What should our policies be on bots to other networks, and in particular Telegram, as we have a large cohort of users and contributors who use that system regularly?
I haven’t investigated deeply, but I know there’s been some problems in the past. At the very least, unless we decide to ban Telegram bridges, we probably need a “Telegram Interaction Issues” topic, too.
So, does EMS run a telegram → matrix bridge? I wonder if it would be good to switch tot hat instead of running our own telegram → irc bridges. This seems like a topic for @jflory7 to chime in on.
We haven’t (re)setup the telegram → irc bridges since the move to libera, so we should figure this out before bringing them back up.
Given that Matrix solves a lot of the newcomer usability issues that IRC has, I’d hope that most of our Telegram bridges would be obsoleted by the move to Matrix. I don’t think we want to outright ban them unless they cause problems. (Except maybe in the meeting rooms where the lack of a user name mapping, makes it a bit of a pain)
So, yes – but it’s a significant added cost. I know we talked about it with them at the beginning, but honestly that was so long ago I don’t remember where we landed on it. I will check.
I’m kind of with Ben on this – I know it’s annoying to use a zillion different chat apps and clients, but it’s also kind of the reality of 2021, and we can really provide the best experience when people use our own service directly.
I think we shouldn’t add Telegram bridges. Telegram is a proprietary service. We shouldn’t endorse it.
Also Telegram is full of spammers. When you delete spam messages on the Telegram side using anti-spam bots, Matrix will still have them visible forever, because one bot (gatekeeper) can’t see actions performed by another (anti-spam) due to Telegram Bot API restrictions.
P.S. I was admin of the Russian Fedora Telegram channel and the Matrix-gated room. Tired of cleaning up spam manually. 50+ spam messages per day.
Yeh, I was hoping once Matrix goes live we can sort of start phasing out the Telegram channels. They were primarily needed because IRC isn’t easy to use on all platforms etc., but with Matrix/Element where we have phone apps and all the rest, this isn’t a problem any more.
So, while I’m always happy for community folks to start channels on whatever platforms, if the community is investing in Matrix, perhaps we can consolidate a bit
