Most of the accounts are on matrix.org right now but they can just move elsewhere even I get them to do something about it. Automated countermeasures are very weak and the tools given to channel owners are weak, especially for the bridged IRC channels to Freenode.
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The matrix.org server eventually stopped federating with some of the openly, officially racist servers and took away matrix.org aliases named after a bunch of open source projects since they've made channels for a hundred projects and reserved aliases.
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Channels still exist and they still have the aliases across most servers. Users on matrix.org who joined those channels thinking they were the right one for the project (and perhaps assuming it was official) are still in those channels. Took a long time to get...
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I think with the way Matrix works, a channel (room) isn't really associated with a specific server. You can give them aliases on different servers. You can claim a whole bunch of aliases for a channel, so a channel can have many different identifiers across many servers.
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If we wanted, we could grab #grapheneos on a bunch of different servers by making accounts there and adding a local alias... in fact it seems like random users in the channel can freely add local aliases on their servers including in abusive ways. A lot of it is messed up.
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On matrix.org, there are bridged channels mapping to every channel on freenode, oftc, etc. and if you have op on the IRC side it gives you mod privileges on the Matrix side. A bridge bot owns the room and many moderation tools are not available to you in those rooms.
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We decided to use this existing bridged room as our Matrix room so that the canonical room is officially the Freenode #grapheneos channel. However, this means we don't fully control the Matrix side. Have mods in it but can't do stuff like disabling anyone being able to invite.
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We had the option of creating a Matrix room that we would actually own and setting up a bridge to the IRC channel, but the matrix.org bridged room would still exist. It'd get confusing where some Matrix users would be in our room with our bridge and some in that one.
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So for example, since we have people acting as spies in the channel, if I set the Matrix room to invite only, they can just start chain inviting spammers into the channel. I cannot disable non-mod invites because the IRC service bot owns the bridged rooms for oftc, freenode, etc.
So I don't even have a way of temporarily not letting more people into the Matrix side of the channel. Also, for some reason these people aren't appearing on the IRC side (the bridge is not bridging them) so IRC moderators are unable to see it happening and ban them from it.
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It's *supposed* to give the owners of the IRC channel control over it but it only has a concept of mapping IRC op to a semi-privileged Matrix moderator and has no concept of the channel owner. It doesn't know about NickServ/ChanServ or anything either. Just gives mod based on op.
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