MSC3266: Room summary API

proposals/3266-room-summary.md

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+# MSC3266: Room Summary API
+
+Quite a few clients and tools have a need to preview a room:
+
+- matrix.to may want to show avatar and name of a room.
+- Nextcloud may want to list the names and avatars of your `/joined_rooms` when
+  asking where to share the media.
+- A client may want to preview a room, when hovering a room alias, id or after
+  clicking on it.
+- A client may want to preview a room, when the user is trying to knock on it or
+  to show pending knocks.
+- A traveller bot may use that to show a room summary on demand without actually
+  keeping the whole room state around and having to subscribe to /sync (or
+  using the appservice API).
+- A client can use this to knock on a room instead of joining it when the user
+    tries to join my room alias or link.
+- External services can use this API to preview rooms like shields.io.
+
+There are a few ways to request a room summary, but they only support some of
+the use cases. The [spaces hierarchy API](https://spec.matrix.org/v1.13/client-server-api/#get_matrixclientv1roomsroomidhierarchy) only provides
+limited control over what rooms to summarize and returns a lot more data than
+necessary.  `{roomid}/initialSync` and `{roomid}/state/{event_type}` don't work
+over federation and are much heavier than necessary or need a lot of http calls
+for each room.
+
+## Proposal
+
+A new client-server API, which allows you to fetch a summary of a room by id or
+alias.
+
+### Client-Server API
+
+The API returns a summary of the given room, provided the user is either already
+a member, or has the necessary permissions to join. (For example, the user may
+be a member of a room mentioned in an `allow` condition in the join rules of a
+restricted room.)
+
+For unauthenticated requests a response should only be returned if the room is
+publicly accessible; specifically, that means either:
+ * the room has `join_rule: public` or `join_rule: knock`, or:
+ * the room has `history_visibility: world_readable`.
+
+Note that rooms the user has been invited to or knocked at might result in
+outdated or partial information, or even a 404 `M_NOT_FOUND` response, since
+the the homeserver may not have access to the current state of the room. (In
+particular: the federation API does not provide a mechanism to get the current
+state of a non-publically-joinable room where the requesting server has no
+joined members. Improving this is left for a future MSC.)
+
+A request could look like this:
+
+```
+GET /_matrix/client/v1/room_summary/{roomIdOrAlias}?
+    via=matrix.org&
+    via=neko.dev
+```
+
+(This is not under `/rooms`, because it can be used with an alias.)
+
+- `roomIdOrAlias` can be the roomid or an alias to a room.
+- `via` are servers that should be tried to request a summary from, if it can't
+  be generated locally. These can be from a matrix URI, matrix.to link or a
+  `m.space.child` event for example.
+
+A successful `200` response should contain a JSON object giving information about the room. For example:
+
+```json5
+{
+  room_id: "!ol19s:bleecker.street",
+  avatar_url: "mxc://bleecker.street/CHEDDARandBRIE",
+  guest_can_join: false,
+  name: "CHEESE",
+  num_joined_members: 37,
+  topic: "Tasty tasty cheese",
+  world_readable: true,
+  join_rule: "public",
+  room_type: "m.space",
+  membership: "invite",
+  encryption: "m.megolm.v100",
+  room_version: "9001",
+}
+```
+
+See below for a more detailed description of the response.
+
+#### Unauthenticated and guest access
+
+This API may optionally be exposed to unauthenticated users, or guest users, at the choice of
+server implementations and administrators. Clients MUST NOT rely on being able
+to use the endpoint without authentication, and should degrade gracefully if
+access is denied.
+
+ * Rationale: unauthenticated access is beneficial for third-party services such as
+   https://matrix.to. On the other hand, allowing unauthenticated access may leak
+   information about rooms that would otherwise be restricted to registered users (particularly
+   on servers which do not allow public federation), and may lead to unexpected
+   resource usage.
+
+Servers may rate limit how often they fetch information over federation more heavily, if the
+user is unauthenticated.
+
+When the endpoint is called unauthenticated, the `membership` field will be
+absent in the response.
+
+As mentioned above, a successful response should only be returned for
+unauthenticated requests where the room is publicly accessible.
+
+#### Response format
+
+If the room cannot be found, the server should return a `404`
+HTTP status code along with an `M_NOT_FOUND` error code. The server should
+NOT return `M_UNAUTHORIZED` or otherwise divulge existence of a room, that
+requires authentication to preview, if the request is unauthenticated or
+authenticated by a user without access to the room.
+
+If the request is successful, the server returns a JSON object containing the
+following properties:
+
+| property name      | description                                                                                                                                           |
+| ------------------ | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
+| avatar_url         | Optional. Avatar of the room                                                                                                                          |
+| canonical_alias    | Optional. The canonical alias of the room, if any.                                                                                                    |
+| guest_can_join     | Required. Whether guests can join the room.                                                                                                           |
+| join_rule          | Optional. Join rules of the room                                                                                                                      |
+| name               | Optional. Name of the room                                                                                                                            |
+| num_joined_members | Required. Member count of the room                                                                                                                    |
+| room_id            | Required. Id of the room                                                                                                                              |
+| room_type          | Optional. Type of the room, if any, i.e. `m.space`                                                                                                    |
+| topic              | Optional. Topic of the room                                                                                                                           |
+| world_readable     | Required. If the room history can be read without joining.                                                                                            |
+| allowed_room_ids   | Optional. If the room is a restricted room, these are the room IDs which are specified by the join rules. Empty or omitted otherwise.                 |
+| encryption         | Optional. If the room is encrypted, this specifies the algorithm used for this room. Otherwise, omitted.                                              |
+| membership         | Optional (1). The current membership of this user in the room. Usually `leave` if the server has no local users (so fetches the room over federation). |
+| room_version       | Optional (for historical reasons (2)). Version of the room.                                                                                           |
+
+(1) The `membership` field will not be present when called unauthenticated, but
+is required when called authenticated.
+
+(2) Prior to this MSC, `/_matrix/federation/v1/hierarchy/{roomId}` doesn't
+return the room version, so `room_version` may be unavailable for remote
+rooms.
+
+Most of the fields above are the same as those returned by
+[`/_matrix/client/v3/publicRooms`](https://spec.matrix.org/v1.13/client-server-api/#get_matrixclientv3publicrooms). (Those
+same fields are also a subset of those returned by
+[`/_matrix/client/v1/rooms/{roomId}/hierarchy`](https://spec.matrix.org/v1.13/client-server-api/#get_matrixclientv1roomsroomidhierarchy).) The
+exceptions are:
+
+ * `allowed_room_ids`. This is currently accessible via the federation
+   hierarchy endpoint [`GET
+   /_matrix/federation/v1/hierarchy/{roomId}`](https://spec.matrix.org/v1.13/server-server-api/#get_matrixfederationv1hierarchyroomid),
+   and is necessary
+   to distinguish if the room can be joined or only knocked at.
+
+ * `encryption`. Currently part of the [stripped
+   state](https://spec.matrix.org/v1.13/client-server-api/#stripped-state). Some
+   users may only want to join encrypted rooms; alternatively, clients may want to filter
+   out encrypted rooms, for example if they don't support encryption, or do not
+   support particular encryption algorithms.
+
+ * `membership`. Exposed solely for convenience: a client has many other ways
+   to access this information.
+
+ * `room_version`. Also part of the [stripped
+   state](https://spec.matrix.org/v1.13/client-server-api/#stripped-state).
+   Can be used by clients to show incompatibilities with a room early.
+
+#### Modifications to `/_matrix/client/v1/rooms/{roomId}/hierarchy`
+
+For symmetry the `room_version`, `allowed_room_ids` and `encryption` fields are
+also added to the `/hierarchy` API.
+
+### Server-Server API
+
+For fetching room summaries of a room a server is not joined to, the federation API of the
+[`/hierarchy`](https://spec.matrix.org/v1.13/server-server-api/#get_matrixfederationv1hierarchyroomid)
+endpoint is reused. This provides (with a few changes) all the information
+needed in this MSC, but it also provides a few additional fields and one level
+of children of this room.
+
+Additionally the `encryption` and `room_version` fields are added to the
+responses for each room.
+
+In theory one could also add the `max_depth` parameter with allowed values of 0
+and 1, so that child rooms are excluded, but this performance optimization does
+not seem necessary at this time and could be added at any later point while
+degrading gracefully.
+
+(Originally there was a separate federation API for this, but it was decided by
+the author that lowering the duplication on the federation side is the way to
+go.)
+
+## Potential issues
+
+### Performance
+
+Clients may start calling this API very often instead of using the
+[`/hierarchy`](https://spec.matrix.org/v1.13/client-server-api/#get_matrixclientv1roomsroomidhierarchy)
+for spaces or caching the state received via `/sync`.
+Looking up all the state events required for this API may cause performance
+issues in that case.
+
+To mitigate that, servers are recommended to cache the response for this API and
+apply rate limiting if necessary.
+
+## Alternatives
+
+### The Space Summary / `/hierarchy` API
+
+The
+[`/hierarchy`](https://spec.matrix.org/v1.13/client-server-api/#get_matrixclientv1roomsroomidhierarchy)
+API could be used, but it returns more data than necessary by default (but it
+can be limited to just 1 room) such as all the `m.space.child` events in a
+space, but also is missing the room version, membership and the encryption
+field.
+
+Additionally the `/hierarchy` API doesn't work using aliases. This currently
+doesn't allow users to preview rooms not known to the local server over
+federation. While the user can resolve the alias and then call the `/hierarchy`
+API using the resolved roomid, a roomid is not a routable entity, so the server
+never receives the information which servers to ask about the requested rooms.
+This MSC resolves that by providing a way to pass server names to ask for the
+room as well as the alias directly.
+
+For server to server communication the efficiency is not as important, which is
+why we use the same API as the `/hierarchy` API to fetch the data over
+federation.
+
+### The `sync` API
+
+For joined rooms, the `/sync` API can be used to get a summary for all joined
+rooms. Apart from not working for unjoined rooms, like knocks, invites and space
+children, `/sync` is very heavy for the server and the client needs to cobble
+together information from the `state`, `timeline` and
+[`summary`](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/688) sections to
+calculate the room name, topic and other fields provided in this MSC.
+
+Furthermore, the membership counts in the summary field are only included, if
+the client is using lazy loading.  This MSC provides similar information as
+calling `/sync`, but to allow it to work for unjoined rooms it only uses information
+ from the stripped state. Additionally, it excludes `m.heroes` as well as membership
+events, since those are not included in the stripped state of a room. (A client
+can call `/joined_members` to receive those if needed. It may still make sense
+to include heroes so that clients could construct a human-friendly room display
+name in case both the name and the canonical alias are absent; but solving the
+security implications with that may better be left to a separate MSC.)
+
+### The `/state` API
+
+The `/state` API could be used, but the response is much bigger than needed,
+can't be cached as easily and may need more requests. This also doesn't work
+over federation (yet). The variant of this API, which returns the full state of
+a room, also does not return stripped events, which prevents it from being used
+by non-members. The event for specific events DOES return stripped events, but
+could not provide a member count for a room.
+
+### Proper peeking
+
+Peeking could solve this too, but with additional overhead and
+[MSC2753](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/2753) is much more
+complex. You need to add a peek and remember to remove it. For many usecases you
+just want to do one request to get info about a room, no history and no updates.
+This MSC solves that by reusing the existing hierarchy APIs, returns a
+lightweight response and provides a convenient API instead.
+
+### A more batched API
+
+This API could take a list of rooms with included `via`s for each room instead
+of a single room (as a POST request). This may have performance benefits for the
+federation API and a client could then easily request a summary of all joined
+rooms. It could still request the summary of a single room by just including
+only a single room in the POST or a convenience GET could be provided by the
+server (that looks like this proposal). At the same time, a batched API is inherently
+more complex to implement for both clients and servers. Additionally, there are no
+known use cases yet that would benefit from batched access.
+
+### MSC3429: Individual room preview API (closed)
+
+[MSC3429](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3429) is an alternative
+implementation, but it chooses a different layout. While this layout might make
+sense in the future, it is inconsistent with the APIs already in use, harder to
+use for clients (iterate array over directly including the interesting fields)
+and can't reuse the federation API. In my opinion an MSC in the future, that
+bases all summary APIs on a list of stripped events seems like the more
+reasonable approach to me and would make the APIs more extensible.
+
+## Security considerations
+
+This API may leak data, if implemented incorrectly or malicious servers could
+return wrong results for a summary.
+
+Those are the same concerns as on [MSC2946](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/2946)
+or [MSC3173](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3173).
+
+This API could also be used for denial of service type attacks. Appropriate
+ratelimiting and caching should be able to mitigate that.
+
+## Unstable prefix
+
+This uses the `im.nheko.summary` unstable prefix. As such the paths are prefixed
+with `unstable/im.nheko.summary`.
+
+- the client API will be
+    `/_matrix/client/unstable/im.nheko.summary/summary/{roomIdOrAlias}`.
+
+Some implementations still use
+    `/_matrix/client/unstable/im.nheko.summary/rooms/{roomIdOrAlias}/summary`,
+    but this was a mistake in this MSC. Endpoints using aliases shouldn't be under /rooms.
+
+Additionally the fields `encryption` and `room_version` in the summaries are
+prefixed with `im.nheko.summary` as well since it is new. The latter might still
+be called `im.nheko.summary.version` in some implementations.