Take a trip back through time with me as we learn about how bridges happened. Why did we do it at all? Whose idea was it to hook up the then fledgling matrix.org network to the biggest IRC network? How many databases were shredded in the line of duty? This talk features a journey back through time as we look at bridges and integrations that have been built on Matrix over the years, and what we can hope to learn from it. There will be laughter, there will be eyebrows raised, there will be content involving the infamous IRC bridges and there may be a tear or two. There is plenty to dig into here as we go behind the scenes on what it takes to maintain a bridge for the global Matrix community, as well as how the standards of appservices have evolved over the years Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ about this event: https://cfp.2025.matrix.org/matrix-conf-2025/talk/D83FKE/