It's the 28th of December as I write this, and I hope you had a good year. Long as it is, I recommend reading Matthew's write-up of the year, as it covers a lot of ground!
Many of the core team have been out of the office this week, but there are still plenty of updates to share from the Matrix ecosystem!
koma-desktop is updated to JavaFx 11 and installation is simplified. Dependencies, including native modules can be packaged into one single file, which only needs to be downloaded and run. Java Runtime 11 is the only runtime dependency. Now it's just cross-compilation that needs to be set up before packaged releases can be provided for Mac, Windows, and Linux users.
I started work on a Prometheus Alertmanager bot for Matrix. The basic idea is that Alertmanager can send webhook alert events to the bot which will then send the formatted events to configured rooms based on the alert receiver. It works, but is still early work in progress. See code and info here: https://git.feneas.org/jaywink/matrix-alertmanager.
As expected the Fractal team released 4.0 and is already hard at work on the next micro version. We recommend getting it from Flathub like we usually do.
From the release notes:
New features:
Enhanced history view with adaptive layout, day divider
Reorganised headerbar, app menu merged with user menu
The new command handling system in maubot is ready. The new system should be much nicer to use when developing plugins.
Previously maubot had a system that was designed after the improved bot support spec proposal, but it wasn't very nice or pythonic. If/when the proposal or something similar goes through, I'll probably add support for it in the new command handling system.
Next I'll make some developer docs so that other people could actually make their own plugins.
https://github.com/apps/matrix-to is a Github App which makes use of their shiny and new Content Attachments API/Webhook. When a matrix.to or view.matrix.org URL is used this app is activated. It adds a little snippet with the Room Title and Topic (if the room is peekable from matrix.org). In future it'll work for event permalinks, but currently there is no support for peeking context/event in Matrix API.
I'm at 35c3 with some known characters from the Matrix world (as well as 15,000 others.) If you're here too, come visit us in our assembly, and also make sure to come to Dijkstra tomorrow to watch me present a look back at on the last year: https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2018/Fahrplan/events/9400.html. We have recorded a message for Matrix Live from 35c3, but will post tomorrow with some more footage from the event.
🔗Matrix Live: Half-Shot talks bridges, and working on libpurple bridging to Matrix
You may have seen that Half-Shot been working fearlessly and tirelessly on bridges for many, many months. In this episode of Matrix Live Half-Shot chats with Matthew about his work, progress and achievements, with a focus on recent matrix-appservice-purple and XMPP work. Audio is not amazing, but worth listening to get acquainted with recent work.
The matrix-appservice-purple bridge gained a XMPP specific backend for better performance when you want to do just xmpp bridging. It's rather quick right now, and needs dogfooding.
A couple of weeks ago, fr1kin PR'd a nice Matrix badge to the Shields project that tells you how many users are in a public room. There were a few issues with it so I PR'd some changes to make the badge more usable, and it's now merged and live (as of yesterday evening), with examples available here! ? For instance, here's a badge for TWIM: https://img.shields.io/matrix/twim:matrix.org.svg ?
matrix-bot-sdk has received early support for application services. Similar to the official matrix-js-sdk, the bot-sdk uses an Intent-based model for making bridges easier to write. Check out the simple example here for more information on how it works.
Aaron Raimist reports that Seaglass is available on homebrew for macOS:
Installing Seaglass is now easier than ever. If you already use Homebrew to manage other packages, you can now install Seaglass with a simple brew cask install seaglass.
alphapapa reports from a team who have forked and are maintaining a Matrix client for Emacs:
Many additions and improvements to matrix-client.el (https://github.com/jgkamat/matrix-client-el) recently, including a "standalone client" mode that launches Emacs to look like this.
the matrix-docker-ansible-deploy playbook has received some bugfixes and improvements lately. Most importantly, it's now running the freshly-released Synapse 0.34.0 under Python 3, so memory usage should be much better.
Fresh from their hackfest in Seville last week, Alexandre Franke reports:
The Fractal crew spent the week chasing last minutes bugs and made two beta releases (3.99.0 and 3.99.1) in preparation for the big new stable release, 4.0, which is right around the corner.
#space:im.kabi.tk for anyone interested in space, rocket launches, satellites, etc. Are you wondering what NASA's new Mars Rover is doing? Maybe you live on the west coast of the United States, and you saw that meteor on Wednesday night that came within minutes of a scheduled rocket launch and just after three astronauts left the space station. If any of that sounds interesting to you, feel free to join the room. A Matrix bot is being tested to send updates about upcoming rocket launches to the room.
Just a head's up that I've increased the storage capacity of the database. With current projections, the server should be good for another year or two.
The database is also 1ms closer to Synapse and has a faster CPU in it. It probably won't make a dent in speed on federation, but it is a step forward.
I'll be rolling out python 3 to the homeserver this week too, which should help a little bit.
New screen to troubleshoot notification issue has been merged on /develop.
Splitting current Android SDK to separate crypto part is on it's way. We're doing this in order to be able to integrate crypto faster in the Riot reboot.
We released 0.34.0! This release recommends Python 3 for production and brings with it huge performance improvements. If you've been putting upgrading off upgrading your Synapse, now is the time to do so. For more details here is a post that explains what you should expect and a recent Matrix Live interviews Amber (hawkowl) on the subject.
Aside from that we are working furiously towards federation R0 and have a bunch of MSCs to get us ever closer. You can track our progress here.
andrewsh notes that 0.34.0 is also available in the Debian repos:
Synapse 0.34.0~rc2 in Debian since Tuesday, 0.34.0 uploaded today; both use Python 3 only
Dendrite's internal audit is progressing very well and is getting very close to its end. What's left to do for me is check the implementation status of a few Matrix features, and translate those into tagged GitHub issues so that everyone can have as clear of a view as possible on what's left to work on. I'm on holiday all of next week, but hopefully will have some good news about that the following week.
Did you get to the end? What was your favourite section? Come tell us in #twim:matrix.org! Do you have your own update you'd like to add? Same place, come chat in #twim:matrix.org.
Next week is various things. It's Christmas, which means there will be more hacking and coding happening than usual I expect! It's also 35c3, which I will be attending, and might affect scheduling next week. Stay tuned in #twim:matrix.org for news, and come join us in #matrix-35c3:matrix.org if you'll be there and want to meet up!
Developers and creators of Fractal, the GNOME Matrix client, have been holding a Hackfest this week in Seville. Matthew and I caught up with them on video for Matrix Live this week, and discussed the product improvements they've been making and their plans for the next release (due next week!)
We don't often get to feature news from Ruma, but this week there is an updated This Week in Ruma.
Ruma is not dead, however, and small improvements have continued over the last year. The Matrix spec has advanced quite a bit and many of the blocking issues for Ruma have been resolved. Rust's maturity is another story. async/await is still under development and this is the most significant blocking issue to progress on Ruma.
maubot got a command-line tool for building plugins and managing maubot instances. I also added some server-side stuff for easy registration of accounts in the management interface using synapse shared secrets, but the UI for that isn't ready.
Also, I'm planning on adding some kind of small Matrix client in the management interface for manually managing the added bot clients. That might lead to a separate library that could be used in other projects or embedded in websites.
mxisd hits v1.2.1 with a new maintenance release, fixing bugs and regressions from v1.2.0. Updating to v1.2.1 is strongly encouraged as v1.3.x will contain breaking changes and will not be a straight-forward update like v1.x has been until now.
This new version supports the consent of matrix servers terms of service (including GDPR) in the registration flow.
It also contains fixes for the "Empty room" bug, the registration issue on iOS 10, etc.
This new version supports the consent of matrix servers terms of service (including GDPR) in the registration flow.
Many bugfixes
SDK contains KeyBackup
My internal audit of Dendrite is continuing, drawing a more and more precise picture of what's left to fix and implement. I aim to have it over by the end of the year, or the very early days of 2019 at the latest. Folks can track its progress through https://cloud.abolivier.bzh/index.php/s/qXi2KFjCQk2c6eG
🔗modular.im now has Extra-Large instances available
Due to demand, modular.im Hosted Homeservers now has Extra-Large instances available. If you need to service 1,000+ users on a Matrix homeserver, this is the product for you!
🔗linuxgaming.life homeserver is the number one Matrix homeserver focused on Linux gaming
In which Matthew & Amandine discuss The Matrix.org Foundation, go-live for the French Government deployment for Matrix, and some exciting random diversions into post-1.0 Matrix features which should land once once 1.0 is out the door!
Before, there was a jarring cut when new messages were loaded, but now you can just scroll upward and older messages are loaded continuously. The part I'm most excited about is the new "new message divider". When the user opens a room they can directly start reading the conversation from the last seen message and they don't need to search for the new message divider. Not only has the UX gotten a lot better, but also the underlying code is much cleaner now. I also spent some time on making message rendering faster. I replaced the RegExp with more efficient code, this made the rendering much faster (from ~10ms to ~ 1ms) for every single message. In summary, all of these things improve Fractal's UX a lot and make it feel more like a modern messaging app.
0.34.0rc1 is out - please test it! 0.34.0 will be the first to officially support python 3. We're still working on the debian packaging but 0.34.0 proper should be out next week.
Brendan has been getting on with Dendrite development:
Started auditing Dendrite's codebase to identify what is left to implement, along with what hasn't been implemented correctly. Still a lot of work left to do on this, but it's looking promising so far.
Currently working on the website (based on t2bot.io, thank you travis for making that available on github!) and making things nicer in general. I will be adding more bots shortly. Please let me know of any issues with the HS or anything surrounding it.
Informo is a project to create a specification and implementation for distributing information and news. This week they have been working on merging changes to the specification:
Work on the Informo specifications has slowed down a bit in the last couple of weeks, though since the last update we did manage to get some relatively big SCSs merged into the specs, including SCS #9 (rendered here) which specifies how information sources must publish their information through the federation, and SCS #11 (rendered here) which describes how sources must register themselves in order to be picked up by clients, and handle localisation. ? There's still a couple of big items to take care of before we can cut a 1.0 release of the Informo specs but this is definitely a huge step towards this goal.
I started working on a Minecraft bridge pretty heavily based on Travis's old project, but using Minecraft-protocol instead of mineflayer. You need a bot Minecraft account that can join and idle in the server, it then uses /tellraw to post messages.
libQMatrixClient 0.4.1 has been released today, with small fixes in the stable branch. Meanwhile, active work is ongoing on lazy-loading support in the library, with ETA for the feature landing in master being in about a week or so.
druig has been working on Koma, a JavaFX Matrix client:
This week in koma: implementation of json library switched from runtime reflection to compile-time code generation The matrix api is implemented manually in the project, retrofit and moshi are used to interact with the rest api.
As we mentioned in TWIM last week, MTRNord has been working on designs for SimpleMatrix, a Matrix client for Android in development. This week he has made a video showcasing the new design.
Last night Half-Shot & Neil & Brendan went to see the Redecentralize folk at their meetup:
Beer! And pizza! And also Redecentralize We chatted to a nice bunch of folks both demoing their decentralized projects and talked to the likes of scuttlebutt, BBC, IPFS and more. Was a interesting experience having around 8 minutes to quickly explain to newcomers what Matrix is and why they should use it in a speed dating format. We chatted (and demoed) bridges, new-riot and generally how it all fits together. There were a lot of very interesting people with different profiles and backgrounds, and diversified questions which lead to a lot of interesting discussions.
Note for the confused: the format of the meetup was comparable to speed dating. There is no suggestion that Matrix should be used at regular speed dating. If you do find such a use for Matrix, come tell us in #twim:matrix.org.
This week it has been winter-in-Europe kind of weather, but that's ok, it happens every year. TWIM on the other hand happens every week, so if you have something to share, and would like to share what you've been working on, come chat to us in #twim:matrix.org.
Longer than usual episode of Matrix Live this week. Amber talks to Neil about the works she's been doing over the last few months to port Synapse from Python 2 to Python 3. Recommended for anyone who's been following along the progress of Synapse, or who wants a good intro on the benefits of Python 3 over Python 2.
an open-source smartphone that can be assembled for 50$ in parts. It is Linux-powered, with UI software written in Python.
Currently, ZeroPhone is based on Raspberry Pi Zero, SIM800L GSM modem and 1.3" OLED screen and button interface.
I stumbled across this blog post which mentions a matrix app in a project to create an open, hackable phone out of a raspberry pi. It's old news at this point I guess, but I don't think I've seen it mentioned here, so I thought it might be a neat thing worth featuring: https://zerophone.github.io/newsletter/ZeroPhone-Weekly-No.-16/
The creator of the Matrix app, derivmug also arrived to tell us about his work:
Hey everyone, I have been suggested to post about the Zerophone project here. I have written a basic matrix client for it. It's basically a simple phone based on a raspberry pi zero, focused on privacy, security and hackability.
Jason Robinson is passionate about Federated technology, and has been working on his site at https://the-federation.info/ for some time. He recently added Matrix to the list of protocols he scrapes and lists:
Matrix (or more specifically, Synapse) servers are now visible on the The Federation info website at https://the-federation.info/matrix%7Csynapse. The website collects lists of servers for various federation protocols (like Matrix, ActivityPub, Diaspora, etc). If a server outputs usage information, it also shows some historical information for servers and projects. Currently the information available from Synapse on the site is just version, availability of registrations and (obviously) domain name. If you want to register your server, check https://the-federation.info/info for more details. Tips also welcome on how to register other Matrix server projects and how to get more data out of servers.
I made a rss plugin for maubot and added a fancy log viewer in the maubot management UI.
mautrix-telegram 0.4.0 was released, though it has no changes since the release candidate. I also copied mautrix-telegram's HTML parser into mautrix-python. Hopefully it's now generic enough so that when mautrix-telegram switches to mautrix-python, it can drop most of the built-in HTML parser.
matrix-appservice-discord received a lot of work these past days.
Not only the usual small bugfixes, but also some rather big changes:
The parsers for both Discord->Matrix sending and Matrix->Discord sending were re-written completely to properly handle things (and thus, at the same time, crunch a bunch of edge-case bugs!).
In addition, the long-awaited highlighting issues with @ everyone and @ here (on discord) and @ room (on matrix) were addressed.
Some of these things are still in PR stage, but expected to be merged soon!
Half-Shot also provided a great screenshot of everything working well:
is just showing off having IRC+Matrix+Discord+XMPP plugged together. XMPP being the one purple is bridging
This week our focus has been to work through some final bugs blocking 0.34.0 which will be our first official python 3 release. Expect a RC rsn. For a sneak peak see this week's Matrix Live video at the top!
Two workshops happened with the Foundation lawyers to work on MSC1318 - basically fleshing out a proposal for the details of the foundation governance in terms of how the Guardians (i.e. directors of the foundation board) should interact with the Core Spec Team to act as a back-stop - and working out how to port the MSC (once finished) into formal Articles of Association & adjunct documents. We'll get the workshop notes written up as a rewrite of MSC1318 very shortly.
MSC1730 Mechanism for redirecting to an alternative server during login
…and an alternate to MSC1730: MSC1731 Mechanism for redirecting to an alternative server during SSO login.
These three SSO-related MSCs are derived from work being done for a large-scale Matrix deployment for a New Vector customer which we should be able to talk about in future. Improving SSO and other auth/identity work in Matrix is vital, and needless to say we're trying to ensure all the resulting work ends up in the spec to the benefit of the whole ecosystem :)
matrix-media-repo has received a lot of updates in the last few weeks. Although mostly bug fixes and improvements, there's added support for streaming downloads from remote servers. This is mostly useful when someone posts a 100mb video in a room: previously the media repo would download the entire thing then send it over to you. Now it'll send you the video while it also caches it.
matrix-docker-ansible-deploy has received some updates in the past few weeks - fixing minor bugs, improving documentation, adding support for additional Synapse/Riot features, etc.
some configuration renaming to make things more consistent. Most people would likely be unaffected.
support has been added for Postgres 11. Upgrading is possible and easy (as a related success story, Aaron Raimist shared that he recently upgraded his ~40GB database)
the ability to set up a public server and the ability to make use of Synapse's \\"auto-join\\" feature. Until now, the playbook was only suited for setting up a private server, but with this, setting up public servers is now a possibility. Thanks @anadahz
I'm quite happy that the playbook is getting more contributions from others now and is improving in such diverse ways!
Additionally, the #matrix-docker-ansible-deploy:devture.com support room in Matrix is now bridged to the #matrix-docker-ansible-deploy IRC Freenode channel, making it easier for people to get support when they don't have a working homeserver.
the work on lazy-loading in libQMatrixClient has advanced to the point when client authors may start trying to integrate it in their applications (welcome to #qmatrixclient:matrix.org for details - it's a bit rough around the edges yet).
SMSMatrix now has a room (#smsmatrix:matrix.org). SMSMatrix is a simple bridge between Matrix and SMS, developed by tijder. You install an android app and register a bot account which will invite you to direct chats under the name of anyone who sends you an SMS, which will then act as a normal SMS conversation.
I had a very quick play with this tool and it works great - a good way to quickly bridge SMS to Matrix.
Most of the focus from the Synapse team this week has been on the new version using Python 3:
Py3 is finished, other than Debian packages - ongoing debate on whether they should use a virtualenv or depend on debian dependencies, and who should maintain them in a Py3 world…
Modular.im provides Hosted Homeservers for Matrix.
Modular now has full support for Custom DNS (letting you point your own SRV records at it)
Lots of work on a migration tool to allow folks to easily shift Matrix accounts between servers, as well as (in future) migrations from HipChat, Slack & others.
Apologies for the delayed release this week - please expect an episode of Matrix Live in the week, and back to a normal schedule for TWIM as of Friday. As always, come talk to us in #thisweekinmatrix:matrix.org and tell us what you've been doing.
This week we continue Matrix Live Season 3 by talking to community member axx, Axel Simon from La Quadrature du Net, a French advocacy group that promotes digital rights and freedoms of citizens. We talk about the work La Quadrature du Net do, with a focus on the importance of decentralisation and how Matrix helps support this.
Max has been giving updates on the road to mxisd v1.2.0, which was released this week:
A new stable version of mxisd is out: v1.2.0. It comes with:
The ultimate identity store that lets you run any command on the system to fetch info, making it the most generic yet. The sky is now your limit!
The ability to send email notifications about room invites when done using a Matrix ID regardless if their users is already provisioned on synapse, using emails found in an Identity store. Targeted at onboarding/migration to Matrix for any org/corp.
Half-Shot has been working on important work for his final undergrad year. Just kidding! He's been working on bridges as you'd expect:
I've been working on matrix-appservice-purple, and the community immediately rallied around and helped me get it into shape. We've got automated builds for both the bridge and the libpurple binding modules. In features land, group chats are now working at a basic level and I will be working on supporting profiles next. #purple-bridge:half-shot.uk is now a room where you can tell me why your favorite protocol doesn't work with the bridge. (It's also used for updates.)
A couple of SCS (Specs Changes Submissions) have been merged into the Informo specs, notably SCS #2 which introduces a complete technical description of the network's nodes and their expected behaviour, and SCS #4 which changes the duration of the call for public review period, shrinking it from 14 days to 7 days, in order to speed specs work up while letting a decent amount of time for people to give a look at new SCSs and voice their concerns.
This week in Koma, I have been working on a correct implementation of the user registration process. Currently waiting for a small issue with synapse to get fixed For kotlin programmer who might be interested https://github.com/koma-im/koma/pull/6
🔗f-droid.org has set up a new matrix (synapse) server
f-droid.org has set up a new matrix (synapse) server for internal conversation and to chat in #fdroid:matrix.org , which will obviously also get a :f-droid.org alias.
For now the server is private, only allowing core team members to get an account in order to keep the performance manageable.
An implementation for Push-to-Talk for Jitsi calls in Riot has now been completed and is in the review phase. This was a result of multiple weeks of work, with code changes across many different repositories. Will hopefully make a difference with background noise or many participants. Look forward to seeing it land in /develop sometime shortly! Works with both Scalar and Dimension setups.
Half-Shot: "The events API update for Slack was released on riot.im/develop a little while ago, which let you do more than webhooks could let you do. The UI scalar/integration manager bits were left on /develop for testing but got rolled out to /app this week."
This week I attended TADSummit in Lisbon to tell them about the excellent progress Matrix has been making this year. You can see more details of the conference (plus video) here: http://blog.tadsummit.com/2018/11/16/tadsummit-2018-web3/
If you need more, come back here next week, for all the latest from This Week in Matrix! Also, join us in #twim:matrix.org to tell us what you've been doing.
We continue the new format for Matrix Live season 3 by chatting with Francois from New Vector, to get a sneak preview of the work he's doing on a new version of matrix-android-sdk, and how that will impact Riot:
Welcome to Brendan, who has started working on Dendrite as his new day job at New Vector:
There's been some progress on Dendrite (?), with a couple of bug getting fixed along with some progress in the implementation of Matrix endpoints, such as the /backfill federation one (documented here), which has already been merged, and the /messages one from the client-server API (documented here) for which a pull request has been opened and is currently under review.
I have pushed my asyncio wrapper of the Python matrix client api class to pypi, so I can use it in a few different projects while the PR to the Python SDK is in an unmerged state. It exposes all the methods on the MatrixHttpApi class as awaitables. https://github.com/Cadair/matrix_api_async and https://pypi.org/project/matrix-api-async/
These improvements will, in time, be merged back into the main Python SDK.
Half-Shot is working on so many bridges that these days he just casually mentions a huge release like Discord bridge v0.3.0. Some of the many many new features:
#251 Support for Postgresql and a newer SQLite3 backend!
#182 Replace npmlog with winston, for logging to files and better logging overall.
#220 Messages are now deleted by a users puppet rather than the bot.
There are many more features and bugfixes on the release notes. Also:
Shoutout to our new member of the team, Sorunome who did a lot of the review work behind the scenes for this release. Also, thank you to everyone who submitted a PR or an issue!
TWIM (but actually over the last few weeks), thanks to the efforts of a new contributor, matrix-puppet-slack v1.7.0 and v1.8.0 have been released, fixing a number of old and new issues and adding support for new types of Slack events, including bidirectional @-mentions, Slack-to-Matrix typing notifications, fixing Slack-to-Matrix image/file uploads with comments, and more!
The matrix-puppet-bridge projects have gotten relatively quiet over the past year or so, but there's still plenty of bridges with plenty of features to implement and plenty of bugs to fix (and, even more importantly, bugs to report!) for any would-be-contributors who'd like to use a trusted Matrix homeserver as their double-puppetting Slack/iMessage/Facebook/GroupMe/iChat/Skype/Hangouts/Signal/Tox client from which to brag to their friends on the other platforms about how great Matrix is.
tulir has been making big progress on his maubot management UI:
The maubot management UI has progressed well, but isn't quite ready yet. I think it should be usable by Next Week in Matrix.
It can be used to set up and configure a maubot instance and plugins. Once it's ready, it should be possible to do everything except installing maubot itself through the UI: installing and updating plugins, adding matrix clients, configuring plugin instances, viewing logs, etc.
Coffee continues his streak of TWIM mentions by bringing a new bot to combat abuse:
HK Bot is an anti-abuse bot for public Matrix chatrooms.
This is a bot that really shouldn't exist, but since some people just like to make others' lives more difficult, here we are.
The purpose of this bot is twofold. It can automatically oversee rooms and respond to abuse, based on programmable pattern rules, providing a stop-gap measure in case no human moderators are nearby. It can also automate some tedious tasks via its command interface, the primary one being the complete redaction of all of an abuser's messages.
HK Bot is still under construction and contains dangerous features. Use with caution.
Dandellion "made an X-SAMPA to IPA bot based on matrix-bot-sdk and discord's conniebot". This bot essentially lets you use ASCII characters to get an output in IPA. The advantage of this is that you can much more easily type and transmit pronunciation (because you don't need to find the characters).
I'll just have to make it a bit more configurable, but then I'll throw the source up
When making constructed languages and talking about linguistics, it's nice to get an easily readable IPA representation of a word, but it's really hard to write IPA, which is why x-sampa exists as a way to input IPA with a normal keyboard!
vabd, the unknown organiser of Informo provided an update about the spec:
A handful of SCS (Specs Changes Submissions) to the Informo specifications have been happening over the last week and a half, with some of them still open to public review for at least a few days before being merged into the specs. The list of SCS open to review can be found here, and people can track new SCS and status changes to existing ones through our specs bot that's living in #discuss:weu.informo.network ?
I increased message rendering performance in the room history. Also the history doesn't move it's position anymore when older messages are loaded, which results in a much better experience. All the changes are in master, but we didn't make a new release.
I have made a video about Riot which could fit in the Guides on matrix.org. It's for beginners, in French. It's 6 months old, but I just uploaded it on youtube. Also it's available on peertube.
ma1uta introduces a new client built on JavaFX: no code yet, but it's built on the previous Java Matrix work he's been doing. "It will be cross-platform (linux,windows,osx I hope) client with supports of the multi accounts."
Half-Shot also continued work on bridging via libpurple: "I've nearly got group chats working, with invites (and hopefully people joining and leaving them showing up properly) as well as user's having profiles."
Since the last TWIM update, koma is updated to kotlin 1.3, experimental coroutines are replaced with stable ones. The changes are being tested and should be merged soon. A new contributor has joined, so expect development to speed up a bit.
You made it, right to the end! Nice going! Come back here next week to find out what's been happening, or even better, come join us in #twim:matrix.org and tell us what YOU'VE been working on!
This week, the first steps were taken in the creation of the Matrix Foundation! Read our blog post from earlier this week for more:
in preparation for the upcoming Matrix 1.0 release, we've been moving ahead with the rest of the open governance plan – and we're happy to announce that as of a few hours ago, the initial incarnation of The Matrix.org Foundation exists! Watch this space over the coming weeks as we announce the Guardians and finish bootstrapping the Foundation into its final long-term form! Meanwhile, any questions: come ask in #matrix-spec-process:matrix.org
Just wanted to let everyone know that changes are coming to the server list: I've put up a notice on the site that starting Nov 16th I will only show a curated list of servers I would recommend to join. This reduces the workload for me quite a bit and avoids me becoming some kind of arbiter on what encompasses the Matrix universe… I think it is also more useful for users who are looking for a server to join. And there is always matrixstats.org for those who are looking for a more complete-ish list of known homeservers.
However, if you have ideas on how to continue the project, or would like to step up and get involved in maintaining a list using data and tools from Hello Matrix, please contact me. Alex told me:
if you find someone willing to take up the project of a more automated, self-service and complete list at a later date, I am more than willing to hand over all the stuff I currently have and might also lend a helping hand myself (if I have time then).
tulir has continued work on the revamped, now-Pythonic maubot, and has added a management API:
The maubot management API I mentioned last week is now mostly ready. It should be possible to use it to set up a maubot instance and plugins without filling the database manually. There's no UI yet though, so it still means curling manually. The management API also supports the fancy plugin reloading stuff which was the > reason I rewrote maubot in python: You can POST an updated plugin to the API and it'll install it without having to restart. I also made a bunch of plugins while working on the API that I used to test the API: a dice rolling/calculator bot, a bot that replies with the MXC URI of images you send it, a simple echo/ping bot and an xkcd bot
Next steps are making the management UI, a few more plugins and making setup and development instructions so that other people could run it and make plugins
My lightweight bot/client framework, matrix-client-core, received its first tag ever. Version 0.0.1 is relatively stable, and lies on the doorstep of some refactoring work (ongoing) which should keep the master branch backwards compatible for now, but could make things less stable as I add new commits.
It turns out this isn't strictly a new project:
[it has] been there all along, quietly powering FAQBot and all of my bots. ? Maybe I have failed to explicitly indicate it as such up until now. (oops)
Always good news to see more bot-creation tooling!
Max has updates on mxisd, Identity Server for Matrix:
mxisd v1.2.0-rc.1 is out with support of all features for the Exec Identity Store, allowing connectivity to totally custom/arbitrary backends. Feedback is extremely welcome!
It's a job that someone needed to do, and that someone was Half-Shot (who else?)
I've been reviving node-purple (a library for communicating with libpurple) and making a brand new bridge service to make use of it called matrix-appservice-purple. Today I got it to the point where you could link your XMPP account to your matrix user and have it bridge PMs over. Work is ongoing to make it bridge group chats, profiles, contacts lists and support other protocols better in the coming weeks
Black Hat is often found working on Spectral (previously 'Matrique'.) This week, he has been building @nsfw:encom.eu.org, which is a bot designed to give scores for how likely an image should be classified as NSFW. It's a simple mechanism, you give it an image, it gives you a JSON object with the result. For example:
My avatar returned less than 1% probability of being NSFW, which I was actually a little offended by.
To talk more about the bot and it's development, chat in #nsfw:encom.eu.org.
kitsune is forced by his employers to use Viber, so is thinking of creating a Matrix bridge.
I spent some time this week repeatedly installing Synapse, then working with Stefan to create a new, hopefully definitive installation guide (available soon). I can also personally recommend Slavi's matrix-docker-ansible-deploy project, this is a great way to get a Synapse installation (and more!) running.
lately in #twim:matrix.org posters have been providing much clearer and atomic updates, which I like a lot
We continue the new season of Matrix Live. This re-booted season has a slightly different format to previous: in each outing, there will be a single deep-dive topic. This week, Matthew and recent-Matrix-arrival Nad discuss UX for E2E encryption key handling. This is an unsurprisingly complex design question, both in terms of how it should behave and how it should look. Nad shared his latest thinking in a blog post earlier today, and you can watch the video below.
We've covered the growth of this project several times in TWIM, but I wanted to give a little more attention to the work Slavi has been doing with matrix-docker-ansible-deploy. Synapse is a large Python project with many configurable options, and many optional components, so installing it has sometimes been a challenge. I have seen many reports that using Ansible and Docker, and in particular using these playbooks from Slavi, is a more sane way to install Synapse. The tools get a lot of attention and updates. This week, Slavi reports:
matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now has a self-check command that can help diagnose various configuration problems with the setup (DNS records being misconfigured, firewall ports not being open, etc).
Dimension is an integration manager for Matrix. It's written and maintained by TravisR, and allows you to an a pre-defined selection of widgets, bots and bridges to improve your self-hosted Matrix experience. Check out: https://dimension.t2bot.io/. This week, TravisR reports:
Dimension has received quite a lot of updates over the last week. Here's what's hot off the press:
4 new bridges can be self-hosted and managed in Dimension: Telegram, Webhooks, Slack, and Gitter.
3 new widgets are available: Grafana, TradingView, and Spotify.
Add your own custom bots for people to add to their rooms.
A dark theme has been added and is automatically applied if you use the dark theme in Riot.
The overall UI has been updated to be slightly more modern and less bright orange.
Various bug fixes and improvements (is it even possible to have a changelog without this?)
As per usual, if you find any bugs or have ideas for things to add to Dimension feel free to come by #dimension:t2bot.io
tulir has been working on mautrix-telegram, and has made some massive performance improvements:
mautrix-telegram now uses the non-ORM part of SQLAlchemy for database tables that are used often. That change made the CPU usage on the t2bot.io instance drop from ~100% to ~7%
We have graphs to illustrate the improvements:
TravisR, who hosts the bridge on t2bot.io, reports that the bridge is now effectively instantaneous!
The bottleneck has returned to being synapse instead of the bridge
#164 Bot will now mention name, topic and membership changes on Discord.
#175 Add special discord keys onto m.room.member for ghosts
Go check out the full release notes if you're interested in the Bridge as there are many more changes. Half-Shot also noted:
Shoutout to our new member of the team, @Sorunome who did a lot of the review work behind the scenes for this release. Also, thank you to everyone who submitted a PR or an issue!
We covered progress on the Slack Bridge previously, but Half-Shot has now declared it ready for 0.2.0 final! The bridge is reportedly running and very stable - go try it out now!
We just missed out on this update from Spectral last week. Black Hat says:
Spectral now provides an AppImage along with Flatpak build. Also, thanks to the notification codes from nheko, Spectral can show icons in notifications, and now enters corresponding room when clicking on the notification. It also gains several UI/UX improvements. P.s. I have resubmitted Spectral to Flathub.
swedneck has created a new gaming community on Matrix:
we just bridged the linux-gaming community from discord to matrix, with a matrix community and individually bridged rooms/channels and all
main room is #general_linuxgaming:matrix.org
community is +linux-gaming:matrix.org
i've set up an instance of matrix-appservice-discord, which is bridging some select rooms from the linux-gaming discord server to +linux-gaming:matrix.org
The Linux Gaming community has gotten a proper matrix community (+linux-gaming:matrix.org) with a fair few rooms in it, all of which are bridged to a discord channel via my matrix-appservice-discord instance.
If you are using ansible, jcgruenhage has a useful addition that will allow you to get notifications from matrix:
After over a month of waiting, the matrix notification module has been merged on to ansible devel which will be released as ansible 2.8 early next year. Src: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/45823
mxisd v1.2.0-beta.3 is out with the start of a brand new Identity store based on arbitrary executable, to connect to anything and everything. Authentication is implemented at the moment (see doc). Feedback is very welcome to improve as much as possible for v1.2.0
Discussion of message editing, in particular for how message edits from Bridges are handled has progressed. Nothing is final yet so check out https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/1695 for the latest.
🔗Quaternion translations: German and Polish now available
Last week we had an update from kitsune to say that there was a new Lokalise project to allow Quaternion translations. This week, we learn that the first translations are now available:
First couple of translations - German and Polish - have made it to the released Quaternion 0.0.9.3 - thanks to krombel and krkk for their contributions! Swedish and Russian translations are in the works.
The first stable release of the #matrix messenger #fluffychat is out now. ? Get it from: https://www.fluffy.chat Thanks to all who have helped me. Thanks to regionetz for hosting the ubports.chat homeserver, thanks to @matrix for the awesome work, thanks to @Ubports for this awesome platform and to fabiyamada, advocatux, wayneoutthere, lionelb, Diogo, mithgarthsormr, mark, and all the awesome people from the community!! With your help, Ubuntu Touch is still alive and has got a new stable messenger!
Informo is an ambitious project hoping to be a "decentralised news network, making information accessible". The project lives at https://github.com/Informo, but for now you can join #discuss:weu.informo.network to get their latest news.
We made a Matrix bot that shouts about updates to change submissions to Informo's specifications. It basically processes all changes made to the list of labels for each issue and PR of a GitHub repository's, and generates a notice message that it sends to the configured room(s). We made it because we wanted the people that are interested in Informo to know in real time about any change made to the state of proposals, along with the calls for public reviews. We just set it up in #discuss:weu.informo.network, and published its source code along with a built binary here: https://github.com/Informo/specs-bot It might also be worth noticing that, although we designed it to shout about updates to Informo's specifications proposals, we also made it compatible with other projects, e.g. the Matrix specs
anoa has been making improvements to Video Calling on Riot:
I've been working on global push-to-talk functionality with Jitsi on Riot. I've got toggle on/off functionality working, but still trying for walkie-talkie mode. To do so, I need to get this library working with Riot: https://github.com/WilixLead/iohook If anyone has experience with native Node modules and/or Electron, please hit me up! @andrewm:amorgan.xyz
Mozfest is a tech-focused event happening this weekend in London. Neil and I have been along tonight and we've been chatting to a lot of people about Matrix, decentralisation and all those things we love! Check out our very short and sweet video below!
This is the start of Season Three of Matrix Live. Matrix Live seasons are variable in length, based on the data available so far. From this season, Matrix Live with change the format slightly, based on feedback. The videos will try to be a bit more interesting, varied, and deep. With this video being the start of a new season, it was meant to be more substantive with us talking to Mozfest-ites, but I lost track of time, so this shorter but still energetic video will hopefully convey the idea.
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