Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matrix is being used in the "world's biggest messaging and collaboration" deployment.

[Matrix will] be rolled out by the German education system to provide collaboration tools for half a million seats in the states of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg

Casual 500,000 user deployment, very nice!

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa announced:

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.

MSC Status

Finished FCP:

• MSC2689: Fix E2EE for guests

• MSC2663: Errors for dealing with non-existent push rules

• MSC2611: Remove m.login.token User-Interactive Authentication type from the specification

• MSC2610: Remove m.login.oauth2 User-Interactive Authentication type from the specification

• MSC2579: Improved tagging support

• MSC1849: Proposal for m.relates_to aggregations

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

New MSCs:

• MSC2713: Remove deprecated v1 Identity Service API

• [WIP] MSC2706: IPFS as a media repository for Matrix

• MSC2705: Animated thumbnails for media (and thumbnail content-type requirements)

• MSC2704: Explicitly allow alternative origins in MXC URIs and specify deduplication requirements on uploads

• MSC2703: Media ID grammar

• MSC2702: Specifying semantics for Content-Disposition on media

• MSC2701: Clarifying Content-Type usage in the media repo

• MSC2700: Thumbnail requirements for the media repo

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we'll be continuing on with MSC2674 (aggregations pt1: relationships) and adding MSC1544 (QR code verification) on top.

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

karlik

karlik announced:

for matrix-ircd

• Merged update for total move to async / await into development branch, (hopefully) soon to be merged to master

• Made single-threaded project thread-safe for easily scaling up to potentially many threads

• Added additional logging for tls and non-tls connections for more clear debugging

Dept of Servers 🏢

E2E Dendrite

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

kegan reported:

E2E Dendrite work is progressing, and we're making a lot of breaking changes ahead of our first stable release which you can expect in the coming weeks.

As for the changes this week:

• Add a bare bones user directory. This is mainly to benefit the iOS Yggdrasil demo.

• The dendrite-config.yaml configuration format has been overhauled. It's still in review but expect big changes here!

• Fixed a bug with SQLite when handling large rooms (thanks @HenrikSolver!)

• Device lists now work locally, with federation support to come.

Spec compliance is up from last week:

• Client-Server APIs: 51%, up from 49%.
• Federation APIs: remains at 53%.

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo announced:

Welcome back! This week was very productive:

• Ignore users (thanks @devinr528)

• Long polling (faster and more efficient /sync)

• Fix and improve presence

• Room tagging (thanks @gnieto)

• /publicRooms pagination

• Refactor endpoints into modules

• Export endpoints as a library (useful for p2p!)

• Config options to set the maximum upload size or disable encryption

• and more!

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Synapse

Neil offered:

This week we shipped 1.18.0 which contained support for our worker sharding performance projects that you’ve been hearing about recently.

We also shipped a security and feature release of Sygnal (actually two each…). The main new feature being the ability to run behind an HTTP proxy which is useful in environments that mandate that all traffic go through a proxy.

Aside from that week we continued our async/await-athon and Patrick provided a visual update

We’ve been documenting worker support and diving into sharding the event persisters. This is not a small job since it means every other part of the code base that assumes an integer stream id will need to be updated to be aware of multiple stream ids from multiple persisters.

Over in feature land we’ve been working on the notifications project and most of the backend support is done. The project will mean more intuitive defaults as well as a much better client UX in configuring notification settings.

Finally special thanks to Aaron Raimist for a bumper docs PR

Synapse Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace offered:

Just pushed the 1.18.0 K8s-optimized Synapse images, now only doing the debian-based version as like upstream - though still including jemalloc. So latest/v1.18.0 and *-debian will be the same in this version and going forwards. Additionally, the *-debian tags will only remain for a release or two more before disappearing, as they're now superfluous.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-telegram

Tulir offered:

I finally added automatic backfilling options to mautrix-telegram. Like my other bridges, it can backfill old messages when creating portals and missed messages when restarting, and it can disable notifications in the room while backfilling.

I also added bridging for your own read receipts, so if you read a message with another Telegram client, the bridge will mark it as read on your Matrix account with double puppeting.

Dept of Clients 📱

NovaChat

eric reported:

NovaChat is a new Matrix-based desktop client that aggregates all your chat networks into one app

July 31 Updates:

• New room list design, featuring collapsible 'clusters' (see gif)

• Enabled encrypted room search (thanks #seshat:matrix.org!)

• Added [mautrix-twitter]( https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-twitter)

• Worked around FB Messenger bridge 'forced-logout issue' by routing traffic through proxy on Raspberry Pi at each users home

In the works...

• Create new clusters of chats in room list, using tags

• iMessage bridge, using jailbroken iDevice

• Android Messages bridge

Adding new users weekly. Sign up for the NovaChat beta. Or send me a DM @eric:nova.chat

gomuks

gomuks is a terminal based Matrix client written in Go. Source on GitHub

Tulir told us:

gomuks can now do interactive verification for e2ee. Most of it is thanks to nikofil's SAS verification PR to mautrix-go, I just made a UI for using it. Currently gomuks can only send verification requests, but I'll add some interface for accepting incoming requests soon.

Related to verification, there are some new commands for verifying/unverifying/blacklisting devices and viewing device lists. There's also a toggle to disable sending messages to unverified devices.

This is super exciting, raises gomuks to the level of a daily driver IMO.

Fractal

Alexandre Franke announced:

We will release version 4.4 next Friday. Now is a good time to test the nightly version and check if it doesn’t break anything with your homeserver compared to 4.2.
The changelog has been sparsely given in previous TWIMs, but you could have a look at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal/-/commit/463e6bc9988e2d8fffbfc38058f8d0b12cd074d7

Element-iOS, previously Riot-iOS

Manu announced:

We released 1.0.2 this week to the AppStore and on TestFlight. It's mainly a bug fix release after the Element rebranding.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

mautrix-go

nikofil offered:

SAS verification support has been merged! Support for it should also be landing in go-neb soon, both for verifying with the bot's device and for testing with go-neb's client testing service. Next up, looking at SSSS and eventually cross-verification support.

Dept of Ops 🛠

YunoHost

Pierre told us:

YunoHost is an operating system aiming for the simplest administration of a server, and therefore democratize self-hosting.

Synapse integration had been updated to 1.15.2 (1.17.0 available in branch testing)

Riot Web integration had been updated to 1.6.8 (Element 1.7.1 available in branch element)

Final Thoughts 💭

Tobi said:

We, some German Synapse admins, have created a survey about the usage of Matrix-Synapse for private statistic purpose (results will be published alike). As suggested in #synapse:matrix.org, this could also be a topic for "TWIM".

Find the survey at http://go.kabi.tk/MatrixQuestionnaire2020.

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. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

Synapse 1.18.0 has landed.

The most important thing to know about 1.18.0 is that it contains support for sharding multiple workers. Specifically this means being able to run multiple federation senders, multiple client readers to handle registration and multiple push workers. This will be important for anyone running a large scale install of Synapse. You can read more about how to benefit from these changes in docs/workers.md. In the same spirit we also moved typing notifications from the main process.

Aside from that, we have new admin API support to list the users in a room, support for oEmbed for media previews (you can unfurl tweets again!) and a general slew of federation bug fixes.

Get the new releases from any of the usual sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md. 1.18.0 is on github here.

Changelog for 1.18.0 follows:

Synapse 1.18.0 (2020-07-30)

Improved Documentation

• Update worker docs with latest enhancements. (#7969)

Synapse 1.18.0rc2 (2020-07-28)

Bugfixes

• Fix an AssertionError exception introduced in v1.18.0rc1. (#7876)
• Fix experimental support for moving typing off master when worker is restarted, which is broken in v1.18.0rc1. (#7967)

Internal Changes

• Further optimise queueing of inbound replication commands. (#7876)

Synapse 1.18.0rc1 (2020-07-27)

Features

• Include room states on invite events that are sent to application services. Contributed by @Sorunome. (#6455)
• Add delete room admin endpoint (POST /_synapse/admin/v1/rooms/<room_id>/delete). Contributed by @dklimpel. (#7613, #7953)
• Add experimental support for running multiple federation sender processes. (#7798)
• Add the option to validate the iss and aud claims for JWT logins. (#7827)
• Add support for handling registration requests across multiple client reader workers. (#7830)
• Add an admin API to list the users in a room. Contributed by Awesome Technologies Innovationslabor GmbH. (#7842)
• Allow email subjects to be customised through Synapse's configuration. (#7846)
• Add the ability to re-activate an account from the admin API. (#7847, #7908)
• Add experimental support for running multiple pusher workers. (#7855)
• Add experimental support for moving typing off master. (#7869, #7959)
• Report CPU metrics to prometheus for time spent processing replication commands. (#7879)
• Support oEmbed for media previews. (#7920)
• Abort federation requests where the client disconnects before the ratelimiter expires. (#7930)
• Cache responses to /_matrix/federation/v1/state_ids to reduce duplicated work. (#7931)

Bugfixes

• Fix detection of out of sync remote device lists when receiving events from remote users. (#7815)
• Fix bug where Synapse fails to process an incoming event over federation if the server is missing too much of the event's auth chain. (#7817)
• Fix a bug causing Synapse to misinterpret the value off for encryption_enabled_by_default_for_room_type in its configuration file(s) if that value isn't surrounded by quotes. This bug was introduced in v1.16.0. (#7822)
• Fix bug where we did not always pass in app_name or server_name to email templates, including e.g. for registration emails. (#7829)
• Errors which occur while using the non-standard JWT login now return the proper error: 403 Forbidden with an error code of M_FORBIDDEN. (#7844)
• Fix "AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'get'" error message when applying per-room message retention policies. The bug was introduced in Synapse 1.7.0. (#7850)
• Fix a bug introduced in Synapse 1.10.0 which could cause a "no create event in auth events" error during room creation. (#7854)
• Fix a bug which allowed empty rooms to be rejoined over federation. (#7859)
• Fix 'Unable to find a suitable guest user ID' error when using multiple client_reader workers. (#7866)
• Fix a long standing bug where the tracing of async functions with opentracing was broken. (#7872, #7961)
• Fix "TypeError in synapse.notifier" exceptions. (#7880)
• Fix deprecation warning due to invalid escape sequences. (#7895)

Updates to the Docker image

• Base docker image on Debian Buster rather than Alpine Linux. Contributed by @maquis196. (#7839)

Improved Documentation

• Provide instructions on using register_new_matrix_user via docker. (#7885)
• Change the sample config postgres user section to use synapse_user instead of synapse to align with the documentation. (#7889)
• Reorder database paragraphs to promote postgres over sqlite. (#7933)
• Update the dates of ACME v1's end of life in ACME.md. (#7934)

Deprecations and Removals

• Remove unused synapse_replication_tcp_resource_invalidate_cache prometheus metric. (#7878)
• Remove Ubuntu Eoan from the list of .deb packages that we build as it is now end-of-life. Contributed by @gary-kim. (#7888)

Internal Changes

• Switch parts of the codebase from simplejson to the standard library json. (#7802)
• Add type hints to the http server code and remove an unused parameter. (#7813)
• Add type hints to synapse.api.errors module. (#7820)
• Ensure that calls to json.dumps are compatible with the standard library json. (#7836)
• Remove redundant retry_on_integrity_error wrapper for event persistence code. (#7848)
• Consistently use db_to_json to convert from database values to JSON objects. (#7849)
• Convert various parts of the codebase to async/await. (#7851, #7860, #7868, #7871, #7873, #7874, #7884, #7912, #7935, #7939, #7942, #7944)
• Add support for handling registration requests across multiple client reader workers. (#7853)
• Small performance improvement in typing processing. (#7856)
• The default value of filter_timeline_limit was changed from -1 (no limit) to 100. (#7858)
• Optimise queueing of inbound replication commands. (#7861)
• Add some type annotations to HomeServer and BaseHandler. (#7870)
• Clean up PreserveLoggingContext. (#7877)
• Change "unknown room version" logging from 'error' to 'warning'. (#7881)
• Stop using device_max_stream_id table and just use device_inbox.stream_id. (#7882)
• Return an empty body for OPTIONS requests. (#7886)
• Fix typo in generated config file. Contributed by @ThiefMaster. (#7890)
• Import ABC from collections.abc for Python 3.10 compatibility. (#7892)
• Remove unused functions time_function, trace_function, get_previous_frames and get_previous_frame from synapse.logging.utils module. (#7897)
• Lint the contrib/ directory in CI and linting scripts, add synctl to the linting script for consistency with CI. (#7914)
• Use Element CSS and logo in notification emails when app name is Element. (#7919)
• Optimisation to /sync handling: skip serializing the response if the client has already disconnected. (#7927)
• When a client disconnects, don't log it as 'Error processing request'. (#7928)
• Add debugging to /sync response generation (disabled by default). (#7929)
• Update comments that refer to Deferreds for async functions. (#7945)
• Simplify error handling in federation handler. (#7950)

Matrix Live 🎙

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

New guide for client e2ee implementation, including cross-signing

Thanks and congratulations to Sorunome this week for releasing a new guide: Implementing more advanced e2ee features, such as cross-signing. This is a hugely detailed guide detailing the necessary steps to enable Cross-Signing and verification. Thanks as well to uhoreg and poljar for their work in reviewing the text!

New Masters Thesis written on Matrix

Julian Sparber announced:

I wrote a master thesis that tries to create e2e encryption based on Ethereum on top of Matrix. It may not solve all problems but it's an interesting experiment

https://blogs.gnome.org/jsparber/2020/07/20/i-finished-my-masters-degree/

I didn't get to look at this yet but it's exciting!

Dept of Spec 📜

kitsune (guess who's back!?) said:

I have put the long-awaited MSC2312 out of WIP - this is about matrix: URIs in case you haven't heard - and it's already in active discussion at #uri-scheme-proposal:matrix.org! Join the fun to make it the most awesome! The upcoming Quotient 0.6 has an implementation of those so adventurous Quaternion users can start experimenting right away.

Spec

anoa reported:

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.

MSC Status

Abandoned MSCs:

• MSC2579: Improved tagging support

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2689: Fix E2EE for guests (merge)

• MSC2663: Errors for dealing with non-existent push rules (merge)

• MSC2611: Remove m.login.token User-Interactive Authentication type from the specification (merge)

• MSC2610: Remove m.login.oauth2 User-Interactive Authentication type from the specification (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC2695: Get event by ID over federation

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus, we've reduced last week's list of 5 MSCs down to one, MSC2674 (aggregations part 1: relationships). Next week, we're going to focus entirely on that MSC to make some headway on finally getting aggregations into the spec.

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

HTML embeddable Matrix client

arnav-t announced:

For the GSoC project HTML embeddable Matrix client this week:

• Added status bar for connection errors

• Added support for displaying typing notifications

Dept of P2P 👥

P2P / Dendrite

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

kegan announced:

The P2P Yggdrasil iOS demo has seen some improvements:

• Federation sender blacklists are now persisted which is important as the iOS app will be frequently terminated.

• SQLite3 now uses TransactionWriters in more places to reduce the amount of 'database is locked' issues.

• Federation sender has had much of its storage code refactored and de-duplicated.

In addition, there has been much work getting Dendrite to support E2E rooms, which it now mostly does.

You can create and join E2E rooms and have a conversation locally, though there's issues with it over federation. In addition, Dendrite currently lacks device lists so adding new devices may result in unable-to-decrypt errors:

• Send-to-device events now work over federation.

• Device key uploads and querying now work both locally and over federation.

• One-time key uploads and claiming now work both locally and over federation.

Spec compliance is up from last week:

• Client Server APIs: 49%, up from 48%.
• Federation APIs: 53%, up from 51%.

Doesn't it feel like we'll be using Dendrite in the wild really soon now?

Dept of Servers 🏢

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo offered:

Another quiet week. Next week should be more exciting again.

• Moved to stable rust (rocket now compiles on stable!)

• Implement /joined_rooms (thanks @aura)

• Add max_request_size config option to set the maximum size for file uploads and other requests (thanks @CapsizeGlimmer)

Synapse

Neil said:

This week we continued on our async/await athon, you can track progress here, expect steady progress over the coming weeks.

We dusted off the notifications project working with our pals in the Element client teams to ensure that the push rule defaults make sense. On the flip side we made further improvements to Sygnal and will merge the ability to have it sit behind a proxy rsn.

We are also trying to figure out how media retention limits should work in Synapse.

Up next is to continue our performance push. We need to spend time between pulling things off the master process as well sharding the event persister. We will continue with notifications and maybe finally squash https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/2528

Dept of Bridges 🌉

Introducing matrix-figma

Half-Shot reported:

Hello people. It's been a while since I've talked about a new bridge...or actually any bridges. Fear not, now you can hear both! Today I'm announcing the birth of another project matrix-figma. Figma is an online collaborative design tool. It was created to scratch an itch with the Element design team, who wanted to see comments appear in their Matrix rooms in realtime when someone commented on a Figma file.

The bridge works by first joining it to an "admin room", which functions as a permitted user list. The bot can then be invited to any other room so long as the invitee is in that admin room, and can then ask the bot to start directing comment notifications into the room.

The room uses room state to hold configuration, so you can host the bot as a docker container anywhere without the need for any support files!

I can announce that the bridge is now functional for simple use cases such as these, with more interesting functionality in the future.

Please check out https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-figma to see if the bridge is right for you :)

slack-matrix-migration

Sven offered:

I opened a PR for https://github.com/Awesome-Technologies/slack-matrix-migration, which makes it compatible with recent Synapse versions and adds new config options allowing to effectively import a Slack workspace history to an existing homeserver via federation.

This Python project was initially intended for a full migration from Slack to a new Matrix homeserver and allows reusing the imported user accounts. We have some research groups using Slack that would like to import their Slack workspace history to our Matrix homeserver. This PR allows to import a (free) Slack export to a fresh and empty Synapse instance that is federated with our main homeserver. We do not need a full "migration": we kick all imported users and invite the existing Matrix users from our homeserver.

Two groups already imported the history and switched to Matrix, one more is in queue and probably more to come.

This is a really, really exciting development, and the context for which Sven is expecting to use it is BIG, I can't wait til we can share more about it!

mautrix-twitter

Tulir said:

The Twitter DM bridge I announced last week mostly works now. It does text and reaction bridging in both directions, twitter->matrix media bridging, end-to-bridge encryption and backfilling. I also added support for it in mautrix-manager for web-based login.

If it mostly works, I guess it's time to mostly start trying it out!

Dept of Clients 📱

Fluffychat

sorunome offered:

Fluffy 0.16.0 has been released! It is already available on F-Droid, Google Play and IOS Testflight will follow. You can also try it out in the webbrowser. Visit https://fluffychat.im

Features

• Implement web notifications

• Implement a connection status header

Changes

• Switch out database engine for faster performance

• Greatly improve startup time

• Added languages: Galician, Croatian, Japanese, Russian, Ukrainian - Thanks a lot to all the weblate users!

• Only show the microg toast once, if you have play services disabled

• Homeserver URL input now strips trailing whitespace and slash - Thanks @Katerina

• Also use prev_content to determine profile of a user: This allows the username and avatar of people who left a group to still be displayed

Fixes:

• Fix not being able to initiate key verification properly

• Fix message sending being weird on slow networks

• Fix a few HTML rendering bugs

• Various other fixes

• Fix the 12h clock showing 00:15am, instead of 12:15am - Thanks @not_chicken

• Fix an issue with replies and invalid HTML

• Fix messages getting lost when retrieving chat history

• Fix a bug where an incorrect string encoding from the server is assumed

• Fix a bug where people couldn't log in if they had email notifications enabled

Mirage

miruka reported:

0.6.0 is out today:

Added

• Room member profiles:

  • Can be accessed by clicking on a user in the room's right pane, or focusing the filter field and navigating with up/down/enter/escape

  • Includes large avatar, display name, user ID, presence info,

    power level control and E2E sessions list

• E2E Verification:

  • Sessions for room members can now be (manually) verified from their profile

  • Sessions for different accounts within the same client will automatically

    verify each others based on session keys

  • Verifying a session will automatically verify it for all connected accounts,

    as long as the session keys are identical

• Presence:

  • Added presence (online, unavailable, invisible, offline) and status message control to the accounts context menu in the room list

  • Added togglePresence{Unavailable,Invisible,Offline} keybinds bound by

    default to Ctrl+Alt+{A/U,I,O}

  • Added openPresenceMenu keybind to open the current account's context

    menu, Alt+P by default

  • The room member list is now sorted by power level, then presence, then name

  • The room member list will display presence orbs and last seen time for

    members if the server supports it. Last seen times for offline members are also automatically retrieved as needed.

  • Set logged in accounts offline when closing Mirage

  • Linux/X11 specific: Add auto-away feature configurable by the

    beUnavailableAfterSecondsIdle setting (default 600 for 10mn), can be disabled by setting it to -1.

• Session sign out: you can now sign out your other sessions from the

  account settings. This currently only supports password authentification.

• Pasting images via Ctrl+V or composer context menu, shows a preview of

  the image before uploading

• Added basic keyboard navigation for account settings session list

• Add a verified devices indicator to encrypted room headers

• Add experimental support for rendering of inline images and custom emotes in

  messages

• Add kineticScrollingMaxSpeed and kineticScrollingDeceleration settings

• When highlighting accounts, rooms or members in lists

  (focus filter field and use up/down), the highlighted item's context menu can now be accessed with the keyboard Menu key

• Support for Menu key when keyboard-navigating messages in the timeline

• Add context menus to text field and areas

• Add a button to quickly expand the room pane when collapsed and focus

  the filter field

• Clicking on the current tab button for the room pane now fully hides it,

  this can also be toggled with the new toggleHideRoomPane keybind (default Ctrl+Alt+R)

Changed

• When panes are smaller than their default width due to user resizing or

  window size constraints, focusing certain elements will auto-expand them until the focus is lost: filter fields, member profile and room settings

• Reduced the default kinetic scrolling speed, which was hardcoded to an

  aggressive 4000 before. This can be restored with the kineticScrollingMaxSpeed setting.

• Improve key verification popup texts and make the session details copiable

• Power levels/room permission change events will now show a line of text or

  table containing the details of what exactly changed

• Messages containing tables will no longer be width-limited

• Using the sendFileFromPathInClipboard keybind (default Alt+Shift+S)

  now shows a preview of the file if it's an image and asks for confirmation

• Image messages now show spinners when loading the thumbnail

• Clicking on a GIF message will now open it externally like other images

  instead of pausing it. A dedicated play/pause button is now displayed in the corner.

And more: full changelog

Riot-iOS, no sorry, Element-iOS

Manu offered:

Last week, we forgot to announce that we renamed the Riot-iOS app to Element but this is not a surprise anymore. The app version is now 1.0.0. This change came with a lot of UI tweaks like new icons and new colors.

Since then, we made bug fixes we will release soon. This week, we also worked on PIN protection for the app, including support of Touch ID and Face ID.

Element Android

Francis offered:

This week has been focused on bug fixing, there will be a release next week. We also started to work on PIN protection for the app.

quotient

kitsune offered:

Quotient 0.6 released! The release notes are somewhat long, since it's been 4 months since the last stable version update, and more than a year since the 0.5 release - thanking two heros of this release, and giving a nod to the original Quaternion author who happened to contribute using an inverted time machine. Read here: https://github.com/quotient-im/libQuotient/releases/tag/0.6.0

Big news - first release in a year. Do take a look at the full notes, they're very readable. In particular, they call out contributions from Black Hat, Alexey Andreyev and the original project creator, Felix Rohrbach aka @fxrh.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

ruma

Ruma is a Rust project to create a comprehensive set of APIs for Matrix. Previously there was a Ruma homeserver project.

jplatte said:

We weren't in TWIM for a while, but that doesn't mean no progress! Apart from Devin's constant work on ruma-events, there was also some movement in ruma-identifiers and ruma-client-api, with the former seeing a new release, 0.17.0.

We're planning to do more releases next week, and hopefully a 0.1 release of the ruma crate that provides a simpler entry point by re-exporting everything else, in one of the weeks after that. Stay tuned!

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

This Ansible playbook is meant to easily let you run your own Matrix homeserver.

Slavi said:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy just gained support for its first bot - matrix-reminder-bot.

See our Setting up matrix-reminder-bot documentation to get started.

Then, another report:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy has gained support for synapse-admin.

See our Setting up Synapse Admin documentation to get started.

Dept of Bots 🤖

matrix-wug

dandellion said:

It's been a while since it's come up, but matrix-wug is a bot capable of transcribing characters writable via normal keyboards to scripts from other languages/notation systems

It supports: x-sampa, z-sampa, proto-indo-european, Inuktitut, and Iñupiatun.

Now it also supports hiragana! The romanization system is something like Wāpuro rōmaji, but sticks to Nihon-shiki when in doubt.

I want this transcription to be forgiving, so if you find it not transcribing something in a way you'd expect it to, feel free to DM me!

To use it use the hi key with a delimiter like /x/ or []

hi/konnichiwa maatorikusu!/

vøgg is also behind pantalaimon now so it now works in encrypted rooms 😀

If you need to convert swiggles into a different type of swiggle, dandellion has you covered here.

Jitsi Token Service

kinta reported:

https://gitlab.com/communia/matrix-jitsi-token-service

This bot is not about adapting the current jitsi integration provided by Element IM as widget.

If you have a configured jitsi server to be authenticated with jwt tokens as in https://github.com/jitsi/lib-jitsi-meet/blob/master/doc/tokens.md , this bot will assist you when claiming for a jwt instead of going to jwt.io each time. You'll need to create a user and invite you in each room where you want to create a jitsi room url respecting the matrix power levels in the room.

When the service is running invite the bot and send message !jitsi-jwt

If you are a moderator in the room (alias you have enough power levels to redact messages), then you will get a direct message from bot with the url to jitsi room with the jwt get parameter.

cody 0.7.0

carl told us:

New cody release. @cody:bordum.dk is a chat bot that works as a REPL for your matrix rooms. This week I worked on metrics. I host a Grafana instance with anonymous access allowed, so codys charts are now embedded the #cody:bordum.dk chat room.

Announcing The Very First Release of sMythbot

ssorbom told us:

I am proud to announce the very first release of sMythbot, the Matrix chatbot designed to control your Myth Tv DVR remotely. This release should be considered a tech preview. I welcome feedback and Bug reports. More information on installation and setup is available in the project wiki.

It currently supports the following commands

• !smythbot help: Display this message

• !smythbot set mythbackend address: Sets the Myth Tv backend address to use for this room.

• !smythbot set mythbacked port: Sets the Myth Tv backend port to use for this room.

• !smythbot view mythbackend address: Allows you to view the Myth Tv backend address set for this room

• !smythbot view mythbackend port: Allows you to view the Myth Tv backend port set for this room

• !smythbot view mythbackend info: Allows you to view various pieces of information for the Myth Tv backend connected to this room. It will not work if the address and port are not set.

• !smythbot display upcoming recordings: Displays the upcoming recordings on your Myth Tv Backend.

• !smythbot display recorded programs: Displays the recordings from the default recording group that are stored on your Myth Tv Backend.

You can find out more information at my Github Page

I love a project designed to scratch the author's own itch!

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Noteworthy Elements for Mobile Web

balaa said:

The team behind Noteworthy (Matrix over WireGuard overlay networks) has started work on bringing better mobile web support for Element (riot-web).

Noteworthy Elements is a lightweight shim powered by the Ionic Framework thats goal is to bring first-class support for Element running on mobile devices.

What we have so far

• Usable version of Element wrapped in native iOS / Android app

• Ability to run multiple instances of Element in a native iOS / Android app (ie connect to multiple home servers simultaneously)

Our initial experimentation has been positive and our goal is to make Element the best mobile client for Matrix with minimal fuss. With minimal changes to Element's codebase our goal is to land (significantly better) support for mobile web in upstream Element. Join us over at #noteworthy:tincan.community to get involved!

Trust-based Moderation Using Distributed Chat Systems for Transitive Trust Propagation

Florian said:

I just stumbled over the master thesis TrustNet: Trust-based Moderation Using Distributed Chat Systems for Transitive Trust Propagation. While it is mainly targeted at systems like Secure Scuttlebut and Cabal, I think it is also of interest for the people thinking about trust-based moderation for Matrix.

Dept of Ping 🏓

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

Matrix Live 🎙

Let's hear from Christian about working on his dream projects, his thoughts on bridging, hosting, and the importance and nature of chatbots and assistants.

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

"Element"

This week was the announcement of the much-awaited rebrand: Riot is now Element. In fact, three brands are coalescing into one: Riot and New Vector will be referred to as Element, while the SaaS platform known as Modular.im is now Element Matrix Services.

Note that Matrix is not involved in this change. Matrix is still Matrix, don't worry about that!

CommCon Virtual 2020, with added Matrix

CommCon is an event dedicated to Real-Time Communications. In 2020 they made the difficult decision to go online-only, but had a fear of missing out on the "hallway-track" that is so important to industry events. Their solution was to include a live chat to run alongside their streamed talks!

Matrix was a natural choice for the crowd, but they wanted a way to encourage viewers to join the correct room from their own Matrix clients. To do this, they used the GSOC project from arnav-t - an HTML Embedded client - to present a live scrolling-view of the chat. You can see the result at https://2020.commcon.xyz/live/.

Dept of Spec 📜

uhoreg said:

anoa is away this week, so no pretty graph, I'm afraid. (this is intolerable - BP)

MSC status

Merged MSCs

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs in Final Comment Period this week.

New MSCs:

• MSC2689: Fix E2EE for guests

Spec Core Team

This week, the Spec Core Team will be focusing on MSC2610 (Removing m.login.oauth2 from User-Interactive Authentication), MSC2611 (Removing m.login.token from User-Interactive Authentication), MSC2663 (Errors for dealing with non-existent push rules), MSC2674 (Event Relationships), and MSC2689 (Fix E2EE for guests).

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

Ruma/Matrix GSoC update

Ruma is a Rust project to create a comprehensive set of APIs for Matrix. Previously there was a Ruma homeserver project.

devinr528 reported:

The End is Nigh

This week in the ruma/matrix Google Summer of Code project, I worked on refactoring both ruma-api and ruma-events. After moving some of the larger chunks of the ruma_api_macro::api::Api::to_tokens method to helper functions, I spent time removing repetition from the Request/Response code generated by the ruma_api! macro. For ruma-events, the input parsing was changed to only allow valid names for the Any*Event enums. Altering the input parsing had the added benefit of replacing all of the string comparison and manipulation with strongly typed comparison and manipulation.

The final few issues to be resolved before the next crates.io release for ruma-events can happen are related to redacted events. Support for redacted events was added to the Any*Event enums, they now have redacted variants of each event kind. A few follow-up PR's have been merged to fully integrate redacted events into ruma-events, fixing specific event deserialization issues and splitting the UnsignedData struct into Unsigned and RedactedUnsigned.

HTML Embeddable Matrix

arnav-t reported:

This week for the GSoC project of HTML Embeddable Matrix Client:

• Added a read receipts menu for messages.

• Minor bug fixes

• Automatic hyperlinking of URLs in pipeline

See above for details of this project being used in the wild!

mautrix-go

nikofil announced:

• Added the capabilities to request room keys from other devices, as well as share room keys with other devices that requested them

• Currently working on device verification using SAS, will then work on key export / import

neb

• Updated to latest mautrix version with some minor fixes, most notably using m.encryption event parameters

Opsdroid(GSoC)

tyagdit said:

End to End Encryption with matrix

• The new connector has been fully implemented!

• Device verification has been put on hold for the time being

• No extra configuration is required

• Check out all the changes here

Matrix database

• Work has begun on porting the matrix database module to matrix-nio and integrating it into opsdroid core

• It uses matrix rooms as databases

• Users can store key value pairs as state events in a room

• Also works with encrypted rooms to allow for encrypted storage

matrix-ircd GSOC

karlik announced:

for matrix-ircd:

• Merge in futures 0.3 support for matrix and http modules

• Opened pull request for updating tests, irc module, and bridge module to futures 0.3 & remove several futures dependencies

• updating several packages TLS packages to their more modern counterparts

Dept of Servers 🏢

matrix-media-repo

matrix-media-repo is a highly customizable multi-domain media repository for Matrix

TravisR said:

matrix-media-repo has just released v1.1.3 with several improvements and bug fixes - please give it a go, and get support in #media-repo:t2bot.io

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo told us:

• @the0 finished /event

• I rebased Jamie's WIP appservice branch

• I wrote some documentation for our database: https://git.koesters.xyz/timo/conduit/wiki/Database

I also investigated why so many sytests fail and created this issue: https://github.com/matrix-org/sytest/issues/913 Apparently Sytest did not expect a server to optimize their /sync responses as much as Conduit does :P.

Note: The official Conduit server is now reachable at "https://conduit.koesters.xyz". Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Synapse

Neil said:

A big week for matrix.org performance.

Hot on the heels of shipping shardable federation readers last week, this week we shipped shardable federation senders. There is still plenty of work to do, but together these changes has made a massive difference to federation lag overall and hopefully those of you not on matrix.org are noticing the difference when you talk to matrix.org users.

This graph shows the impact to outbound federation lag.

Aside from that we also shipped shardable push and frontend proxy workers as both were starting to max out on CPU as well as a shardable client reader, allowing us to shard registration which was especially important this week :)

Finally we moved typing notifications from the master process and optimised incoming replication queuing to buy us a little more head room.

Next steps are to revisit where all the remaining cycles are going on the master process. To help us profile we are migrating to async/await semantics and Patrick produced this natty graph to track progress.

Outside of performance we shipped a bug fix to prevent large initial syncs taking out the synchrotrons. The admin api sprouted an end point to list room members (thanks awesome-michaeland the ability to reactivate previously deactivated users.

Coming up we’ll dust off the notifications project which has been put on hold while Riot transmogrified into Element and we’ll continue with chipping away at the master process.

Synapse Deployment 📥️

Kubernetes

Ananace said:

And another bump of the K8s-optimized Synapse images, this time to 1.17.0

Synapse adoption graphs

We only featured this a month ago, but I want to call attention again to this awesome Synapse version adoption tracking project from Chris . I wanted to know how quickly Synapse 1.17.0 would be the most deployed version (~36 hours), and the answer is right there!

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-twitter

Tulir announced:

I started working on a Twitter DM bridge that uses the internal API instead of the complicated official one. It should be easier to set up than bridges using the official API, since there won't be a need to get API keys and forward webhooks. The main risk is that Twitter doesn't like people using the internal API and starts blocking users like Facebook does, but hopefully that doesn't happen.

So far I've only made a simple library for the API, but the bridge should be usable by the next TWIM. The bridge and API library are at https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-twitter and there's a discussion room at #twitter:maunium.net.

Dept of Clients 📱

Element Android 1.0.0

benoit announced:

Element Android 1.0.0 is out! Download or upgrade it from the PlayStore at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.app or download it from the F-Droid store at https://f-droid.org/packages/im.vector.app/

• PlayStore users: Element should come as a regular upgrade of the application Riot-Android, and the upgrade will update your previous account and data, without the need to log in again.

• F-Droid users: Element is a new app, you have to install it and log in again.

• RiotX: RiotX will disappear from the PlayStore (it was only a beta application). We will provide a very last update to inform users to install Element Android

Please report any issues at https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android (which will probably be renamed soon), because Element Android is actually RiotX code! Thanks for all the contributors of RiotX, we still have lots to do to make the app even better and full featured.

Radical

Davo announced:

After seeing all the Element room avatars, I thought to myself, "you know what, #radical-webext:matrix.org needs a new icon"… so I sat down and combined a couple of icons. The result:

Radical also quickly (as always) got updates when Element 1.7.0 and 1.7.1 were released. Huge thank you to stoic for making Radical in the first place.

Element F-Droid repos

krombel announced:

I updated my F-Droid repos which are containing the dev builds to reflect the latest naming change to Element.

The people who formerly used my repos for getting the dev repo of Riot-Android should update to the new repo. It wont be updated to get Element

As always you can grab the F-Droid or GPlay flavor and you can pick the repo which reflects your flavor on https://fdroid.krombel.de

Note: As "the new repo" is internally the same repo as the one of RiotX (and Riot.imX) the people who already used that don't need to update their packet source. They will get the updates to Element via the old repo urls.

Feel free to use it 🙂

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

maubot

Tulir announced:

As promised last week, maubot now supports end-to-end encryption. It's a bit bare at the moment, so you need to manually insert the device ID into the database for it to start working, but other than that it works. Plugins don't need to be changed at all, the framework will handle everything.

While I was adding e2ee to maubot, I also improved mautrix-python's crypto stuff so that it's easier to use it directly as a client library with e2ee. Some day I might even add docs :D

matrix-appservice-cr

Chris Vincent reported:

Related to my previous update here, I've just published an initial version of a Matrix Client-Server client library for the Crystal programming language: https://github.com/cvincent/matrix-client-cr

Is this the first time we've seen tooling for Crystal?

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

This Ansible playbook is meant to easily let you run your own Matrix homeserver.

Slavi announced:

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy is now ready to help you with the Riot -> Element transition.

We have a few ways to handle the migration depending on how much change and breakage you're willing to tolerate. See our Migrating to Element documentation page.

Incredibly thorough migration paths here!

Dept of Bots 🤖

Matrix-Alertmanager bot v0.3.0

jaywink offered:

Matrix-Alertmanager bot has a new release of v0.3.0. Highlights are compatibility with AWS Lambda, better error handling if message fails to send and the ability to do a @room mention on firing alerts. Find it here.

cody 0.6.0

carl reported:

REPL for your matrix rooms

This week, we got support for javascript (nodejs) with !js. The code

complexity was considerably reduced, which should make adding new languages much easier in the future. All Python sub-dependencies are now pinned, making

cody builds even more reproducible.

Chat with cody: @cody:bordum.dk

Read the source: https://gitlab.com/carlbordum/matrix-cody

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Noteworthy (Matrix over Wireguard overlay networks)

balaa said:

Noteworthy team (patrick and myself) have open sourced both components (spoke & hub) of Noteworthy (Matrix over Wireguard overlay networks -- https://github.com/decentralabs/noteworthy) we are actively welcoming testers/contributors and working with a handful of projects on incorporating our deployment model over in #noteworthy:tincan.community-- it is also the fastest way (less than a minute) to deploy your own home server! Also, working on incorporating Noteworthy into the popular ansible deployment repo to enable users who don't have access to a publicly accessible to deploy their own home servers.

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. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

Synapse 1.17.0 is here!

Hot on the heels of Synapse 1.16.1, 1.17.0 is a bug fix release most notably containing a fix for 'stuck invites' which happen when we are unable to reject a room invite received over federation.

Get the new releases from any of the usual sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md. 1.17.0 is on github here.

Changelog for 1.17.0 follows:

Synapse 1.17.0 (2020-07-13)

Synapse 1.17.0 is identical to 1.17.0rc1, with the addition of the fix that was included in 1.16.1.

Synapse 1.17.0rc1 (2020-07-09)

Bugfixes

• Fix inconsistent handling of upper and lower case in email addresses when used as identifiers for login, etc. Contributed by @dklimpel. (#7021)
• Fix "Tried to close a non-active scope!" error messages when opentracing is enabled. (#7732)
• Fix incorrect error message when database CTYPE was set incorrectly. (#7760)
• Fix to not ignore set_tweak actions in Push Rules that have no value, as permitted by the specification. (#7766)
• Fix synctl to handle empty config files correctly. Contributed by @kotovalexarian. (#7779)
• Fixes a long standing bug in worker mode where worker information was saved in the devices table instead of the original IP address and user agent. (#7797)
• Fix 'stuck invites' which happen when we are unable to reject a room invite received over federation. (#7804, #7809, #7810)

Updates to the Docker image

• Include libwebp in the Docker file to properly handle webp image uploads. (#7791)

Improved Documentation

• Improve the documentation of the non-standard JSON web token login type. (#7776)
• Update doc links for caddy. Contributed by Nicolai Søborg. (#7789)

Internal Changes

• Refactor getting replication updates from database. (#7740)
• Send push notifications with a high or low priority depending upon whether they may generate user-observable effects. (#7765)
• Use symbolic names for replication stream names. (#7768)
• Add early returns to _check_for_soft_fail. (#7769)
• Fix up synapse.handlers.federation to pass mypy. (#7770)
• Convert the appserver handler to async/await. (#7775)
• Allow to use higher versions of prometheus_client <0.9.0 which are expected to introduce no breaking changes. Contributed by Oliver Kurz. (#7780)
• Update linting scripts and codebase to be compatible with isort v5. (#7786)
• Stop populating unused table local_invites. (#7793)
• Ensure that strings (not bytes) are passed into JSON serialization. (#7799)
• Switch from simplejson to the standard library json. (#7800)
• Add signing_key property to HomeServer to save code duplication. (#7805)
• Improve stacktraces from exceptions in background processes. (#7808)
• Fix various spelling errors in comments and log lines. (#7811)

Matrix Live 🎙

This week it's Open Tech Will Save Us!

• Jay Graber (@arcalinea, @arcalinea:matrix.org), creator of Happening and all-around decentralisation fan gave an overview of the decentralized social media ecosystem.
• Ania M. Piotrowska (@aniampiotrowska), known for her work on Nym, Loopix, and at UCL presented "Building private future for the internet with the Nym mixnet".
• Burak Nehbit (@nehbit, @burak:tomesh.net) gave a deep dive into his work on Aether P2P.

Dept of Spec 📜

anoa reported:

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.

MSC Status

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC2630: checking public keys in SAS verification (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC2677: Annotations and reactions

• MSC2676: Message editing

• MSC2675: Serverside aggregations of message relationships

• MSC2674: Event Relationships

• MSC2673: Notification Levels

• MSC2666: Get rooms in common with another user

Note that a majority of those new MSCs are split out from MSC1849 (the aggregations MSC) to make it easier to review 🙂

Spec Core Team

In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we're sticking to implementation work. anoa did have some time this week to make the graphs more useful though:

Check out that graph!

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

HTML embeddable client GSoC project

arnav-t told us:

This week for my HTML embeddable client GSoC project:

• Added full markdown support and made replying and quoting fully functional

• Added a lot more configuration options to the client, including a read-only mode

• Fixed some bugs

go-neb

nikofil said:

• work is still being done on the bot's functionality to test different crypto functionalities of other Matrix clients when thrown in a room with them

• slight improvements to mautrix-go (sql store can now store multiple Olm accounts and their sessions, key rotation params taken from encryption event, other minor things)

• add some simple instructions to the readme for enabling e2ee for neb as well as integrate these mautrix changes (PR #330)

• room_key_requests will probably be the next thing to be developed for mautrix-go

Nheko (GSoC)

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Chethan said:

• Added user cache which stores the encrypted user keys and updates them on sync

• Added Verification Cache which stores verified devices of a user

• Showing Verification Status of a device on Userprofile

Dept of P2P 👥

Riot iOS P2P Demo

Neil Alexander announced:

Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on the next P2P demo, using Yggdrasil as the transport instead of libp2p. Although libp2p is arguably more featureful in many ways, Yggdrasil does have one major benefit in that it provides full overlay routing. Participants in the network can carry traffic on behalf of other participants, resulting in something much closer to a true mesh network.

The mad science doesn't end there however. I've also built a custom Riot iOS build that includes the full Dendrite P2P demo (yes, that's a homeserver running locally on your phone). If you have an iPhone or iPad, it's available in public TestFlight right now and you can play with it!

The demo still is very experimental and has a number of bugs still (including but not limited to messages occasionally taking a while to deliver, the app crashing when going into the background sometimes etc.) but we'll be improving it further in the coming weeks and it's quite fun to play with, particularly if you can do so with other people nearby.

Thanks to the same technology that powers AirDrop, the demo will automatically find and connect to other nearby devices running the demo and build up a network automatically - even if you are not on the same Wi-Fi network (or indeed connected to Wi-Fi at all)! If you don't have any other nearby peers to test with then fear not - you can still configure a public static peer in the app settings and join the wider network that way.

With any luck the room directory will even work too, showing published rooms from other nearby devices. If not, try joining #beachparty:b5ae50589e50991dd9dd7d59c5c5f7a4521e8da5b603b7f57076272abc58b374 from within the app.

Questions, comments or feedback? Join us in #p2p:matrix.org!

Dept of Servers 🏢

A new way to test homeservers - Complement

kegan reported:

Many of you know that I work on a Go homeserver called Dendrite, and so I've had to get familiar with SyTest: a black-box homeserver integration testing project. Unfortunately SyTest has a number of problems: from the dialect of perl, lack of documentation for federation bits, the inability to run a single test, and so on. Having a solid black-box integration testing project is crucial for the ecosystem to ensure spec compliance (and hence compatibility between server implementations) and for making all servers more stable and reliable.

As a side project I've been working on a modern Go rewrite called Complement which is now ready for a bit more exposure. It currently only has a handful of SyTests converted but I hope to rapidly expand the number in the coming weeks. Complement makes heavy use of Docker to agnostically run homeservers, and already includes a Dockerfile for configuring a Dendrite instance. To try it out, clone the repo and run:

(cd dockerfiles && docker build -t complement-dendrite -f Dendrite.Dockerfile .)

COMPLEMENT_BASE_IMAGE=complement-dendrite:latest go test -v ./tests

If you're interested in learning more and maybe adding some tests check out ONBOARDING.md.

My overall hope is that Complement will lower the barrier to entry when adding tests by so much that it encourages any bugfix/feature in any homeserver implementation to result in a new test. This will benefit everyone and create a feedback loop which will make Matrix even more reliable.

Asked about Sytest and SyTS, Kegan added:

Complement currently implements the same tests as sytest, so tests which pass sytest will pass complement (though that will diverge as complement will guard against more race conditions by default). There's about 9 different kinds of tests currently testing CS-API and Federation (outbound to a dummy server and inbound via a federation client)

The problem with SyTS was that the test tooling around it ultimately wasn't expressive enough. I was using Jest and kept finding myself fighting it by bumping up against issues like https://github.com/facebook/jest/pull/8751 and the multi-process parallelisation stuff was too opaque. The assertion helper functions also lacked context because they rely on behavioural testing names like describe("foo") { it("should say bar") { ... } etc so when your assertion fails (eg wrong value for a JSON key using assert equals) it just says unhelpfully "foo != bar" where what I really want is to know what it actually does say then, and other contextual info around the object (maybe the key name was typod). When I realised that the assertion lib didn't have this and I'd need to add it, coupled with parallelisation concerns and head-desking against Jest, I found myself wishing I just used something else. I stuck with it though and then realised that all the federation stuff (signature checking, canonical JSON, etc) would need to re-implemented when I knew I had working code in Go. Both of these things combined and I thought "you know what, I'm just going to do this in Go" but you'll note that the architecture is identical, so SyTS lives on as an early prototype for Complement ;)

Find out more in the room: #complement:matrix.org.

Dendrite / gomatrixserverlib

Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go

Neil Alexander told us:

While I've been busy distracted with the P2P demo, Kegan has been on a mission to implement some new features. Changes this week include:

• Redaction is now mostly implemented

• User-interactive authentication is now implemented

• Device lists in the client API are now implemented

• Media APIs are now available on both /r0 and /v1 endpoints which makes Riot iOS a bit happier

• Some federation sender bugs have been fixed

• Some database locks in the federation sender in SQLite mode have been fixed

Spec compliance has improved a bit:

• Client-Server APIs: 48%, up from 45% last week

• Server-Server APIs: 51%, up from 50% last week

Conduit

Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs

timo said:

Conduit

Hi everyone, here are some things we worked on this week:

• Work on to-device sending improvements

• Work on room tags (thanks to @gnieto)

• Merged /logout/all endpoint (thanks to @CapsizeGlimmer)

• Work on /joined_members (thanks to @CapsizeGlimmer)

Last week we had a list of major features still missing. Here's a list of what already works:

Registering, logging in, creating rooms, room visibility, join rules, basic permission management, public room list, inviting, creating DMs, e2e encryption, key backups, device verification, cross signing, notifications, uploading media/files (also user/room avatars), lower-resolution media thumbnails, voip calls and a few other thing's I'm forgetting right now. So it's useable for non-federating chats already.

Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!

Synapse

Neil reported:

In Synapse land this week, we shipped 1.16.0 and err 1.16.1.

Lifting from the blog post, the highlights are:-

• An important performance fix to improve room state resolution.

• An option to enable e2e by default for new rooms.

• Ability to run multiple media repo workers side by side.

• Ability to mark specific content as being safe from quarantine.

• Bug fixes to make migrating from SQLite to Postgres more reliable - if you are running sqlite for anything other than evaluation purposes then please migrate!

We also put out a release candidate for 1.17.0 which all being well we’ll release on Monday. 1.17.0 is really a bug fix release the most notable being finally squashing a long standing bug that caused locally rejected invites to get ‘stuck’ client side.

Continuing our matrix.org performance theme, having now got the CS API largely into a good state of responsiveness, we are looking at federation lag. Today we shipped a sharded Federation Reader to matrix.org which has reduced the average lag from seconds to milliseconds. We are just running two currently and are still tuning as we figure out how to get the best from it. Initial impressions seem promising. Watch this space.

We also have a PR out for review to shard the Federation Sender, which will have much the same effect in the other direction.

Once we have sending messages via the Client-Server API, much reduced federation lag and a sharded Pusher we’ll take a look at room joins.

Synapse Deployment 📥️

dacruz21/matrix-chart

Typo Kign reported:

v2.3.0 of dacruz21/matrix-chart has been published with Synapse 1.16.

Kubernetes

Just pushed the 1.16 K8s-optimized Synapse image tags, this time done from a tablet in a server room between moving a bunch of hardware.

New WireGuard-based deployment

balaa announced:

Hi everyone, my friend Patrick and I have been working on making Matrix more accessible in the context of personal overlay networks powered by WireGuard. We’ve built a 1-click deployment solution for Synapse & Riot based on docker. The interesting part is that it gives you public addressability via a distributed proxy service that we have been developing. We are free and open source and welcoming contributors and testers ASAP! We are imagining an ecosystem for building collaborative intranets and see them as foundational to a freer, more equitable internet. Please join us at #noteworthy:tincan.community See https://www.patrickdlg.com/personal-messaging/ and https://noteworthy.tech/start/

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-whatsapp

Tulir announced:

mautrix-whatsapp got some bugfixes and improvements:

• You can now create private chat portals by inviting a WhatsApp ghost user (e.g. from a group chat)

• WhatsApp users in groups are now synced to Matrix properly, including kicking users who left the group without the bridge noticing

matrix-sms-bridge

Benedict offered:

I fixed some bugs in matrix-sms-bridge and added a feature that allows delayed sending of sms messages with the sms send command. It runs very fast and stable in my production environment.

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko

Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at

Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) reported:

Not much to talk about currently, since I'm breaking my Nheko to replace the entire event store at this moment, but I have some heads up on an annoying bug that I fixed on my branch:

Sometimes we had a weird issue, where Nheko wouldn't load the language the user set on their system. This was especially annoying when I wanted to test a specific language, like Japanese, and I couldn't figure out the right LANG* variables to set the language to Japanese in Nheko. Turns out, this was a bug in Nheko and you wouldn't have guessed so, when looking at the examples in the Qt documentation. Anyway, KDAB wrote a nice blogpost explaining this issue: https://www.kdab.com/fixing-a-common-antipattern-when-loading-translations-in-qt/

If you are a Qt developer, you may want to check your applications, if you are also affected.

Riot-iOS

steve offered:

This week, we worked on the rebranding.

RiotX / Riot-Android

benoit announced:

We will release a beta (0.91.5) of Riot-Android this evening, including all the recent changes and lots of fixes. We are still working to prepare the great release!

Daydream

MTRNord told us:

While not much is happening on the master branch some things happened on the Redesign branch:

• Daydream does the sync now on a worker which is similiar to using a thread

• jplatte made a PR for optimizing multiple Parts of the Code which significantly improved the overall Daydream performance ( https://github.com/daydream-mx/Daydream/pull/22 )

• Some rework of the Login logic happened to prepare for well-known support

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

mautrix-python

Tulir offered:

When I initially implemented end-to-bridge encryption in mautrix-python, I used matrix-nio in a slightly hacky way to get it done quickly. It worked fine in some cases, but also caused some undecryptable messages. I tried switching to using matrix-nio's crypto module directly, but the sans-I/O design made that difficult: there were too many parts that needed to be hooked up to the actual I/O and I wasn't able to find them all. In the end, I just decided to implement the basic e2ee stuff directly in mautrix-python the same way it's implemented in mautrix-go.

All my bridges based on mautrix-python (Telegram, Facebook and Hangouts) have been switched to use the new crypto stuff. After a few initial bugs that are already fixed, it seems to work better than the old system. I'll probably add native e2ee to maubot soon too, which is my last main project that's still missing e2ee.

Dept of Internet of Things 💡

Mozilla IoT Matrix Adapter 0.3

Christian reported:

The Mozilla IoT Matrix Adapter can send posts based on events in your home.

Version 0.3 brings the ability to use room aliases instead of internal room ids. Furthermore, you can configure it to accept invites and follow room upgrades.

Due to utter negligence and malpractice by myself, we missed the update for this project last week. Of course, 0.2 is now superseded by 0.3, but here is the 0.2 update anyway:

Released v0.2.0 of the Mozilla IoT Matrix adapter. It's now possible to post in multiple rooms (still one per post).

Dept of Bots 🤖

Cat Disruptor 7000

Stephen D told us:

I wrote a pretty simple Matrix bot in Rust which is loosely based on Cat Disruptor 6000. It will react with 🐈️ to any message containing the string "cat" *. Since it is a small project, I hope it can be used as an example for other people interested in writing Matrix bots in Rust. It implements several important features (crypto/device store, auto-accepting invites, crafting custom events, etc.) You can host it yourself, or you can try it out by inviting the user "@catdisruptor:m.scd31.com" to your room! https://git.scd31.com/stephen/cat-disruptor-7000

* Cat Disruptor 6000 does not do this (it is used for disrupting monologues with cat pictures). However, many instances of Cat Disruptor 6000 also include a separate bot, which is what Cat Disruptor 7000 is mimicking.

matrix-imposter-bot

mr_johnson22 said:

matrix-imposter-bot - A bot that uses your account to repeat other people's messages. This gives relay-bot capabilities to puppet-only bridges.

Updates:

• Can be much more easily deployed with a production-level WSGI server. It comes with waitress but it's possible to use any other server.

• Member join/leave/rename now post messages

• Shuts down when receiving a term/exit/quit signal, instead of hanging

For more details, see https://github.com/mrjohnson22/matrix-imposter-bot

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

cody

carl offered:

cody is a REPL for your matrix chat rooms.

This week, the big new feature was support for Ruby with the message prefix !rb.

Chat with cody: @cody:bordum.dk

Read the source: https://gitlab.com/carlbordum/matrix-cody

Dept of Jobs 💰️

Famedly is recruiting

sorunome announced:

Heya, we (famedly) are looking for about 2-3 more flutter developers. We are a german startup which works on revolutionizing communication in the medical area. We build on top of matrix, so having some matrix-knowledge would be very beneficial.

You might have seen us previously in TWIM with projects such as famedly-email-bridge or the famedly dart SDK.

While we are based in Berlin we do allow remote work, and communication in english is fine, too.

If you are interested or have more questions, please message Niklas Zender.

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. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

That's all I know 🏁

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!