Retiring the Slack Bridge on matrix.org

2025-11-28T09:30:00+00:00

Bridges are one of the reasons Matrix is called Matrix: let’s matrix all the networks together! They are key to onboard new users into the network. However, maintaining and operating bridges, in particular to closed, proprietary platforms, is expensive: they need to be kept up to date with any change made by the platform on a regular basis and they’re fiddly to keep up and running.

The Matrix.org Foundation has been hosting a free of charge Slack bridge for users of the matrix.org server</a> for several years. The code of the bridge belongs to the Foundation</a>, hosted under its GitHub workspace, but the bulk of the maintenance was done by Element. Maintaining and operating bridges to closed, proprietary platforms such as Slack comes at a high cost, both financially and in terms of reliability as they are subject to change without notice. The bridge has been unmaintained for some time now, and this has led to degraded functionality and inconsistent performance for users. While we understand that some people still find it useful in certain cases, it is not right to continue providing a service that we know does not meet the standards expected of matrix.org.

This is why, without enough customers paying for it and despite the efforts of the community trying to help, Element will not continue to maintain this bridge. As a result, the Foundation will no longer provide this service to matrix.org users. We want to thank Element for all these years of graciously maintaining a bridge for us.

🔗</a>What this means for users</h2>
The Slack bridge will be removed from matrix.org on January 13. After this date, rooms connected to Slack will stop receiving new messages, and no new connections will be accepted. Existing messages and room history in Matrix will remain available, but the link to Slack will be closed.
Users who rely on Slack bridging are encouraged to take over its maintenance, find a supplier who can maintain it for them, or explore alternatives</a>. If you operate your own Matrix homeserver, you are able to host your own instance of the Slack bridge or develop one that suits your needs. However, please note that ongoing maintenance will be required to keep such a bridge functioning as Slack evolves its APIs.
The following bridges will remain online.
Instance</th> Platform</th> Project</th></tr></thead>

OFTC</td> IRC</td> matrix-appservice-irc</a></td></tr>
Snoonet</td> IRC</td> matrix-appservice-irc</a></td></tr>
Bifrost</td> XMPP</td> matrix-bifrost</a></td></tr> </tbody></table>
🔗</a>Looking ahead</h2>
Bridges are an important part of the Matrix ecosystem. They connect Matrix rooms to conversations on other platforms, helping users communicate without needing to maintain multiple accounts or abandon existing communities. They also help onboard users in the Matrix network. This bridging capability allows Matrix to act as a unifying layer across fragmented chat systems.
Many of these bridges — including those for IRC, WhatsApp, and others — are developed and maintained by community contributors, and we want to acknowledge and thank everyone who has contributed to this ecosystem.
Deprovisioning Slack bridge for matrix.org users does not signal a retreat from the goal of Matrix bridging to other platforms. Bridges remain a valuable part of the Matrix ecosystem, and the Foundation continues to support their development — especially those that connect to open protocols and standards.

Cleaning up Libera.Chat aliases

2023-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Matrix.org Foundation has taken down the bridge with the Libera Chat network. This only prevented messages from making it across the bridges, for Matrix users to appear on the IRC side, and for new IRC users to appear on the Matrix side.
As part of our work to remove the bridge leftovers, we have removed the ghosts in Matrix rooms and demoted the Libera Chat appservice user. We will now remove the aliases from the rooms, and strongly encourage you to make sure you update the links to your Matrix room if they relied on a `matrix.to</code> link that contains :libera.chat</code> `
🔗</a>Ghosts cleanup</h2> One of the core concepts of Matrix is interoperability with third party platforms via bridges. In the example of Libera Chat, when an IRC user appears on the Matrix side, it’s called a ghost. When a Matrix user appears on IRC, it’s called a puppet. When the IRC bridge was taken down, all the puppets disappeared from IRC. Matrix works differently than IRC, and all the ghosts remained in most bridged rooms. The Foundation has performed the clean-up work to remove ghosts from the rooms, and will now tackle the alias clean-up. 🔗</a>Aliases cleanup</h2> The bridge operated by the Matrix.org Foundation was hosted on a dedicated Matrix server that lived under the libera.chat domain. This means that all the matrix users whose username looks like @username:libera.chat</code> are ghosts. It also means that aliases looking like #roomname:libera.chat</code> are hosted on the libera.chat Matrix instance. The Foundation will decommission this server, and as such those aliases will stop working. This doesn’t mean the room will stop working, but links to this room might stop working because the alias won’t resolve. The Foundation is going to remove all the libera.chat aliases from rooms that have them by January 7. After this date matrix.to links that contain :libera.chat</code> will stop working. You will need to update them by going to your matrix client, and asking it for a new link to share the room. In Element on a computer, you can do this by clicking on the room header and then clicking on “Copy room link”. If you are the administrator of such a room, you can change the alias in advance. To do so, in your favourite client go to the room settings, add a new published address if none exists, and change the main address. You can then repeat the “copy room link” steps to get a new matrix.to link.
Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera.Chat 2023-11-28T00:00:00+00:00 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. If you are one of those who have relied on the bridge in the past, you may be asking: what now? You do have options. People who need a bridge for their community can run their own</a>: the matrix-appservice-irc software is still maintained. Only its Libera Chat instance, which was configured to persist connections across restarts, is being shut down. Please be mindful of the network, and read Libera Chat’s recommendations</a> and their Matrix FAQ</a> when doing so. 🔗</a>Background</h2> 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. We know that many communities and individuals were relying on the bridge, and we regret the impact this situation has on them. To date, development, maintenance, and operation of the Libera Chat bridge had been donated to the community by teams at Element. We are grateful for their work and ongoing support, and understand that limited staffing has impacted their ability to consistently prioritize work on this bridge. Over the course of the last couple of years of operating the bridge, issues had been raised and work undertaken to address those issues to the extent possible with available resources. Transparently, the complexity of the work meant that we didn’t get the desired results as quickly as any involved party would’ve liked. Given that, the teams came to mutual agreement to turn the bridge off until key improvements were made and verified. It’s possible that the necessary work will be undertaken at some point, and Element has made it clear that they would like to make this happen. But with so many people wondering about the status and trying to make plans, we owe it to the impacted communities to provide more certainty than we’ve offered to date. 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. We thank all of the involved parties for their commitment to doing right by the community and are sorry that we don’t have better news to offer at this time. Libera.Chat bridge temporarily unavailable. 2023-08-04T22:30:00+00:00 Following a series of stability issues, the Libera.Chat team has requested that the Matrix <> Libera.Chat bridge be disabled</a> until we can resolve the stability issues. From 14:00 UTC on Saturday 5th August the bridge will be unavailable. We will be working to get the bridge back up as soon as we can, however, given the severity of the situation we do not expect immediate resolution. We send our sincere apologies to anyone caught up in this decision and unable to reach folks on the Libera side. We’ll get you back as soon as we can. Disclosure: Bridges security issues 2023-08-04T10:30:00+00:00 Hi folks. As previously mentioned on Monday</a>, we’re now disclosing the vulnerabilities patched for the IRC, Slack and Hookshot bridges. If you have not already done so, please ensure you are running the patched versions. Today we are disclosing the 3 vulnerabilities. 🔗</a>matrix-appservice-bridge doesn't verify the sub parameter of an openId token exchange (CVE-2023-38691)</h2> GHSA-vc7j-h8xg-fv5x</a> / CVE-2023-38691</a> The POST /v1/exchange_openid</code> endpoint did not check that the servername part of the sub</code> parameter (containing the user's claimed MXID) is the same as the servername we are talking to. This could allow a malicious actor to spin up a server on any given domain, respond with a sub</code> parameter according to the user they want to act as and use the resulting token to perform provisioning requests. This is now patched so that the server part of the sub / user ID is checked against the server used to make the request. Discovered and reported by a community member. 🔗</a>IRC command injection via admin commands containing newlines (CVE-2023-38690)</h2> GHSA-3pmj-jqqp-2mj3</a> / CVE-2023-38690</a> When the IRC bridge attempted to parse an admin command from a Matrix user, it would only split arguments by a literal space. For example, sending “!join #matrix\nfoobar” would treat the channel name as “#matrix\nfoobar”. This could then be exploited to inject any IRC command into the bridge to be run. Since the !join command first joins via the bridge bot user, it could be used to execute commands as the bridge bot. This is now patched so that both the command handler is more strict about its arguments, as well as channel names being explicitly validated when provided by users. Discovered and reported by Val Lorentz</a>. 🔗</a>Events can be crafted to leak parts of targeted messages from other bridged rooms (CVE-2023-38700)</h2> GHSA-c7hh-3v6c-fj4q</a> / CVE-2023-38700</a> The IRC bridge caches recent timeline messages in memory, so that when a reply is seen for a message it doesn’t need to request the event content from the homeserver. However the room ID was not validated when accessing this cache, so a malicious actor could craft a reply event in another room referencing any event ID (so long as it was still in the bridge cache) to trick the bridge into posting the message content into a bridged reply. Discovered and reported by Val Lorentz</a>. If you have further questions, please reach out on security@matrix.org</a> Bridges Security Update 2023-07-31T11:40:00+00:00 Today we are announcing security updates for several of our bridges. matrix-appservice-irc 1.0.1</a> affected by GHSA-vc7j-h8xg-fv5x CVE-2023-38691</a>, GHSA-3pmj-jqqp-2mj3 / CVE-2023-38690</a>, and GHSA-c7hh-3v6c-fj4q</li> matrix-hookshot 4.4.1</a> affected by GHSA-vc7j-h8xg-fv5x / CVE-2023-38691</a></li> matrix-appservice-slack 2.1.2</a> affected by GHSA-vc7j-h8xg-fv5x / CVE-2023-38691</a></li> </ul> In addition we have released matrix-appservice-bridge 9.0.1</a> (and backported to 8.1.2</a>) which patches GHSA-vc7j-h8xg-fv5x. All mentioned bridges are affected by a vulnerability in the provisioning interfaces of these bridges. If you are unable to upgrade, please disable provisioning for now (which should be documented in the relevant bridge sample config). IRC bridge config</a> Set provisioning.enabled</code> to false.</li> </ul> </li> Slack bridge config</a> Set provisioning.enabled</code> to false.</li> </ul> </li> Hookshot config</a> Remove the widgets</code> resource (NOT provisioning)</li> </ul> </li> </ul> The IRC bridge is also affected by two additional vulnerabilities. In this case, we would recommend upgrading immediately rather than working around the problems. Disclosures for these vulnerabilities, as well as CVE numbers will be out in three days (Thursday 3rd). We advise to upgrade as soon as possible. If you have further questions, please reach out on security@matrix.org</a> Postponing the Libera.Chat deportalling 2023-07-28T14:00:00+00:00 We have recently announced that we will be honouring Libera Chat’s request</a> to turn off portalled rooms on the Libera.Chat bridge maintained by the Matrix.org Foundation. The changes were originally scheduled to be effective on 31st July. In the meantime, we posted instructions for people to turn their portalled rooms into plumbed ones</a> so the bridge keeps working for them. Some stability issues on the bridge have prevented people from turning their portalled rooms into plumbed ones. We have been actively working on resolving those issues since the first reports and the situation is gradually improving. However, at this point, we do not believe the plumbed mode can be considered sufficiently stable yet. Additionally, as part of the project we have been made aware of several new bridge security issues. These issues must be patched ahead of the plumbing stability work thereby increasing the overall scope of the project. The limited resources of the Matrix.org</a> Foundation didn’t allow us to meet the deadline in time. Rather than plough ahead with the original timeline and risking splitting communities, we have asked Libera Chat for an extension for turning off portal rooms to ensure successful migrations in order to make sure the bridge is ready to handle the traffic in plumbed rooms and to leave people enough time to migrate their rooms after the stabilisation work. We have asked the Libera Chat staff to allow us to postpone the deportalling to Friday 11 August, which they accepted. We’re grateful to the Libera Chat team for accommodating us. We will turn off the new portal creation on Monday 31 July, but will leave the existing portals active. On Friday 11 August we will make all the portal rooms read-only, and will send a message in each portalled room to list all the public rooms plumbed to the same channel on IRC. 🔗</a>Security release information</h2> On Monday 31st, we will release new security updates for several bridges and the matrix-appservice-bridge library, including the IRC bridge. These will be: matrix-appservice-bridge 9.0.1</li> matrix-appservice-irc 1.0.1</li> matrix-appservice-slack 2.1.2</li> matrix-hookshot 4.4.1</li> </ul> We, and the community, have found several vulnerabilities classified as High severity and strongly recommend upgrading as soon as possible after the release. A full disclosure of the vulnerabilities will be out 3 days after the release, to allow people time to upgrade. Making Sure The Libera.Chat Bridge Keeps Working 2023-07-07T18:45:00+00:00 Libera Chat recently announced their decision to opt-out of portalled rooms</a> from the Libera.Chat bridge instance hosted by the Matrix.org Foundation (a decision we regret but respect</a>). This means that for the bridge to keep working, all of your portalled rooms need to be turned into plumbed rooms before July 31st. All of this might be a bit obscure, so let’s walk together through these concepts and give you the tools to make sure the bridge keeps working for you. 🔗</a>Am I concerned?</h2> If your community is primarily on Matrix and your rooms are not bridged to Libera.Chat channels, then you’re not concerned! If your community is spread across Matrix and Libera Chat, you need to make sure your room is “plumbed” into a Libera Chat channel, and not “portalled” to it. But what are those, and how to find out? 🔗</a>Plumbed and portalled?</h2> The simplest approach to it is to say that: Portalled rooms are primarily owned by the bridge and “obey” the IRC side. Everyone can join a portalled room.</li> Plumbed rooms are primarily owned by an individual, and try to obey the IRC side as much as possible. Plumbed rooms require an IRC chanop to approve a plumbing request to establish the link between the Matrix room and the IRC channel.</li> </ul> If you created the room yourself and you remember manually plumbing it into IRC, then it's a plumbed room. In all other cases, chances are very high that you are using a portalled room. There is no simple way for the general public to know whether the room is plumbed or portalled because it’s a technicality that shouldn’t matter for most people, and the bridge was not designed to work with only plumbed rooms. Widgets are not part of the Matrix specification, but given the short time you have to migrate your channels, they’re the most straightforward way to figure out whether your room is portalled or plumbed and do the necessary to keep the bridge working. In this guide, we’ll be using Element. Open your room, then click on the top right i</code> to open the right panel. Click on “Add widgets bridges & bots”. Click on “IRC Bridge (Libera.Chat)” and see if you have results in the “Linked channels” section. If you see results in that section, the room is plumbed, and it will keep working. If you don’t see any result in that section, the room is portalled and the bridge will stop working by July 31st. 🔗</a>What to do if my room is portalled</h2> Unfortunately, portalled rooms cannot be easily turned into plumbed rooms. You need to: Create a brand new Matrix room</li> Plumb it to the IRC channel it was bridged to</li> Redirect the users of the portalled room to the new plumbed room.</li> </ol> The third step can will be done automatically by the bridge in portalled rooms. On July 31st, it will make the room read only and list the public rooms which are plumbed to the same IRC channel. 🔗</a>Create a brand new room</h3> At first this room is not connected to IRC at all. We recommend you to set the room history visibility to “Members only (since they joined)”, which corresponds to m.room.history_visibility = joined</code> technically. This setting matches IRC’s behaviour. 🔗</a>Plumb it to IRC</h3> In Element, make sure you’re in the room you have just created, and click on the top right i</code> icon to open the right panel. Then at the bottom click on “Add widgets, bridges & bots” like you did in the portalled room. In the “Bridges” section, click on “IRC Bridge (Libera.chat)” and “Add”. Scroll down to “Link a new channel”. You will be asked to fill information so you can plumb the room to IRC. You can’t edit the server field, which is correctly set to Libera Chat. Enter the channel you want to plumb to, and the nick of a chanop of this channel. We ask you to please be considerate of Libera Chat chanops and staff, and to only send plumb requests to channels: you control;</li> or you have talked to the chanop prior to the plumb request</li> </ul> The chanop will receive this request on their end: If they accept, the room will be plumbed into the IRC channel. Again, please be mindful of the remote side of the bridge and don’t send plumbing requests out of the blue: IRC chanops will very likely turn them down if they don’t know who is sending them or who is controlling the room. 🔗</a>A note on aliases</h3> Portalled rooms used to have room addresses in the form#myroom:libera.chat</code>. Since the libera.chat</code> instance only has Matrix ghosts and no real human users, you can’t move the alias from the portalled room to your new plumbed room. This is by design. We hope to be able to turn portalling back on in the future, when we have more resources reserved for the bridge and can make stronger commitments. As such we want to keep addresses ending in :libera.chat</code> for portalled rooms. This is not too much of a problem for your room and users though. Let’s consider your portalled room was #myroom:libera.chat</code>, and that you have created #myroom:example.com</code> to plumb it into the same #myroom</code> channel on Libera.Chat. People who try to join #myroom:libera.chat</code> will be greeted with a message telling them that the room has been archived, and redirect them to your plumbed room. Deportalling from Libera.Chat 2023-07-04T16:00:00+00:00 On Monday 3rd July, the Libera.Chat IRC network shared that they would no longer accept portalled rooms over the Matrix.org <> Libera.Chat bridge</a>. This change will come into effect between 25th July and 31st July. We respect the decision but also recognise that this will be disruptive for matrix.org users accessing IRC over the bridge. Practically speaking, if you currently use matrix.org as a bouncer into Libera.Chat this will no longer be possible unless the admin of every room you inhabit is willing to reconfigure the room for plumbing. This post explains the situation as seen from the matrix.org side, what it means for matrix.org users and what to do next. 🔗</a>What is a portalled room, what is a plumbed room?</h2> Portalled rooms are rooms that already pre-exist on the IRC side of the bridge - e.g. #example:libera.chat in Matrix is, for now, #example on Libera. It is possible to join from matrix.org without any configuration needed whatsoever. Effectively using matrix.org as a ‘bouncer’ for the remote network. Plumbed rooms are existing Matrix rooms bridged to existing IRC channels. They require specific configuration and action by the IRC chanop. They can be useful in cases where multiple protocols bridge into the same room on the Matrix side though are harder to manage than their portalled counterparts, and have limits to avoid large (100+ user) preexisting rooms being plumbed together. 🔗</a>What happened?</h2> Bridging two incompatible protocols together is hard and requires constant attention. It is at once a technical and social challenge. Over the last 9 years, the IRC bridge has had its share of problems, and we have worked through fixing them. Though in fairness, not always as rapidly as we would like. For many years it was essentially just one person leading the effort, and then in recent times, we added two more people (though the team covers all bridges and integrations). We are in constant dialogue with the Libera.Chat team, and we know they have been frustrated with the experience of working with the bridge. Recent examples include Latency due to federation delays</li> Spam from Matrix - open signup spam not being blocked on the bridge, and Libera having to write their own scanner</li> Dropped messages following an ambitious refactor of the bridge</li> </ul> We have tried to address these problems as they arise, this changelog for the 1.0 release</a> gives an idea of some recent changes. More concretely: Persisting connections over a restart</li> Continually monitoring and scaling the libera.chat homeserver (hosted on EMS)</li> Automatically disconnecting users banned by matrix.org moderators, by reading the ban list</a>.</li> Improving test coverage with a new suite of E2E tests</a> for the bridge.</li> </ul> Fundamentally, progress has been slow due to bandwidth, and we cannot stress enough that these hurdles are not due to a lack of care or interest, but much more due to trying to support the bridge on limited resources. All in all, it adds up to a lot of work on both sides of the bridge, which places pressure both on the matrix.org side and the Libera Chat side. After consideration, the folks at Libera decided that it would be better to block portalled rooms and instead move to an opt-in model where the specific admins would need to agree to have their room be ‘plumbed’ into Matrix. As a separate point, we know there have been some concerns about the archive.matrix.org service. This is unfortunate, not least because we see some fundamental misunderstandings on what the service is doing and why. Here is a more detailed post to explain</a>. 🔗</a>So what does this mean?</h2> From August 2023, only plumbed rooms will be possible. This means that unless the chanop on the Libera Chat side is open to plumbing the room, then it will not be possible to talk in the room from Matrix. This will affect the majority of the ~11,000 Matrix users currently using the bridge to communicate on IRC (and the remaining ~31,000 users left on the IRC side of the bridge). As a consequence, it will no longer be possible to use matrix.org as a bouncer into Libera and in order to reach a given room, chanop must specifically configure the plumbed room. Additionally, some features will stop functioning, like topic synchronisation or kick propagation from Libera. 🔗</a>What to do next?</h2> If you are a matrix.org user and want to continue to participate in an Libera IRC community, then you will need to persuade the room IRC chanop to do the necessary plumbing. Hopefully, they will do that for you, but if not, there will be no way to reach across the bridge. We will put together a guide to make the process of converting to a plumbed room easier. Further down the line, Libera have floated an idea to implement a channel mode to let chanops opt-in to portalled bridging. This approach could reduce the overall burden on the chanop and reduce friction to interoperability. 🔗</a>A word on the bigger picture</h2> For the most part, this post attempts to lay out the situation practically. However, we should not ignore the bigger picture. At Matrix, we consider this situation to be a great sadness. We respect the decision from Libera Chat, but see this as a lose-lose for the open-source community overall. This move will partition the two networks. It will stop users from being able to use matrix.org as an IRC bouncer into Libera. It will make life more irritating for Libera chanops who will now be hassled by users to enable Matrix bridging for their rooms, rather than it happening automatically. It will fragment communities still further between their Matrix room and their separate IRC room (as well as their Discord and Telegram and Slack etc), unless the chanop chooses to plumb the two together. It will represent a blow to the open-source community at large and make it even harder for contributors to participate in discussions for their projects. Also, since it means creating new rooms, there will be a discontinuity in room history with valuable discussion effectively lost. Perhaps most importantly, it will encourage plumbing, which can cause more problems than portal bridging. Specifically, the social implications of plumbing (merging) together two existing communities will always be more more controversial and awkward than simply joining a Libera IRC channel using matrix.org as a bouncer. In practice, plumbing gives fewer privileges to the bridge bot, which makes support for bridged rooms more difficult on both sides. Fundamentally, we do not want to be bad IRC citizens and acknowledge that the matrix.org bridge generates more work on the Libera Chat side than native IRC bouncers. We do consider that extra effort to come with a significant upside: it’s transparent for users, who can pick the technology they love to join the conversation. Likewise, the folks at Libera are keen to stress that this is not necessarily a permanent change, and that in future, they would be open to reconsidering the move should the support burden of the bridge reduce. So that’s it, we’ll be working with the community over the coming month to help with the transition. Old Gitter bridge end of life (2021-04-21) - to be replaced with native bridge 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00 Next week on Wednesday (2021-04-21), the old Gitter bridge (identified as @gitterbot:matrix.org</code>) will be shut down and any plumbed rooms (bridged connections) remaining will no longer bridge. To replace this, we've already migrated all of the portal rooms and many of the plumbed rooms in preparation so most users will not need to take any further actions. The remaining rooms with the old Gitter bridge are unfortunately not possible to migrate and for those communities a clean break will be needed. The new native Gitter bridge is here to replace this! Gitter is bridged natively to Matrix</a> on the gitter.im</code> homeserver and all of the public rooms are available there. The new native Gitter bridge has many advantages over the old bridge and is being actively developed to ensure parity and delivers: Ability to join public Gitter rooms from Matrix via #<community>_<room>:gitter.im</code></li> Native feeling virtual users on both sides of the bridge so messages appear from the author itself</li> Bridging edits, replies (mapped to threads on Gitter), deletes, file transfers</li> Full support for markdown, emoji and mentions</li> Soon to be direct message (DM) support</a>!</li> </ul> If you still need your existing Matrix room for a public community plumbed to Gitter, we’re happy to help community admins with the setup of a manual plumb. Send an email to support@gitter.im</a> with the details! Self-service plumbing will be coming in future (meanwhile, please keep it to public community rooms only, if you must!) We hope that this notice helps make the transition a little smoother and avoid any disruptions 🙇 If you have any questions about the migration path or the new bridge, you can always chat with us in #gitter:matrix.org</a>. Happy chatting everyone! matrix-appservice-slack bridge 1.0 is here! 2019-10-03T00:00:00+00:00 Hello Matrix enthusiasts! Yesterday we released matrix-appservice-slack 1.0</a>. This marks a major milestone in bridge development for the Matrix.org team, being our first bridge to ever reach 1.0. The decision to release this version came after we decided that the bridge had gained enough features and reached a point of stability where it could be deployed in the wild with minimal risk. For those not in the know, the Slack bridge is Node.JS based, and bridges slack channels & users into Matrix seamlessly. And for those wondering, yes it works with Mattermost too (since their API is compatible with Slack)! In previous versions only a limited subset of features were supported, making heavy usage of Slack’s webhook API. As of 1.0, the bridge now makes use of the newer Slack Events/RTM API which gives us all we need for a richer bridging experience. Everything from edits and reactions to typing notifications is supported in the 1.0 release. Finally for those who are self hosting, we are pleased to offer the ability to "puppet" your Slack account using the bridge. Puppeting is the process in which the bridge will send messages as if you were sending them from the Slack client directly, when you talk using your Matrix account. This opens the door to seamless bridging and direct messaging support. For those wishing to bridge their whole workspace across, picard</a> exists as a tool to manage large scale Slack bridge deployments. This tool is provided by Cadair</a> and SolarDrew</a> Threading & Reactions! The bridge has undergone some pretty serious code surgery as well. The whole codebase has been rewritten in TypeScript to take advantage of type checking and generic types. The bridge is currently based upon the matrix-appservice-bridge</a> library. The datastore interface now supports PostgreSQL, which allows for administrators to inspect and edit the database while the bridge is running, as well as offering helpful performance boost over the NeDB datastore format that was used previously. Finally, the codebase has proper Unit and Integration Tests to ensure new changes will not cause any regressions in behaviour. In short, now is an excellent time to get involved and hack on the bridge. There is already a crafted list of easy issues</a> for new and experienced bridge devs. Memory usage of the bridge comparison CPU usage of the bridge comparison In terms of how many users matrix.org is currently serving at the moment, we present to you some figures: 2562 bridged rooms</li> 764 teams connected to the bridge</li> 103711 events have passed through the bridge since the launch of 0.3.2</li> </ul> Of course, our work doesn’t stop at 1.0. The plan for the immediate future of the bridge is to continue adding support for other event types coming from Matrix and Slack to create an ever richer experience. Obvious features are things like topic changes, and syncing membership across the bridge. In the long term future we would also like to add community support to the bridge, so whole Slack workspaces can be bridged across with a single click. That’s all from me, and I would like to say a massive thank you to Cadair</a> and Ben</a> for both their code and review work on the project and as always, thank you to the community for using the bridge and reporting issues. 🙂 Useful links: Matrix Room</a></li> Project Home</a></li> Docs</a></li> </ul> So long Half-Shot, thanks for all the bridges 2018-08-31T00:00:00+00:00 Thank you to Half-Shot for all your work on Bridges over the last months and beyond. Today is your last day, but I'm sure we'll see you again before long. Text below is from Half-Shot. Today marks my last day of my 3 month internship at New Vector (the startup which hires many of the core Matrix team). For those of you who haven't been reading Ben's fabulous blog posts, I've been working exclusively on bridges; in particular the IRC bridge. Tasked with the goal of making it crash less and run faster, I hope that the evidence is visible and people are generally having a better experience on it! Some stats pulled from the matrix-appservice-irc repo: 39 PRs closed (4 remain open)</li> 27 issues closed, 27 issues opened.</li> 334 commits, averaging 7.6 commits a PR.</li> </ul> Commits this year: But aside from showing off some stats, I wanted to mention all the new features: Replies on Matrix translate well to IRC, or as well as IRC allows.</li> People mentioning your IRC nick now ping your matrix user, finally!</li> So. Many. Metrics. Everything you wanted to know about the internals of the bridge, but were too afraid to --inspect</code>.</li> Not spamming homeservers with join requests on startup (it makes for a happy ops team).</li> No longer are IRC users shackled to a "(IRC)" extension on their displayname, you can be who you want with group flairs!</li> Support for node 4 has been dropped, and support for 6,8 and 10 has been assured.</li> </ul> On the matrix-appservice-bridge</a> side, I optimised some calls to cache locally and avoid hitting the homeserver too often, and disabling presence for homeservers that don't support it. There are future plans to make bridging more visible to Matrix Clients as a first class citizen. Ideas like speccing a state event (MSC1410)</a> so that bridges can interact with each other properly and clients can create full bridge management views which are still decentralised from an integration manager. I'd like to give a shoutout to Travis who has reviewed nearly all my changes that have made their way into the bridge, on top of all the other tasks he has on his plate. And of course a thank you to all of the Matrix team who have been very supportive during my time here.

Matrix.org - Bridges

Retiring the Slack Bridge on matrix.org

Cleaning up Libera.Chat aliases

Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera.Chat

Libera.Chat bridge temporarily unavailable.

Disclosure: Bridges security issues

Bridges Security Update

Postponing the Libera.Chat deportalling

Making Sure The Libera.Chat Bridge Keeps Working

🔗</a>Plumbed and portalled?</h2> The simplest approach to it is to say that:</p> Portalled rooms are primarily owned by the bridge and “obey” the IRC side. Everyone can join a portalled room.</li>

🔗</a>What to do if my room is portalled</h2> Unfortunately, portalled rooms cannot be easily turned into plumbed rooms. You need to:</p> Create a brand new Matrix room</li> Plumb it to the IRC channel it was bridged to</li>

Deportalling from Libera.Chat

Old Gitter bridge end of life (2021-04-21) - to be replaced with native bridge

matrix-appservice-slack bridge 1.0 is here!

So long Half-Shot, thanks for all the bridges