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.
The big news from the spec this last week is the release of Matrix v1.3 π (read the blog post if you haven't already)! Roughly three months since the release of Matrix v1.2, this release brings improvements such as knocking on rooms, room version 10, reduced metadata in encrypted messages and the first pieces of aggregations finally landing in the spec proper. And more! See the blog post for the full changelog.
Most of the Spec Core Team has been away this week, thus there has not been much moving forwards. But we do have two new MSCs from @duxovni and @Johennes, which you can view above.
This MSC allows for differentiating between different incoming streams of media coming from a single user by adding a sdp_stream_metadata dictionary to Voice over IP (VoIP)-related events. This is a relatively simply addition with useful functionality, such as allowing a single user to share both their camera feed and screen share at the same time!
1.4.24 released to beta testers which includes support for UnifiedPush and fixes for voice recordings and duplicated messages in the timeline
We're making it easier to opt in to Live Location Sharing by displaying the labs setting within the location sharing flow, no need to hunt down the setting anymore!
We have also fixed some outstanding crashes around opening large images in the timeline and signing out
added previews of room name and topic in tooltips for room icons
added handling for an eventId component of annotation URLs
Along with a number of other minor bugfixes and UX improvements. And, we've added one neat new user-facing feature: inline previews of video and audio annotations. This one is a little hard to explain, but a video is worth ten thousand words:
A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Rumaβs approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.
Released Ruma 0.6.4 with a bug fix for rich reply fallback generation
Added support for pretty much everything from Matrix 1.3, which was to a large extent just the removal of feature flags for previously-unstable functionality
Thanks to @zecakeh for both implementing most of these features and now stabilizing them in Ruma!
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.
The release date for Matrix v1.3 has been set in stone for Thursday, June 16th 2022! Expect a blog post on the day detailing all of the new additions.
The bot that posts MSC updates in #matrix-spec:matrix.org and elsewhere has been switched from @mscbot:amorgan.xyz to @mscbot:matrix.org. The backend of the bot uses https://github.com/Informo/specs-bot/.
This is a proposal that adds a mechanism for homeserver administrators to define a password policy for users. This policy can decide rules such as a minimum password length, whether a digit is required, etc. This policy can be enforced by the homeserver when a user registers an account or changes their account password and is communicated to the client so that it can also be enforced locally.
Astute readers will possibly note that authentication in Matrix will eventually be replaced by OAuth2 (MSC2964). This will move operations like password policy enforcement from the homeserver to a separate authentication service, essentially removing the need to reinvent-the-wheel in a homeserver.
Registration, login and managing passwords and connected third-party IDs is often a complex part of a Matrix homeserver. Moving these out to a separate authentication service will both unlock new features (log in with Matrix!) as well as reduce the resources required to implement a Matrix homeserver.
Hey there, I am Rohit. I'll be participating in GSoC this summer, under the Matrix organization.
For my project, I'll be working on the desktop client, Nheko. Specifically, I aim to work on its VoIP Library and also on implementing and updating some of the features to concur to specification changes to the Matrix protocol, which include
Improved VoIP Signalling
VoIP Call Transfers
Muting Calls
I plan on starting a blog and hopefully will do so soon. In the meanwhile, if you want to know more about the project you can visit here and join the #nheko:nheko.im to participate in discussions.
Looking forward to learning and interacting with the community.
Work continues on speeding up federated room joins, improving testing, and reducing database i/o. In addition, some lovely features have been added:
Add new media_retention options to the homeserver config for routinely cleaning up non-recently accessed media.
Experimental support for MSC3772: Push rule for mutually related events.
Update to the check_event_for_spam module callback: Deprecate the current callback signature, replace it with a new signature that is both less ambiguous (replacing booleans with explicit allow/block) and more powerful (ability to return explicit error codes).
Add storage and module API methods to get monthly active users (and their corresponding appservices) within an optionally specified time range.
Support the new error code ORG.MATRIX.MSC3823.USER_ACCOUNT_SUSPENDED from MSC3823.
Add a configurable background job to delete stale devices.
Improve URL previews for pages with empty elements.
Allow updating a user's password using the admin API without logging out their devices. Contributed by @jcgruenhage.
This is in addition to quite a number of bugfixes!
This week we released Dendrite 0.8.8, which contains the following improvements:
The performance of state resolution has been increased significantly for larger rooms
A number of changes have been made to rate limiting:
Logged in users will now be rate-limited on a per-session basis rather than by remote IP
Rate limiting no longer applies to admin or appservice users
It is now possible to configure additional users that are exempt from rate limiting using the exempt_user_ids option in the rate_limiting section of the Dendrite config
Setting state is now idempotent via the client API state endpoints
Room upgrades now properly propagate tombstone events to remote servers
Room upgrades will no longer send tombstone events if creating the upgraded room fails
A crash has been fixed when evaluating restricted room joins
As always, please feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more discussion.
Hello friends. This week we bring you a security release for matrix-hookshot. Please ensure you have upgraded to at least 1.7.2, and have read the security advisory. Thanks!
The changes are as follows:
Add support for GitHub enterprise. You can now specify the URL via enterpriseUrl in the config file. (#364)
Add ability for bridge admins to remove GitHub connections using the admin room. (#367)
FluffyChat 1.5.0 has been released and will soon be in all stores. This release comes with a bunch of bugfixes and introduces the first iteration of a Material You based design. We also try to support Android 12 accent colors (while this does not seem to work yet). On other platforms, our own purple shape will stay the default.
I like the new Material You design while we needed to tweak it at some points. Also the dropdown menu misses some elevation but this is a known issue in the Flutter repo which will be fixed soon.
This is also the first build with Flutter 3 which should improve the performance a little bit. Unfortunately it brings some regressions. We are forced to ship a little bug with it: Sharing on iPads seems to be broken. I'm very unhappy with this situation but otherwise we would have ended up in different releases for different platforms. As there afaik are not that many iPad users out there, we decided to live with this compromise and ship a bugfix release asap.
Yeah... Flutter has a lot of pros but also a lot of cons. Every new release of this framework leads to the fear of new regressions. Shipping a new major release where basic stuff like "Sharing" is just broken, is totally stupid... but that's the decision of Google. :-P
We didn't want to wait to ship the new design and also we needed a new release to come back to F-Droid where FluffyChat wasn't available in the last weeks because of a ProGuard problem, which should be fixed now.
Threads is in Beta and progressing. Weβre working hard setting up the foundational work needed to improve read receipts and notifications cross-platform.
Keep sending feedback and rageshakes as weβre also continuing to improve the UI and fix any bugs that are raised.
Community testing
Weβre moving closer to getting the new search experience out of beta, thanks for all your help on testing so far.
Next up: Big regression testing session on Android, after the removal of communities/groups (Wednesday or Thursday TBC)
Weβre continuing our bug fixing spree and the latest release has fixed some of the more significant problems we had
Weβre working towards adopting a new notification filtering entitlement and we will soon be able to silence those pesky empty notifications
Our βEdit Home Screen Layoutβ experiment is running well and we hope to be sharing the results of the diary study and prototypes soon.
The new first time user experience is continuing to make good progress and is quickly approaching finalisation
We are now allowing account deactivation for users that signed up through SSO
On ElementX we have merged the new crash reporting service and we are starting to see reports come in. Weβve also successfully integrated an initial version of the DesignKit and added room filtering
1.4.19 is available and fixes some small bugs, including a fix for the regression surrounding space switching performance.
Our prototype study is nearly at a close - weβve received a lot of great feedback on our suggested changes to the home screen and space switching interactions.
Weβve been working on integrating UnifiedPush for both Google Play and FDroid versions of our app.
The team is finalising the updates to the create account flow. It will be ready for testing soon.
This week we landed Element Call beta 2 (https://call.element.io) including a bunch of nice updates. First of all, everything is now end-to-end encrypted by default: not only the WebRTC streams but also the matrix signaling (It was consciously disabled in beta 1 for debugging purposes). Moreover, we have experimental support for spatial audio rendering. Give it a try β you can find it in the settings section. It's a lot of fun to play with and really supports immersion during a video call. This release also introduces a whole new experimental way of communicating: Walkie-talkie mode. In that mode, videos are disabled, and everyone is muted by default. To speak, press the βpush-to-talkβ (PTT) button β takes me back to my childhood π
For further details follow this blog post: https://element.io/blog/element-call-beta-2-encryption-spatial-audio-walkie-talkie-mode-and-more/
This week, the team released version 0.9.12. In this version, we updated our Matrix API Lite package, in which we fixed the issue with the room hierarchy endpoint with some improper parsing and wrong type coming from the generation of the spec Open API documentation.
We also did some housekeeping and renamed some methods and getter to make them explicit. For example, the futureSender getter is now an asynchronous method called fetchEventSender() to make it clear that calling this function may trigger an API call.
Possibility to override the supported Matrix spec version but we don't really recommend using it for production.
Here's a fun Matrix-based project for you, sponsored by yours truly and my employer FUTO.
The "Golden Tiger" senior capstone project team at Portland State University just delivered the results of two quarters's design and implementation work on a secure/private, self-hostable, end-to-end encrypted cloud security camera using Raspberry Pi's and Matrix. The idea of this prototype project was to provide similar functionality to commercial services like Ring or Nest, but without letting any nosy third party see inside (or around) your home.
The students' code is available on Github in two repos:
Hey all, it's been a holiday for much of the team this week, so from the plane of Maple trees I present to you the 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/unstable/proposals
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been working on getting Matrix 1.3 out the door and generally working towards a better process for handling releases alongside critical proposals for the protocol. The goal is to be able to ship these major features while reducing the risk of a release falling behind. Watch this space for more details as this should result in MSCs getting through the process a little bit quicker.
For Matrix 1.3, we're targeting Thursday, June 16th, 2022 as our release date, though this comes with a small asterisk: we're looking to land quite a lot of stuff so might have to adjust the date once more as needed. We do feel reasonably confident in the date though - watch for blog posts titled Matrix 1.3 in the coming weeks.
The script has chosen MSC2846 - Decentralizing media through CIDs as your random MSC this week. The MSC raises an interesting question about how to make media more akin to events in Matrix. If you're interested in this area, take a read of it and the related MSCs.
Hey there, I'm Aditya Rajput (aka BURG3R5), a sophomore at IIT Roorkee, India. This summer I'll be working on implementing encrypted Search in Matrix rooms. More details about this project can be found here. Once a week, I'll be blogging about my progress (plus some neat stuff I find during research) in this blog. Technical discussion and more frequent updates can be found in the public room #encrypted-search:matrix.org.
While writing my GSoC proposal, I'd already made some progress w.r.t. the actual code required for this project, and my preliminary implementation can be found here.
Looking forward to working in this ecosystem with you all!
Hello everyone, my name is nannanko. From today, I will officially participate in GSoC to contribute code to the Kazv Project. I hope I can get along well with you all.
Hey there!
I'm Binesh Munukurthi, a Computer Science student from India. I'll be working on the 3rd Party Authorised Room Membership project for this year's GSoC.
This project aims to develop an application that has the ability to delegate membership of a room based on a userβs interaction with other third party services.
For more details on what I'll be implementing, please refer to the link
I'll be posting my weekly updates here
If you are interested in knowing more about the project's progress, feel free to join the public room #matrix-cerberus:cadair.com.
I look forward to spending a wonderful summer with you all!
Thanks!
Hi! I'm Snehit Sah. I will be contributing to KDE's Matrix client, NeoChat, during GSoC. I will add Spaces support to the application. My progress can be followed at my blog.
Hoping for a fun stay!
This week was a short one, but work continues on fast room joins, testing Synapse with workers on Complement,
and increasing the efficiency of Synapse with regard to database i/o. In addition, we released v1.60.0 (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/releases), which includes
work to reduce the possibility of database corruption
a fix to a bug introduced in Synapse 1.60.0rc1 that would break some imports from synapse.module_api
This week we released Dendrite 0.8.7! This is a highly recommended update since it fixes some fairly large bugs:
Support added for room version 10
A number of state handling bugs have been fixed, which previously resulted in missing state events, unexpected state deletions, reverted memberships and unexpectedly rejected/soft-failed events in some specific cases
Fixed destination queue performance issues as a result of missing indexes, which speeds up outbound federation considerably
A bug which could cause the /register endpoint to return HTTP 500 has been fixed
As always, please feel free to join us in the #dendrite:matrix.org room for more discussion!
Quadrix is a single-codebase, multi-platform project, using the meanwhile deprecated ReactXP framework (Microsoft's answer to Flutter), which compiles to iOS, Android, and web/Electron. The Quadrix apps are available in the main app stores for mobiles and desktops (including Snapcraft and Flathub). Repo is at https://github.com/alariej/quadrix. Would be great to have a few people test the apps and leave feedback in the repo or in the (still empty) #quadrix:matrix.org room!
Important: Quadrix doesn't support E2EE yet, but it's on the TODO.
Our prototypes for a new app layout are going well. Just a few people have early access in order to give us feedback to ensure weβre building a new layout that works for everyone. Watch this space!
Weβve been working on improving our onboarding flow so that users signing up for Matrix and Element find it much easier. This work is making great progress.
Live location sharing is also making great progress and is quickly approaching the beta phase
On the ElementX front weβve been busy adopting async/await, introducing state machines, a new design kit component and hooking up crash reporting and sentry.io
We are a bit late on the release candidate. We want to fix a performance regression when switching spaces. It will be available early next week.
We have merged the UnifiedPush PR from P1gP1g. We are doing some adjustments but users will be able to choose their push distributor soon.
The prototypes that are with a small group of early access tester are going down a storm - weβre getting lots of great feedback that will help to build a new app layout that works for all.
Our improvements to the first time user experience are nearly ready for testing and shipping! Weβre hoping to make our onboarding experience a lot simpler for folks that are creating an account.
We've had breakthroughs this week on implementing a native Matrix SFU (selective forwarding unit) which speaks MSC3401, thanks to Sean DuBois - all round WebRTC superstar, project lead for the Pion WebRTC implementation for Go, and author of WebRTC for the curious.
Sean generously contributed an initial proof of concept to show how you'd build an MSC3401 SFU using Pion at https://github.com/matrix-org/sfu-to-sfu - which (I think?) is the first time that the first implementation of a major core MSC has been contributed from outside the core team. Huge thanks to Sean to setting the ball going on this - the current PoC demonstrates not just SFU capability but also the decentralised cascading architecture which makes MSC3401 unique. The initial PoC speaks a 'test jig' version of MSC3401 hooked up to a simple web client for experimentation, but Matthew's now experimenting with adding genuine Matrix support to it via mautrix-go, and hooking up Element Call to speak to it.
Adding SFU support to Element Call will mean that we can support more than ~7 simultaneous calls - and with MSC3401-style decentralised cascading, we should be able to support hundreds or even thousands. There's lots of work remaining here, but the ball is now rolling. For more info about SFUs and MSC3401, check out Matthew's CommCon 2021 talk (which was what prompted Sean's implementation work here!)
Separately, we've been running Element Call on staging with E2EE enabled for the last few weeks, and should be releasing the first major Element Call update next week. And once SFUs land, then Element Call can exit beta - watch out Zoom!
libolm 3.2.12 has been released. The main update in this release is that the olm_sas_calculate_mac_fixed_base64 is now exposed in all the official bindings, so that MSC3783 can be implemented. Aside from that, there have been some minor fixes and improvements. See the changelog for more information.
While most of the work in the background continues (Sliding-Sync PoC, Wasm+NodeJS support, UniFFI macros), the first few parts surface through the cracks and show themselves in new PRs: basic wasm web-js and nodejs support has landed with more APIs, tests and documentation on the way; the Sliding Sync PoC has been upgraded to the latest JSON layout and now provides a first set of reactive API via FFI, too. Furthermore this week has seen a bunch of cleanups, simplifications and clarifications around the OlmMachine and crypto types, and we're fixing a bug in the state store, where not all data has been properly encrypted in the past.
This week, the team released version 0.9.9. In this new version, we added a search function to allow searching for an event in database and on server through several requests to the /messages endpoint.
There was also some work on updating the image size when generating thumbnail, which allow saving a bit of calculation when sending events. If using a custom resizer make sure to update the resize response as here.
We also did some refactor with the event sender getter. The getter result is now a future to allow requesting the member event to the server if we cannot find it in memory, to help fix the issue when the user was not found in memory.
Finally, a quick helper function (client.waitForSync) was added. It allows you to wait for a room to appear in (left, join, invited) section of the sync response.
Only a small update this week. One new feature and some much needed Ansible improvements.
Pipes move messages from one room to an other. Useful if you are in important rooms but only want to monitor a single room.
The Ansible role can now manage more aspects of MCM. Mainly in the post setup phase. The major one being if you run into encryption errors for any reason you can run the playbook with the fix tag and it will generate you a new device ID and encryption store.
Pipes move all messages from one room to an other.
Adding a filter now uses the room the command was sent from by default if the roomid is not specified.
Ansible role now has tags for start, stop, configs, fix and all.
Ansible role backs up the configuration.toml file to prevent the possibility of data loss.
Element has signed the open letter of the Global Encryption Coalition, of which we are members of. We are working with them to push back against any intrusive measures that could compromise the privacy of users.
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.
Some new MSCs popping up this week around widgets, room types, fixing notifications with threads and room version 11! Though note that the last one currently serves as a means for the Spec Core Team to publicly track what should be included in room version 11, and is by no means is its content considered final.
The Spec Core Team are currently focused on room version 10 and getting Matrix v1.3 out the door soon. There's also been some discussion on MSC2676: Message editing this week, with the intention of finally landing that in the spec. Thanks to richvdh for driving the charge there.
Homeservers currently make use of Client Server Media APIs to pull media from other homeservers over federation. This has worked for a long time, but is a bit of a confusing blur of the lines between client<->server and server<->server traffic. It also makes it difficult to require different authentication rules for clients versus servers.
This MSC aims to help clean that up. Take a look if you're interested!
This week we released Synapse 1.59, which features a bunch of niceties including new features, bug fixes and performance improvements. Read all about it, including increased flexibility for workers and improvements on push rules, on the matrix.org blog!
Aside from this, the team is still hard at work and focusing on making Synapse better, among other things by looking at improving performances on room join and decreasing memory usage.
Last week new version of Hookshot came out starring the following changes:
Docker images can now be built cross-platform. Thanks Paul for getting arm64 builds going!
Improved GitLab push hook formatting: markdown commit hashes, link "N commits" to the list of commits, if there are more commits than can be shown only link instead, and show committer unless a single person committed and pushed
RSS feed support got a configuration widget: now need for using bot commands anymore! (though they are still supported)
Added widgets.openIdOverrides option to help developers test configuration widgets locally
Fixed regression where GitHubRepo and GitLabRepo connection config options were not being honoured
Better error handling: if the backend hits an error that causes your connection to KT chats to be dropped, the bridge should notify you about it (not that it should ever happen in the first place, but you never know!)
Better logging: the Node module can be configured to print the arguments of RPC commands received from / sent to the Python module. The example Node config includes a default set that should be helpful for general debugging.
Room metadata bridging: setting an Open Chat title & topic from Matrix should work now!
Setting the title of a Direct Chat should work too, but topics remain unbridged (since KT Direct Chats don't have topics/descriptions)
Defensive error handling: Attempts to add a non-friend user to a DM will be refused by the bridge, since KT only allows Direct Chats between friends
KT does allow "1:1 Open Chats" between non-friends, but those aren't bridged yet
Also, testing adds support for joining KakaoTalk rooms from Matrix, either by joining an existing portal or providing an Open Chat URL to the bot with a join command. ...However, I've been unable to test this, since KT is stingy about whom it allows to join Open Chats! So please give this a try if you can.
In other news, this bridge is now listed on Matrix.org! π₯³ Thanks Thib !
Hello! Just a notice to say that the `matrix-appservice-discord project has kindly been adopted by the matrix.org foundation, which means that hopefully there will be a lot more time available to maintain it than when it was my personal project! We expect to have a new update for you (the first one in 1.5 years) very soon! If you've got any questions about this, please feel free to ask in the usual spots like #discord:half-shot.uk.
Read default port and listen address from config url (@BtbN)
Improvements to pillifying IRC nicks, again
Fixes for AUTOQUERY not always working correctly
Allow anyone to use STATUS command to get their own status
Filter control characters only for plumbs so people can send garbage to IRC if they wish from Matrix
Support for converting IRC color codes to Matrix (@tjaderxyz)
Fixed compose docker Synapse configuration for registration
Improved Python 3.10 compatibliy (@BtbN)
Hidden room to hide joins using restricted rooms join rule (@BtbN)
Some cool stuff this time around! Aside from many bug fixes this release has two great new features: IRC message colors and hiding invites from channels.
IRC colors are enabled by default and are rendered how your Matrix client sees fit. They can be disabled per network if needed.
Hiding joins works with room v9 restricted join rules feture to allow IRC ghosts to join rooms without an invite from the bridge bot first. This clears some clutter and may even make joining a bit faster in the long run - we will see. This feature is disabled by default and needs to be enabled by the bridge administrator as it is consiered a "labs" feature for now.
The main work is currently happening behind the scenes, while we prepare for the upcoming tasks - like WASM and NodeJS support for the crypto-crate and work on UniFFI. We are also hardening our processes for improved security and risk management around our code base, dependencies and the potential to ship binaries.
ποΈ We are very happy about the influx of people, who joined our developer community questions since the release. We'd like to take this opportunity again to invite anyone else interested in hacking on matrix in rust to check out our help wanted tagged issues and join our matrix channel at #matrix-rust-sdk:matrix.org.
We are proud to announce that Ossrox is now listed as a hosting provider on matrix.org! π We offer Matrix Home Servers via https://ossrox.org - for the time being only in the German-speaking area. We are dedicated to hosting open-source software and also offer other services in the messaging, groupware and web meeting segments. If you got any questions, just reach out to us at #public:ossrox.org.
Hello Matrix friends. We have recently launched an online learning platform that has Element at its core. We added some great features such as annotations for both course material and web pages. Here is an overview video of what we are doing.
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.
The Spec Core Team has decided to not include MSC3440 (threading via m.thread relations) specifically in the upcoming Matrix v1.3 release. We previously stated that it would be in v1.3, but there's a few unproven MSCs (namely MSC3773 (notifications for threads)) which make it feel improper to put threads into the spec at this stage. We're aiming for a future (very near) spec release to contain threads, assuming we can get enough of the feature landed. This is a very similar approach to what we did with Spaces: while the core feature existed as FCP-concluded for a while, we wanted to give some other MSCs a chance to land before writing it up formally.
As a follow-on from this, any implementations that are currently assuming "v1.3" spec support translates to threading support should note the following:
Clients which are pre-emptively checking for v1.3 in /versions should stop doing that. Look for org.matrix.msc3440.stable as an "unstable" feature flag instead.
Servers which offer MSC3440's behaviour should expose it on stable endpoints and expose org.matrix.msc3440.stable for clients to detect.
Optionally, clients and servers can drop support for the org.matrix.msc3440 (truly unstable) flag, given clients & servers should have already upgraded.
At the spec level, we'll still be writing up MSC3440's dependencies (aggregations and friends), but will notably be missing MSC3440 specifically in v1.3. If folks can update their clients urgently, it would be massively appreciated!
A simple change to the auth rules to help prevent an edge case where one is able to invite a user, but not disinvite them as the latter requires a separate permission. The MSC attempts to solve this by always allowing the cancellation of invitations you've sent.
A small MSC, but one with some open threads still. Perhaps a good opportunity to go in and clean it up!
In parallel, Olivier's been doing groundwork to reduce replication traffic for workerised Synapse deployments, Andrew (anoa) has been looking at media retention policies and work continues on faster room joins.
This week we've actually made two releases β Dendrite 0.8.4 and Dendrite 0.8.5 β which are both primarily targeting performance and bug fixes.
We've also released our new living documentation, which is available at https://matrix-org.github.io/dendrite/, which features new installation instructions and documents that will be helpful to Dendrite server administrators. We will be writing more documentation and expanding this over time.
Changes include:
The built-in NATS Server has been updated to version 2.8.2
Monolith deployments will no longer panic at startup if given a config file that does not include the internal_api and external_api options
State resolution v2 now correctly identifies other events related to power events, which should fix some event auth issues
The latest events updater will no longer implicitly trust the new forward extremities when calculating the current room state, which may help to avoid some state resets
The one-time key count is now correctly returned in /sync even if the request otherwise timed out, which should reduce the chance that unnecessary one-time keys will be uploaded by clients
The create-account tool should now work properly when the database is configured using the global connection pool
Fixes a regression introduced in the previous version where appservices, push and phone-home statistics would not work over plain HTTP
Adds missing indexes to the sync API output events table, which should significantly improve /sync performance and reduce database CPU usage
Building Dendrite with the bimg thumbnailer should now work again (contributed by database64128)
As always, feel free to join us in #dendrite:matrix.org for more Dendrite-related discussion.
Ement.el, a Matrix client for [GNU Emacs](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs], received some more updates this week:
Additions
New Transient-based command menu for room buffers, bound to ?.
New command ement-list-members, which lists all members in a room.
Member completion now completes from all members in a room (rather than only those whose messages have been seen).
Power-level events are displayed.
Grouped membership events have tooltips showing each member's individual event.
When usernames are colorized, message bodies may optionally be colorized in a less intense shade of the same color, so they are easily distinguished yet easy on the eyes (and, of course, the shading is customizable).
Changes
When displaying usernames in the margin, names that are wider than the margin are abbreviated, with the full name in the tooltip.
Fixes
Typing notifications (recently broken--oops!).
Sending direct messages marks new direct rooms as direct rooms.
Event notifications for rooms not displayed in a buffer.
As always, feel free to join us in #ement.el:matrix.org.
The newest version of the app (1.8.14) was released on Monday! In this release weβve made a bunch of improvements and bug fixes, check it out here
π We also merged an initial version of mention pills and are working on ironing out edge cases. Exciting!
Thereβs good progress on the new authentication flows and live location sharing, both of which weβre looking forward to sharing and testing with you soon.
On the ElementX front we're nearly done with the DevX setup and are working towards using the latest Rust SDK
unit and UI test runs on the CI and Codecov.io coverage reports
swiftlint, danger-swift and sonarcloud.io checks for code quality
automatic generation of PR builds, published on diawi
scripts for importing and reusing localizable strings from Android
Weβve been working on smashing bugs, improving stability, and reducing crashes.
Our first time user flow is progressing - weβre starting to test the new authentication flow internally and will be asking for help testing this soon.
Since this release, we are also shipping a desktop app of Cinny for Windows, MacOS and Linux. You can download the app for your platform from https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny-desktop/releases
Find more about Cinny at https://cinny.in/
Join our channel at: #cinny:matrix.org
Github: https://github.com/ajbura/cinny
Twitter: https://twitter.com/@cinnyapp
The Rust Matrix team is very excited to announce the next major release Matrix SDK 0.5 "stores and native crypto", now available for everyone by adding matrix-sdk = "0.5.0" to their dependencies in their Cargo.toml. This first major release in about 8 months brings significant changes many have been waiting for:
Better, safer, native-er crypto: matrix-sdk 0.5 ditches libolm in favor of Vodozemac, the completely fresh rust-native re-implementation of the crypto crate. It has also been audited, the report of which is scheduled to be released soon.
Store revamp: the entire cache storage infrastructure for crypto and state has been restructured to allow for full plug-ability, with even the two default supported backends, sled and indexeddb both being separate crates now. And as a matter of fact, a community-driven sql implementation has already been published as beta (with postgres and sqlite support) by charlotte π¦.
WebAssembly; both of these changes also allow us to finally make WASM a Tier 1 supported target for the SDK. Not only does it build and even use the browser native indexeddb for permanent storage, we also have CI tests ensuring nothing will break this support going forward.
Features, Features and Process: there's plenty more features and bug fixes in this release, e.g. native thumbnail generation support, as well as changes on our processes going forward.
Buscarron is the new backoffice of the etke.cc and its main feature is to receive web forms (HTML/HTTP POST) and convert them into (encrypted) matrix messages.
So, what's new?
Email confirmation after form submissions with Postmark
If you use Matrix with the Signal bridge (or any bridge) with relay mode
enabled, your guests have probably experienced the confusion where they don't know who else (on Matrix) is in the chat as only Matrix can double-puppet.
When this bot is added to a Matrix room, it will announce:
Who the room members are when a new Signal user joins;
When a Matrix user joins or leaves, who that Matrix user was.
I built it just this afternoon using the excellent matrix-bot-sdk, but it's in Typescript and has plentyful unit tests!
PRs for adding support for other chat apps (basically identifying which bridge from the puppeted username) are very welcome! https://github.com/jakecoppinger/whos-in-this-room-matrix-bot
The videos from the HYTRADBOI conference a few weeks back are now publicly available, in case anyone was curious but couldn't make the conference. I gave a talk about building collaborative, open software on Matrix. The whole conference was great, so I recommend browsing the schedule for videos that may interest you. π
Loomio, an open source collaborative decision making tool, now supports integrating with Matrix rooms using their chatbot. They previously supported other (lesser) chat systems, but have recently added support for Matrix.
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.
"Wowza, that's a lot of new MSCs!" I hear you say. This is actually a listing of the last 3 weeks, as it was pointed out to me that the last 3 editions of TWIM have not all features an MSC status update - which means some MSCs may not have necessary made it into the limelight.
As such, here's those from this past week, as well as the ones that were missed!
Any other MSCs which have so far been accepted, but not yet made it into the spec.
MSCs which land between now and v1.3 might get incorporated if easy enough, though chances are they'll slip to v1.4 (expected next quarter).
On top of that, the other bit of news is that the proposal-in-review label has now been removed from the matrix-spec-proposals repo and thus all MSCs. This doesn't mean your MSC is no longer in review! We simply found the label redundant along with the other labels in the process (it was attached to all MSCs which hadn't been accepted/merged yet, which means very little) and thus we decided to remove it to reduce noise.
This MSC has actually been potentially(?) superseded by MSC3382. In short, both look to provide a solution to the problem of attaching (multiple!) images to messages, such that clients can display an album of images in a single event in the timeline.
Check it out if you're interested in introducing such a feature!
Synapse v1.58.0 was released this week! Check out the v1.58 blog post for the full scoop, but the highlights are:
Our Docker images and Debian packages are now built from a dependency lockfile courtesy of Poetry. Props to David for leading the charge on this multi-week epic.
An experimental implementation of MSC3383 has been contributed by @Bubu and @jcgruenhage at Famedly, which will help with proxying federation traffic, amongst other uses.
An experimental implementation of MSC2815 has been merged, which allows room moderators to view redact event content for the purposes of moderation. This was contributed by @tulir at Beeper.
Device list updates are now asynchronous thanks to Erik, leading to much faster login times for accounts in big rooms.
plus many other bug fixes and improvements!
We also released a v1.58.1 patch shortly afterwards to address an issue with the Debian packages on some configurations. Server admins not using the Matrix.org Debian packages do not need to install this patch release.
Otherwise, ongoing work from the core team continues with Sean and Rich working on faster room join performance, Olivier pushing forwards on testing Synapse with workers in Complement, while Erik has been tackling general performance work.
Hey folks! We're announcing our 1.6.0 release for matrix-hookshot today. More features in this release: tadzik has gotten involved and given us support for RSS feeds in this release. You can check out how to get going with those in our hosted documentation.
Add support for GitLab in the widgets configuration UI. (#320)
Send a notice when a GitLab merge request gets some review comments. (#314)
Add new !hookshot gitlab project command to configure project bridges in rooms. See the docs for instructions. (#321)
New hookshot_connection_event(_failed) metrics for tracking successful event handling.
Reinstate matrix_* metrics which were previously not being recorded. (#312)
This week brings another round of big improvements & new features!
Features & fixes include:
Fixes to Docker support & the documentation for setting it up
Changes to the login flow
The bridge can now be configured to enforce a login flow that more closely matches the official KakaoTalk desktop client's, and to better warn you when a new login will kick out another one of your KT sessions. This will hopefully prevent the bridge from getting KT accounts banned!
Backfilling for KT->Matrix read receipts
Commands for adding/removing KakaoTalk friends
Commands to edit your KakaoTalk ID & mark it as shared or hidden
Matrix->KT DM creation, i.e. the ability to create a new DM with a KakaoTalk user from within Matrix
This might fail on the first attempt at creating a DM. If it does, try re-inviting the KakaoTalk puppet to the room.
Many stability & correctness improvements
With the combination of friends list curation & DM creation support, it should now be possible to connect with KT contacts entirely from Matrix! Simply add some friends, list them, and invite a listed friend to a 1:1 room!
This week we released Thunderbird Beta 101.0b1. It includes a bunch of bug fixes for the Matrix implementation and shows reactions as system messages, so you know when someone gives you a ποΈ.
Someone on Twitter complained that no chat client works like MSN anymore, where you could have separate windows for each chat. So for MSN compatibility we added that. (It is a bit experimental still, expect some stuff to not work or crash)
Bulbu also went through a lot of effort to add a second set of emoji shortcodes to Nheko. Those should be more familiar to people coming from other platforms or clients while the old shortcodes are available still as well. We also saw a lot of progress on the Finnish, Chinese, Indonesian and Russian translations, animated images should work properly in the image viewer again, buttons for opening the member list are now clearly marked with a people icon next to them. The memberlist is also now search- and sortable.
Anyway, have a look at how important multiple windows are:
FluffyChat 1.4.0 has been released with a lot of bug fixes, performance improvements and new designs. Take a look at the new designed sign up screen, which also now supports recommended homeservers from joinmatrix.org
Ement.el has received several updates since the last time it was mentioned in TWIM:
Additions
A new room list command, ement-taxy-room-list, shows rooms grouped "smartly" (and programmably). (It will be made the default soon; until then, call the command to use it.)
The new room list shows unread-notification/highlight counts, similar to Element.
Basic support for spaces:
Rooms (and spaces) can be added to and removed from spaces.
Rooms are listed under their spaces in ement-taxy-room-list.
Reactions can now be toggled off (i.e. redacted) by clicking them, like in Element.
Command ement-room-send-file allows uploading non-image files to rooms, and file messages are now displayed usefully, so the files can be downloaded or viewed.
Command ement-ignore-user ignores and unignores users.
Command ement-tag-room adds and removes favourite, low-priority, or custom tags on rooms.
Command ement-room-occur allows searching messages in a room buffer, similar to Emacs's occur command (i.e. it locally searches already-received messages).
Membership events are now coalesced by default, similar to Element (especially helpful in large public rooms, like bridged IRC rooms, where join/part spam can be overwhelming).
"In reply to" links in replies, as well as other matrix.to links, can be activated in a room buffer to go to the linked message.
Mentions in outgoing messages are HTML-linkified (aka "pilled"), like Element.
Generated avatars for rooms that have none, similar to Element. (Only displayed in ement-taxy-room-list for now.)
Option ement-shr-use-fonts (disabled by default, which prevents HTML messages from being displayed in a different font).
Faces for favourite/low-priority rooms.
Redacted messages that are still known locally are now displayed with a strikethrough (after reconnecting, their content will be unknown).
When images are disabled, image messages are presented as clickable URLs, so they can still be viewed.
Some events, like membership events and images, are displayed alongside a vertical bar to help distinguish them from normal messages.
Even "hotter"-looking timestamps for rooms updated in the last hour.
Changes
Refactored notification system. Now easier to configure (see M-x customize-group RET ement-notify RET).
Fixes
Improved error handling when looking up homeserver hostnames and .well-known URIs.
Improved error handling when processing malformed events.
"Elemental" display style (not used by many users, apparently).
In this months demos (also shown off at the top of the TWIM post), Eric showed off a proof of concept to anonymize your screenshots so you can easily include more context when submitting logs or bug reports without worrying where the bug occurred. The current concept will color block all of the text on the page to still maintain the structure of the app but completely hide the content itself.
This still has a ways to go before it's integrated in Element under the click of a button so if anyone wants to take over or give feedback, go comment on the issue, https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/9615. If you want to use the anonymization now, you can manually run the JavaScript snippet from the issue in the browser devtools.
This mode could even be further extended further to include event_id labels in the corner of each message to easily correlate the logs to the screenshot.
We are testing out Sonarcloud, youβll see comments from the sonarcloud bot in new PRs about bugs, vulnerabilities and other inconsistencies that it has found
Our first time user experience is getting some attention in Web. Weβre working on simplifying a userβs first session as we know it can be pretty daunting
Weβre thinking about new ways to give flexibility on the Home screen - watch this space!
The new Create Account flow is being implemented, currently weβre working on the captcha and T&Cs pages
Fix several crashes like when searching or when clicking bottom bar twice
Improve interaction with spaces which are in a space
ElementX-iOS
We are going to share more and more about ElementX-iOS, a complete rewrite of the Element-iOS app using matrix-rust-sdk. We made a prototype last quarter. The result was so promising that we want to go full steam on it
Work is moving forward with our proposals for a new app layout, weβre excited to share it with you
Our Create Account experience is still being updated, weβre currently working on ensuring that the Sign-in pieces work as expected
Fixed a number of crash bugs around calls, launching app and space list
Notifications have have been improved so that there is a noise for every notification which is received when they are enabled, in line with how web and iOS work
On the SDK side, we are working to improve / clarify / document the public API. Itβs still in progress, but the generated API documentation is already visible here: https://matrix-org.github.io/matrix-android-sdk2/
Over the last two weeks, the theme in populus-viewer development has been permissions:
The settings menu for rooms has been redesigned
It's now possible to assign and remove standard roles (admin and moderator) from populus viewer
It's now possible to set power levels for standard events and actions from populus viewer
It's now possible to ban and unban using the membership management modal
Redacting the messages of others is now exposed as an action for those with that permission.
Besides that, I've been having some fun on the css-overhaul branch reorganizing some design elements, and centralizing the color CSS in a few variables, opening the way for things like a dark mode and user-definable themes. Here's a peek at the new milder and more welcoming default look:
The permissions work now has us at one thousand commits. Here's to the next thousand! π As always, if you want to learn more, follow project progress, or talk about the future of social annotation on matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.
I'm working on a few features for Wrench's anniversary on 13th June.
Here's a bug fix for storing identities and a new button to check your membership status in a room.
Added: A "Am I a member?" button tells your membership state in a room.
Fixed: Unchanged identities got deleted from localStorage when editing identities twice.
After a few release candidates and weeks later, we released Trixnity 2.0.0 today! It contains many breaking changes due to a large refactoring, which allows us to share a lot code between server and client implementations of the Matrix APIs.
This means, that Trixnity can be used to implement matrix servers in addition to application services and clients!
Trixnity finally has support for Kotlin/JS. You can implement a browser client or even better: multiplatform client. Support for Kotlin/Native will follow soon (e. g. for iOS clients). Right now, there is no trixnity-client-store implementation for JavaScript (e. g. IndexedDB), so you need to stick with InMemoryStore at the moment.
Besides notification support (push rules are evaluated), we introduced helpers to get the complete timeline as Kotlin-Flow (no more complicated loops to get the timeline). You can even subscribe to all timeline events, which is really helpful to implement bots with e2e encryption support. Speaking of e2e encryption: libolm is bundled into trixnity-olm jars, so you don't need to build olm by your own anymore.
These are the most important features. For the complete changelog, have a look at the release candidates.
This week the team released version 0.9.0 which contains new features and some refactoring as many deprecated endpoints were removed so make sure to use the new ones when doing the migration.
Support for the Element recent emoji (io.element.recent_emoji) was added. A new method to get the last read marker was added.
Lastly, the timeline logic was enhanced, and it's now possible to load the timeline at a specific event. So you can load the room to the last event and then paginate through the new events. When reaching the last event, the timeline will automatically allow new events to be added in the timeline when received.
I have spent the day ignoring more important things and trying to have something to TWIM. I wrote (yet another) GitHub Action for sending build status to matrix rooms. This action looks at all the completed jobs in your workflow and posts a combined status for the workflow as a message and reactions for all the individual jobs, inspired by the maubot GitLab plugin.
Hello together. I made a generic bot, named Safed Sundarata, or Sundar in short, that should make it easy to get basic special functionality working. It has a lot of different functionality so you have an example code to work off of. The main motivation for this bot was to provide an !error <code> command for the developers in the ReactOS Matrix Rooms, which translates error codes to human readable text. Then of course i added other useful or fun commands to the bot. You want to read the Readme to find out more.
This is the first time i ever wrote a bot, so feedback and corrections to the Source Code are highly appreciated. It is written in Go using the mautrix-go framework (thanks tulir and everyone who worked on this making it easy!). Even easier is to run and build it with go, no insane build system with broken dependencies required, which was the reason why i made it from scratch.
We have released v1.4.2 of Mjolnir https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir/releases/tag/v1.4.2 which includes:
Bot:
A new JoinWaveShortCircuit protection, thanks to Jonathan with https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir/pull/280. This protection can be used to detect a mass-join scenario and set the room to invite-only.
Change of behaviour: Mjolnir will now apply server ACL and member bans to the most recently active rooms first (while syncing). The order was random before.
The causes of errors at startup (e.g. via misconfiguration) have been made more clear.
The image with the latest tag on dockerhub is now correctly in sync with the main branch.
I am releasing a brand new moderation bot, graim! This bot allows you to moderate communities that are bridged with Discord via matrix-appservice-discord. You can tie a Matrix account to a Discord account, and moderate both platforms seamlessly from either end! Graim supports one Discord server and as many Matrix rooms as you want, per instance. :)
You can run it yourself from the Github - https://github.com/luphoria/graim
You can join the matrix space, which is bridged to the Discord server
I'm streaming every week live coding Rust and Matrix at https://twitch.tv/andybalaam and https://andybalaam.uk.to (Owncast). Feel free to join me as I write a Rust Matrix bot. I'm currently on a side quest to add Redis support to the matrix-rust-sdk crypto store. You can watch past streams at diode.zone/a/andybalaam.
Taking my GNOME Foundation hat on for this news: the GNOME Foundation is adopting Matrix! Is this TWIM worthy? It probably wouldn't have been if it wasn't for all the great work of Gwmngilfen! We published a joint blog post (though in all fairness Greg did all the heavy lifting) to explain how the decision was taken, and transparently share the data we had at hand.
In practice that means after years of Matrix being around in the GNOME community and being the most popular platform, it's finally moving out of the grey zone of "everyone is using it but some older contributors really like their current set up, so it exists but it's not officially our primary platform". For now we're keeping both our Matrix instance and the bridge to GIMPnet (the IRC network GNOME people have been using for years). The major change is that IRC is now our legacy, so if tradeoffs have to be made Matrix will keep the premium experience.
Again, huge shout out to Gwmngilfen who gave meaning to the data I handed to him.
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.
Hello again everyone! Your regularly-scheduled TWIM Spec update has returned, along with graph-based media!
Quick news to point out this week is that a new maubot plugin has been written to simply note the details of MSCs after their IDs ("msc1234") have been posted in a room. The bot supports multiple MSC IDs in a message, message edits, threads and end-to-end encrypted rooms.
A copy of the bot is currently running under @mscbot:matrix.org, so feel free to invite it to a room if you'd find that useful!
This MSC serves as an alternative to MSC2962, and essentially allows for user permissions to be simultaneously enforced across a set of rooms in a Space. This would allow functionality to users of platforms like Discord, where a user can be a moderator in a guild, and thus in all of that guild's channels.
A few operational issues have taken up quite a bit of the team's time this week, but we've still found time to cut a couple of release candidates of v1.58. Highlights include:
Locked python dependencies for our Docker images and Debian packages, thanks to David's poetry work.
We're also excited to see quite a few contributions from outside the core maintenance team: thanks to Dirk, Beeper, Famedly and everyone else in the community who has made pull requests!
Meanwhile on the core team, Sean has been continuing to lay groundwork for faster room joins, and Olivier has been doing some exciting work so that we will (finally) be able to test Synapse in worker mode under Complement.
Lazy-loading has been added to the /sync endpoint, which should speed up syncs considerably
Filtering has been added to the /messages endpoint
The room summary now contains "heroes" (up to 5 users in the room) for clients to display when no room name is set
The existing lazy-loading caches will now be used by /messages and /context so that member events will not be sent to clients more times than necessary
The account data stream now uses the provided filters
The built-in NATS Server has been updated to version 2.8.0
The /state and /state_ids endpoints will now return M_NOT_FOUND for rejected events
Repeated calls to the /redact endpoint will now be idempotent when a transaction ID is given
Dendrite should now be able to run as a Windows service under Service Control Manager
Fictitious presence updates will no longer be created for users which have not sent us presence updates, which should speed up complete syncs considerably
Uploading cross-signing device signatures should now be more reliable, fixing a number of bugs with cross-signing
All account data should now be sent properly on a complete sync, which should eliminate problems with client settings or key backups appearing to be missing
Account data will now be limited correctly on incremental syncs, returning the stream position of the most recent update rather than the latest stream position
Account data will not be sent for parted rooms, which should reduce the number of left/forgotten rooms reappearing in clients as empty rooms
The TURN username hash has been fixed which should help to resolve some problems when using TURN for voice calls (contributed by fcwoknhenuxdfiyv)
Push rules can no longer be modified using the account data endpoints
Querying account availability should now work properly in polylith deployments
A number of bugs with sync filters have been fixed
A default sync filter will now be used if the request contains a filter ID that does not exist
The pushkey_ts field is now using seconds instead of milliseconds
A race condition when gracefully shutting down has been fixed, so JetStream should no longer cause the process to exit before other Dendrite components are finished shutting down
Let us know your feedback as we continue to work on this feature.
The next step for Threads is improving our notifications and push rules on threaded messages. Weβve drafted some MSCs and are excited to move them forwards.
Community testing
Thank you all who joined the async community testing sessions.
The leaving space experience is now in line with web: you can leave all rooms, none of the rooms or only selected ones
Our first time user experience and create account flow is being improved.
Started prototypes for IA experiments. Weβre hoping to make the app much easier to use and will test out new interactions and patterns to see what works for users.
Hard at work fixing bugs - weβve squashed one where the UI would freeze after incremental syncs and weβve also made improvements to the read line and read markers.
Our team is still working on the sign up flow. Itβll be ready soon and we hope that new-to-element users will find it much easier (and less scary) to create an account and get chatting.
Weβve started designing and building prototypes for a new home experience; weβre excited to start experimenting with ways we can simplify our app.
A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Rumaβs approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.
Our last update included the words "if things go to plan", and even though that's usually calling for trouble, not so this time!
We released Ruma 0.6.0 yesterday and apart from a tiny missing feature that was fixed and released as 0.6.1 today, everything went smooth π
The biggest breaking changes are
new owned identifier types β calling .to_owned() on &UserId now gives you an OwnedUserId instead of Box<UserId>
a new event enum hierarchy, where redacted events are better taken into account
Also, with this release we can now claim practically 100% coverage of Matrix v1.2, that is you can send and receive requests for all specified endpoints of the various APIs, as well as send and inspect all specified event types, all with a strongly-typed Rust API.
There were no news about miounne for a while because we worked on a new "iteration" that can handle matrix encryption (thanks to the mautrix-go).
So, here is it - Buscarron v1.0.0 with e2e encryption and multiarch (arm32, arm64, amd64) support. It can handle any HTTP POST/HTML form and send it to a (encrypted) matrix room. Of course, Buscarron has small neat features like spam checker and rate limiter.
etke.cc is migrating to Buscarron and deprecating Miounne.
I wrote a small, extensible bot that replays GPX recordings as a location sharing stream.
This is an implementation of MSC3489: Sharing streams of location data with history and may help you debug the feature or see it with real world data.
Join my Space to see this in action (with the Element Web Labs feature): #geo-trackers:iot-staging.ems.host
or run the bot with your own rooms and GPX files. https://gitlab.com/jaller94/matrix-location-sharing
Opsdroid 0.26 has been released this week. Included in this release are some improvements to the Rasa NLU parser if you want natural language training for your matrix bots as well as some small documentation improvements to the matrix connector and other bug fixes. Big thanks to Oleg for many of the changes as well as all the other contributors.
Matrix Community Manager has seen some work in the features department over the past week.
With the new Ansible playbook I think it's possible for someone with a bit of Ansible experience to get this bot up and running in under 10 minutes. I did a fresh install in 4 minutes. That is a fresh VPS and creating a new matrix account. Instructions for the Ansible deploy can be found here.
The major features are:
An Ansible playbook that should simplify the installation process for new users.
Edits to the message that triggered the bot will now be reflected in the bots message. This bot now has a feature Twitter doesn't have :laughing:.
Hashtags are now called filters. Filters are more customizable allowing for custom delimiters and now show the originating room.
The AutoJoin feature has filters to control who or from where invites will be excepted.
Announcements can have more than one output room. Using a comma separated list of room ids.
A few bugs were fixed as well:
Some text characters were causing messages to be classed incorrectly thus causing crashes.
Exotic characters specifically in links were causing crashes.
We're meeting on Fri, 6th May at 6:30 PM in the c-base.
Please join us, if you're looking for locals who work with Matrix and use it regularly.
Our Matrix room is Matrix Meetup Berlin.
This week was a little on the quieter side again, with some of us away on holiday and others away with illness. Nevertheless, this week develop saw a variety of activity. Some personal highlights:
Shay's effort to document Synapse's numerous config optionslanded. This is a huge and comprehensive effort that'll help administrators to understand all the options they have to configure Synapse.
A subtle bugfix from Erik which corrects incorrect counts in one of the Admin API endpoints.
The remainder of the poetry work has landed. There were a few last-minute complications in CI to smooth out, but we've now finished the migration. Synapse's docker images and debian package now come with a fixed set of dependencies (even transitive ones) in a way that lets us support multiple Python versions and interpreters.
We're looking forward to shipping these in Synapse 1.58, whose RC is scheduled for Tuesday the 26th of April.
I'm also keen to see how PR 12522 from Rich and Olivier progresses. It aims to fix a nasty memory bug which can cause Synapse to get stuck in an OOM loop.
As ever, I'd like to express thanks to our community of users, server operators and contributors. Thanks are also due to @callahad: today is his last day of managing the Synapse team. We're all going to miss him and wish him well: thank you for everything you'd done over the last year and a half.
As a follow on from our previous launches, the team is building βlive location sharingβ. This will allow you to automatically share where you are in the world with others for a period you choose (15 minutes, 1 hour, or 8 hours), instead of sending a single static location.
Community testing
We ran our first async community testing session this week. Thank you all who joined in! We found 13 issues so far, which is good going.
We have some new features landing for the search experience on Web, join us for testing from Thursday!
Threads is in Beta! The team is hard at work smashing bugs and improving notifications so that we can remove the beta label and get everybody access to our new feature!
If youβre using Threads, donβt forget to give us your feedback.
This week the team discussed how our Web product looks and feels to new users. While we use our own products all the time, it can be good to take a step back and ensure that our product decisions benefit all users, including the newbies. Watch this space for more info in the coming weeks as we continue to trial things that we hope will make onboarding to Element easier.
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
Video rooms are coming together nicely, with the addition of lobby screens and room list stickiness to wrap up the design implementation
The newest version of the app (1.8.13) is ready! In this release weβve made a bunch of improvements and bug fixes, check it out here.
Our favourites include: Force touching room previews no longer update your read receipts, thereβs a congratulations screen for new users when creating an account, and weβve reduced the number of home page reloads.
Also new in product are presence indicators! From your home page or DMs youβll be able to see if a user is present or away. Note; this is only supported if your homeserver has it enabled.
Upcoming; Weβre working on adding βmention pillsβ when tagging users in a room.
Please note; Weβll soon be removing support for iOS 12 and iOS 13
The team is working on fixing bugs and making improvements to flows like βignore userβ. Weβve also made some changes to the way we format code.
Element Android 1.4.12 is ready to be released but currently on hold in the Play Store due to rules around User Generated Content (UGC). Weβre chatting with Google and the new update should be available soon.
We've added two major user-facing features to populus viewer:
A two-up view in the pdf viewer, allowing you to view and annotate two pages at once on a wider screen
An audio viewer, complete with audio annotation, so that you can annotate temporal segments of an audio recording
I'm especially excited about the latter - being able to discuss audio recordings will be a great teaching tool, and I'm hoping it might also be useful for things like people who want to talk about podcasts together (for purposes of editing, or just for fun), and people who want to annotate recordings of public talks of various kinds. The last use case would also be pretty well served by video annotation - so that's now rising on the agenda. I've created an MSC, here where I'll be filling in the details of a proposed format for interoperable audiovisual media annotations. As always, if you've got questions, want to follow development progress, or just want to talk about the future of social annotation on Matrix, come join us at #opentower:matrix.org.
nheko-krunner has finally been released! Version 0.1.0 contains several handy features such as searching your rooms, joining new rooms, and starting and switching to direct chats. Furthermore, if a room has unread notifications, nheko-krunner will let you know by tacking on a notification count to the room name (e.g. This Week in Matrix (TWIM) (1). Currently this feature is not disable-able, but I plan to dive into writing KCMs (KConfig Modules) soon so that I can add a toggle for this.
Hopefully a few people find this handy, and remember that if you don't use KDE, nheko still has a handy D-Bus API that you can use to write integrations with other software.
We haven't done any regular posts about it in a while, but the SDK sees almost weekly releases. (We did release version 0.8.20 last week) If you forgot about it, the Matrix Dart SDK is the SDK FluffyChat, the Famedly clients and a few others use. Let me summarize some of the changes for those who haven't kept up:
One of the killer features is probably WebRTC support π. It handles all the signalling for you, which makes integrating call support into your Flutter or Dart Matrix client fairly simple. Currently it supports version 1 of the call protocol, which is still an MSC and implements a few of the other MSCs. Experiments with group calls are still in progress.
We also switched databases a few times and tuned it more (we posted about FluffyBox last year). The database backend should now be a lot more stable and more performant, while also using less memory.
Continuing with stability, we worked a lot on how the timeline is stored and structured, leading to a much more robust experience. The SDK is also now completely nullsafe π, which gets rid of a lot of annoying error modes. There were some fixes to E2EE here and there, but mostly the experience has been really solid and didn't need much work.
Some of the more recent developments include widget support as well as improving the file upload experience. The SDK now inserts a dummy event for a pending upload, images are thumbnailed and resided in a different isolate and uploads are automatically retried after a connection failure. We are also working on improving the push support, making it easier to fetch events from a push.
And I'm currently working on bringing fragmented timeline support. Nico told me it would be pretty (not) easy to do... and IΒ have to say, he was right. Good first issue π
I've created a NixOS module, nix-matrix-appservices, that can simplify the bootstrap and maintenance of matrix appservices on nixos. With it, appservices can be spun up easily with registration and tokens handled by the module. Most mautrix and mx-puppet bridges have been tested to work and they can be setup in a couple lines of nix code. There are plenty of options you can make use of to configure more complex appservices.
You can find the the code, matrix room(gitlab badge), and usage information here: https://gitlab.com/coffeetables/nix-matrix-appservices
If you are looking for a docker container with just the auto compressor for linux amd64/arm64 in it, her you go: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/rust-synapse-compress-state
We know you missed it, 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.
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.
There's been lots of new MSCs this week! Three of them - those regarding state restrictions and subkeys - are related to the ongoing live location sharing work that Element is currently working on. See MSC3672 for the current state of the spec work for that feature.
Otherwise the spec core team has been reviewing a flurry of MSCs this week. This includes MSC3383 (Include destination in X-Matrix Auth Header), MSC3700 (Deprecate plaintext sender key) and MSC2246 (Asynchronous media uploads). Exciting things in the pipeline!
Another MSC in the sphere of moderation, and one that aims to put moderation control more in the hands of room admins rather than homeserver admins. A similar MSC in this realm is MSC3215 (Aristotle), which aims to send event reports to room admins, rather than homeserver admins that may not even have control over the malicious user.
In case you missed it, we've released the first release candidate for Synapse 1.56 on Tuesday. This one includes a couple new module-related features, but also quite a few bugfixes and internal improvements. I'll talk about this in more details next week when Synapse 1.56 gets properly released, but the key points of this release is that Synapse will now refuse to start if it's configured with unsafe registration settings (i.e. open registration without any form of verification) as well as if it's running against a PostgreSQL database with the wrong locale values. Have a look at the upgrade notes for more information about this.
Apart from that, the team still continuing work on the two main topics I've been mentioning in previous weeks: fast room joins and integrating poetry. The latter is getting reeeally close to the finish line now, as the pull request has recently entered the review stage. So watch this space for more exciting news on this topic!
That's all for this week, catch you all next time π
MMR v1.2.12 is out now with a bunch of added features, removal of in-memory cache (per last release's deprecation notice), and some bug fixes.
Most notable are some added/improved support for JPEG XL, HEIF, and HEIC thumbnails, content ranges support (allowing the ability to skip to a part of a video), and a way to make the logs a bit quieter.
Give it a go and report issues to the issue tracker π
It feels like one of these comes out nearly every month, which probably means we're doing something right! This release takes a step back and fixes quite a few of our more longstanding bugs and fixes many nits here and there. Please read the change notes carefully as some APIs have moved around and your load balancers / config may need adjusting. One final note is that this release drops support for Node 12, making the minimum version Node 14.
Once again, thanks to the wider Matrix community for filing bugs and submitting PRs, it's very much appreciated!
More updates! This week the bridge library itself gets a major update. We've made a few breaking changes, notably we now expect target homeservers to at least be Matrix v1.2 compatible. Also, this release brings the new "Provisioning and Widgets API" which allows developers to start creating HTTP APIs for their bridges which work for both provisioning mode (shared secret tokens) and widget API style (authenticating via Matrix OpenID token sharing). This stuff is still a little experimental, but it's starting to power our new experiments in the bridge world.
Media messages, both from or to KakaoTalk, are now supported! The biggest exceptions are inbound files & stickers. The latter may be a hard sell to get working, due to how KT manages stickers, but I'll look into it some more before giving a concrete answer.
The bridge is also now responsive to disconnects, like when you log in from another KakaoTalk desktop client (since the bridge mimics the desktop client, and KT only allows one desktop client to be logged in at a time!). Luckily, not all KakaoTalk APIs rely on the same connection that chatting does, meaning that some functionality can continue to work even when "disconnected". The bridge now takes advantage of this, meaning that profile-management commands (currently just the list-friends command) will work even if you get disconnected from chats for whatever reason.
The bridge is drawing ever closer to "good enough" status... Please give it a try if curious!
Heyo, we released a hotfix release for the IRC bridge this week. This fixed a rather nasty
regression where the bridge would kick everyone from the Matrix side when a Matrix ban
list is updated. People who aren't using the new ban lists feature don't need to upgrade.
Please check out https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/releases/tag/0.33.1 for more details
1.0 is a big number and a step not taken lightly. But Nheko has been in development for half a decade and we think it is time to take a step forward! As such we worked hard to fix readability issues in the app. Your messages should now be readable on any theme, because we send the first half as white text and the second half as black text (thank you, rrogalski for the contribution). For accessibility reasons this is enabled by default. We also added an improved typing indicator. Sometimes it is hard to notice when a message is too long, as such we gradually adjust the background color the longer the message gets. It also helps a lot, if you have a bad theme and can't read the text against the background color. Just enter a few characters and the background will change, so the messages should become readable. But that is not all! We all know some people have a harder time seeing colors than others. So for accessibility we also slowly rotate the screen, so that even if your display is monochrome, you don't miss out. Please see the attached video for a demo or check out our release candidates here and here.
Before this month we also rewrote the room creation dialogs to be less confusing. We now have separate dialogs for direct chats and group chats, which should cut down confusion between the options by a lot. You can also now edit the topic and name of a room inline and Malte added a jump to bottom button. On mobile you can also now drag to the sides to reply. Last but not least, you can now knock on rooms from Nheko using /knock or if an invite failed because you were not allowed to join a room and you can add a reason to room joins, leaves, invites, knocks and everything. Some of those features require the server to support Matrix v1.1, so make sure you update your servers to use them.
NeoChat now has a KRunner plugin thanks to work done by Nico (not the one from Nheko π). This allows plasma users to search for and open matrix rooms directly from their desktop. You will be able to enable it from the KRunner settings after the next release.
Snehit changed the room preview to no longer show markdown characters, fixing a few situations where this would be unexpected.
On the end-to-end encryption side, we're currently working on implementing device verification.
This week I have something really exciting to report. We moved Fractal-next to the main development branch. This means that we now have nightly flatpak builds[1], so users can already try out the new version of Fractal without having to build it from source. This will also give use much more feedback and many more bug reports, hopefully not too many :) Note that this isn't a release and the software should still be considered unstable.
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly)
Voice rooms are now known as video rooms! Weβve landed some new designs to help make the experience more coherent, and bring them out of βprototypeβ status.
Threads! From next week youβll be able to turn on threads in all versions of Element but for a sneak preview you can head to Labs in Develop or Nightly and access Message Threading from there.
Weβre continuing to work on our updated search experience: we are going to be merging the people and room search dialogs into the new search experience and adding filtering. Expecting work to start early next week.
Along with some feature work in Labs, the team is hard at work closing issues and clearing pesky bugs.
Our latest release is a hotfix (1.8.10) resolving a crash that occurred when uploading a photo via the camera in the timeline.
Following a team discussion and input from all areas weβve decided to change how we launch new languages in Element. Weβll soon be moving to an automatic rollout model meaning, if thereβs any amount of a language available, and itβs set as your preference, youβll see it in the app.
Previously weβd wait until hitting the 80% mark and then manually push the translation. This leaves too much room for us to forget, or restricts access to those languages hanging around the 70% markβ¦
Other things weβve been working on this week include; improving the new user experience, and starting to prototype with the layout for the app.
We released spaces on iOS this week! Where you could only view spaces before, you can now create and manage them from your phone. We have more improvements planned for the next release.
The Android team has been determined over the past weeks to improve our internal process, increasing efficiency and quality of building and deploying. With that in mind, weβve recently published a guide for PRs on our Android Repo. Itβs still a draft right now but if you want to know more about our approach, read it here.
In terms of building weβre continuing on our path of improving the quality of the app by focussing on bugs and UI issues.
Weβre also working on improving our new user experience to make it easier for newbies to get up and running on Element Android!
matrix-streamchat got it's first proper release, after some battletesting by another streamer :D
https://git.pixie.town/f0x/matrix-streamchat/releases/tag/0.0.2
hosted instance is also available at https://streamchat.pixie.town
Matrix Highlight got an update this week. I've switched the highlighting widget to use a shadow DOM, which means styles from the page don't affect styles from the extension itself. This used to affect quite a lot of pages, but shouldn't be much of a problem anymore!
A set of Rust library crates for working with the Matrix protocol. Rumaβs approach to Matrix emphasizes correctness, security, stability and performance.
Support for vodozemac as an alternative to libolm has been merged, and enabled by default π
A bug around invitations to previously-left rooms was fixed
There was also a decent amount of internal cleanup / developer experience work, so if you previously tried to contribute but ran into weird IDE bugs or code inconsistencies, make sure to check back. The same goes for sliding sync, which has been making decent progress β stay tuned!
I'm doing a talk about Matrix at the ACCU Conference on Saturday 9th April. Recordings of talks will be available soon after the conference, and tickets are still available to be there live in person or online! Here's the talk summary:
The Matrix network provides messaging (like WhatsApp or Slack) that offers all the features you expect, but without centralised control: it's an open standard, and anyone can run a server. The servers link together, so you can talk to other people even if they use a different server (kind of like email).
In the first half of this session, we will explore the basics of the protocol: making simple HTTP requests to send and receive messages, and discuss some of the interesting distributed-systems issues that make writing a server exciting.
In the second half we will explore the fact that messaging is only one potential use of this network, and look into some examples of other real-time use cases that are in active development, taking note of how these use cases benefit from the real-time and distributed nature of the network.
There was some silence lately on this, but activity is picking back up.
Mainly, the project is getting rewritten. Why? Well, I learned from the issues and ran into issues with the framework used. There are going to be various changes to the architecture (like no more SSR, no nextjs, pwa support and more).
Feel free to follow https://github.com/MTRNord/matrix-art/pull/121 for progress.
Another big thing that's going to change is that I am working on a complete redesign. While I am still fairly early in the iterations, I wanted to share the first art direction Matrix Art is going to go. The main changes are that I try to have an art language which distinguishes it from the other proprietary players, as well as compensating for the fact that Matrix Art has a much lower volume of images on it's feed. Please be aware that this is way before the first round of polish. :)
If you want to connect with matrix-art please join the room: #matrix-art:nordgedanken.dev or follow/star the github project :)
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.
This MSC proposes some much-desired practical and usability fixes to the "Well-Known" discovery method for Matrix homeservers. This is part of the system that enables homeserver's to "delegate" their homeserver address (your Matrix ID is @alice:example.com, but your homeserver is listening for requests on homeserver.example.com).
Well-known for homeserver delegation was introduced a number of years ago, and since then some friction has arisen from various implementations. This MSC aims to address a collection of them!
Hey everyone! This week we've released Synapse 1.55, which includes a bunch of new features, performance improvements and bugfix. If you're using Mjolnir to moderate your rooms, and/or synctl to manage your homeserver, this release also introduces a few changes you definitely want to be aware of, head over to the announcement on the matrix.org blog for more!
Yesterday, we noticed a compatibility issue with a newly released version of Jinja, which is the tool we use in Synapse to render e-mail and web templates. We've quickly put out Synapse 1.55.2 to address this - so if you were unable to start Synapse because of it just update and you should be fine π
Note that this doesn't apply to deployments of Synapse using the matrixdotorg/synapse Docker image or Debian packages from packages.matrix.org since they are already using a compatible version of Jinja.
Apart from that, work continues towards integrating Poetry with Synapse, which should prevent this kind of issues from happening in the future, and on improving room join times.
This week brings yet more bugfixes & stability to DMs: now, there should be no trouble sending messages into a KakaoTalk DM that hasn't been active for a few days.
The other major improvements are:
A command for listing your KakaoTalk friends list, appropriately named list-friends
Receiving images from KakaoTalk
I had hoped to finish support for sending images from Matrix by today, but I couldn't quite crack it in time--either KakaoTalk changed their API for sending media messages, or I'm doing something wrong π
Nonetheless, the bridge is rapidly approaching a state of being usable!
A little over a year has passed since our last update, but we're not dead! On the contrary, Syphon has seen some significant improvements over the last year both in terms of features and project structure; the project is more alive than ever before, and we're really excited to share some updates!
Core Team
Syphon now has a core team, consisting of @ereio:matrix.org (creator of Syphon), @ed:geraghty.london, @dnisbetjones:mozilla.org, and @0x1a8510f2:0x1a8510f2.space (me)! With some of the workload now being shared, we're hoping Syphon will grow even faster with less time needed to review and merge PRs, triage and fix bugs, evaluate and implement features and answer support requests.
Cross-platform Availability
Syphon has been steadily expanding its list of supported platforms over the past year:
@ed:geraghty.london worked hard to bring Syphon to Windows with full feature parity, including (currently unofficial) Windows builds of Syphon.
I've been busy creating a flatpak for Syphon which is available on Flathub.
Regular and official ARM64 builds are also planned soon, with the first manual one already released. Once the CI infrastructure is properly set up, these will be included for every release and the flatpak will receive ARM64 support too!
Releases
Between 0.1.7 (21 Mar 2021) and 0.2.12 (23 Mar 2022), 21 releases were published. Of course, too much changed to list everything, but here are some highlights:
Multi-account support π
Media messages π
Markdown support π
Message editing π
Key import and export π
App lock with encryption π
HTTP proxy support π
Theme tweaks
3pid auth support
EXIF data removal from sent images
System brightness setting
Various customisation options
(Unencrypted) chat message search
Ability to deactivate an account
Countless new translations
Massive performance improvements
Numerous bug fixes (including encryption and SSO)
Lots of refactoring and cleanup
Many of these would not have been possible without our awesome contributors.
Translations
We have also received many contributions in the form of translations and Syphon now supports, at least partially, 26 languages. Of these, 6 languages are fully or almost fully translated. To deal with all the incoming translations, there is now also an official Weblate page for Syphon.
All of these translations are submitted by volunteers and we're really grateful for their contributions in making Syphon more accessible to an international audience.
Syphon Space
We also now have an official Syphon space which we use for support, development discussion or just friendly offtopic chat. Come join us if you like at #syphon-space:matrix.org!
SchildiChat is a fork of Element that focuses on UI changes such as message bubbles and a unified chat list for both direct messages and groups, which is a more familiar approach to users of other popular instant messengers.
SchildiChat-Android now has more styles of message bubbles! So if you prefer the Schildi-bubbles over the Element ones (which you can use too in SchildiChat if you want), you can now also select between bubbles with or without tail, and select some more round bubbles than what we had previously, which was a highly requested feature!
If you wonder what makes SchildiChat special except for the different design now that Element has bubbles as well: it's hard to describe in a couple of short sentences, as it's mostly in the details.
So if you are interested in a list of things that we did on Android, I wrote up some aspects here.
Note however that this list is usually not really kept up-to-date, and there might already be some things that are now outdated since I added them.
However, it might give you some general ideas of what SchildiChat has to offer :)
Hello folks, quick update on what major things happened in Fractal-next the last two month. The most exciting addition is definitely the SSO support we merged this week and therefore we could close a 2 years old issue.
Timeline
You can now send files via drag-n-drop and via the file send button to a room. It also includes a nice preview for Images.
The timeline now shows audio messages with a small inline player.
Fractal-next lets you now remove messages you sent
Session verification
During first login, Fractal checks if the user hasn't started session verification from another client before offering to start a new one
The QrCode scanning is now spec compliant, and asks for user's confirmation after scanning.
We dropped screenshot support for QrCode scanning, since it makes the UX worse without adding any real benefit.
Room details
The room details show now the members of the room including the power level
Login
Fractal-Next now supports SSO ποΈ
We implemented auto-discovery of the homeserver via .well-known
Sorry that I was a little bit silent in the last weeks. So much stuff to do...
If you haven't heard it yet (because I have not made it that much public yet) there are experimental video calls in FluffyChat now. You need to enable them first under Settings > Chat and then you can try them out. They should be fully compatible with the Element video calls. But be aware that they are very unstable at the moment and may let your app crash.
This release contains a lot of updated translations and bugfixes. I'm very excited about the new keyboard shortcuts from TheOneWithTheBrain. Also in your stories you can now pick the background color and the size of the picture. This is still a little bit experimental but I will share of course update the stories MSC asap.
Thanks to all contributors and translators.
[[https://github.com/alphapapa/ement.el][Ement.el]], a Matrix client for Emacs, has learned to create new rooms and invite users to rooms. Feedback is appreciated; see our chat room, [[https://matrix.to/#/#ement.el:matrix.org][#ement.el:matrix.org]], or the issue tracker on the repo.
Threads will be released behind a labs flag in the next release and enabled by default in the Release Candidate (RC) from 5th April
If youβre using an older version of Synapse (<v1.55.0) you might experience compatibility problems with stable prefixes. After upgrading Element to v1.18.0 unstable threads will be moved to the main room timeline
Groups have been deleted on develop. It has also landed alongside other fairly major changes so please definitely report issues if you see them
Continuing work to remove skinning from the application. This is a fairly major change to how everything works under the hood, so when it lands please report any issues with the app as most will be subtle and therefore might be missed.
Currently expected to land on or about April 5th
Component replacement will still be possible (and this will be documented)
In labs (you can enable labs in settings on develop.element.io or on Nightly):
Thread list is now ordered by last reply
Fixes for the room list counter
Last stretch of threads acceptance testing before releasing to beta
Iteration to the new search dialog to integrate people & public rooms search into the new experience.
Element 1.8.7 was released on the App Store after delays with the review: weβve made ignoring users easier and now suggest a Matrix ID when using βSign in With Appleβ to resolve the issue.
Space creation and management will be available in the next release, due next week.
We had some issues with publishing releases to TestFlight so the latest release candidates havenβt been updated publicly - we have been testing them internally so releases will not be delayed
If you are looking for a docker container with just the auto compressor for linux amd64/arm64 in it, her you go: https://gitlab.com/mb-saces/rust-synapse-compress-state
The theme of the episode is "analytics and privacy". We will have guests from the awesome non-profit Exodus Privacy to shed some light on analytics: what can your apps know about you and how you can get better informed.
Nad from Element will give us the perspective from the other side: as a vendor, does it make sense to use analytics? Are there better alternatives? Is there a way to do it right?
