Matrix-Libera IRC Bridge Temporary Shutdown, a Retrospective (2023)

great post from the libera staff, respecting the matrix folks while dealing with all of that must have felt disheartening.

matrix has other driving forces and incentives. there’s only so much time they can spend on things like individual bridges.

meanwhile, they devote developers to writing two different homeserver implementations in parallel. or writing an experimental p2p homeserver - or the three guys working on thirdroom. ugh

i just hope they realize what’s important. people just want to chat on a distributed platform that isn’t irc - make it as simple and fun as possible. that is your entire mission.

no metaverse, no experimental backend shit, no securitygasm cryptography - nobody is buying drugs on matrix. this isn’t signal or whatsapp, this is discord for tech dorks.

just focus on making GROUP chatting good, simple, and fun. the ux just utterly sucks right now.

it’s the difference between scrolling through a menu on an ipod versus a self checkout kiosk - the kiosk just FEELS bad, simple human revulsion. the element interface offers the same experience.

and we _still_ don’t have custom emojis or selfserve moderation, even though matth himself promised them to us 2 YEARS ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33014245

element is _the product_, and it hasn’t moved a single inch in years from my point of view.

Putting aside all the other problems this post talks about, for me the biggest issue was the bridge itself appeared to be run by a single person. When the bridge crashed and he was asleep or on vacation just got stuck waiting hours/days for it to come back. Made for a terrible user experience.

Since then I just run 1-to-1 heisenbridge connections with my homeserver. It's not as fancy but it works reliably.

> We have been reluctant to go into detail before now because the last thing we wanted was to put our communities through another public dispute with a for-profit company. However we believe you, our users, deserve to know the circumstances of our decision, so this post is an attempt to satisfy your expectation of transparency from us as an organisation.

The idea of transparency being a "burden" is ridiculous. It implies that sharing information is a problem, which seems like an excuse to avoid accountability.

Really a pity this. Suddenly all those bridged-to-matrix chatrooms were left out in the cold. I am using IRC now to reach those, and they lost a lot of folks that were active in their channel before.

Are there any alternatives to the official bridge that someone who is a user of both Libera and Matrix can run for themselves to bridge the channels they operate?

> Within a few months after welcoming the bridge, we were routinely dealing with a sizable and often automated abuse load from the bridge that made use of easy anonymous registration and the protocol’s persistent and distributed archiving of files, including images, videos, and long messages converted to pastebins.

Umm libera itself allows "easy anonymous registration". You don't even need to have an account. You just join with a made-up name if you want to.

This is in fact one of the things I love about IRC. Nothing wrong with it but it feels wrong calling matrix out on that.

The archiving makes kinda sense for matrix' features of scrollback on demand. I believe there's an IRCv3 feature for it too. The bridge should have a provision to prevent users to see any backlog from before the moment they joined.

Ps I really hate those new "single puppet" third party bridges they recommend. Because they break nick colouring and also the actual nick of the user speaking is in a different place. Having each matrix user have their own IRC puppet is much nicer on the IRC side. Especially when there's more matrix than irc users.

I think libera has enough problems with moderation as it is. And most of the regulars (including most mods) in all the biggest channels seem to have cosmically inflated god complexes and are regularly and demonstrably abusive to their users with no recourse available (if you try to report it they just ban you).