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

Tue Aug 29 13:09:24 BST 2023

Hello,

just a couple of comments from my side ... .

* In my view we have close-to-zero energy/capacity to move (nor
strongly influence) our users in their choices when it comes to sync
communication channels.
   * We never did have such capacity, not in the IRC days, the jabber
days, where the landscape was simpler...  not now. Probably we never
will. Otherwise, the situation should be improving. It seems to me it
is getting significantly more challenging.
   * On the contrary, generally it has been KDE contributors
interested in engaging with users the ones who moved where the users
feel more comfortable in.
   * This is no different from what happens in areas other than
technology, by the way. You go where your users are.
* In my view, our ability to engage with our users in whatever new
communication channel they use has a direct relation with our ability
to engage with young(er) generations of future contributors, which
directly hits our sustainability as a project.

* The impact of this decision is not on our users, it is on those
contributors interested in engaging with them. They are the most
affected by removing bridges between where their fellow contributors
are and their users are.
   * These people are one of the most relevant core groups of
contributors we have.
   * The fact that they are not united as a coherent group of
contributors, like sysadmins are, should not hinder the relevance they
have in this community.

* Seems to me that the impact of the decision is significantly bigger
than anticipated by those who took it.
   * Only that should be enough to reconsider it, at least partially.
   * I encourage us as a community to find a solution that solves this
tension between what is affordable for sysadmins and what is best to
this relevant group of sensitive-to-users contributors. The current
decision is unbalanced.
   * Keeping bridges requires effort and acceptance of issues. Can we
find volunteers to help mitigate the situation?  If we cannot, is it
worth investing money on this?

On a different note...

Everytime I boot my laptop, including more and more communication
tools and tabs with social media accounts related with KDE, I wonder
when we start deviating from sanity. I then check the resources
consumption on my laptop of all these increasing number of
communication channels (incl. social media) and I go mad.

If we keep following this channel-centric[1][2][3][4][5][6] approach,
the tension on our interface between contributors and users will keep
increasing and the experience we provide to our users will keep
decreasing (despite not being "our fault"). Then I analyse the trend
and almost give up.

And when darkness takes hold on me, I look at our planet[7] (an
information-centric approach) and hope comes back to me. Maybe in a
few years....

[1] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo
[2] https://kde.org/support/mailinglists/
[3] https://userbase.kde.org/IRC_Channels
[4] https://community.kde.org/Matrix
[5] https://community.kde.org/Telegram
[6] You put here a page with all our social media groups/accounts,
slack channels, mattermost, rocketchat, forums...
[7] https://planet.kde.org/

Best

Agustin Benito (toscalix)
KDE community member
Profile: http://www.toscalix.com

On Thu, Aug 24, 2023 at 8:39 PM Ben Cooksley <bcooksley at kde.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Aug 25, 2023 at 3:12 AM Carl Schwan <carl at carlschwan.eu> wrote:
>>
>> 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 cross posting was started to ensure that everyone is well aware this is going to happen.
>
> As sysadmin I have had far too many people claim they weren't aware of something even when it was posted to many lists (including this one), so it is understandable why we are cross posting here.
> (A small handful of people even missed the notification about the Invent server move, even with the heavy handed cross post approach I took with that...)
>
>>
>>
>> > 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.
>
>
> I believe this depends on the channels you are in.
> For a while some channels (#kde-devel being one of them if memory serves) were definitely the target of spambots based on Telegram.
>
> It is likely that for a given channel, the dominant side is less likely to experience spam, while the less dominant and therefore less well moderated parts will experience more spam.
>
>
>>
>> >  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.
>
>
> Given that it appears that for a selection of channels (not necessarily all) we are going to need to maintain bridges to Telegram, are there any suggestions for resolving the problems we have experienced with the bridge being reported as a spammer?
>
> From what I understand here, a huge part of the interest in getting rid of the Telegram bridging is because we will now have to take it over and it has caused us substantial issues (including not working from time to time and being unreliable - and an unreliable bridge is actually worse than no bridge at all).
>
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>> Carl
>>
>>
>>
>
> Cheers,
> Ben