Thank you for the thoughtful response, Nicco! Of course absolutely no
one wants for you or anyone else to stop contributing to KDE because of
this. And I understand many of your points and agree to with the view
that the transition time is short.
I am helping out in the capacity of communicating what the situation is
and what is to be done, and I am here to help with any co-ordination
that is needed for the transition. I cannot speak to the technical
aspects of the decision in the announcement, only relay the information
that I have. I am happy to help you or any others with the transition,
if I can.
Some background: Upon suggestion I reached out to the administrators
regarding Telegram bridging two weeks ago when the bridges were down in
Promo and possibly community-wide. I was informed that closing the
Telegram bridges was, most importantly, not a matter of if, but when:
they were never meant to be part of the official KDE communication and
were initially only a temporary solution, and the bridges are causing
ongoing technical issues.
As I said, I personally felt a longer timeline would be better, and if
there is a way to negotiate this I will support the effort however I
can. However, from what I understood, the transition work being done in
the background due to the sudden shutdown of the public Libera.Chat
bridge overlaps with the shutdown of the Telegram bridges, and it makes
sense to do this work at the same time.
This may not address the points you raised in a sufficient way, but I
felt it may be worth sending the above information anyway.
Again, if I can help in any way to keep the communication channels
working for you when the Telegram bridges are shut down, please do not
hesitate to contact me.
I will let others comment on other points you raised, I hope that is ok.
Cheers,
Joseph
On 8/22/23 12:45, Niccolò Ve wrote:
This is a terribly careless decision, for multiple reasons.
Firstly, this is something that has a strong impact on the entire community
and, because of that, it should've been discussed publicly before agreeing
on this. I had been told this was going to happen, but only through private
messages and without really any chance to argue against this. No chance has
been given to discuss the consequences of this action, nor to discuss how
to best address the technical issues related to the bridge maintenance.
Secondly, the transition timeframe is way too small. There are a very big
number of Telegram channels, and some even lack a Matrix counterpart.
Telegram links used in multiple KDE wiki pages, and it will take time to
shift all the chats over to Matrix. Taking Promo as an example, who knew
this was happening some weeks ago: some chat have been successfully ported
to Matrix, but it will take much more time to shift them all; this means
that, after the 20th of Sept., Promo coordinators like Paul will have to
handle both the Telegram and Matrix that's separately; or, we close down
the Telegram channels before the transition is completed, which is even
worse.
Thirdly, this will make KDE lose contributors. The majority of developers
I've worked with throughout my KDE experience has used Telegram as their
main channel, and only a few switched over to Matrix when asked to. For
many, this worked mean installing one extra application(with terrible UX)
just to be able to contribute to KDE; it wouldn't be an issue if they were
employees, but we're all volunteers here and most likely those people will
either not switch at all or slowly open that application less and less.
This includes me; I have very little interest in forcing myself to use e.g.
buggy phone applications exclusively to contribute as a volunteer and in my
free time.
Fourth, this will make onboarding so much harder. All developers I've seen
and helped onboard KDE have joined through Telegram, because that's what
they had and it was easy for them. Again, same applies to me: I never
would've joined KDE if it wasn't for the Telegram channels.
Fifth, the technological reasons given for this choice are lacking. It
assumes that we use UserBots instead of normal bots (the limit of 1 message
every 3 seconds is too restrictive?); it talks about issues with admin
privileges of the bridge, without explaining why they would be necessary.
It complains about spam over the telegram side: some channels introduced a
captcha when users joined and that worked really well, why can't we use
that for all channels? And so on: there are tons of questions and different
approach that are lacking in the exploitation, which is particularly bad
considering just how damaging the decision is to KDE,
Of course, please don't bother replying to this paragraph with answers to
my questions: this should've happened in the discussion phase of the
choice, which you entirely ignored. I had expressed interest in helping out
figuring out a solution to the bridging issue, but of course - since I had
only been told about this privately - I had done that privately. I could've
done that publicly if you had warned about what was going to happen.
I will be happy to do everything I'll be asked to as part of my work; but
as far as free time goes, this choice makes it harder for me to contribute
to KDE and - as a result - I'll most likely fade out my free-time
contributions over time.
~Nicco
On Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 9:02 AM Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hello KDE community,
apologies for cross-posting!
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.
For all KDE contributors: please read at least the "Five To-Dos" below
to be informed about what will happen and what needs to be done.
Below that there is some additional information about the bridging
situation at KDE. Consult these notes if you want more background
information about why the Telegram bridge is being retired.
Cheers,
Joseph
_Five To-Dos_
1. *General*: On Wednesday 20 September the Telegram bridging to KDE
Matrix rooms will be shut down. To make the transition go smoothly,
teams should start co-ordinating for the shutdown now. The Matrix room
for co-ordination is "Telegram shutdown co-ordination" at
https://go.kde.org/matrix/#/#telegram-shutdown:kde.org.
2. *Co-ordination*: This includes: (i) migrating all contributors to
Matrix, and (ii) deleting the Telegram rooms before the bridge is
shutdown or -- at most -- one day after the shutdown. Keeping Telegram
rooms open when they are no longer being used will cause unnecessary
confusion. Importantly, do not later add a non-KDE Telegram bridge to
KDE's Matrix rooms as that will not solve the problems from doubled user
accounts and lack of control over Telegram; see below for operational
issues with Telegram bridging.
3. *Action needed by Telegram room admins*: Due to the unexpected
shutdown of the public Libera.Chat bridge, we will 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 will require
someone with admin in the Telegram room to ensure @ircsomebot is in the
Telegram room with admin. This needs to be done after we unbridge the
Matrix bridge from the Matrix side, so the room can continue to be
bridged until the Telegram shutdown on 20 September.
4. *Are there exceptions?": There /may/ be some rooms that focus on
interacting with people external to the KDE Community who would benefit
by having a Telegram bridge. We are thinking teams like those involved
in the KDE Network program: https://community.kde.org/The_KDE_Network.
Not all will need an exception, and it may turn out most don't. We would
like to start putting together a list of these rooms so we can review
for potential exceptions and estimate the scale of how much support is
needed. However, this should be kept to a minimum; see below for
operational issues with Telegram bridging. We understand that there are
large internal KDE communities which rely heavily on Telegram, and we
understand that shutting down the Telegram bridge is less than ideal for
these rooms, but the issues we have with the Telegram bridge mean we
need to keep exceptions to a minimum and only for those teeams whose
work has a primarily external focus.
5. *Getting a Matrix account*: We can offer KDE Contributors (usually
those in the developers group, but will consider other requests) a
Matrix account on our KDE Matrix Homeserver. To request an account
please file a sysadmin ticket https://go.kde.org/systickets. However, as
Matrix is federated you do not need to have an account on our homeserver
to access KDE's Matrix rooms -- you can use any homeserver! A list of
some alternative Matrix servers is available on
https://joinmatrix.org/servers/.
To co-ordinate with other teams to make this transition go as smoothly
as possible, please reach out to the "Telegram shutdown co-ordination"
Matrix room: https://go.kde.org/matrix/#/#telegram-shutdown:kde.org.
_Additional Information Re Bridges_
* Four years ago it was decided to add Matrix to IRC as KDE's
official IM platforms (bridged together). IRC is not planned to be shut
down.
* 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.
* 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.
* 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 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. 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).
--
Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss
KDE Internal Communications & KDE Eco Community Manager
OpenPGP: 8FC5 4178 DC44 AD55 08E7 DF57 453E 5746 59A6 C06F
Matrix: @joseph:kde.org
Generally available Monday-Thursday from 10-16h CET/CEST. Outside of
these times it may take a little longer for me to respond.
KDE Eco: Building Energy-Efficient Free Software!
Website: https://eco.kde.org
Mastodon: @[email protected]
--
Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss
KDE Internal Communications & KDE Eco Community Manager
OpenPGP: 8FC5 4178 DC44 AD55 08E7 DF57 453E 5746 59A6 C06F
Matrix: @joseph:kde.org
Generally available Monday-Thursday from 10-16h CET/CEST. Outside of
these times it may take a little longer for me to respond.
KDE Eco: Building Energy-Efficient Free Software!
Website: https://eco.kde.org
Mastodon: @[email protected]
