26 KiB
+++ title = "This Week in Matrix 2020-06-26" path = "/blog/2020/06/26/this-week-in-matrix-2020-06-26"
[taxonomies] author = ["Ben Parsons"] category = ["This Week in Matrix"]
[extra] image = "https://matrix.org/blog/img/2020-06-26-ml.png" +++
Matrix Live 🎙
It's demos this week!
- Riot X video calls (valere)
- Room list (TravisR)
- Notifications - (Michael (t3chguy) & richvdh)
- E2E Onboarding (Dave & Nad)
- Modular SAML support (ChristianP)
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Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡
Merch Returns!
Yes it's back! For the first time in months we are shipping branded IRL-items featuring Matrix branding. Head to The Shop to stock-up.
Dept of Spec 📜
anoa announced:
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
MSC Status
Merged MSCs:
MSCs in Final Comment Period:
New MSCs:
Spec Core Team
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, unfortunately our three MSCs from last week ( MSC2366 (verification flows), MSC2403 (knocking), and MSC2630 (SAS security)) are still pre-FCP. Most of the team has been quite busy with implementation for the past few weeks. Instead of advertising those 3 MSCs again, we're going to switch the focus to "implementation" for a bit until we're freed up again.
So the focus for this week is: MSC implementation work. However, this should not discourage any MSC authors from responding to MSC feedback in the meantime 🙂
Dept of GSoC 🎓
Ruma GSoC
devinr528 reported:
This week in the ruma/matrix Google Summer of Code project, ruma-events was made ready for use! After adding stripped and sync event generation to the
event_enum!macro there were only a few small tweaks needed to try it out in some dependent rust crates. I spent a few days converting matrix-rust-sdk to use the ruma-monorepo. Since ruma is used on both client and server-side, I also opened a PR to update Conduit, a homeserver implementation written in Rust. To test that everything worked together, I updated rumatui, my command-line client written in rust.Then I could test that Conduit sent, and matrix-rust-sdk received the new ruma events successfully. While updating, I felt the pain of not having accessor methods for the
Any*Eventenums to get at the event fields held within. I have opened a pull request to add the generation of these methods to theevent_enums!macro. Hopefully, the Conduit and matrix-sdk PR's will be merged and the ruma monorepo can be tested in the wild!
matrix-ircd GSOC
karlik told us:
Moved matrix protocol, irc protocol, and bridge module to futures 0.3. Converted some utility functions to new futures, and updated the http implementation to use the standardized Hyper library instead of using a custom http implementation.
go-neb
nikofil said:
Created PR for enabling e2ee across all services! This required a few changes to how the bot client is initialised, as well as changes to all services to use the new functionality instead of directly sending messages to a room. https://github.com/matrix-org/go-neb/pull/324
Added code from another of tulir's projects to Mautrix to allow storing the crypto material (olm / megolm sessions, accounts etc.) in a SQL database, adding a second way besides using Gob storage. https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-go/pull/10
Future plans are to work on the library itself to add any features that might be missing.
HTML embeddable chat rooms
arnav-t told us:
This week I've worked on the following features for the project "HTML embeddable chat rooms" under GSoC '20:
Added support for signing-in
Via sign-in popup
The user can enter their credentials into the modal dialogue box.
Via
postMessageinterfaceiframe.contentWindow.postMessage({ cmd: 'login', args: { user: 'username', passwd: 'password' } }, origin);Arguments:
args(object):
username(string) - Username
passwd(string) - PasswordResponse:
{ status: 'success', message: 'Attempting sign in...' }Added support for default avatars
Using the same design as Riot. However, I am just using flexbox and text instead of drawing on an HTML5 canvas. The HSL color is generated by hashing the user ID.
Quoting and replying
Added on-hover buttons and reply popup above message composer similar to Riot web. Quoting prepends the message (quoted) to the message composer similar to Riot web and replying would also work similar to Riot web. It will be fully functional once markdown parsing is added.
Guest access
The client now supports guest access. If no access token or user ID is provided in the configuration file, the client attempts to register a guest account on the home server. Room contents are viewed using
peekInRoom.If the guest attempts to send a message, only then
joinRoomis called to avoid spam (each page load would lead to a guest joining the room).
Nheko
Chethan told us:
SAS Verification is completed and works !
Supports both Emoji and Decimal Verification Only uses curve25519-hkdf-sha256 as key_agreement protocol
Brand new UserProfile written entirely in qml. https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko/pull/203
Mtxclient
Updated with needed APIs for SAS verification.
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Opsdroid
tyagdit reported:
Port to Matrix-nio
The matrix connector is now using matrix-nio!
Bots can send and receive texts, images, files as before
No change in configuration required, just update opsdroid and run as before
Encryption is not yet implemented
You can check out the PR here
Enabling E2EE
Sending and receiving encrypted texts, edits, replies works just as normal messages
Images and files are being worked on
User shouldn't have to change much about their configuration to use encryption
Some testing is due
Check out the progress here
Dept of Servers 🏢
Dendrite
Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go
kegan reported:
This week has been mainly about testing to ensure that all the progress over the past few months is kept up-to-date and correct. We've also added a few features in order to get certain sytests working. To that end:
Invites can now be declined over federation and they will be reflected in
/syncresponses.Errors encountered when joining a room over federation are now sent back to the client.
Errors encountered when accepting an invite over federation are now sent back to the client.
Dendrite will now check server names meet the server name grammar in the specification.
A bug which caused
client-api-proxyto not actually proxy correctly has been fixed, thanks @fantashley !
/sendnow abides by the limits in the specification: 50 PDUs / 100 EDUs.The docker-compose scripts now include
appservice_api, thanks @fantashley !Sending invites over federation will now fall back to v1 if v2 fails with a 404.
Dendrite now implements
room.timeline.limitcompletely (in both in-line and stored filter formats).Dendrite now sets the
limitedflag on/syncresponses correctly.In addition, we now have support for collecting code coverage output from SyTest. This indicates we are testing roughly 70% of the Dendrite codebase. The remaining 30% are hard to reach via integration tests (e.g database failures, communication problems between internal APIs).
Spec compliance:
Client-Server APIs: 45%, up from 40% last week
Server-Server APIs: 50%, up from 38% last week
In total, we've made an additional 45 sytests pass this week.
Mascarene
Nico reported:
Mascarene v0.2.0 has been released.
This version implements a minimal set of client API endpoints to work with Riot and allow user registration,
room creation, invitation and messages sending on the same running instance (no federation support).
Docker image are also available. See this documentation
for rough installation instructions.
Join us at #mascarene:beerfactory.org
Conduit
Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs
timo told us:
This week I finished the cross-signing PR:
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To try it out yourself, open Riot (preferably https://riot.im/develop) and join the
<https://conduit.koesters.xyz:14004>homeserver.Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!
Synapse
Neil told us:
This week we’ve been working on further improvements to event persistence and ironed out a nasty bug where an unusually long state resolution could block the reactor overall and impact send times. We seem to have got to the bottom of this and m.org has improved a lot as of today.
More generally we’ve been trying to characterise matrix.org performance so that we can continue to improve over the coming months.
We are going to focus on:-
Client send event
Outbound Federation Latency
Inbound Federation Latency
Room joins
As well as tracking the CS API generally.
We are using apdex with a satisfied limit of 250 ms and a tolerating limit of 1000 ms. By the end of the Summer we will aim to hit an apdex score of 0.9 for each area.
For instance here is Federation Send Event Apdex graphed overtime. You can see that we are averaging about ~0.8 currently, so plenty to keeping us busy!
Next up will be to work on Outbound Federation Latency
Aside from that we’ve been working hard on the upcoming Notifications improvements. Mapping the push rules to the demands of the UI has been challenging and we’ve been through several iterations. If you’d like to learn more take a look at Michael and Rich’s explanation in this week’s Matrix Live. Rich’s presentation has Sheltie pictures #justsayin’
Dept of Bridges 🌉
It's a Tulir kind of week.
mautrix-whatsapp
Tulir told us:
The WhatsApp bridge got a bunch of improvements this week, such as:
Matrix -> WhatsApp gif bridging
Bridge status notices if your phone battery is low
A command to get group invite links and another command to join groups using invite links
Matrix <-> WhatsApp bridging of most membership changes
mautrix-facebook
Tulir reported:
The Messenger bridge mostly got bugfixes, but also Matrix->Facebook bridging of all media and location messages
mautrix-telegram
Tulir offered:
The Telegram bridge now supports logging in by scanning a QR code, although it requires using the master branch of Telethon instead of a release. I also fixed bridging captions in file messages, so they're now bridged as separate messages like with images
Half-Shot bridges roundup
Half-Shot offered:
Hey all, I've got several releases to talk about this week!
First,
matrix-appservice-slackhas been updated to 1.4.0 with several quality of life changes such as automatically setting the bot profile on startup, supporting logging out of slack accounts and adding a health checkpoint. There are also quite a few bugfixes so make sure you update.
matrix-appservice-ircwas also bumped to 0.18.0 with the headline features being Node 14.x support.We've also shipped 0.19.0-rc1 which has stopped support for Node 10.x. Why? Because we're adding worker support to the bridge! This release starts to make use of the new(ish)
worker_threadsfeature so that we can dish out processing to separate threads (running their own UV event loops, for node enthusiasts). The first thing to be workerized is metrics, so that metrics may still be reported should the bridge become saturated, but we plan to split out more work as things progress.Finally
matrix-appservice-bridgegot a few fixes to support our new worker land, as well as being updated to supportmatrix-js-sdk6.0.0. You can checkout the changes for 1.13.1 here.
Dept of Clients 📱
Fluffychat
sorunome offered:
Fluffychat Version 0.15.0 is released, and should be available in the Play Store, on F-Droid and in IOS Testflight soon! This makes Fluffychat the first non-Riot matrix client that supports Cross-Signing.
Features:
New room list app bar design
Chat app bar transparent
Implement web file picker
Minor design and UX improvements
Implement Cross Signing
Restore keys from online key backup
Added translations: Czech, Spanish, Slovakian
Changes:
Show presences of users sharing a direct chat
Big refactoring
Fixes:
- Various fixes, including e2ee fixes and olm session recovery
Pattle: version 0.18.0
Wilko said:
A new version has been released and will soon become available on Google Play, TestFlight and F-Droid!
Changes
You can now play videos!
The main public address (room alias) of chats are now shown in chat's details
The time of sending is now always show on the right side for images
Notifications are grouped nicer, there's now one notification for Pattle, grouped by chat
Fix sending an image crashing the app
Fix urls not being accounted for in time placement (#132)
Fix chat input not scrolling
Fix multiple issues regarding showing notifications
F-Droid: All left-over proprietary code is now removed, thanks to Bubu for notifying me!
Get Pattle
Android
Get involved
Follow development: #app:pattle.im
Issues or suggestions: Post them here!
Donate: If you want to support Pattle, you can donate!
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Mirage
miruka* reported:
0.5.2 is now out:
Added
Sessions/device list: you can now inspect, rename and manually verify
your devices from the account settings page. The interface is still work in progress, keyboard navigation and signing
out sessions will be added in a next version.
Re-add client-side unread/highlight room indicators.
If your account has push notifications disabled, which precise cross-client counters depend on, the local indicators will be used as fallback.
Support the
MIRAGE_CACHE_DIRenvironment variable to override wherefiles and thumbnails are downloaded
A bunch of theme additions, check the full log
Changed
Overhauled account settings to match the design of other tabbed pages.
The horizontal layout design has been removed due to complicated code and being impossible to extend without breaking it.
The display name field in account settings is now colored,
preview your new display name's color as you type
For rooms without image avatars set, the room settings's avatar color now
responds to the name field as you type
Overhauled scrollbars:
Now match the Mirage theme and much better visibility
No more right margin for the timeline's bar
Minimum height to prevent the bar from becoming impossible to grab
Use brighter text for room names of rooms that have unread messages
Buttons, tabs, text fields and areas now have animated bottom borders
to represent keyboard focus instead of being highlighted like when hovered
Text fields and areas can now have rounded corners, following the theme
Tabbed pages (Sign In, Add Chat, etc) can now be swiped left and right
Popups can now be scrolled when their content is bigger than the
window's height
Replace most generic checkmark icons for apply buttons in popups
Pressing escape in forms will consistently trigger corresponding
cancel buttons
Fixed
- Various fixes, see full changelog
Nheko
Nheko is a desktop client using Qt, Boost.Asio and C++17. It supports E2EE (with the notable exception being device verification for now) and intends to be full featured and nice to look at
Nico (@deepbluev7:neko.dev) offered:
Most of our time this week was spent trying out device verification with Chethan. It's fun and I could finally file bugs in Nheko against someone else!
We fixed some issues that should hopefully make text in the timeline less blurry again.
Fixed a bug which cause some clients like fluffychat to break in E2EE rooms (we accidentally sent a null relation when not replying...)
Fixed an issue, where Nheko didn't verify the format of html formatted messages correctly, causing it to render messages in a way which wasn't compliant to the spec.
Thanks to the work of a Pirate and his friends, current versions of Nheko should be available in backports for Debian Buster once again!
Riot Chat for Nextcloud
Gary Kim announced:
Riot Chat for Nextcloud 0.5.0 The new version updated the Riot.im version to 1.6.6 and added the ability for admins to set their own custom config for Riot rather then using the settings interface in addition to a few bug fixes.
Riot Chat for Nextcloud allows individuals and organizations with a Nextcloud instance to easily set up and configure their own Riot instance with just a few clicks on a web interface without the need to write a config file.
Join the development Matrix room at #riotchatfornextcloud-general:garykim.dev. Check out the source code here.
Riot-iOS
Manu told us:
This week, we completed UX for cross-signing and secure backup. We made associated settings but we still need to polish them.
Sygnal and the new push extension have been updated to match Apple requirement and our privacy concerns. Events content are no more sent anymore. We started to implement the new room notifications settings UI.
RiotX
benoit told us:
This week we were mainly working on cross-signing, room settings, VoIP stabilization and performance improvement.
Riot-Android
benoit reported:
We will publish at the beginning of next week a beta version of the migration to RiotX codebase on the beta channel of the PlayStore, to be able to ensure the migration works fine, before release it to production.
Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰
Matrix Dart SDK: v0.33.0
Wilko told us:
Net::Matrix::Webhook
joepie91 discovered this project, presented yesterday at Conference in the Cloud:
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Net::Matrix::Webhook implements a webhook, so you can easily post messages to your matrix chat rooms via HTTP requests. It uses IO::Async to start a web server and connect as a client to matrix. It will then forward your messages.
matrix_scrape_emoji_translations script project
sorunome announced:
Soru wrote a quick program that scrapes riot-web, riot-x and riot-ios for translations of the emoji names for emoji verification and combines them all into an easily-readable json file, so that other client developers can use it. Since all three riot versions have a different set of translations, it might also be helpful for them. You can find the source code along with the outputted json files here.
Dept of Bots 🤖
"Scandinavia and the World" comic bot
Tulir offered:
To add to my existing xkcd and CommitStrip maubot plugins, there's now a similar plugin for Scandinavia and the World comics: https://github.com/maubot/satwcomic
Like the other bots, you can self-host it, use my instance (@satw:maunium.net) in your own room or simply join #satwcomic:maunium.net to automatically get the latest comics in Matrix.
matrix-webhooker
kinta announced:
A bot that will allow to room administrators and moderators to generate room custom commands (in a similar way how telegram commands are thought).
When they are invoked it will post the message event object data and a predefined context object along with a token to a custom url. More information in: https://gitlab.com/communia/matrix-webhooker
Matrix webhook
kinta told us:
https://www.drupal.org/project/matrix_webhook
Drupal module to receive links shared from a matrix room. Get links provided by a matrix bot in a room. With this module one can get media from a matrix own bot to any drupal site. Once installed and bot is created through matrix-webhooker bot. A blog entry about it (in spanish) in https://planet.communia.org/content/enlaces-desde-matrix
Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰
Pollvis - new poll visualiser project
We have a couple of conferences coming up who are planning to use Matrix as part of their offering, much as we do with Open Tech Will Save Us. To help add some more features, I created an MVP "poll visualiser", which watches a room and works in tandem with the poll-bot from Brendan Abolivier . This project is still at the beginning, but might be interesting to some! Find the code at https://github.com/benparsons/pollvis.
Dept of Ping 🏓
Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. 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 | fairydust.space | 331 |
| 2 | services.pyrahex.com | 537 |
| 3 | heitkoetter.net | 604 |
| 4 | nitro.chat | 646.5 |
| 5 | mchus.pro | 660 |
| 6 | privacytools.io | 671 |
| 7 | matrix.vgorcum.com | 727.5 |
| 8 | eiselecloud.de | 740 |
| 9 | aruiz.io | 855 |
| 10 | neko.dev | 923.5 |
That's all I know 🏁
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!