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Create a plumbed Matrix room for every Wikimedia IRC room that doesn't opt out
Open, Stalled, Needs TriagePublic

Description

The Matrix <-> Libera Chat portal is going away. The portal automatically created a bridged room for every Libera Chat public room. Once it's disabled, we'll have to do that manually, or with automation of our own.

Event Timeline

We need:

  • a list of rooms to set this up for, maybe we can scrape https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Channels
  • automation to set up the bridge (there's some discussion in #irc:matrix.org about the API for this
  • buy in from either an IRC group contact (to approve bridging across the namespace) or local channel ops
  • to confirm how abuse prevention/mitigation will work (do IRC kicks+bans work, etc.), rooms should be added to mjolnir ban list as well
  • to contact support@matrix.org to get ownership over the portaled rooms so they can be tombstoned to the new plumbed rooms

The portal will be turned off on the 31st (blog post, doesn't contain much new).

What happened in the end was Matrix.org completely disconnecting from Libera.chat on August 5, due to a different set of technical issues (possibly caused by trying to fix the initial issues). There is a retrospective from the Libera side.

This means neither portalled nor bridged rooms work right now (or at the very least we'd have to run our own bridge, or some public non-Matrix.org-related bridge). Hopefully only temporary, the bridge maintainers are supposedly working on fixing it.

Tgr changed the task status from Open to Stalled.Sep 13 2023, 7:01 PM

This Week in Matrix 2023-09-01:

The bridge team at Element is still actively working on the issues that led to the bridge being disabled in the first place. You can see some of the work that’s in flight through GitHub PRs: #1757, #1766, #1764, #1734.

We’re also looking into a way to transition responsibility for the bridge from Element to being directly run by The Matrix.org Foundation over the coming months - more details as we have them.

Unfortunately, we do not yet have a clear timeline for bringing the bridge back online. We’ll continue providing regular updates and will share more information as soon as we can. Thank you again for your patience! Please do not hesitate to reach out at #libera-matrix:libera.chat if you have any questions or concerns.

It is unfortunately not coming back.

Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera Chat:

Today we are sorry to announce that we are not able to bring the Libera Chat bridge back online. We have already begun working through clean up tasks, such as clearing ghosts, and expect to be done by December 22. If you see any bridge artifacts left past that point, please let us know.

If you are one of those who have relied on the bridge in the past, you may be asking: what now? You do have options.

People who need a bridge for their community can run their own: the matrix-appservice-irc software is still maintained. Only its Libera Chat instance, which was configured to persist connections across restarts, is being shut down. Please be mindful of the network, and read Libera Chat’s recommendations and their Matrix FAQ when doing so.

Libera banned the official bridge but allows channel operators to use the same bridge software if they run it on their own, so that doesn't prevent this task, but we'd have to set up the bridge ourselves. etke.cc (which I think is the most realistic short term option for running our own Matrix services, now that EMS went enterprise-only) doesn't support matrix-appservice-irc out of the box, but they are using matrix-docker-ansible-deploy which does, so probably can be enabled somehow. (They do offer heisenbridge, which is an irccloud-like experience, so less ideal, but also an option.)