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Comment by rwxer | Hacker News Reader

One of the really nice features of Matrix is the IRC bridge to Libera Chat. Libera Chat is the current home of open source projects' community and support channels.

Earlier it was necessary to set up an IRC bouncer if you needed a persistent connection to the IRC server. But now you can just create an account on Matrix and join a Libera IRC channel from Matrix. The Matrix bridge functions like an IRC gateway on Matrix. It's a great way to stay logged into the IRC channels and ensure that you don't miss any messages when you are away.

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Sadly, I think Matrix's bridge onto Libera might soon be curtailed - they've not been good neighbors for some time and it's eroding the usability of IRC for IRC natives. https://libera.chat/news/matrix-irc-bridge-updates

On the Matrix side, we've put a lot of effort into being good neighbours, fwiw - e.g. recently this massive refactor at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/166... to allow the matrix<->irc bridge to be restarted without reconnecting all its IRC users (the single biggest complaint we ever had about the bridge in terms of eroding usability of IRC for IRC natives).

Sadly it looks like it wasn't considered sufficient, based on https://libera.chat/news/matrix-deportalling.

I'm not sure how many years you have been bridging in but with recent developments like Matrix logging all chats (including a second bot after the first one was banned) it sounds like too little too late.

Matrix does not "log all chats". There were some IRC channels which had been explicitly configured by their chanops in the past to be "world readable" in Matrix parlance (i.e. opting into being publicly viewable), which meant that they showed up on archive.matrix.org.

It seems this caused concern because archive.matrix.org didn't have UI to explain why a given channel was visible (i.e. "chanop Bob explicitly set this channel to be world-readable on the Matrix bridge on Jan 1 2017") - and so after we got complaints from ircops last weekend we immediately took the service down to double-check and add the UI to spell out what's going on (and give the IRC channels & networks in question a chance to mark themselves as non-world-readable if that's what they want).

As I said, we're trying to be good neighbours, but there's a lot of ill will flying around.

For the sake of completeness, https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/what-happened-with-the-archi... writes up the confusion over archive.matrix.org.

Oh, I wasn't aware the bridge was actively maintained... Any hope to ever have things like this properly considered?

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/146...

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/137...

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/146...

Sounds like an overkill bouncer. I use the one of SourceHut, it just works.

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