matterbridge VS Synapse

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.

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