (already available for beta testers!) includes things like moving the typing indicator from the top bar to the bottom of the timeline.
We are also improving our PR process. In particular we want to reduce the time the submitters have to wait to get a review.
Our onboarding flow is being updated. We want new users to have a simple and straight-forward experience when they’re creating an account.
We are happy to announce that Cinny now support all the features of Spaces — a way to group rooms in Matrix. This means that you can now create new spaces from client, add rooms or subspaces inside them or manage the added rooms.
We have also made our unique feature of Pinning spaces to sidebar more easy and organized. With this option all the spaces and subspaces will be visible at one place and you can select the one you want to pin or remove.
One more unique feature we added with update is the Categorized subspaces, what this do is make all the subspaces inside a space appear as categories. This is helpful when there are deep nested spaces inside a space and breadcrumb is pain to navigate back and fourth. Keep in mind that this ignore the nesting of subspaces and all of them will appear under mainspace, but nice thing is that you can select which subspace you want to categorized and which not.
Another exciting update related to spaces is the Drag-and-Drop. Earlier there was no option to reorder pinned spaces but now with DnD you can reorder them as you like.
Apart from spaces this update also include option to drag and drop files, ||sending spoiler||, desktop notification and viewing event source. (Thanks to @ginnyTheCat for these amazing additions.)
Full changelog is available at: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny/releases/tag/v1.8.0
Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in
Join our channel at: https://matrix.to/#/#cinny:matrix.org
Github: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@cinnyapp
In the last two weeks we've made some UX improvements:
The PDF viewer now has nicer tooltips
The width of sidepanels is now adjustable
Searchbars now have hints to help find the keyboard shortcut
Error messages are now displayed more uniformly
Populus-viewer now has an icon
Failed messages are now indicated, with the option to resend
Fixed some bugs:
room avatars should now update more quickly
highlights should always display immediately after joining a new discussion
And added a service worker, for a better offline experience.
Finally, we've opened a new draft MSC (just a stub at the moment) to create a format for annotations on text documents. So... matrix annotations as a vim plugin? The future is bright 😎
As always, if you're interested in this work, or in the future of annotation and scholarship on matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.
Matrix Streamchat got it's first alpha release, and was successfully set up + used by someone else this week
Recorded a little demo video on the setup with OBS: https://youtu.be/HmJ3XwJXB7I, and implemented the GUI for configuring the chat's settings and looks, to then copy the link into an iframe (embedded chat) or OBS (overlay).
Gatho.party is a replacement for Facebook Events for small social gatherings. I've used it for a number of parties and received great feedback, and I'm seeing others are starting to use it too 🎉
To receive confirmations of attendance you can either:
Use the included Matrix bot to automatically sync RSVP emoji reactions in a linked Matrix room (great
for your friends on Matrix or in a bridged Signal chat)
Send a unique one-click RSVP links to you friends without Matrix (eg. Instagram DMs, SMS)
And as of this week, guests can "self serve" and add their own RSVP via the unique event link, so you can just drop the event link in a Facebook Messenger chat or iMessage group
(without email or phone verification at the moment, so hosts will need to moderate if
their guests go rogue and add multiple fake names!)
Other recent improvements are:
Ability to delete guests
Improved call to action and copy text for when a guest with a "magic" link is prompted to RSVP
Confetti animations when your guests RSVP via the Gatho website as "Going"
I'm currently testing an experimental chat embed using Matrix Live so your guests not on Matrix can optionally see your linked Matrix room - I've found some of my friends join Matrix after seeing this so they can join the action!
I'm keen to eventually use Cactus Comments once I figure out a bit of Elm and have more spare time so that non-Matrix guests can post too.
The Gatho website and bot is open source (AGPL-3.0) on Github, PRs and Github issues are very welcome! It's built using Next.js in Typescript.
I'd love to hear your feedback! Join the Matrix room at https://matrix.to/#/#gatho-events:matrix.gatho.party
Polyjuice Client Test is a tool for testing Matrix clients by creating a predefined environment for each test. Since the last time it was mentioned in TWIM,
more tests have been added: a test for basic end-to-end encryption message sending and receiving, symmetric key backup (MSC3270), and key withheld codes (MSC2399). More tests (and improvements to existing tests) to come.
the UI has improved a bit. Sorry, it's still ugly, but slightly less so. Also, now you can search through the tests.
I am now running a publicly-accessible instance of it at https://test.uhoreg.ca/ so you can test your clients without having to set it up yourself. This instance is stable-ish, in that it should always be available, but may be restarted randomly, in which case you may need to re-start your tests.
If you are looking for a docker container with just the auto compressor for linux amd64/arm64 in it, her you go: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/rust-synapse-compress-state
hello! wanted to show a small matrix web client made with unminified js/html/css & web components (wip++)
https://libli.org/
https://gitlab.com/sctlib/libli + https://gitlab.com/sctlib/matrix-room-element
looking forward feedback comments or anything,
cheers & viva la matrix!
for now it only uses default matrix messages, and it is read only, so users have to login/register/CRUD through element (or any other client)
the idea would be to give back users control on their data, allow them to "collect" (individually or as group), any type of content, gathered into matrix room
For now, the client is making HTTP requests to matrix API, to fetch the data of a (public) room, all message & state events.
it also give a "clean URL" libli.org/room:server.tld so users can access their "profile" (chat room) easily (just like a twitter, instagram, medium) page
Following Element's recent announcement of location sharing with support for self-hosted map tile server, I went ahead and set up one, and have written a blog post about it, explaining how to go a little further than the currently published guide, and with Ansible scripts included.
*> https://wrily.foad.me.uk/self-host-a-matrix-map-server
Andy Balaam wrote a blog post explaining extensible events - it shows simple examples of what message events look like now, and how they change with extensible events. It also covers the abbreviated forms of m.message: m.text and m.html, which can make it somewhat more confusing to understand.
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 1.54 is
out! Let's see what goodness is coming your way with this new release.
Improving URL previews
As part of the Matrix specification, Matrix clients have the option to rely on
the homeserver to generate URL previews. This means the homeserver (in this case
Synapse) needs to have a look at the content at that URL and extract data to
send back to the client.
In the past, Synapse has had issues with generating complete URL previews, and
some metadata (e.g. image, description) would be missing from the data that
Synapse sends to clients. Synapse 1.54 includes improvements to the generation
of URL previews, and while testing it we've been able to observe improvements to
previews generated for Twitter and Reddit.
New module callbacks
Synapse modules allow third-party developers to write extra features for
Synapse, that wouldn't necessarily be generic enough to fit within the Matrix
specification. This includes custom behaviours such as smarter event filters,
bespoke media storage providers, or spam checkers. Since we rewrote Synapse's
module system in Synapse
1.37,
we have been improving it by adding new callback functions that module can
implement, allowing them to interface better with Synapse.
Synapse 1.54 includes three new module callbacks. One of them,
get_displayname_for_registration,
allows modules to define the display name for newly registered users. Together
with the existing
get_username_for_registration
introduced in Synapse
1.52, they allow
modules a better control over the user registration process.
The two other module callbacks introduced in Synapse 1.54,
on_profile_update
and
on_user_deactivation_status_changed,
allow modules to react to profile changes, as well as the deactivation (or
reactivation) of users.
Everything else
This release of Synapse also includes more work to make joining large Matrix
rooms faster (I was telling you about that in the Synapse 1.53 release
announcement). While
it's still very experimental and not yet ready for show time, it's still very
exciting to see this work happening!
Synapse 1.54 also includes a change to the client-side versions
endpoint
to advertise Matrix 1.1 and 1.2. See the Matrix
1.2 release
announcement to read all about the changes this latest version of the
specification brings to the ecosystem.
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) Dirk Klimpel, Andrew
Ryan, and
lukasdenk.
t2bot.io - a public integrations network for Matrix - has passed 1 Million known rooms and 8.3 Million bridged users. 10,000 of these rooms are attributed to Voyager (a bot which actively goes out to find rooms to map Matrix, with the map currently down for maintenance), leaving the remaining ones either bridged, previously bridged, or using a different integration offered by t2bot.io for free.
The 8.3 Million users are mainly Discord and Telegram users which have been brought over to Matrix through bridges. The stats say "excluding Twitter-bridged" because there's 424,832 old accounts from back in the day when t2bot.io had a free Twitter bridge available. To further break this down, about 6.8M are Telegram users (12% of Telegram) and 1.3M are Discord (<1% of Discord).
For perspective, t2bot.io has about 569 Million events stored in its database and sees approximately 30 thousand people bridged daily from the wider world into Matrix through its bridges.
This post is just a milestone update, but it also serves as a reminder that running your own server/bridges is also possible. In fact, it's even recommended to have better control over your own data and avoid latency issues that large providers, like t2bot.io, can unintentionally introduce. Synapse is relatively easy to set up with minimal sysadmin knowledge (guide), and there's always paid offerings like Element Matrix Services (for home and also for fun) and Beeper for a richer bridging experience than t2bot.io can feasibly provide.
It is to be noted that eQualitie has set-up public Matrix and Element instances for Ukrainian people who are struggling right now. If you are in Ukraine or are in touch with Ukrainian people who need secure communications, you can show them https://kyiv.dcomm.net.ua, https://odessa.dcomm.net.ua, or https://kharkiv.dcomm.net.ua depending on their location so they get instructions on how to create an account on Matrix and stay in touch
MSC3575 Sliding Sync work is progressing, and a number of new features have been added to the MSC with implementations in the built-in web client in the proxy. A list of changes include:
spec/proxy: the ability to filter the room list by room name.
spec/proxy: Aninitial flag on the room to distinguish between updates and the initial sync for a given room. This can be used as a hint to clients to determine if they should update/replace their local data for that room.
proxy: more efficient algorithm for determining overlapping sets of ranges, resulting in fewer bytes over the wire when scrolling.
proxy: the client implementation now supports sending basic text messages as well as issuing/join,/invite,/leave commands.
proxy: the client implementation now has a developer HUD which tracks the Tx/Rx bytes as well as a visual representation of the sliding window.
The net result is a basic but incredibly low bandwidth syncing client: 60.79KB to download an entire initial sync on matrix.org. Further improvements will be done on the client to make sure it doesn't scale with the number of rooms on the user's account (it currently does because it naively adds a placeholder for each room in the list) to ensure it remains extremely snappy and a vision for what Sliding Sync can do in practice, right now. Please continue giving feedback on MSC3575 or in #sliding-sync:matrix.org as the API is still in development and will change depending on what clients require.
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.
Heads up! You may have noticed some changes to the matrix-org/matrix-doc github repository this week. The first major one being that it no longer exists!
We have separated it out into two repositories:
matrix-org/matrix-spec - the source text of the spec. Issues and pull requests filed here should relate to the source of the spec.
matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals - all Matrix Spec Change proposals. New MSCs should be filed against this repository as pull requests. Issues should not be filed against this repository (and no, the issue tracker cannot be disabled, as it would cause transferred issue link redirects to 404).
The primary motivation for this was to separate concerns of interacting with matrix-org/matrix-doc. Those interacting with the spec's source would have to wade through long-lived spec proposals, while those only interested in spec proposals would need to filter out spec source files and other issues and PRs related to them. This also helps writing tooling against the repo either as it no longer needs to filter MSCs via issue labels.
Existing links to matrix-doc should be automatically redirected by github to the right place. MSC authors and developers should update their git remote settings to point to the new repos.
What happened in detail to achieve this was:
matrix-doc was renamed tomatrix-spec-proposals
matrix-spec was created
All files other than the "proposals" folder were transferred frommatrix-spec-proposals tomatrix-spec
All open issues frommatrix-spec-proposals were transferred tomatrix-spec
Further details are available here: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/927
This MSC asks for the simple change of adding a "destination" field to the Authorization header of federation requests. This would have the benefit of allowing reverse proxies - potentially handling traffic for multiple homeservers - to know where requests should be sent. Or for forward proxies, which could validate outgoing requests from a homeserver before they're sent.
There is currently some discussion on the fundamental idea of the MSCs, which will need to be resolved first before it can move forwards.
Quite a varied bag this week! Firstly we cut a release candidate for Synapse 1.54.0, which we hope to release next week. As ever, testing and feedback is much appreciated.
Our switch to Poetry for dependency management has come a few steps closer, by removing tox from our Continuous Integration, and converting some of our ad-hoc scripts to proper Python entry points.
Meanwhile we've been continuing to knock out blockers to improving room join speeds, including better exception handling and logging, and some exciting work to reduce wasted work when a client disconnects while we're still processing a request.
We've also been taking a wider look at performance problems, such as slow /sync and /login times.
I have been asked by numerous people over months if there are any kind of graphs comparing Synapse and Dendrite. Up until now, my answer has been "as far as I know, no". However, this got me thinking whether I can use Complement to engineer some kind of performance testing infrastructure. After hacking on it for a day or two, I can now share some of the work I've done in this area. There now exists two new binaries in the Complement repo: perftest and perfgraph. The former will run some tests and output a .json file. The latter will consume these files to generate .svg graphs. The tests performed include:
Creating a bunch of rooms with different users. (currently 10 users and 50 rooms)
Joining a bunch of rooms with different users.
Sending messages into rooms with different users. (currently 100 messages)
Doing an initial sync for all users.
Updating the display name of all users.
Doing an incremental sync for all users.
The metrics are collected using docker stats. This means the entire container is measured, not just the homeserver binary (e.g any daemons or assistive processes are included in the metrics) and includes:
CPU time consumed
Memory consumed
Bytes transmitted/received
Disk read/writes
Time taken
Here are some results:
This was a surprising find and probably indicates that Dendrite has a memory leak somewhere when creating events. However, the fun doesn't stop there. We can also use this tool to compare different versions of the same homeserver:
This allows us to quantify any performance improvements we've been working on, and you can clearly see how we're being more efficient with CPU in newer versions. But the fun doesn't stop there either. We can also compare different flavours of the same version of a homeserver:
You can quantify the cost of running sqlite or postgres for your particular installation.
Care must be taken when interpreting results. Lower doesn't always mean better. For example, a low readout on "create_users" may be a cause for concern as it might indicate that the server is not hashing passwords correctly (e.g using bcrypt/scrypt which are designed to consume CPU/memory). Servers which don't implement all of the specification will also be abnormally low on CPU/memory (e.g not having to calculate unread counts or handle push notifications naturally means less work to do so less resources consumed). Furthermore, these tests do not yet test federation, so expensive remote joins are not measured (remote joins require the joining server to check signatures, hashes, etc of a lot of events which doesn't happen for local servers). That being said, I have hopefully illustrated how useful this tool can be for both server developers trying to improve their software and server admins who want to use the right server for their hardware. The graphs are still a work-in-progress and there's a lot more that can be done in this area beyond a few days work, but it's a start.
Today we've released Dendrite 0.6.5 which contains early push notification support as well as a number of fixes and improvements. This release includes the following changes:
Early support for push notifications has been added, with support for push rules, pushers, HTTP push gateways and the /notifications endpoint (contributions by danpe, PiotrKozimor and tommie)
Spaces Summary (MSC2946) is now correctly supported (when msc2946 is enabled in the config)
All media API endpoints are now available under the /v3 namespace
Profile updates (display name and avatar) are now sent asynchronously so they shouldn't block the client for a very long time
State resolution v2 has been optimised further to considerably reduce the number of memory allocations
State resolution v2 will no longer duplicate events unnecessarily when calculating the auth difference
The create-account tool now has a -reset-password option for resetting the passwords of existing accounts
The /sync endpoint now calculates device list changes much more quickly with less RAM used
The /messages endpoint now lazy-loads members correctly
Read receipts now work correctly by correcting bugs in the stream positions and receipt coalescing
Topological sorting of state and join responses has been corrected, which should help to reduce the number of auth problems when joining new federated rooms
Media thumbnails should now work properly after having unnecessarily strict rate limiting removed
The roomserver no longer holds transactions for as long when processing input events
Uploading device keys and cross-signing keys will now correctly no-op if there were no changes
Parameters are now remembered correctly during registration
Devices can now only be deleted within the appropriate UIA flow
The /context endpoint now returns 404 instead of 500 if the event was not found
SQLite mode will no longer leak memory as a result of not closing prepared statements
Spec compliance, as measured by Sytest, currently sits at:
Client-server APIs: 76%, up from 65% last time
Server-server APIs: 95%, up from 94% last time
As always, you can join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite discussion and announcements.
Hey folks, I'm back from holidays and I'm proud to say that hookshot is kicking out release after release. This release is especially large and contains a bounty of new features and fixes. Of note are:
JIRA Datacenter (On Premise) is now supported.
You can now configure fine grained permissions for users on the bridge by userId, homeserver domain or room membership (think spaces).
Generic webhooks has sprouted a versioned API, with v2 allowing for finer control over the output.
GitHub connections now include the closing comment when issues and PRs are closed.
GitHub connections will also notify a room when an existing issue has been relabled to one filtered by that room.
Figma now uses MSC3440 for comment threads.
But seriously go check out the release, there is way more there than I can include in this TWIM post. Happy webhookin, matrix gang!
In case you did not know, Hookshot can be installed via spantaleev's Ansible playbook. In addition to updates for this new release, the role has recently gotten some improvements and fixes by the community, so in case you had issues before, now is the time to try again!
P.S oh and I almost forgot, we rehomed to https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-hookshot. This doesn't change much, other than some redirects in your browsers cache.
Allows anyone to run github commands in rooms. User part of the room listed can actually go and create connections to anywhere (we use it internally at $work), and then there is a final random user who gets those permissions because they refuse to join that room :p
Released v1.10.5 and also v1.10.6 as a hotfix for a crash
Surveyed users and collated feedback from search result ordering for improvements to the new search experience (enable it in Settings -> Labs in production)
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
Pin drop location sharing has been added
Fixed message ordering issues in threads
Fixed threads discovery when scrolling back in a room
Added a couple of new ways to access pinned messages, in the room header and info panel
Improved the reliability of pinned messages with edits
Making progress on the registration flow by setting name and avatar
In development:
We will be trying out Spaces on iOS at 16:00 UTC / 17:00 CET on Tuesday, 8th of March. Head over to #element-community-testing:matrix.org to hear the latest on all testing sessions!
Live location sharing has started
In labs:
An option to use the last member avatar and name in the timeline
a very simple invite-accepting bot as part of matrix-streamchat to more easily facilitate peeking into rooms over federation.
You run one on your guest-access enabled homeserver, invite it to your remote room, and now all guest accounts from your server know they are in fact allowed to publicly read the room over federation without joining themselves. https://git.pixie.town/f0x/matrix-streamchat/src/branch/main/autojoin-bot
Work on having a setup page for the bot was added which allows to easily add the bot to your room (sets up permissions and invites the bot as required)
Added support for a state event which tells the widget about "who is the bot?" and "which lists does this bot monitor?" Which also allows you to use the widget without being in the banlist room yourself. (See https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-moderation-widget#use-a-state-event-to-allow-showing-relevant-lists-only-in-the-dropdown for more information)
Element Call has entered beta! Head over to https://call.element.io (formerly matrixvoip.dev) to play with in-browser native Matrix voice/video calling powered by MSC3401, supporting all webrtc-capable mobile & desktop browsers. See all the details over at https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-element-call/
Offers high quality video calls with around 6 or 7 participants as a small & simple, standalone app that allows anyone to drop into a video conference easily.
This is beta - please file bugs at https://github.com/vector-im/element-call/issues and be aware that currently all participants need good bandwidth
This is the first implementation of MSC3401: a spec for secure, federated voice and video conferences.
Integrations into other clients are coming soon, Hydrogen is working on it right now
We’ll also be developing a server to mix media streams so calls can scale up to much larger number of participants. The server will only ever see your encrypted media, so calls will stay secure and confidential.
A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Ruma’s approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.
We're back (to TWIM)! Here's some highlights from the past few months:
Stronger types for some things:
Base64 which ensures you always decode / encode with the appropriate base64 dictionary [@jplatte]
TransactionId which is simply a little more explicit than String and easier to generate a random instance of [@jplatte]
Stable support for lots of previously-unstable functionality that got stabilized upstream as part of the Matrix specification releases v1.1 and v1.2 [@zecakeh]
More fine-grained feature flags for MSC implementations (before: everything behind unstable-pre-spec, after: most things behind dedicated unstable-mscXXXX features) [@zecakeh]
All of these changes are available in version 0.5.0 which was released about two weeks ago.
Additionally, @zecakeh recently started implementing extensible events and doing some pretty heavy internal refactoring that will make our release process faster and hopefully make contributing to Ruma easier as well.
With all these changes we're very close to supporting all of Matrix v1.1 (and Matrix v1.2 too!), with the only major omission being Secure Secret Storage and Sharing (SSSS). Some work on that was done as far back as last year's GSoC but it was blocked on a medium-sized refactoring of how we handle account data. I'm planning to get that over the finish line over the next weeks.
I'm working on a little hobby project, The Matrix Scribe.
The Matrix Scribe helps us re-post or transcribe messages into matrix that we received from somewhere else, posing as different ghost users to represent the original authors.
Scribe will post this:
Ann I'm Ann.
Bob Hello! I'm Bob.
when I write this to @scribe-bot:
@julian /scribe as Ann
@julian I'm Ann.
@julian /scribe as Bob
@julian Hello! I'm Bob.
That is an illustration of the goal. The output part works already; the bot part isn't implemented yet.
Why?
I want to encourage people to experiment and play with extending Matrix in creative ways.
As a building block for myself towards building more usual matrix bridges. Scribe is the input half of the matrix half of a bridge, so literally one quarter of a typical matrix bridge.
I hope that I myself and maybe some other people will find Scribe fun or useful in itself.
a simple bot https://github.com/borisrunakov/maubot_azuracast built with maubot, that you can use to request data from your azuracast self hosted instance. It's not much but ok...
I'll be speaking at the new HYTRADBOI conference (29 Apr) about building collaborative, open software on Matrix. All of the talks sound super interesting, highly recommended! 😄 The talks will be public after the conference as well.
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.
MSC3440 continues to be the focus on much review as the proposal inches towards entering final comment period.
Otherwise both MSC3589 (room version 9 as the default room version) and MSC3582 (remove m.room.message.feedback) merged this week. The former brings with it updated versions for rooms as they continue to be created across the federation, whereas the latter is simply a nice clean up to the existing spec :)
This MSC aims to introduce a set of generic administrative APIs for Matrix homeservers, starting with those that could potentially be useful for user moderation.
There has long been talk of adding administration APIs akin to Synapse's Admin API to the spec, in part to reduce the number of tools that are specifically created for it, and thus can only be used with Synapse.
This week we released Synapse 1.53.0! This release adds support for sending to-device messages to application services, adds a background database update to purge account data for deactivated users, and adds more features to improve performance and stability, as well as bugfixes and improved documentation. Check out the release notes here.
In addition to the release, work continues on improving the performance of room joins-progress is being made! Finally, we began the process of switching over Synapse to use Poetry for dependency management-keep your eyes peeled for more information on that project as it develops.
This week we released Dendrite v0.6.4 which contains a significant number of improvements and fixes. It includes the following:
All Client-Server API endpoints are now available under the /v3 namespace
The /whoami response format now matches the latest Matrix spec version
Support added for the /context endpoint, which should help clients to render quote-replies correctly
Accounts now have an optional account type field, allowing admin accounts to be created
Server notices are now supported
Refactored the user API storage to deduplicate a significant amount of code, as well as merging both user API databases into a single database
Guest registration can now be separately disabled with the new client_api.guests_disabled configuration option
Outbound connections now obey proxy settings from the environment, deprecating the federation_api.proxy_outbound configuration options
The roomserver input API will now strictly consume only one database transaction per room, which should prevent situations where the roomserver can deadlock waiting for database connections to become available
Room joins will now fall back to federation if the local room state is insufficient to create a membership event
Create events are now correctly filtered from federation /send transactions
Excessive logging when federation is disabled should now be fixed
Dendrite will no longer panic if trying to retire an invite event that has not been seen yet
The device list updater will now wait for longer after a connection issue, rather than flooding the logs with errors
The device list updater will no longer produce unnecessary output events for federated key updates with no changes, which should help to reduce CPU usage
Local device name changes will now generate key change events correctly
The sync API will now try to share device list update notifications even if all state key NIDs cannot be fetched
An off-by-one error in the sync stream token handling which could result in a crash has been fixed
State events will no longer be re-sent unnecessary by the roomserver to other components if they have already been sent, which should help to reduce the NATS message sizes on the roomserver output topic in some cases
The roomserver input API now uses the process context and should handle graceful shutdowns better
Guest registration is now correctly disabled when the client_api.registration_disabled configuration option is set
One-time encryption keys are now cleaned up correctly when a device is logged out or removed
Invalid state snapshots in the state storage refactoring migration are now reset rather than causing a panic at startup
Sytest compliance is up slightly:
Client-server APIs: 67%, up from 65%
Server-server APIs: 95%, same as before
As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for Dendrite-related chat!
Here are the first steps for a bridge to KakaoTalk! The bridge is based on mautrix-python (having used mautrix-facebook as a starting point--there's still plenty of Facebook-specific code in there), with the backend handled by node-kakao (connected via RPC, as there seems to be no Python API for KakaoTalk!).
The bridge doesn't do much yet; all it can do is log in & sync your list of chats (if that). But it's under rapid development & decent momentum, so hopefully it will be usable soon!
For anyone brave enough to try it out, its setup steps are very similar to that of any of the Python-based mautrix bridges (though Docker is currently unsupported).
We made a small release that just is compiled against the new mtxclient version to fix an issue with servers announcing support for Matrix v1.1 or higher. We strongly recommend you update before the next Synapse stable release is out.
Apart from that Nheko now has support for hidden read receipts (thanks to symphorien, see MSC2285). ZenWalker updated our usage of deprecated gstreamer APIs. Malte has been spending a lot of effort on improving the scrolling experience on the PinePhone as well as allowing to search on mobile. Forwarding should now work properly again as well as calling on mobile and we fixed a small memory leak when opening some dialogs.
“Twosday” wasn’t the only exciting thing happening this week. Take a peek at everything else we had going on…
Coming to a Poll near you…
From next week’s releases, you’ll discover two new updates on polls! First off, you’ll be able to edit a poll as long as no one has yet voted on it - which is great if you create a poll and realise you’ve made a small mistake. Even better, there’s now a new type of poll: ‘closed polls’ don’t show any results until the poll has ended, to keep the surprise.
Location Sharing
Location Sharing is now available by default for users on all platforms, except desktop (where you can receive but not send locations). Check it out!
The next stage is live location sharing and ‘pin dropping’, expect more soon.
Threaded Messaging
Designed to make catching up on rooms easier, and to keep the main timeline as clutter free as possible, Threads are nearly here.
You can try Threads out on all platforms - you’ll find them in Labs. This feature is experimental; let us know your feedback, and report any bugs as we continue to improve.
Community testing
We will be looking at search result ordering on Web as part of the new search experience at 17:30 UTC / 18:30 CET on Tuesday, 1st of March
We’re also hoping to test Threads on mobile devices towards the end of the week, join the testing room to get involved!
The EleWeb team has been working on Spaces, Threads, and defects this week.
We are starting to look at batched updates, which could be bringing performance improvements to us.
On the process improvement side, we are looking at test coverage and process improvements around PR submission. Don’t be surprised if our developers start a conversation around tests when you submit your next PR 🙂
V1.10.5 release candidate is available and release is expected to go out on Monday, 28th February.
And don’t forget; the new and improved search experience is available. It’s in Beta so turn it on, try it out, and send us your feedback!
We will be talking to the community about planned improvements in the next Community Testing Session on Tuesday over in#element-community-testing:matrix.org
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
Improvements to Threads reliability are happening everyday. We’re also making some tweaks to the user experience details, like dragging and dropping files into the Thread panel.
Next week’s release (1.8.3) includes changes and improvements we’ve made to our overall app experience by closing some pesky UI defects.
This week we’ve also been working on improving the reliability of our Labs features. If you’ve turned on Threads or Bubbles in Labs you may have experienced app slow downs or crashes. In the next version, these will be minimised.
Spaces on iOS are also getting some attention at the moment and we’re hoping to improve the user experience of Spaces on Mobile.
The next release of Android (1.4.2) includes support for “@ room” and other usability defects you might have seen before… Fixes include steadying the notification badge in the room list, adding the correct interactions on bottom sheets, and opening a DM from the Space member list.
We’ve also been working on upgrading the voice message experience, adding improvements like scrubbing! Keep sending voice notes and let us know what other improvements we should make.
Our onboarding flow is also getting a new lick of paint. We want new users to our platform to have a simple and straight-forward experience when they’re creating an account.
Over at Populus-Viewer, we're continuing to refine the UX, for maximum focus, efficiency and enjoyment. Since last time we've:
Reworked the mobile view controls into a sidebar design.
Improved the generation of highlight rectangles.
Made sure that LaTeX and code listings are always displayed nicely
Made it possible to modify text selections within a PDF using the keyboard
Added "one-click" links for onboarding new users into a particular server, SSO flow and PDF collection.
We've also had some bug fixes related to federation, and had some of our first ever (maybe the first on matrix - first in the history of the universe?) federated social annotation sessions.
Populus-Philarchive
Populus-Philarchive, our proof-of-concept discussion overlay for preprint archives, now incorporates an OAI-PMH harvester, so it can aggregate OAI bibliographic metadata, and use that data for room creation and discovery. The implementation is pretty general, so it should be easy to tweak for any archive that supports OAI-PMH.
MSC3574
MSC3574 - marking up resources got some love this week, as we added a proposal for serializing annotations on matrix that ought to be compatible with the w3c web annotation data model. This paves the way for interoperability between the matrix annotation ecosystem and services like hypothes.is, and hopefully will make matrix a compelling option even for institutions where compliance with existing web standards is a must.
As always, if you'd like to chat about any of these developments, come visit us at #opentower:matrix.org !
The Circles beta on iOS continues inching toward a public release later this Spring.
This week I added support for infinite scrolling on timelines. (Previously, scrolling the timelines was very clunky -- the user had to manually tap a button to "Load More" every 10-15 posts.)
Also added a confirmation dialog when the user attempts to leave a group.
On Android, the prototype is coming along nicely, thanks to the efforts of our new developer Taras:
The login screen works
Currently working on implementing the timeline of social posts for groups
In the last 2 weeks, I increasingly had to learn how to moderate rooms properly, which brought up a lack of nice Mjölnir gui for me.
Due to that, I just started to write one.
It is at the time of writing still fairly young.
The current features are:
An overview of the ban list data the user is in (Not for the specific Mjölnir currently. Also requires a user to have joined the list room)
A quick form to ban a person
A form to redact someone or a message
Planned features are:
Support for showing MSC1929 information if available
Writing a patch for Mjölnir, so the widget can know which banlist the bot watches, so only relevant lists show up.
Editing the banlist (aka unbanning)
Adding support for more advanced features like deactivation of users and removal of media on the matrix-media-repo.
Covering most of Mjölnir's commands
Redact on ban and similar utilities you might want while banning.
Small getting started (it is simple :D)
To use it, you simply can add it to your Mjölnir Admin room by putting /addwidget https://moderation_widget.nordgedanken.dev?room_id=$matrix_room_id (the variable will get replaced automatically) in the message bar and pressing enter. The widget runs entirely client side, so this is not sending any events to my server. If you still are concerned due to the big amount of permissions asked, you can just build it yourself and host it.
You know what would be embarrassing? If changing the version number of something broke Nheko... Well, completely unrelated, mtxclient 0.6.2 is out now which fixes an issue where it would aggressively validate that version numbers started with an 'r'. Otherwise that release is API and ABI compatible, so if packagers could pick that up as a bugfix release into stable releases, that would be great!
A small update was released, merging 2 month old PRs.
The changes are mainly features being now deactivated because we did not actually use them and fixing the example in one case. No updates to dependencies.
0.4.0
Dependencies have been updated to the newest versions.
The distribution-provided Debian packages for Synapse will only be provided for Bookworm (in testing/unstable) and Bullseye (in bullseye-backports). If you’re still using Buster (through buster-backports-sloppy), consider switching to Bullseye or, alternatively, to packages provided by the Synapse upstream. 1.52.0 is the last version to be provided for Buster through the backports repository.
I saw an interesting (to me) reMarkable telegram bot somewhere. But I prefer matrix and node.js was more difficult to deploy on embedded. So I wrote a reMarkable matrix bot in Go. https://gitlab.com/ptman/remarkable-matrix
Looking for a bot to manage events and feedback from your community?
MCM an information bot. It manages the flow of information between community leaders and their community.
It aggregates messages from community members in several ways.
A @ mention. You can mention the bot with a message.
A Direct Message. Members of your community can message this bot privately.
hash tags. Using hash tags members of your community can send messages tagged to go to a specific back room.
You as an administrator of the bot can send timed announcements to any room using the built in matrix administration interface.
You can also manage tags, add and remove admin of the bot, add automatic replies and more. All from the comforts of your Matrix client.
Rejoice everyone, Synapse 1.53 is out! Let's have a look at what's new with this release.
Stabilisation of registration tokens
Registration tokens is a feature introduced in Synapse 1.42.0, which allows homeserver administrators to force their users to use specific tokens when registering. This is similar to Synapse's registration shared secret support, but with added features, such as the possibility to limit how users can be registered with the same token, or to make a token expire. See the admin API documentation for more information on how to manage registration tokens on your homeserver.
Registration tokens were initially proposed to the Matrix specification in MSC3231 by Callum Brown during their Google Summer of Code internship last summer. The MSC has since been accepted, and released in the stable Matrix specification as of Matrix v1.2. As a result, its Synapse implementation has been updated to remove support for unstable identifiers. Administrators of homeservers on which the reverse proxy rules explicitly allow the unstable route for this feature need to update their configuration. Same goes for developers of Matrix clients that support this feature. See the upgrade notes for more information.
Time-based cache expiry now enabled by default
To avoid being overly intensive on resources by making too many queries to the database, Synapse maintains several in-memory caches to store data it needs to use frequently. However, this comes with the inconvenience that, if Synapse needs to store too much data, these caches can become fairly big and occupy too much space in the host's memory.
Historically, Synapse has dealt with this issue by having set sizes for each cache, either hardcoded or set in the configuration, and evicting the oldest items when exceeding this size. Synapse 1.38 introduced the possibility for homeserver administrators to configure Synapse to evict cache entries based on the time they were last accessed on. This mechanism acts on top of the aforementioned eviction policy, and allows automatically evicting entries that haven't been accessed for some time, leaving more room in the caches to store data that needs to be accessed more often.
Synapse 1.53 enables this behaviour by default. Without specific configuration, Synapse will automatically evict cache entries that haven't been accessed for more than 30 minutes. Server administrators that were already using this feature might need to update their configuration, as this change deprecates the expiry_time configuration setting, which will be removed in a future version of Synapse. See the upgrade notes for more information.
Everything else
You might have heard that we're working on improving the time it takes to join big Matrix rooms with Synapse. If not, then you definitely want to have a look at the demos Matrix live that was published earlier this month and includes more details and a demo of the work we've been doing in this area.
This release of Synapse includes an implementation of MSC3706, which is part of this work. It's still very experimental and definitely not production-ready, but it's a huge stepping stone towards making room joins snappier than ever.
We've also been continuing our work towards enabling end-to-end encryption for application services (see the Synapse 1.50 release blogpost for more context on that). Synapse 1.53 includes support for sending to-device messages to application services. This is also still very experimental, watch this space for future updates.
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) Dirk Klimpel, Brad Jones, and Alexander Mnich.
Hello everyone! It's me, not-anoa, here with your weekly spec update. I finally got the scripts to run which means you get a proper update once again (yay).
The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been looking at unblocking MSC3440: Threads so it can make a smooth journey into acceptance. This involves quite a lot of work to ensure that the features we're concerned about are addressed, but so far the FCP progress on it is looking good.
We're also spending a bunch of time working out what room version 10 looks like to try and fix some usability issues with join rules and general maintenance of things like power levels. The hope is that in time for Matrix 1.3 we'll have v10 out (but not made default) for folks to experiment with.
Random MSC of the week
Your random MSC is MSC2974: Widgets: Capabilities re-exchange. I swear it was actually random and only after running the script exactly once. The MSC is interesting because it allows widgets (a feature working its way into the general spec, slowly) to ask for more permissions when they need them. This ensures the widget doesn't need to ask for everything at startup (which is more likely to mean that it gets rejected), and that it can maintain a clean security state during normal operation.
One day it'll probably make it into the spec as part of the larger widget movement, but first we need to get widgets into the spec properly.
The Graph
Numbers only mean so much, and graphs show progress. Here's the breakdown of MSCs over time:
Of note
If you look carefully at the OpenAPI viewer, you might notice a dropdown for not-client-server APIs 👀. There's still work to be done to bring on the missing APIs, but this is in a place where it can be experimented with. Thanks to Alexandre Franke for getting this over the line :)
This week we've released Synapse 1.53.0rc1, which includes a bunch of new features, improvements, and other niceties... But more on that next week when we release Synapse 1.53.0 🙂 As usual, we're super grateful for anyone that helps us test release candidates by running them with their homeservers! Please report any breakage or feedback in #synapse:matrix.org
Apart from this we have been continuing our experimentations with Poetry to better manage our dependencies in our Python projects after we switched Sydent to it last week. We're already starting to see improvements off the back of this work, such as automated security PRs and an opportunity to centralise our automated workflows to better reuse them in our projects (see https://github.com/matrix-org/backend-meta). We look forward to bringing all this goodness to Synapse soon!
And my Helm Chart updates are still happening, also now listed on Artifact Hub for easier discovery. This week saw several element-web updates, finally ending on 1.10.4
Is using Nheko a bit of a pain on your PinePhone? Do you just want bubbles in your chat app, not raw lines of text? Does Nheko waste too much space on timestamps and other metadata for messages?
Well, I am assuming Malte was annoyed by that or similar reasons. But in the end, they did spend a lot of effort reorganizing the way Nheko layouts messages so that people can have bubbles. This should make Nheko feel much more at home on the PinePhone and it seems like they are doing even more to make Nheko a great experience on mobile devices! But just look at it yourself:
If you are scared now and you think: "This is not the Nheko I came to love!", don't worry, all of this is optional. You can play around with the different avatar sizes as well as the bubbles themselves. You can even make Nheko look like it always looked!
There will be some regressions though. If you want to contribute, it would help a lot if you test those changes and report issues that you find! <3
Apart from that, there were also a lot of other bugfixes and cleanups by various contributors. You can also hide events by type now. If you don't want to see stickers or when someone joins a room, just disable that in the room settings! Tastytea implemented that. Long usernames should now also no longer overflow the profile pages and you can reset the state for a single room using the /reset-state /command. This is helpful when updating Nheko to use widgets, but Nheko just threw those events away (or pinned messages or other state events).
The new search experience came out this week, you can enable it in Beta to try it out! We are collecting feedback from users to inform upcoming improvements.
We’re working hard on smashing bugs and reducing the number of defects.
Along with closing bugs, we’re working hard on adding finesse to our app and removing some of those “papercut” issues that users experience.
Keep your eyes peeled for updates and let us know what you think!
Our first time user experience is being updated also. We’ve introduced new splash screens to help introduce Element. Don’t panic! You can skip straight to “sign-in” if this isn’t for you.
A new spinner is here… While we work on the speed and performance of the app we’ve introduced a new spinner that does not get in your way while you work.
Bugs and Papercuts… Our app is getting some love from our developer team as we try to reduce confusion and simplify flows throughout the app.
Keep an eye out for any small changes and let us know what you think!
Creating a new account in Element can be intimidating for new users, especially those who aren’t familiar with Matrix. We’re introducing new screens and simplifying our questions so that users can sign up with confidence!
If you have any feedback, or want to share your thoughts on our first time user experience, get in touch.
A new layout option hit our app this week: Message Bubbles! If you’re used to seeing inbound messages on the right, and outgoing messages on the left this might be for you. You can access the new appearance option from Settings.
I wrote a small web app thing that can download, decrypt and display Matrix media in a browser. The goal is to use it in the Android SMS bridge for sending attachments that are too big for MMS, but it might be useful for other things too.
Currently it consists of the web frontend, a maubot plugin to generate links, and a small server that stores file metadata (so the URLs just contain the decryption key and a short ID to find the metadata on the server). I'll probably continue working on the exact URL format to make it shorter and to encrypt the metadata, and maybe also add an alternative mode where all info is included in the URL to make the server component optional.
I worked on adapting the NixOS module for Synapse to support worker deployments. It's a great reproducible deployment method, and super easy to configure. My module is perhaps less quality than the rest of the chain, but it's pretty neat to define your whole Matrix deployment like this: https://git.pixie.town/f0x/nixos/src/branch/synapse-workers/nodes/cosmos/containers/synapse-workers.nix#L60 and have Nix figure out all the systemd units and nginx routes that have to be added
Full Nix code for the module is at https://git.pixie.town/f0x/nixos/src/branch/synapse-workers/common/modules/synapse
pictured is the ping stat for a little test deployment with 8 federation senders :P
matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now supports installing the matrix_encryption_disabler Synapse module (details here), which homeserver admins can use to prevent End-to-End-Encryption from being enabled by users on their homeserver. The popular opinion is that this is dangerous and shouldn't be done, but there are valid use cases for disabling encryption discussed in this Synapse issue.
Pushed 234 updates and enhancements to the automation framework used as the service core
Integrated 17 additional components to the matrix stack
Developed 5 bots and tools to extend matrix capabilities
Installed 92 new matrix servers
Helped 172 people and organizations to achieve their goals in the matrix
Posted 74 updates in the announcements room
Some history:
the project (not service yet) started on February 12, 2021
the first installed server was etke.cc itself (yes, etke.cc homeserver is a customer of etke.cc service from the day 1)
the second installed server was a chatbot, that uses matrix as a platform to interact with users across different chat networks (Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, etc.) - one API to rule them all.
After a few years, matrix-room-directory-server has finally gotten an upgrade to modern times. Intended to eventually be a standalone directory server (making vanity aliases possible, but otherwise not functional as a homeserver), it currently only supports overriding the federation /publicRooms endpoint.
The changes made today are to replace the old, broken, appservice-backed approach with a space-backed approach. You can see this in action on t2bot.io: querying the room directory over federation will hit the room directory server, which is watching #directory:t2bot.io in the background to determine which rooms to serve.
Hay y'all. I created a blog post about how to host element and matrix .well-known files using cloudflare pages that I thought might be worth sharing. Have a few kinks to work out regarding CORS (might need to clean my browsers cache) though.
https://minecraftchest1.wordpress.com/2022/02/17/hosting-element-and-matrix-well-known-files-with-cloudflare-pages/
https://matrix.to/#/#minecraftchest1-blog-matrix-elemet-cloudflare:matrix.org
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.
