| dzho | so, I struggle a lot with the way people tend to talk about bridging in IM. | 15:01 |
|---|---|---|
| dzho | I think of bridges in a networking sense, where it may require some care for a network engineer type of person to configure and maintain, but from a user perspective it is transparent. | 15:02 |
| dzho | IM bridges are rarely transparent. They do have an essential bridge aspect of connecting two sides so that traffic can flow between them. | 15:02 |
| dzho | but maybe a way to think of them better is to look at the vehicles that are used. | 15:03 |
| dzho | In this way, these "bridges" are more like the places where trains run between two systems that have different gauges (ie, the width between the rails). | 15:03 |
| dzho | The one place I know this happens (or used to happen, I haven't checked current status) is at the French-Spanish border in Catalonia. | 15:04 |
| dzho | Most of the accomodation there is effected by the trains themselves, which have wheelsets that can change their widths. There's a stop near the border where the shift is made before the train can continue on down the line. | 15:05 |
| dzho | Now, the static infrastructure at the point of transition clearly has to have both rail widths available in order to accomodate this transition, so that's an important component too, but it seems to me to be the less tricky part of it. | 15:06 |
| dzho | aaaaaand, maybe that's more than enough monologguing for now on the topic. I've got more but I'll hold up because damn that's a lot of text for IRC. | 15:07 |
| thafreak | haha, I'm sure it's fine, it's not like this channel is super busy or anything lol | 16:47 |
| yano | lol | 18:10 |
| yano | it's all good | 18:10 |
| dzho | haha, thanks. | 18:15 |
| dzho | pulling it back, then, from the analogy to the software and networking ... | 18:16 |
| dzho | usually the systems on each side of an IM bridge have different feature sets | 18:17 |
| dzho | so rarely is passage transparent. | 18:17 |
| dzho | usually I'm seeing this all from the IRC side of things, with the thing I use second-most often is Matrix. | 18:18 |
| dzho | but I routinely encounter channels that have bridges to slack and to telegram, occasionally here and there also gitter. | 18:18 |
| dzho | and generally the way the bridge manifests itself as a bot, a user account that encapsulates the traffic back and forth. | 18:19 |
| dzho | the freenode-matrix.org IRC-Matrix bridge manifest on a per-user basis. | 18:20 |
| dzho | hmm, wait one. | 18:20 |
| dzho[m] | moo | 18:24 |
| yano | hehe | 18:24 |
| yano | my primary irc client is weechat in tmux | 18:24 |
| yano | secondary is TheLounge | 18:24 |
| yano | third is Riot/Element | 18:24 |
| dzho | yeah I use irssi in tmux on a VPS, connecting via ssh or mosh | 18:24 |
| dzho | usually tmux on the local system wrapping tmux on the VPS | 18:25 |
| dzho | I use weechat here and there, which I decided was acceptable after learning Meta-l (ESC or Alt 'ell' not 'one') was good for toggling out of and back into multi-column mode. | 18:26 |
| dzho | which allows, eg, gnome-terminal's URL detection to Just Work | 18:26 |
| dzho | so I can ESC l Ctrl-click ESC l to open a URL that has been posted without much friction at al | 18:27 |
| dzho | so, there's the example where the bridge looks just like a second connection through another client. | 18:27 |
| dzho | the default is to tack on the '[m]' but that's configurable, or can just be removed. | 18:27 |
| dzho | in contrast, just about every other bridge I've seen is not so well integrated, and only a single IRC account encapsulates all traffic from all users on the other side of the bridge. | 18:29 |
| dzho | and so one can't see for instance using the IRC /names command to see any of the users on the other side of the bridge | 18:29 |
| dzho | highlight is impacted | 18:29 |
| dzho | users of one bridge got annoyed by getting multiple notifications when their nick was mentioned and so they made the bridge insert a zero-width space so as to deliberately break nick recognition | 18:30 |
| dzho | I didn't realize that until I tried to search backscroll for a nick I had *just* seen and /lastlog wasn't finding it | 18:31 |
| dzho | that's when on further inspection I saw names across the bridge were showing as, eg, d<nbs>zho | 18:31 |
| dzho | a search for 'dzho' would fail but a search for 'zho' would succeed. | 18:32 |
| dzho | in another channel there is a slack user whose name just gets completely dropped by the bridge | 18:32 |
| yanome | I also like TheLounge because the web interface is mobile friendly :D | 18:36 |
| yanome | lol | 18:36 |
| dzho | yanome: do you run your own instance or use someone else's? | 18:38 |
| yanome | I run my own | 18:38 |
| dzho | legit | 18:38 |
| yanome | dzho: I run my run lol | 18:38 |
| yanome | yeah | 18:38 |
| yanome | from the same server I did tmux+WeeChat on ahaha | 18:38 |
| yanome | the nice thing about this, is that I can use any subdomain from my main domain I want; and I do it over SSL | 18:39 |
| dzho | I was pretty annoyed that with the switch from qwebirc to kiwi, freenode put recaptcha in | 18:39 |
| yanome | yeah | 18:40 |
| yanome | I'm not a huge fan of those web clients | 18:40 |
| yanome | I like being able to run my own | 18:40 |
| dzho | I'm also ok with people using irccloud if it suits them | 18:40 |
| dzho | so long as irccloud doesn't EEE web clients too much | 18:40 |
| yanome | EEE? | 18:40 |
| yano | anyone in to amateur radio and in columbus? | 18:44 |
| dzho | yanome: embrace, extend, extinguish | 18:54 |
| yanome | dzho: ah | 18:54 |
| dzho | in this space most bitterly remembered as the crap slack pulled against IRC | 18:55 |
| yanome | yeah | 18:55 |
| dzho | but of course with a long and storied history | 18:55 |
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