The last few weeks have been fantastic for the Ubuntu Matrix project. We received so many requests from folks and teams asking to create rooms and spaces on the Ubuntu Matrix instance that we actually had to re-prioritize some tasks to accommodate them. I am pleased to see so many of you helping out, offering to help with moderation, reporting bugs and asking questions.
Speaking of questions, we are aware that Matrix is slightly different from other non-federated chat clients. Therefore, we decided to start a small wiki to help our community. The Discourse Wiki backend is not active yet, so for now, they appear like regular discourse posts. Once the front end is ready, we will share the updated link.
There are only a few articles, but we are working to add more. Ideas for new articles and contributions are always welcome.
Charmhub migration from Mattermost to Matrix is still ongoing, full speed ahead. The Mattermost instance is currently scheduled to go read-only at the end of January 2024. Special thanks to @jnsgruk for the great support.
Bridging with IRC
As you can read in the weekly reports linked above, we had great conversations with the KDE community. They have been bridging IRC and Matrix with good success. We are working to deploy our self hosted bridge, while at the same time @nbuechner is working hard to run tests. Special thanks to Kenny from KDE for his energy and patience.
Full federation and room search
We are still working to enable full federation on our Matrix instance. Please be patient with us as we work on the federation proxy. Room searching from federated servers is still not enabled but the issue was reported and it is being looked at. I will provide updates when both these issues make progress.
Documentation
We are working on documentation and processes. Our next focus is to create a clear set of documents for users, regarding room publishing and room moderation. @ulfnic contributed with a very useful document that explains How-to change the main address of a room or space to ubuntu.com
We are then going to focus our documentation efforts on moderators and defenders.
Stay engaged
If you see topics that interest you on the Matrix Council weekly reports, if you have the passion to help us grow Ubuntu’s presence on Matrix, or if you have questions regarding this project, I encourage to get involved here on Discourse. You can reply on this thread, on any of the Matrix Council meeting report threads. Alternatively, you can also get in touch on Matrix directly. This channel would be a great place: #matrix-ops:ubuntu.com
I bring more exciting news today. Launchpad now has a new social accounts section where we can add our IRC, Jabber and… Matrix!
You can check a write-up by @ines-almeida on the Launchpad Blog
I would like to thank @rbasak , @cjwatson , and @clinton-fung for starting the discussion and approving the work with very short notice.
Special thanks to @pelpsi for working on the backend, @ines-almeida for the frontend and @lgp171188 for planning and code reviews.
First thing I do after this post? Go add my matrix account to my launchpad ID!
That’s great news. Thanks to all involved in getting this done!
I think the real value of this is that now the data exists to do things like “allow all Matrix accounts of Ubuntu members”, which will hopefully be useful for moderators who can identify a set of people they can trust, while those people can continue mostly unimpeded, in case of moderation emergencies.
Hi all, what is better than weekend time? Matrix news before weekend time!
We have been working hard this week to launch our Matrix documentation frontend. Please note that this is work in progress and we are working to improve the experience, as well as adding more documents. We are very ambitious and we would love it if our Matrix documentation could be referenced by other open-source projects.
If you have a passion for this initiative and you want to help with documentation, please reply to this thread or reach out on the Ubuntu Matrix Ops channel. This is a great opportunity to contribute to Ubuntu!
I wish to thank @aaronprisk for his help with Discourse documentation frontend, and @kewisch for making things happen, his reviews and advice.
Special thanks to all the incredible people of the Matrix Council. Not only they are moving mountains, but they also have to tolerate my incurable optimism on a daily basis. @sarnold@nbuechner@ulfnic@merlijn-sebrechts . Last but not least, @arraybolt3 thank you so much, you are a superstar!
The element-desktop snap seems broken on AMD. The Store entry for this snap does not show where a bug can be filed. Strangely, I encountered a similar issue with the whatsie snap but after it being uninstalled for a few months a reinstallation has it working again. I’ve included the output error I get when launching the Element snap from the CLI. I believe this to be the key line:
/usr/share/libdrm/amdgpu.ids: No such file or directory
This report on the Snapcraft forum appears to corroborate my experience and findings.
EDIT: I forgot to say that none of the workarounds given in the above report worked for me.
Entire output:
/home/pmatulis/snap/element-desktop/83/.config/Element exists: yes
/home/pmatulis/snap/element-desktop/83/.config/Riot exists: no
Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Failed: cannot find desktop file "/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/element-desktop_Element.desktop"
(element-desktop:43725): Gtk-WARNING **: 14:55:14.374: GTK+ module /snap/element-desktop/83/gnome-platform/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libcanberra-gtk-module.so cannot be loaded.
GTK+ 2.x symbols detected. Using GTK+ 2.x and GTK+ 3 in the same process is not supported.
Gtk-Message: 14:55:14.374: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
(element-desktop:43725): Gtk-WARNING **: 14:55:14.375: GTK+ module /snap/element-desktop/83/gnome-platform/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libcanberra-gtk-module.so cannot be loaded.
GTK+ 2.x symbols detected. Using GTK+ 2.x and GTK+ 3 in the same process is not supported.
Gtk-Message: 14:55:14.375: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
[43725:0205/145514.391744:ERROR:zygote_host_impl_linux.cc(273)] Failed to adjust OOM score of renderer with pid 43850: Permission denied (13)
/usr/share/libdrm/amdgpu.ids: No such file or directory
Starting auto update with base URL: https://packages.element.io/desktop/update/
Auto update not supported on this platform
[43725:0205/145514.518428:ERROR:zygote_host_impl_linux.cc(273)] Failed to adjust OOM score of renderer with pid 43920: Permission denied (13)
Fetching translation json for locale: en_EN
Changing application language to en
Fetching translation json for locale: en
Resetting the UI components after locale change
Resetting the UI components after locale change
Changing application language to en
Fetching translation json for locale: en
Resetting the UI components after locale change
zsh: trace trap (core dumped) element-desktop
Hello,
Thank you so much to everyone involved in the federation tests today. Today’s update was quite long so I decided to have it in a dedicated post: Ubuntu Matrix homeserver: Go Live
Keep up the enthusiasm and the engagement, thank you all for your great contributions to this project!
Do you think that Matrix can be a great tool to interact with the Ubuntu Community?
Matrix, is a really great tool for collaboration. I mostly find it like Slack, ability to create spaces/rooms and manage. Also a variety of client options which also provides flexibility.
It is a great protocol! But… I don’t find it suitable for this purpose.
E2EE (End-to-End Encryption) is really problematic. You might not be able to see some messages. So we already disqualified one of the best Matrix features already.
Spamming and other stuff. Since it is self-hostable and totally free, then it means some bad stuff is going to happen. Although it can be prevented with management bots, (e.g. Mjolnir) there still are a lot of stuff you guys need to take care off to have a friendly/non-toxic environment.
Activity. I don’t think Matrix spaces/rooms of yours will be more active than other platforms had achieved. Since I don’t think people will just check their Matrix account for Ubuntu and more nerd stuff. As myself, I want everything in one place and uncluttered. I would be able to check memes, news, hobbies, chats… And Matrix isn’t for that.
Have you used or managed Matrix before? If so, what did you like, what did you not, and how does it compare to other chat platforms you have used?
I have been actively using Matrix for over 2 years. I liked the “privacy, self-hostable and multiple server implementations” -we call them homeservers- (e.g. Dendrite). I was looking for decentralized “social” platforms for messaging/chatting and mostly tinkering purposes. I still think that Matrix is the best amongst IRC, XMPP etc.
I also am managing a homeserver. Just for me and my friends. Making public instances require great amount of money and time, I don’t have those.
Once again, I show up before the start of the weekend, and I bring some interesting updates from within the Matrix:
Matrix Council
Call for nominations for the Matrix Council are open! Please check this announcement and consider applying!
If you want to keep up to date with Ubuntu Matrix Council meeting reports, you can use this custom filter.
Documentation
Ubuntu Matrix documentation efforts: We are working on more documents aimed at Matrix users, room admins, and moderators. Feel free to have a look at our documentation frontend.
If you care about the Ubuntu Matrix project, we strongly recommend to read Moderation and Defense of our Matrix Community. This document explains the moderation vision, the structure, but also how to become a moderator or a defender.
We are testing the snapped bridge on a staging instance of Matrix. More updates on that in the next few weeks.
We reached out to the LoCo teams and sent some general recommendations on this post. IRC bridging and Matrix were a part of it.
Get involved!
If you like what you see, you enjoy using Matrix and you have the passion to help this initiative, we encourage you to get involved. Nominate yourself for Matrix Council, help us with documentation, guide new users into the Matrix, or help us spread the word.
You can do so by replying to this thread, or by joining the Ubuntu Matrix Ops room: #matrix-ops:ubuntu.com
Thanks for the shout out for this! Tried FluffyChat right away and it certain appears the most user friendly and comprehensible of all Matrix chat clients tried so far.
I think FluffyChat is getting lots of things much clearer than say Element.
There’s another new Matrix client, which might be interesting to some. It is command-line based and uses vim key bindings. I made a snap of it, so it’s easy to install:
Thanks @popey for this comment. Initially we wanted to keep everything in a post to avoid fragmenting the discussion. Having said that, we are well past that point, and there are multiple Matrix related discussions that are hard to track with tags only.
In order to provide a better place to promote discussions around matrix, we created a new sub-category under Community. I moved all the meeting reports and announcement posts.
@nbuechner , @arraybolt3 This category will also be a good place to post about Matrix bots
