design

#766 Making a final team decision on bridges and communication equity
Closed: Invalid by duffy. Opened by jflory7.

Closed: Invalid
Reopen Issue

phenomenon

The Telegram/IRC bridge bot was removed from the #fedora-design channel by IRC operators, which segments the Telegram and IRC/Matrix rooms into isolated chats from the other.

reason

I propose a team discussion and a logged, recorded vote on what to do about the Telegram bridge.

After the bridge was abruptly disconnected on Telegram, some of us in Telegram voiced our mutual confusion, hurt, and frustration that we were cut off from other Fedora Design contributors. It felt like a deliberate rejection and invalidation of the people, work, and contributions that happen on the Telegram side of the bridge. It is demotivating to our morale as contributors.

This also goes against previous precedent, when we did have the Freenode IRC channel and Telegram group linked together with TeleIRC. This compounds the confusion and frustration over why this change was reverted for Libera.Chat.

recommendation

For a short-term measure, I propose discussing, voting, and recording a decision as the Fedora Design Team on whether the Telegram group deserves to be bridged to IRC/Matrix. I am in favor of reconnecting the Telegram and IRC/Matrix.

For long-term, we will benefit from the bridge support provided by the Element folks once that is ready, but there is no known public timeline for this and I am willing to hedge it could be months before we see a first Telegram bridge become operational.

I am in favor of the bridge from Fedora Design IRC to Telegram, and ideally it would bridge to Matrix as well.

While I was the one who actually removed the tg-feddesign bot from the IRC channel, I did so at the request of @duffy. I will gladly remove the ban if that is what is decided in this ticket.

Hi,

The bridge wasn't working. Libera IRC <=> Matrix traffic is broken right now. I posted lonks to the issue in the channel. Matrix traffic goes to IRC but we cant see IRC posts in Matrix. The telegram bot was posting to IRC and it was not being received in Matrix. I prefer the Matrix bot style of bridging telegram anyway. It was my intention to fix the Telegram bridge via Matrix bot but I have not had a lot of time to do so.

Bottom line: we cant see telegram IRC bot messages in Matrix no matter what. I didnt want the bot in Libera IRC to add to the confusion caused by ongoing Libera bridge issues, by making folks in Telegram believe they were being heard in Matrix when they are not. Whether or not the bot was in IRC, would have no impact on whether or not they would be heard in Matrix and having the bot there only exacerbated the confusion.

Reading the full log should have revealed this, but also talking to me I would have been happy to explain and nobody raised a concern about this with me before opening this ticket. I am sorry people's feelings were hurt. This is a technical issue. The sooner we have our Fedora Matrix server available the sooner it will be resolved. Matrix is the primary chat mechanism so if folks want to make sure they don't miss out, they should join Matrix.

Metadata Update from @duffy:
- Issue close_status updated to: Invalid
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

btw here is the bug
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1355

FWIW from the matrix-org github issue, there's a link to this:

[...] while I'm not sure this is the cause of all these unidirectional failures, there is one caveat about the Matrix—Libera bridge that wasn't there with freenode: I understand due to privacy concerns, IRC messages are not relayed to Matrix unless and until all Matrix users in a room have successfully joined as their bridged IRC counterparts.

That seems like a pretty big barrier, especially since I don't think there's any documentation for how to actually join as one's bridged IRC counterpart.

We're going to have some rough spots going through this transition, unfortunately, and I'd just ask everyone to be extra patient. We'll get this all figured out eventually.

In the meantime, I think it's probably best if people who are currently accessing via Telegram try out Matrix or even IRC. I know it's annoying to have one more chat client, but it's not like the whole world is accessible from Telegram anyway and Matrix is going to be our official preferred platform.

This is now properly bridged via Matrix bot and it appears two-way communication is again functioning (it had not been at the time of this change.)

Screenshot_from_2021-06-17_14-10-04.png

Screenshot_from_2021-06-17_14-10-34.png

fedora-design:matrix.org remains the official chat communication for the team. The telegram bridge is provided as a best-effort, non-SLA courtesy.
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