Matrix almost-live!

Hi folks,

I'm afraid that we've failed to record a dedicated Matrix Live for this week, what with the disruption of the Matrix & Friends meetup in Berlin yesterday and lots of other distractions - so instead we're going to shamelessly cheat and try to pass off the recording of the live broadcast of the meetup as this week's episode...

The meetup talks were structured in three sections, conveniently bookmarked for your reference:

1. Matthew & Amandine giving a general update on where we're at today and what's on the horizon (although we got a bit bogged down talking about recent stuff and not enough talking about cool new stuff): 

https://youtu.be/aRkT-RSfQ7w?t=77

2. Andi (exul) giving a great overview of his Rust matrix-rocketchat bridge; Carlo von lynX introducing Secushare, Psyc and GNUnet; and Max Möhring explaining decentralised identity with Keyp:

https://youtu.be/aRkT-RSfQ7w?t=3518

3. Jack Fransham from Parity Technologies giving an overview of Polkadot - interoperable bridging between blockchains (whilst also providing one meta-blockchain to rule them all. sound familiar?)

https://youtu.be/aRkT-RSfQ7w?t=7207

The meetup was fairly epic, but hopefully in a good way - huge thanks to everyone who came along and made it successful!

Finally, a quick update on where things are at in general this week:

* Progress towards long-term funding is continuing. We are aiming to have a solution in place by the end of October.  Meanwhile Patreon & Liberapay (and ETH & BTC) donations continue to be absolutely critical - both to help make ends meet for the team, and also to help long-term funding options see the enthusiasm of the community.  Thank you!!

* Riot:

  * 0.12.7 of riot-web was released; it's a largely a maintenance release and we forgot to announce it; sorry!  The main new feature is that Jitsi conferencing should now work on Riot/Desktop.

  * We soft-launched Groups (also known as Communities) on synapse & riot-web develop. There's still some work to be done here, but it's looking cautiously promising and the first groups are starting to appear... e.g. https://riot.im/develop/#/group/+matrix:matrix.org

  * On iOS: CallKit and PushKit is merged to develop and being debugged on mobile - it's starting to look really good.  Lots of maintenance working on Android too.

* Synapse & Dendrite

  * Synapse 0.24-rc1 is out as of yesterday, with initial support for groups and lots of other fixes.

  * Dendrite is progressing, but slowly, thanks to lots of distractions maintaining Synapse.

* There's also been some progress on spec work (derived in part from Dendrite development) as we've started formally improving the federation protocol.

That's it for this week; sorry for the lack of dedicated video - we'll be back as normal next week :)

- Matthew & Amandine