Telegram <-> Matrix bridges will be removed in September

[Paul Brown]

Hello,

This weekend, members of KDE España asked me to start requesting bridges for 
some of their Telegram channels. When I sent the request, I was informed that 
there will be no new bridges set up between Telegram channels and Matrix, and 
that all currently existing bridges will be removed in September.

A would like to point out a few things about this:

1. No longer providing new bridges for existing Telegram channels has the 
opposite of the desired effect. It makes it more difficult to convince members of 
longstanding, populous Telegram channels to move to Matrix (which I assume is 
what we want), as they would face being cut off from their friends who don't 
move. Moving people to a new platform is always a hard sell. Losing your 
contacts, conversations and friends makes it a doubly unattractive 
proposition.

2. Shutting down the bridges, especially so soon and without a prior warning, 
will cause the KDE community to lose a large audience for our applications and 
projects. Adoption, potential contributions, outreach, and communities built 
over years will be negatively affected.

I understand why the sysadmin working group would want to do this: maintaining 
the bridges is a pain and a drain on resources for a platform that is closed 
source and ethically ambiguous at best.

However, Promo also has to work with undesirable platforms like FB and Twitter 
on a daily basis, but we know that deliberately cutting ourselves off from them 
would be a mistake. Contact with tens of thousands of users would be lost.

This is also what would happen if all contact with Telegram were removed. 
Although some channels, like Promo's own Telegram channel, could probably be 
closed tomorrow, this is not the case for many others. "Cañas y Bravas" is the 
Telegram channel for general KDE discussion in Spanish. It has about 600 
users. I estimate we would lose 50% or more if you asked them to move. It 
would be extremely difficult to build up this community again from within a 
niche platform like Matrix.

The same goes for all the Brazilian community Telegram channels. Telegram is 
very popular in Brazil and the idea that, by closing these channels, members 
will decide to move to Matrix is unfortunately unrealistic. The more likely 
result would be that most end up on Discord channels run by non-KDE community 
members, putting them well out of our reach.

Kdenlive has very active communities in both Spanish and English in channels 
on Telegram. Most members are not FLOSS diehards. Most don't run Kdenlive on 
Linux at all, preferring to use it on Windows. The likelihood of them joining 
KDE's Matrix platform is nil.

And so forth.

Cheers

Paul
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