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

[Carl Schwan]

On Tuesday, 22 August 2023 08:57:31 CEST Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss wrote:
> Hello KDE community,
> 
> apologies for cross-posting!

Please let's stop doing that, it's generating a lot of duplicated emails for 
everyone. Most people interested in this discussion are in the kde-community 
channel and if they are not we should encourage them to join it. No need to 
have this discussion in unrelated, purelly technical and low traffic channel 
like kde-framework, kde-core-devel or release-team.
 
> 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.

As one of the person who pushed quite hard a few years ago to improve our 
Telegram bridging situation, I'm very unhappy with this decision and I don't 
say this as a Telegram fan. Far from that, I love decentralized and open 
source social media and messaging platforms, I started developing NeoChat and 
Tokodon, I'm also quite involved around email client development and I'm 
barelly using my Telegram account (both for kde or private usage).

So why did I push for Telegram bridging in the past? First of all, Telegram is 
an amazing entry point for new contributors. People don't have to adopt a new 
messaging app to talk with us, which reduce the barrier considerably. 
Particularly for newcommers, the more step they need to make to start 
contributing and publish their first commit, the higher the chance they give up 
midway. And as far I know, we deseperably need more contributors, so we are 
shooting ourselves in the foot with this move.

Even people who are contributing for a longer time sometimes prefer to keep 
communicating with Telegram, because it's easier or it's just the medium they 
use for most their communication and they prefer to keep like this instead of 
investing time and changing their habits. As much as I want more people to 
adopt Matrix,  this is perfectly understandable and forcing them to change 
their habits as more change to loose them in the short to middle term as 
active contributor.

Another reason, why I pushed for a better telegram bridge years ago, was 
because even if not everyone switch to Matrix, some people do which is a net 
gain in term of contributors and they might even be tempted to improve 
NeoChat.

Now on the technical issues:

>    * 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.

Gmail is also not Free Software and will allow people using a gmail account 
(booo) to communicate with us. Sure gmail still use a common standard to 
communicate with us, but using bridges is a somewhat working alternative. 

>    * 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.

Why wasn't this communicate before that this was only temporary in
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2021q2/006884.html ?

I was completely unaware of that and I'm in the KDE IM ops room, the KDE/
Matrix support room and in the KDE/Matrix VIP room.

>    * 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 state events generated by the telegram bridge are in an order of magnitude 
less than the state events generated by the irc bridge since the telegram 
users usually don't join and leave a room multiple times a day. And similarly 
a lot of IRC users also have a Matrix account. I wonder how many double 
accounts there was actually, because to me it seems the issue was actually 
that there was too many Matrix users in the room which was then causing issue 
with the IRC bridge. If we expect 100% (very unlikely) of the telegram user to 
move to Matrix, we will likely have the same issues again.

The IRC bridge also has the political issue that we can't see previous message 
when joining a room and that Matrix user who are not actively interacting in a 
rom get kicked out of a rom after a month, which has been a cause why people 
want to keep a Telegram account to avoid being kicked out.
 
>    * 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.

Source needed. I'm in the kde moderation room and regularly do moderation for 
our Matrix channel and while we had in the past a few spam wave coming from 
Telegram, currently most of the spam is coming from matrix.org and 
libera.chat.

>  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).

To me, it would make more sense to spread out the responsability of managin 
the telegram bridging into more shoulders. I know some people would be 
interested in helping with the managements.

Alternatively, we could go back to the unofficial Telegram bridging we were 
doing in the past. I was happy when it was replaced by something more official, 
but that might be a last recourse solution.

Regards,
Carl