New Matrix bot and bridges

About the new bridges

These are freshly deployed and watched. As long as they are in “Beta” (see website) – there might not be all mechanisms such as monitoring or backups in place.

WhatsApp

One of the most requested features for our Matrix server is a bridge to WhatsApp. I kept refusing it until now, because: 

• I never was and don’t plan to be on WhatsApp 
    * I don’t want my or your stuff to touch this Meta platform 
    * I cannot reproduce eventual problems users might be running into 
  

Anyway, for a client, I am running one at this point and it seems to be quite reliable. Also there might be a usecase for members of a local society I wanted to try. While having that society thought, another user asked be for such a bridge, so I finally deployed one.

Configuration notes:

• currently only intended to be used as a tchncs.de user
• groups bridged chats into a space
• tba

Signal

I don’t have so many contacts on Signal and it’s a less often requested bridge, but if I deploy WhatsApp, it would be wrong to ignore Signal – also this might be interesting to that society I was writing about.

Configuration notes:

• as I expect less load, it is available for external users (for now)
• tba

Future

Soon to come: XMPP bridge.

RemindMe bot

This bot can remind you one time or multiple times about things. Invite @remindmebot:tchncs.de and type !help reminders for more infos.

This is more or less a test, it was chosen and requested because its advanced reminder features, other bots don’t support, but it’s been quite a few months since development was last active, which makes me worry.

First time setup

This is the first time, that I have deployed bridges – which actively communicate with the Synapse server instance on an external machine – also there are some other things that I have tried to do in a more clean and ideal way this time. Everything seems to work as expected.

However unlike other tchncs servers, this machine does not support hotplug of the SSDs – for when one needs to be replaced. This adds a small percentage of downtime to a year.

Donating

If the Matrix service of tchncs serves you well, you can support it with your kind donation: tchncs.de/donate