Gitter has fully migrated to Matrix

Today, you will have noticed that Gitter looks a little different. In fact, you may recognize it as Element, the flagship Matrix client you might already be familiar with. This brings together all the benefits we mentioned in our pre-announcement blog post and wrapping up the long-term plan from back when Gitter joined Matrix.

If you’re looking for your existing rooms and chat message history, that’s all still there. Just sign in to app.gitter.im and you should be onboarded with all of the same room membership as before. If you notice anything missing or off, please reach out to support@gitter.im with the details.

This is fantastic progress to move away from the venerable Gitter apps and making your history durable to stand the test of time.

If you’re staring at our feature parity issue, there is a glaring missing checkbox omission on a “Public static archive (indexed by search engines)” solution. We’re addressing this with the Matrix Public Archive but it isn’t quite ready yet to have a canonical instance for everyone to use yet. This piece will be an eager follow-up to today’s migration though. If you really need something to use now, view.matrix.org is available to view any Gitter room, example with the gitter/gitter room. The Matrix Public Archive also has the potential to fill the void of Sidecar for embedding your chat room on your own site.

What’s changing?

Instead of inheriting community and room permissions from GitHub or GitLab repos, rooms are now only set as private or public respectively with current membership synced. This means that when offboarding a team member, you should also manually remove them from your Matrix rooms.

Email notifications are also off by default. If you still want to receive email notifications, after signing into Element, go to Settings -> General -> Email addresses to set your email, then go to Settings -> Notifications to make sure email notifications are turned on.

For the integration and activity feed that used to live in the right sidebar, you can set up bots/bridges like matrix-hookshot or go-neb (some are available in the integration manager). For the sidebar itself, you can track https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-hookshot/issues/631

Anything left using the Gitter APIs will need to be updated to use the Matrix API, https://spec.matrix.org/latest/client-server-api/

FAQ

Where is my message history?

We’ve split each room into two Matrix rooms, "live" and historical. The "live" room is the one you’ve been chatting in since we started bridging and the historical Matrix room is where we imported all the history up to the point of the "live" room. You can find the historical Matrix room by looking for the room predecessor of your "live" Matrix room. You can find this via Room Settings -> Advanced -> View older messages in foo/bar

Jumping through history will become even easier once jump to date is generally available in Element and you can jump to the beginning of a room. And generally browsing history by day in the Matrix Public Archive when that goes live.

If you don’t see any messages in the historical Matrix room, then there wasn’t any history to import before the "live" room. We didn’t make the distinction whether to create the historical room based on if any messages would be sent in it.

A small minority of rooms that weren’t bridged to the gitter.im homeserver; the rooms where you originally asked us to bridge somewhere else or were an automatically migrated portal room from the old Gitter bridge. Those rooms will have a gap in history from when we initially started bridging to Matrix until you asked us to bridge to your own room. That history still exists in that in-between gitter.im room but that chain is not something we tracked so you will have to wrangle that yourselves.

Why do I see a bunch of random rooms that I didn’t see in the old Gitter app?

You probably had these rooms hidden in Gitter but this isn’t a distinction made on Matrix so you will have to decide what you want to do with them. Feel free to leave any room you don’t want to be in or with Element, you can mark them as low priority to put them at the bottom of your room list.

How do I get rid of this ugly ID in the middle of my Matrix user ID (MXID)?

If you had an existing Gitter account, sorry, you’re stuck with an ugly looking Matrix user ID (MXID) since there isn’t a way to rename them and we wanted you to have control of the same bridged user that has been sending messages on Matrix.

If you want a better MXID, you will need to create a new account and manually migrate your membership and permissions to that new account.

I should be an admin of this room? What should I do?

If you expect to be an admin of a room but don’t see the power levels on Matrix, it’s probably because your GitHub/GitLab token was no longer valid or your org had organization access control that blocked Gitter at the time that we did the admin check. You will need to rely on the existing admins in the room to re-grant you permissions.

Also make sure you're signed in with your account on the gitter.im homeserver and not some other Matrix account you had elsewhere.

Everyone shows up as "Mod" instead of "Admin" in my room?

People who have a power level of 90 show up as a "Mod" in Element but they are in fact admins of the room.

90 is the custom power level we've set for admins of the room. If you notice, any action can be taken by a user with 90 power level (check the roles and permissions of the room or the m.room.power_levels event)

We're considering updating the power level of everyone to 100 so everything just displays correctly in any case, https://gitlab.com/gitterHQ/gitter.im/-/issues/4

Improving the way a custom power level in Element is displayed is tracked by https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/24528

Help?!? I can’t scrollback past all of the membership events

Syncing the membership in some of the big rooms created a lot of membership events which make it hard to scroll past because it first needs to paginate 20 at a time before you get to real messages.

This issue is being tracked by Filter out flood of member & hidden event spam when we detect the scrollback is full of it. Go add a 👍 reaction there if you care or create a new issue if you have a better idea to solve this.

Another thing that could help with this "soon" is jump to date (not generally available in Element yet) but then as a user you have to know that trick to jump to the previous day before all of the membership events.

Is there a good way to accept all of these invites and mark the messages as read?

For bulk accepting invites, you can use Settings -> Security & Privacy -> Advanced -> Bulk options -> Accept all invites

For mark all messages as read, you can use Settings -> Notifications -> Mark all as read (red button at the bottom)