I am still waiting for a Matrix client that I can love, but I LOVE THIS NEWS. I am very very happy to see this move. Thanks for those that did the work to make this happen, and that probably were planning ahead of time and getting this ready.
My condolences too, to folks. I was never too big into the larger Freenode community, but I can sympathize with the hard feelings and sense of loss, especially as I read about some of the details. I hope LiberaChat flourishes as well!
In terms of bridging, I believe Pine64 uses GitHub - 42wim/matterbridge: bridge between mattermost, IRC, gitter, xmpp, slack, discord, telegram, rocketchat, twitch, ssh-chat, zulip, whatsapp, keybase, matrix, microsoft teams, nextcloud, mumble, vk and more with REST API (mattermost not required!) to bridge IRC, Discord, Telegram, and Matrix. My experience is very limited, but interacting with remote users on Discord was much better than my experiences with using Matrix.
I’ve made an RFC where we can discuss this major community change before making it official:
What’s the best way to install (read: how did you install) weechat-matrix plugin on NixOS?
I’m seeing improvements happening every day, so your characterisation is not really accurate.
Ex-freenode staff and OFTC are working on a Charybdis-based ircd, Solanum. If I search for multiline in the Solanum repo, I can see it is getting support for the multiline spec.
Edit: just to continue a bit, at the start of 2021 I wrote a summary article on what happened in the second half of 2020 regarding IRC spec and software (still unpublished as I wanted to guest-post it in a particular place and delays ensued). I was frankly overwhelmed with the amount of IRC-related activity I was seeing on all fronts. Certainly covid-19 seemed to have an effect in boosting the intensity of development and old projects being resurrected.
Edit pt. 2: so I finally published the article after quickly setting up a personal blog site: IRC technology news from the second half of 2020 | Ilmari Lauhakangas
It would be great (for me) if someone revived this weechat PR for home-manager and made it easy to use and configure plugins like weechat-matrix there.
It would be especially nice if the Matrix IRC bridge to Libera.Chat learned to make use of IRCv3 CAPs like multiline to improve the quality of the Matrix/IRC integration in the future.
fwiw this is currently maintained and usable with a home-manager config like:
{ pkgs, ... }: let
url = "https://github.com/arcnmx/nixexprs/archive/master.tar.gz"; # also available as NUR.arc, no flakes sorry :<
arcChannel = builtins.fetchTarball { inherit url; }; # pin or use a channel import instead as needed
arc = import arcChannel { inherit pkgs; }; # only needed if you want to pull in deps from my repo
in {
imports = [
(arcChannel + "/modules/home/weechat.nix")
# alternatively: arc.modules.home-manager.weechat
];
config.programs.weechat = {
enable = true;
plugins.python = {
enable = true;
packages = [ "weechat-matrix" ]; # maybe optional if the plugin has pythonpath embedded?
};
scripts = [
pkgs.weechatScripts.weechat-matrix
# alternatively: arc.packages.groups.weechatScripts.weechat-matrix or arc.pkgs.weechatScripts.weechat-matrix (same difference)
];
# optional: pythonPackages = arc.pkgs.python3Packages;
};
}
this is a terrible idea. Matrix is HUGELY complicated and has failed as software goals. The config file for a hosted matrix instance is 2000+ lines. Not to mention, this article about “both sides” of the debate: The Freenode Users Exodus as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Boosted by Those Looking to Gain
Joining with XMPP (to MUC #nix#nixos.org@matrix.org via the matrix bifröst bridge) seems to work
I think the shortcomings of synapse are relatively well known, but there is hope for the future with dendrite.
The config file for a hosted matrix instance is 2000+ lines.
That’s just wrong, at least when using NixOS. I’m comfortably hosting my own matrix-synapse instance, using the configuration listed in the NixOS manual.
Some of the bridges, on the other hand, have complex configurations, though not thousands of lines. Looking at you matrix-appservice-irc.
https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/56667733419ebf070f1a7f7c9a04070f1b944572/docs/sample_config.yaml 2933 lines of “examples”
Ive managed a synapse for over a year now, and its so unnecessarily complex.
Well, no. 58 lines of examples, 292 empty lines, 606 effectively empty lines, and 1977 lines of docs.
And it specifically says at the top:
# It is *not* intended to be copied and used as the basis for a real
# homeserver.yaml. Instead, if you are starting from scratch, please generate
# a fresh config using Synapse by following the instructions in INSTALL.md.
Ohhhhhh only 2000 lines of documentation, I’m sorry. Guess i’m wrong and matrix is not complex at all.
Quickstart is way shorter, of course, and I mean the total for a homeserver and a bridge together. Reference documentation for the bridge configuration, often more detailed than minimally necessary (which is actually good) is of course longer. Lack of such documentation for Nixpkgs lib makes Nixpkgs manual shorter, but does not make Nixpkgs simpler.
Matrix is complex. It also achieves things email doesn’t fully achieve and nothing else tries. Still could be less inefficient.
But citing the length of reference documentation of some component as if it was the expected length of configuration is not a good argument for any claim, not even for a true one.
Ohhhhhh only 2000 lines of documentation, I’m sorry. Guess i’m wrong
and matrix is not complex at all.
Reading the following of the thread I guess this was sarcasm, but I must
say that as an ircop I did take it at face value. FWIW, inspircd has a
bit more than 5000 lines of documented example configuration. Anope,
that you also need to run a basic IRC network, is another 6000 lines of
documented example configuration. Plus you need to somehow orchestrate
the two so that they run correctly together, and provide fallback when
one anope instance dies.
The actual complexity of matrix comes from the fact that it’s still
under development and things still change every year or so, plus the
fact that it doesn’t work smoothly yet and diagnostics are not good
enough.
Initial setup cost and the like are not bad at all when you take into
account the fact that you’re configuring a server that’s meant to be
shared, not a single-user client.
(And yes, this is comparing comparable things, you don’t need to
actually run a synapse server yourself to use matrix. And all the nixos
channel logs are already public anyway, so there’s no problem with logs)
How does one use the invitation link with one’s own Matrix homeserver (e.g. running Element and Synapse on NixOS)?