I didn’t plan for this blog to be about me testing Matrix, but now that I’m at it, I might as well keep going. Maybe I will get to write about RPG things at some point, too!

Since folks at the Discord server for Veiled Fury Entertainment also expected Discord to – let me quote here – „go to shit“ in the near future, I offered to assist in testing Matrix as an alternative as well. This time, we also used a bridge: One channel in Discord would be connected to a room in Matrix, so messages from one protocol would also be seen in the other. I chose https://t2bot.io/ for the bridge.

The set-up was rather straightforward:

  1. Create a new Matrix room [^1]

  2. Invite the bot to the Matrix room

  3. Invite the bot to the Discord server

  4. Copy the channel ID of the Discord channel

  5. Tell the bot to build the bridge in the Matrix room

  6. Confirm the request that pops up in the Discord channel

(Details can be found at t2bot.io)

After that, messages from the Discord channel show up in the Matrix room as if it was written by a Matrix user, while messages from Matrix show up in Discord with a little „App“ badge. In both cases, the nicknames and profile pictures are transferred from the other protocol. Only replies from Matrix users to Discord users look a bit differently, but work just the same: There’s a quote with profile picture and nickname of the original author, a timestamp and a highlight before the reply begins.

This presents a possible in-between solution when you want to move from Discord to Matrix, but not everyone is on board yet. However, there are a few security implications for that, which is especially relevant for people who want to move from Discord because they don’t want their chats being monitored and AI analysed: Not only can you not encrypt your Matrix room, but by design all your messages from that Matrix chatroom also land in Discord, now affecting both the Discord and Matrix users of that community. The bridging service itself also has to have access to all your messages in clear text for it to work, but given that t2bot.io has a pretty sensible and well-readable privacy notice, I don’t see this as a major issue. If you do, you could setup your own server with a bridging service to mitigate this.

My recommendation would be to clearly mark the bridged rooms on the Matrix side and offer additional, non-bridged and encrypted rooms on the Matrix side.

In our test, the performance was good – messages would appear on the other protocol quickly. However, users have noted that there are times in which the service slows down considerably because it’s under heavy load.  Because of that, it might make sense to host a bridge service for oneself. Different software is freely available and listed on the Matrix website. 

[^1]: I could have used an already existing room on Matrix to be bridged as well, but we didn’t have one