fwiw, i would be first to agree (as project lead for Matrix) that we (I) have fucked up the communication about libera irc bridging problems, and I am sorry for it.

the root cause is lack of bandwidth: the bridge is both written and run by one guy, alongside a tonne of other stuff which often takes priority given it revolves around trying to generate $ to fund matrix dev.

Around the beginning of the year, we had some nasty problems on the bridge (from memory, some delayed traffic, and a security bug). Libera started threatening to deportal us, so we rushed out a major feature (persistent IRC connections, so Matrix users don’t reconnect when the bridge restarts) to try to address the longest running series of issues and avoid Libera killing portals (ie stopping users bouncing via Matrix). Unfortunately, while this seemingly worked, it introduced the nightmare subtle traffic loss bug which the parent is complaining about, which we haven’t been able to repro outside of production. Meanwhile, rather than averting deportalling, the new problem reinforced the case, combined with false concerns about archive.matrix.org (https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/what-happened-with-the-archi...).

This has caused a particularly unpleasant vicious negative feedback loop where we’ve had to split time fixing the reliability bug with: fixing plumbing, preparing deportalling, handling tonnes of community reqs about deportaling and the awkward UX of plumbing, dealing with the libera team, and dealing with a new brace of security issues which showed up thanks to newfound attention on the bridge.

Meanwhile it’s fair to say that we have badly failed to communicate about this with the wider IRC community, focusing on trying to fix bugs while talking to the libera team instead. This is clearly a huge screwup, and, again, I apologise for it (and for the bad job I’ve done on resourcing keeping the bridge running).

At this point, the our best hope is that we’ve fixed the root message loss bug, and that the bridge will go back to being lower maintenance again, and plumbing will prove usable in practice. However, we’re also in a catch 22 when the main use of the bridge (portalling, ie acting as a bouncer) is now gone, meaning fewer people will be able to use it and it’ll be even harder to justify spend time on it going forwards. If libera hoped that by turning off portals they would somehow make it easier for us to improve the bridge, they were wrong.

Our fallback position, if plumbing doesn’t work out, is to try to find a set of people who libera trust to run/maintain the bridge and hand it over to them - or alternatively give up and encourage the community to run their own personal bridges via matrix-appservice-irc or heisenbridge or even matterbridge, if empirically running a huge bridge to libera’s satisfaction is impossible.

If anyone has any other bright ideas, please let me know.

Finally: the reason we have run the bridge for the last 8 years is, perversely, to try to support IRC and let xkcd.com/1810 style users still participate in communities which have otherwise migrated to discord/slack/matrix and avoid community fragmentation. Right now the Libera Matrix bridge has around 10K IRC connections - around 25% of Libera’s total users. By knifing portaling, I’d guess this will drop 10x. So the whole thing ends up being an utterly depressing spiral of fail.