>On the IRC side you seem like a normal user as well.
Until you accidentally start using Matrix features that don't translate well.
Eg your matrix client will let you post large messages. On the IRC side this will generally appear as
foo[m] send a long message: <https://matrix.org/some/long/url/uNiQuEcOdE>
<foo[m]> How do I fix this?
and now IRC users have to open a browser to answer your question.
Also I've heard that if a Matrix user edits their message, the bridge resends the whole message to the IRC channel. I've not experienced Matrix users repeating themselves with tiny differences, so I can't confirm this.
Thankfully this is rare, at least in the channels I hang out in. But in general I have a dim view of all these protocols that attempt to interop with IRC - they all have some form of impedance mismatch that causes jank. The worst one was probably gitter, where its users were used to posting kilobytes of code in markdown code fences because the browser UI would collapse it by default so it'd look fine, but their IRC bridge sent the whole thing line-by-line to all clients. And if the gitter user edited that code block, the bridge would send the whole code block down again. I disconnected from that thing as soon as it happened to me (The fact that its IRC impl was broken and required me to patch my client was also part of the reason.)
That matrix example seems like strictly worse and much more complicated to implement than the obvious naive solution of just splitting the big matrix message across multiple IRC messages.
And then you are automatically kicked for spam. Long messages are strongly disliked on irc and the typical workflow is you paste your text in to a pastebin and link it in a message which matrix does.
You type the prose part of your question in the channel. The thing that gets pastebin'd is code or logs if they're more than one line long. [1]
The problem I was describing is that the Matrix user has no reason to follow this rule, because the Matrix client UI lets them type arbitrary long prose and code and logs in a single message and send that. And then the bridge has no choice but to put the whole thing in a pastebin.
[1]: Unless the prose part of your question is itself an essay. But in that case the solution is not to put your question in a pastebin. It's to spend some time distilling your question down to remove all the fluff that made it an essay.
Probably the correct thing is for matrix to realize that this is an IRC bridge, and warn the user this behavior will occur; they can fix it accordingly, and everyone is happy
Until you accidentally start using Matrix features that don't translate well.
Eg your matrix client will let you post large messages. On the IRC side this will generally appear as
and now IRC users have to open a browser to answer your question.Also I've heard that if a Matrix user edits their message, the bridge resends the whole message to the IRC channel. I've not experienced Matrix users repeating themselves with tiny differences, so I can't confirm this.
Thankfully this is rare, at least in the channels I hang out in. But in general I have a dim view of all these protocols that attempt to interop with IRC - they all have some form of impedance mismatch that causes jank. The worst one was probably gitter, where its users were used to posting kilobytes of code in markdown code fences because the browser UI would collapse it by default so it'd look fine, but their IRC bridge sent the whole thing line-by-line to all clients. And if the gitter user edited that code block, the bridge would send the whole code block down again. I disconnected from that thing as soon as it happened to me (The fact that its IRC impl was broken and required me to patch my client was also part of the reason.)