We'd like to welcome Ercom as the newest Silver Member of the Matrix.org Foundation and are excited to announce a couple other new members before the end of the year 🚀
The Matrix.org Foundation stewards the Matrix protocol specification, facilitates open governance, and convenes the ecosystem. While Matrix continues growing in adoption, the Foundation's funding is not keeping pace. If your organization builds on Matrix and is invested in its future, the time to become a funding member is now.
From the department of no-the-other-Matrix: This week saw news of Europol shutting down an encrypted messaging service called MATRIX. All indications are that this has nothing to do with the Matrix protocol, and we are grateful to the agencies and publications that have made an effort to disambiguate. We are, of course, monitoring the situation as more information becomes available.
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.
Following on from last week, the SCT continues to work towards the next spec release, expected in mid-December with Account Suspension, backwards compatibility for captions, and likely some further work towards Matrix 2.0 in the form of crypto MSCs.
Folks are encouraged to raise their MSCs for review in the SCT Office as soon as they feel it's ready for broad review. This helps ensure there are minimal process delays, and feedback can be incorporated into the feature design early. This is especially important for Matrix 2.0 MSCs, which the SCT hopes to be able to release in the new year.
Happy Friday! Synapse 1.120.2 was released this week. This releases includes fixes for several high-severity vulnerabilities. Please update as soon as possible if you have not already.
In addition, Synapse 1.121.0rc1 was released in the second half of this week. This release candidate includes new features - please test it on your non-production deployments and report bugs if you are able to! Note that this release candidate indeed includes the security fixes from 1.120.2.
You can now send multiple files at once. The login page got a redesign with SSO as the new default action (legacy password login still available in the context menu at the top right corner).
MAS account settings now available in the profile, making FluffyChat ready for the Matrix OIDC change! 💪
Lot's of new colors and style settings with much better chat wallpapers also landed in this release. 🐾
RC 1.9.9 has been sent for verification, the RC has been delayed to avoid some bugs to be shipped in production, that promptly fixed.
Knocking rooms has made great progress and is getting close to be completed
We are also working on adding more options in the room details, to allow changing alias, room visibility and other settings that are already available on Web but not on X
Media gallery of a room has also made great progress, and first simple implementation is going to reach Nightly very soon!
Share extension is back, and will be available on the coming app store release, alongside the option of adding captions to the media you are going to share!
NeoBoard Widget v2.0.0 is a major version update due to some significant tooling changes. Still, it has several new user-facing features.
We picked these highlights for you:
Custom font sizes for text shapes
The font size in text shapes can now be set to a specific size. We offer a list of recommended values but you can always use the auto sizing, which adjusts the font size to the dimensions of the shape.
Inserting or importing a PDF
We extended the "Import" and "Insert here..." feature to also support PDF files, alongside the native .nwb format. Doing this will render each PDF page as an image in a new slide.
A demo of importing a matrix flyer to NeoBoard
Monitoring the user's online state
We added a snackbar to the board that provides troubleshooting information when there are issues saving your data.
For example, the widget monitors your network connection status to determine if you’re online, making it clear that content changes to the board or updates from collaborators cannot sync while you’re offline.
It also looks out for rate-limiting scenarios and provide context-aware information when it is possible.
Updated tooling and build process
In this release, we migrated away from Facebook's Create React App (CRA) framework in favour of the new and actively maintained Vite framework. We also swapped out our testing framework from jest to the Vite-native Vitest.
This is modernizing the build process and improving security, but requiring updates to build scripts, configurations, and imports due to the switch to ECMAScript modules (ESM).
Support for IPv4-only deployments
It is now possible to deploy the widget container on hosts without IPv6 support through a configuration option. This can be toggled easily through our Helm charts.
Beyond that, the container image also gained the ability to also add your own files with custom config that will be added to the nginx server block config, should you need that.
Read more about both in our documentation.
We also released updates to our NeoChoice and NeoDateFix widgets to match this feature.
...and more!
As usual, we try to improve existing features and fix bugs whenever we can. Check out the changelog for a more detailed report of what has changed.
If you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to us using our public room #nordeck:nordeck.io.
PS: make sure you check out Christian's NeoBoard Advent Calendar in the Dept of Interesting Projects 🛰️!
Happy to announce that the pypi package vodozemac has gotten its first release in 2 years to 0.8.1, matching the latest (at the time of writing) published version of the official rust crate of the same name.
The published packages include binary distributions across many different platforms and architectures (everything supported by maturin), as well as a srcdist.
The previous version was published from the now-abandoned matrix-nio/vodozemac-bindings. In the light of the deprecation of libolm, it became clear that modernized python bindings to the supported matrix encryption library is an absolute must, and it's possible now!
The new repo itself is https://github.com/matrix-nio/vodozemac-python
It's very much a WIP, with documentation and certain usability QoL items still left to implement, but it's expected to be usable as-is.
Not finalized yet, but I'm roughly planning to institute a versioning scheme that strictly follows that of the rust crate vodozemac, with a subversion to account for any changes that don't relate to the actual underlying library.
PRs are extremely welcome, especially for helping getting to replace pyolm with vodozemac in matrix-nio!
A while back, we at etke.cc announced our Synapse-Admin fork. This week, we're excited to share a roundup of new features and quality-of-life (QoL) improvements we've introduced!
Previously, you could prefill the username and server fields in the login form using GET parameters for convenience. With this update, the password (for credentials-based auth) and accessToken (for access token-based auth) fields can also be prefilled.
⚠️ Due to security considerations, this feature is restricted to local environments only.
We're slowly documenting all the enhancements we've made to Synapse Admin. To make navigation easier, we've introduced a structured index page that organizes the documentation by sections.
A new status page and app bar indicator are now available! Using our monitoring service, you can view your server's status via Matrix, email, or the web UI.
Unified List View: Show 50 Items by Default
Lists for all resources - users, rooms, media, reports, tokens, and more - now display 50 items by default. This change offers a more consistent experience across devices, especially on larger-than-phone screens. Previously, lists showed either just 10 items (leaving the page mostly empty) or an overwhelming 500 items.
We've recently released react-native-matrix-sdk which wraps the entire FFI bindings of matrix-rust-sdk in a React Native Turbo Module by way of uniffi-bindgen-react-native. We have successfully used this library to prototype a cross-platform app including room list and timeline but it is a fairly young project and will most definitely still have a few sharp edges.
Christmas is coming up and to shorten the wait, you can open a door of my bilingual advent calendar every day. It has templates and coding examples for NeoBoard whiteboards.
Do you also wonder what will be behind today's door? 😏
NeoBoard is a whiteboard widget for Element, allowing you and your team to collaborate during meetings, presentations and group projects. You can export and import whiteboard files to reuse them as templates or migrate between rooms.
As of today, 10444 Matrix federateable servers have been discovered by matrixrooms.info, 3169 (30.3%) of them are publishing their rooms directory over federation.
The published directories contain 21309 rooms.
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #twim:matrix.org with your updates!
To learn more about how to prepare an entry for TWIM check out the TWIM guide.
The Foundation needs you
The Matrix.org Foundation is a non-profit and only relies
on donations to operate. Its core mission is to maintain
the Matrix Specification, but it does much more than that.
It maintains the matrix.org homeserver and hosts several
bridges for free. It fights for our collective rights to
digital privacy and dignity.
