Interesting take. I feel the complete opposite, though (With some intense caveats so bear with me here).
While XMPP is definitely more mature, it was more interesting 20 years ago when text chat was king, and voice and video chat was just a novelty. The problem with comparing Matrix and XMPP is that, while on the surface, they seem like competitors, being federated messaging standards, XMPP is first and foremost an instant messaging protocol. Rooms feel added on after, and where voice chat exists, it’s a complete afterthought. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. The extreme intercompatibility of XMPP is a great feature, but you can never, ever know if your correspondents can utilize voice chat unless you ask them[1].
In Matrix, however, rooms and VoIP are first-class citizens. I don’t know if I can say “from the very beginning”, but it sure seems like Matrix, and especially Element were made, from the beginning, with VoIP in mind. While the monopoly of the Element/Synapse ecosystem is problematic, it’s helpful to just be able to assume a person you’re talking to will be able to utilize all the same features you are. Even under the best circumstance, I don’t think you even get close to that in XMPP.
For years, I was rooting for XMPP, it’s got everything I want in a text chat, but if I want to convince my friends to use something other than Discord or Whatsapp, it needs the features that people want[2] from those apps. XMPP is great, but Matrix is solving a different problem. A problem that XMPP can solve, but only if you’re willing to put in the work.
[1] Maybe some XMPP clients have a way of notifying the user of VoIP capability, I’m sure it exists, but I haven’t seen it.
[2] Not to mention end-to-end encryption, which I know is possible in XMPP, but as an afterthought. It’s not a selling point if I have to walk a non-technical user through turning it on, and they have to remember to do it for each chat.
Edit: Final thoughts: If you can show me an out-of-the-box XMPP solution like Synapse/Element that I can launch in a day, and get my Discord friends on, I’ll gladly set it up and try it out!
1: xmpp has come a long way. rooms and video/audio calling work seamlessly even with my parents who are non-technical. (can’t really speak for the state of apps on ios/mac since we don’t have any of those, but some new updates for siskin and monal are said to have some major improvements)
2: e2e encryption via omemo is also enabled by default and works great for 1:1 chats and private groups.
additionally there are now some services that are great for easy onboarding like snikket for running your own server and quicksy for getting users onboarded with a familiar phone number flow (they get an address in the form +@quicksy.im).
compare xmpp. matrix is still mostly unusable in its current state.
I found the example very interesting, especially if you can try it for free however it’s quite memory hungry.
Interesting take. I feel the complete opposite, though (With some intense caveats so bear with me here).
While XMPP is definitely more mature, it was more interesting 20 years ago when text chat was king, and voice and video chat was just a novelty. The problem with comparing Matrix and XMPP is that, while on the surface, they seem like competitors, being federated messaging standards, XMPP is first and foremost an instant messaging protocol. Rooms feel added on after, and where voice chat exists, it’s a complete afterthought. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. The extreme intercompatibility of XMPP is a great feature, but you can never, ever know if your correspondents can utilize voice chat unless you ask them[1].
In Matrix, however, rooms and VoIP are first-class citizens. I don’t know if I can say “from the very beginning”, but it sure seems like Matrix, and especially Element were made, from the beginning, with VoIP in mind. While the monopoly of the Element/Synapse ecosystem is problematic, it’s helpful to just be able to assume a person you’re talking to will be able to utilize all the same features you are. Even under the best circumstance, I don’t think you even get close to that in XMPP.
For years, I was rooting for XMPP, it’s got everything I want in a text chat, but if I want to convince my friends to use something other than Discord or Whatsapp, it needs the features that people want[2] from those apps. XMPP is great, but Matrix is solving a different problem. A problem that XMPP can solve, but only if you’re willing to put in the work.
[1] Maybe some XMPP clients have a way of notifying the user of VoIP capability, I’m sure it exists, but I haven’t seen it.
[2] Not to mention end-to-end encryption, which I know is possible in XMPP, but as an afterthought. It’s not a selling point if I have to walk a non-technical user through turning it on, and they have to remember to do it for each chat.
Edit: Final thoughts: If you can show me an out-of-the-box XMPP solution like Synapse/Element that I can launch in a day, and get my Discord friends on, I’ll gladly set it up and try it out!
1: xmpp has come a long way. rooms and video/audio calling work seamlessly even with my parents who are non-technical. (can’t really speak for the state of apps on ios/mac since we don’t have any of those, but some new updates for siskin and monal are said to have some major improvements)
2: e2e encryption via omemo is also enabled by default and works great for 1:1 chats and private groups.
additionally there are now some services that are great for easy onboarding like snikket for running your own server and quicksy for getting users onboarded with a familiar phone number flow (they get an address in the form +@quicksy.im).
Thank you! What app do you and your parents use?
we use conversations. it’s really lovely and can replace any mainstream chat app.
I run two ejabberd servers, hmm.st for friends and family and one for tilde.team that’s hooked up to shell authentication.
Yeah, 1GB of RAM is not enough to federate with the rest of the matrix homeservers, so it’s only useful for private deployments