this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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I'm looking into hosting one of these for the first time. From my limited research, XMPP seems to win in every way, which makes me think I must be missing something. Matrix is almost always mentioned as the de-facto standard, but I rarely saw arguments why it is better than XMPP?

Xmpp seems way easier to host, requiring less resources, has many more options for clients, and is simpler and thus easier to manage and reason about when something goes wrong.

So what's the deal?

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (10 children)

has many more options for clients,

The problem of XMPP is here. These options are not uniform among the possible different combinations of servers and clients.

The situation has improved a lot, but there was a point in time where saying "this is my XMPP handle" was far from enough to know if you'd be able to communicate with others, and you'd have to figure out things like:

  • Does the server support MUC?
  • Does the server support E2E? If so, which?
  • Are emojis supported on the server, or do they get converted to ASCII?
  • Can you use audio calls? If so, which codec?
  • If my client supports "share live location", what do you see on your end?

Not to mention that until recently there was no decent XMPP client for iOS. Even today, the best alternative is siskin, which may have its vocal fans but quite frankly is pretty barebones and has a UI that would be considered ugly even in 2010.

Matrix as a protocol is technically worse than XMPP and Synapse is a resource hog compared to Prosody and Ejabberd? Yes, true. But at least I can tell non-technical people to download Element from the App stores and they will have a consistently-not-great-but-acceptable-and-improving experience.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (4 children)

But at least I can tell non-technical people to download Element from the App stores and they will have a consistently-not-great-but-acceptable-and-improving experience.

Conversations on Android looks and feels like any other modern messenger and supports basically all the XMPP features there are. And I found Monal on iOS to be pretty usable as well, when I tested it 3 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Conversations on Android seems to be the default answer for "advanced client".

But for everything else... look at Monal's blog, they only added support to audio calls in October of last year. Nice to see it's still being developed, but "too little, too late" seems fair.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

The other XMPP client for iOS called Siskin has had a/v calls for many years now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Yeah, I mentioned it in the first comment. But seriously, it looks like something built in 2009. It might be functional, but only a die-hard XMPP fan would be interested in using it.

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