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Matrix-Libera IRC Bridge Temporary Shutdown, a Retrospective (2023)

85 points by walterbell 2y ago

ranger_danger 2y ago
I think libera has enough problems with moderation as it is. And most of the regulars (including most mods) in all the biggest channels seem to have cosmically inflated god complexes and are regularly and demonstrably abusive to their users with no recourse available (if you try to report it they just ban you).
- tomrod 2y ago
  You described my experience learning C and mistakenly asking for input from the channel in IRC
  - BostonFern 2y ago
    It’s a Libera-wide thing? I once dared ask for Javascript advice on solving a front-end problem without Node.js. That particular detail was taken as a personal insult. I’ve never experienced anything like it.
    - tovej 2y ago
      I'd say it's more of an IRC thing. IRC has always had a less than professional culture of communication and this is just regular behaviour on an open IRC network. Personally I think that, on one hand, the more relaxed standards make communication more direct, but on the other hand, there's definitely a tendency to escalate disputes and pile on if someone disagrees with a regular in a channel.
- toenail 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - majorchord 2y ago
    This sounds exactly like what one of those moderators would say... I have observed a lot of the behavior of what OP is referring to, and I really have to agree with them although apparently some people are taking issue with it. I think there are a lot of factors that play into why those communities are not replaced and/or people don't move, such as: - most users who are not regulars are transient help-seeking users that never stay long, often just leaving after being abused by the regulars for daring to ask a question - most regulars simply don't care enough or are enabling/participating in the same abuse to do anything about it - it's not something that happens constantly all day, so nobody feels it's worth trying to start up a whole new community over it, plus they don't want that burden - it could be argued that libera as a whole would also not be the right place for a new community due to the attitude of their network operators
    - PokestarFan 2y ago
      This seems to be a constant in a lot of programmer spaces. Stack Overflow was notorious for toxicity a while back. Even some of the programming subreddits have power-tripping mods and whatnot.
7bit 2y ago
> We have been reluctant to go into detail before now because the last thing we wanted was to put our communities through another public dispute with a for-profit company. However we believe you, our users, deserve to know the circumstances of our decision, so this post is an attempt to satisfy your expectation of transparency from us as an organisation. The idea of transparency being a "burden" is ridiculous. It implies that sharing information is a problem, which seems like an excuse to avoid accountability.
- ranger_danger 2y ago
  I am assuming it is due to their own moderators not acting appropriately because they seem to have a big problem with that.
- gertop 2y ago
  Sounds to me like they wanted to avoid publicly shaming a company, I see nothing ridiculous in that? How would users have benefited from knowing the specific details of EMS' incompetence/deception? Free speech absolutism has its place, but so has diplomacy.
  - 7bit 2y ago
    They don't say anything like that and I wonder how that sounds like that to you. You are interpreting things into it, that they didn't say.
- eptcyka 2y ago
  Are you aware of what happened to freenode?
  - 7bit 2y ago
    No, pls explain in the context of my reply.
joecool1029 2y ago
Putting aside all the other problems this post talks about, for me the biggest issue was the bridge itself appeared to be run by a single person. When the bridge crashed and he was asleep or on vacation just got stuck waiting hours/days for it to come back. Made for a terrible user experience. Since then I just run 1-to-1 heisenbridge connections with my homeserver. It's not as fancy but it works reliably.
j3s 2y ago
great post from the libera staff, respecting the matrix folks while dealing with all of that must have felt disheartening. matrix has other driving forces and incentives. there’s only so much time they can spend on things like individual bridges. meanwhile, they devote developers to writing two different homeserver implementations in parallel. or writing an experimental p2p homeserver - or the three guys working on thirdroom. ugh i just hope they realize what’s important. people just want to chat on a distributed platform that isn’t irc - make it as simple and fun as possible. that is your entire mission. no metaverse, no experimental backend shit, no securitygasm cryptography - nobody is buying drugs on matrix. this isn’t signal or whatsapp, this is discord for tech dorks. just focus on making GROUP chatting good, simple, and fun. the ux just utterly sucks right now. it’s the difference between scrolling through a menu on an ipod versus a self checkout kiosk - the kiosk just FEELS bad, simple human revulsion. the element interface offers the same experience. and we _still_ don’t have custom emojis or selfserve moderation, even though matth himself promised them to us 2 YEARS ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33014245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33014245 element is _the product_, and it hasn’t moved a single inch in years from my point of view.
- fisian 2y ago
  I'm not that active on matrix (mostly just passively listening on a few topics that interest me). However, regarding your last point there seems to be an active focus on improving element and their recent post about elementX [1]. I agree with your other points though, there are a lot of experiments that often lead to nowhere (e.g. P2P is basically abandoned AFAIK). [1]: https://element.io/blog/element-x-ignition/ https://element.io/blog/element-x-ignition/
  - mgrandl 2y ago
    ElementX on iOS feels really good these days. On the desktop though, I feel nothing really scratches the Discord itch.
    - SSLy 2y ago
      well, Slack is best UX but welp.
rapnie 2y ago
Really a pity this. Suddenly all those bridged-to-matrix chatrooms were left out in the cold. I am using IRC now to reach those, and they lost a lot of folks that were active in their channel before.
wkat4242 2y ago
> Within a few months after welcoming the bridge, we were routinely dealing with a sizable and often automated abuse load from the bridge that made use of easy anonymous registration and the protocol’s persistent and distributed archiving of files, including images, videos, and long messages converted to pastebins. Umm libera itself allows "easy anonymous registration". You don't even need to have an account. You just join with a made-up name if you want to. This is in fact one of the things I love about IRC. Nothing wrong with it but it feels wrong calling matrix out on that. The archiving makes kinda sense for matrix' features of scrollback on demand. I believe there's an IRCv3 feature for it too. The bridge should have a provision to prevent users to see any backlog from before the moment they joined. Ps I really hate those new "single puppet" third party bridges they recommend. Because they break nick colouring and also the actual nick of the user speaking is in a different place. Having each matrix user have their own IRC puppet is much nicer on the IRC side. Especially when there's more matrix than irc users.
- progval 2y ago
  > Nothing wrong with it but it feels wrong calling matrix out on that. The difference is that Libera relies on blocking anonymous connections abusive IP ranges (proxies, gratis VPN providers). When abusers connect through Matrix, Libera only had their username, which delayed spam mitigation. > The bridge should have a provision to prevent users to see any backlog from before the moment they joined. That's already how it's supposed to work, though it had some issues. > Ps I really hate those new "single puppet" third party bridges they recommend. Because they break nick colouring and also the actual nick of the user speaking is in a different place. I think everyone hates them (and I say this as someone who maintains a few of them). Some IRC clients have scripts to substitute nicks from relayed messages though.
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    > The difference is that Libera relies on blocking anonymous connections abusive IP ranges (proxies, gratis VPN providers). When abusers connect through Matrix, Libera only had their username, which delayed spam mitigation. Yeah but that's not Matrix' fault. They just offer the same ability as Libera: To create an account with no validation. Putting pressure on Matrix server providers to stop anonymous connections when they themselves provide anonymous connections is a bit too hypocritical to me. If they have a problem with the practice then just block matrix connections (as they have done). But don't complain about the practice. Personally I love the idea of anonymous connections like on IRC and also some Matrix servers. I'm a bit sick of every single service needing me to make an 'account' these days and needing all kinds of personal info from me.
blenderob 2y ago
Are there any alternatives to the official bridge that someone who is a user of both Libera and Matrix can run for themselves to bridge the channels they operate?
- tslocum 2y ago
  I use matterbridge to do that. It works well. https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

85 points by walterbell 2y ago

I think libera has enough problems with moderation as it is. And most of the regulars (including most mods) in all the biggest channels seem to have cosmically inflated god complexes and are regularly and demonstrably abusive to their users with no recourse available (if you try to report it they just ban you).

tomrod 2y ago
You described my experience learning C and mistakenly asking for input from the channel in IRC
- BostonFern 2y ago
  It’s a Libera-wide thing? I once dared ask for Javascript advice on solving a front-end problem without Node.js. That particular detail was taken as a personal insult. I’ve never experienced anything like it.
  - tovej 2y ago
    I'd say it's more of an IRC thing. IRC has always had a less than professional culture of communication and this is just regular behaviour on an open IRC network. Personally I think that, on one hand, the more relaxed standards make communication more direct, but on the other hand, there's definitely a tendency to escalate disputes and pile on if someone disagrees with a regular in a channel.
toenail 2y ago
[flagged]
- majorchord 2y ago
  This sounds exactly like what one of those moderators would say... I have observed a lot of the behavior of what OP is referring to, and I really have to agree with them although apparently some people are taking issue with it. I think there are a lot of factors that play into why those communities are not replaced and/or people don't move, such as: - most users who are not regulars are transient help-seeking users that never stay long, often just leaving after being abused by the regulars for daring to ask a question - most regulars simply don't care enough or are enabling/participating in the same abuse to do anything about it - it's not something that happens constantly all day, so nobody feels it's worth trying to start up a whole new community over it, plus they don't want that burden - it could be argued that libera as a whole would also not be the right place for a new community due to the attitude of their network operators
  - PokestarFan 2y ago
    This seems to be a constant in a lot of programmer spaces. Stack Overflow was notorious for toxicity a while back. Even some of the programming subreddits have power-tripping mods and whatnot.

7bit 2y ago

> We have been reluctant to go into detail before now because the last thing we wanted was to put our communities through another public dispute with a for-profit company. However we believe you, our users, deserve to know the circumstances of our decision, so this post is an attempt to satisfy your expectation of transparency from us as an organisation. The idea of transparency being a "burden" is ridiculous. It implies that sharing information is a problem, which seems like an excuse to avoid accountability.

ranger_danger 2y ago
I am assuming it is due to their own moderators not acting appropriately because they seem to have a big problem with that.
gertop 2y ago
Sounds to me like they wanted to avoid publicly shaming a company, I see nothing ridiculous in that? How would users have benefited from knowing the specific details of EMS' incompetence/deception? Free speech absolutism has its place, but so has diplomacy.
- 7bit 2y ago
  They don't say anything like that and I wonder how that sounds like that to you. You are interpreting things into it, that they didn't say.
eptcyka 2y ago
Are you aware of what happened to freenode?
- 7bit 2y ago
  No, pls explain in the context of my reply.

joecool1029 2y ago

Putting aside all the other problems this post talks about, for me the biggest issue was the bridge itself appeared to be run by a single person. When the bridge crashed and he was asleep or on vacation just got stuck waiting hours/days for it to come back. Made for a terrible user experience. Since then I just run 1-to-1 heisenbridge connections with my homeserver. It's not as fancy but it works reliably.

j3s 2y ago

great post from the libera staff, respecting the matrix folks while dealing with all of that must have felt disheartening. matrix has other driving forces and incentives. there’s only so much time they can spend on things like individual bridges. meanwhile, they devote developers to writing two different homeserver implementations in parallel. or writing an experimental p2p homeserver - or the three guys working on thirdroom. ugh i just hope they realize what’s important. people just want to chat on a distributed platform that isn’t irc - make it as simple and fun as possible. that is your entire mission. no metaverse, no experimental backend shit, no securitygasm cryptography - nobody is buying drugs on matrix. this isn’t signal or whatsapp, this is discord for tech dorks. just focus on making GROUP chatting good, simple, and fun. the ux just utterly sucks right now. it’s the difference between scrolling through a menu on an ipod versus a self checkout kiosk - the kiosk just FEELS bad, simple human revulsion. the element interface offers the same experience. and we _still_ don’t have custom emojis or selfserve moderation, even though matth himself promised them to us 2 YEARS ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33014245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33014245 element is _the product_, and it hasn’t moved a single inch in years from my point of view.

fisian 2y ago
I'm not that active on matrix (mostly just passively listening on a few topics that interest me). However, regarding your last point there seems to be an active focus on improving element and their recent post about elementX [1]. I agree with your other points though, there are a lot of experiments that often lead to nowhere (e.g. P2P is basically abandoned AFAIK). [1]: https://element.io/blog/element-x-ignition/ https://element.io/blog/element-x-ignition/
- mgrandl 2y ago
  ElementX on iOS feels really good these days. On the desktop though, I feel nothing really scratches the Discord itch.
  - SSLy 2y ago
    well, Slack is best UX but welp.

rapnie 2y ago

Really a pity this. Suddenly all those bridged-to-matrix chatrooms were left out in the cold. I am using IRC now to reach those, and they lost a lot of folks that were active in their channel before.

wkat4242 2y ago

> Within a few months after welcoming the bridge, we were routinely dealing with a sizable and often automated abuse load from the bridge that made use of easy anonymous registration and the protocol’s persistent and distributed archiving of files, including images, videos, and long messages converted to pastebins. Umm libera itself allows "easy anonymous registration". You don't even need to have an account. You just join with a made-up name if you want to. This is in fact one of the things I love about IRC. Nothing wrong with it but it feels wrong calling matrix out on that. The archiving makes kinda sense for matrix' features of scrollback on demand. I believe there's an IRCv3 feature for it too. The bridge should have a provision to prevent users to see any backlog from before the moment they joined. Ps I really hate those new "single puppet" third party bridges they recommend. Because they break nick colouring and also the actual nick of the user speaking is in a different place. Having each matrix user have their own IRC puppet is much nicer on the IRC side. Especially when there's more matrix than irc users.

progval 2y ago
> Nothing wrong with it but it feels wrong calling matrix out on that. The difference is that Libera relies on blocking anonymous connections abusive IP ranges (proxies, gratis VPN providers). When abusers connect through Matrix, Libera only had their username, which delayed spam mitigation. > The bridge should have a provision to prevent users to see any backlog from before the moment they joined. That's already how it's supposed to work, though it had some issues. > Ps I really hate those new "single puppet" third party bridges they recommend. Because they break nick colouring and also the actual nick of the user speaking is in a different place. I think everyone hates them (and I say this as someone who maintains a few of them). Some IRC clients have scripts to substitute nicks from relayed messages though.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  > The difference is that Libera relies on blocking anonymous connections abusive IP ranges (proxies, gratis VPN providers). When abusers connect through Matrix, Libera only had their username, which delayed spam mitigation. Yeah but that's not Matrix' fault. They just offer the same ability as Libera: To create an account with no validation. Putting pressure on Matrix server providers to stop anonymous connections when they themselves provide anonymous connections is a bit too hypocritical to me. If they have a problem with the practice then just block matrix connections (as they have done). But don't complain about the practice. Personally I love the idea of anonymous connections like on IRC and also some Matrix servers. I'm a bit sick of every single service needing me to make an 'account' these days and needing all kinds of personal info from me.

blenderob 2y ago

Are there any alternatives to the official bridge that someone who is a user of both Libera and Matrix can run for themselves to bridge the channels they operate?

tslocum 2y ago
I use matterbridge to do that. It works well. https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge