Half-Shot reported:
Gitter is joining the Matrix ecosystem!
It's true! Element has acquired Gitter from GitLab and will be implementing Gitter's current chat features in Matrix, before rebuilding Gitter as a Matrix client! Before all that however, the first step is to build a proper, modern bridge between the two networks, replacing the old one that's been around for years.
The full spectrum of news is:
And if you'd like to chat with your fellow Matrix and Gitter users, there's a bridged room already set up at #gitter:matrix.org!
Welcome to the community, Gitter! 🎉
anoa reported:
Spec
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
MSC Status
Merged MSCs:
- No MSCs were merged this week.
MSCs in Final Comment Period:
- MSC2788: Room version 6 as the default room version (merge)
- MSC2414: Make reason and score parameters optional for reporting content (merge)
New MSCs:
Spec Core Team
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, after dropping off MSC2414 in the FCP bucket, we're heading back for another big swing at widgets. MSC2774 (widget ID URL parameter), MSC2765 (widget avatars) and MSC2790 (modal widgets) are the focus for this week 🙂
kitsune told us:
being totally shook up about the Gitter announcement for a good part of the week, I completed the work on MSC2312 (it's about Matrix URIs, ICYMI) and it hopefully won't be long before it becomes the actual standard to share Matrix coordinates in popular web browsers. Ok, who am I kidding - before Matrix clients get on with adoption.
This will allow people to post links to Matrix rooms/messages/users and when clicked will open right in your favourite Matrix client. Super convenient and great for adoption!
Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go. It is currently serving as the basis for peer-to-peer Matrix experiments
Neil Alexander announced:
Build 38 of the iOS P2P Demo, as built using Element iOS and Dendrite, has been submitted to TestFlight and will hopefully be available for testers shortly (pending Apple approval)! It features lots of updates in the Dendrite backend which should hopefully make it more reliable.
If you have an iPhone or iPad and enjoy things that sometimes work, join the TestFlight here!
Neil reported:
This week we put out a new release candidate -1.21.0rc2
Highlights include
Add experimental support for sharding event persister. (#8294, #8387, #8396, [#8419]
Add experimental prometheus metric to track numbers of "large" rooms for state resolutiom. (#8425)
Add prometheus metrics to track federation delays. (#8430)
Fix messages not being sent over federation until an event is sent into the same room. (#8230, #8247, #8258, #8272, #8322)
Fix a regression in v1.21.0rc1 which broke thumbnails of remote media. #8438
Aside from that we are working on moving background processes away from the main process, actually getting the event persister sharding onto matrix.org and trying to improve Synapse stability generally.
Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go
Neil Alexander said:
Dendrite is nearing beta! Today we will be cutting a candidate 0.1.0rc1 version after a week of hunting and fixing bugs. We are on track to release version 0.1.0 next week, at which point we will be inviting people to try installing and using Dendrite!
Changes this week include:
Initial sync is fixed after a bug caused us to fall back on incremental sync
The
Content-Type
HTTP header is now handled properly when MIME-formattedInternal API calls over HTTP in polylith mode now use their own HTTP client with higher timeouts
Dendrite now tries harder to find missing auth events, using fetcher workers
Dendrite no longer falls back on
/state
unnecessarily, which was the cause of a major memory leak and high CPU usageFederation HTTP calls now include the
User-Agent
headerThe event
depth
field is now ignored in the federation APIWe now report the password change capability properly (thanks bn4t!)
Registration flows now include the
completed
field after a failure (thanks Lesterpig!)A bug in the previous event updater in the roomserver has been fixed
A bug where we didn't check our own old verify keys when verifying event signatures is fixed
A bug where we didn't handle event ID domains being different to the event origin in earlier room versions has been fixed
TLS fingerprints have been removed
Spec compliance is unchanged:
Client-Server APIs: 56%, same as last week
Server-Server APIs: 77%, same as last week
Recently, we updated some of our documentation and created a whole new set of easy first issues and medium to hard issues for contributors.
If contributing to Dendrite sounds like something you would be interested in, please take a look at these issues and join us in #dendrite-dev:matrix.org! There's also #dendrite:matrix.org for general Dendrite chat and updates and #dendrite-alerts:matrix.org for release notifications and important alerts.
Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs
timo reported:
Fix bug leading to many requests at the same time due to error in waiting code
Implement /query/profile over federation
Start work on /invite over federation
Thanks to everyone who supports me on Liberapay or Bitcoin!
Jason reported:
This week in Matrix Construct supports aarch64 (ARMv8) architectures. The experience has been phenomenal, with performance exceeding all expectations. Last week I wrote about all new vector code inside Construct using SSE through AVX-512 hardware acceleration in servers; that same code is now accelerated by SVE (Scalable Vector Extensions) on ARM architectures when you compile with clang.
This result is important: ARM virtual machines are offered at a significantly lower price compared to x86 from the same vendor. The systems are cheaper, require less power, but generally perform worse. The trick is to optimize the software for the weaker hardware. The benefit allows, for example, Matrix server hosts running Construct to make th eir profit margin from the lower TCO, getting more out of every computing cycle.
Construct is available at https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct and don't forget to idle and idle #construct:zemos.net.
Pierre announced:
YunoHost is an operating system aiming for the simplest administration of a server, and therefore democratize self-hosting.
Synapse integration had been updated to 1.19.3 (1.20.1 available in branch
testing
)Element Web integration had been updated to 1.7.7 (1.7.8 available in branch
testing
)
Tulir said:
I made a Signal bridge using signald.
Currently it supports bridging messages, reactions and signal read receipts. End-to-bridge encryption also exists (mautrix-python does all the work there). The bridge can be linked as a secondary device and possibly even registered as the main device, but I didn't actually test registering yet. Setup instructions are currently somewhat non-existent, but it's mostly the same as my other bridges plus signald as a separate daemon.
The repo is https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-signal and the room is #signal:maunium.net
He then popped up again a few days later to say:
After the initial announcement earlier this week, I implemented a few of the missing features like media bridging, and even added setup instructions.
The speed at which Tulir writes bridges scares me sometimes.
mx-puppet-discord is a (double)puppeting and relay bridge for discord, based on mx-puppet-bridge
sorunome said:
mx-puppet-discord got updated to the newest discord.js version, meaning you have to update if you want to continue to operate it, due to discord having changed their gateway url!
mx-puppet-discord now also supports the intent stuff, so be sure to update by 7th oct
If you run mx-puppet-discord (like I do), make sure to update by October 7th or it will stop working!
Half-Shot reported:
Hey folks, I wanted to give another shoutout to say that we are still accepting PRs as part of hacktoberfest. Contributing 4 PRs will get you a T-Shirt (sadly not a Matrix one). Obviously, please ensure your PRs are meaningful (no copyright adjustments, typo fixes).
You can work on any issue, but we've highlighted some issues that would be perfect for newcomers over at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Ahacktoberfest and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-slack/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Ahacktoberfest
Cadair reported:
In the hope of expanding the number of people contributing to the matrix-appservice-slack repo I have spent a chunk of my morning improving the issue descriptions and labelling up issues. If you are interested in fixing a little annoyance with the slack bridge or just fancy writing some typescript see the good first issue label on the repo.
Half-Shot reported:
The matrix.org team are delighted to bring you the latest in Slack bridging technology. Do not let the
minor version bump fool you, this release is packed with the good stuff. The headline feature is that our phase 1 encryption feature has landed and is free for users to experiment with. Head over to the
docs to see how to set this up.
There have been other notable changes, such as:
New configuration options to allow or deny some channels from being bridged.
Support removing reactions from Slack and Matrix messages.
Add onboarding message for new users when puppeting is enabled, to encourage them to puppet.
Improved feature documentation
(and many many bugfixes)
You can read the release information over at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-slack/releases
Looking forward to seeing all the new Hacktoberfest contributors! 🎃
sorunome offered:
Fluffychat 0.19.1 has been released!
Features
Implemented ignore list
Jump to events in timeline: When tapping on a reply and when tapping a matrix.to link
Display messages with up to 10 emotes or emoji bigger
New design for the chat list and message bubbles
Implement reactions
Implement password change
Implement deactivate user account
Fixes
Timeline randomly resorting while more history is being fetched
Automatically request history if the "load more" button is on the screen
Bruno said:
More browser compatibility work this week, making Hydrogen run IE11 on Windows 7, and on Safari on macOS and iOS (still with some caveats). Also fixed several bugs:
fix for unable to open session after a synapse bug manifested itself
prevent the app locking up when you start the app with previously unsent messages
fix sync errors being reported as "null" in the banner
handle timeout during initial sync (important for large accounts) (although I have seen 1 report that this still isn't fixed, please report if you can't login with a large account)
SpiritCroc said:
SchildiChat's codebase has been updated to Element 1.0.8!
Furthermore, there have been a few design updates:
Media items (pictures, videos, stickers) are no longer displayed in message bubbles
Bigger stickers
Avatars are now hidden in direct chats (when using dual-side message bubbles)
Finally, Schildi doesn't crash anymore if somebody sends an empty message.
SpiritCroc also mentioned some relavent links!
Manu announced:
1.0.14 is in on the release path. It has:
Room: Differentiate wordings for DMs
Room: New room details screen
Add Estonian support
Polishment in several areas and many bug fixes
Full changelog:
https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/releases/tag/v1.0.14 https://github.com/vector-im/element-ios/releases/tag/v1.0.13
Neil announced:
This week released v1.7.8
Highlights include
Secure Backup has been moved out of the registration flow to a toast when you first encounter an E2EE room, which simplifies the new user experience
Added options to hide various UI features when hosting a custom Element
Aside from that we continue to improve on widget support for resizable widgets, modal widgets and generally making widgets better.
We are also continuing to work on instrumenting the app, improving mobile support for matrix.to and making jitsi calling more reliable.
benoit told us:
Element Android: Version 1.0.8 is now available on the stores, it fixes issues with verification and PIN code among other issues (see https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/releases/tag/v1.0.8 for more details). Now we are working on improving performance when sending messages to rooms, and also improving global UX, especially of the home (rooms list). Search messages (in clear rooms for the moment) is coming soon, and it will be also possible to filter the room members list.
We will also spend some time on the new Android SDK, https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-android-sdk2, which is for the moment a quick extract of what we have in Element Android. We have to take care of it as a real product now: document it properly, set up CI, export Javadoc, develop a sample app, etc.
Gary Kim reported:
Element for Nextcloud v0.6.11 has been released this week. The new version comes with various bug fixes, dependency upgrades, and an upgrade to Element Web v1.7.8. The version is also compatible with Nextcloud 20 which is being released soon.
iinuwa told us:
Over the past couple of weeks, we've received PRs for all of the remaining federation endpoints, and all but one have already been merged!
Now that the end is in sight, we're turning our focus elsewhere. We're working on cleaning up and fixing a few bugs in our event signing code and soon will create tracking issues for filling out the Identity Service API.
TravisR reported:
t2bot.io has crossed 1M monthly active users
All of these users are Telegram/Discord users that have been brought into Matrix over the last 30 days. This doesn't appear to be a temporary spike either: over the last 8 weeks t2bot.io has been hovering at 900-950 thousand monthly active users, up from 600-700 thousand. Record-setting traffic levels have also been achieved, with matrix.org being able to keep up for the first time in a long while.
Overall it's a good sign to see so many communities making the jump to Matrix and sticking around ❤️
progserega told us:
I added zabbix-bot to my zabbix-matrix repo, which can get information about current problems from zabbix-server and send it to matrix user. https://github.com/progserega/matrix_zabbix
In our company we use it for get current situation and https://github.com/progserega/im_sender_service for sending events from zabbix.
I've found that having your systems reporting in a room while you chat around it can be really productive. Props to supporting yet another monitoring platform!
While 1-1 calls benefit from end-to-end encryption due to WebRTC, Jitsi group calls have always only benefitted from transport encryption.
A while ago Jitsi announced that they were adding E2EE to Jitsi. But did you know that it's using Matrix's Olm encryption under the hood? It's currently available as an experimental feature on https://meet.jit.si!
Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.
Rank | Hostname | Median MS |
---|---|---|
1 | fairydust.space | 368 |
2 | blob.cat | 543 |
3 | nuclearlimes.co.uk | 580 |
4 | nuclearlemons.uk | 889 |
5 | conduit.rs | 912.5 |
6 | mailstation.de | 1075 |
7 | matrix.org | 1092 |
8 | test.zemos.net | 1123 |
9 | shortestpath.dev | 1251.5 |
10 | chatcloud.net | 1338.5 |
We also now have a room where the ping bots are only hosted on non-Synapse servers! See the scoreboard below.
Rank | Hostname | Median MS |
---|---|---|
1 | conduit.rs | 104 |
2 | settgast.org | 154 |
3 | construct.grin.hu | 182 |
4 | blob.cat | 209 |
5 | grin.hu | 324.5 |
6 | dendrite.neilalexander.dev | 367 |
7 | test.zemos.net | 379 |
8 | maunium.net | 448.5 |
9 | conduit.nordgedanken.dev | 476 |
10 | inferiorlattice.com | 592 |
Alexandre Franke told us:
XKCD made another strip about messaging systems and I’m outraged to see that Matrix has been left out of it.
Not to worry though, we've fixed it up!
I hope you enjoyed this week and last's TWIM editions! Benpa will return next week for more of your regularly scheduled programming. Ciao!
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
Hi all,
We are ridiculously excited to announce that Gitter is joining the Matrix ecosystem and will become the first major existing chat platform to switch to natively speaking Matrix!
If you’re reading this from the Gitter community and have no idea what Matrix is: we’re an open source project that provides an open protocol for secure, decentralised communication - effectively the missing real-time communication layer of the open Web. The open Matrix network has more than 20M users on it and is growing fast (adding another 1.7M or so with the arrival of Gitter!)
Gitter is easily one of the best developer community chat systems out there, used by the communities of some massive projects (Node, TypeScript, Angular, Scala etc) and is a custodian of huge archives of knowledge via their chat logs. Gitter is unique in specifically focusing on developers: their tagline is literally “Where developers come to talk” (unlike Slack, which has barely any community features - or Discord, with its ban on unofficial clients, where developers are a bit of an afterthought relative to the gamers). With Gitter natively joining Matrix, we’re super excited to see the global developer community converging on the open Matrix network - and Gitter’s community rooms should see a huge new lease of life as they’re properly made natively available to the wider network as first class citizens :)
We’ve always had a bit of a crush on Gitter ever since we ended up opposite each other in the exhibition hall at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe 2014 - particularly when they demoed us not only their sexy webapp but also their official IRC server bridge at irc.gitter.im :D Over the years we’ve been gently nudging them to consider fully embracing Matrix, but perhaps understandably they’ve been busy focusing on their own stuff. However, earlier this year, our friends at GitLab (who acquired Gitter in 2017) reached out to explore the opportunity of Gitter becoming a core part of Matrix rather than a non-core project at GitLab… and we’ve jumped on that opportunity to bring Gitter fully into Matrix.
In practice, the way this is happening is that Element (the company founded by the Matrix core team to fund Matrix development) is acquiring Gitter from GitLab, with a combined Gitter and Element dev team focusing on giving Gitter a new life in Matrix! You can read about it from the Element angle over on the Element blog.
Practically speaking, we have a pretty interesting plan here, which we’d like to be very transparent about given it’s a little unusual:
At first, Gitter will keep running as it always has - needless to say, we will be doing everything we can to delight the Gitter community and keep the service in good shape.
Then we’re going to build out native Matrix connectivity - running a dedicated Matrix homeserver on gitter.im with a new bridge direct into the heart of Gitter; letting all Gitter rooms be available to Matrix directly as (say) #angular_angular:gitter.im, and bridging all the historical conversations into Matrix via MSC2716 or similar. We will of course do this entirely as open source, just as Gitter itself is open source thanks to GitLab releasing it under the MIT license in 2017. The plan is to comprehensively document our progress as the flagship worked example case study of “how do you make an existing chat system talk Matrix.”
This will of course replace the old and creaky matrix-appservice-gitter bridge we’ve been running since 2016. Gitter users will also be able to talk to other users elsewhere in the open Matrix network - e.g. DMing them, and (possibly) joining arbitrary Matrix rooms. Effectively, Gitter will have become a Matrix client.
Now we come to the interesting bit. Gitter has some really nice features which are sorely lacking in Element today:
...and we promise to do everything in our power to preserve and honour these features at all costs and continue to give the Gitter community the experience they’ve come to know and love.
However: in the medium/long term, it’s simply not going to be efficient for the combined Element/Gitter team to split our efforts maintaining two high-profile Matrix clients. Our plan is instead to merge Gitter’s features into Element (or next generations of Element) itself and then - if and only if Element has achieved parity with Gitter based on the above list - we expect to upgrade the deployment on gitter.im to a Gitter-customised version of Element. The inevitable side-effect is that we’ll be adding new features to Element rather than Gitter going forwards.
In practice, the main outcome in the end should be Element having benefited massively from levelling up with Gitter - and Gitter benefiting massively from all the goodies which Element and Matrix brings, including:
So, there you have it. It’s a new era for Gitter - and we look forward to reinvigorating Gitter’s communities over the coming months. We hope Gitter users will be blown away by the features arriving from Matrix… and we hope that Element users will be ecstatic with the performance and polish work that Gitter-parity will drive us towards. Imagine having guest access in Element that can launch and load a massive room in less than a second!
Finally, we would like to explicitly reassure the Gitter community again that we love and understand Gitter (it was one of the very first ever bridges we wrote for Matrix, for instance) - and we will be doing everything we can to not screw up our responsibility in looking after it. Please, please let us know if you have any concerns or if we ever fall short on this.
Any questions, come talk to us on #gitter:matrix.org - which is bridged with https://gitter.im/matrix-org/gitter. Exciting times ahead!
- Matthew, Amandine, and the whole Matrix, Element and Gitter teams.
Sid Sijbrandij (CEO at GitLab) and Matthew had a chance to sit down with The Changelog to talk about Gitter's Big Adventure - so tune in to hear the story first hand! Warning: contains non-ironic use of the word "synergy" :D
Hello all, and welcome to this week's addition of This Week in Matrix! Matrix is an open network protocol for secure, decentralized communication on the web.
My name is Andrew (aka anoa
), and I'm a Synapse developer at Element.
Thanks to Ben for letting me take over the reins of TWIM for this week! I'll
actually be doing the same for next week as well, so please adjust your
clocks to Anoa Nonstandard Time accordingly.
With that out of the way, let's jump right in!
It's demos week again. This time around we've got the following lineup:
Don't forget that Matrix Live is also available in podcast form, if you're into that sort of thing. Search for "Matrix Live" wherever you get your podcasts.
anoa (hey that's me!) told us:
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
MSC Status
Merged MSCs:
MSCs in Final Comment Period:
- No MSCs are in FCP.
New MSCs:
- MSC2790: Modal widgets (acquiring user input from a widget)
- MSC2788: Room version 6 as the default room version
- MSC2787: Portable Identities
- MSC2785: Event notification attributes and actions
- [WIP] MSC2783: Homeserver Migration Data Format
- MSC2782: Pushers with the full event content
- MSC2781: Deprecate the (reply) fallbacks in the Matrix specification
Spec Core Team
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, we've been rather busy with implementation, so we'll be continuing on with the same focus as last week. As a reminder, that's MSC2414 (making reason and score optional on reports).
Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go.
Neil Alexander announced:
This week has mostly been spent trying to improve stability and to fix bugs ahead of the beta release, which is so far still planned to go ahead in the next two weeks.
Changes this week include:
Room version 6 is now the default for newly created rooms
Soft-fail of events that aren't allowed by the current room state is now implemented
Support for configuring
old_verify_keys
has been added to the Dendrite configCorrect formatting for signing key IDs is now enforced in the configuration
Initial support for peeking over federation (MSC2444) is in progress and it "even works!" (thanks Matthew!)
Federated joins will now continue being processed even if the client gives up on the join due to a HTTP timeout
Backoff code has been refactored a bit more, and now correctly affects device list syncing
/make_join
now errors correctly if a federated user tries to join a room which all members have leftA bug where a single user could start multiple simultaneous federated joins to the same room has been fixed
Some initial (but unfinished) support for the
/key/v2/query
notary endpoint has been addedSignature verification has been updated to not fail if the event
origin
field is missing (although it still requires a signature from the domain of thesender
field)A number of places where we use SQL transactions have been updated with safe wrappers (thanks samcday!)
A couple of error codes on invite endpoints for room version 6 JSON violations have been fixed
Spec compliance has improved slightly for federation:
Client-Server APIs: 56%, same as last week
Server-Server APIs: 77%, up from 74% last week
As always, if contributing to Dendrite sounds like something you would be interested in, please feel free to join us in #dendrite-dev:matrix.org ! There's also #dendrite:matrix.org
Neil offered:
This week we released 1.20.0 (and 1.20.1) highlights include shadow banning support and including unread message counts in the sync response. This will help client developers and is a precursor to improving notification support.
We’ve also been looking at adding monitoring to get a better sense of which rooms are most expensive from a state resolution perspective, we also want a better way to track federation lag.
Up next we’ll move all background tasks away from the main process and try it out on matrix.org, we are hoping for a 10-15% saving in CPU. Event persistence sharding, specifically the new stream token format is on hold slightly while we work on a nasty race condition on start up of the event persister. We hope to get back to the main sharding project next week.
Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs
timo announced:
- Respect SRV record when sending requests over federation
- Don't send new requests to servers if we are already waiting
- Implement get_missing_events
- Bug fixes and code cleanup
We also started work on a system that retries failed or blocked requests after some time.
Thanks to everyone who supports me on "Liberapay" (https://liberapay.com/timokoesters) or Bitcoin!
Jason reported:
This week in Matrix concludes a summer of Construct where several transformative rounds of optimization took place. I'd like to talk about these achievements and why they are important for future directions.
Over the summer, Construct introduced new vector extensions to the project. As server software, our primary target is the datacenter which (for now) is dominated by x86 hardware. The latest features of x86 chips include AVX-2, AVX-512, and on-die GPU. These advancements are important because they help mitigate current limitations of hardware, such as the cubic relationship between a processor's frequency and its power consumption. These limitations mean that CPU cores aren't completing more cycles-per-second every iteration of their development -- they're not getting much faster.
The problem with threads is that they can introduce a lot of complications to a project. Construct is able to forego multi-threading as a network server because it is primarily IO-bound. The benefits to a single-thread design in both performance and simplicity cannot be overstated. This is why Construct stands to benefit the most from features which allow more work to be accomplished at every individual computing cycle.
Construct undertook several endeavors over the summer which directly leverage platforms featuring SSE, AVX, AVX-512, etc. As an added bonus, our approach is designed to effortlessly port to ARM's Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) as it becomes available (inside datacenters too!). Our focus has been JSON, Unicode, and finally Base64. Detailed explanations for each of these will need to be discussed in their own posts, but in summary:
Matrix specifies a canonical form of JSON which is not necessarily the same as the JSON the server receives. Therefor it is imperative that Construct is liberal with what JSON it accepts and correct with its transformation into canonical JSON. Over the summer, a portion of Construct's canonical transform received some optimization to go beyond the default method of character-by-character read-modify-write. As seen in [1], a streaming hardware-accelerated transform now processes at least 16 characters at a time (with more possible) without forward branching except for the parts where transformation needs to occur. One of these transformations is UTF-16 to UTF-8 surrogate conversion, which leads into the second endeavor.
Construct introduced a completely branch-free Unicode toolset in [2]. Among the functions offered is a custom transform of UTF-16 surrogate pairs to UTF-8 sequences. Using the new vector registers, Construct can transform two UTF-16 surrogates in parallel to output two UTF-8 sequences, or two UTF-16 surrogates in a pair to output one UTF-8 sequence. Unfortunately, these specific functions were written at fixed vector widths, so more work needs to be done to really take advantage of the widest hardware. Each surrogate is 6 bytes, and a surrogate pair is 12 bytes; therefor we cannot make use of the last 4 bytes of a 16 byte vector. However, with a little more work this approach can be extended to a 64 byte vector, capable of decoding 5 surrogate pairs and 10 individual surrogates in parallel!
Professor Daniel Lemire recently published a paper about fast Base64 from hardware acceleration in [3]. This approach is extremely elegant on the 64-byte-wide AVX-512 system. Prior to Construct's implementation of this in [4], the Boost library base64 encoding and decoding took roughly 20 and 25 cycles per character respectively. Our implementation on the same system, an old system with only SSE2 (not even AVX-512!) yields 5 and 6 cycles per character!
All of this helps lay a foundation for Construct to introduce Federated Media Rooms sometime in the future. Currently, Construct stores media in a separate database. Recently there's been work on a separate branch at [5] which stores actual file block inside events using Base64. It is for this reason sub-cycle and branchless JSON parsing and Base64 encoding is essential for maximum performance. The result is worthwhile, as the latency for querying the media database is slower than parsing and decoding the event content already in-hand.
That's all for today. Construct is available at https://github.com/matrix-construct/construct and don't forget to idle and perform #construct:zemos.net / #construct:maunium.net
Thanks!
It's really exciting to see Homeserver development ramping up from all angles, and nice that the protocol warts are slowly getting ironed out in the process.
Ananace told us:
Before I forget (more) about it, I pushed the 1.20.0 tag for my K8s-optimized container image as well as my Helm chart.
Pierre reported:
YunoHost is an operating system aiming for the simplest administration of a server, and therefore democratize self-hosting.
Synapse integration had been updated to 1.19.3 (1.20.0 available in branch
testing
)Element Web integration had been updated to 1.7.5 (1.7.7 available in branch
testing
)
Typo Kign announced:
Thanks to Arkaniad, v2.7.0 of my Matrix Helm chart for Kubernetes is released with support for exporting Prometheus metrics. It pairs well with the Synapse Grafana dashboard.
Ananace said:
And just pushed the 1.20.1 tag too for my K8s-optimized container image as well as my Helm chart.
andreas announced:
The synapse docker image from AVENTER (https://www.aventer.biz), does support PowerPC (ppc64le) and ARM64 architecture now. But at the moment only under the docker tag "ppc". https://hub.docker.com/r/avhost/docker-matrix/tags?page=1&name=ppc We will be happy to get feedback.
As a Synapse developer, it's great to see the community making personal and enterprise Matrix deployments more accessible!
sorunome told us:
Fluffychat 0.19.1 has been released!
Features
Implemented ignore list
Jump to events in timeline: When tapping on a reply and when tapping a matrix.to link
Display messages with up to 10 emotes or emoji bigger
New design for the chat list and message bubbles
Implement reactions
Implement password change
Implement deactivate user account
Fixes
- Timeline randomly resorting while more history is being fetched
- Automatically request history if the "load more" button is on the screen
Sorunome briefly mentioned afterwards that there is no 0.19.0 due to some accidental messed up tagging, and that it was easiest to just call the new version 0.19.1.
Neil offered:
This week we put out a new release candidate 1.7.8-rc.1 highlights include:-
Secure Backup has been moved out of the registration flow to a toast when you first encounter an E2EE room, which simplifies the new user experience
Added options to hide various UI features when hosting a custom Element ...along with various smaller fixes.
Aside from that the work to improve the widget experience continues with modal widget next on the agenda.
Next week we will continue to improve widgets and add some more instrumentation into the app.
Bruno said:
Released 0.1.0 (and 0.1.1) this week with read-only session backup enabled 🎉 Also doing more work to make Hydrogen work on IE11 on Windows 7 (it does already for Windows 10), Safari and other browsers where you get
TransactionInactiveError
during login, hope to release that soon.
I need to give Hydrogren a shot myself, the quick speeds and low RAM usage are really attractive.
Manu offered:
This week, room settings have been updated with a new intermediate screen. The codebase saw the introduction of an AppCoordinator (in swift) which will help us to have a better control on navigation within the app AND to use swift from end to end.
uhoreg told us:
Polyjuice Client v0.3.0 has been released. This release includes many breaking changes. ("Breaking" in the sense of API changes, rather than the sync process suddenly failing to work, which was already featured in a previous release.) This release also includes many changes, such as the client managing more bookkeeping, detecting if it got logged out, and supporting more Matrix features. See the release notes for more information.
uhoreg reported:
Igor is a bot framework for Elixir. Igor v0.2.0 has been released. The main change is updating it to use Polyjuice Client 0.3.0.
erdnaxeli announced:
Hi!
I present you a new project I've been working on for some time. It's a bot that allows you to use the admin API through matrix, by typing commands to the bot. The inspiration comes from the OperServ-like bots that allow IRC operators to administrate an IRC server.
The bot exposes some of the available admin APIs and aims to provide some more high level commands by combining different APIs. There is currently one "high level command",
!room garbage-collect
, which allow you to purge from your HS all rooms without local users.The project is written in crystal and is my first project in this language. It should be stable in normal conditions, but don't hesitate to fill issues. A Docker image is provided for more convenience.
I hope you will find this project useful 🙂
People administering their Synapse deployment through Matrix itself! How deep does the rabbit hole go?
Tulir reported:
benpa wanted a bot that replies with a songwhip.com link whenever someone sends a music link (youtube, spotify, apple music, etc), so I wrote a small maubot plugin to do that: https://github.com/maubot/songwhip
It's available at @songwhip:maunium.net
I'm also desperately in need of this for the 10 open.spotify.com
links that get thrown at me every week. Thanks Tulir!
jj reported:
There's a new bot! Cyberbot.
It supports E2EE and can be easily extended with Python plugins. Can be used e.g. for GitLab notifications, automated user invites, room creation, and of course can be programmed to react to any message posted in a room.
sorunome said:
Soru made a new thing, matrix-gotify. It is a gotify plugin to receive matrix notifications. This means, you can now receive matrix push notifications on your android phone self-hosted without the need of google services! That is why putting the full event in the push notification is actually not a privacy leak in this case.
This plugin could also be used to receive push notifications on any other kind of device that gotify supports.
Please note that this is independent of any matrix client - you don't even need to run one to be able to use this!
I asked whether an OpenPush-like solution be built on top of this , and Sorunome responded that someone had already started working on just that! https://github.com/gotify/android/pull/115
This would allow other matrix clients on your phone to get their push notifications through your gotify client, instead of needing to run a process each. Great for battery life without proprietary Google blobs!
js got Synapse running in a car on a German highway:
the setup is a cigarette lighter to 2x 230V converter, one being used to power the RockPro64, the other being used to power my notebook. My notebook is connected to the hotspot from my phone, while also being connected to a USB ethernet, the other end of which is plugged into the RockPro64.
The notebook then acts as a gateway, as well as SSHing to a tiny VPS with -R, to get a public port, and forwarding that traffic to the RockPro64.
Maybe one day we'll all have an embedded Synapse homeserver in our cars. P2P E2EE car comms anyone?
reivilibre announced:
https://github.com/matrix-org/voip-tester
I have been through the perils of setting up a TURN server and having VoIP continue to fail, whilst spending hours scratching my head and staring at Wireshark without getting anywhere. When I was given free reign over project choice last year during my internship, I chose to start a tool that tests your homeserver's VoIP configuration, hoping it would be useful to both me and the community at large.
It saw some progress but I never managed to iron out some of the 'last few things' or put a pretty front on it — until about 2 weeks ago, when I got some more time to do it.
There are known issues — such as the scores being very arbitrary, wrong and misleading; it crashes Chromium every time (on my machine) and it completely misbehaves in Brave Browser (on my machine). It may also not be the prettiest (but hopefully it is at least somewhat inoffensive). I hope to work on these annoying issues soon.
I have deployed a test instance at https://test.voip.librepush.net — it can be tried in a WebRTC-supporting browser (probably Firefox if you want half a chance). Please don't take it to heart if you get a Fail or Poor score — it's probably not your fault. :)
Oliver was interning with us at Element this Summer. Fixing up and releasing this VoIP tester was part of it, but he's still working on it in his spare time even though his internship has finished :)
Through this I found out that I forgot to turn on my turnserver on my homeserver again. Thanks Oliver!
Samuel told us:
I started an article series about Matrix on my german blog. The goal is to make it easier for new users to get started with Matrix. https://blog.sp-codes.de/werde-teil-der-matrix-matrix-teil-1/
Guides like these are the essential entrypoints to a project for a lot of users. The more, in different languages, the merrier!
Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.
Rank | Hostname | Median MS |
---|---|---|
1 | thomcat.rocks | 896 |
2 | matrix.vgorcum.com | 965 |
3 | conduit.rs | 1226.5 |
4 | neko.dev | 1232 |
5 | kif.rocks | 1396 |
6 | chatserver.ca | 1533.5 |
7 | jauriarts.org | 1949.5 |
8 | settgast.org | 2328 |
9 | vkane.cz | 2419 |
10 | conduit.nordgedanken.dev | 2519 |
timo told us:
Here we look at how fast ping bots respond.
I changed the formatting of the plot a bit to make it more readable. Note that it is now using a log scale which allows us to see more data at the same time.
Tulir reported:
Now that we have multiple somewhat federating Matrix homeserver implementations, I decided to make a ping room where all the echo bots are hosted on second-gen homeservers: #ping-no-synapse:maunium.net. Synapse users are still allowed to join and
!ping
, but all the pongs will come from non-Synapse servers.Based on observations in that room so far, the new server implementations don't like eachother very much.
Rank | Hostname | Median MS |
---|---|---|
1 | conduit.rs | 110 |
2 | pc.koesters.xyz:59003 | 162 |
3 | cd.mau.dev | 162.5 |
4 | maunium.net | 181 |
5 | c.mau.dev | 238 |
6 | dendrite.neilalexander.dev | 370 |
7 | conduit.nordgedanken.dev | 427 |
8 | inferiorlattice.com | 592 |
9 | matrix.org | 1294 |
10 | grin.hu | 3560.5 |
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
Synapse 1.20.0 is here!
Highlights of 1.20.0 include:-
Also take note that in a future release, we will be dropping support for accessing Synapse's Admin API using the /_matrix/client/* prefixes
. More details follow in the changelog.
Get the new releases from any of the usual sources mentioned at https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md. 1.20.0 is on github here, and 1.20.0rc4 is here.
The changelog for 1.20.0 is as follows:
No significant changes since v1.20.0rc5.
Historically, the Synapse Admin API has been accessible under the /_matrix/client/api/v1/admin
, /_matrix/client/unstable/admin
, /_matrix/client/r0/admin
and /_synapse/admin
prefixes. In a future release, we will be dropping support for accessing Synapse's Admin API using the /_matrix/client/*
prefixes. This makes it easier for homeserver admins to lock down external access to the Admin API endpoints.
In addition to the below, Synapse 1.20.0rc5 also includes the bug fix that was included in 1.19.3.
/versions
endpoint for whether new rooms default to using E2EE. (#8343)/send
requests. (#8342)Synapse 1.20.0rc4 is identical to 1.20.0rc3, with the addition of the security fix that was included in 1.19.2.
Some older clients used a disallowed character (:
) in the client_secret
parameter of various endpoints. The incorrect behaviour was allowed for backwards compatibility, but is now being removed from Synapse as most users have updated their client. Further context can be found at #6766.
/federation/v1/user/devices/
API by only returning devices with encryption keys. (#8198)Re-starting finished log context PUT-nnnn
warning when event persistence failed. (#8081)client_secret
parameter used in various endpoints. (#8101)/sync
requests to fail with a 404 if you had a very old outstanding room invite. (#8110)users
table from startup code. (#8271)HTTP 308
redirects due to an upstream library not supporting them. Contributed by Ryan Cole. (#8120)name
to the /users
admin API, which filters by user ID or displayname. Contributed by Awesome Technologies Innovationslabor GmbH. (#7377, #8163)/submit_token
requests on incorrect session ID if request_token_inhibit_3pid_errors
is turned on. (#7991)get_current_token
into two since there are two different use cases for it. (#8113)ChainedIdGenerator
. (#8123)get_auth_chain_ids
. (#8132)StreamIdGenerator
and MultiWriterIdGenerator
to have the same interface. (#8161)MultiWriterIdGen
used by events stream. (#8164, #8179)SlavedIdTracker.advance
have the same interface as MultiWriterIDGenerator
. (#8171)is_guest
parameter from, and add safeguard to, MessageHandler.get_room_data
. (#8174, #8181)LoginRestServlet
's helper methods, and move them to AuthHandler
for easier reuse. (#8182)wait_for_stream_position
to allow multiple waiters on same stream ID. (#8196)MultiWriterIDGenerator
work for streams that use negative values. (#8203)@cached
. (#8240)order
field from federation send queues. (#8245)TechRadar have published a fairly thorough Element secure messenger review. This covers the Web, Android and iOS clients, and appears to use the matrix.org server for signup.
The review is very positive, awarding 4.5/5, and concludes:
The Element messenger platform scores highly for its approach to security and its commitment to decentralization, and it's definitely going to be of interest to businesses wanting control over their own chats – as well as plenty of individual users as well.
anoa told us:
Here's your weekly spec update! The heart of Matrix is the specification - and this is modified by Matrix Spec Change (MSC) proposals. Learn more about how the process works at https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals.
MSC Status
Merged MSCs:
- No MSCs were merged this week.
MSCs in Final Comment Period:
New MSCs:
Spec Core Team
In terms of Spec Core Team MSC focus for this week, MSC1960 has made it into FCP, so this week our focus is MSC2414.
Neil announced:
This week we put out two point releases to fix critical bugs. At the very least ensure that you have upgraded to 1.19.2 which is a security release but you may as well go the whole hog and upgrade to the hot off the press 1.19.3. We will release 1.20.0 early next week.
Aside from that we continue to work on performance analysis and the sharding of the event persister continues - it’s proving to be a really tough job but we are getting there. We’ve also been making progress on the room knocking implementation
This week we say goodbye to Oliver (reivilibre) as a leaving present he fixed a long standing bug that prevented servers catching up after a federating outage and as we speak is furiously trying to finish a service to test TURN configuration. Thanks Oliver!
Dendrite is a next-generation homeserver written in Go
Neil Alexander said:
Not much has happened this week, as the Dendrite team have been taking some time off. However, we still have a couple of changes to report:
Support for rejected events has been merged
Work on soft-fail has begun (although not complete yet)
A new mechanism for avoiding SQLite parameter limits was contributed (thanks HenrikSolver!)
Spec compliance is on the up:
Client-Server APIs: 56%, same as last week
Server-Server APIs: 74%, up from 71% last week
Conduit is a Matrix homeserver written in Rust https://conduit.rs
timo announced:
Welcome back! This week we made some groundbreaking progress - this is not a joke, we found a bug in Synapse while breaking multiple Matrix rooms, causing the Matrix team a lot of unnecessary stress. Let me explain: The good news is that Conduit is starting to federate now. This means that you should be able to join all public rooms of the Matrix network and exchange messages. Note that Conduit does not do all the checks it should be doing yet making it stop sending messages from time to time as well as that advanced features like loading the history, syncing temporary data like read receipts or accepting invites are not implemented yet.
The bad news is that, while Synapse is happy to accept Conduit's messages when it is already part of the room, joining into one of the rooms Conduit servers are part of didn't work because of an event validation bug. The Matrix team did an excellent job at fixing this bug and releasing a Synapse patch the same day, but the damage has been done making a few rooms inaccessible to old Synapse servers. Thanks to everyone who supports me on "Liberapay" (https://liberapay.com/timokoesters) or Bitcoin!
js reported:
I ported Synapse + its dependencies to NetBSD and it is now in pkgsrc as
chat/matrix-synapse
. This means that Synapse is now easily installable on any operating system that supports pkgsrc (which is many, e.g. NetBSD, Linux, macOS, Solaris, AIX, Haiku, …). And while at it, I also ported mautrix-hangouts + dependencies (in pkgsrc aschat/mautrix-hangouts
).
Pierre told us:
YunoHost is an operating system aiming for the simplest administration of a server, and therefore democratize self-hosting.
Synapse integration had been updated to 1.19.1 (1.19.2 available in branch
testing
)Element Web integration had been updated to 1.7.5 (1.7.7 available in branch
testing
)
Ananace offered:
Both image tags and a new chart version are hereby pushed for 1.19.2 for my Synapse image and Helm chart
then later
Just pushed the updates for the K8s-optimized Synapse image and chart for 1.19.3
Half-Shot said:
Hey bridge developer enthusiasts! Myself and ChristianP (bridge crew of matrix.org) have been working hard on freshening up the matrix-appservice-bridge library. It's no secret that it was using "classic" Javascript rather than ES6 syntax, was poorly documented in places and there were no types at all to make use of.
But that's all changed now, the 2.0.0-rc1 release brings fresh types, new convienence methods, a total swichover from Bluebird Promises to native Promises and much much more. If you are looking to quickly get set up writing bridges, it's never been easier.
Check out the slack-starter project to get your first taste of bridge excellence and see what you think.
As this is an RC, feedback is valuable and logging bugs helps us all. Please do so if you encounter any issues 😄
Half-Shot reported:
Hi encryption fans. This week the bridge team has been churning away at adding support for encrypted rooms in the
matrix-appservice-bridge
library, to enable support inmatrix-appservice-irc
,matrix-appservice-slack
, and anyone else using the library. This is probably the most exciting feature the library has seen in a long time!The feature will be a simple config toggle, so existing bridges will have to do very little work to support it.
The first phase plans to use Pantalaimon with bridge users syncing like real users, but eventually the hope is that this will be all built into the library. Come check out this issue to keep track of progress.
Neil announced:
Released 1.7.6 and 1.7.7 highlights include
Redesigned right panel where top right actions are now revealed via the i icon
Widgets can now be opened in the right panel
Widgets won't be visible in the Apps Drawer (top of timeline) by default (except Jitsi) - you need to pin them from the right panel
Widgets can now be resized
- A new version of matrix.to is now live you can check it out here, bug reports welcome
A new feature to defer e2ee set up until the user actually wishes to use an e2ee channel.
A series of config flags to remove various features from the UI thereby simplifying the experience.
miruka said:
0.6.3 and 0.6.4 were released this week, and I'm now working on desktop notifications support and push rules control.
Added
Add a system tray icon.
A left click will bring up the Mirage window, middle will quit the application and right will show a menu with these
options.
Add a
closeMimizesToTray
setting to the config file, defaults tofalse
.Controls whether closing the Mirage window will leave it running in the system tray, or fully quit the application.
Add a discrete read marker indicator to messages, shows how many people
have this event as their last seen one in the room.
A way to see who read the message and when will be added in the future.Themes: add
chat.message.localEcho
andchat.message.readCounter
color propertiesAdd a
zoom
setting, defaults to1.0
Add a
lexicalRoomSorting
setting, to sort rooms by their name instead ofrecent activity.
A restart is needed to apply changes to this setting.Changed
Restrict Mirage to a single instance per config folder, trying to launch a
new window will instead focus the existing one.
TheMIRAGE_CONFIG_DIR
andMIRAGE_DATA_DIR
environment variables can beset to run different "profiles" in parallel.
Reduce the visible lag when opening a chat page, switching rooms should be
a lot smoother
When using the
focusPreviousMessage
andfocusNextMessage
keybinds, if nomessage is focused and the timeline has been scrolled up, focus the message in the center of the view instead of returning to the
bottom of the timeline and focusing the last one.
Don't re-center the room list on clicks by default.
This prevents the list from jumping around every time a room is selected.
The previous behavior can be restored with the newcenterRoomListOnClick
setting.
Show a better terminal error message than "Component is not ready" when the
window creation fails, giving details on what went wrong in the code
If an account's access token is invalid (e.g. our session was signed out
externally), say so with a popup and cleanly remove it from the UI, instead of spamming the user with errors.
Rename message context menu option "Debug this event" to just "Debug"
Unify up/down and (shift+)Tab navigation for the account Sessions page
Changes to the UI scale/zoom via keybinds are now persisted across restarts
Themes:
uiScale
is now bound towindow.settings.zoom
.This change is necessary to keep the zoom keybinds working.
Fixed
benoit offered:
Element Android 1.0.7 has been released (still stuck in Google pipes writting those lines), and will be quickly followed by 1.0.8 to fix a problem with cross signing verification.
We are working to implement search of messages in a room and we keep on fighting bugs and improving performance of the application.
We are also iterating on the home screen, to improve user experience, and try to satisfy users with a few rooms as well as users with several hundreds of rooms.
Manu said:
This week, we released 1.0.12 with several bug fixes including the one for background crashes due to PushKit
Bruno told us:
Released 0.037 on Monday with some polish for E2EE:
remove outdated devices when querying
update room summary with decrypted events, also when retrying decryption
various crash protections
keep megolm session with earliest index when receiving a room key we already know about
add new icon
fix issue where olm would be loaded twice when login failed
show decryption errors in timeline
show encryption enabled tile in timeline
The rest of the week was implementing session backup, which I hoped would be ready to release today but it needs some more polish unfortunately. In the meantime, here's a GIF teaser:
Thank you to Krille, who told us:
FluffyChat version 0.18.0 is out now in F-Droid, Testflight and soon the PlayStore:
Features
- Added translations: Armenian, Turkish, Chinese (Simplified), Estonian
- Url-ify matrix identifiers
- Use server-side generated thumbnails in cleartext rooms
- Add option to send images in their original resolution
- Add additional confirmation for sending files & share intents
- Add option to opt-in to report issues / crashes to sentry
- Write keys to online key backup, fully implementing online key backup
Changes
- Tapping links, pills, etc. now does stuff
- Better handling of sending messages in bad network
- Better recovery of "keys not cached"
- E2EE is enabled again
Fixes:
- Various html rendering and url-ifying fixes
- Added support for blurhashes
- Image viewer now eventually displays the original image, not only the thumbnail
Hemppa the bot is a multi-purpose Matrix bot for writing new functionality easily with Python.
Cos said:
Hemppa gained a small but big feature for making fediverse better: per-room Mastodon tooting support. This means that you can set up a Mastodon account in your room and anyone with moderator rights can toot to that account. This way you and your roommates can super easily send toots to the world directly from Matrix. Mastodon (unlike the big alternative) supports RSS feeds out of the box so it's very easy to subscribe to users and hashtags with stock RSS bot. Toot #hemppathebot if you like it! Another new contribution worth mentioning is welcome which can send welcome messages to users registering on the server or joining a room. https://github.com/vranki/hemppa
Ananace said:
Another week, another Ruby SDK release. This time adding a little fix to avoid duplicate state events being passed twice to the application if identical ones arrive in both state and timeline, also adds a global state event handler and moves room event handling to not depend on room instances themselves.
Asked how much the SDK is used in production, Ananace said:
a little, we've hooked Matrix into our server orchestration / configuration management system TheForeman - which is a Rails application. Also got a colleague who's doing a bot to linkify internal ticket IDs.
iinuwa told us:
Thanks to @q-b and @jtescher we have implemented more of the federation endpoints (bringing us up to about 85% completion) and every (one) endpoint of the Push Gateway API!
We fixed a bug where federation endpoints expected access tokens instead of server signatures for authentication. In the future, we may add an API that requires signatures on requests.
Finally, we've also continued progress on the non-exhaustive type updates for backwards compatibility; we expect to finish this within the coming weeks.
New Contributors
@jtescher, not new but forgot to mention earlier!
anoa announced:
v0.2.0 of matrix-reminder-bot has been released! This releases includes lots of bugfixes, updates and polishing. Find the list below:
Features
Better support for command prefixes other than the default
!
.Just writing
!silence
now silences the currently active alarm.The bot will now print the correct syntax of a command if the user fails to follow it.
The bot will reply to events if it cannot decrypt them, as well as offer helpful tips that both the user and bot operator can try to fix things.
Bugfixes
Timezones. They should finally work correctly! ...no 100% guarantees though.
Alarms were a bit broken. They're fixed now.
Fix commands with formatting and newlines not being picked up by the bot.
Fix non-latin characters preventing reminders from being deleted.
Internal changes
Add a dev-optimised Dockerfile for quicker iteration during development.
Better wording revolving alarms. They're just reminders that alarm repeatedly when they go off.
Log why the bot is unable to start.
Don't print "Unknown help topic" in case the user is trying to ask another bot for help.
The config dict is now a singleton.
Type hints everywhere!
Additionally, the minimum Python version is now 3.6. matrix-reminder-bot is made with nio-template.
Here we reveal, rank, and applaud the homeservers with the lowest ping, as measured by pingbot, a maubot that you can host on your own server. Join #ping:maunium.net to experience the fun live, and to find out how to add YOUR server to the game.
Rank | Hostname | Median MS |
---|---|---|
1 | fairydust.space | 412 |
2 | matrix-dev.kapsi.fi | 1308 |
3 | utzutzutz.net | 1519 |
4 | blob.cat | 1521 |
5 | r23s.eu | 1915.5 |
6 | conduit.rs | 2149 |
7 | maescool.be | 2759 |
8 | halogen.city | 2774.5 |
9 | uraziel.de | 3253 |
10 | kapsi.fi | 3713 |
timo announced:
Normally the ping shows how long other servers take to receive the sending-server's message. Some servers receive it quickly, some take hours. All this flows into the statistic of the sending server. I wrote a small program that's the other way around. Instead of measuring the sending-server's ping, it associates each measurement with an echo-bot (instead of the sending server), so this plot shows which maubots are the fastest to respond (it's probably not accurate at all, because most of the pings were started on conduit servers this week, but it's interesting nevertheless):
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
This is part of a series of reports on the six projects assigned to Matrix for Google Summer of Code 2020.
View project: Moving matrix-ircd
to async/await and futures
0.3
The goal of this project was to port matrix-ircd
from the outdated combinators style of futures
0.1 to the new-and-improved style of futures
0.3. As initially proposed, this greatly improves code readability and removes the convoluted compiler errors that were pervasive in futures
0.1
The matrix-ircd project functions as a bridge between two chat platforms: Internet relay chat (irc) and Matrix. matrix-ircd lets you use any standard IRC Client to communicate with Matrix chatrooms and direct messages.
This project is mentored by Philipp Mandler (@phlmn) and Jonas Platte (@jplatte). I would like to thank them for the helpful advice and code reviews they have given me over the course of GSoC 2020.
Since much of the code was written in late 2016, there were many portions of the code that were unidiomatic and produced compiler errors. The first step I made was to remove all compiler errors from cargo
and clippy
in #64.
Additional tests were then written in various parts of the codebase to ensure that the upgrade would produce the same results. These changes were made in #64 and #66.
Since the project master branch currently used a custom http implementation, I moved it to use hyper, a fast and correct http implementation that already supported async/await. Additionally, I moved the module that most utilized http, matrix
, to async-await and the new hyper
code. Not only did these changes shrink the code by ~700 lines, they also removed a lot of unnecessary complexity. These changes were made in #67.
The last large module remaining, irc
, was then ported to irc
, along with its dependencies in stream_fold.rs
and its upstream user in the bridge
module. The most exciting part of these changes was the removal of the futures
0.1 dependency. All code was now running in futures
0.3! These changes also moved away from tasked-futures which further improved code readability. This PR was in #71.
Since the bulk of the changes were now complete, I moved onto bug fixes. As @jplatte mentioned in #71, the current single threaded approach to the application was not ideal. In #72 I updated all code to be multithreaded-compatible.
Lastly, In #77 I included more tests to functions with heavy changes, added additional logging, removed unnecessary complexity that was introduced to keep code as "1:1" as possible, and added TLS support to hyper
so that https would work. This patch also fixed a rather difficult bug regarding the irc TCP streams and the buffer they were reading into.
Based on my personal testing there is no additional work to be done in the realm of updating to async/await. All tests pass and the IRC server and matrix bridge function as expected. @jplatte kindly announced in the This Week In Matrix blog that we will be conducting public testing of the async_await
branch on github. Barring any issues the async/await code should be merged into the master branch in the next few weeks.