Today we are sorry to announce that we are not able to bring the Libera Chat bridge back online. We have already begun working through clean up tasks, such as clearing ghosts, and expect to be done by December 22. If you see any bridge artifacts left past that point, please let us know.
We at the Matrix.org Foundation have been working behind the scenes for months with the team at Element who operated the bridge and our peers at Libera Chat. Our hope had been to address the issues that were raised about the bridge to the satisfaction of Libera and to quickly bring it back online, but ultimately the Foundation is only a facilitator in the process and does not have the resources to maintain and operate the bridge itself.
Long term, the Foundation’s hope is to have the resources to service its core programs as well as provide additional community services like bridge maintenance and operations. However, as an open source foundation that is still early in its journey, we must be realistic about our capacity and make hard choices about where we put our scarce resources.
Following Libera Chat earlier post it’s not surprising. Matrix Foundation, been paying Element to handle all the infrastructure of even their main matrix.org instance. They have no team of their own.
Element is starting to look really really nasty in all of this. It’s disconcerting to me.
New Vector was always like that and the foundation was always “community washing” by them. The only difference is that they are running out of easy venture capital cash and thus can’t afford spending much money on community goodwill any longer.
What’s your concern with element?
I mainly see a funding issue for matrix.org but that’s also because the people behind it always offered the service as element, not as matrix.
But what’s the bigger problem with it?
In theory, for profit Element (aka New Vector) and open governance Matrix Foundation should have different motivations. But since CEO and COO of Element are part of the Matrix Foundation and how all Matrix development is mainly done by Element it raises a lot of questions. Not to mention Element having ties and taking money from law enforcement agencies.
And just recently Foundation transferred two of the Matrix servers to Element which will require CLA to contribute.
How would you like Matrix to be funded?
The CLA isn’t that great I agree, yet there are other implementations and anyone can set up another server.
There are, but Synapse is by far the most popular and if the transfer kills the momentum of outside development due to CLA, it will doom other implementations too.
Sure, it raises a lot of questions but they can’t or can not yet be answered negatively.
Which law enforcement agencies? That’s not neccessarily bad. Tor is/was funded by the CIA.
I don’t disagree that it is not a lost cause, the protocol is open, it’s just everything surrounding it is iffy. The Foundation finally got a Managing Director, we will see what that brings.
Personal ties are to some London based law enforcement agencies, I don’t recall specifically which ones anymore. As far as money, it’s whoever wants it. That part is not concerning on its own as they’re selling the service, not access, but the more worrying details you combine, the less trustworthy everything seems.
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It’s only the groups that’s choose to be public.
You have to configure it for that.
Matrix is perfect for private and personal communication too.
These bridges are usually self-hosted so I’m assuming this is not due to infrastructure costs but rather the bridge code maintenance issues? Do they require so much work to stay functional, are other bridges at risk of abandonment too?
The main problem here is that IRC moke libera has a lot of random ephemeral users who join once and leave soon after. For the bridge, this means creating a matrix account on the instance and either deleting it, which creates problems down the line and is inefficient, or leaving it be, which means the instance fills with a crazy number of inactive accounts really fast.
Right, I never really used IRC but always just created an account directly
