Migrating from mautrix-facebook

[MrAnno]

Hi,

Last week, a migration path from mautrix-facebook to mautrix-meta was published by upstream:

https://github.com/mautrix/docs/blob/master/bridges/go/meta/facebook-migration.md

I couldn't find anything similar in the playbook, so I thought it might be worth opening an issue and discussing the current migration method.

[jswetzen]

I've added a link to that documentation in #3254, but have been unsuccessful in completing it. A few issues:

1. The migration feature isn't there in v0.2.0, so it needs the latest Docker image (which makes my doc link misleading).
2. Database permissions need to be manually altered in order to run the migration, and it's still not straightforward to modify the mautrix-meta-messenger service etc. as needed.
3. Migration requires identical bot name and username prefixes, which I think is only partially supported by the playbook variables.
4. hs_token and as_token may or may not have to be identical, I didn't manage to get it running either way.

At this point, I'm very curious about people who have made the switch already, did you get any message history without db migration? A meta bridge issue mentions backfill, does that pull in old messages?

[Joshndroid]

Migration did not work for me and i had to manually remove each room from my matrix element session and then re-add the chats... it was painful but fine in the end

[jswetzen]

@Joshndroid But did you get chat history? 😱

[Joshndroid]

@jswetzen no I lost all history. I am not too concerned with the Facebook messages history though so was okay.

I was more annoyed that I ran everything and it never did the clean up/out. It was weird at first as I thought that the new bridge was broken until I realised that it was the old Facebook bridge rooms and I needed to find the new ones created by the new meta bridge and delete the old ones

[ThellraAK]

I lost all history as well, but got hundreds of extra rooms.

The old bridge only created rooms as they were used, this one pulled out to I think at least 6 months.

[MrAnno]

Meta started to enable their e2e encryption automatically, even though I refused to set their PIN thingy for long months:

It seems I can't delay the migration any longer. I'll let you know if I succeed.

[jswetzen]

I've started preparing to run migration, but didn't take the plunge yet. I think these configuration variables will be needed to match the old bot username etc. at least.

matrix_mautrix_meta_messenger_appservice_username_prefix: facebook
matrix_mautrix_meta_messenger_bridge_username_prefix: facebook
matrix_mautrix_meta_messenger_version: latest
matrix_mautrix_meta_messenger_bridge_permissions_custom:
  '@<myuser>:{{ matrix_domain }}': admin

I needed version because db migration wasn't enabled in the meta_messenger version used by default. Good luck @MrAnno !