Re: Matrix IRC bridge considered harmful

[Georges Basile Stavracas Neto <georges stavracas gmail com>]

Personally, my experiences with Matrix have been catastrophic so far. So much

so that I'm convinced that Rocket.Chat, with all it's flaws and misbehaviors, is

a better option on the long run.

The Riot application is hard to use. It took me days to figure out how to connect

to a GNOME room. It doesn't allow me to log out of the servers. Fractal is nice,

as I really like native clients, but Polari feels more polished. Matrix apparently

doesn't allow turning off federation, and to me that's a no-go aspect of it. At

last, I have a strong impression that Matrix suffers from feature bloat.

Rocket.Chat has been apparently more responsive to out contact, and even

accepted a few pull requests from us. I believe it has a brighter future, specially

if a native GTK client shows up.

Em qua., 12 de fev. de 2020 às 16:07, Zander Brown <zbrown gnome org> escreveu:

🎉

I've used the matrix bridge for years now (I'm generally only on irc "for real"
to fix things after the bridge does crazy things like de-op me or change my
nick without warning...)

Matrix isn't perfect. matrix.org, the main "homeserver", regularly has high
latency further exacerbated by the bridge. Hopefully hosting our own would
avoid that

I know there are some (possibly even the majority of people on this list) that
will never move away from IRC for one reason or another so it does seem
reasonable to allow IRC access to matrix (rather than the current matrix-to-
IRC). I guess this would still have disappearing PMs but at least it has a
chance of getting status right giving you a fighting chance

RocketChat is a really nice idea but so far only the web/mobile clients are
available which leave a lot to be desired whereas Fractal does the job for
matrix (personally I'm a riot-in-firefox person though)

My concern would be the "federal" nature of matrix where people don't need a
gnome.org specific chat account to join a room. Whilst there are a lot of
arguments for this I'm increasingly convinced it's an anti-feature especially
if we want to enforce CoC (which, of course, we do)

Zander


On Wed, 2020-02-12 at 12:30 -0600, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just got an email from a new-ish contributor: "I sent you some PMs
> about a week ago but I think you weren't online when I sent them so I'm
> assuming you didn't receive anything." Problem is the Matrix IRC bridge
> presents all IRC users as online, even when they're not. If an IRC user
> is offline, it lets you send private messages, but they get *silently
> dropped*. From Matrix, it appears as if the message was successfully
> delivered, but it was never actually sent to IRC.
>
> Basically our chat has broken down into a dystopian scenario where
> users message other users, thinking they've successfully sent messages
> that were never actually sent. We've been living with this for a couple
> years now and it's just not OK that we tolerate it. I have no way of
> knowing how many messages I've missed due to this issue, but I'm sure
> it's causing problems for newcomers who don't realize their messages
> aren't being delivered.
>
> WORKAROUND: Matrix users should ask "you there?" whenever starting a
> conversation, and assume your message was dropped unless you receive a
> response. If you get a response back, then a human is reading, at least
> initially. This applies to all stages of a conversation: if I sign off
> IRC partway through a conversation, the Matrix user has no way of
> knowing, so Matrix users must assume all messages sent to IRC after the
> last message received from IRC may be unread.
>
> Anyway, a workaround is not a solution. Can we please either:
>
>  (a) Shut down the bridge to Matrix and force everyone to use IRC,
> which actually works properly; or
>  (b) Replace our IRC with an actual Matrix server, so we get native
> Matrix. Matrix is very nice as long as you're not using the abysmal IRC
> bridge, which is unfit for purpose.
>
> Personally, I think native Matrix would be a *lot* nicer than IRC, if
> we have sysadmin time to get it set up, but I'm not going to be picky
> here. I'd just like us to be able to trust that we're not missing
> important messages.
>
> (Note I don't include rocketchat in the list of options because I don't
> consider it a serious option when compared to Matrix, which has become
> extremely popular and has a variety of client options: desktop Riot,
> mobile Riot, fractal, or whatever UI you prefer, sure to keep almost
> everyone happy. Or use the reverse IRC bridge, which I can only hope is
> not as awful as the bridge we're using now.)
>
> Michael
>
>
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