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 -- Promotion & Communication www: http://kde.org Mastodon: https://floss.social/@kde Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kde/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kdecommunity LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kde
