The Fedora project has been moving to Matrix for our interactive chat needs for a while, but we wanted to make any such transition smooth and not leave behind users that preferred IRC for whatever reasons. When we setup Matrix rooms we also setup a portal using the Matrix<->libera.chat IRC bridge. This allows Matrix and IRC users to see the same content and interact with each other. There have of course been issues from time to time of dropped messages, or clashes between the Matrix and IRC cultures, but overall it’s been a great help to keeping our community from fragmenting.
Unfortunately, issues with the bridge have reached a point that libera.chat folks have asked for the bridge to be taken down until it can be fixed up. This happened at 2023-08-06 14UTC.
What does this mean for the Fedora Community? a few things:
- Realize that part of the community will not see your messages. If you send from IRC, Matrix users will not see or be able to respond to those messages. Likewise if you send from Matrix, no IRC users will see or be aware of your messages. If you are expecting a reply from someone and don’t see it, do realize they could be on the other platform.
- Fedora’s meeting bot (zodbot) is on IRC. This means you will need to have everyone involved in meetings on IRC. Meetings can’t be recorded from Matrix.
Hopefully this is a very temporary issue and the bridge will be back soon.
Why not drop Matrix and just do IRC like back in the day?
I don’t think we want to re-hash that entire discussion again here.
See The future of real-time (chat) discussion for the Fedora council - #62 by farribeiro
I’m glad I’m not involved in any IRC meetings because I would likely miss those meetings for a little while, at least in the hopes that the bridge came back. Ay caramba.
Would it be possible to self host a Matrix to IRC bridge on Fedora infrastructure for Fedora channels ?
I thought about it backwards, why not to take the chance and drop IRC and move entirely to Matrix? We are not in the 90’s anymore
Well, not really. There’s only really 2 bridges for matrix/irc out
there. One of them is… the one that is having all the issues and needs
to be fixed up. The other is one that doesn’t do true bridging, it’s
more of a relay. ie, person on one network says ‘hi’ and the bot relays
that to the other side with ‘relaybot: person: hi’. It might be worth
exploring that, but it has a lot of downsides. ;(
Maybe Fedora should just move the IRC channels to a different network? Matrix bridging is still up and running on OFTC, for example. And Fedora was very quick to rush off Freenode and to the libera.chat fork, so it is not like moving to a different network has never been done or has been a lengthy process.