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.
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