Not only that, but if you're disconnected and reconnected again, you lose your ident if your nickname contains uppercase characters or underscores: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/issues/1...

What stops you from running your own bridge?

The reason for this limitation is actually on the IRC side - we can only have so many users connected via Matrix, so we need to time out stale ones.

I asked around and it seems like you're right about it not being a resource issue (network or computational). The issue is that the bridge is unstable and having tens of thousands of matrix.org users join/parting every now and then disrupts the IRC channels.

It's also mentioned in Libera's FAQ:

> At our request, the EMS-hosted Libera.Chat bridge regularly prunes idle connections to minimize disruptions to IRC channels during bridge restarts.

-- https://libera.chat/guides/faq#can-i-connect-with-matrix