Gitter, Matrix, IRC and bridges

Community
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Introduction

For those not having followed, story time: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/09/30/welcoming-gitter-to-matrix
. Matrix bought Gitter.

Recently, Matrix announced that basically, Gitter and Matrix can talk together with a bridge hosted by the organization https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/07/gitter-now-speaks-matrix. We can already see people talking from Matrix in the Gitter chat!

Crystal chats and bridges

All of this means Crystal could switch to Matrix as its main channel, and we will be able to use all the existing bridges (IRC, Slack, Discord).

The benefits are:

  • support more chats, and have thus a wider more inclusive community
  • have more featured bridges, and not having to maintain them (code wise, still having to self-host)

For the transition, it is possible to create a new Matrix channel, then setup the bridges.

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There is currently no way to add Matrix into the equation in a nice way and without making one of the existing channels (IRC or Gitter) second-class.

I also don’t want to maintain, say, an IRC to Matrix bridge when it’s impossible to compete with one that (1) requires no hosting and (2) got special integration privileges with Freenode. Exactly the same can be said about Gitter to Matrix (even more so).

I brought up this situation with people responsible for this migration of Gitter, and we’ll just need to wait for improvements (that are actively being worked on!)

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As an additional note, Gitter will ultimately become “just” a Matrix front-end, like Element (the official one).

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So what is the irc network and room now? For Crystal.
Gitter seems to have shut down their irc.gitter.im.