Re: Matrix IRC bridge considered harmful

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 7:07 pm, Zander Brown <zbrown gnome org> wrote:
> 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)

What's the problem with federation? Can't we just ban individual users 
when there are CoC problems? Surely federation doesn't prohibit 
moderation? I would be far more worried about spammers (a rare problem 
on GIMPNet) than abusive users, and in any case the solution is to give 
moderator rights to more trusted users. It seems that whenever we have 
spammers in GIMPNet (fortunately, a rare occurrence) the IRC ops are 
asleep; simple solution is to just have more ops in more timezones.

I used to use my workplace Matrix account to join the fractal Matrix 
room. Federation worked quite nicely. If not for federation, I would 
not have been able to join the room at all, because fractal does not 
support use of multiple Matrix accounts; obviously, if I have to choose 
between my work account and a GNOME account, I have to pick my work 
account. So I'd say we definitely want federation.

Federation also makes it easier for people from unrelated communities 
to join. E.g. libvirt developers might join the Boxes room, or WebKit 
developers might join the Epiphany room, something like that. It's a 
tough sell to create a new user account to join one particular room for 
a quick conversation, but with federation you can just pop in and 
there's basically no cost.

Michael