Josh Simmons announces
Have you seen the Stack Overflow Developer Survey results for 2023?!
Of the 83,830 folks surveyed, Matrix was the #1 chat tool in terms of current users' satisfaction. It was also rated as the most desirable among the open source tools with open governance, but there is a lot of room for improvement in awareness. We’re excited to build on this 2024! 🚀
No Matrix Live this week, but a YouTube playlist of the Matrix talks given at FrOSCon!
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:
- MSC3981:
/relationsrecursion (merge)Accepted MSCs:
- No MSCs were accepted this week.
Closed MSCs:
- No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.
Spec Update
For those familiar with Travis' weekly task lists of MSCs for the Spec Core Team to review in the Office of the Matrix Spec Core Team room, a new weekly list is now being posted in the Matrix Spec & Docs Authoring room. This list is aimed at technical writers who can help by converting MSC authors' words into PRs against the spec text itself.
This is the final step for getting an MSC integrated into a new release of the Matrix spec, and anyone can try their hand at it! It would also very much help the Spec Core Team by freeing up more bandwidth for review of the MSC backlog, as well as push forward the protocol itself. Thank you!
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the relevant Matrix rooms.
Random MSC of the Week
The random MSC of the week is... MSC4003: Semantic table attributes!
This MSC proposes expanding the set of suggested, interpreted HTML tags in Matrix clients to include additional tags related to tables. With them, more control over table rendering is possible. The proposal itself includes one such (albeit fairly arbitrary) example
The proposal is well-written and straight-forward, so do feel free to have a look if the subject interests you!
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.
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!
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.
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
listandremovecommand 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
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
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
matrixscheme- 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!
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!
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
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)
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.Eventbut offers no major functionality at the time. The API interactions are planned to come after implementing an exposedMatrix.Roommodule for interactions with Matrix rooms.This week, I would love it if you take a look at the
Matrix.Eventmodule, 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.
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!
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,titleandtext) and provide an interface for guest and registered users to create a newpost(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
v0.2.1allows to register aformTemplateanddisplayTemplateto 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.
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.
Aine announces
collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc
As of today,
8389Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info,2269(27.0%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain168449rooms.
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.
| Rank | Hostname | Median MS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | rom4nik.pl | 263 |
| 2 | utzutzutz.net | 265.5 |
| 3 | nerdhouse.io | 297 |
| 4 | maunium.net | 299 |
| 5 | fostered.uk | 373 |
| 6 | matrix.org | 454.5 |
| 7 | matrix.its-tps.fr | 503 |
| 8 | mailstation.de | 957 |
| 9 | mtrx.fail | 1544.5 |
| 10 | littlevortex.net | 2006 |
Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.
| Rank | Hostname | Median MS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | inu.is | 144 |
| 2 | nerdhouse.io | 158 |
| 3 | matrix.its-tps.fr | 160 |
| 4 | spqr2gang.com | 163 |
| 5 | frei.chat | 170 |
| 6 | matrix.org | 316 |
| 7 | matrix.maymundere.org | 897 |
| 8 | littlevortex.net | 1479.5 |
| 9 | shiftsystems.net | 24439.5 |
| 10 | chat.eutampieri.eu | 88738 |
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
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. :)
Thib says
I'll start with a heads-up that the Foundation is going to clean-up all the
libera.chataliases 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
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:
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!
/messagesreturns 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
gapsproperty to theGET /_matrix/client/v3/rooms/{roomId}/messagesendpoint, 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!
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.
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 ;)
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!
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. 🦣
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
CPXserver 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.
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!
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.
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).
Aine announces
collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc
As of today,
8330Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info,2186(26.2%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain272674rooms.
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.
| Rank | Hostname | Median MS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | matrix.sp-codes.de | 293 |
| 2 | fostered.uk | 331 |
| 3 | nerdhouse.io | 335 |
| 4 | maunium.net | 425 |
| 5 | ilmari.org | 460 |
| 6 | catboyindustries.co | 516 |
| 7 | littlevortex.net | 583 |
| 8 | mailstation.de | 958 |
| 9 | plocki.org | 1629 |
| 10 | jauriarts.org | 2475 |
Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.
| Rank | Hostname | Median MS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | spqr2gang.com | 167 |
| 2 | dendrite.s3cr3t.me | 169 |
| 3 | fostered.uk | 192.5 |
| 4 | nerdhouse.io | 194 |
| 5 | kumma.juttu.asia | 282.5 |
| 6 | matrix.org | 289 |
| 7 | matrix.its-tps.fr | 333 |
| 8 | inu.is | 397.5 |
| 9 | kanp.ai | 481 |
| 10 | herkinf.de | 592 |
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
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.
Unfortunately no Matrix Live this week, your host and editor apologises for the inconvenience!
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.
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).
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:
MSCs in Final Comment Period:
Accepted MSCs:
- No MSCs were accepted this week.
Closed MSCs:
Spec Updates
Matrix 1.9 is due out next week. Keep your eyes peeled for an update.
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
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:
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!
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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.
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.CancelledErrorproperly, following officialasynciostandards- Allowing custom
ToDeviceEvents viaUnknownToDeviceEvent(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!
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:
- Invite the bot into your room.
- Once the bot joins, use the command
!join helpto explore its features. Please note that the bot responds exclusively to users or servers configured by the bot owner.- 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.
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
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!
Aine reports
collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc
As of today,
8251Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info,2068(25.1%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain274767rooms. 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!
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.
| Rank | Hostname | Median MS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | maunium.net | 252 |
| 2 | nerdhouse.io | 259 |
| 3 | tcpip.uk | 278.5 |
| 4 | rom4nik.pl | 280 |
| 5 | shortestpath.dev | 330 |
| 6 | nevarro.space | 356 |
| 7 | pleasemakemeri.ch | 450 |
| 8 | forgedtheir.phd | 540 |
| 9 | badti.me | 558 |
| 10 | matrix.rainer-zufall.tk | 598 |
Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.
| Rank | Hostname | Median MS |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | dendrite.s3cr3t.me | 138 |
| 2 | inet6.in | 154 |
| 3 | kumma.juttu.asia | 159 |
| 4 | dendrite.matrix.org | 213 |
| 5 | kanp.ai | 221 |
| 6 | inu.is | 224 |
| 7 | pleasemakemeri.ch | 340 |
| 8 | herkinf.de | 362 |
| 9 | matrix.amcforum.wiki | 414 |
| 10 | matrix.its-tps.fr | 423 |
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
