This Week in Matrix

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons reports

We’re excited to announce the timeline for our first ever elections as we take the next big step in open governance for Matrix. We’re also introducing two new membership tiers to increase community representation by including open source projects and foundations on the Governing Board.

Read about this and more in our latest blog post.

Dept of Spec 📜

Matthew says

I dusted off MSC4016 (Streaming and resumable E2EE file transfers) over the holidays and turned it from a WIP into a full MSC, complete with draft proof-of-concept clientside implementations for the streaming attachment fileformat (hypothetical 'v3 attachments') at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-encrypt-attachment/pull/26 and https://github.com/matrix-org/streaming-files-test. Some of the benefits this would bring include:

• zero-latency file transfer (receiver can start decrypting & playing the download as soon as the upload begins)
• halving file-transfer duration (as you don't need to wait for the upload to finish before you start to download it)
• resumble uploads via tus
• unlimited file transfer size, given it's streamed - no longer limited to ~1GB to fit inside v8's 1.4GB heap on Web.
• O(1) memory usage for sending files, given it's streamed (great for share extensions)

It works by switching from AES-CTR to splitting the file into blocks, and encrypting each one as AES-GCM, muxing into a very simple file format which provides basic headers to allow framing for incremental decryption and random access. Given this changes the security model of attachments significantly, and given the fileformat is homemade, this MSC is now blocked on needing some serious cryptographic review before it proceeds any further :)

Matthew says

I just came across https://benstokman.me/blog/my-thoughts-on-msc-4080/ and https://benstokman.me/blog/my-new-thoughts-on-msc-4080 - an interesting discussion on the design of CryptoIDs (Client-Owned Identities - MSC4080); the cornerstone of mainstream account portability in Matrix. (Account Portability work is currently paused for a bit, but it shall return...)

Andrew Morgan (anoa) announces

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.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• There were no new MSCs this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

Spec Updates

It's been a quite week from the perspective of the MSC Status list, but there has definitely been activity across various MSCs (at least according to my inbox). MSC3981 has seen discussion, as has MSC4041 and MSC2448 (we're considering switching the proposal to Thumbhashes).

More to come next week I suspect!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Andrew Morgan (anoa) reports

Happy New Year!

Following on from the release of v1.98.0 (the final release of 2023), as well as seasonal holidays, we expect to return to our usual 2-week release schedule. Starting with a release candidate on Tuesday, January 9th.

As a reminder, Element is switching its development on Synapse to be AGPLv3 at https://github.com/element-hq/synapse, and development from Element's side now continues there (see the blog post if you haven't already). We have done our best to migrate issues from the now-archived matrix-org/synapse repo over, as well as preserving issue and PR numbers. PRs were not migrated, and their PR number has been reserved by a stub issue instead. Huge thanks to Erik and WillL for figuring out the plan there and implementing it (and working with GitHub's heavy rate limits on issue creation!). As well as fixing up CI, packaging, etc. etc.

As things have been a bit topsy-turvy with the migration (and of course the holidays), there's not a huge list of changes to report from the development side. But we did have a few excellent community contributions.

Thanks to @dklimpel, @loelkes, @lanker, @FadhlanR, and @adamjedrzejewski for their PRs!

Expect an increased pace of developer pick right back up from next week, as folks return from holidays.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot (website)

A multi purpose multi platform bridge, formerly known as matrix-github

Half-Shot says

matrix-hookshot 5.1.1!

Hello wonderful people. I hope you all are having/had a good break. Over in bridge towers we've been working on a few holiday treats in the shape of hookshot improvements. Let me lay them down for you:

• dark mode 🌗 is now a thing! We've moved the majority of the components used in the widget to use Compound, which means a more coherent style and light/dark support. It's still early days so please log bugs as you find them. Also, the dark mode is triggered by whatever the browser believes is your operating systems preference, so currently we don't match any overrides your Matrix client might be setting.
• Lots of bug fixes around bits of widget interface not updating properly, particularly around feeds.
• Node 18 support has been dropped, as it's not long for this world and we would like to focus on Node 20/21 support.
• We have added a list and remove command for webhooks.
• We now tell you if your bot doesn't have enough PL to speak, meaning you don't need me to confirm it for you :)
• The GoNEB migrator has been removed, though you can still migrate in a prior release and upgrade.

You can grab the release from here

Dept of Clients 📱

Moment (website)

A Matrix client; forked from Mirage.

Maze announces

Moment release 0.7.4

I bet no one was expecting this! After 2 years, finally another release of Moment (fork of the old client Mirage)!

Not much has changed. Mostly we're just keeping up to date with dependencies. But you will notice a couple differences:

• 👍 Emoji reactions to messages are now displayed (previously not visible)
• 🖉 Edited messages are displayed properly (previously only fallback text)
• 🚀 Almost all UI animations were removed, to fit the "snappy powerclient" idea

Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

It is a new year 🎆️, and what better way to celebrate this than to release Fractal 6.rc? It has been only 2 weeks since our latest beta release, but we have been hard at work during the holidays.

Here is an excerpt:

• Matrix URIs can be opened with Fractal, it is even registered as a handler for the matrix scheme
• Our Join Room dialog now shows some room details as a preview upon entering an identifier or URI
• The verification flow was rewritten to rely more on the Matrix Rust SDK, hopefully solving most issues that occurred before
• Room members now have a profile page that allows, among other things, to kick, ban or ignore them
• Speaking of ignoring users, the list can be managed from the account settings
• The dialog to view an event’s source was reworked to show more details about the event

… and a lot of other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, it should be mostly stable and we expect to only include minor improvements until the release of Fractal 6.

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to contribute to an open source project, take your pick amongst our issues. Any help is very welcome!

Element X Android (website)

Android Matrix messenger application using the Matrix Rust Sdk and Jetpack Compose

benoit announces

Version 0.4.0 of Element X Android is live on the PlayStore. It includes new features like Read Receipt, Chat backup and Mentions, and lots of other features and bugfixes. Full details here: https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-android/releases/tag/v0.4.0. We are now focusing on performance, testing and stabilizing the application, in particular around the Rich Text Editor.

Lots of new features are planned for 2024, stay tuned!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Florian Heese says

Video rooms Jitsi backend deprecation

Hello from the VoIP team,

In the past months we've had a lot of progress on Element Call our scalable video and voice conferencing solution with calling built natively on Matrix and so benefitting from Matrix’s end-to-end encryption. Now is the time to slowly convert the existing video solutions to default to Element Call. We are starting with video rooms, which will be using the Element Call stack by default in the near future. If you (still) have a Jitsi video room, you will need to re-create it to make use of Element Call.

Stay tuned

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Rory&::LibMatrix (.NET 8 matrix bot/client library)

Emma [it/its] ⚡️ reports

Happy 2024! It's been a while since I last posted a TWIM update... Any help I can get is super appreciated!

Changes

• Lots and lots of code cleanup
• Sync deserialisation uses a compiled model now (still slow, but turns out this only affects debug builds)
• Floating point numbers are now sent as strings (since matrix doesnt like floats)
• Some internal fields were renamed to be more clear
• Join rules are now mapped
• Added utility function to get a room's avatar url as a resolved URI
• Added support for setting identity assertion on client instances (for appservices)
• Added overload to get member list as a list instead of an async enumerable
• Added GetAsObject and GetAsJson to MatrixException, to allow serialization
• Hot paths no longer use typed event content, due to the overhead of deserializing it
• Rewrote initialization of a client instance to be cleaner

And, as always:

• The code is available at cgit.rory.gay
  • All contributions are more than welcome, be it documentation, code, anything! Perhaps, example usecases, bots, ...?
• Discussion, suggestions and ideas are welcome in #libmatrix:rory.gay (Space: #mru-space:rory.gay)

elm-matrix-sdk

Bram says

This week, beta version 2.1.0 of the Elm SDK has been published!

The minor update is similar to version 2.0.0, where it introduces a new module Matrix.Event but offers no major functionality at the time. The API interactions are planned to come after implementing an exposed Matrix.Room module for interactions with Matrix rooms.

This week, I would love it if you take a look at the Matrix.Event module, and let me know if the documentation is sufficient and meets your requirements. I'd love to hear your feedback in the Matrix room #elm-sdk:matrix.org.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

The Matrix Community met at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress

erebion 🏳️‍🌈♾ ☎️ 2142 says

The 37th Chaos Communication Congress, sort of a school reunion of hackers, recently ended. From the 27th to the 30th of December 2023, a bunch of nerdy people met up in Hamburg (northern Germany) to discuss all the cool stuff they had been up to. Topics ranged as wide as technology, society, politics and even food hacking as well as a whole lot of other interesting things (talks can by the way be found at https://media.ccc.de/ and most are already uploaded, wow!). We had a Matrix Community Assembly there. An assembly is basically an area for like-minded people to meet up and talk about their topics, in this case Matrix.

We answered questions, sold merch, talked about Matrix-related projects, had workshops about topics like setting up Hookshot, took group photos, tapped beer via Matrix, handed out a bunch of cool new Matrix Community stickers and even fixed some Matrix servers. And Nico bridged the whole Eventphone network to his Matrix account while tinkering and got very confused.

If you have said hello at the event, then also say hello at #chaosevents:matrix.org!

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

matrix-site

urp announces

An example minimal website, dynamically sourcing its content from a public matrix room that anyone can read and publish to.

It uses a custom event io.gitlab.ugrp.post (with two keys, title and text) and provide an interface for guest and registered users to create a new post (cannot edit yet, tbd).

The site is built in vanilla HTML, CSS and Javascript, using the @sctlib/mwc library of web-components (the new version v0.2.1 allows to register a formTemplate and displayTemplate to be able to display and create and custom event in a room).

This is all prototypes (and examples), experimenting using public matrix data outside of traditional chat clients (see also matrix-static). The objectives are to allow users to manage and display their data in environments they control, and subscribe to event feeds from sources they chose.

Dept of Guides 🧭

Josh Simmons says

New year, new homeserver! I completed a migration from managed Matrix with EMS to self-hosting using the matrix-docker-ansible-deploy project. It was a bit tricky as someone new to self-hosting Matrix, but a lot of folks helped along the way and the matrix-docker-ansible-deploy project greatly simplified the process.

I wrote up my notes in the Foundation blog in hopes that they'll be helpful, especially for other folks like me who were on small EMS plans that are being discontinued.

Matrix Federation Stats

Aine announces

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 8389 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 2269 (27.0%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 168449 rooms.

How to add your server | How to remove your server

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.

#ping:maunium.net

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

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse: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

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Matrix Community Year In Review 2023

Nico announces

(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. :)

Continue reading…

Matrix Live

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib says

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.

You can find all the details on our blog

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) announces

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.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• There were no new MSCs this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC3381: Polls (mk II)

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

Spec Updates

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!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3871: Gappy timelines!

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!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite (website)

Second generation Matrix homeserver

Devon Dmytro reports

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)
• Fix canonical json utf-16 surrogate pair detection logic (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.

Dept of Clients 📱

Quaternion (website)

A Qt5-based IM client for Matrix

kitsune reports

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 ;)

Nheko (website)

Desktop client for Matrix using Qt and C++17.

Nico reports

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!

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

elm-matrix-sdk (website)

Bram says

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. 🦣

Dept of Services 🚀

etke.cc (website)

Your matrix server on your conditions

Aine announces

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.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix Foundation & Community Meetup (room)

HarHarLinks reports

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.

See you in Brussels!

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Acter (website)

ben says

v1.23.1214 is now on the AppStore for Mac

After what seemed like forever we finally found and fixed the bug that prevented our submissions to be accepted by Apple. With the latest release from thursday Acter is finally available for Mac to be installed (and kept up-to-date) conveniently via the the preinstalled Apple Mac AppStore - 💥 whopwhop, pew-pew 💥.

message edit and improved multimedia previews

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

becoming an Acter supporter

Some of you might already are aware that Acter isn't your average "startup" but build by a non-profit association. We have recently taking some time to explain better what that means, why that matters (to us) and how you can become a supporting member of the association (or gift it someone else for the holidays) and what's in it for you.

Dept of Guides 🧭

Matrix client tutorial (website)

uhoreg says

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).

Matrix Federation Stats

Aine announces

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

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.

How to add your server | How to remove your server

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.

#ping:maunium.net

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

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse: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

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

dmr reports

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.

Of note in this release candidate:

• Synapse now fully supports Matrix v1.7, v1.8 and v1.9.
• Server notice rooms received a few quality-of-life improvements to. Thank you Mathieu Velten for submitting these changes.
• Synapse's upgrade notes now describe how far Synapse can be safely downgraded.

As ever, thank you to our users, contributors, and community of server operators.

Continue reading…

Matrix Live

Unfortunately no Matrix Live this week, your host and editor apologises for the inconvenience!

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Libera Chat bridge sunsetting

Josh Simmons says

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.

For more information, read our full announcement and Libera.Chat’s announcement.

Matrix on Wikidata

Christian Paul (jaller94) reports

Wikidata is an open knowledge base, containing structured information to be read by humans and machines. I love it and I contribute to it a lot.

This week, I added a few more items from the Matrix ecosystem which I want to highlight:

You may have heard of this event series called Matrix Community Summit (Q123583505). In the past, we've had the Matrix Community Summit 2022 (Q123583515) and the Matrix Community Summit 2023 (Q123583556).

One output of these community summits is the Matrix Salon Podcast (Q123583531), which is a podcast featuring community members. Check it out! After all, you already seem to be interested in Matrix (Q22906785) given you're currently reading This Week In Matrix (Q123583570).

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Matrix Live

Dept of Spec 📜

uhoreg reports

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.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC4081: Claim fallback key on network failure

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC1929: Homeserver Admin Contact and Support page (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC4037: Thread root is not in the thread

Spec Updates

Matrix 1.9 is due out next week. Keep your eyes peeled for an update.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

matrix-hookshot (website)

A multi purpose multi platform bridge, formerly known as matrix-github

Andrew F announces

Hookshot 4.6.0 & webhook responses

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

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Matrix Live

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) announces

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.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC4080: Cryptographic Identities (Client-Owned Identities)
• MSC4079: Server-Defined User Home Pages
• MSC4078: Transparent pusher creation
• MSC4077: Improved process for handling deprecated HTML features
• MSC4076: Let E2EE clients calculate app & E2EE-room badge counts themselves

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• MSC4072: Handling devices with no one-time keys in /keys/claim

Spec Updates

Cross-posting from TravisR's announcement in the Office of the Spec Core Team room...

Matrix 1.9

The next release, Matrix 1.9, is scheduled for release on Wednesday, November 29, 2023. This will largely be a maintenance release, but if there's anything you think we might have missed, please let us know.

Matrix 1.10

The Spec Core Team is now accepting MSC and feature suggestions towards the Matrix 1.10 release, due sometime around FOSDEM in February (unsure if it'll be before or after). So far we've got the following features up for consideration:

• Extensible Events (at least proposing FCP on the majority of the core system; plan to merge for Matrix 1.11)
• Encrypted appservices (like MSC2409)
• Custom emoji/stickers (merge)

If there's specific MSCs, or even vague ideas you'd like the SCT to focus on, let us know in the Office of the Spec Core Team room. The SCT will generally find it harder to actually write the MSCs ourselves, but if you're planning on implementing a feature that will need spec review, let us know so we can ensure bandwidth is made available for that review to happen.

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3394: New auth rule that only allows someone to post a message in relation to another message!

This MSC is paving the way towards the use case of a room where, for instance, announcements can be made by admins, while general users can start or participate in a thread branched off from an announcement. But they otherwise would not be able to make "top-level" posts.

This feature is common in services such as Telegram, for announcement or support rooms. And it would be nice to be able to support the same kind of use case in Matrix.

It looks like I dropped the ball on keeping up with the discussion on this one. So excuse me while I go do that!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

clokep reports

Synapse 1.96.1 was released (note that 1.96.0 was skipped due to issues releasing). It includes:

• Support for multiple receipts workers.
• Some new module APIs.
• Performance improvements
• Many bugfixes!

Check it out and let us know of any issues.

Additionally, synapse-s3-storage-provider 1.3.0 was released to fix some incompatibilities with newer dependencies used in Synapse.

This past week has also seen Erik land a bunch more performance improvements, especially when using workers. Support for asynchronous uploads was finally merged, thanks to Sumner Evans from Beeper.

Dept of Clients 📱

Commet (website)

airyz announces

Hello! today we are announcing the latest minor update, v0.1.3! This contains mostly small bug fixes and UI Improvements, as well as a few quality of life features!

What's New?

• Rooms and spaces shared between multiple accounts are visually distinguished
• Improved HTML Rendering
• Implemented lazy loading of room members
• Zoom and pan on images and video
• Background task indicator for downloads
• Direct messages in spaces are now visually distinct from rooms

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where a room shared between multiple logged in accounts wouldn't open correctly
• Fixed notifications being displayed for old messages

Release: https://github.com/commetchat/commet/releases/tag/v0.1.3

Join Our Room Github Twitter Mastodon

FluffyChat (website)

Krille-chan announces

FluffyChat v1.15.1 has been released with a lot of bugfixes and updated translations.This release also finally makes it possible to select text in the chat on web, desktop but also on mobile. Please be aware that the default long press behavior to select events has changed to normal taps because of this.

For the next release you can also expect the return of presences. While this feature is disabled on matrix.org, it seems to work fine on other servers. The app tries to filter out users from servers where presences are disabled to not display them as always-offline. I hope this works fine. As far as I can see, the difference is that on server with presences enabled there is always a „last_active_ago“ field in the presence content. So the app assumes that, if the user is offline and last_active_ago is NOT set, then it is better to just not display the presence status at all.

Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element-iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 16+.

Ștefan announces

We took this week to work on some polish for Element X and squished a host of bugs, including:

• Tweaked the pin lock screen so it hides the app faster
• Changed a lot of the icons [1], [2] and [3]
• Started displaying which rooms have an active call in the room list
• Added accessibility for read receipts
• .. and much much more

Element X Android (website)

Android Matrix messenger application using the Matrix Rust Sdk and Jetpack Compose

benoit says

Element X Android 0.3.1 is available on the PlayStore. We spent the week fixing bugs and improving our codebase. We are also adding the read marker and read receipt rendering to the timeline and are also progressing on the mention epic. Jorge also made a big improvement on the release time for the Rust SDK. It now takes around 20 minutes, previously it was up to 5 hours!

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Danielle reports

Element Web/Desktop

• We’ve tightened scope and started reviewing feedback and iterating on the new room header and right panel designs. Keep your feedback coming, we’d love to hear it!
  • If you don’t have the new header already, go ahead and try it out on Element Develop by using the labs flag: “Under active development, new room header & details interface”
• The team’s been working on streamlining the process we use to release Element Web. We’ve simplified it and are working through different testing tools to ensure that we’ve got our automated tests running smoothly.
• Our week has also been focussed on reducing the number of failing notification tests by fixing bugs and working through the test suite.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-nio (website)

Paarth Shah says

Another full release 0.23.0 of is out as of a few minutes ago (right as I'm typing this), with some nice bugfixes, nicer features, and important progress for a whole lot more (I'll give you a hint: 🧵)

Notable changes (full changes here):

• Introduce querying for m.direct
• Propagating asyncio.CancelledError properly, following official asyncio standards
• Allowing custom ToDeviceEvents via UnknownToDeviceEvent (use this wisely, and consult the spec!)
• Allowing arbitrary callable/awaitable objects to be set as a callback (don't limit yourself to functions and coroutines!)

A sincere thank you to everyone who contributed!

Dept of Bots 🤖

MatrixJoinLink (website)

Dominik reports

MatrixJoinLink is bot that allows the creation of invite links to non-public rooms in matrix.

Several months have passed since I initially introduced the bot in TWIM. In the interim, I've seamlessly incorporated the bot into various work related contexts as well as in private contexts. The bot addresses the challenge of being unable to invite individuals via a link to a non-public room or space. Since my last announcement, I further improved UX. The bot is now able to deal with various room identifiers (i.e., matrix.to links, internal room ids, and public room aliases).

How to use JoinLink

MatrixJoinLink simplifies the process of inviting users to non-public spaces. Here's a guide on how to make the most of it:

1. Invite the bot into your room.
2. Once the bot joins, use the command !join help to explore its features. Please note that the bot responds exclusively to users or servers configured by the bot owner.
3. To create a Join Link, kindly type !join link Demonstration_Link, and the bot will promptly generate a join link for you. Ensure that the bot has the necessary permissions to invite users.

Help

Creation of Join Links (with Developer Mode Details)

Entering a Join Link Room

Feel free to test the bot and raise any issue using GitHub or using the development room that is mentioned in the project's README. Also consult the README for technical details.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

FOSDEM 2024

Thib reports

a heads-up that the Matrix.org Foundation & Community Devroom has been accepted at FOSDEM24 You can find the CfP here, and submit your talk propositions before December 4

Centralize the Matrix Community at the Chaos Congress

Nico says

As you may know, the 37th Chaos Congress takes place in Hamburg, 27.-30.12.2023. If you don't know, the Chaos Congress is a collection of cool people mostly from the different Chaos communities to talk about interesting topics ranging from technology all the way to politics. You will however need a ticket, which will only be available in very limited quantities.

Similar to the what we already did at the Chaos camp, we have applied for an assembly at the congress. An assembly basically is a few tables with people centered around a topic, where you can join to chat, participate in workshops or even get someone to fix or setup your Matrix homeserver!

Currently the assembly is not yet approved. However we are announcing it now, so that you can give it some thought if you want to participate and maybe help shape the Matrix Community assembly!

Since the proposal isn't public yet, there is no link to share to find more information about it. But if you are helping to organize the assemblies, you can find it in the backoffice. So for now (and for later), if you want to discuss it, suggest things to do or have other comments, feel free to join us in #chaosevents:matrix.org!

So far we don't have a program yet, but maybe you have a cool workshop you want to do in our small round? Or maybe you just want to hang out and maybe answer questions people have about Matrix? Or maybe you just want to meet some Matrix developers, that you have always looked up to, to complain about how this one button is slightly of center when running their client on your PDP11?

In the end YOU can decide what you want this assembly to be, but now at least you know about it (if it gets approved)! Further updates will follow as we make progress and when we think you may have forgotten about us!

Matrix Federation Stats

Aine reports

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 8251 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 2068 (25.1%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 274767 rooms. Do you know what room isn't one of them? There are no rooms about backpacking among them, so if you're wondering "what an interesting room I can create to find great people to socialize with" - a room about backpacking would be a great choice!

How to add your server | How to remove your server

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.

#ping:maunium.net

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

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse: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

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Matrix Live

Dept of Social Good 🙆

Josh Simmons announces

The Matrix.org Foundation is proud to join with Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and over 400 security experts, researchers, and NGOs in sounding the alarm about the EU's proposed eIDAS reform.

As written, the proposal radically expands the ability of governments to surveil their citizens and residents across the EU.

We encourage citizens and residents of the EU to pay close attention and look for ways to get involved – urgently.

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) reports

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.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC4072: Handling devices with no one-time keys in /keys/claim
• MSC4071: Pagination Token Headers

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

Spec Updates

IETF 118 is happening next week, and as per usual we'll be there participating as the Matrix.org foundation! We're working away at drafts in the hopes of converging with the MIMI design team and working group on a new MIMI protocol. Said protocol will hopefully allow the various gatekeepers and other players to have interoperable instant messaging, under the requirements laid out by the EU's Digital Markets Act.

Travis, Matthew and others have been spearheading this work in various areas, with myself helping out on the content format side of things. More to come post-IETF 118!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2413: Remove client_secret!

This is an MSC written by yours truly! I have no influence over what the script chooses, the script is it's own master.

This (quite old now) proposal aims to argue that the client_secret parameter on various third-party ID-related endpoints in the spec is not necessary. As we already have a server-generated session_id which can be used to identify a particular client's session and validate that the client is allowed to interact with the session (by way of knowing its ID).

Essentially, we have two values in play where we only practically need one. This spec aims to simplify things, as well as reduce the amount of client-controlled parameters are involved in third-party ID processes (which can be a bit finicky as they often interact with external systems).

I have yet to update this or really do anything with it for the past few years. But it exists, and now you know!

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by the matrix.org core team

Erik reports

This week released a patch release (v1.95.1) that fixes a moderate security issue in Synapse. See the advisory for more details.

We also released an RC (v1.96.0rc1) with some new module APIs, experimental support for running multiple receipt workers, and the usual tranche of bugfixes.

The team has also been looking at performance improvements, and some low-hanging fruits have already landed on develop.

Dept of Clients 📱

Nheko (website)

Desktop client for Matrix using Qt and C++17.

Nico announces

This week was mostly polishing trying to make the Qt6 version of Nheko stable enough for a release. However I also got to close some ancient issues like search stopping pagination randomly.

One fun issue was, that you currently can't sign in with any mxid longer than 128 characters... When we first started to persist data in Nheko (before I joined the project), we ensured the database was unique by storing the database in a file named after the hex encoded mxid. However most filesystems have a file name limit of 255 characters or so... However, we are not in 2017 anymore, so we switched to hashing the mxid, which ensures the database name will always have a constant length, that is legal on most filesystems (sorry, no DOS support for you!).

Another fun change is that Nheko now reduces how often it syncs, when the window is unfocused for a while. This decreases how much power Nheko uses on my system by quite a bit, since it used to sync 5-10 times a second before just to process typing notifications in some unimportant room... Now it will at most sync once a second (if the window is unfocused for 30s or more). This means you will still receive important messages immediately unless someone was typing immediately before it, in which case it might be delayed by up to one second. I guess most people won't even notice this change.

We also tried to get a working msix package of Nheko. The biggest blocker currently is signing it with a useful certificate, but there are also a few minor issues like notifications not showing the pretty app name and the protocol handler not forwarding the url. If we can resolve those, we might provide an MSIX in the future instead of the traditional installer, which should allow for automatic updates on Windows, might make Nheko on the Windows Store possible and is also a smaller package with more security options. Half of the time was spent on reducing our compile times though, since with this new build step we hit the 1 hour build time limit quite a lot (on a clean cache run).

Nheko now also uses im.nheko.Nheko as the appid on all platforms and there are also some fun, non-code things happening behind the scenes, which might show up in TWIM in the future!

I wish you all a wonderful weekend and maybe give the nightlies a go and report regressions you want fixed before a potential release!

Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element-iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 16+.

Doug announces

This week we’ve been focused on releasing version 1.4, which is now available on TestFlight and should be making its way to the App Store next week. The following features have been enabled:

• User Mention Pills and Suggestions.
• Voice Messages.
• Starting a Call from inside a room.
• Screen Lock with a PIN code, Touch ID or Face ID.

This version also lays the groundwork ready for us to enable key backup support and you may find that after cross signing a fresh session, some parts of the backup start to work in the background (no promises though).

Element X Android (website)

Android Matrix messenger application using the Matrix Rust Sdk and Jetpack Compose

benoit announces

• We have released Element X Android 0.3.0 on Tuesday and it’s now available for beta testers on the PlayStore.
• Voice Messages, Element Call, PIN code are available
• We are also working on member suggestions in the message composer.
• KeyBackup is also available but behind a feature flag for now, to give time to fix the latest issues.

Element Web/Desktop (website)

Secure and independent communication, connected via Matrix. Come talk with us in #element-web:matrix.org!

Danielle reports

Element Web/Desktop

• This week we're back on track with notifications! Next week's release will contain fixes for problems that happen when messages are deleted, and the following release will contain fixes for editing messages.
• On the new room header and right panel we’re nearly ready for a ‘proper’ launch. Releasing the new version to all users, not just those on Develop or Nightly. We’ll continue to iterate once the first version has landed but we’re really proud of the new design direction.
• And, work progresses on our project to automate some of our CI processes!

Dept of Widgets 🧩

NeoBoard

Milton Moura announces

We are pleased to announce that NeoBoard had it's first major release, v1.0.0!

NeoBoard is an open-source collaborative whiteboard widget for Matrix! It's an ideal tool for creating and sharing content, conducting presentations, and collaborating with colleagues or friends. All data is stored as Matrix events within the Matrix room, leveraging Matrix's native end-to-end encryption, decentralization and data privacy features.

This update is our first stable release and includes some new features:

• Buttons to easily navigate to the next and previous slide in a presentation
• Support for PDF file export
• Editing slides while in presentation mode

If you are interested in the gory details, please watch our presentation at the Matrix Community Summit 2023 for a deep dive into what NeoBoard is and how it's implemented.

You can also try it out right now by adding it as a widget to a room following these instructions.

The NeoBoard is the latest widget from Nordeck. Please direct any questions to us at #nordeck:matrix.org.

Dept of Encryption 🔐

libolm

uhoreg announces

The JavaScript package for libolm is now available at npmjs.com. This means that your package.json files no longer have to include the full URL for the package, and can just include the version specifier. This was the last package type that was relying on the gitlab.matrix.org package registry.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

matrix-rust-sdk (website)

Next-gen crypto-included SDK for developing Clients, Bots and Appservices; written in Rust with bindings for Node, Swift and WASM

Jonas Platte says

This week, we did a lot of bug fixing and refactoring, notably compile times and binary sizes should be down due to the trimming of our dependency tree. We also made a bunch of progress on key backup support, with the crypto-crate level support being moved out of its feature flag soon (stabilization of the functionality in the higher-level crate will follow).

matrix-bot-sdk (website)

A TypeScript/JavaScript SDK for Matrix bots

TravisR announces

v0.7.0 is here! The bot-sdk is generally fairly stable as it's a very low-level SDK over top of the Matrix Client-Server and Appservice APIs, meaning it gets few releases. This might change in the future, but for now its twice-yearly release has happened 🎉

This release's highlight is a PostgreSQL storage provider to accompany the existing filesystem storage provider. Like SimpleFsStorageProvider, it's not great, but it does work. Other changes and details are available in the changelog: https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-bot-sdk/releases/tag/v0.7.0

Matrix Federation Stats

Aine reports

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 8679 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 2096 (24.2%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 272740 rooms.

How to add your server | How to remove your server

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.

#ping:maunium.net

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

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse: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

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons says

A couple months in, it’s a joy and a privilege to introduce myself as the first Managing Director of The Matrix.org Foundation! Read my intro post to learn more about me, the work ahead, what you can do to help, and how the leaders of other open source foundations are reacting to my appointment.

I’m thrilled to take this opportunity to also announce the Office of the Matrix.org Foundation, a new room that offers a direct line to me and the rest of the small but mighty team behind the Foundation. Come say hi! 👋🏻

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