October 2024 releases & progress

As expected, WhatsApp has been upgraded to a megabridge. Other bridges have received minor bugfixes, but nothing too exciting. In non-bridge news, hicli has finally progressed again.

Megabridge progress

The Telegram bridge rewrite has mostly reached feature parity with the features that Beeper uses, but there hasn't been any progress on non-Beeper features, such as relaybots, so there's no ETA for the full release yet.

The Twitter rewrite has been resumed and may be ready by next month. Unfortunately Discord hasn't progressed at all, so it'll likely take until December at least, possibly even next year.

gomuks / hicli

As mentioned in my first post, I'm working on a high-level client framework to build a new web client and to replace the internals of gomuks. Back when I wrote that, Element Web was using 2-3 GB of ram. Now, it uses 3-6 GB and freezes completely several times a day, so making a replacement has become more urgent.

The new web client now exists. Inventing a new name was too much effort, so I decided to call it gomuks web. You can find it in the webmuks branch (CI binaries are available on mau.dev as always).

Like I said in the first post, the new client isn't exactly a true web client, as it communicates with a Go backend that's running locally (although technically nobody forces it to be local: you could perfectly well run the backend on a raspberry pi or something).

The frontend is stateless: it receives the room list from the backend on connect and then receives new events over websocket as the backend receives them from sync. Since the backend knows the exact order of rooms and their preview messages, it only takes a fraction of a second to send the first 100 rooms to the frontend, which means there's no waiting time when reopening the frontend.

It's significantly faster than Element Web and it needs less than 250 MB of ram for both the backend and the browser tab combined to handle my main account. In terms of features, I still need to implement unread counts, reactions and maybe spaces, but otherwise it's already usable as a basic client.

The old version of gomuks is now called gomuks legacy. At some point in the future, I'll copy the old terminal UI over to the hicli-based version and call it gomuks terminal. I might also eventually wrap the web client in a desktop and/or mobile app. The web UI is not mobile optimized, but performance-wise it seems decent even on mobile browsers.

Meowlnir

Meowlnir now supports receiving reports via the standard Matrix [/report endpoınt]. In addition to just forwarding reports to the management room, bot admins can also send commands to the bot in the report message, which allows quickly banning spammers without having to switch to the management room.

Other than that, there were a couple of bug fixes around evaluating policies, as well as a feature to notify the management room if a user pings the bot in a protected room.