Re: Matrix IRC bridge considered harmful

Hi folks,

Sorry for the delay in response here - the last 24 hours have not been fun.

Trying to address the main bits of feedback here:

1. The original issue that Michael Catanzaro reported (Matrix->IRC PM 
going missing) was a legitimate bug in the bridge.  The bridge is meant 
to display an error if you try to talk to an absent IRC user; this was 
fixed today and will be deployed tomorrow: 
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/978. Sorry that 
you got bitten by this :(

2. In terms of: "We currently have loads of garbage IRC users in the 
channels after the bridge hosted at matrix.org was replaced with one 
hosted at the gnome.org homeserver." - I thought we'd cleared this up in 
the days following the migration, and this is the first I've heard of it 
still being a problem.  It sounds like the old bridge created IRC users 
on the Matrix side, and then the new bridge bridged them back over to 
IRC.  It should be trivial to kick out the old bridge's IRC users - 
please can you give me an example channel/room where this is happening 
to look at?

3. In terms of bridge performance: we set up a dedicated bridge and 
server for gnome.org powered by modular.im back in April 2019.  The 
bridge got put live, but the server was never publicised because we 
never got a greenlight to announce its existence (plus the go-live was 
eclipsed by some unrelated security dramas on the matrix.org 
homeserver).  As a result, the majority of users have been using the 
bridge via the public matrix.org server, which is (unfortunately) often 
overloaded thanks to the exponential growth we've been dealing with. 
However, if folks were actually using the dedicated GNOME server, then 
it would be an *excellent* experience - much like the one that Mozilla 
is enjoying currently.  It's worth noting that we provided the GNOME 
server for free because we want to support the project, but the running 
costs are significant - it's been very frustrating that the server has 
not been used.  (It seems that some people have found it anyway over the 
course of today, to quote someone in #general:gnome.org: "OMG the IRC 
bridge is SO much faster on this instance.").  I'm hoping that we can 
get a greenlight to point people at the Gnome.org server, as right now 
the situation is indeed terrible and it's hurting Matrix's reputation as 
well as hurting GNOME :((

4. Mozilla *are* running their homeserver federated (as of this week) - 
c.f.https://twitter.com/littledan/status/1227603567722319873 
<https://twitter.com/littledan/status/1227603567722319873>. They're 
countering abuse by using the arsenal of anti-abuse tooling we've been 
working on over the last year as per 
https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/ and 
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/proposals/2313-moderation-policy-rooms.md 
etc.

You may also be interested that the core Matrix team is starting to look 
seriously at the work going on around Fractal, particularly around E2E 
encryption, to accelerate E2E encryption for Rust clients in general.  
Specifically, we're porting pantalaimon (the Matrix daemon which 
offloads E2E encryption) from Python to Rust, and we hope that the 
resulting official E2EE-capable Matrix Rust SDK will be directly usable 
by Fractal and help the project along massively as a first class native 
Matrix GTK client (assuming they want to use it! :)

So, TL;DR: we've had a solution to much of the Matrix<->IRC problems 
since April 2019, we just need to actually use it.

I'm sorry this has taken so long to sort out - I genuinely hadn't 
realised that things were so bad.

thanks,

Matthew


On 13/02/2020 20:28, Carlos Soriano via desktop-devel-list wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> We been in contact with Matthew from Matrix for some time already. I 
> lately didn't have much time to invest on this, so we had have some 
> delays on answering. However, it's our expectation that with the set 
> up that we have right now the IRC bridge should perform as its best, 
> as we are using servers from modular.im <http://modular.im>, the 
> company that maintains paid severs with matrix services on them. We 
> believe our set up is correct, but there might be some miss 
> configuration somewhere, or the current situation it's already the 
> best that can be offered.
>
> We'll update you as soon as we have more information.
>
> Cheers,
> Carlos
>
> On Thu, 13 Feb 2020 at 17:16, Michael Catanzaro <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>     On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 4:15 pm, Britt Yazel <[email protected]
>     <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>     > Attached is an image of the compact mode + dark theme. Just for the
>     > record.
>
>     The thing is, it really comes down to personal preference. I
>     suspect we
>     have a lot of people who like web clients, and a lot of people who
>     just
>     don't. With open protocols like IRC, XMPP, or Matrix, where lots of
>     client choice exists, you can use whatever you prefer. It's no
>     problem
>     if you don't like any particular client because you can just use a
>     different one.
>
>     Myself, I like to see GNOME clients: polari, dino, fractal, chatty.
>     They look good next to our other apps, and vindicate the potential of
>     our desktop platform. But if we're going to have a web client, at the
>     very least do it using WebKitGTK, like Revolt does, to stick with
>     GNOME
>     technologies and avoid bundling Electron.
>
>     I'll also suggest: whatever we use, it'd be nice to select something
>     with the potential to become a widely-accepted standard, like IRC
>     used
>     to be. Chat has become a failed disaster area of fragmented walled
>     gardens, and when we have a choice between an emerging standard
>     and yet
>     another silo, I think there's tremendous value in choosing the
>     standard.
>
>     Michael
>
>
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-- 
Matthew Hodgson
Matrix.org

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