(Please ignore, that I never know, what year number to attach to such a "Year In")
You may remember I organized a small blog post last year to collect stories from the different community projects and what they did in the year and maybe some sneak peaks at the next year. If not, you can find it here or on the Matrix.org blog.
Anyway, enough about 2022, I now encourage you to talk about 2023 and beyond! If you have interesting stuff to report about your projects or projects you have been involved in in 2023, feel free to join #year-in-2023:neko.dev and talk about it! The usual TWIM rules apply there, just that we talk about a whole year and it may involve lots of manual editing on my side, so don't try to break it. Also please be positive in your news and lets try to end 2023 with a bang!
And please share this with projects you want to hear about. :)
As 2023 winds down and I find myself in the thick of planning for 2024, I’d like to start preparing all of us in the Matrix ecosystem for what is to come.
Next year will mark a number of important milestones in the history and evolution of Matrix: the protocol will mark its 10th birthday, we’ll see key initiatives in the spec cross the finish line, and we’ll seat the first ever community-elected Governing Board.
The election of our first Governing Board is what I’d like to focus on today, because it is a huge milestone on the path to an independent, self-sustaining, and self-governing ecosystem. When we celebrate Matrix’s 20th birthday, we’ll look back and our history will be divided much the same way it is in other ecosystems: before and after incorporating a foundation, and before and after introducing community governance.
Let’s talk about what the Governing Board is, why it matters, and how to get involved!
I'll start with a heads-up that the Foundation is going to clean-up all the libera.chat aliases on Matrix. You might want to check the rooms under your control to update the alias and the matrix.to links to it.
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.
As you can make out from the stats, the spec process has been mostly quiet over the past couple weeks. In fact, the stats above are from the last couple weeks, as someone (cough, me) forgot to post a spec TWIM last Friday. All to be expected with the holidays looming however, including my own!
This MSC actually gives background and summarises itself pretty well, so I'm just going to copy/paste from it here as an explainer!
/messages returns a linearized version of the event DAG. From any given
homeservers perspective of the room, the DAG can have gaps where they're missing
events. This could be because the homeserver hasn't fetched them yet or because
it failed to fetch the events because those homeservers are unreachable and no
one else knows about the event.
Currently, there is an unwritten rule between the server and client that the
server will always return all contiguous events in that part of the timeline.
But the server has to break this rule sometimes when it doesn't have the event
and is unable to get the event from anyone else. This MSC aims to change the
dynamic so the server can give the client feedback and an indication of where
the gaps are.
This way, clients know where they are missing events and can even retry fetching
by perhaps adding some UI to the timeline like "We failed to get some messages
in this gap, try again."
It does this by adding a gaps property to the GET /_matrix/client/v3/rooms/{roomId}/messages endpoint, which tells the client which events its missing, instead of the client just assuming incorrectly!
Do check out the MSC if it sounds like something that would be useful to your client!
This week we released v0.13.5. Upgrading to this version is highly recommended, as it fixes several long-standing bugs in our CanonicalJSON implementation.
Here are a few of the highlights:
Fixes
Convert unicode escapes to lowercase (gomatrixserverlib)
Handle negative zero and exponential numbers in Canonical JSON verification (gomatrixserverlib)
Issues around the device list updater have been fixed, which should ensure that there are always workers available to process incoming device list updates.
Fixes around the way we handle database transactions (including a potential connection leak)
ACLs are now updated when received as outliers
Features
Appservice login is now supported!
Users can now kick themselves (used by some bridges)
...and a whole lot more. Check out the release notes for the full set of changes!
As always, feel free to stop by #dendrite:matrix.org to join in on the discussion and if you encounter a bug make sure to report it here.
The long-awaited Release Candidate for version 0.0.96 is finally out - not many changes as the last beta has been reasonably good. 0.0.96 release will be the last one supporting Qt 5.15; packagers are recommended to build it with the most recent Qt 6 at their disposal. Binaries for macOS and Windows are available from the GitHub Releases page linked to above, and a flatpak is already available from the beta channel at Flathub. Totally not promising the release before Christmas ;)
I didn't post many updates recently, but that was mostly because I was working on boring and tedious stuff, that isn't interesting to hear about. Nevertheless, I'll tell you about some of the things now.
On Wayland, if you want to activate your window (as in, bring it to the foreground), you are not allowed to do that. This is for security reasons, since when Wayland was designed, many people were dealing with bad web popups that always stole your focus. In itself that design decisions does make sense, but it does cause some problems. Want to open a notification? App will blink, but not come to the top. Want to open a url in your browser like matrix:r/nheko:nheko.im ? Well, the app will blink and open the url, but stays in the background! Want to run the app from the command line or an icon? Well, the existing window will blink, but not come to the foreground!
However, we fixed that. Usually you should get an activation token, but not all apps provide you with one (like X11 applications, KDEs Konsole, etc). Nheko will now try to use an activation token, when one is passed from your notification manager, but that didn't work reliably for the other ways Nheko could be activated. In those cases Nheko now creates a small window with a loading spinner to get an activation token (because launching a new window of course will bring you to the top...) and then uses that window after 100ms to create an activation token for the main app, sends it to the main app and now the main app can raise itself. Do you think this sounds like a terrible hack? Well, it is, but it works and that's better than nothing! Hopefully all the wayland users won't complain about the useless loading indicator in the future...
Also, on Windows clicking a notification didn't put you in the room. This is now fixed! And we have a shiny new Windows CI runner.
Speaking about Windows, we now also provide an msix for Windows users, that even has a valid signature (that costs quite a lot of money....)! This should make the installer experience quite a bit better for Windows users and soon even should provide auto-updates, but we still need to figure out if we want to enable the "ping nheko.im to check for an update every 15 days" or if we don't want to have our app call home... In theory that should be optional depending on how you install Nheko though. It will only be enabled when you use the appinstaller link, not the msix directly. Apart from that there is a small issue still in the notifications, where the App name now has a weird suffix... and possibly some issues with the protocol handler. If anybody has experience with Windows development, I would appreciate some help. I don't use the platform, so I am mostly flying blind there!
We also now use a different package to manage the single instance behaviour, which should work more reliably on Qt6. However that means you really shouldn't run Qt5 and Qt6 Nheko side by side!
There have been plenty of updates to the spanish translation by CM0use and leaving a space should now properly unhide its rooms again. Begasus also improved the Haiku support by a lot and plenty of smaller fixes!
At the current rate, see you next year, I guess? Thank you for reading our update!
The Elm SDK is an SDK in Elm that compiles to JavaScript and hence aims to be a competitor to the established matrix-js-sdk. This week, the SDK has released its beta 1.0.0 release on the public Elm registry!
The project has received funding from NLnet 💸 and it is now time to start releasing beta versions in an accessible way. The beta versions are experimental and unstable, but feedback is already going to be very much welcome as new versions are going to be released!
You can follow the progress in the Matrix room #elm-sdk:matrix.org and the project will also give you timely release updates on the Fediverse. 🦣
Attention: Changes to the Pricing Model at etke.cc
We're excited to announce a significant update to our pricing model at etke.cc, your trusted managed Matrix servers provider.
Transition to Pay-By-Complexity
In a move towards fairness, we're shifting from a flat-fee pricing model to a more dynamic, pay-by-complexity approach. This means you'll now pay based on the services you choose, allowing for a more tailored and equitable pricing structure.
Fair Pricing for Everyone
The previous flat-fee model sometimes led to discrepancies, where customers with different service needs paid the same amount. With pay-by-complexity, you'll only pay for the services you select, ensuring fair pricing for every user.
Introducing Base Matrix Server at $5/month
As part of this change, we're thrilled to offer a base Matrix server (just a Matrix homeserver and some core services, without bridges/bots, etc.) on your hardware for as low as $5/month—a 50% reduction compared to our previous Maintenance tier. This enables you to enjoy Matrix services at a more affordable rate.
New Services Available
Expanding beyond Matrix, we're reintroducing additional services, such as Miniflux, Radicale, Uptime Kuma, GoToSocial, Linkding, and Vaultwarden, available as paid add-ons. Your feedback will guide us in expanding this service portfolio gradually.
Hello, America and AMD-powered Servers
We're now supporting Hetzner Cloud's new AMD-powered CPX server line, offering improved performance-per-dollar and double the disk space. These servers are available not only in Europe but also in the US, opening up new possibilities for our customers.
FAQs: Your Questions Answered
We understand you may have questions about these changes. We've covered topics ranging from pricing adjustments to server upgrades and service additions in the full announcement, and in the FAQ entry. For existing customers, there's no rush—current pricing remains in place until at least July 1, 2024.
Explore the new offerings and get started with the enhanced etke.cc experience. To stay in touch, join the #news:etke.cc room and keep an eye on etke.cc/news.
There is a large interest in FOSDEM from the Matrix community, and we are very excited to see not just a stand, not just an online track, but an in-person Matrix devroom happening again this year! If you have been following the CfP, you know that the officially allotted time for the Matrix devroom at FOSDEM however is only half a day.
You may be wondering "wait, haven't I read this before?" and you would be correct. Last year, at this point a couple friends from the Community involved with organising several other Matrix events got together and started the "FOSDEM 2023 Matrix Community Meetup", and I dare say, to great success! So, this year again, we got together and sat down with the Matrix Foundation to plan yet another Matrix FOSDEM Fringe event, which is why this time around...
We are happy to announce the FOSDEM 2024 Matrix Foundation & Community Meetup at Hackerspace Brussels (HSBXL)!
The meetup is set to begin on Friday February 02 around noon local time (CET) and will go into the evening. See https://hsbxl.be/enter/ for multiple well documented ways how to find the way there. Thank you HSBXL for providing a location for this!
Further, we are also happy to announce that we have found some sponsors which again will enable us to provide some drinks and food for everyone! If you or your company are planning to attend and are able to contribute to the sponsoring, please contact Thib on Matrix or using legacy comms at mailto:thib@matrix.org!
More details will be announced soon in a blog post, so if you're not subscribed to the feed (https://matrix.org/atom.xml), do so using your favorite feed reader and watch this space!
In the meantime, you can already join #fosdem2024-foundation-community-meetup:matrix.org for all upcoming info, program suggestions, to follow the process & help out, general discussion and everything else related to the event.
Additionally this release contains important improvements and fixes in the chat: for once, you can edit chat messages now from within the Acter app (before it would display them correctly but you couldn't edit yourself) on all platforms. Secondly, we have reworked the entire multimedia handling for chat messages allowing for inline preview and viewing as well as in full-screen now, as well as several fixes around posting media. Learn more about all that in our latest blog post
I've added another section to my Matrix client tutorial, explaining how to encrypt and send to-device events with Olm. I had previously written sections on encrypting and sending to-device events. This new section deals with some of the additional considerations when there are multiple recipients, and how to manage the network requests. Notably missing from this section, so far, is how to deal with errors such as failing to get one-time keys; that will come later. Next up will be encrypting room events (which is already mostly written, but is lacking tests).
As of today, 8330 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 2186 (26.2%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation.
The published directories contain 272674 rooms.
The Matrix.org Foundation has taken down the bridge with the Libera Chat network. This only prevented messages from making it across the bridges, for Matrix users to appear on the IRC side, and for new IRC users to appear on the Matrix side.
As part of our work to remove the bridge leftovers, we have removed the ghosts in Matrix rooms and demoted the Libera Chat appservice user. We will now remove the aliases from the rooms, and strongly encourage you to make sure you update the links to your Matrix room if they relied on a matrix.to link that contains :libera.chat
This Tuesday we released Synapse 1.98.0rc1. Its promotion to the 1.98.0 release proper is planned for the coming Tuesday (12th Dec). We expect v1.98.0 to be the final release of 2023, as the team takes a break over the holiday period.
Several potential speakers asked us to extend the deadline of our CfP for the Matrix Devroom at FOSDEM. We are extending the deadline to Friday 8th December.
You will find below the Call for Participations amended. Please submit your talks to https://pretalx.fosdem.org/: we're looking forward to reading them!
This week we were sorry to announce that we are not able to bring the Libera.Chat bridge back online. We have already begun working through clean up tasks, such as clearing ghosts, and expect to be done by December 22. If you see any bridge artifacts left past that point, please let us know.
We know that many communities and individuals were relying on the bridge, and we regret the impact this situation has on them.
If you are one of those who have relied on the bridge in the past, you may be asking: what now? You do have options.
People who need a bridge for their community can run their own: the matrix-appservice-irc software is still maintained. Only its Libera.Chat instance, which was configured to persist connections across restarts, is being shut down. Please be mindful of the network, and read Libera.Chat’s recommendations and their Matrix FAQ when doing so.
We’ve just pushed out Matrix 1.9! Our last release was Matrix 1.8 and brought us a whole new room version. Matrix 1.9 continues a theme of an annual maintenance release, bringing with it mostly clarifications and bug fixes.
Today’s release sees just 1 MSC formally merged to the specification, though this is expected for a maintenance release. For the last 2 months (and beyond), we have largely been focused on changes which haven’t settled enough to be MSCs yet, such as interactions with the More Instant Messaging Interoperability (MIMI) working group at the IETF.
This post covers a lot of what we’ve been up to for the last few months, and what we expect to get done for the Matrix 1.10 release cycle. As always, the full changelog for Matrix 1.9 is at the bottom of the post :)
Messaging interoperability
One of the major features of Matrix is its ability to connect multitudes of messaging providers with a common communications fabric - a feature that is extremely useful in light of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) which requires gatekeepers to interoperate with other messaging providers.
We’ve been working with the MIMI working group at the IETF to establish a federation protocol for DMA-style messaging alongside our own experiments like MSC3995: Linearized Matrix. The proposed protocol for MIMI is based upon the Linearized Matrix work, but is primarily designed for an MLS-centric environment.
Discussions and experiments will continue over the next several months, and you can read all about our progress so far in TWIM 2023-11-10.
Custom emoji/stickers
We mentioned in Matrix 1.8’s release that we’d be taking a look at MSC2545, MSC1951, MSC4027, and MSC3892 - a family of MSCs collectively called “custom emoji/stickers”. Our review started relatively late in the Matrix 1.9 release cycle (sorry), and we started thinking about interactions with MSC3916/MSC3911 where media is linked to a specific event.
We haven’t had a chance to really dig into the specific possible concerns on these two features overlapping, but do welcome feedback and suggestions for what might impact custom emoji/stickers over on our dedicated tracking issue. We’ll continue working through the problem space in the Matrix 1.10 release cycle, and hope to get both linked media and custom emoji/stickers up for FCP.
Upcoming in Matrix 1.10
With each release we aim to have a plan for what the next release will look like, giving us a direction or theme to follow. Noting that the next release cycle has a lot of holidays (and FOSDEM) in it, we’ve got an initial list of things to look at, grouped by theme:
This list is not final and will be iterated upon over the next couple of weeks. If you’ve got an MSC to add or remove, let us know in the SCT Office on Matrix. For all of the MSCs above, we aim to get them to a FCP-accepted state at a minimum, and merged to the spec if time permits (and makes sense - looking at you, Extensible Events).
The full changelog
Matrix 1.9 is a relatively light maintenance release, but it still has a changelog! Read on for full details.
Client-Server API
Backwards Compatible Changes
Add the m.rule.suppress_edits default push rule, as per MSC3958. (#1617)
Today we are sorry to announce that we are not able to bring the Libera Chat bridge back online. We have already begun working through clean up tasks, such as clearing ghosts, and expect to be done by December 22. If you see any bridge artifacts left past that point, please let us know.
If you are one of those who have relied on the bridge in the past, you may be asking: what now? You do have options.
People who need a bridge for their community can run their own: the matrix-appservice-irc software is still maintained. Only its Libera Chat instance, which was configured to persist connections across restarts, is being shut down. Please be mindful of the network, and read Libera Chat’s recommendations and their Matrix FAQ when doing so.
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.
Get ready for another Hookshot release! The flagship new feature is the ability for Hookshot to respond to webhooks with custom response data, once Hookshot has handled the webhook message. This feature exists because while some services expect an immediate response to webhooks, others wait for the request to complete. With this release, Hookshot can now handle both cases. For more details, refer to the documentation.
The release is available at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-hookshot/releases/tag/4.6.0, or by doing docker pull halfshot/matrix-hookshot:4.6.0. And as usual, feel free to direct any questions about Hookshot in our Matrix room: #hookshot:half-shot.uk
