Portions of conversations in Gitter are missing in the Matrix room
I recently started a conversion in a room using the gitter.im website. However, when I went to the same room using the Element matrix client, I noticed that there was a line in the conversation that was missing.
Here is a screen shot from gitter.im

And here is a screen shot from Element

You see that the "Hi... " line is missing in the second.
I have checked this same room using the android Element client, and the same line is missing.
What is strange, is that this room is bridged to a slack room, and the entire conversation was correctly bridged to slack.
Workarounds
When a Gitter user joins a room, we could also join them on the Matrix side instead of waiting for the first message to be sent (as suggested by @piegames). The delay between when they join and send a message is probably great enough to not trigger this issue. But it's still general issue with Synapse which could be triggered at any time-scale given lag and network weirdness.
Related issues:
- Synapse issue (federation race condition): https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/10066
- https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/1444