Matrix Live

Something a little different this week: Erik helped me install Prometheus logging on my own homeserver, and we recorded it for Matrix Live.

Interesting reading: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/docs/metrics-howto.rst

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡

The Official Merch Store

<blink> YOU NEED MATRIX MERCH </blink>

Yes, it's true: Official Matrix Merch is available now. There are stickers, t-shirts and hoodies all available now, go and claim yours from https://shop.matrix.org.

<blink> CONSUME </blink>

Free Open Source Conference appearance from Oleg

Oleg:

I will be doing a talk on Matrix this weekend (tomorrow) at the annual Free Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) in Sankt Augustin (Germany). If you are around - come by and get some awesome [matrix] stickers! =)

https://programm.froscon.de/2019/events/2330.html

Visit #FrOSCon2019:froscon2019.fiksel.info to talk about the event.

Dept of Spec 📜

Approved MSCs

[MSC 2134]: MSC2134: Identity Hash Lookups 🎉

Final Comment Period

No MSCs have entered FCP

In Progress MSCs

[MSC 2213]: Rejoinability of private/invite-only rooms [MSC 2214]: Joining upgraded private rooms

Dept of Servers 🏢

Dendrite

Huge update from Andrew:

Synapse

From Neil:

The big news this week we’ve landed some massive DB improvements (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5706) which should make message sending on matrix.org (and any other server) feel noticeably snappier. :) It'll be in the next release. Outside of perf, we’ve also been continuing with our privacy project, sydent now supports hashing third party identifiers instead of storing the raw form, and in the coming week we’ll look at minimising the meta data we store. You can track our progress across the full project here (https://vector-im.github.io/feature-dashboard/#/plan?label=privacy-sprint&repo=matrix-org/synapse&repo=vector-im/riot-web&repo=vector-im/riot-ios&repo=vector-im/riot-android&repo=vector-im/riotX-android&repo=matrix-org/matrix-doc&repo=matrix-org/sydent) Work continues on our installer to make it easier to configure Synapse and we’ll be looking for some community feedback rsn. The room directory revamp is now very close and we hope to have something live on matrix.org in about a week. Finally we’re working on improving the efficiency of smaller instances sending messages into large rooms, we’re still at the design stage, but it will make a huge difference for anyone self hosting.

andrewsh also informs us:

synapse in up-to-date in Debian unstable — and in buster-backports (uploaded last week)

Ruma

This Week in Ruma: https://www.ruma.io/news/this-week-in-ruma-2019-08-04/

Also, get live-streamed Ruma development: https://www.jimmycuadra.com/posts/twitch-live-streams-of-ruma-development/

Does the video include time spent waiting for async to land in Rust?

signaller - new "lightweight server"

ChronosX88 announced that he is "developing a lightweight Matrix server" - check on their progress at https://github.com/signaller-matrix/signaller, also join #signaller_dev:netwhood.online.

TravisR announces various unstable interesting things

TravisR:

If you fancy running highly experimental software on your homeserver which might break things, I have two things for you: matrix-key-server ( #matrix-key-server:t2bot.io ) is an implementation of a Matrix key server with notary support. Although it follows the specification, it has not been tested against Synapse. It is however fully featured: check it out on the federation tester ( https://federationtester.matrix.org/#keys.t2host.io ) or by querying it yourself ( https://keys.t2host.io/_matrix/key/v2/query/matrix.org ). matrix-room-directory-server ( #matrix-room-directory:t2bot.io ) is less experimental than the key server but is still very early days. Currently it only offers the ability to manipulate the federated public room directory for your server, but in future it is planned to be its own standalone directory server (room aliases without having to run a whole homeserver). Check it out by searching the t2bot.io room directory from your client.

Dept of Clients 📱

Continuum progressing!

I love getting updates from yuforia - they've been consistently working on Continuum for some time, and by increments are making a great client.

Reuse the ListView of messages across different rooms to reduce memory usage (Experimental) Remember and refocus the last read message, making it easier to go through all unread messages while switching chat rooms freely.

QMatrixClient is now Quotient

kitsune:

Renaming of QMatrixClient to Quotient has been finally merged to the master branch; Quaternion master uses it from now, too. Packagers are welcome to make test builds and report bugs in #quotient:matrix.org. libQuotient 0.6 beta is coming close now!

Riot iOS

Test on iOS 13 Beta. Beta 6 fixed most bugs discovered on Beta 5

Released 0.9.2 (Waiting for Apple review at the time of writing)

Working on privacy concern.

Riot Android

Working on privacy concern.

RiotX (Android)

Release of v0.3.0 on Friday: full changelog can be found here: https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android/releases/tag/v0.3.0

We are working on read receipt management, it’s nearly functional

Dept of Identity 🛂

ma1sd 2.1.1

ma1uta announced ma1sd release 2.1.0:

Changes: reworked unbind (MSC1915). Now ma1sd is compliant with the MSC1915 (unbind).

and then 2.1.1:

ma1sd release 2.1.1 with the security fix and more strict request validation, allows only requests from ma1sd's matrix domains (mirroring bind). Download links: https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd/releases/tag/2.1.1 (archives and the deb package) and https://hub.docker.com/r/ma1uta/ma1sd for docker image.

Dept of Bridges 🌉

mautrix-facebook, mautrix-telegram and the tulirverse

tulir has been making big updates to two of his bridges:

mautrix-facebook can now bridge formatting, mentions, replies and reactions in both directions.

There is also a logout command now.

mautrix-telegram's switch to mautrix-python is nearly finished (i.e. it didn't cause any errors for the past few days when testing in production). The main reason for the switch is using one Matrix library for all my python bridges. It also means the bridging code like double puppeting and command handling I shared between mautrix-facebook and mautrix-hangouts is now also used in mautrix-telegram. Visible changes directly caused by using mautrix-python: Logs are now colorful.

Python 3.5 is no longer supported.

The bridge will refuse to start without access to the base config file. Other changes that happened during the switch: Telegram "Saved Messages" can now be bridged even when using double puppeting.

Mentions on Telegram are marked as read when using double puppeting (messages were already being marked as read, but mentions weren't). Also, this actually happened last week and the week before that, but anyway: I've moved the CI and docker registry of my active projects to a self-hosted GitLab at mau.dev. Specifically, the CI/docker registry for all four mautrix bridges and maubot and automatic builds for gomuks have been moved. My maubot plugins also have automatic .mbp builds in the CI. For the docker registry, prepending dock.mau.dev/ to the existing image names will work. The old places (docker hub, dl.maunium.net) won't get new builds anymore. The repos on GitHub are still the "canonical" repos, but they're mirrored more or less instantly with maumirror.

He adds:

mautrix-telegram will probably get some sort of history filling in the near-ish future

Also,

I'm going to add some way to put bridged rooms into personal communities for filtering purposes. Not yet sure if it'll be fully built into the bridges or some kind of an external script

IRC bridge RC

Half-Shot:

Hi folks, we've released a RC of the next irc bridge version. Check it out at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.13.0-rc1

Email2Matrix

Slavi, famed for his ansible playbooks, announced:

I've just released Email2Matrix - an SMTP server that can relay incoming messages over to Matrix based on mappings defined in a configuration file. While it can also be installed standalone and work with any Matrix homeserver (see its documentation), the simplest way to install it is using matrix-docker-ansible-deploy and its guide for Email2Matrix installation. The configuration process (users, rooms, mappings) is quite manual, but it's simple and has worked well for me for the past year and a half. I've only just polished it up a bit, released and integrated with the Ansible playbook, so others could benefit from it too.

mijutu appeared, and announced:

I started a "matrix-xmpp-filter" project. It's like matrix-ircd, but with xmpp instead of irc. It can also filter messages by weekday, time and regular expressions. Target audience is Sailfish phone users, but it could be used with other xmpp clients too (no xmpp MUC support required). https://k2c42.dy.fi/matrix-xmpp-filter.git/ #matrix-xmpp-filter:ellipsis.fi.

matrix-github (GH issues bridge)

Half-Shot:

https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-github has had quite a few updates. Notably: Support for storing users access tokens securely, using a bot command.

Multi-process bridging: The webhook portion of the bridge can be run in a seperate function if needed for performance.

Images and mentions now work in both directions

The readme is now actually helpful, and have also made *.sample.yaml files.

files. You can now use it via oauth

Dept of Ops 🛠

Ananace:

Currently working on a Puppet module to manage Matrix Synapse installs (both directly and through docker), not quite ready for prime-time yet but watch this spot.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Voice to text bot

progserega announced:

I develop matrix Bot, which converting voice messages to text. It use Yandex Speech API and Yandex API cloud (some as aws) for temporary store voice-data before converting. https://github.com/progserega/voice2textMatrix Bot have such logic: user add bot to room (for example room with whatsapp bridge users - now bridge support adding bot to such rooms) bot listen room, and when get voice-message - send it to Yandex-cloud for translate (now support only Russian language). When translating is success - bot get result text and show it in room as notice, such: "Username said: text" Bot also receive some command, which allow disable it in this room, or disable translating for user, which send command..

Seeing this, I wondered, "y tho?", luckily progserega was able to explain with a graphic! They say a picture paints a thousand words, and it's clear from the conversation below why he'd want to have speech-to-text capabilities.

Dept of Services 🚀

The Modular Matrix -> Matrix migration tool now supports migration of power levels to the new user.

That's all I know 🏁

So that's all I have to say to you right now! See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!