hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3034.txt

Episode: 3034
Title: HPR3034: How to bridge Freenode IRC rooms to Matrix.org
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3034/hpr3034.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 15:28:56

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,034 for Thursday 19 March 2020.
Today's show is entitled, How to Bridge, Freeno, DRC Rooms to Matrix.org,
and as part of the series' social media, it is hosted by Thage Sarah,
and is about 13 minutes long, and carries a clean flag. The summer is.
Thage builds upon a previous episode by Clacky to Deep Dive into bridging IRC to Matrix.org.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
What's good everybody, this is Thage, and just doing a real quick episode,
nothing that's going to be too drawn out about using Matrix to bridge to other services.
So this kind of came up recently on the mailing list for Hacker Public Radio,
and if you're listening to this and you're not on the mailing list for Hacker Public Radio,
that's where all of the decisions get made, so you should probably sign up and be part of that.
If not, you know, you don't get much of a say, but it's usually spurs some interesting conversation.
One of the conversations that was begun last month was how does Hacker Public Radio and the people in Hacker Public Radio engage in social media.
Lots of people brought up different things, but one of the things they got promoted a little bit was Matrix.
And so talking about Matrix, it's really just a free and open source decentralized messaging system.
It's been around for a little bit, and I'll talk about my experience with it before I get into the how we do this.
It's big, strong suit that I've seen now, and the reason that I am using it pretty extensively at this point,
is that it has this inbuilt ability to bridge to other protocols.
I kind of see it as the glue that sticks together some of these social networking and messaging systems into one interface.
Everything you bridge to has a slightly different way of handling it, but it is an extremely powerful way to pull everything together in one spot.
So being the good free culture citizen that I am, I am going to start this episode with a little bit of attribution because everything I'm going to tell you came from other people.
And so I definitely want to make sure that I'm giving those people credit for it, and also pointing you towards the things that they do because it's awesome.
Probably the first thing is if you don't have any idea what Matrix is, or even specifically talking about bridging the IRC, which is what today is really going to be about.
In fact, HPR episode 2169 was put together by Klaiki.
I think this was in 2016. That's a very good episode.
And I would definitely point you in that direction to listen to that.
If you maybe essay precursor to listening to this, definitely.
And then the other person I want to kind of shout out is Dave Lee.
Dave Lee is one of the hosts on the other side podcast network.
They have lots of cool podcast. So you should go check them out if you haven't.
But he is also involved in the HPR community. So definitely both of those people you should go seek out and look at their things because they basically put me on the road to this.
So we've talked about what Matrix is.
My sort of introduction to it was I was in an educational conference.
And one of the things that they did was set up a matrix room.
Matrix was a thing I had heard about because it is a free and open source thing.
And so it was kind of out there.
And so out of curiosity, I just joined it when I was at the conference.
The problem with that was it didn't really highlight what Matrix was.
And when I logged into it, it basically was an IRC room for the conference we were at, which in theory is kind of cool.
But at the same time, I'm at a conference.
I can just look at people and it being sort of vaguely IRC-ish.
I already have IRC. I didn't need another IRC.
So it just didn't appeal to me.
And I came home and deleted the app.
And that was that I didn't really look into it anymore because it just seemed like a redundant thing to me.
Now the thing that power sold me on this was its ability to bridge to free note.
That ability is built into matrix.org's server.
So Matrix is decentralized.
You can't spin up your own server.
But the main server is matrix.org.
And it has some of this bridging capability already built in.
You don't have to put in anything to do it.
And one of those is free note.
For me, what I typically would do is I ran IRC on a server that I run at home.
And I would run that in a screen session.
And when I got home at night, I would reconnect to my screen session and go through IRC.
The problem with that was usually by the time I got home, I was tired and exhausted.
And I would see a big long conversation.
And I would just kind of breeze through it because I didn't have the energy to get engaged with it.
And so it sort of was self-defeating.
I didn't use IRC despite the fact that I was going out of my way to have IRC available to me all the time.
And any IRC connection and any app that I had ever used mobile to stay connected just did not work.
Or the interface wasn't good and it was never a thing that I could fit into my life reliably in a way that made sense.
So when I got in to using Matrix because we were talking about it through HPR,
Clotu actually set up an HPR room a couple of years ago that I guess had just set their dormant
until everybody had figured out that it was there.
And I would say if you are going to try Matrix, that should probably be your first stop.
I believe, let me double check here, I have it pulled up.
So the room, if you get in, you want to join the room hashtag HPR colon matrix dot org.
And what that is is it's basically kind of like an IRC room just for HPR people.
It's kind of cool because a lot of people are there daily hanging out and talking.
When I got on there, I was speaking to Dave and we were talking about how I'd heard that this bridge is
but I never really looked into it because it seemed redundant.
And then he was like, you can pull in your free node rooms into here fairly easily.
And I looked into it and it is remarkably simple to do.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to kind of talk you through the steps to do it.
So everybody has the ability to do so.
Now, the reason you I wanted to do this is because it brings that IRC experience that I love to me and gives me something else.
So one of the nice things about Matrix when you log in is that you find out that there are tons of rooms that are
it's basically like finding a second free node where there are rooms for all sorts of subjects.
So you can join these rooms and it's different communities.
And a lot of these communities are bridged to other things that I don't use.
Like you will see some things bridged to discord servers which I don't use.
Things bridged to Telegram which I don't use.
There's actually I'll put in the show notes a link to all the different protocols that can be bridged to Matrix.
So it's a nice place to find sort of centralized places for people.
But then on top of that, I could keep my IRC rooms logged in with me on the phone all the time.
And so the way I'm doing that is I'm using riot.im.
There'll be a link in the show notes.
That is sort of my understanding the official Matrix app for mobile.
It's available pretty much for everything.
There's also desktop clients that are riot.im.
The nice thing about it being open source is there are other clients.
If you want to go check those out too, I have not because riot seems to do everything I wanted to do.
And especially on mobile, it is a very nice interface.
I'm able to do everything I want to do from there.
Okay, so let's get down to the nitty gritty.
How are you going to get logged into IRC and pull your IRC rooms into here?
So when you get into whatever Matrix app you're using or however you're connected.
Now this is like I said on matrix.org if you're on their main server.
If you're doing another server, you may have to this may not work automatically.
And this is specific to free node.
You can bridge other networks to here, but this is the way that free node does it.
And you will have to look up details for other networks if you want.
So I'm going to assume that you already have registered Nick on free node.
If not, you can actually register a Nick through matrix to free node.
But I'm just going to assume you have one.
So it's pretty simple process if you already have that.
The first thing you need to do is there are kind of two different levels of messaging inside matrix.
The first one is a direct message, which would be directly to a person.
One of the nice things about that is you can you can actually set that up to be double-in encrypted
to where everything in there is completely safe, but you don't have to.
So you're going to first set up a direct message with at free node underscore Nick serve,
which is capital NICK capital SE RV colon matrix.org.
So essentially what this is basically typing slash MSG if you were in IRC.
And you're just sending a message to NICK serve.
And you're just doing that through the matrix client.
And when you do that, you're going to use basically the same command you would use when you log into IRC
if you were using a command line client.
You would type the command identify and then space you would put your Nick and then space the password that you used to log in
that you have registered with that Nick.
And so what that does is it just logs you into free node at that point.
Now step two, you need to start another direct message.
This direct message is going to go to at app service dash IRC colon matrix dot org.
So you should have two direct messages open.
First one was to free node Nick server. This one is going to be to app service dot or app service dash IRC.
Now in this you're going to send another set of commands.
And this command is going to store your password for your IRC Nick and associate that with your matrix account.
So the command is exclamation point store pass all in word.
And then your Nick colon password.
Once you do that, that should associate your login to where you don't have to ever log in again.
Every time you log into free node on matrix, it just associates your Nick on free node with your matrix account.
Now I have, I personally had a couple issues with that and I've heard talking to some other people that they have similarly had issues specifically with augcast planet,
which is if you're going to do this and you want to get on IRC, that would be probably one of the first places that you should check out.
Place where all of us podcasters kind of hang out.
You have to have a register Nick to get into that room.
And for some reason it takes a while and you may bounce off of it a couple times, but eventually it does work.
Another thing that I have read and not tried, but I have passed it along to people as maybe a solution.
I know specifically free node the store pass command instead of putting your Nick and password.
I think you can just put your password.
I don't think it needs to be Nick colon password.
So your mileage may vary.
Just try it both ways and see what happens.
So you've got your direct messages, you authenticate or you identify yourself with Nick serve.
And then you go to app service dash IRC and you store your password inside there.
And then to join, you're just going to go to join like you would join any matrix room.
And you're going to join with kind of the same formula.
It always looks something like this and all this is in the show notes.
It's a lot of me talking words to you.
So I would definitely check out the show notes on this one.
So the form that you will typically use is hashtag free node underscore hashtag.
Hashtag and then whatever channel name.
So if we're going to use all cast planet, we'll just put all cast planet there colon matrix dot org.
So if we were going to do all cast planet, it would be hashtag free node underscore hashtag all cast planet colon matrix dot org.
And from there, you will join the room just like it's any other matrix room.
But it is actually the IRC room.
The IRC room is being brought to you, which is kind of nice.
And you can interact with it in pretty much the same way you interact with IRC in general.
And the nice thing is you can set notifications.
The riot I am app has really nice detailed notifications.
So you can change how you get notified.
So it's not notifying you every time somebody posts in a channel.
But you could kind of keep up to date slowly through the day.
So it's not so overwhelming, at least that's the benefit that I get out of it.
I hope that everybody tries this out.
It's pretty fun.
And I will talk to you guys next time.
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