News

This page contains copy of #news:etke.cc room messages, but you may use RSS , or Fediverse to get them. Additionally, you may check News Archive for full list of messages.

Stable Updates Published

  • Borg 1.2.7 -> 1.2.8
  • Borgmatic 1.8.6 -> 1.8.9
  • Funkwhale 1.4.0 new
  • Miniflux 2.1.1 -> 2.1.2
  • Peertube 6.0.3 new
  • Synapse 1.103.0 -> 1.104.0

Service Updates: Email Deliverability

We continue working on improving email deliverability from your matrix servers. With this update, the outgoing email queue was made persistent, so emails won’t be lost due to restarts or temporary downtimes.

Service Updates: Extras Updates

We’ve restructured the extras page, added missing quick start guides, and divided all items into sensible sections

Service Updates: List of Deprecated Components was updated

The list was extended with Facebook (mautrix-facebook) and Instagram (mautrix-instagram) bridges, as they were archived by their devs on March 2024, and superseded by Facebook (mautrix-meta) and Instagram (mautrix-meta) bridges.

Quick start guides of the deprecated bridges contain migration guides for your convenience

Service Updates: New Component - Funkwhale

A new component is available for order - Funkwhale is a self-hosted audio player and publication platform. It enables users to build libraries of existing content and publish their own. It uses the ActivityPub protocol to talk to other apps across the Fediverse. Users can share content between Funkwhale pods or with other Fediverse software.

Funkwhale is available for new and existing customers for +$5/month

Service Updates: New Component - Peertube

A new component is available for order - Peertube is a self-hosted video platform over Fediverse, similar to Funkwhale. And as with Funkwhale it allows building libraries of existing content from Fediverse and publish your own.

Additionally, Peertube supports S3-compatible storage, so you don’t need to worry about the disk space utilization

Peertube is available for new and existing customers for +$5/month

#discussion:etke.cc

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Stable Updates Published

  • Element / app.etke.cc 1.11.61 -> 1.11.63
  • Grafana 10.4.0 -> 10.4.1
  • Jitsi 9364 -> 9364-1
  • KeyDB 6.3.4 new
  • Ntfy 2.9.0 -> 2.10.0
  • Radicale 3.1.9.0 -> 3.1.9.1
  • Redis 7.2.3 -> 7.2.4

Service Updates: LanguageTool is back

Previously, we’ve offered LanguageTool , but it was taken down for refactoring. It returns for the price of +$1/month, with optional extended list of supported n-grams and a quick start guide .

Service Updates: Redis has been replaced with KeyDB due to upcoming license changes

Starting from v7.4.x, Redis is no longer Open Source, and switch to source-available model, it was announced in their blog . As a result, we’ve decided to replace Redis with KeyDB - an Open Source drop-in replacement with additional features (like multi-threading). That change affects all customers with Synapse Workers, but you don’t need to do anything - it will be fully automatic. The only possible impact is longer downtime during the maintenance (only once, to apply the migration)

#discussion:etke.cc

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Stable Updates Published

  • Element / app.etke.cc 1.11.60 -> 1.11.61
  • Etherpad 1.9.6 -> 2.0.1
  • Google Messages bridge 0.2.4 -> 0.3.0
  • Jitsi 9258 -> 9364
  • Facebook & Instagram bridge 0.1.0 -> 0.2.0
  • Prometheus 2.50.1 -> 2.51.0
  • Radicale 3.1.8.3 -> 3.1.9.0
  • Signal bridge 0.5.0 -> 0.5.1
  • Sygnal 0.13.0 -> 0.14.0
  • Synapse 1.102.0 -> 1.103.0
  • WhatsApp bridge 0.10.5 -> 0.10.6

during this week, there were issues with system packages updates. We apologize for the inconvenience, but can assure you that the issue did not affect Matrix servers, just blocked the update of the system packages for a short time. We’ve fixed all affected hosts already, and adjusted automation to properly handle such situations. However, if you will notice a failed maintenance, please, try to run it again to apply the fix

Service Updates: About Us

We’ve added the About Us page that contains information about the founders and some stats. It hasn’t even been four years 😄

#discussion:etke.cc

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Stable Updates Published

  • Element / app.etke.cc 1.11.59 -> 1.11.60
  • Miniflux 2.1.0 -> 2.1.1
  • Ntfy 2.8.0 -> 2.9.0

Service Updates: Support Updates

Previously, we’ve announced the Customer Support service and described the limits for each support level. Now we continue to enhance it, and will tell the current request’s number (counted for the last 30 days) in the greetings message when you contact us via Matrix

#discussion:etke.cc

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Stable Updates Published

  • GoToSocial 0.13.3 -> 0.14.0
  • Grafana 10.3.1 -> 10.4.0
  • Synapse 1.101.0 -> 1.102.0
  • Vaultwarden 1.30.3 -> 1.30.5

Service Updates: Registry Updates

To prevent abuse of our private Docker registry, we’ve made internal changes to how access is controlled/secured. The new flow has been enabled for all customers. If you encounter any issues with the new flow, please, do not hesitate to contact us

As with anything we do, the changes are open source under AGPL-3.0

#discussion:etke.cc

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Stable Updates Published

  • Element / app.etke.cc 1.11.58 -> 1.11.59
  • Prometheus 2.49.1 -> 2.50.1
  • SchildiChat v1.11.30-sc.2 -> v1.11.36-sc.6

Service Updates: New Facebook and Instagram bridges

mautrix-instagram and mautrix-facebook bridges were superseded by the mautrix-meta bridge. Quick Start documentation has been updated both for the Facebook / Messenger and the Instagram bridges.

Existing customers are not affected, but if you wish to migrate to the new bridges - just follow the Facebook and Instagram migration guides

Service Updates: Registry Updates

To prevent abuse of our private Docker registry, we’ve made internal changes to how access is controlled/secured. The new flow has been enabled for customers using the fresh stability branch . If you encounter any issues with the new flow, please, do not hesitate to contact us

Service Updates: Demo Server is Up&Running

To offer a way to test components before ordering them (both for new & existing customers), we’ve deployed a demo server that you could use to decide. It has a few limitations, and not all components are available for usage yet, but we hope you will find it useful! Details: etke.cc/demo

#discussion:etke.cc

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Stable Updates Published

  • GoToSocial 0.13.0 -> 0.13.3
  • Hookshot 5.1.2 -> 5.2.1
  • Miniflux 2.0.51 -> 2.1.0
  • Signal bridge 0.5.0 first actual realease of the go-based bridge

#discussion:etke.cc

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Stable Updates Published

  • Element / app.etke.cc 1.11.57 -> 1.11.58
  • Jitsi 9220 -> 9258
  • #postmoogle:etke.cc 0.9.16 -> 0.9.17
  • Synapse-Admin 0.9.1 -> 0.8.7 downgrade due to regression issue in 0.9.x versions
  • Synapse 1.100.0 -> 1.101.0
  • Traefik 2.10.7 -> 2.11.0

#discussion:etke.cc

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🎉 Today marks 3 years of etke.cc! 🎉

The etke.cc managed Matrix hosting service was launched on the 12th of February 2021 and has turned 3 years old today!

Below, we’d like to show you what improvements have happened over the last year and what’s coming ahead for us.

New payment model, more services, more server regions

In case you’ve missed our large news announcement from December 2023, it’s not too late to learn about it now.

To summarize, we have:

  • switched to a new payment/pricing model, which is more sustainable
  • launched many of new components and services (see below) and will continue to launch new ones
  • completely reworked order form - easier for you and for us - a quicker turnaround time when deploying servers
  • began offering more powerful servers (using Hetzner Cloud ’s CPX line) and in more geographic locations - including the U.S.

We encourage you to read the our original news announcement for more details about these changes.

New component additions

In the past year, we have launched many new Matrix-related and non-Matrix components.

If you’d like to use one or more of the components seen below, contact us and we’ll install it to your existing server.

All of the Matrix components described below are new additions to our stack. Some are installed by default to all servers managed by us, as part of our base Matrix components stack .

  • (free) Sliding-sync - assists next-generation clients like Element X in talking to the homeserver in an optimized manner. This component is installed by default to all servers as part of our base Matrix components stack .
  • (free) Encrypted Bridges - we now offer a checkbox on our order form that globally enables encryption for all bridges that support it. This is experimental and may not work well for some bridges, so we don’t recommend it to everyone.
  • (free) The synapse_auto_compressor tool, which runs in the background and periodically compresses the (Postgres) database for the Synapse homeserver, so that it runs optimally. This component is installed by default to all servers as part of our base Matrix components stack .
  • (free) We’ve switched to exim-relay for delivering emails (optionally via an SMTP relay ) and wired all email-sending components (the Synapse Matrix homeserver and other addons) to it.
  • (free addition to our $5/mo bridge pack) a Google Messages bridge (powered by mautrix-gmessages). The old Google Chat bridge still continues to work.
  • (+$1/mo) the SchildiChat web-based Matrix client - an Element-web fork offering more customization.
  • (+$3/mo) ChatGPT - a Large-Language-Model (LLM) bot that you can talk to via Matrix, based on OpenAI ’s ChatGPT (Requires a separately-obtained OpenAI API key )
  • (+$2/mo) S3 storage support for the Synapse homeserver - for infinite Matrix media storage (Requires a separately obtained AWS S3-compatible object store of your choice)
  • (+$5/mo) Synapse workers - a multi-process homeserver setup to more efficiently handle many users and large rooms (Requires a powerful server - 8+ GB of RAM)

We’ve also replaced our Signal bridge (mautrix-signal) offering with the new bridge implementation (complete rewrite from Python to Golang ). 

  • (+$1/mo) [previously-offered and making a comeback] the Miniflux RSS reader
  • (+$1/mo) [previously-offered and making a comeback] the Radicale CalDAV/CardDAV server
  • (+$1/mo) [previously-offered and making a comeback] the Uptime Kuma monitoring system
  • (+$1/mo) [brand new] the Linkding bookmark manager
  • (+$2/mo) [brand new] the Vaultwarden password manager (a lightweight Bitwarden -compatible server which can be used with the Bitwarden client apps)
  • (+$2/mo) [brand new] the Firezone - a VPN server based on WireGuard with a Web UI
  • (+$3/mo) [brand new] the GoToSocial ActivityPub server (a lightweight Mastodon alternative)

New or discontinued etke.cc services

Dedicated support

On the services front, we’re now offering a Dedicated support tier for $100/mo. This is an addition to the free Basic support tier that we offer to all etke.cc customers.

The dedicated support tier is useful when your product relies on Matrix and you may require quicker help in case of outages. The main differences with the Basic tier are the dedicated Matrix chat room with etke.cc developers and the higher priority of your requests relative to others.

We’ve developed the Matrix Rooms Search tool (naturally, as AGPLv3-licensed free-software). Anyone can run their instance and index the global Matrix Federation.

MRS provides a search across room names, topics, etc., allowing for better discoverability of rooms across all of Matrix.

We’re making Matrix Rooms Search available to etke.cc customers in 2 ways:

  1. The MatrixRooms.info website
  2. Pre-configured as an alternative Rooms Directory in Element

More domain choices

To those who don’t wish to use their own custom domain for their server, we’ve been offering hosting on etke.cc-owned domains like my-business.etke.host.

At the expense of some independence (afforded by having your own custom domain), using etke.cc-owned domains allows people to avoid dealing with domains, DNS, and the cost that comes with that.

We now offer hosting on these additional domains:

  • onmatrix.chat
  • kupo.email
  • matrix.town
  • matrix.fan
  • ma3x.chat

When making a new order , you can claim your subdomain on any of these domains and get your Matrix server deployed more quickly and easily (no DNS configuration required on your side).

Discontinuing our Custom Consulting/Development service

We used to offer a Custom Consulting/Development service - helping people with custom deployments or integrations on top of Matrix.

We have discontinued this service in order to free up time and let us focus on improving etke.cc for everyone. This is part of the reason why we have so many major improvements to announce in this birthday post.

Improved internals

Besides the many new components, services and tools, we’ve also done a lot of internal work - improving reliability and performance.

Below are some of the important internal changes we’ve done:

  • The Scheduler :
    • Automatic HTTP, DNS, and port checks, including federation tests, on run ping and run maintenance
    • Cumulative alerts - we combine multiple failure alerts into a single message that we deliver via Matrix and email
    • Improved deliverability of emails, thanks to sending them via Postmark
    • Full overhaul of the agent/worker (injector) part making it blazing-fast and decreasing the delay (to milliseconds) between receiving a command from the user and executing it
    • Huge refactoring of the codebase
    • Many automation improvements, allowing us to more quickly and easily install new servers
  • Server Maintenance:
    • Automatic Postgres database vacuuming on each maintenance run
    • Automatic Postgres database tuning (based on PGTune ’s calculaton logic) which takes into account your server’s configuration and installed components
  • Networking: reworked Matrix stack networking for improved security, performance and ease of plugging-in new services (we’ve migrated from nginx to Traefik )
  • Emails: we’ve also configured DKIM , SPF and rDNS for customers hosted on our (Hetzner Cloud ) servers - this improves outgoing email deliverability for big providers like Google (see New Gmail protections for a safer, less spammy inbox )

Free-software work

We’ve also done a lot of work on a new free-software (AGPLv3) Ansible mega-playbook - mash-playbook , which currently includes 80+ components. Many of these began their life at etke.cc, while others were developed by us (or by the community) later on. Some of these components will be offered as addon components to etke.cc customers in the future. There are no technical difficulties to offering all of them immediately, but supporting a new component is not so simple - it requires documentation, commitment, support-staff training, etc.

Components from mash-playbook and the matrix-docker-ansible-deploy playbook are at the core of our automation (etke/ansible ), powering all servers managed by us.

As part of our work over the past year, we have also developed and released as free-software (AGPLv3) the following new tools:

Numbers!

  • We’ve installed 243 new Matrix servers
  • Pushed 461 updates and enhancements to the automation framework used as the service core
  • Posted 60 updates in the announcements room, so you’re always up-to-date with what we’re working on

If you’re curious to travel back in time, here are posts from previous etke.cc birthdays:

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Stable Updates Published

Reminder

All announcements published into the #news:etke.cc room are published on etke.cc/news page, RSS feed , and Fediverse account for your convenience. Moreover, we’ve added Attention needed! block with the most important things on the news page

Please keep an eye on them, to avoid missing important information. We publish announcements only once a week (except security updates - announcements published ASAP), so you could safely enable “All messages” notification preset.

Service Updates: Deprecating Abandoned Components

Some of the components we offered previously have been abandoned or deprecated by their developers, but we continue to maintain them on customers’ servers (if any of the abandoned components are installed).

Unfortunately, such components misbehave and sometimes can’t even work with modern APIs, so we’ve proclaimed them deprecated many months ago and now defined a removal plan.

Starting from 1st July 2024, the following components will be uninstalled from customers servers:

Almost every component has maintained and updated successor, so you have time to migrate to the new components until the deprecated ones are removed.

More details are available in the related FAQ entry: etke.cc/help/faq#what-about-deprecated-components

#discussion:etke.cc

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Don't have a Matrix server yet?

We specialize in setup, hosting and maintenance of Matrix and various Matrix & non-Matrix add-ons.
Hosting is on affordable VPS servers provided by us (via Hetzner Cloud) in the EU or US, or on your own infrastructure anywhere in the world.

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