Disabling Matrix Portalling

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.

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.

Here's an alternative for Matrix<>IRC bridging for Matrix homeserver operators: https://github.com/hifi/heisenbridge

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.

Can someone explain what caused this decision? I use and love matrix but I don't really get the context of the article.

We use matterbridge to bridge IRC to matrix at https://tetaneutral.net

https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

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.

In case anyone else was confused by the terminology here: https://matrix.org/blog/2017/03/11/how-do-i-bridge-thee-let-...

Are there any metrics as far as how many normal users will be impacted by this?

Might as well just ditch IRC (it's dead, grandpa) and use Matrix directly.

Why is using Matrix supposed to be easier than irssi and tmux?