Matrix Live

Thib was away this week, Matrix Live is finally coming back next week!

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Gitter

madlittlemods (Eric Eastwood) says

If you didn't already catch it this week, Gitter has fully migrated to Matrix! 😎

We brought over all of the historical Gitter content to the gitter.im homeserver and gave everyone free rein over it via app.gitter.im, a Gitter branded Element instance.

Of course, since it's Matrix, you can use whatever client you want to access your public, private and one to one (now DM) conversations!

You can read about the full details in the blog post: https://blog.gitter.im/2023/02/13/gitter-has-fully-migrated-to-matrix/

Happy chatting! 🤠

Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR 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

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3925: m.replace aggregation with full event (merge)

New MSCs:

• MSC3967: Do not require UIA when first uploading cross signing keys

Spec Core Team

The Spec Core Team has been busy working away at Matrix 1.6 (released earlier in the week) and aiming to get MSC3925: m.replace aggregation with full event, MSC3952: Intentional Mentions, and MSC2677: Annotations and reactions and all of their dependencies through the spec process. These are all MSCs the SCT has been asked to help get through the process - if there's an MSC we should be looking at, please let us know in #sct-office:matrix.org.

IETF/MIMI/DMA

With the Extensible Events Core (MSC1767) being accepted last week, the focus now turns to all the other extensible event MSCs for images, files, etc. How does extensible events relate to IETF/MIMI/DMA, you ask? In our mission for having Matrix be the standard for interoperability, we need a content format that works for everyone. Events prior to MSC1767 could work with enough effort, though MSC1767's system makes things a lot easier when representing arbitrarily complex messaging features.

Stay tuned to TWIM for progress in this area. It's a relatively slow process, but we're working through it.

Random MSC of the week

This week's random MSC is MSC2785: Event notification attributes and actions! This is effectively a replacement for the push rules system we have today, and a super interesting one (how do you even design a notifications system?). Focus has shifted a little bit since this MSC was first opened, though its ideas still comes up frequently when aiming to make smaller changes to push rules today.

The Chart

The chart has been giving us a bit of grief when trying to be generated, but today it seems agreeable enough to include - enjoy :)

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Greetings Matrix fans! We've published Synapse version 1.77 as the new stable release this week. Synapse admins are encouraged to upgrade to it at their convenience.

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Hey all,

Matrix 1.6 is out there! Like Matrix 1.5 back in November, this release is largely a maintenance update. Matrix 1.1 through 1.4 have been relatively major upgrades, so a little time between features doesn’t feel like a bad idea :)

As with all spec releases, we encourage implementations to gradually update over the next few months rather than have support for everything on release day - please be kind to the projects you use, and help them gain support if able.

Matrix 1.6 sees just 7 MSCs get merged, though this is to be expected from a maintenance release. Check out Matthew’s Matrix 2.0 talk at FOSDEM for an idea of what’s expected over the next few releases.

We’ve covered a couple of the MSCs below, but read on to the full changelog for the full picture.

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Matrix Live

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC3964: Notifications for room tags

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC3862: event_match (almost) anything
• MSC1767: Extensible event types & fallback in Matrix (v2)

Merged MSCs:

• MSC3943: Partial joins to nameless rooms should include heroes' memberships
• MSC3783: Fixed base64 for SAS verification

Spec Updates

In keeping with our (roughly) quarterly release schedule of the Matrix Spec, v1.6 is due to be released on February 14th. That's only four days from now! The headline features are a new Jump-to-Date Client-Server API (MSC3030) and initial work on speeding up room joins (MSC3706), along with many other fixes and clarifications to the spec text itself.

If you haven't yet seen it, Matthew's Matrix 2.0 talk at FOSDEM walks through some of the upcoming features in the spec. Each will land in subsequent, future releases of the spec. Once all have landed, we'll call that Matrix 2.0 (in name and in actual version number).

Extensible events is one such upcoming feature. While the core proposal outlining the feature (MSC1767) will land in v1.6, the smattering of MSCs which describe how various event types will work under extensible events will span multiple upcoming spec versions. Watch this space!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC2974: Widgets: Capabilities re-exchange!

This MSC is relatively simple; proposing a method for widgets to ask the client for additional capabilities after it has already been initialised. Doing so allows for increased security and privacy workflows, as the widget need only ask for access to certain pieces of data at the point that it needs it (rather than all up front).

A similar transition of permission granting happened in mobile devices and apps. Initially mobile apps would ask for all permissions they would need up front - which users would blindly accept. These days, mobile OS's have shifted to a model where individual permissions are requested upon attempting to complete an action in an app. This way, users have better context on the reason for the permissions request. (Oddly, browsers have yet to reach this stage with extensions - those still ask for all permissions up front.)

Do check out the proposal and its technical details if widgets are your thing!

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For the past two years, FOSDEM couldn’t happen in-person. Fortunately we could help, and Matrix hosted the world's largest free & open source software conference online! This year we were finally back in-person… but not only.

The set-up we have arranged in 2021 and polished in 2022 has proved to be robust and served us well during the pandemic. Returning to an in-person conference didn’t mean we had to throw it all away… quite the opposite!

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Matrix Live

No Matrix Live today, but there will be a lot of Matrix content this weekend at FOSDEM in the Matrix devroom, and Matthew's main-track talk.

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Greetings Matrix fans! We've published Synapse version 1.76 as the new stable release this week. Synapse admins are encouraged to upgrade to it at their convenience. Please take a look at the upgrade notes for any important information about upgrading.

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Matrix Live

Dept of GSoC 🎓️

Thib reports

The Matrix Foundation is a candidate this year again to the GSoC programme. If you intend to mentor a student around your Matrix project, please ping me (@thib:ergaster.org) in the #gsoc:matrix.org room. Your project doesn't have to be set in stone yet: we need to have a good estimate of the number of mentors and projects applying before FOSDEM (by the end of next week).

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Matrix Live

Unfortunately no Matrix Live this week!

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

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

New MSCs:

• There were no new MSCs this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3943: Partial joins to nameless rooms should include heroes' memberships (merge)

Merged MSCs:

• No MSCs were merged this week.

Spec Updates

This week and the week afterwards, the Spec Core Team are mostly focused on improvements to Matrix that we'd like to show off at FOSDEM 2023 this year! That consists of MSCs related to Faster Room Joins (MSC3943 among others) and Extensible Events (MSC1767).

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3230: Spaces top level order!

This defines an algorithm and a data structure that can be used to order one's top-level list of Spaces and have that order sync across all of their clients. Rooms and spaces within a Space continue to have their order defined by an order key (and failing that, the origin_server_ts field) in the corresponding m.space.child event of their parent's Space's state.

I won't get into the details of the algorithm here (or its criticisms), but feel free to jump into the MSC and take a look!

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We published Synapse version 1.75 as the new stable release this week. Synapse admins are encouraged to upgrade to it at their convenience. It seems like the blog post for version 1.74 was eaten by Santa's reindeer, so this post will also cover changes from it.

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