Discontinue bridge in favour of native gitter federation

[Half-Shot]

As the gitter.im homeserver and bridge is now live (thus Gitter now speaks Matrix), this bridge will be winding down and will be deprecated soon. Before we wrap up here, the new bridge will need to be able to plumb to rooms as this bridge currently does.

Once this has been done, a final version will be released telling users to upgrade and that support for this bridge has ended. We will archive the project soon after.

Plan: https://gitlab.com/gitterHQ/webapp/-/issues/2675#note_462793676

• Portal rooms
• Plumbed rooms

Plumbed rooms

(Concerns: this could backfire if we end up pushing everyone back into v1 rooms, how do we cause the least friction here?)

• Removing the old gitter bridge users.
• Remove the association in the database.
• Invite the new gitter bot to the room & ensure it joins.
• Re-map the new bridge to this room.
• (Optionally) Repoint the new gitter room back to the old one.

-- https://gitlab.com/gitterHQ/webapp/-/issues/2675#note_462793676

Also see https://gitlab.com/gitterHQ/webapp/-/issues/2674#option-2-add-gitter-cross-server-aliases-to-the-old-rooms-white_check_mark

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Related to:

• https://gitlab.com/gitterHQ/webapp/-/issues/2674
• https://gitlab.com/gitterHQ/webapp/-/issues/2675

[MadLittleMods]

I've created the Gitter half of the script to migrate the plumbed rooms, https://gitlab.com/gitterHQ/webapp/-/merge_requests/2119

And we can probably adapt #106 for the first half of the migration to break the old bridge away.

[MadLittleMods]

From the sync call meeting on 2020-02-11, we're going to leave the old Gitter bridge running for the random plumbed rooms.

We can move the obvious rooms which would benefit from the new bridge’s capabilities. I'd say this step is done except for the few mentioned here: https://gitlab.com/gitterHQ/webapp/-/issues/2674#note_486764127

Then for the medium term, focus on MSC2923 to solve the plumbing use case for people.

[MadLittleMods]

As an update, we're deciding shut down the old Gitter bridge. The plan is to find the leftover rooms on the bridge that are still active and bridge them over. But the inactive rooms will be left out and anyone who speaks up, we can just point them to the new place on Gitter.

@Half-Shot What's the best way to get the active rooms still going through the old bridge?

[tqpcharlie]

I've created a PR that adds a deprecation notice to the README: #107

[MadLittleMods]

Thanks @Zachinquarantine 🚏