matrix-appservice-irc VS matterbridge

The issue in question here is https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1... (and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/133...) which accidentally regressed due to other stability work done for Libera (specifically, keeping the IRC-side connections persistent, rather than reconnecting when the bridge starts). As a result there was an race condition edge case where users on the Matrix side could read history in the IRC channel while still connecting the Matrix users on the IRC side. This was one of the straws that broke the camel's back in terms of Libera wanting the bridge disabled. The other was the confusion over https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/what-happened-with-the-archi....

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.

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?

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.

This happened right after Freenode banned IRCCloud users following IRCCloud staff statements suggesting users to migrate off Freenode and the launch of competing bouncer services.[0] Now that most channels are dead and direct users to other networks despite staff's best efforts to quell any criticism (channel migrations+topic-renaming, banning users, etc), I guess they decided to wipe everything and start over to more easily remove any references to Libera/OFTC. In fact, it removes any every reference to anything at all.

If you had a bot that directed users to the actual location of your community, you should check to make sure that it survives this migration (this was probably part of the intent).

If you use Matrix and have left Freenode channels, the IRC-Matrix appservice bridge might still be keeping you connected. To leave Freenode, send a "!quit" message to the Freenode bridge appservice user, @appservice-irc:matrix.org.[1][2]

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210612224853/https://nitter.ni...

[1]: https://matrix-org.github.io/matrix-appservice-irc/latest/ad...

[2]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/wiki/Bri...

Matrix bridging to Libera is already functional in testing and should be announced soon, subscribe for news to this issue.

It looks like they could be fixed as the bridge code is open source. For example here is an issue around messages being split incorrectly: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1...

All of them. :)

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

An involved alternative is to access whatsapp through a matrix bridge. It requires either paying for hosting or figuring out how to host a matrix server and the whatsapp bridge [1]; I do the latter and can attest it's not very hard if you have a technical background (and you're on hn, so you probably do), but YMMV. There's a lot of matrix clients, all of which open source; and the whatsapp bridge works really well nowadays, enough that I've been using it almost exclusively for my texting (no whatsapp calls tho).

In fact, I recently bought a non-smartphone running KaiOS, and use whatsapp through a matrix client, chooj - which, although in early alpha, works well for my use case of accessing whatsapp while outside the home without having to carry an addictive smartphone with me. KaiOS does have a native whatsapp app, but it does not support whatsapp web at all, and that is an absolute necessity for me, especially when typing requires (bad) T9.

My point is, matrix bridges afford A LOT of freedom with how to access whatsapp (and other closed-source communication apps), if you're willing to deal with some friction. And now they're stable and mature enough that they work pretty darn well - no doubt thanks in part to support from beeper [2], which funds development for several major bridges. Within the android ecosystem, beeper is probably the easiest way to gateway all your communications through matrix, though I have no experience with it. Sounds like paid matrix+bridge hosting, plus a generally much nicer and frictionless experience.

[1]: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

[2]: https://www.beeper.com/

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

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

It's a chat bridge for different platforms. https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

I personally use matterbridge to bridge between specific IRC channels and specific discord server channels, and run it on a FreeBSD server. Packages are available for it on the BSDs and major Linux distributions. Follow the instructions for configuration and enable its service as appropriate on the OS.

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

Hi, I'm looking for an easy to use automation tool for my company. There are tons of projects out there and I find it hard to pick one among them. I found : - hugging - n8n - beehive - flogo - metterbridge - node-red

As for the use case op hopes for -- the matterbridge project might be relevant. Ideally, you could migrate the history to a Mattermost server and set up the bridge. The Mattermost server will log all future communications automatically. The benefit of this over a pure archive (HTML or PDF type) is that the archive itself is a full-featured workspace ready to be used standalone at any time, should any issues arise from Slack.

Oh, interesting! It seems like an alternative to MatterBridge but for 1 to 1 bridging.