I spent some time today updating some of the web properties around the Lexington Bitcoin Meetup to hopefully get all of our technology up to date. I initially wrote up a review of the changes in our Matrix server but I figured I'd do a more complete changelog here on my blog.
I've updated LexingtonBitcoin.org with a number of changes today to help new users discover some of our servers while cleaning up some of the links we use from lopp.net. This was by far the biggest time consumption piece since Jameson has made a number of commits to his site that I needed to piece through for our links section.
The first part of this refresh was pretty simple adding links to some of our new services that we've established for our group. The first links were added to our newly set up Discord server that links with our Matrix server and Telegram room. I then added links to our Mastodon/Pleroma server hosted at lexingtonbitcoin.social so that users would have an alternative for Twitter. You can read more about that in a second.
The second half was updating all of Lopp's commits and merging them to our site. Now we should have a much more up to date set of links for anyone interested in digging into more features of the network. I'm very happy to see one of those changes was adding Base58 to our Bitcoin Classes page. If you have links you'd like to see added please don't hesitate to hit me up on the Matrix server.
The first update I made was updating our Matrix Synapse to v1.56.0. I didn't read the upgrade notes before jumping in and quickly realized the Matrix server was broken. At first I couldn't tell what had happened because Matrix was just reporting as 'activating' which left me confused what was going on. I assumed I broke something with the homeserver.yaml file so I jumped over to the release notes where I found the culprit. Synapse will now refuse to start if open registration is enabled but 'enable_registration_without_verification' isn't defined.
To solve this issue I've disabled open registrations on the matrix.lexingtonbitcoin.org server until I can set up a proper email server for the lexingtonbitcoin.org domain. Until I get that setup new users will still be able to join our Matrix server but will need to register on another homeserver like Matrix.org or
For now I've disabled registration on our server until I can set up a proper email server for lexingtonbitcoin.org to handle registration and comply with the new requirements. Until then anyone that wants to join our homeserver can sign up for a matrix account through Matrix.im, tchncs.de or another homeserver and then join our space.
While I was working on the Matrix server I went ahead and updated our Element web app to v1.10.10. v.10.10 comes with a number of new features that improve using it as a chat application but most importantly it adds 'Threads' as a beta feature. Once enabled from the labs section, it will keep discussions a bit more organized and allow you to respond to individual messages in a thread form.
I've not really talked much about this yet so I figured I'd include it in here since it is likely new for a lot of users. LexingtonBitcoin.social is our fediverse server built on Pleroma (very similar to Mastodon and built on the same ActivityPub standard) that is federated through k3tan's relay to a number of other Bitcoin related instances including Bitcoin Hackers.
You can register on our site for a @lexingtonbitcoin.social handle and then communicate with anyone using the fediverse through federation. It's a great replacement for Twitter and probably even better! In fact I even have all my Tweets get crossposted to LexingtonBitcoin.social in case I say something that the Blue Bird doesn't like and they end up banning me for some reason.
Finally I updated our Jitsi server to the latest version. We don't really use this application much at the moment but if for some reason we weren't able to meet up in person each week, we could use our Jitsi server to host the weekly meetup online without worrying about using an external server. It's also linked for group calling in our Element server in case anyone wants to have a group call there.
As always I look forward to seeing all you psychopaths this week! If you have any questions or need help with anything that's changed please don't hesitate to hit me up on Matrix or come down to Centro. I'll be happy to see if we can't figure out what's going on and do our best to get you connected on the servers!
