As a user, this is miserable. Matrix is used as a decentralised bouncer for tens of thousands of users to access IRC (including me) and while the bridge has certainly had problems over the years (e.g. occasional delays & a recent spate of dropped messages), it's also improved loads too - e.g. with support for restarting the bridge without reconnecting all the IRC users (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1...) and all the other stuff in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/blob/dev....
By now requiring users to go and contact chanops to ask them to explicitly plumb IRC channels to Matrix, it's just going to waste time for chanops, precipitate weird cross-plumbing failures, or fail outright (given plumbing channels with more than 100 users has to be done manually to prevent abuse).
It's very unfortunate that it's come to this, and I can only hope that the whole "opt in with a chanmode" thing happens, if portalling is off the table.
In fact, wouldn't it have been better to just ban the bridge by default, and let chanops unban it if they want people to be able to access via Matrix, rather than encourage people into the weird world of plumbing?
EDIT: clarifying that i'm not neutral on this, given i'm project lead for Matrix, and also responsible for running the Libera bridge at Element.
> Matrix is used as a decentralised bouncer for tens of thousands of users to access IRC
Matrix as a whole isn't banned, only the bridge operated by Element. If anything, this could encourage more people to run their own bridges (eg. Heisenbridge).
> while the bridge has certainly had problems over the years (e.g. occasional delays & a recent spate of dropped messages),
As well as flood (multiline messages and edits), spam, harassment[1], leaking secret channels[2], leaking past message metadata and channel membership.
The very room used to discuss the Matrix bridge (#irc:matrix.org) has been dropping all IRC messages for at least three days, and the one to talk to Libera's staff (#libera-matrix:libera.chat) was only fixed today [EDIT: actually it's still dropping some people's messages]. The room used to discuss the Matrix spec (#spec:matrix.org) has been dropping them for over a year.
After two years of message drops, there is no way for users to know their messages are being dropped without using developer tools, causing miscommunication issues to many Free Software projects.
There have been, as far as I know, no work on addressing UX issues on the IRC side (primarily multiline messages, edits, and replies) in the last couple of years; except my work on MSC3968 and MSC3969 which is still awaiting initial review from Element four months after I submitted it.
> Matrix as a whole isn't banned, only the bridge operated by Element. If anything, this could encourage more people to run their own bridges (eg. Heisenbridge).
That won't help 80% of the users that are not techy people. So yes imho while not intended as one, it will backfire as a full ban of matrix.
> except my work on MSC3968 and MSC3969 which is still awaiting initial review from Element four months after I submitted it.
Honestly, as a Matrix user, I hope these don't land any time soon as they will strongly decrease usability for matrix users. (And yes, I am going as far as saying that I want a native feeling chat on matrix side. Not an IRC emulation. If I wanted an IRC emulation, I would use an IRC client. That's EXACTLY the one thing I DO NOT want as a matrix user.)
> they will strongly decrease usability for matrix users
There is an impedance mismatch between IRC and Matrix, and these try to find a middle-ground, by helping non-technical Matrix users follow social norms in a room they joined. As your own client dev, you are free not to implement these specs in your client to ignore these norms.
I'm not trying to push these on all of Matrix, that would be ridiculous. My implementations only enable them in 1-on-1 chats with IRC users, and (hopefully) on portal rooms in the future.
> As well as flood (multiline messages and edits), spam, harassment[1], leaking secret channels[2], leaking past message metadata and channel membership.
What abuse? That link says "Matrix does not provide the moderation tools we need to keep our community safe", but doesn't say how their safety(?) was compromised.
I also find it odd since Mozilla switched from IRC to Matrix specifically because they wanted to censor people, I mean "keep our community safe" though "moderation tools".
> I also find it odd since Mozilla switched from IRC to Matrix specifically because they wanted to censor people, I mean "keep our community safe" though "moderation tools".
Mozilla had neglected their IRC network for years, so they were lacking the expertise. And they didn't try to reach out to other networks like Freenode (Libera Chat's predecessor) or OFTC to try to ask them for advice.
Good riddance. The random message drops problem has been going on for well over a month now, with a really long issue on GitHub. Almost zero messages from developers, as far as I can tell they neither have a clue what the problem is, nor are they working on a solution. This is absolutely pathetic. If anything this just cemented my aversion towards the whole matrix ecosystem.
As a long-time user, they have a shockingly glacial development pace. If I remember correctly, this has been in development since 2014 (that's 8 years) and the official client is still missing features(!) That's not to mention the issues others are having with it, such as the IRC logs in another part of this thread. I've also heard a lot of Synapse horror stories.
I totally agree with everything you said (as a normal user of Matrix and this bridge) but shouldn't you clarify that you work for Element? You are a user but also more than.
have clarified. i was posting from a user point of view, though (given i love lurking and hanging out in loads of IRC channels via the bridge today, and i'm gutted to lose that. it feels like the ultimate splintering of communities.)
I'm one of those who is affected by the decision, and I also hope the chan mode ends up being the chosen solution and implemented before times runs out.
There's no need for hyperbole though. Libera overall only has a few tens of thousands of users, there's no way the vast majority are accessing it via Matrix like you say/imply. I'd wager we're less than 1000 impacted on libera.
I'm not being hyperbolic, i'm looking at the grafana stats on the matrix<->libera bridge, and the total connected users from Matrix fluctuates between around 10,000 and 12,000 users (bearing in mind that connections from Matrix get kicked if the user from Matrix hasn't been seen for >30 days). https://netsplit.de/networks/statistics.php?net=Libera.Chat implies there's around 42K users connected to libera overall, so we're talking about 23% of the total network participants here.
Thank you I stand corrected, 12k is 10x what I expected. Though I feel like "tens of thousands" should means 20k or more, so hyperbole is still at play..
Knowing that at least 1/4 of Libera users are from a fairly unstable bridge is really depressing. IRC truly is dying...
Before I checked the figure, I thought it was around 22,000 (from memory, the I:line is set up for 25,000 connections). However, as time has gone one we've been more aggressive about culling idle connections on the Matrix side (plus there seems to be less activity to bridge to on the IRC side), hence it being around 11K these days.
In terms of the bridge stability: there have obviously been stability problems over the last few months, but overall it's certainly been better than nothing. Agreed that the situation overall is really depressing.
I have had my own share of problems with both portalled rooms as well as plumbed rooms on Matrix. Dropped messages, dropped connections, etc. were some of the problems. Sometimes the re-connection times can be several hours long. Despite these problems, the portalled rooms have been a convenient way to quickly set up a relatively persistent connection to the IRC network via the Matrix bridge.
That convenience is now going to be lost unless the IRC channel operators opt-in to create an account on Matrix, then set up a plumbed room on Matrix, and then advertise the plumbed rooms sufficiently well. Of course, many regular IRC users set up an IRC bouncer (I use ZNC myself) to keep a persistent connection to the IRC network, so this move would not affect them. But the portalled rooms served as a good alternative to setting up IRC bouncers yourself and unfortunately, this nice alternative is now going away.
As a channel moderator, I haven't been too happy with the plumbed channels either. For example, one of the things I have found to be a little problematic is that the Matrix bridge service joins the Matrix room with Admin power level. To avoid these complications, I wrote my own tiny script to bridge the Matrix rooms and IRC channels I needed. Since my script joins the networks as an ordinary client, it does not need elevated privileges in the channels/rooms. In case, anyone is interested in the script, I have shared it here: https://github.com/susam/nimb
The section "Differences from Matrix Appservice" at the bottom of the README in the preceding link explains some of the inconveniences I faced with the Matrix bridge service for plumbed channels and why I had to write my own script to avoid them.
A pity, and maybe they have good reasons (load, abuse, the bridge being too flaky, ..), but I do not like the user experience of plumbed rooms and the limitation of only certain rooms being plumbed even further makes this uninteresting so this would mean I would need to run my own instance of the bridge or stop using Libera. And, no, I am no fan of the proposed new channel mode either. It was how it just worked and included all channels which made the bridge so useful.
I liked the bridge despite its occasional technical issues.
Sadly not too surprising. Matrix can do a lot of really cool stuff, but also is just wonky in random places, and at scale that really hurts. And the bugfixing seems to endlessly run behind the work piling features on the other end.
It is so painful. I really want Matrix to be good, but most people I talk about it with have struggled with it. The clients aren't good at all.
Matrix 2.0 is a step in the right direction, they better be serious about it (and to me that means not only mobile Element X, but also a new web app!).
I agree. Very excited for element X. It's def a rough tradeoff that they've slowed fixing bugs to get X out. However, they just released a new version using the rust crypto library which I hope makes error related to waiting for decryption less often.
Unfortunate, but the IRC bridge is an absolute dumpster fire at least at these scales, and Element seems to have been unable to do much about this so far.
I guess I'll add "set up Heisenbridge" to my TODO list; the number of "actual" Matrix rooms that I'm in is very few compared to the number of bridged IRC channels, and most of those are on Libera.
Because by the time you're 30 minutes into explaining the phrase "userland daemon", Grandma and the preschoolers have already created a matrix account and signed into it on their ipads.
By now requiring users to go and contact chanops to ask them to explicitly plumb IRC channels to Matrix, it's just going to waste time for chanops, precipitate weird cross-plumbing failures, or fail outright (given plumbing channels with more than 100 users has to be done manually to prevent abuse).
It's very unfortunate that it's come to this, and I can only hope that the whole "opt in with a chanmode" thing happens, if portalling is off the table.
In fact, wouldn't it have been better to just ban the bridge by default, and let chanops unban it if they want people to be able to access via Matrix, rather than encourage people into the weird world of plumbing?
EDIT: clarifying that i'm not neutral on this, given i'm project lead for Matrix, and also responsible for running the Libera bridge at Element.