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Comment by peterlk | Hacker News Reader

If this got more development energy put on matrix bridges, this seems like a net win. IRC still works, but is used through a matrix bridge… I would love to have a unified chat layer

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It's totally sweet. I consolidated WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Instagram into my Matrix server, and get it all via Element. Battery life is many magnitudes better on my Pixel and ThinkPad as a result instead of running all this background crap.

One app to install on any device, any OS, including Linux, and all my messages appear, SMS included. What's not to love?

My only gripe about element is its too easy to get encryption locked out of rooms if you switch devices and cant access the old one anymore. They need to get rid of that crap. And no im not backing up keys and remembering more passwords. Enough!

Can't say I've ever had that happen, and backing up keys is trivial.

Why don't you use a password manager in 2023 instead of being forced to remember things?

i don't know. i thought i had a backup of my keys, but they aren't recognized. doesn't seem trivial to me.

I keep my key in my password manager.

I setup my synapse about 6 months ago, and it was not easy to get the bridges working. I would argue I’m pretty technically sound but getting everything running took a lot of trial and error. If the bridges deployed easier like a snap package, it would help a ton.

There's an amazing Ansible playbook. Use that, it's great and easy to keep everything up to date.

Link?

Yeah sorry I was on mobile when I wrote that so I didn't have it to hand.

Here it is: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

What bridges were you using? I've set up several and the hardest part was reading through the default configurations.

I’m running a WhatsApp and signal bridge, I use everything through Docker. The biggest issue was registering the bridge to work with synapse. If everything fails, you need to delete specific folders in your volume and it gets messy. I also have a Postgres image running that isn’t as obvious how to set up from the docs.

This comment made me go down a serious Matrix + bridges rabbithole. Seriously considering getting a cheap VPS and doing it. But would you recommend using matterbridge for all the protocols or using some of the individual protocol bridge projects I've seen out there? I only really need XMPP, WhatsApp, and Facebook.

Matrix bridging to IRC is a pain for server administrators and tbh I think IRC should be left out of this "bridge everything" goal. It's totally different and IRCv3 is working on modernizing the protocol, bringing a lot of new features available on IM services to IRC. There's no need to bridge IRC to Matrix or vice-versa, IRC is much more simple and lightweight than Matrix.

I am not bothered by running The Lounge + ZNC and having to use Matrix for everything else.

EDIT: I don't like this push for Matrix everywhere and essentially only having Matrix as the means of contact for open source projects. I installed Dendrite (lightweight golang homeserver) on my cheap VPS and I realized that federation is a big no-no for me, Matrix uses a LOT of resources for federation.

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