[announcement] Telegram bridging to be retired Wed. 20 Sept. | 5 to-dos

[Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss]

Hello KDE community,

apologies for cross-posting!

The time has finally come: both Telegram <-> Matrix bridges will be shut 
down in 4 weeks on *Wednesday 20 September*. Let's start the 
co-ordination process now so everything goes as smoothly as possible.

For all KDE contributors: please read at least the "Five To-Dos" below 
to be informed about what will happen and what needs to be done.

Below that there is some additional information about the bridging 
situation at KDE. Consult these notes if you want more background 
information about why the Telegram bridge is being retired.

Cheers,
Joseph

_Five To-Dos_

   1. *General*: On Wednesday 20 September the Telegram bridging to KDE 
Matrix rooms will be shut down. To make the transition go smoothly, 
teams should start co-ordinating for the shutdown now. The Matrix room 
for co-ordination is "Telegram shutdown co-ordination" at 
https://go.kde.org/matrix/#/#telegram-shutdown:kde.org.

   2. *Co-ordination*: This includes: (i) migrating all contributors to 
Matrix, and (ii) deleting the Telegram rooms before the bridge is 
shutdown or -- at most -- one day after the shutdown. Keeping Telegram 
rooms open when they are no longer being used will cause unnecessary 
confusion. Importantly, do not later add a non-KDE Telegram bridge to 
KDE's Matrix rooms as that will not solve the problems from doubled user 
accounts and lack of control over Telegram; see below for operational 
issues with Telegram bridging.

   3. *Action needed by Telegram room admins*: Due to the unexpected 
shutdown of the public Libera.Chat bridge, we will have to move rooms 
over to the matterbridge (ircsomebot) bridge as we work through moving 
channels over to our own Libera.Chat IRC bridge. This will require 
someone with admin in the Telegram room to ensure @ircsomebot is in the 
Telegram room with admin. This needs to be done after we unbridge the 
Matrix bridge from the Matrix side, so the room can continue to be 
bridged until the Telegram shutdown on 20 September.

   4. *Are there exceptions?": There /may/ be some rooms that focus on 
interacting with people external to the KDE Community who would benefit 
by having a Telegram bridge. We are thinking teams like those involved 
in the KDE Network program: https://community.kde.org/The_KDE_Network. 
Not all will need an exception, and it may turn out most don't. We would 
like to start putting together a list of these rooms so we can review 
for potential exceptions and estimate the scale of how much support is 
needed. However, this should be kept to a minimum; see below for 
operational issues with Telegram bridging. We understand that there are 
large internal KDE communities which rely heavily on Telegram, and we 
understand that shutting down the Telegram bridge is less than ideal for 
these rooms, but the issues we have with the Telegram bridge mean we 
need to keep exceptions to a minimum and only for those teeams whose 
work has a primarily external focus.

   5. *Getting a Matrix account*: We can offer KDE Contributors (usually 
those in the developers group, but will consider other requests) a 
Matrix account on our KDE Matrix Homeserver. To request an account 
please file a sysadmin ticket https://go.kde.org/systickets. However, as 
Matrix is federated you do not need to have an account on our homeserver 
to access KDE's Matrix rooms -- you can use any homeserver! A list of 
some alternative Matrix servers is available on 
https://joinmatrix.org/servers/.

To co-ordinate with other teams to make this transition go as smoothly 
as possible, please reach out to the "Telegram shutdown co-ordination" 
Matrix room: https://go.kde.org/matrix/#/#telegram-shutdown:kde.org.

_Additional Information Re Bridges_

   * Four years ago it was decided to add Matrix to IRC as KDE's 
official IM platforms (bridged together). IRC is not planned to be shut 
down.

   * Telegram is not Free Software and has never been an official 
platform for KDE communications. However, it has been used unofficially 
in a number of areas.

   * EMS hosts KDE's Matrix instance and the current Telegram bridge, 
and the majority of issues our community have with Matrix are related to 
bridges. Due to the huge extra load and poor performance Telegram 
bridging has in the Matrix rooms, it was agreed with EMS that the bridge 
would be only run for about a year until people had time to migrate to 
Matrix.

   * However, instead of people migrating away from Telegram, we have 
seen an increase in contributors using /both/ Matrix and Telegram, which 
has doubled the number of users we have to cope with. Having twice as 
many users as needed in the room slows everything down: longer joins, 
more state events for each user, higher chances of room state developing 
problems.

   * The public Libera.Chat bridge was unexpectedly shutdown, and we 
have to move rooms over to the matterbridge (ircsomebot) bridge as we 
work through moving channels over to our own Libera.Chat IRC bridge. 
This is not as originally planned, which was to migrate to that IRC 
bridge after the Telegram shutdown.

   * The vast majority of spam is from Telegram. Due to the Telegram 
bridge account being reported for spam, the account has lost the ability 
to do admin tasks in many rooms. At its worst the account was blocked 
from logging in for weeks, making the bridge non-functional. Since then, 
rooms often can't be bridged without deleting the Telegram room and 
starting fresh, but this only has about a 30% success of working 
long-term. We did not get anywhere attempting to get Telegram to help.

   * The current Telegram bridge doesn't work properly so it makes sense 
to shut it down rather than trying to just change account phone numbers 
(which would require removing the bridge from all channels then 
re-adding to a new bridge, with high chance we end up in the same 
situation in the future).

-- 
Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss
KDE Internal Communications & KDE Eco Community Manager
OpenPGP: 8FC5 4178 DC44 AD55 08E7 DF57 453E 5746 59A6 C06F
Matrix: @joseph:kde.org

Generally available Monday-Thursday from 10-16h CET/CEST. Outside of 
these times it may take a little longer for me to respond.

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