Wasn't anybody using the Matrix bridge to Libera Chat IRC?
Seems like IRC is really dead and only used by a very tiny small minority of people.
Also Slack made the same move a couple years ago, first trying to appeal to IRC users at the beginning and then shut it all off when they had everyone else
Some of the most deeply technical people in the world use IRC.
Being able to talk to them is a superpower.
Discord is awful. It's most of the downsides of IRC, with all the downsides of a centralized company running it, with a very resource heavy client. You can run IRC on just about nothing (I ran an IRC network in college on a 16MHz 68030 with 8MB RAM just fine), and I know quite a few quiet little backwaters servers doing exactly that.
But apart from that, it's still as good as it always was.
Yeah, I am sure it is possible to set up my own appservice, but ERC has been convenient enough for my use case.
** There are 73 users and 33193 invisible on 28 servers
** 39 operator(s) online
** 75 unknown connection(s)
** 22136 channels formed
** I have 1884 clients and 1 servers
** Current local users 1884, max 2958
** Current global users 33266, max 34731
** Highest connection count: 2959 (2958 clients) (25302 connections received) ** - platinum.libera.chat Message of the Day -
** - This server provided by NORDUnet/SUNET
** - Welcome to Libera Chat, the IRC network for
** - free & open-source software and peer directed projects.
Opensuse also has their own matrix server #space.opnensuse.org and archlinux does too #archlinux:archlinux.org
While it was decided to migrate to Matrix, still a lot of tooling was built for IRC & many users connected via IRC to the rooms, so the situation with bridges in place was ideal.
But wen the bridge stopped working, it effectively split some of these room in half, with some people being on Matrix and some only on IRC. Worse yet, some meeting still depend on IRC only tooling/bots & happen only on the "IRC side" until the tooling can be ported. Not the best situation. :)
I'm embarrassed at the thought that I would "soon" soft nudge my friends and family to matrix, years ago. With the state of synapse, matrix.org, and the project in general, I wouldn't consider trying that for another 12-18 months. Or more.
This current news just gives me more pause about leadership and vision. This is a huge "oopsie" to put it nicely. It feels like a massive loss for matrix (bad first impressions, negative impact on network effects, etc) and will undoubtedly be something that matrix detractors will point to for years.
I normally keep quiet about this and just huff more copium because I WANT matrix to succeed, but I wish using Element and matrix as it exists didn't make me feel so ... Idk. Normally by now a tech project with this transcripts hits a steady state but man, the protocol is lacking, element web is just passable at the most generous. Element on Android, I won't even speak about, refer to where I want element to succeed.
To balance this out - Element x has been pleasantly satisfying lately. I'm curious if the team is deliberately taking a different strategy. New Element is working on basically the intersection of what I think are going to be foundational future "stuff" but seem almost to eager. Meanwhile element x is missing for feature but is, still after months of using it, "blazingly fast".
> Matrix, at this point, is effectively proprietary.
Matrix is fully open [0] and fully spec'd by the MSCs [1], and stewarded by the Matrix Foundation [2].
> It's fully controlled by one for-profit company (Element).
2/5 people on the board work for Element [2].
> and the blockchain protocol (yes, it uses a blockchain)
It does not use a blockchain (there is no proof-of-anything). You might be confusing blockchains with Merkle Trees, but in that case you'd also have to think git is a blockchain.
> is complicated enough to prevent independent reimplementations
There are several independent client [3] and server [4] implementations.
> And it doesn't even work that well.
Maybe not, but it has pretty good adoption [5]
[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org
[2]: https://matrix.org/about/
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)#Clients
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)#Servers
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)#Adoption
So, exercising all due restraint, I say this: your statement is unmoored from reality. I thank @camgunz for chiming in and citing sources.
Only time will tell, and of course I'm biased as the Matrix.org Foundation's Managing Director, but I think there's good reason to remain hopeful:
The spec continues to evolve with major improvements expected in feature set and performance in the next year as we get to the 2.0 spec release, the Foundation is staffing up and beginning to fundraise, we're on the cusp of holding our first ever community elections to seat a Governing Board, and adoption has continued doubling on an annual basis.
I invite you and anyone else who is invested and/or concerned to join us in the Foundation's new office room – it's a way to get a view into ongoing activities, ask questions, provide direct feedback, and celebrate all the little wins on our way to collective success: https://matrix.to/#/#foundation-office:matrix.org
As useful as Cory Doctorow's concept of enshittification is, it has absolutely no utility in describing what is happening here.
Nobody is being locked in, the user experience is incrementally improving as the spec and the implementations evolve, and we're sure as hell not collecting ever more data and using recommendation algorithms to shove advertising down people's throats.
There are plenty of valid critiques. But what you're saying here is just patently absurd.
Synapse is very stable these days, and relatively resource efficient. Matrix.org (both the server, website, spec and foundation) is in a good place too, as is (from my biased pov as project lead) the project in general.
> This is a huge "oopsie" to put it nicely
We simply don't have the people to do a good job of maintaining the Libera bridge. We tried to jump forwards on it with persistent connections to improve the experience on the Libera side; this caused a tonne of instability; we couldn't move back (given it would have also been seen as a backwards step); we didn't have the manpower to fix it rapidly either; so this is not remotely our preferred outcome. We ran the bridge for almost 8 years; it wasn't perfect; it wasn't a total disaster either; but in the end we overstretched ourselves and Libera pulled the plug.
> It feels like a massive loss for matrix (bad first impressions, negative impact on network effects, etc) and will undoubtedly be something that matrix detractors will point to for years.
Matrix has around 5M native active users based on the phonehome stats, of which ~22k were using the libera bridge. I agree that it's awful for early adopter geeks who love IRC, and I despair that it has happened. But I don't think the sky is falling either.
> Element X has been pleasantly satisfying lately. I'm curious if the team is deliberately taking a different strategy.
Yes, it's a very different strategy. Element isn't working on the legacy mobile apps at all any more (other than for security updates), and rather than being spread too thin over too many projects and codebases (Element Web, Element iOS & Element Android all had zero code in common other than libolm) instead the intention is for Element to focus on one primary codebase (matrix-rust-sdk + Element X and Element Web 'R') and nail it. Meanwhile we don't have the manpower to do a good job of other projects (e.g. Libera bridge, P2P Matrix, Third Room etc.) and so they are on hold for now.
I agree that with 20:20 hindsight this hasn't been the most efficient route to get to where we are today.
Yeah, no. I run both a Matrix server (Synapse) and an XMPP server (Prosody). It is completely obvious when Synapse is running on my server. I don't need ps or systemctl status, I can tell if Synapse is running just by looking at the bars at the top of htop.
Meanwhile my XMPP stuff is as invisible as any other system service.
Re-reading my posts, I guess I could be more specific. Y'all seem like you have great technical vision but are having a hard time with success, growth, and revenue. While I can appreciate some technical bits of Matrix, I would never dare to think I could do better than anyone at those real challenges. It hurts to read about y'all struggling for dev funds, in spite of success. And I feel like that probably weighs on you, it would weigh on me. Godspeed, good luck, I look forward to tomorrow's TWIM :).
The only thing I'll say about matrix is they have a lot of cool features but a smooth/fast experience like discord is the only thing they are missing to compete there but aside from philosophy I see no reason to avoid discord unless I want to operare a server instance. To me it's like webmail, I don't care if gmail or proronmail are opensource as much as I care about their security and reliability. I mean, I gotta applaud all the folks that worked on matrix clients, but there is still much left to be desired, I wish I could help in some way.
IRC is a "fully mature technology" at this point in the internet. It just works. I believe a number of tech companies keep IRC servers around for the "Everything but TCP/IP has gone down" emergency communications technology.
But it's fine. The filter of IRC is part of what makes it worth it these days to use. It's the anti-Reddit.
You people like your lemmy, mastodon, peertube,etc... and it's not like I disagree with the idea but ideals are only good for academic discussions. They need to work well IRL, there is no replacement for that, period!
I will give you a good example: firefox! It's not just ideas, it works just as well as Chrome!
And you know what, back in the day when you could trust or be apathetic to server ops IRC was great. But not having e2ee encryption and server operators being anti-privacy like with libera means we have no modern day options.
You can downvote me all you want but these bullshit dramas have destroyed communities I liked and that is not f*cking ok! Downvote me a million times but I have not had unexpected disruptions on discord or crazy memory/performance issues.
I would love to use ircv3 that is full e2ee with no opportunistic crap or matrix with a decent well maintained lightweight web client and simple/good UX. But don't tell my the problems don't exist because youe ideology is nice and shiny.
Yeah, discord can be bought by some crappy company and they can start banning for bad reasons but guess what? So can matrix.org and it already happened with freenode (and reddit in a related manner). But today, discord is best.
I hold on to the hope of a better alternative as I point out the flaws in what exist today. It needs to work well first and foremost.
IRC is a protocol.
Discord is a platform.
Platforms always die. Protocols can live forever.
- Reliable
Oh, dear fools...
https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/deportalling-libera-chat/
I wonder whether the July move prompted users to find other ways to connect to Libera.chat besides Matrix, killing usage of the bridge, leading us here.
Thanks to those involved for the efforts while they could be sustained!
Echoing you, I am likewise really grateful for all the people who worked on it while it was doable!
* Speaking on behalf of the Matrix.org Foundation here as its Managing Director.
If you find any issues, bugs, etc. in this tool, please let me know. Although this tool works well for my modest requirements, someone else may find issues while using this tool that I have not encountered yet. In such a case, bug reports, pull requests, patches, etc. are very welcome!
Otherwise you may have a command injection vulnerability similar to what matrix-appservice-irc used to have: https://pktz.fr/matrix/security/2022-appservice-irc-command-... (though with carriage returns instead of null bytes)
It certainly, did, I deployed Heisenbridge on my homeserver because I didn't want to go back to having two clients open.
Libera.Chat staff that used to work at Element departed the company due to budget cuts.
In combination with the budget cuts' wider effects on the matrix ecosystem, this meant there was little if any hope the issues with the bridge would get fixed.
I'd like to see a post from libera about what they expect someone to do if they take the bridge and take it further to work on other servers..
I still dream of a trillium (sp?) manychat kind of thing that can bridge all things... I get that some want to prevent that - and others even if they want interoperability may have debates about how things should be implemented for various reasons.
maybe libera can make a bridge with options and defaults that make most people happy.. but a user of libera myself, but I want an all things work together future - I get that tech stuff can be hard, even without those who want walled gardens and barriers.
- fingers crossed for more options in the future instead of less.
Matrix is, for me, a replacement (or a slightly less annoying way) to handle "person to person and local group" communications. And the bridges beat having to run a bunch of other clients for Google Chat, Signal, etc. However, my goal there is to move people onto Matrix, and I've done a decent job of it so far in my circles.
IRC is "professional technical chatter during work hours," and I use it as such - as I've used it for the bulk of three decades at this point. There's some social stuff there, but it's mostly "deeply technical conversations in the sort of chat rooms filled with people there for the same reasons." It's very much been a bit of a superpower - build relationships in the right IRC servers and you have a massive "external brain" of relationships you can query for weird questions. I worked at a small IT shop for a while, and people eventually figured out the correlation between "An absolutely off the walls question" and "the clattery keyboard," when I started discussing the problem in IRC.
I don't want IRC to be Matrix, any more than I want to bridge "professional chat rooms" into my evening hours (which more and more are simply hard analog, offline, etc).
I question whether the Matrix team even wants to eclipse IRC. It probably won't earn them many beans.
IRC is "professional technical chatter during work hours," and I use it as such - as I've used it for the bulk of three decades at this point.
Indeed and the clients and servers certainly treat it as such. But remember that Matrix is a federated protocol... What if your employer also used it? Or if you wanted to participate in Nix or Rust or Mozilla discussions?
Certainly you wouldn't want to receive work/business/etc messages while off with your friends and family. Different device, different account on the device, different client on the account... Lots of options to get Matrix working for you in more than one way.
But the clients are so different compared to IRC. And there is no real home server for the FOSS world. Mozilla, Nix each run their own AIUI.
I’ve been mucking away for months trying to integrate all social media apps together, and these bridges are obscure and hard to customize/configure for n00bs.
Soon, I can do away with the 10+ apps and just use 1
Though I try to move people into the "native Matrix" ecosystem. The bridges are just nice as a transition technology.
Sounds like Beeper
Maybe matrix/element has that, but I’m not very adept at finding it I guess. Old time original freenode had so many communities.
Personally I would like to see a discord interface where there's not a jarring difference between each server. Something more like this hexchat screenshot (although hexchat itself isn't pretty) https://hexchat.github.io/screenshots.html but note the server and channel list on the left. I want something more like that.
I know I might be using a dying medium but I enjoy IRC the way it is.
Use the client for the group you are in rather than some bodged together bridge.
The user drop is quite noticable here: https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php
After that you can see Libre.Chat is actually growing in users again and at a very consistent pace.
Updates on the matrix<>IRC bridge (Jun 7th) https://libera.chat/news/matrix-irc-bridge-updates
Disabling Matrix Portalling (July 3rd) https://libera.chat/news/matrix-deportalling
Delays in Disabling Matrix Portalling (July 28th) https://libera.chat/news/deportalling-delay
Temporarily disabling the Matrix Bridge (August 5th) https://libera.chat/news/temporarily-disabling-the-matrix-br...
Matrix Bridge Temporary Shutdown, a Retrospective (August 10th) https://libera.chat/news/matrix-bridge-disabled-retrospectiv...
It was sad to see a few matrix people drop away but most of the activity and users were/are on the IRC side. And of the active matrix users I considered friends most just decided to connect to IRC using a real client. Much like Slack started off with an IRC bridge to bootstrap itself with IRC communities the Riot.im/Element.io corporation no longer feels the need to maintain the bootstrapping and does not allocate resources for it.
