[HN Gopher] Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera Chat
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Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera Chat
Author : feanaro
Score : 67 points
Date : 2023-11-28 21:58 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (matrix.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (matrix.org)
| colesantiago wrote:
| Huh?
|
| Wasn't anybody using the Matrix bridge to Libera Chat IRC?
|
| Seems like IRC is really dead and only used by a very tiny small
| minority of people.
| PostOnce wrote:
| Wizards use IRC, and their apprentices use discord.
|
| Some of the most deeply technical people in the world use IRC.
|
| Being able to talk to them is a superpower.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| IRC's biggest weakness is the protocol didn't transition
| cleanly to a mobile world.
|
| But apart from that, it's still as good as it always was.
| mlyle wrote:
| IRC's biggest weakness is the lack of a consistent history
| mechanism and that you usually need to idle.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| things like irccloud made this easier for consumers this
| but it was too late
| mortallywounded wrote:
| _puts on wizard hat_
| Syonyk wrote:
| Indeed. The only sane place on the internet to get answers to
| a range of deeply technical questions about modern tech (or,
| at least, a discussion that will get you closer to the
| answer) I've found is IRC. It's filled with a lot of "old
| tech guys who have been doing this forever." And, often
| enough, that's who you need to make sense of some bit of
| architectural manual arcana.
|
| Discord is awful. It's most of the downsides of IRC, with all
| the downsides of a centralized company running it, with a
| very resource heavy client. You can run IRC on just about
| nothing (I ran an IRC network in college on a 16MHz 68030
| with 8MB RAM just fine), and I know quite a few quiet little
| backwaters servers doing exactly that.
| blueflow wrote:
| 10-15k Users were using it, its quite a big thing. You can see
| the user count drop around 4th August:
| https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php
| koito17 wrote:
| I pretty much only used Matrix as a glorified IRC bouncer that
| worked across my devices. When the libera.chat bridges went
| away, I just stopped using Matrix altogether.
|
| Yeah, I am sure it is possible to set up my own appservice, but
| ERC has been convenient enough for my use case.
| jeltz wrote:
| I instead stopped using IRC since the Matrix bridge was the
| by far best bouncer I have used to date. The other bouncers I
| have used have just been annoying.
| brabel wrote:
| I use it, from emacs, sometimes :D when you connect it actually
| tells you exactly how many users are on it, which seems to be
| quite a few:
|
| ** There are 73 users and 33193 invisible on 28 servers
|
| ** 39 operator(s) online
|
| ** 75 unknown connection(s)
|
| ** 22136 channels formed
|
| ** I have 1884 clients and 1 servers
|
| ** Current local users 1884, max 2958
|
| ** Current global users 33266, max 34731
|
| ** Highest connection count: 2959 (2958 clients) (25302
| connections received) ** - platinum.libera.chat Message of the
| Day -
|
| ** - This server provided by NORDUnet/SUNET
|
| ** - Welcome to Libera Chat, the IRC network for
|
| ** - free & open-source software and peer directed projects.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I was using it, but I kept getting kicked out of channels for
| idling too long. It wasn't a good experience, and I went back
| to just using IRC for IRC and Matrix for Matrix.
| mickael-kerjean wrote:
| IRC is far from dead. My relatively unknown oss work has a
| channel on libera which is seeing ~100 message per month
|
| Also Slack made the same move a couple years ago, first trying
| to appeal to IRC users at the beginning and then shut it all
| off when they had everyone else
| tazjin wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if by the time Matrix is cold as ice,
| IRC will still see activity. Sufficiently simple protocols
| have some aura of immortality to them, and Matrix is the
| opposite of that.
| jeltz wrote:
| As is IRC. IRC is only a simple protocol in an ideal world
| which no longer exists.
| mort96 wrote:
| IRC is the best place to go to find developers of a whole host
| of open source projects. If you work with open source software,
| not using IRC really limits what you can do and who you can
| reach.
| snvzz wrote:
| I do not really know what this is about, but imagine the issue
| has to do with cross-network moderation issues or spam flowing in
| either direction.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Matrix has a long way to go to compete with IRC and XMPP...
| Godspeed.
| broodbucket wrote:
| I've been using heisenbridge[0] to do my Matrix to IRC bridging
| and I like it. Not a broader solution to the problem since most
| people don't want to run their own services, but it works well
| for me and is no different to a bouncer for IRC servers, noone
| knows it's actually Matrix on the other side.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/hifi/heisenbridge
| kinduff wrote:
| Same here, I really like it. Really easy to configure and
| setup.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| What were the "issues" that are not named?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| apparently some actors used the Matrix bridge to join private
| chat rooms in Libera without being detected.. AFAIK
| progval wrote:
| https://libera.chat/news/matrix-bridge-disabled-retrospectiv...
| jmbwell wrote:
| This seems like an inevitable progression of the de-portaling in
| July:
|
| https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/deportalling-libera-chat/
|
| I wonder whether the July move prompted users to find other ways
| to connect to Libera.chat besides Matrix, killing usage of the
| bridge, leading us here.
|
| Thanks to those involved for the efforts while they could be
| sustained!
| susam wrote:
| I wrote my own IRC + Matrix client to bridge the channels I
| operate. I've made the source code available here under the
| terms of the MIT license in case anyone finds it useful too:
| https://github.com/susam/nimb
| progval wrote:
| You need to split on (or sanitize) null bytes here: https://g
| ithub.com/susam/nimb/blob/b40d87ddf2e1134fed4d7380b... and
| sanitize NUL/CR/LF from the prefix (well, display_name) here:
| https://github.com/susam/nimb/blob/b40d87ddf2e1134fed4d7380b.
| ..
|
| Otherwise you may have a command injection vulnerability
| similar to what matrix-appservice-irc used to have:
| https://pktz.fr/matrix/security/2022-appservice-irc-
| command-... (though with carriage returns instead of null
| bytes)
| susam wrote:
| Thank you for taking a close look at the source code and
| highlighting this issue.
|
| > You need to split on (or sanitize) null bytes
|
| Do you mean splitting on (or sanitising) carriage returns?
| I read the security advisory and as far as I understand,
| the issue occurs due to improper handling of the carriage
| returns, i.e., CR or 0xD. I don't see anything about null
| bytes there.
| progval wrote:
| You're not allowed null bytes in IRC messages:
| https://modern.ircdocs.horse/#parameters
|
| Some IRC servers (especially those written in C) may
| interpret it as a line end, so you would have a similar
| issue
| jeltz wrote:
| I wager many like me just stopped using Libera.chat.
| joshsimmons wrote:
| I suspect many people _did_ find other ways to connect (indeed
| I fired my IRC Cloud subscription back up...), but that's not
| what ultimately brought us* to this decision. Really it came
| down to not having the funds or staff time to maintain and
| operate it to the level that was needed.
|
| Echoing you, I am likewise really grateful for all the people
| who worked on it while it was doable!
|
| * Speaking on behalf of the Matrix.org Foundation here as its
| Managing Director.
| Laaas wrote:
| The explanation seems a bit vague. What were the concrete issues
| at hand?
| INTPenis wrote:
| Some channels on libera have been awful, a ton of [m] names, and
| long repetitive messages converted from matrix.
|
| I know I might be using a dying medium but I enjoy IRC the way it
| is.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Not a fan of IRC, but I agree. Bridges and multi protocol
| clients just suck. They never work flawlessly and result in a
| ton of annoyance for people on both sides.
|
| Use the client for the group you are in rather than some bodged
| together bridge.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| thank goodness, endless garbage noise
| badrabbit wrote:
| The whole thing with freenode-> libera and now this has been a
| shitshow to say the least. I am glad some communities are moving
| to discord where things are stable and reliable. Instead of
| implementing proper registration process for example, libera bans
| ip addresses from tor and vpns unless you auth first and you have
| to register with an email and an ip they like. I have many
| criticisms of matrix/element but in this case it looks like yet
| another libera complaint that is at issue, not really matrix's
| fault I think.
|
| The only thing I'll say about matrix is they have a lot of cool
| features but a smooth/fast experience like discord is the only
| thing they are missing to compete there but aside from philosophy
| I see no reason to avoid discord unless I want to operare a
| server instance. To me it's like webmail, I don't care if gmail
| or proronmail are opensource as much as I care about their
| security and reliability. I mean, I gotta applaud all the folks
| that worked on matrix clients, but there is still much left to be
| desired, I wish I could help in some way.
| smlavine wrote:
| Well, stable for now. Give Discord another two decades to
| figure itself out and see what happens. When it hits the fan,
| there won't be a "Discord 2" right next door that everyone can
| migrate to by changing a URL.
| Syonyk wrote:
| The centralized mess of Discord is neither stable, nor
| reliable, nor lightweight to access, and it's going to bite a
| lot of communities in the rear end, very hard, at some point
| down the road. The history of "convenient, free to use tech"
| like Discord is "Someone buys it and tries to turn a profit,
| and squeezes the life out of it."
|
| IRC is a "fully mature technology" at this point in the
| internet. It just works. I believe a number of tech companies
| keep IRC servers around for the "Everything but TCP/IP has gone
| down" emergency communications technology.
|
| But it's fine. The filter of IRC is part of what makes it worth
| it these days to use. It's the anti-Reddit.
| jeltz wrote:
| I agree with the first part but IRC in no way just works.
| Maybe after all seers and clients support IRCv3, but right
| now it does not just work.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| What communities are y'all in that are only or primarily on
| Matrix? I haven't seemed to find myself in any yet, but perhaps
| I'm missing out
| dizhn wrote:
| The thing is even though not all communities were fully there,
| they were using the bridges. As far as I know almost all KDE
| and openSUSE channels were bridged. Now we ended up with a
| situation where there are still people in the matrix rooms with
| no connection to the irc users.
| joshsimmons wrote:
| There are a number of open source events, projects, and
| foundations that primarily communicate on Matrix, and no
| surprise it seems particularly common among projects that build
| on federated technologies (eg ActivityPub-based projects).
| That's what got me started on Matrix before I joined to lead
| the Matrix.org Foundation :)
| graphe wrote:
| You aren't. If you haven't heard of social media it lacks
| sociability: it's only feature. If you want information join
| mailing lists. Discord and IG is what I usually use; because
| and only because everyone else uses it.
| rch wrote:
| I mostly use it for the Fedwiki and NixOS community channels.
| diamondfist25 wrote:
| On the side note, are there anyone whose only using matrix for
| all the social media apps bridges?
|
| I've been mucking away for months trying to integrate all social
| media apps together, and these bridges are obscure and hard to
| customize/configure for n00bs.
|
| Soon, I can do away with the 10+ apps and just use 1
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(page generated 2023-11-28 23:00 UTC)