matrix-appservice-discord VS Synapse

In my experience Mautrix has been very easy to run and can bridge new channels automatically as they're created. I use Matrix exclusively to chat with my friends on Discord.

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord

If you're fine with discord and matrix having access to new content, you can use a bridge such as https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord with a homeserver or use https://t2bot.io/discord/ (unreliable, sometimes laggy) to automatically copy new messages to both.

To be clear, I don't mean this as an attack, you already deserve huge respect for developing free software, but if you really want to try other options for the whole "community infrastructure" I think you will find some pretty good ones. For example in your case you could explore mirroring your GitHub repo on Codeberg or Gitea, then making a Matrix bridge to your Discord server.

Is there going to be more muscle put into polishing up the various bridges? Matrix has an amazing opportunity to be the glue protocol between various communication silos, but there's a few things I've encountered that have been preventing me from using it further.

One issue I hit is this:

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-slack/issues...

I tried pinging the people that were committing to the repo on the matrix channel for that bridge, but never got a response and now I'm just stuck with a room with a dead bridge. It's not a huge deal since the Matrix side of things still works, but having some way to reach out for stuff like that would be really helpful.

The other thing is this issue:

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord/issu...

It's not a showstopper since the bridge still works, but it's a lot of management to sync all of the rooms initially, and keep them in sync with any changes. I'm going to wait before that's implemented before suggesting that we try bridging Discord and Matrix for my friend group that's stuck on Discord.

Hopefully this doesn't come across as negative, I still use and love Matrix myself. All I want for Christmas though is to have one communication app in my life that talks to everyone everywhere effortlessly :)

I don't have discord and matrix via element is better anyway. Are you guys interested in opening a room or bridging it to discord?

If the choice would be Matrix, a bridge between Discord and Matrix could be used (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord).

https://progress.opensuse.org/issues/97673 is already known, however looking at https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-appservice-discord it seems, upstream did the last commit 8 months ago.

github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-appservice-discord

Be careful though. Discord is known to ban accounts that use unofficial clients. The bridge mentioned (matrix-appservice-discord) uses the official bot API so should be relatively safe.

What are you thinking of here? Synapse has supported purging room history since 2016: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/911, and configurable data retention since 2019: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/5815.

Meanwhile, Matrix has never needed the full room history to be synchronised - when a server joins a room, it typically only grabs the last 20 messages. (It does needs to grab all the key-value state about the room, although these days that happens gradually in the background).

If you're wondering why Matrix implementations are often greedy on disk space, it's because they typically cache the key-value state aggressively (storing a snapshot of it for the room on a regular basis). However, that's just an implementation quirk; folks could absolutely come up with fancier datastructures to store it more efficiently; it's just not got to the top of anyone's todo list yet - things like performance and UX are considered much more important than disk usage right now.

some context re the Matrix isses, long history apparently: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/14481#issuecomm...

Why not Matrix? Here's one reason: it has incredibly hard-to-debug edge cases, and plenty of bugs. One of my favourites is the one where people are kicked out of your room at random, which was reported a year ago[0]. It wasn't fixed, however, because the head of the Matrix foundation (Matthew) presumably didn't like the issue being posted on Twitter.

This is honestly really disappointing behaviour from a platform owner.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/14481

> That doesn't make this situation any less bad to the rest of the community.

How is the community suffering here? Let's say Element adds a bunch of baller stuff to their versions over the next few months and then closes the source. Can't the community just fork the last AGPL version? You might say, "well then no one can take the AGPL fork and make their own closed-source business", but do you want them to? Even if you do, they still can with the existing Apache-licensed version, just like Element is doing right now.

You're arguing that Element will lose a lot of contributions, but TFA points out that despite being super open, the vast majority of contributions are still made by Element employees (which seems to be true [0]). It's not the case that Element is looking to monetize the (small) contributions of others, it is the case that others are looking to monetize the (huge) contributions of Element.

And besides, aren't the MSCs the core of Matrix? It's already super possible to build your own compliant client and server.

The situation is that Element needs money to keep developing the ecosystem. It would be cool if there were a big network of donors and contributions, but there isn't. You're essentially saying, "that's fine, go out of business then, and the community will keep developing the ecosystem", but that's not happening now, and it can still happen anyway with the Apache-licensed versions, which again people can still contribute to.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/graphs/contributors