Thib

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) 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:

• MSC4033: Explicit ordering of events for receipts

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• No MSCs are in FCP.

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC4025: Local user erasure requests

Closed MSCs:

• MSC3746: Render image data in reactions
  • An alternative proposal: MSC4027: Propose method of specifying custom images in reactions

🔗Spec Updates

Work to use Matrix as the standard for interoperable messaging at the IETF is continuing in full stride. At IETF 117 (July 22nd - 28th, 2023) we'll be talking about the precise requirements of an interoperable protocol, and encouraging Matrix be that protocol. Linearized Matrix is our proposal for the room model, with more updates expected in the coming days ahead of the submission deadline, meanwhile yours truly is working on using MSC1767 Extensible Events for a content format. Watch this space for updates leading up to IETF 117 🙂

We're also well on track to test interoperability of different Linearized Matrix implementations at the Hackathon - get in touch with us via the #sct-office:matrix.org if you're working on such an implementation so we can coordinate details. It's not too late to get started either; Linearized Matrix itself is relatively simple to implement compared to the full capability of Matrix, by design.

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3903: X25519 Elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman ephemeral for establishing secure channel between two Matrix clients!

This MSC provides a means of establishing a trusted, secure communications channel across a potentially untrusted network. Subsequent MSCs could then use this channel to transfer details such as login tokens or key backup credentials in the context of setting up a new Matrix device. MSC3906 is one proposal that takes advantage of this.

This is just one piece of work building on the tree of MSCs supporting the shift of authentication in Matrix from home-brewed to OIDC. See https://areweoidcyet.com/ for more details on that effort.

Continue reading…

Libera Chat recently announced their decision to opt-out of portalled rooms from the Libera.Chat bridge instance hosted by the Matrix.org Foundation (a decision we regret but respect). This means that for the bridge to keep working, all of your portalled rooms need to be turned into plumbed rooms before July 31st. All of this might be a bit obscure, so let’s walk together through these concepts and give you the tools to make sure the bridge keeps working for you.

Continue reading…

We launched the Matrix Public Archive publicly on June 2nd, 2023. We decided to take it down on Sunday, June 25th out of precaution after a member of OFTC staff warned us that the archive made the content of two OFTC IRC channels bridged to Matrix available on the Internet.

After investigating the issue, we determined that the Matrix Public Archive's behaviour was expected for these channels, given an IRC chanop had explicitly configured the Matrix side of the rooms to be world-readable.

Let's talk about how room visibility works in vanilla Matrix, how it works with bridges, and what are the next steps.

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib announces

You might have seen the news already, but the Matrix.org Foundation is pleased to welcome the first public sector organisation as part of its membership: Gematik joined us as a Silver member!

If you're an organisation of the public sector it might not be obvious why spending money on an open source product is important: you will probably be interested in why it makes sense for gematik to contribute, and how it benefits the public sector in general.

Whether you're an individual, a business, a non-profit, a public sector organisation, you can join the Matrix.org Foundation as a member to support us in our mission and help us steer Matrix in the right direction!

Continue reading…

We were already proud to announce that the national agency for the digitalisation of the healthcare system in Germany (gematik) had selected Matrix as the open standard on which to base all its interoperable instant messaging standard, back in 2021.

We are now delighted to let the world know that they are doubling down on sovereignty and sustainability: gematik is the first organisation of the public sector to join the Matrix.org Foundation as a Silver member.

🔗Collaboration in the public sector

Our friends at the FSFE have been calling for software used in public services to be free software in their Public Money Public Code campaign. As advocates of open standards and an open source project ourselves, this is something we can get behind.

Software development can be an impenetrable world for people who don’t work in the field. It can sometimes be difficult for people outside of our industry to understand the importance of bitrotting and refactoring. One very unfortunate effect of this is that new features are easy to fund because they feel very tangible, but the most critical housekeeping work is not as appealing.

Yet, without regular refactoring to clean things up, it gets increasingly costly and difficult to add new features. Counterintuitively, spending money on “the boring tasks” is the most efficient use of money: without it the technical stack would become either obsolete, bloated, or both, and it would be much more costly to move to something else or maintain an in-house fork.

We’re very happy gematik is doing the right thing by supporting the technical stack it builds TI-Messenger on. By supporting the Matrix.org Foundation, gematik contributes to the sustainability of the protocol powering the communications of the German healthcare system… but not exclusively.

🔗Sharing costs across public services, and with the private sector

Matrix is an open standard, which means not only everyone can use it: when someone contributes to Matrix, everyone benefits from it. This makes Matrix particularly interesting for the public sector: if the German healthcare contributes to Matrix, the German Armed Forces benefit from it, and the other way around. It allows both to contribute less of their budget, instead of contributing each to an entirely different product. The German Federal Ministry of Defence already actively contributes to Matrix development and funding via its public IT services provider BWI GmbH, who relies on Element’s consulting services to develop their own Matrix-based messenger.

But Matrix being open source, it also allows the public and private sector to share the costs of maintenance by design. The public sector benefits from the contributions of the private sector to Matrix, and the opposite is true as well.

The Foundation plays a critical technical and social role in this system: it centralises and curates contributions to the protocol so it remains unbiased, coherent, and efficient.

🔗This is just a beginning

We’re extremely happy to welcome the first public sector organisation in the Matrix.org Foundation! Given how popular Matrix is among governments and the public sector in general, we know this is just a beginning: it would be illogical to deploy any solution at a large scale without contributing to its sustainability.

Whether you’re an organisation from the public or the private sector, looking to cut costs down by building on a common, standard and reliable foundation, you can support Matrix and join the Foundation today.

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Status of Matrix 🌡️

Thib says

Not only have we formally launched the Matrix.org Foundation membership programme… we're happy to already welcome our first member: Beeper!

Wondering why it makes sense for Beeper to support the Foundation? In short: we're mission-aligned, and it's a strategic business choice.

Thanks again to Beeper for all their contributions to the Matrix ecosystem, and we can't wait for more prospective members to show that they really mean to stand for open, decentralised secure communications 🚀

Continue reading…

We're proud to announce Beeper is the first member to join the Foundation! Beeper is a universal chat app, built on top of Matrix. Beeper is strongly committing to support Matrix by becoming the first member in the Gold tier as well.

🔗Matrix is a strategic choice

Beeper allows you to connect accounts from up to 15 different chat platforms to get a unified inbox in a single app. The core business of Beeper is to provide a polished app and service to their users. Beeper is built upon Matrix: behind the scenes, a Beeper account is a Matrix account on the Beeper homeserver, and the company hosts bridges for its users. The experience is completely transparent for them.

Matrix was an obvious choice in Beeper's stack because of its interoperable nature. Bridges are the core of Beeper's business: they are the most active bridges maintainer of the Matrix ecosystem, and most of them are open source too. It makes a lot of sense for Beeper to build on top of Matrix so they don't have to reinvent the wheel: homeservers exist, the AppService API that allows them to create bridges exists, and maintaining an in-house solution for this all would cost more than their contribution to Matrix.

Matrix also solves the difficult problem of End-to-Bridge Encryption: it allows bridges to decrypt messages from a third party platform like WhatsApp and re-encrypt it for Matrix users. This makes the homeserver completely oblivious to the content of the messages. It protects customers against passive leaks, and the most privacy conscious ones can even self-host their bridges to get total control of the messages making it through.

🔗Mission aligned

Beyond the obvious business choice of relying on Matrix, Beeper and the Foundation have a lot of values in common. The Foundation is fighting for interoperability possible at a technical level… but it's also fighting to make it possible at a legal and systemic level. We've been very vocal in the Digital Markets Act discussions In Europe. Beeper's CEO Eric Migicovsky also took part in the consultation launched by the EU in the hopes of opening up the walled gardens of Gatekeepers. The regulation change brought by the DMA will accelerate the adoption of interoperability across the board, bringing the tools to make it sustainable and reliable, which is a direct business enabler for Beeper.

🔗Join us

We once again welcome Beeper and congratulate them for being the first member to support the stack they rely on! As for organisations who depend on Matrix: we still need your support to make Matrix sustainable.

Join us in our mission to make Matrix the ubiquitous foundation for respectful products and services, become a member today!

🔗Matrix Live

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

Andrew Morgan (anoa) [GMT-6] reports

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:

• MSC4030: Progressive image in Matrix
• MSC4029: [WIP] Fixing X-Matrix request authentication
• MSC4028: Push all encrypted events except for muted rooms
• MSC4027: Propose method of specifying custom images in reactions

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC3989: Redact origin property on events (merge)
• MSC3821: Update the redaction rules, again (merge)
• MSC3077: Support for multi-stream VoIP (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• MSC4009: Expanding the Matrix ID grammar to enable E.164 IDs

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

This actually happened last week, but a huge shoutout to Kévin Commaille, aka @zecakeh, for their work on upgrading the OpenAPI schema data for the Matrix Spec to version 3.1. This schema describes all of the requests and responses for all endpoints in the spec, as well as various event types and other bits and pieces. It directly powers the Matrix spec website, the Matrix API Playground and several Client and Homeserver SDKs that generate code from it.

With a diff of +14,997 −12,660, this was a multi-month effort of both implementation and review (thank you @richvdh and @KitsuneRal!). This change will allow us to use all the new features that OpenAPI 3 has to offer, as well as generally keeps us up to date with modern tooling.

Thank you!

🔗Random MSC of the Week

The random MSC of the week is... MSC3051: A scalable relation format!

This MSC describes a different way of describing how an event relates to other events. In the current Matrix spec, you can use the m.relates_to property to indicate that this event (say, a reaction) relates to another event (say, a message) in a certain manner. You can specify how it relates using the m.relates_to->rel_type key; a value of "m.annotation" for reactions.

But sometimes you may want to relate to multiple other events. For instance, what if that message you're reacting to is also in a thread? In fact, this MSC has come up recently as one possible way to solve the problem of efficiently discerning whether an event should belong in a thread or not (discussion). This MSC isn't the only option for solving such a problem - MSC4023 would also work, and both have tradeoffs.

MSC3051 could also allows for actions such as editing replies; both the text and the message it was a reply to. Neat!

Do read the MSC and give feedback if relations is something that excites you.

Continue reading…

Hello federation,

TLDR: New website is coming tomorrow, your RSS reader might be disoriented during the switch.

That's right, after several months of studying, designing and implementing: we're finally going to deploy the new matrix.org website on June 16! Let's have a look back at the why and how.

I also need to thank Jonas Platte not only for his technical expertise but also for his kind support and patience. Thanks to MTRNord as well for kickstarting the project, and to the various designers involved.

Continue reading…

🔗Matrix Live

We didn't have time for a Matrix Live this week, but don't miss next week's episode!

🔗Dept of Spec 📜

TravisR 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:

• MSC4026: Allow /versions to optionally accept authentication

MSCs in Final Comment Period:

• MSC4009: Expanding the Matrix ID grammar to enable E.164 IDs (merge)

Accepted MSCs:

• No MSCs were accepted this week.

Closed MSCs:

• No MSCs were closed/rejected this week.

🔗Spec Updates

On the Spec Core Team (SCT), we've started converting the list of MSCs we received into a roadmap for the next 8-ish weeks. This is all to prepare for Matrix 1.8, and we're already starting to think a bit about what Matrix 1.9 looks like too. You can see what the team plans to look at here - each column is ordered in relative priority, where the top is more likely to receive attention first. Not everything is actionable at the moment, but that's the point 😄 As we work through the next month or so, the remaining MSCs should be unblocked or near-unblocked enough to allow the SCT to make progress on them.

Most of the MSCs on the roadmap have a target state of acceptance (and merge, if we can make that happen), though some do have a simple task of reviewing the MSC ahead of implementation effort. We're aiming to test this process over the next few releases, where the SCT unblocks progress by providing review ahead of review actually being needed, but to do that we need to know what people plan to work on. If you have something which could do with review (not just acceptance) in the August-November window of time, let us know in the SCT Office.

As always, if you have questions about a particular MSC's state or what this process actually means, let us know in the SCT Office.

Meanwhile, the SCT is continuing its IETF/MIMI adventures by pushing Linearized Matrix towards working group adoption. The current stages involve updating the Internet-Draft (I-D, or MSC in IETF terms) to cover the MIMI-specific bits of the room model and working on multiple implementations of the proposal. We'll be updating the MSC at a later stage to account for the DAG interop components, though how to get a DAG to work with the linear, append-only, MIMI variant is very much top of mind. You can see the current rapidly-changing I-D here.

As mentioned, to further adoption of Linearized Matrix within MIMI we're looking for independent implementations. "Independent" here means not written by the Matrix Core Team and not written by Element given the potential for conflict of interest, though the Matrix team is working on proving the I-D through eigen-server and possibly a dual-stack Synapse (watch this space). We have a line on ~2 completely independent (but undisclosed 😇) Linearized Matrix implementations already, but more is often better for these things: if you work for a messaging service provider and are interested in writing an implementation, get in touch with us so we can coordinate some interop testing. You don't already have to be using Matrix to write an implementation, and in fact it's probably better if you aren't already using Matrix, awkwardly.

🔗Random MSC of the week

The script of fate has decided to put forward MSC3060: Room Labels this week. This is a relatively small MSC, but one which provides a ton of value to discovering rooms. The labels/topics your room covers are listed in a state event and can inform users of what to expect beyond the room name/avatar. For example, if your room has primarily NSFW/18+ content, you can disclose that in the labels.

Leave your thoughts and concerns on the MSC via threads on the diff 🙂

Continue reading…