IRC, Matrix, and thanks for all the kicks

Community
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About the IRC update, @averi has been following progress with the network administrators.

  • We are waiting for some administrators to confirm they have upgraded the hosts on which ircd is running and are ready to move forward upgrading unrealircd. We expect the update to land in the next two weeks, but it depends mostly on the schedule of the IRC administrators (who are providing the service on their free time)
  • Once done, we can land the flood prevention whitelist for Matrix (to prevent bridge reboot kicks) and the rule to exempt Matrix puppets from needing +R mode in +R IRC channels (to prevent kicking/join deny of Matrix users when a IRC channel is in spam-protect mode)
  • We may eventually add a cloack for the IPv6 subnet of Matrix to identify more obviously Matrix users on IRC
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I just came here after following a link from the Fedora Discourse. I’m not too active on GNOME channels, so my opinion might not mean much. I’m writing my thoughts here because I think this discussion is relevant for many other communities, and this decision could help cement an existing precedent far beyond GNOME itself.

I think maintaining a bridge is currently the “least bad” option available. I’ve written my thoughts on this in an email on the Libravatar-Fans mailing list. I’ve also described some redeemable issues I have with Matrix in a section of a blog post, linked below.

Pasting my email below:

Personally, I don’t have a big problem with either since both are open platforms with some degree of federation; I use both daily through WeeChat and Gomuks. However, I do have a preference for IRC for a number of reasons:

  1. Given that so many other projects are on IRC, it makes sense to not require people to use a different client just for a few select communities.

  2. Many people, including myself, prefer TUI clients to graphical ones. Right now, the only TUI Matrix client that isn’t missing essential features is Gomuks. While Gomuks development seems to be progressing well, I wouldn’t say it’s a replacement for other graphical clients yet.

  3. Issues with Matrix itself: I described these in a bit more detail in a blog post, “Keeping Platforms Open”. https://seirdy.one/2021/02/23/keeping-platforms-open.html.

Regarding features in Matrix that aren’t present in IRC:

Long-form and long-term discussion already happens in a mailing list, which is well-suited for the task; I’m not aware of any other open platform that allows nested discussion threads delimited by subject. Given the existence of a mailing list, I think a chat platform should focus on a niche that isn’t covered by mailing lists: ephemeral, real-time chat with less structure.

If a discussion needs marked replies and searchable history, it’s probably better off happening in a mailing list. Given that these features aren’t especially valuable given the existence of a mailing list, I’d say that IRC should fit the bill.

Honestly, I don’t think a Matrix-IRC bridge hurts the Matrix experience too much since join/leave events can simply be filtered out from most clients. Most of the issues come from the perspective of IRC users, mainly long-form messages turning into pastebin links instead of being broken up. That being said, I find excessive pastebin links preferable to not having IRC support at all.

Not all of what I said in the Libravatar-Fans mailing list is applicable to every GNOME project. For example, Libravatar maintains both a mailing list and an IRC channel; this is not true for all GNOME projects.

I think that the issues involving NickServ registration are valid. Perhaps efforts could be spent on a bot that kicked unregistered IRC users but not users connecting from Matrix? I’ll see if I can give this a shot next week if there’s enough interest. Nonetheless, while I agree that the registration issues are bad, I don’t think they’re worse than abandoning IRC.

I’m currently in the process of expanding the thoughts I described in that email into a {Web,Gem}log post, so any feedback before then is welcome.

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Hi @Seirdy, you might be interested in the Ease interactions between IRC and Matrix users issue where we track the main complaints from each side of the bridge and bring solutions to them when possible :slight_smile:

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Speaking of it: I wonder how the “Chat Platforms Evaluation” is going :slight_smile:
@nmcgovern

Hi @nmcgovern, if I’m not mistaken the evaluation was many months ago, do you know how processing the results is going?

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In the meantime I’ve been working on a piece to explain how the GNOME Foundation can get back its sovereignty on its Matrix instance and how to get there.

TL;DR:

  • Leaving the instance too open can lead to abuse, and we want to preserve both our contributors’ safety and the public image of GNOME
  • Inscriptions are closed for non Foundation members (anyone with a @gnome.org email account can register)
  • We will need to ask non Foundation members to find a provider elsewhere for their personal account and help them migrating and staying with us
  • We would like to get guest accounts in the longer run (and Fractal will probably help greatly with that!)
  • We can get the instance back on premises if the results of the study are published and the board approves that decision
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Thank you for your in-depth initial write-up! A decision like this isn’t taken lightly, your arguments for and against matrix are sound, and even so for IRC.

I’d like to mention weechat-matrix and matrix-ircd for this conversation, though I see the latter one is already mentioned.

Strong statement, but unfortunately true, I don’t see many people learning the courtesies and intricacies of IRC today, and I must admit that I only do it personally out of nostalgic interest.

As a member of the matrix community, though unaffiliated with GNOME, i want to congratulate on the steps taken to matrix, while obviously this means (not) much to the GNOME community to arrive here, it means a lot more to the matrix community, as this becomes part of the statement that, yes, matrix is a viable communication tool for this little corner of the internet.

Sorry for the all the formality, this is just very exciting, and seeing the reasons for it made me appreciate the move even more.

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How many people have :gnome.org accounts currently? Perhaps if it’s not too many, we could just disable creation of new accounts and allow existing ones to be grandfathered in?

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Very fair question Michael, and we might even achieve something very close, if not better. @averi is working on a (web) app to streamline Foundation membership. To put it simply, the concept is that instead of opening an issue for someone to join the Foundation and having two people commenting that they vouch for the person, everything would be streamlined through an app.

  1. Someone asks to join the Foundation through the app
  2. Two members of the Foundation vouch through the app
  3. The person is now a member of the Foundation

This way, we can incentivise people to join the Foundation by lowering the barrier to entry. Instead of grandfathering the accounts, we could grandfather the people themselves in the Foundation as a whole.

So far, the grand scheme of Matrix and the Foundation

  1. Andrea releases his super Foundation Membership O Matic 2000
  2. We encourage people to get an account if they have made significant contribution
  3. For those who didn’t, we leave them a “grace period” to migrate their account (with proper docs that I’m in the process of writing right now)
  4. I perform account reconciliation between the existing accounts and what the authentication mechanism sends to Matrix (spoiler: we’re going to use OIDC eventually)

Ideally I would like to wait for both Fractal and Element Mobile (Android/iOS) to support OIDC before flipping the switch.

Edit: I realise I didn’t make it really clear. The Matrix instance is not going to move to the Foundation’s infrastructure but we will keep relying on Element Matrix Services. One of the key aspects for this decision was that they provided excellent support especially during the spam waves we faced.

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Important IRC/bridge update:

The upgrades on the GIMPnet network cause(d) hard disconnects from the IRC side, which ends up in kicks on the Matrix side. As a consequence, everytime there is an upgrade, the bridge needs to reconnect everyone, which makes ircd go in flood protection mode (it enables the +R mode) for some specific channels (such as Shell, Design or the one with more experienced people). Those channels all have in common to have the +f mode set. I don’t have sufficient privileges to remove those modes.

Since this is not a one-time upgrade but a progressive one, I flipped the switch to prevent the kicks from being propagated to Matrix. Now Matrix users can stay in the channels, but if they are not registered against NickServ, their messages might not make it to IRC and fail silently. This is clearly suboptimal, but preferable to being kicked every day or so without knowing when you will have a chance to r-join.

To circumvent the problem, Matrix users can register against IRC’s NickServ from Matrix, and their messages will make it to the other side of the bridge again.

Once the upgrades are done and the flood protection are in place on the IRC side, it won’t be necessary at all to register on IRC for any Matrix user, making the experience (finally!!) transparent.

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Finally, all the technical bits have been sorted out so we can provide a seamless experience!

Since the configuration where IRC and Matrix users can talk to one another transparently requires significant changes on GIMPnet, we now need to!

  1. Wait for a validation from the GNOME Foundation that Matrix is indeed going to be our recommended platform for the future
  2. Communicate properly to IRC users (which can be done regularly through network-wise messages, on Foundation announce, and on Discourse) that they will need to register against NickServ or join through Matrix
  3. Deploy the changes on the IRC side
  4. Enjoy some good time together with much less spam, at last!
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IRC is the last system powering human interactions that hasn’t been updated to a
more comfortable solution.

Hmm - depends on what you mean with “comfortable”.

I have not used oldschool IRC in many years, mostly because I
no longer have the time available I once used to have. But back
when I used IRC, I liked that it was simple to use for “power” users.

I’d use mIRC and then xchat and then hexchat.

I have not paid much attention to modern-day replacements,
not even WhatsApp and such, but my impression was that they
made communication harder for the “power” users. Personally
I always liked how quickly one can get information from IRC
“live”. Admittedly, since I have not used IRC in years, a lot of
my own old experiences will be outdated - freenode doesn’t
even exist anymore either so there is that. (I actually started
on Galaxynet due to some people from Singapore - was great
fun; we rallied behind a browser game …)

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GIMPnet is finally up to date!
Aditionnally, irc.poop.nl has been removed from the network since the maintainer didn’t answer to sollicitations.

Several restarts of the bridge have occurred and apparently went smooth, nobody should have been kicked from the Matrix side. Let me know if that was the case and I didn’t notice :slight_smile:

The next step still is to enforce the NickServ registration bypass for Matrix puppets, and to make the registration mandatory on GIMPnet for regular IRC users.

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And let’s not allow poop-related domains into the network in the future. Please and thank you. :wink:

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