Discord Bridge

[erlend-sh]

As part of our Beyond Discord strategy, we need to begin our incremental detachment from Discord as our default team chat. We have multiple options available to us, detailed in individual sub-threads below.

We might pursue multiple of these paths at once.

[erlend-sh]

Baseline: commune:matrix.org

We've already got a space set up for Commune at commune:matrix.org. The easiest way to immediately start bridging our Discord over to Matrix would be to simply set up an instance of mautrix-discord which bridges to our vanilla server on the Matrix.org network.

Pros

• Doable within hours
• Makes our entire Discord community properly accessible to Matrix users, some of which cannot be reached on Discord.
• Gets us familiarized with the mautrix-discord setup.

Cons

• Doesn't move the needle on real Commune work.

[erlend-sh]

Use commune-client as read-only archive

Could we use commune-client as a read-only viewer of regular Matrix rooms? If so, we could use it to view our commune:matrix.org space in the same way matrix-viewer works, thus providing a proof-of-concept of our publicly viewable Matrix chat rooms functionality without having to operate a full-fledged Commune instance right away.

matrix-viewer has been discontinued, but a community member is maintaining a live demo of how it works:
https://view.gaytrix.org/r/matrix:matrix.org

Pros

• Compatible with matrix.org server.
• Demonstrates & tests a vertical slice of Commune's capabilities.

Cons

• Might be too much work to justify it as a transitional action.

[erlend-sh]

Work has begun on this in Generic Matrix Client Support.

However, for an out-of-the-box Discord bridge experience we'd need to run our own Matrix server + bridge. Once we have that, we'd probably replace matrix.org as the default homeserver with our own preview.matrix.org.

It does seem like theoretically we could operate an equivalent to t2bot ourselves, in order to also support the likes of matrix.org.

[erlend-sh]

Read-only bridge with commune-rs

We're actively working towards basic Discord syncing in commune-rs. Unlike the two options above, this would entail running an actual Commune instance like https://app.commune.sh/commune and syncing it with Discord.

To start with this wouldn't need to be more than one-way (Discord to Commune) and read-only.

Pros

• Live-tests an actual Commune instance
• Seeds our Commune instance with real-world content.
• Compatible with the matrix.org approach, since the Commune instance would be set up on its own domain.

Cons

• Will likely remain read-only for a long time due to the still early development stage of commune-rs.

[erlend-sh]

Read-only bridge with commune-server

We've previously been severely blocked on this, but there's been time to ponder and we've got more people around with fresh perspectives and insights, so perhaps it's worth revisiting?

Pros

• Live-tests an actual Commune instance
• Seeds our Commune instance with real-world content.
• Compatible with the matrix.org approach, since the Commune instance would be set up on its own domain.

Cons

• Dev-time might be better spent on lower-hanging fruit for the purpose of our MVP milestone.