<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" ><generator uri="https://jekyllrb.com/" version="4.3.0">Jekyll</generator><link href="https://libera.chat/atom.xml" rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" /><link href="https://libera.chat/" rel="alternate" type="text/html" /><updated>2025-02-17T18:16:00+00:00</updated><id>https://libera.chat/atom.xml</id><title type="html">Libera Chat</title><subtitle>A next-generation IRC network for FOSS projects collaboration!</subtitle><entry><title type="html">A belated state of the network</title><link href="https://libera.chat/news/belated-state-of-the-network" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="A belated state of the network" /><published>2025-02-17T00:00:00+00:00</published><updated>2025-02-17T00:00:00+00:00</updated><id>https://libera.chat/news/belated-state-of-the-network</id><content type="html" xml:base="https://libera.chat/news/belated-state-of-the-network">&lt;p&gt;Happy 2025 everyone!&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;We’re now a month and a half into the new year (and a quarter of the way into this century?!) and realized that we are overdue for a periodic state of the network.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;After a tumultuous 2023 where we &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/guides/matrix&quot;&gt;parted ways&lt;/a&gt; with the official Matrix bridge, 2024 was much quieter on the bridges front. Over the course of the year, many projects and communities stood up their own Matrix bridges. This has proven to be a far more stable and sustainable arrangement, and we sincerely appreciate their work and cooperation.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In July we were looped into a coordinated security response, involving various networks and IRC software maintainers, to mitigate a &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/zncpsa&quot;&gt;potentially nasty exploit&lt;/a&gt;. We appreciated the collaboration of our peers on other networks in ensuring that the word got out, and hope to use this incident as guidance for responding to similar incidents in the future.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Sable development is also continuing, albeit slowly. We are of course interested in welcoming new contributors to the project, so if you’re curious, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Libera-Chat/sable&quot;&gt;the repository&lt;/a&gt; and drop into &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;#libera-dev&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;We also managed to deliver some long-awaited improvements to our current stack for our users:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;Account auto-cloaking. On a rather infamous day at the start of April, we finally delivered auto-cloaking upon registration verification.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Deprecated certificate expiry verification. As of early July, &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/retiring-certfp-expiries&quot;&gt;we no longer check the expiration of certificates&lt;/a&gt; used for logging in. Now you won’t get locked out if you forget to make a new certificate in time.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;To celebrate the arrival of the auto-cloaking feature, we also had some fun with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20240401000834/https://libera.cat/&quot;&gt;temporary rebranding&lt;/a&gt; of the network. If you missed out on the limited-time novelty cloak, you can still get a meowmento of the prank with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freewear.org/Libera.Chat&quot;&gt;our freewear.org merch&lt;/a&gt;! Every purchase of merch from that freewear.org page generates a donation to help the network remain sustainable. We also have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://liberapay.com/liberachat/donate&quot;&gt;liberapay&lt;/a&gt; if you want to help us without buying gear.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;While most of our resources are donated, some are not. This includes costs that ensure we will remain an independent and non-commercial platform. In this current social media climate, we think that is very important and likewise encourage the use and support of other community-run social protocols. Like numerous other projects, we have retired our use of Twitter/X and Facebook, now posting only to &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosstodon.org/@liberachat&quot;&gt;the Fediverse&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://bsky.app/profile/libera.chat&quot;&gt;Bluesky&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;</content><author><name>el</name></author><summary type="html">Happy 2025 everyone!</summary></entry><entry><title type="html">Establishing an etiquette for LLM use on Libera.Chat</title><link href="https://libera.chat/news/llm-etiquette" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="Establishing an etiquette for LLM use on Libera.Chat" /><published>2024-11-22T00:00:00+00:00</published><updated>2024-11-22T00:00:00+00:00</updated><id>https://libera.chat/news/llm-etiquette</id><content type="html" xml:base="https://libera.chat/news/llm-etiquette">&lt;p&gt;Greetings fellow humans!&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;For better or for worse, controversially perhaps, we are now immersed in an online landscape laden with LLMs.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;This may be a fact that brings you great joy. However, not everyone feels the same way about LLMs. Some folks dislike them for privacy or ethical reasons. Some people just don’t feel good about talking to LLMs without knowing. We want folks in all camps to feel welcome on Libera.Chat.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;We believe that the best way to make this happen is to ensure that people are not caught unaware. As such, building on the principles of our &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/policies/#public-logging&quot;&gt;public logging policy&lt;/a&gt;, staff would appreciate cooperation with these simple guidelines:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;LLMs are allowed on Libera.Chat. They may both take input from Libera.Chat and output responses to Libera.Chat.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Training LLMs on channel content or logs is subject to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/policies/#public-logging&quot;&gt;public logging policy&lt;/a&gt; and therefore requires permission before that content can be used for training.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;As soon as possible, people should be made aware if they are interacting with, or their activity is being seen by, a LLM. Consider using line prefixes, channel topics, or channel entry messages.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;People who operate interactive LLM scripts or bots in channels they don’t run must obtain permission from the channel founders and operators.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;LLM scripts and bots are not exempt from &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/policies/#unwanted-content-and-behaviour&quot;&gt;our network policies&lt;/a&gt;. People running LLM scripts and bots are responsible for what they output.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Other people may be responsible for what a LLM script or bot outputs based on their prompts.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;While these guidelines are not final, nor enshrined as &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/policies/&quot;&gt;network policy&lt;/a&gt; with exception of training LLMs on channel content, we do have &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/policies/#unwanted-content-and-behaviour&quot;&gt;a broad prohibition on antisocial behaviour&lt;/a&gt;. We encourage folks to consider whether their application of LLMs is reasonably prosocial or antisocial.&lt;/p&gt;</content><author><name>staff</name></author><summary type="html">Greetings fellow humans!</summary></entry><entry><title type="html">Retiring CertFP Expiration Verification</title><link href="https://libera.chat/news/retiring-certfp-expiries" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="Retiring CertFP Expiration Verification" /><published>2024-07-09T00:00:00+00:00</published><updated>2024-07-09T00:00:00+00:00</updated><id>https://libera.chat/news/retiring-certfp-expiries</id><content type="html" xml:base="https://libera.chat/news/retiring-certfp-expiries">&lt;p&gt;Here is some good news for folks who use &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/guides/certfp&quot;&gt;CertFP&lt;/a&gt; to log in to &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;NickServ&lt;/code&gt;: we have rolled out a change that means SaslServ will no longer reject expired certificates when used for identifying to accounts.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Why are we doing this? We don’t have a rotation policy on passwords, which are generally less secure, so it makes no sense for certificates to have one. Meanwhile, certificate expiries are quite disruptive, particularly for folks who use our &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/guides/connect#accessing-liberachat-via-tor&quot;&gt;tor hidden service&lt;/a&gt; which does not allow other forms of authentication. Respecting the expiry of the certificate provides no benefit but does cause annoyance for both users and staff.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;We do still recommend that you practice good certificate hygiene, such as cycling your certificates, using unique certificates for each network, and keeping your &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;CERT LIST&lt;/code&gt; clean.&lt;/p&gt;</content><author><name>el</name></author><summary type="html">Here is some good news for folks who use CertFP to log in to NickServ: we have rolled out a change that means SaslServ will no longer reject expired certificates when used for identifying to accounts.</summary></entry><entry><title type="html">PSA: Critical vulnerability in ZNC’s modtcl</title><link href="https://libera.chat/news/zncpsa" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="PSA: Critical vulnerability in ZNC’s modtcl" /><published>2024-07-03T00:00:00+00:00</published><updated>2024-07-03T00:00:00+00:00</updated><id>https://libera.chat/news/zncpsa</id><content type="html" xml:base="https://libera.chat/news/zncpsa">&lt;p&gt;TL;DR - If you are using a version of modtcl that is NOT from &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.znc.in/ChangeLog/1.9.1&quot;&gt;ZNC 1.9.1&lt;/a&gt; (distribution versions may differ) or newer, &lt;strong&gt;update or unload it immediately&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In coordination with other IRC networks and ZNC providers, we’re sending out a global notice today about a vulnerability in a non-default core ZNC module, modtcl. Please unload this module until it can be upgraded to a patched version. You can unload this module by running &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;/quote ZNC unloadmod modtcl&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Modtcl in ZNC versions prior to 1.9.1 contains an injection vulnerability (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2024-39844&quot;&gt;CVE-2024-39844&lt;/a&gt;) that allows channel operators to run arbitrary TCL code on ZNC instances present in their channel. This exploit can be used to compromise NickServ accounts, channels, or the system user account that is running ZNC.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Luckily, modtcl is not loaded by default. To check if you have modtcl loaded, run &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;/quote ZNC listmods&lt;/code&gt; to see the list of loaded modules. If you have access to the ZNC’s config file, you may additionally search for the line &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;LoadModule = modtcl&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Prior to this announcement, to protect folks who are idle, Libera’s servers were patched to reduce the impact of this vulnerability on Libera. Our mitigation will result in some kick messages being blanked out. Other networks have undertaken their own mitigations as they see fit. Please ask them directly if you have questions.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;We appreciate your help in ensuring that everyone gets updated as soon as possible! We encourage you to contact ZNC-using friends who are idle. Please also keep us informed in &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;#libera-hotline&lt;/code&gt; about folks trying to take advantage of this vulnerability.&lt;/p&gt;</content><author><name>She, el</name></author><summary type="html">TL;DR - If you are using a version of modtcl that is NOT from ZNC 1.9.1 (distribution versions may differ) or newer, update or unload it immediately.</summary></entry><entry><title type="html">Three!</title><link href="https://libera.chat/news/three" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="Three!" /><published>2024-05-19T00:00:00+00:00</published><updated>2024-05-19T00:00:00+00:00</updated><id>https://libera.chat/news/three</id><content type="html" xml:base="https://libera.chat/news/three">&lt;p&gt;Hello everyone!&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;When we opened Libera Chat three whole years ago, we were not sure how things would play out. There were definitely doubts that we would still be here today, working hard to provide you all with a stable collaboration platform. But here we are!&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Besides standing up a whole darn network in the blink of an eye, we are also very proud of the various other things we have accomplished in the past 36 months. We have:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt; &lt;p&gt;Made it &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/new-and-upcoming-features&quot;&gt;easier to manage your channels&lt;/a&gt; including &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/new-and-upcoming-features-2#extban-improvements&quot;&gt;improvements to ban masks&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; &lt;p&gt;Added several privacy improvements &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/new-and-upcoming-features-2#user-mode-i-disable-idle-time-display&quot;&gt;such as hiding idle time&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/autocloaking&quot;&gt;autocloaking &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; accounts&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; &lt;p&gt;Added &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/new-and-upcoming-features-2#new-commands-for-group-contacts&quot;&gt;features that expanded autonomy for Group Contacts&lt;/a&gt;, allowing them to self-manage their namespaces without waiting for staff.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; &lt;p&gt;Worked out &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/login-failure-notice&quot;&gt;a solution to login failure spam&lt;/a&gt;, which was a common complaint.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;We are also still actively working on our next generation IRCd, called Sable. You can &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/Libera-Chat/sable&quot;&gt;check out the repository&lt;/a&gt; or pop in to &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;#libera-dev&lt;/code&gt; for more information about that.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Finally, starting some time &lt;em&gt;next month&lt;/em&gt;, our &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freewear.org/Libera.Chat&quot;&gt;freewear shop&lt;/a&gt; will start carrying a new design; the libera.cat logo from this year’s April Fools prank! Keep an eye on our &lt;a href=&quot;https://bsky.app/profile/libera.chat&quot;&gt;bluesky&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://fosstodon.org/@liberachat&quot;&gt;fosstodon&lt;/a&gt; social accounts for an announcement about that.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In the mean time, please join us in &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;#libera-birthday&lt;/code&gt; to celebrate!&lt;/p&gt;</content><author><name>el</name></author><summary type="html">Hello everyone!</summary></entry><entry><title type="html">Account Auto-Cloaking</title><link href="https://libera.chat/news/autocloaking" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="Account Auto-Cloaking" /><published>2024-04-02T00:00:00+00:00</published><updated>2024-04-02T00:00:00+00:00</updated><id>https://libera.chat/news/autocloaking</id><content type="html" xml:base="https://libera.chat/news/autocloaking">&lt;p&gt;Hello Libera.Chat users!&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Starting now, newly-verified accounts will automatically get a &lt;a href=&quot;/guides/cloaks&quot;&gt;cloak&lt;/a&gt;. No more need to join &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;#libera-cloak&lt;/code&gt; and say &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;!cloakme&lt;/code&gt;!&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As usual, if you want a bot cloak for an account or don’t want a cloak so that you can show off your cool rDNS, you can &lt;a href=&quot;/guides/faq#how-to-find-libera-chat-staff&quot;&gt;contact a member of Libera.Chat staff&lt;/a&gt;. Accounts without cloaks will remain uncloaked. Additionally, we will be closing &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;#libera-cloak&lt;/code&gt; in one week from the day this post goes live. If you would like a generic user cloak after it closes, please contact staff.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The new generic cloak format is mostly the same as the old format, but it is slightly different if your nickname contains characters that are not valid in a cloak. The old format looked like &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;user/&amp;lt;name&amp;gt;/x-&amp;lt;number&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. The new format is &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;user/&amp;lt;name&amp;gt;:&amp;lt;number&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;. If you have a user cloak with an &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;x-&amp;lt;number&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;, you may request a cloak change to the new format if you prefer.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;At this time, users connecting to Libera.Chat without accounts will remain uncloaked. We are evaluating methods of improving guest privacy while still allowing channel operators to restrict access from frequently-abused hosts and ranges.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;That’s all. Have a good day!&lt;/p&gt; &lt;!-- markdownlint-disable MD033 --&gt; &lt;details&gt; &lt;summary&gt;April Fools&apos; Note&lt;/summary&gt; &lt;p id=&quot;april-fools&quot;&gt; During the 1st of April 2024, we gave out vanity cloaks to anyone who registered an account that day. If you have one of these vanity cloaks and do not want it, you may request a cloak change to the new generic user cloak format, which we will grant no-questions-asked. Note that your vanity cloak will be permanently lost. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;/details&gt;</content><author><name>She</name></author><summary type="html">Hello Libera.Chat users!</summary></entry><entry><title type="html">New And Upcoming Features</title><link href="https://libera.chat/news/new-and-upcoming-features-2" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="New And Upcoming Features" /><published>2023-12-04T00:00:00+00:00</published><updated>2023-12-04T00:00:00+00:00</updated><id>https://libera.chat/news/new-and-upcoming-features-2</id><content type="html" xml:base="https://libera.chat/news/new-and-upcoming-features-2">&lt;p&gt;Hello Libera.Chat users,&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As we look towards the end of the year, we thought we’d put together an update on what we have been up to behind the scenes.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2 id=&quot;new-features&quot;&gt;New Features&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;h3 id=&quot;user-mode-i-disable-idle-time-display&quot;&gt;User mode &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;I&lt;/code&gt;: Disable idle time display&lt;/h3&gt; &lt;p&gt;This was an upcoming feature on &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/new-and-upcoming-features#user-mode-i&quot;&gt;our previous New And Upcoming Features blog post&lt;/a&gt;, and it’s finally here!&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Your idle time is the number of seconds since the last time you sent a message. It is shown by &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;/whois&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;/who %l&lt;/code&gt; queries that are sent to the server you are on. This can be useful for people to determine if you are available, but can also be a privacy concern.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;User mode &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;I&lt;/code&gt; hides your idle time, displaying a time of 0 seconds wherever it would otherwise be displayed. Additionally, responses to &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;/whois&lt;/code&gt; queries about you will explicitly indicate that you are hiding your idle time. To keep things fair, however, setting user mode &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;I&lt;/code&gt; will also prevent you from seeing others’ idle times, regardless of whether they have &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;I&lt;/code&gt; set or not. Note that staff will always be able to see users’ idle times.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h3 id=&quot;new-commands-for-group-contacts&quot;&gt;New commands for Group Contacts&lt;/h3&gt; &lt;p&gt;We have added a bunch of nice things to the &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;ProjectServ&lt;/code&gt; service that we use to manage and document project and community registrations. These new features are aimed at enabling peace of mind by providing information that allows groups to audit their registered namespaces without needing to wait for staff assistance:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;ChanServ LISTGROUPCHANS&lt;/code&gt; lets Group Contacts list all registered channels in their namespaces.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;NickServ LISTGROUPCLOAKS&lt;/code&gt; lets Group Contacts list all users with cloaks belonging to their projects.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; &lt;p&gt;Group contacts now receive a notification whenever a new channel is registered in one of their channel namespaces. The notifications look like this:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;pre&gt;&lt;code class=&quot;language-irc&quot;&gt; -ProjectServ- The user veryrealbob (account name fakebob) has registered the channel #bobsproject-hates-kittens which is within the namespace (#bobsproject) of a project that you are a group contact for (bobsproject) &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt; &lt;p&gt;When Group Contacts of a namespace do &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;ChanServ INFO&lt;/code&gt; for a channel registered in their namespace, they will now see a full list of both public and unlisted/private Group Contacts assigned to their project. Others will still only see public contacts when they use &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;ChanServ INFO&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;h3 id=&quot;extban-improvements&quot;&gt;Extban improvements&lt;/h3&gt; &lt;p&gt;The existing &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;$x&lt;/code&gt; extban has been improved. This extban allows the GECOS string (also known as realname) to be matched in addition to the standard nick, user, and host fields. The improvement is that the host component of these masks will now also match against IP addresses if that address is publicly visible. While matching both hosts and IP addresses was standard behaviour for normal masks, it was previously not implemented for &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;$x&lt;/code&gt; bans. GECOS matches are generally most useful when matching bridged users where the GECOS value is fixed by the bridge.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Help text: &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;$x:&amp;lt;mask&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; - Bans all users with matching &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;nick!user@host#gecos&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;$x:*!*@192.0.2.0/24#suspicious-gecos-here&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The new &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;$g&lt;/code&gt; extban extends &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;$x&lt;/code&gt; by only matching unidentified users. This could be useful if unidentified bots or other undesirable connections were coming from a specific service and a channel did not want to restrict chat from all unidentified users. When a &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;#&lt;/code&gt; character is present in the mask, this ban works like &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;$x&lt;/code&gt; to match GECOS as well.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Help text: &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;$g:&amp;lt;mask&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; - Matches as a normal ban but excludes identified users&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;$g:*!*@undesirable.host.name&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;For documentation on all the extbans, please visit our &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/guides/channelmodes#available-extban-types&quot;&gt;channel mode documentation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2 id=&quot;upcoming-features&quot;&gt;Upcoming features&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;h3 id=&quot;easier-account-creation-and-verification&quot;&gt;Easier account creation and verification&lt;/h3&gt; &lt;p&gt;This was announced &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/new-and-upcoming-features#easier-account-creation-and-verification&quot;&gt;late last year&lt;/a&gt;, and an initial iteration of this feature is finally complete. We are currently working on an automated build and deployment pipeline for it, which we should also be able to use for our other projects written in Rust.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h3 id=&quot;sable-update&quot;&gt;Sable update&lt;/h3&gt; &lt;p&gt;We’ve continued to work in the background on Sable, our experimental next-generation server platform. It is currently possible to create a network of Sable servers, connect to it, and use it for basic chat. While &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/orgs/Libera-Chat/projects/2/views/1?sortedBy%5Bdirection%5D=desc&amp;amp;sortedBy%5BcolumnId%5D=Status&quot;&gt;there’s a long way to go yet&lt;/a&gt;, Sable will allow us to offer a greatly improved user experience, including persistent presence and history without the need for bouncers and much better resilience to network interruptions. If you’d like to get involved in this effort, or just observe how we’re progressing, come and join us in &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;#libera-dev&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2 id=&quot;documentation-updates&quot;&gt;Documentation updates&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;We were asked in the &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;#libera-communities&lt;/code&gt; channel if we could provide a quick reference to help operators know when and how to set various types of access control measures for their channels. This has been asked and attempted several times in the past, but this time we did manage to pull a simple guide together! You can now find a &lt;a href=&quot;/guides/quickops&quot;&gt;Quick Ops Guide&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;/guides&quot;&gt;guides area of this site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In the future we hope to supplement this guide another more comprehensive reference text that summarises some of the more advanced features and practices available. If there are any other guides you would like to see, let us know.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;We have also updated our &lt;a href=&quot;/chanreg&quot;&gt;channel registration&lt;/a&gt; guide which explains channel namespaces, what is considered on-topic, and the formal group registration process. The previous guide was quite confusing in many respects, leading people to be unsure where their channels belong or whether or not they were allowed to register channels with &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;ChanServ&lt;/code&gt; without also going through a formal group registration process for their projects. We hope that the new guide clears up all of this confusion and becomes a more useful point of reference.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2 id=&quot;libera-merch&quot;&gt;Libera merch&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;As a reminder, we have a lineup of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.freewear.org/Libera.Chat&quot;&gt;Libera.Chat merch at FreeWear.org&lt;/a&gt; including shirts, mugs, and stickers. We get a small cut of every purchase made on the platform, so it is a good way to show your support in addition to repping the network in real life.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;If that’s not quite your thing but you’d like to show your support in other ways, you can give us a &lt;a href=&quot;/contributing/donate&quot;&gt;donation&lt;/a&gt; or contribute to the &lt;a href=&quot;/contributing/development&quot;&gt;many open source projects&lt;/a&gt; that Libera.Chat relies on.&lt;/p&gt;</content><author><name>el, glguy, moonmoon, She, spb</name></author><summary type="html">Hello Libera.Chat users,</summary></entry><entry><title type="html">Official Matrix bridge farewell</title><link href="https://libera.chat/news/official-matrix-bridge-farewell" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="Official Matrix bridge farewell" /><published>2023-11-28T00:00:00+00:00</published><updated>2023-11-28T00:00:00+00:00</updated><id>https://libera.chat/news/official-matrix-bridge-farewell</id><content type="html" xml:base="https://libera.chat/news/official-matrix-bridge-farewell">&lt;p&gt;Hello, I am the bearer of unfortunate news.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Following the &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/matrix-bridge-disabled-retrospective&quot;&gt;disabling of the official Element Matrix Services (EMS) operated bridge&lt;/a&gt; between the Matrix network and Libera.Chat IRC network, staff of Libera Chat met with staff from The Matrix.org Foundation in mid October to discuss the future of the bridge.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Due to various constraints, The Foundation informed us that it cannot take on the obligation of the needed modifications in a timely manner, nor can it commit to operating the official bridge going forward.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Upon receiving this information we requested that The Foundation and EMS arrange a graceful sunset of the bridge, a clean-up of bridged rooms so that users are no longer misled or confused due to the presence of non-functional ghosts, and to take accountability for the delay in wrapping things up. You can &lt;a href=&quot;https://matrix.org/blog/2023/11/28/shutting-down-bridge-to-libera-chat&quot;&gt;read about their plan on their blog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;We have written a &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/guides/matrix&quot;&gt;new FAQ about Matrix&lt;/a&gt; to address this sunset and give more information about the future of Matrix use on Libera.Chat. We would also like to extend to our communities a sincere apology; it has taken far too long to coordinate communications with EMS and The Foundation to clarify the fate of the bridge, and we regret any inconvenience the delay of this information has caused.&lt;/p&gt;</content><author><name>el</name></author><summary type="html">Hello, I am the bearer of unfortunate news.</summary></entry><entry><title type="html">Matrix Bridge Temporary Shutdown, a Retrospective</title><link href="https://libera.chat/news/matrix-bridge-disabled-retrospective" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="Matrix Bridge Temporary Shutdown, a Retrospective" /><published>2023-08-10T00:00:00+00:00</published><updated>2023-08-10T00:00:00+00:00</updated><id>https://libera.chat/news/matrix-bridge-disabled-retrospective</id><content type="html" xml:base="https://libera.chat/news/matrix-bridge-disabled-retrospective">&lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Update: We no longer have an official Matrix bridge. Please see our &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/guides/matrix&quot;&gt;FAQ about Matrix&lt;/a&gt; for more information about using Matrix on Libera.Chat.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Hello Libera users,&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Some people have requested transparency into how Libera came to the conclusion that we needed to take the drastic action of requesting that Element Matrix Services (EMS) &lt;a href=&quot;https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/postponing-libera-chat-deportalling/&quot;&gt;deactivate the portalling bouncer-like feature of the Matrix bridge&lt;/a&gt; and limit it to explicitly opted-in plumbed rooms, and then escalate to more serious action in &lt;a href=&quot;https://matrix.org/blog/2023/08/libera-bridge-disabled/&quot;&gt;requesting the bridge be disabled fully&lt;/a&gt;. We have been reluctant to go into detail before now because the last thing we wanted was to put our communities through another public dispute with a for-profit company. However we believe you, our users, deserve to know the circumstances of our decision, so this post is an attempt to satisfy your expectation of transparency from us as an organisation. It is going to be a long one, so fetch a snack or beverage and settle in. There is also a quick tl;dr&lt;sup id=&quot;fnref:1&quot; role=&quot;doc-noteref&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;#fn:1&quot; class=&quot;footnote&quot; rel=&quot;footnote&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; if you want that instead.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Back when we first launched Libera.Chat in May 2021, we did not have hopes of becoming a large network, and we honestly did not care if we did or not. We quickly exceeded expectations on that front because of the trust that you all have placed in us to have the best interests of your communities as our guiding principle. Several of these communities requested a bridge that would allow their channels to be accessible from Matrix. We were initially vocally reluctant due to prior experiences with the bridge on another network. However, at the end of a very hectic May we sat down with EMS and came up with some baseline expectations.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;One of our requirements included &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/1337&quot;&gt;the rollout of the privacy filter&lt;/a&gt; which prevents Matrix users being able to invisibly watch IRC conversation or engage in abusive behaviour on the Matrix side without being seen in that room’s respective IRC channel. While this might seem like double standards compared to “one to many” bridging in which one bot acts as a puppet for many individuals, such bridges are observable and typically only serve one community each. The agreement also included the statement &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/temporarily-disabling-the-matrix-bridge&quot;&gt;we quoted previously&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;the bridge may be subject to temporary closure (on your side or ours) in the event of future privacy issues, dependent on severity and predicted resolution timeframes, with honest public-facing explanations.”&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;As 2021 progressed, we worked with EMS to address the bridge’s instability, often notifying them of pending allowance or service disruption issues before their own monitoring did. We also kept watch for double-bridges which would expose other networks to potential abuse by bridging their services to us. We also found ourselves needing to prompt EMS to respond to the concerns of some projects they hosted. Within a few months after welcoming the bridge, we were routinely dealing with a sizable and often automated abuse load from the bridge that made use of easy anonymous registration and the protocol’s persistent and distributed archiving of files, including images, videos, and long messages converted to pastebins. The abuse was targeted at both plumbed and portalled channels.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In February 2022, Matrix was chosen to host a major open source event that went online-only during the pandemic. The event rooms were bridged to Libera. Throughout that event, Libera’s abuse mitigation folk responded to a massive spike in bot waves whose impact favored but was not limited to the event’s channels. Late nights were spent monitoring for bots, temporarily toggling a drastic anti-abuse measure that bounced any Matrix puppets, processing connection data logs, manually screening for obvious false positives, and issuing many thousands of network bans targeting individual puppets or open-registration homeservers respectively. We provided EMS a list of homeservers that were involved and asked that they help with outreach to get them configured correctly and cleaned up.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Rather unexpectedly, the bot abuse continued to be bridged to Libera long after it had ceased on the Matrix side. Some of our abuse mitigation stopped the bots from bridging to begin with. Operating under assurances that failed connection and messaging attempts would not be bridged, we began to relax our abuse mitigation measures, only for some of those bots’ puppets (on homeservers that had not been cleaned up) to reconnect to Libera, join channels, and send “federation delayed” spam even half a year later. Furthermore, these returning bots were consuming a portion of the bridge’s connection limit, and also contributed to some misconfigured Matrix rooms filling channels to the point of overloading some clients because the idle puppet cleanup process could not work.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;After the event ended, we arranged to meet with EMS in early March 2022 to debrief and negotiate a path forward where the workload of managing bridged abuse by Libera staff would be reduced. It was at this meeting that we first raised the idea of disabling portalling. As EMS agreed to work on a homeserver blocklist and actually did implement it for us, we did not pursue deportalling at this time. This meeting also had promises from EMS that reductions in bridge restart noise and reliable removal of media could be expected some time later in 2022. Currently, we do not believe there is a reliable way to quickly remove abusive hosted media without homeserver admin intervention.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Through 2022 and into 2023 we were made aware of &lt;a href=&quot;https://matrix.org/category/security/&quot;&gt;various security vulnerabilities&lt;/a&gt; and privacy leaks in the bridge. At least one issue this year, for a recurring privacy leak, needed us to advocate for a fix that was then released without a transparent announcement &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/1700&quot;&gt;until that oversight was pointed out&lt;/a&gt; causing third party bridges and the bridge of at least one other network to lag in getting fixed. As a result of all this, we feel we are unable to be confident that reported issues have been acknowledged or addressed, and some folks have expressed a lack of motiviation to report issues due to past experiences. Our confidence in EMS’s capacity to respond to future issues was further eroded with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2022/#trust-safety&quot;&gt;“reset” of their trust and safety team&lt;/a&gt; during layoffs at the end of last year.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;We acknowledge that the security concerns were the least visible issue for you, our users. There have also been several serious outages this year which EMS failed to notice until Libera staff put substantial effort into documenting the symptoms in the coordination channel, often needing to find alternative ways to make contact when no response was forthcoming. We likewise continuously forwarded reports of spam originating from the Matrix network to varying success and also requested Matrix developers find a solution to avoid IRC users being listed in the Matrix network’s expansive user directory, which was causing some people to receive unwanted attention and problematic spam in private messages.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;After many discussions among staff and with frustrated channel operators about the overall situation, we decided to put an item on the agenda for our &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/minutes/2023-02-24-public&quot;&gt;February 2023 Monthly General Meeting (MGM)&lt;/a&gt; to discuss our options for reducing the negative impacts arising from the bridge instability, the company’s ongoing communication deficits regarding security and privacy flaws, and the difficulty in getting things addressed long term. We acknowledged that some communities are locked into using Matrix due to their workflows and thus ought to be able to opt-in explicitly to using the platform while we scaled back the bridge’s reach.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Those attending that MGM concluded that we should first consult the &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;#libera-communities&lt;/code&gt; channel to which all &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/chanreg/&quot;&gt;Group Contacts&lt;/a&gt; on the network have standing invites. Additionally, we committed to reaching out to some of the key communities that originally requested Matrix bridging. During these consultations we explained the deportalling option, and the responses we received were ambivalent to positive. At the &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/minutes/2023-03-31-public&quot;&gt;March MGM&lt;/a&gt; we reviewed the responses and decided to proceed with asking EMS to disable portalling on the official Libera bridge that they operate. EMS were informed that same day (March 31st, 2023) and were asked to communicate with us on a plan for going forward.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;At the end of May 2023, we noticed a bot named “&lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;archive[m]&lt;/code&gt;” joining a large number of channels unsolicited, including portalled channels such as &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;#libera&lt;/code&gt;. After disconnecting the bot and investigating its origins, we became aware of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-viewer/&quot;&gt;Matrix Public Archive, now known as Matrix Viewer&lt;/a&gt;. Given previous privacy incidents involving Matrix leaking channel info, we became deeply concerned that this archive was violating our public logging or scraping policies for a large number of portalled channels. Further investigation was difficult since the archive was very clearly a work-in-progress, often returning cryptic errors for basic operations or just being slow to respond. EMS later assured us that the archive was mostly benign from a privacy standpoint, and renamed it to indicate that the bot itself didn’t archive but accessed already archived data. Given it was assumed this behaviour was opted into based on room configurations which did not disclose that they applied to the Matrix Viewer publishing logs to the web, we remained skeptical and unhappy that it could roam into channels without warning or explanation. The lack of proactive communication surrounding this bot only served to reinforce the lack of confidence we felt we could afford to EMS on such matters.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;By this point, EMS appear to have assumed the cause of the deportalling request was entirely about stability issues, and set about working on the previously promised measures to reduce the connection noise caused by the bridge. This resulted in a feature known as seamless restarts, where connections over the bridge are maintained through the bridge restart process by a proxy, which landed earlier in 2023. Unfortunately this has led to many new problems; message drops, which had occurred previously but were mostly manageable, skyrocketed. The bridge began silently dropping ranges of messages, resulting in roughly one out of every five messages being dropped during periods of high bridge activity. These issues were often undetectable by the average user on either side, and we have no doubt that they caused breakdowns in communication that harmed people’s relationships with projects and frustrated their support volunteers.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;At our &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/minutes/2023-06-30-public&quot;&gt;June MGM&lt;/a&gt; we discussed if we would enforce the decision of the March MGM and set a deadline for deportalling. That deadline was originally July 31st, but at EMS’s request we extended it for two weeks to August 11th. During this transition period, the bridge management bot was unresponsive for several days while channels tried fruitlessly to set up plumbing. After we granted the deadline extension, the bridge was fully restarted in order to implement an attempted fix for the silent message drops.Shortly before midnight UTC on the 31st, almost all the bridge’s connections timed out. The bridge was not brought back online until more than 24 hours later, further disrupting people’s ability to arrange plumbing for their channels.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/temporarily-disabling-the-matrix-bridge&quot;&gt;previous blog post&lt;/a&gt;, on August 2nd we noticed a serious regression and immediately notified EMS. That regression was that the privacy filter feature, the earlier mentioned prerequisite for the bridge’s access to the network, was somehow not functioning. A Libera.Chat staff member was able to see IRC channel comments on their Matrix account while their Matrix puppet was not connected to the Libera.Chat network at all. EMS informed us that this flaw could not be remedied quickly. Meanwhile the symptoms were being mentioned by concerned users in public channels so it became clear that it was only a matter of time before this would be noticed and employed by bad actors; a &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/pull/1755&quot;&gt;recently discovered bug in the blocklist&lt;/a&gt; mechanism had been noticed because problematic content had been bridged as a result. As portal removal was not yet ready for rollout, we could not reduce the vulnerability to opted-in channels.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As a result of this network-level risk, staff consensed that the responsible course of action was to escalate our request and asked that the whole EMS Matrix bridge be shut down as soon as possible, until this and other critical issues have been addressed. We gave them 36 hours to do so. At 1400UTC on August 5th 2023, EMS shut down their Libera.Chat Matrix bridge at our request.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;This is not a choice we wanted to have to make on the behalf of our users, and we’ve held off as long as we could to avoid this disruption in your communities. Throughout this whole process the employees of EMS have engaged with us professionally with the limited resources afforded to them, and we would like to acknowledge their efforts and thank them for their work and patience, in particular Halfy, Thib, and Neil. We are genuinely sorry that this is where we have ended up.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Third party bridges will remain unaffected and are not subject to the request for shutting down. As with any bridging on the Libera.Chat network, third party bridges will be judged on a case by case basis if problems arise. We are hoping that this will be a temporary measure. We anticipate the official EMS bridge will return plumbed-only, depending on the issues addressed by EMS, at some point in the future.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As per the our prior post, staff are available for questions and concerns about this decision in private message or in the &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;#libera-matrix&lt;/code&gt; IRC channel.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Regards, el, She, Allie, Ben, and the rest of the Libera.Chat staff body.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div class=&quot;footnotes&quot; role=&quot;doc-endnotes&quot;&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li id=&quot;fn:1&quot; role=&quot;doc-endnote&quot;&gt; &lt;p&gt;tl;dr: We asked for portalling to be disabled due to compounding concerns such as abuse mitigation workload, various privacy and security issues, and overall stability. We escalated to the temporary shutdown due to a recurring privacy issue where Matrix users not connected to Libera.Chat could see channel content. The issue could not be addressed quickly or limited to opted-in channels. Third party bridges remain welcome and will be judged individually if concerns arise. Questions? PM staff or ask in &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;#libera-matrix&lt;/code&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;#fnref:1&quot; class=&quot;reversefootnote&quot; role=&quot;doc-backlink&quot;&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;/div&gt;</content><author><name>el, She, Allie, Ben</name></author><summary type="html">Update: We no longer have an official Matrix bridge. Please see our FAQ about Matrix for more information about using Matrix on Libera.Chat.</summary></entry><entry><title type="html">Temporarily disabling the Matrix Bridge</title><link href="https://libera.chat/news/temporarily-disabling-the-matrix-bridge" rel="alternate" type="text/html" title="Temporarily disabling the Matrix Bridge" /><published>2023-08-05T00:00:00+00:00</published><updated>2023-08-05T00:00:00+00:00</updated><id>https://libera.chat/news/temporarily-disabling-the-matrix-bridge</id><content type="html" xml:base="https://libera.chat/news/temporarily-disabling-the-matrix-bridge">&lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Update: We no longer have an official Matrix bridge. Please see our &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/guides/matrix&quot;&gt;FAQ about Matrix&lt;/a&gt; for more information about using Matrix on Libera.Chat.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Hello Libera users,&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As you know per &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/&quot;&gt;previous blogs&lt;/a&gt;, we have been liasing with Element Matrix Services (EMS) as they transition the Matrix bridge to an opt-in configuration that aims to allow plumbed channels (channels that opted in to being accessed by Matrix) while deactivating portalled channel access (where Matrix users could roam freely on the network). This process was undertaken at our request due to various security and privacy concerns that EMS have been unable to address to our satisfaction due to time constraints. During this transition period, a number of new issues have arisen, and we have already &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/news/deportalling-delay&quot;&gt;extended the deadline&lt;/a&gt; for the deportalling transition by two weeks, at the request of EMS. Some of these issues are specific to the bridge operated for Libera.Chat and may not affect bridges on other networks.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;When we agreed to accept the Matrix bridge onto Libera.Chat at the request of a few projects early in 2021 part of that agreement was the following clause:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;the bridge may be subject to temporary closure (on your side or ours) in the event of future privacy issues, dependent on severity and predicted resolution timeframes, with honest public-facing explanations.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;On August 2nd, we notified EMS of a serious regression in our coordination channel after close of business London, UK time (where EMS is based). After no response we requested acknowledgement 24 hours later on the 3rd. At this point we were informed that no attention had been or could be given to the issue. Having subsequently investigated and confirmed the issue was still occuring, today, Friday August 4th at the start of business hours, we notified EMS that they had until 1400UTC Saturday August 5th to address the issue.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, EMS have informed us that they cannot satisfy this deadline.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In order to protect our users and our IRC-first communities from mounting stability, security, and privacy issues, we requested that EMS remove the Matrix bridge from Libera.Chat until this serious regression can be fixed, and all other outstanding issues are likewise resolved. EMS agreed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://matrix.org/blog/2023/08/libera-bridge-disabled/&quot;&gt;shut the bridge down&lt;/a&gt; by 1400UTC Saturday August 5th. We cannot anticipate a timeline for the bridge’s return, but we hope it will be soon.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;We will put together a more complete retrospective for publication in the near future, and we invite projects to make &lt;a href=&quot;https://libera.chat/guides/faq#are-bridges-allowed&quot;&gt;alternative bridging arrangements&lt;/a&gt; in the meantime. There are various options available, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/whitequark/catircservices.org/&quot;&gt;catircservices&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/hifi/heisenbridge&quot;&gt;heisenbridge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As always, Libera.Chat staff will be on hand via PMs, and in &lt;code class=&quot;language-plaintext highlighter-rouge&quot;&gt;#libera-matrix&lt;/code&gt; to answer any questions.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Regards, Allie &amp;amp; el on behalf of the entire Libera.Chat staff body&lt;/p&gt;</content><author><name>Allie and el</name></author><summary type="html">Update: We no longer have an official Matrix bridge. Please see our FAQ about Matrix for more information about using Matrix on Libera.Chat.</summary></entry></feed>