A Long Overdue Update – Fractal-next

It’s been a while since I last blogged about the state of Fractal-next. Even though I’m not great at writing updates we’ve been making steady and significant progress on the code front. Before we dive into our progress I want to say thank you to all contributors, and especially Kévin Commaille. Keep up the good work ❤️.

Encryption 🎉️

Fractal-next now has support for sending and receiving room messages and allows people to verify their newly logged-in session and other users via cross-signing.

Thanks to the matrix-rust-sdk we got room encryption, especially the key management relatively easily. Nevertheless, we had to to integrate the SDK into Fractal and figure out a user experience that would work well with our design patterns and integrate with the GNOME desktop.

I spent quite a bit of time with Tobias, our designer, figuring out a design for session and user verification. Most of that has landed now, and though it still needs more polish, it work pretty well already.

One of the bigger differences between Element and Fractal-next is that we require users to always verify their new session, because making encryption “optional” on login means you end up with a confusing, half-functional session.

To fully support Matrix E2E encryption we will still need to implement the key backup system (which is not yet supported by matrix-rust-sdk). Currently we also don’t have a way to turn on encryption for a room. And of course we also still need lot more testing to make sure everything works.

Session management

Session/device managment has been in Fractal-next for a while now, allowing people to log out of other sessions and check if other sessions are verified.

 

Many new features

Fractal-next is currently in a bit of an inbetween state, where we don’t quite have all features from the old GTK3 version yet, but at the same time we have some very advanced new features we never managed to implement there.

A good example of this are reactions added by Kévin. Also, we’ve had multi-account support since last summer, but still no support for logging out 😅️.

There are also so many other things being implemented in record time that I’m not always sure what we have already added and what not (Thankfully we have an issue tracker 😀️).
To mention a few recent additions:

• Moving rooms between categories via drag&drop as well as via a context menu.
• The most important part of the room details
• Switching between versions of rooms after upgrades
• Media viewer for media in rooms
• Rich replies

Updates about the NLnet Grant

If you remember my work on Fractal-next was sponsored by NLnet. The initial grant was to add end-to-end encryption to Fractal, which then lead to the rewrite and Fractal-next. Luckily they accepted to sponsor more work. Without their support it wouldn’t have been possible for me to spend so much time on this project.

I still need to finish some things up before I can wrap up the grant project, which I really hope to do it within the next few weeks. I have also been talking to NLnet to get another extension to keep working on Fractal-next full-time a bit longer, to get everything in shape for a first release later this year.

The following items are part of the grant project and still missing:

• Finish the message store/cache for the SDK:
  This was much more complicated then anticipated, since Matrix doesn’t supported a persistent local copy of a room’s timeline, because the Event Graph can change due to federation.
• The grant foresees an Accessibility Audit and Security Audit:
  These wouldn’t have made sense so far since the app isn’t complete enough yet, so this is still outstanding.

At FOSDEM 2022

Don’t miss my talk about Fractal-next at FOSDEM 2022. It will be part of the matrix-rust-sdk talk.