September 2024 releases & progress

As mentioned in last month's release post, the Google Messages and Meta bridges have been upgraded to megabridges. As a bonus surprise, there's now a Google Voice bridge as well.

Megabridge progress

The Telegram bridge rewrite has progressed and is being tested at Beeper. However, there are a number of features that Beeper doesn't use, which means it'll still take some time before the rewrite is fully released.

The Discord rewrite got delayed due to bugfixes in other bridges, and WhatsApp also ended up being prioritized over Discord. The WhatsApp rewrite will likely be released next month.

Authenticated media

Authenticated media support was added back in July and by now most servers have been forced to update as matrix.org and others have started freezing unauthenticated media. These releases drop support for unauthenticated media downloads entirely, which means the bridges will only work with an up-to-date homeserver. However, the bridges will not enforce this via /versions, as some servers don't advertise v1.11 support yet.

New bridgev2 features

The bridgev2 interface now includes streaming file download/upload methods: DownloadMediaToFile and UploadMediaStream. Some of the network connectors already use those, and the rest will switch over time. The methods will roundtrip big attachments through the disk to avoid storing the entire file in memory. It should be especially useful when backfilling to avoid several files being stored in memory at the same time.

Another new feature is "split portals", which means segregating portal rooms on Matrix by login instead of sharing them. With the default shared rooms, if multiple users are in the same chat on the remote network, they'll all be in the same Matrix room. With split portals, every login gets a separate room. In the future, the option may be extended to split ghost users as well, to allow using contact list names without risk of conflicts.

Meowlnir

Because I clearly don't have enough projects already, I started writing a new Matrix moderation bot: Meowlnir. It is now somewhat functional (it can watch a policy list, ban users and redact messages) and is deployed on maunium.net.

The primary goal is to be as fast and efficient as possible, as well as have native encryption support without the need for Pantalaimon or other hacks.

It's initially only compatible with Synapse as it depends on MSC2409 & MSC3202 for encryption, plus it reads the database directly to efficiently find events to redact (although that requirement will hopefully go away in the future with MSC4914).

You can find Meowlnir at https://github.com/maunium/meowlnir.