Matrix Live

No Matrix Live as your usual host Thib has been unavailable most of the week!

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons says

Our first ever Governing Board elections are approaching, with the nomination period set to begin in late April. If you want your organization or community to be able to nominate a candidate, or to vote in the election, the time to join as a member is now – same for individuals who want to participate!

This week we’re thrilled to announce three new members: two Ecosystem Members, Trixnity and Nheko-Reborn, and our first Platinum Member, Element!

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) [UTC-5] announces

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• No new MSCs were created this week.

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3935: Cute Events against social distancing (postpone)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

Spec Updates

A reminder to teams working on Matrix 2.0 features to update their MSCs and send them for review in #sct-office:matrix.org soon to help bring them closer to release in the next couple of quarters.

Thank you to Kévin, Johennes and Rich for their PRs to the spec text this week!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC4018: Reliable call membership!

This proposal makes the case for putting the onus on homeservers for tracking whether a user is in a Matrix voice/video call, rather than relying on clients. Currently, clients must update the user's m.call.member state event in the room when they join/leave a call. This can be problematic if a user closes their client without giving it a chance to do so however (such as when a browser is force-quit). This can lead to other clients thinking the client is still in the call, when it left minutes ago!

A homeserver typically continuously remains online. If it were in charge of tracking call membership, then it could notice that a user's device has disconnected from all call streams, and could then update the m.call.member state event in the room itself for that user.

The MSC also proposes two new Client-Server API endpoints which instruct the homeserver to either add or remove a device from the user's m.call.member state event. This would prevent two clients attempting to update the state event at the same time, potentially resulting in the modification of one of the clients being lost.

The intention is that this would lead to more reliable Matrix voice/video calls! If any of that sounds interesting to you, please have a look and leave your thoughts on the MSC.

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element

Andrew Morgan (anoa) [UTC-5] announces

This week the team released Synapse v1.104.0rc1, in preparation for the full release of v1.104.0. It contains improvements to OIDC support, as well as a few fixes for various bugs and to the Synapse Docker image.

Please test the release candidate if you're able to!

Dept of Clients 📱

iamb (website)

A Matrix client for Vim addicts

ulyssa reports

I've released and published iamb v0.0.9! 🎉 Since its last version, the client has gained support for:

• Image previews through several different terminal image protocols
• Threads, unread indicators, and notifications via terminal bell or desktop environment
• Customizing keybindings, sorting for room and member lists, and other parts of the UI
• Commands for importing and exporting room keys
• Updated to use v0.7.x of the matrix-rust-sdk
• SSO login, TOML configuration, fixes for Windows Terminal, improved manual pages, and many other fixes and improvements!

The online documentation has been updated to account for new configuration options and commands, and you can read the GitHub releases page for a full list of changes. I've also added a PACKAGING.md file to the repository to provide a place for notes useful to package maintainers.

Many thanks to all of those who have contributed to this release! :pray:

SchildiChat (website)

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.

SpiritCroc reports

SchildiChat Next, our fork of Element X for Android, received some new experimental settings for managing your chat overview. You can now:

• Sort favorite chats on top
• Sort low priority chats on bottom
• Filter by DMS/groups, unread chats, favorites, and rooms not added to any space, via dedicated pages from our bottom space navigation

Furthermore, you can now send freeform reactions again, if you want to react to messages with arbitrary text or just want to use your keyboard's emoji picker instead of the app's inbuilt picker.

Fractal (website)

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

Spring is here in Fractal land. Birds chirping, flowers blooming, and a new beta for you to try!

Staff’s picks for Fractal 7.beta:

• Encryption support has been extended, with server-side key backup and account recovery.
• Messages that failed to send can now be retried or discarded.
• Messages can be reported to server admins for moderation.
• Room details are now considered complete, with the addition of room address management, permissions, and version upgrade.
• A new member menu appears when clicking on an avatar in the room history. It offers a quick way to do many actions related to that person, including opening a direct chat with them and moderating them.
• Pills are clickable and allow to directly go to a room or member profile.
• Many more improvements on the accessibility front, for better navigability with a screen reader.

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!

As always, you can try to fix one of our issues. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Element X Android (website)

Android Matrix messenger application using the Matrix Rust Sdk and Jetpack Compose

benoit announces

• Element X Android 0.4.7 is available on the PlayStore, for the tester. 2 features have been enabled "Room List filters" which let the user filter the rooms and "Mark as unread”. More details in https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-android/releases/tag/v0.4.7
• This week we’ve done some preparatory work to support permalink navigation. In the meantime, the Rust team is actively working on exposing new API to support this feature.
• Also working on a troubleshoot notification screen, as per what was done on Element Android. We will also work on adding a way to switch between available PushProviders in the coming week..
• Last note: it will be more obvious that a poll is closed in the timeline, thanks to an enlightenment of the winning answer.

Dept of Non Chat Clients 🎛️

Circles (website)

E2E encrypted social networking built on Matrix. Safe, private sharing for your friends, family, and community.

cvwright announces

Circles is a secure social network app for families and friends, where every post is protected with Matrix's E2E encryption. We have recent releases of Circles on both Android and iOS.

On Android, v1.0.27 is now available on F-Droid.org and in beta on the Play Store. New features in this release include:

• Improved email address management
• Re-designed People tab to help you connect with friends of friends
• Support for recovering your account when you forgot your password
• UI for configuring the default power level in each room

On iOS, v1.0.1 is now available in the App Store, featuring:

• New support for push notifications
• Cross-signing for an account's 2nd/3rd/etc devices
• Several bug fixes

Source code is available from the FUTO Gitlab (Android | iOS) and from our Github mirrors (Android | iOS).

If you're interested in trying the app, stop by and say "Hi" in #circles:futo.org.

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Rory&::LibMatrix (.NET 8 matrix bot/client library/SDK)

Emma [it/its] announces

Some rough changes that haven't been published yet, I'll have to work out the kinks first ^^

Changes

• Rewrote client and server well known resolvers (currently broken if passing a full URI)
• Added JsonSerialiserOptions to StateEvent.RawContent in order to remove nulls (oops ^^')
• HSE: Small rewrite to reading of auth data, to deduplicate a lot of code
• HSE: improved logic for detecting if a sync response is empty
• HSE: now reports supporting all room versions over /capabilities (Element still won't shut up :c)

Additions

• HSE: logging out has been implemented
• HSE: Importing of external matrix accounts using nheko's config file format
• HSE: Importing of external matrix rooms over client-server API (see previous)
• HSE: fetching media from other homeservers
• HSE: incremental sync! (at least for joined rooms)
• HSE: /messages endpoint
• HSE: /event/:id endpoint
• HSE: estimation of position in time based off of pagination/sync tokens, and event IDs
• HSE: chat commands for utility interaction (!hse x y z)
• HSE: shorthand for calculating final state from a section of timeline (not state res!)
• HSE: Support for read markers (top level only)
• HSE: Added shorthand to get all rooms by member mxid, with membership

And, as always:

• The code is available at cgit.rory.gay!
  • All contributions are more than welcome, be it documentation, code, anything! Perhaps, example usecases, bots, ...?
• Discussion, suggestions and ideas are welcome in #libmatrix:rory.gay (Space: #mru-space:rory.gay)
• Got a cool project that you're working on and want to share, using LibMatrix? Be sure to let me know, I'd love to hear all about it!

Matrix Rust SDK 🦀

bnjbvr announces

It's been a quiet week, with the team merging the LinkedChunk data structure for efficiently storing events in the EventCache, a few bugfixes here and there, as well as a full investigation and fixing issues in integration tests.

The team keeps on working on the event cache (including matching known events against new events received from servers, and prepping for caching on disk) as well as the QR code login feature.

Trixnity (website)

Multiplatform Kotlin SDK for Matrix

Benedict reports

I added support for Matrix 1.10 in Trixnity 4.3.0 this week. Changes since last TWIM:

features:

• Matrix 1.10
• move all room list calculation logic into RoomListHandler making it a lot faster due to less database operations
• BREAKING: naming of files saved by client-media-okio has been changed. This means, that files may need to be redownloaded

bugixes:

• fix, that sending keys to new members of an encrypted room may not have been triggered
• handle redacted event in RoomEventEncryptionService

Dept of Ops 🛠

matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (website)

Matrix server setup using Ansible and Docker

Slavi says

Thanks to Aine of etke.cc, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy now uses KeyDB (a drop-in Redis alternative), instead of Redis.

The playbook used to install Redis (and now installs KeyDB in its place) if services have a need for it (enabling worker support for Synapse, enabling Hookshot encryption, etc.) or if you explicitly enabled the service (redis_enabled: true or keydb_enabled: true).

This change is provoked by the fact that Redis is now "source available". According to the Limitations of the new license (as best as we understand them, given that we're not lawyers), using Redis in the playbook (even in a commercial FOSS service like etke.cc) does not violate the new Redis license. That said, we'd rather neither risk it, nor endorse shady licenses and products that pretend to be free-software. Another high-quality alternative to Redis seems to be Dragonfly, but the Dragonfly license is no better than Redis's.

To learn more, refer to our changelog entry.

Slavi announces

Thanks to Julian Foad, matrix-docker-ansible-deploy can now install the Pantalaimon E2EE aware proxy daemon for you. It's already possible to integrate it with Draupnir to allow it to work in E2EE rooms - see our Draupnir docs for details.

See our Setting up Pantalaimon documentation to get started.

Dept of Bots 🤖

Gnuxie 💜🐝 announces

Draupnir v1.87.0 was released, and this will be the final release before we merge our 6month in the making rework of the Draupnir core. We are advising anyone running against gnuxie/draupnir:develop to instead pin to gnuxie/draupnir:v1.87.0 as there is going to a significant drop in user experience as we integrate and gather more feedback on the rework. Those running against gnuxie/draupnir:latest will be unaffected, but we will advise you to read the v2.0.0 release notes as there will be dramatic changes in behaviour. If you're a confident system admin and you're happy with manually intervening then by all means continue to use develop and come talk to us in #draupnir:matrix.org.

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Matrix User Meetup Berlin

saces announces

Next Matrix user meetup 3.4.2024, 8 pm @ c-base

Have you seen the weather forecast? Finally we can stop pretending to be interested in matrix and meet up for BBQ again :)

Meet other matrix users, chat about Matrix, the rest, and everything else, discuss your Matrix ideas, sign each other in persona, and maybe spice the evening with a good mate or beer.

And don't forget to wish you brougth your favorite item :)

Every first Wednesday of the month in the c-base at 8pm ('til the next pandemic).

Matrix room: #mumb:c-base.org

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Octoprint plugin

Cadair reports

I have for the first time in years pushed a release of my octoprint plugin which sends matrix notifications about the status of your prints with images. Thanks primarily to @Links2004 we now properly handle image transformations, upload images in a background thread and don't send markdown in the plain text body of the matrix message. If you run into any issues please open an issue on the github repo.

Moderator Tools for PubHubs

JulianF announces

This week I have put up a web site documenting my work on Moderator Tools for PubHubs.

PubHubs is a Dutch research project to enable citizen-facing organisations to provide online group communications, value-aligned with their real-world presence. It uses matrix protocol, combined with an interesting and different user identity model involving pseudonyms and selective cryptographic disclosure of identity attributes such as "is over 18" or "is a member of organisation X". Each hub is built around a non-federating Synapse server, with their own identity plugins and custom client. (All public-interest, open-source.)

I have been working on three aspects of introducing initial moderation tooling. Some of it crosses over with general matrix (this week's Pantalaimon role is a side product of the Draupnir part), while some is different (Attribute Disclosure), and the third part is general (research and planning for Civilised Discourse).

My funded stint is coming to an end and I am looking for ways to continue in any related area of work -- please matrix me @julian:foad.me.uk !

Dept of Guides 🧭

Matrix Codebrowser

Loren says

Some of you may be familiar with https://codebrowser.dev already. For those of you who aren't, it's a tool that parses compiled code in C++, Rust, or Dart and displays it as a webpage with full syntax highlighting, clickable links to symbols, searchable symbols, and a wealth of other features. It's very useful for browsing a library's source code to see what individual functions do (for example, here's QObject::connect() from Qt 6). The codebrowser software was originally built by Woboq, but as the maintainers have moved on to work on things like Slint, they have passed it on to KDAB.

I have spun up an instance of codebrowser at https://matrix.codebrowser.lorendb.dev, serving sources for mtxclient, libQuotient, and olm so far. If you want to see more projects added, please let me know and I'll add them if possible. I'm focusing on libraries for now, as they are the most useful for developers, but I'm not opposed to adding other Matrix projects either.

Please note that I currently can't support Rust or Dart code yet; while KDAB has implemented support for those languages, they haven't yet open-sourced their changes (though I can confirm that is tentatively in the pipeline). Once they open-source their changes, I'll be upgrading my installation to use that version and adding project like matrix-rust-sdk and vodozemac.

If you have any questions or feedback, come say hi in #matrix-codebrowser:nheko.im!

Matrix Federation Stats

Aine announces

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 9531 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 2844 (29.8%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 161695 rooms (gitter.im rooms are back)

Stats timeline is available on MatrixRooms.info/stats

How to add your server | How to remove your server

Dept of Ping

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	fostered.uk	229.5
2	aguiarvieira.pt	239
3	maunium.net	272
4	075-141-169-120.res.spectrum.com:8447	275.5
5	nerdhouse.io	299
6	herkinf.de	374
7	transfem.dev	391
8	fx3.eu	507.5
9	pain.agency	533
10	littlevortex.net	551.5

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	aguiarvieira.pt	156
2	075-141-169-120.res.spectrum.com:8447	162.5
3	nerdhouse.io	164
4	fostered.uk	185.5
5	spritsail.io	192.5
6	transfem.dev	200
7	herkinf.de	244
8	doctoruwu.uk	247
9	daedric.net	274.5
10	craftingcomrades.net	302

That's all I know

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

Matrix Live

Today's Matrix Live: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HbzMofPhX0Y

Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Josh Simmons reports

The wait is over! We are now accepting applications from projects and organizations that want to join the Foundation as Ecosystem and Associate Members.

You may recall that in December we announced two new membership tiers to ensure we have healthy community representation as we introduce more open governance for Matrix. Specifically, we created Ecosystem and Associate Member tiers. Ecosystem Members are open source projects that speak Matrix, and Associate Members are FOSS foundations, nonprofits, and academic institutions.

We’re excited to bring more folks into the fold, and thrilled to welcome Thunderbird, Draupnir, and Conduit as our first Ecosystem Members 🎉 Curious who else has joined as a member recently? Check out our Supporters.

We’d also like to recognize Thunderbird for sponsoring the Foundation, which helps us get a little bit closer to making the Foundation’s activities sustainable 🚀

Thib announces

There is a question we often get asked: why do you operate the Matrix.org homeserver, and why do you keep registrations open? We don't want to become the gmail.com of Matrix after all. We covered those in this post.

https://matrix.org/blog/2024/03/why-matrix-org/

Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) says

Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://spec.matrix.org/proposals.

MSC Status

New MSCs:

• MSC4119: Voluntary content flagging

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

Spec Updates

Next Friday, March 22nd, is the release date of Matrix v1.10! Watch this space for when the blog post goes live.

A new release of the spec means it's planning time for the subsequent one. For v1.11 we're looking to focus on Trust & Safety, authenticated media and Extensible Events. See this message in the Office of the Matrix Spec Core Team room for further details. If you have something that you'd like to suggest that isn't already on that list, please do so in that room!

Otherwise there has been lots of activity in the spec-writing side of things this week. 5 new PRs and 2 merged during this week alone! A mix of spec PRs and general fixes/improvements to the spec itself. Thank you to everyone who's pitching in!

Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3999: Add causal parameter to /timestamp_to_event!

The gist of this proposal is that the existing GET /_matrix/client/v1/rooms/{roomId}/timestamp_to_event endpoint (which allows you to jump to a point in a room based on a given date and time), could suffer from some edge cases. Particularly if you're heavily using /timestamp_to_event to form your room timeline (which the Matrix Viewer does).

Dept of Servers 🏢

Synapse (website)

Synapse is a Matrix homeserver implementation developed by Element

Andrew Morgan (anoa) announces

Synapse v1.103.0 is due out next week, carrying with it some upcoming features and bug fixes:

• Stabilise, and enable by default, support for MSC4041 (Retry-After header).
• Fix performance issues when joining very large rooms that can cause the server to lock up (thanks to @ggogel for their persistence on this one!)
• Fix a bug introduced in v1.76.0 that prevented joining remote rooms when a module uses the on_new_event callback.

...and more!

We have a release candidate out (v1.103.0rc1) if you would like to help test early and shake out any bugs before the full release. Otherwise, expect v1.103.0 to land next week. Thanks!

Dept of Clients 📱

Element X iOS (website)

A total rewrite of Element-iOS using the Matrix Rust SDK underneath and targeting devices running iOS 16+.

Mauro Romito announces

• Release candidate 1.5.13 to be released soon! it will include filters and mark as read/unread/favourite
• We improved our testing by having all of our views preview tested on both iPhone and iPad and multiple languages
• A lot of progress has been done on moderation management in rooms.
• We improved our logging for UTD events, this will help us improve the quality of decryption over time.

Element X Android (website)

Android Matrix messenger application using the Matrix Rust Sdk and Jetpack Compose

benoit announces

• Element X Android 0.4.5 is now in production. It adds the ability to mark a room as favourite and adds some action regarding moderation (moderation is still under a disabled feature flag).
• The next release candidate (0.4.6) can already be downloaded from GitHub here: https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-android/releases/tag/v0.4.6 and will soon be available on the PlayStore if you’re a tester. The loading of the room members is much faster, especially in crowded rooms, and the UX has been tweaked too.
• We are working on room filtering, but the feature is not enabled yet on production. You can use the nightly build to be able to enable it from the settings, Developer options.
• The room moderation feature is now closer to completion: if you are an admin you can now change the roles of other users, the default power levels for some actions. If you are either an admin or a moderator you can now remove, ban or unban users.
• We are also working on a tool to be able to check the quality of Element X Android translations. It is available at https://element-hq.github.io/element-x-android/ If you spot any mistakes / typo / inconsistency in any languages, feel free to reach us! You can help translate the application at https://localazy.com/p/element. We manage the translations in French and German, but other languages are provided by the community. Also, we enable the language only if the translation progress is close to 100%. For layout issues, please report an issue using https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-android/issues/new/choose. Thanks!

Beeper (website)

All you chats in one app.

tulir says

We've released a new Android app that's awesome and rebuilt from the ground up instead of being an Element fork. It uses Kotlin and Jetpack Compose for the UI and mautrix-go for all the Matrix things. For more details, check out our blog post: https://blog.beeper.com/p/new-beeper-android-app-open-beta

Dept of SDKs and Frameworks 🧰

Matrix Rust SDK

bnjbvr announces

• More logging has been added to the crypto crate, to better understand unable-to-decrypt (UTD) events. In particular, it's possible to listen to the UI timeline's UTDs events, using a special dedicated hook
• Back-pagination has been added to the Event Cache, and the UI timeline now makes use of that, in place of its own code.
• The event cache now has an experimental fancy data structure to represent events, implemented as a linked list of chunks. It's not used yet, but it's being integrated.
• A filter to show only invites has been added to the Room List service.
• When fetching all the room members, the computation for disambiguating names has been optimized, resulting in much smaller run times for Room::sync_members() et al. (And a benchmark has been added to prove it!)
• And your usual load of refactorings and smaller bugfixes and improvements.

Rory&::LibMatrix (.NET 8 matrix bot/client library/SDK)

Emma [it/its] reports

Working on some scope cleanup, moving utilities into subclasses in order to make extensions more cleanly separated, along with some nice bot changes, in order to allow more versatility and customisation.

Changes

• Moved named filters to hs.NamedCaches.FilterCache
  • This also means that any named filter handling functions have been removed from AuthenticatedHomeserverGeneric
• Bot utils: AddMatrixBot no longer adds default commands (see additions)

Additions

• Added BodyWithoutReplyFallback to RoomMessageEventContent
• Added file/media cache at hs.NamedCaches.FileCache
  • This allows avoiding reuploads of files that are commonly reused, such as reaction images
• Added WithCustomEmoji(string mxcUri, string name) to MessageBuilder
  • You can now add custom emojis to messages, whether you're using a custom emoji pack or not
• Added WithCodeBlock(string code, string language = "") to MessageBuilder
• Added WithCollapsibleSection to MessageBuilder - sometimes a code blocks or details can get very long :)
• Added generic named cache implementation (NamedCache<T>(string name))
  • You can now easily implement your own caches mapped to account data as Dictionary<string, T>
  • Language is optional but can be omitted for clients that don't support it
• Added hs.NamedCaches in order to group named caches for different data types
• Bot utils: Added extended bot configuration support:
  • AddMatrixBot no longer adds command support or default commands
  • There's a configuration option (MentionPrefix), to allow mentioning the bot directly, as prefix
  • Added methods to services.AddMatrixBot():
    • AddCommandHandler() - Adds command handler
    • AddCommands(Type[] commandClasses) - Allows adding a list of command classes, without necessarily including builtins like !help
    • DiscoverAllCommands() - Registers all commands that can be found, including builtins such as !help
    • WithInviteHandler(Func<InviteEvent, Task> handler) - Allows easy addition of invite handling with custom logic (eg. must be in x room)
    • WithCommandResultHandler(Func<CommandResult, Task> handler) - Allows overriding command/permission error handling in order to add custom messages, or extra logging
• Bot utils: Added Aliases and Unlisted to ICommand, allowing bots to add aliases and hide commands from !help
• Bot utils: Added support for multiple prefixes, and prefixes with spaces (needs more testing)
• Bot utils: Added support for command names with spaces (needs more testing)

And, as always:

• The code is available at cgit.rory.gay!
  • All contributions are more than welcome, be it documentation, code, anything! Perhaps, example usecases, bots, ...?
• Discussion, suggestions and ideas are welcome in #libmatrix:rory.gay (Space: #mru-space:rory.gay)
• Got a cool project that you're working on and want to share, using LibMatrix? Be sure to let me know, I'd love to hear all about it!

Dept of Events and Talks 🗣️

Netzpolitischer Abend

HarHarLinks reports

Every first Tuesday of the month, the Digitale Gesellschaft e.V. ("digital society") hosts the Netzpolitischer Abend ("internet politics evening") at c-base Berlin, Germany, with - you may have guessed it already - talks covering digital and internet politics (usually in German). I hope that does not stop you, because the 134th edition from 1709665200 2024-03-05 20:00 CET featured talks on some great topics ranging from Feminist Internet Politics over Freedom of Press to the Latest News on Chat Control. The most interesting topics to you, dear TWIM reader, might be Nadine's update on her Polychat project (#polychat-ambassadors:datanauten.de) and Yan (aka yncyrydybyl aka t) giving a brief introduction on the Matrix protocol and Foundation, an overview how Matrix is being implemented in the German public administration, and answering questions from the in-person attendees. View Yan's talk on YouTube, Vimeo, or watch the live stream of the whole evening here. Here are some links to the things Yan shows in his presentation, I tried to also include links to the English versions where available:

• Matrix Manifesto and ecosystem
• Matrix in Germany/Matrix in Deutschland on Element's website
• TI-Messenger
• BwMessenger and BundesMessenger
• openDesk (previously "sovereign workplace"), more openDesk, openDesk in English
• Map of (mostly German and German language) Universities

_{Tip: If you'd like to follow Digitale Gesellschaft/Netzpolitischer Abend, you can subscribe to their social media or their website feed/youtube feed using your favorite tool; mine is called hookshot.}

Andy's Matrix bot live stream

andybalaam announces

I'm still live-streaming hacking on a Matrix bot in Rust every week, Thursdays at 15:00 UK time. Watch the streams live on https://andybalaam.uk.to/ and find the recordings at https://diode.zone/c/andybalaam_programming/videos

Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️

Gregor announces

External videos & posts, reaction images, polls… There are many things I like to see inline in conversations without having to follow a link. emweb is a prototype for a lightweight protocol to solve for all of these and more, while keeping implementation burden low.

I am looking for interested parties that want to help refine the idea, especially with regard to security and UX. There is also a lot more prototypes to build and spread inspiration. A few from the top of my mind: coin flips, games likes tic tac toe or chess, live location sharing…

So far I have two scrappy host implementations: one for the Matrix client Cinny (hosted here) and one for the Mastodon client Elk (hosted here). The Elk fork is not just an emweb-host but also a guest, so you can send links to Mastodon posts on it within the emweb fork of Cinny, and they will be directly embedded into your chat.

If this piqued your interest, talk to me @Gregor:matrix.org

Matrix Federation Stats

Aine announces

collected by MatrixRooms.info - an MRS instance by etke.cc

As of today, 9473 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 2816 (29.7%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation. The published directories contain 20025 rooms.

Stats timeline is available on MatrixRooms.info/stats

How to add your server | How to remove your server

Dept of Ping

Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server.

#ping:maunium.net

Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	maunium.net	247
2	nerdhouse.io	291
3	075-141-169-120.res.spectrum.com:8447	343
4	aguiarvieira.pt	346
5	plocki.org	420
6	chatinamatrix.xyz	474
7	ilmari.org	476
8	matrix.netho.tk	537
9	littlevortex.net	646
10	rom4nik.pl	678.5

#ping-no-synapse:maunium.net

Join #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.

Rank	Hostname	Median MS
1	dendrite.s3cr3t.me	154
2	aguiarvieira.pt	182
3	pain.agency	204.5
4	matrix.its-tps.fr	216
5	spritsail.io	235
6	transfem.dev	367
7	inu.is	439.5
8	matrix.org	524.5
9	herkinf.de	601
10	doctoruwu.uk	672

That's all I know

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!

Matrix self-defines as the go-to protocol for "open, secure, decentralised communications". The Matrix.org Foundation defines "maximising […] the number of online servers in the open federation" as a key objective in its mission. So why is the Matrix.org homeserver, probably the largest homeserver in the whole federation, still in open registration mode?

Let's dive into the technical, and user experience choices behind it.

A point of centralisation

The Matrix protocol is heavily decentralised. It goes beyond just federation: every single server in a room maintains a local copy of that room in sync with all the other servers participating in the conversation.

Matrix is often compared to email but for instant messaging. The first thing that comes to mind is that email might be federated, but it's no longer that decentralised. According to this article on sellcell.com, Gmail.com provides nearly 50% of the active email accounts in 2023, iCloud follows with 27.8%, and Outlook.com owns 13.1% of them.

The Matrix.org Foundation doesn't want to become the Gmail.com or Outlook.com of Matrix. It doesn't generate any revenue from its users and runs on donations. The costs of hosting, maintenance and support of the Matrix.org homeserver grow with the number of people using it.

A steep and steady growth comes with three significant issues:

1. The technical maintenance costs do not grow linearly with the number of users. The infrastructure itself costs more, but more time needs to be spent on research and development to make the backend scale.

2. Moderation becomes more difficult. The more reports the Trust & Safety team has to handle, the less time it can spend on tools to improve the moderation experience.

3. Support can't be automated and is very costly to scale. The more users on Matrix.org, the less responsive the support team can be (unless we find resources to hire more support team members) and the more frustrating it is for everyone involved.

In short: everyone stands to benefit from Matrix.org not being a supermassive homeserver that is difficult to leave.

Mindfulness of others

One of the goals of the Matrix.org Foundation is to maximise the number of Matrix users in the open federation. Another goal is to make sure Matrix remains decentralised by increasing the number of servers in that same open federation.

One of the fundamental aspects that makes Matrix appealing is decentralisation and (open) federation. Those concepts are not as difficult for the general public to understand as some claim. But we must acknowledge the general public is not regularly confronted with them and their implications when trying new apps.

For Matrix to gain traction outside of technical circles, it needs to be mindful of the time and habits of the general public. Whether we like it or not, people are used to trying apps, not protocols or providers. It is not reasonable to ask a user to pick a homeserver before they even know what a homeserver is, nor what this decision entails. People need to be able to download an app, try it right away, and get some (potential) value from it before making more advanced decisions.

We have made Matrix.org one of the most prominent entry points for people discovering Matrix because we believe inclusivity is one of the fundamental premises of Matrix's global success.

So then, how do we reconcile the need for ease of adoption with the goal of decentralisation?

A way in and a way out

Creating an account on Matrix.org is a typical first step in the Matrix user journey. Since agglomeration around a single instance is against the goals of Matrix and its Foundation, users need to have a way out and incentives to move.

To move to another homeserver, a user needs to be able to pick a homeserver and move there.

Picking a homeserver

Matrix community member Austin Huang created servers.joinmatrix.org to list all the servers with open registrations where people could find a new home. I am working on creating an official and curated version. We need the instance picker to work on Matrix.org's website, and provide data that the client apps can reuse and present to users who want to move away from Matrix.org.

Moving to the new homeserver

The Foundation will implement an account migration tool to allow people to migrate to another server. A proper portable identity mechanism would be better - however, the Foundation had to pause its development due to a lack of funding. Such a mechanism would also rely on a new room version. It would only allow migrating conversations that happened after a room upgrade to that hypothetical new version, which results in data loss.

The most reasonable solution

There are alternatives to a prominent onboarding homeserver like the Matrix.org homeserver. We don't find any of them satisfactory:

• Picking a server randomly when a user wants to sign up in the app is confusing and has a lot of security implications. This is not acceptable.
• Forcing the user to choose a server when they sign up is a highly cumbersome process that does not respect the user's time and resources.
• Portable identities are very desirable but will take time to materialise.
• P2P Matrix depends on a portable identity mechanism and is further away in the future.

As you can see, we at the Foundation need to strike a balance as we pursue goals that are occasionally in tension with one another, and the Matrix.org homeserver is a prime example. We are committed both to making Matrix more accessible, and to doing the work to decenter the Matrix.org homeserver.

You can help us achieve both: the Foundation needs your support! If you can afford to, please consider supporting us financially. If you want to contribute to the Foundation’s governance, consider becoming a member.