Issue a statement about chat strategy for the GNOME community following the Libera Chat bridge being taken down
Hello board,
First of all a disclaimer: as of the writing of this ticket I'm employed by Element, one of the biggest players in the Matrix ecosystem.
The GNOME community relies on Matrix channels bridged to Libera Chat for its communication. About a month ago, Libera Chat asked the Matrix.org Foundation to shut down the bridge Element ran on its behalf. Since then, no message have been making it through between the Matrix and IRC channels.
The Matrix.org Foundation is still committed to bringing the bridge back online. We are in the process of making the Foundation more independent from Element, and have hired a Managing Director to scale it up.
We want to bring the bridge back online, but we want to make sure this is properly budgeted and resourced before bringing a plan to Libera Chat and agreeing on a date to re-open it. We don't have any specific timeline for it. The order of magnitude is probably more in the months than weeks.
The GNOME community would probably welcome a message from the GNOME Foundation to give a direction. As a heads up, before I joined Element I posted https://discourse.gnome.org/t/irc-matrix-and-thanks-for-all-the-kicks/6482 and the Foundation had ended up posting https://foundation.gnome.org/2022/06/02/gnome-chat-moves-to-matrix/