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?
Again, if “venture funding” is some sort of cheat code, why can’t XMPP make use of it? Do you want some moral high ground or some minimally useful product with mass reach?
Does it allow copying and redistribution? Yes
Can people fork it in case Element tries anything ridiculous like what happened with Elastic/MongoDB/Redis? Yes.
The thing is FOSS. This is what matters. Enshittification is being thrown around way too easily nowadays
And where is the water provided by the XMPP side? “if you are on iOS, use siskin” is not at all an acceptable answer on 2024. The mobile OS with the largest market share in the USA simply does not have a decent client. What is going to be the next line? “People shouldn’t be using iOS anyway, so we shouldn’t spend our resources on it?”
Honestly, we are going in circles now. I don’t want to get in some type of flamewar over two separate open protocols. It starting to get ridiculous like discussing which branch of the Christian Orthodox Church is the purest one.
It’s not a “cheat code” it is a self-defeating funding mechanism as clearly seen with Element. The venture-capital funders don’t care what happens with the individual projects, all they care is to milk them dry at some point and hope that there is at least one that managed to capture the market and thus turns into a monopoly cash-cow.
There are good reasons for companies not wanting to play that game as it is a poisoned gift for most of them, and it is increasingly evident that this is true for Element as well.
P.S: Monal works fine now. But honestly, Apple is such a shit company for open-source projects that it is no wonder that people were not exactly excited about developing a client for it, and Element siphoned up all sustainable funding that might have paid for improving the commercially developed Tigrase iOS xmpp client (Siskin).
No, it doesn’t. It is still far behind in features compared with Element. It still doesn’t have things like reactions, which is pretty much standard in any messaging app.
That you think that Monal is an acceptable alternative makes me believe that your biases are clouding your judgment and make it very difficult to accept your premise about Element being “damned” because of its funding. But let’s just agree to disagree, because I don’t see how this discussion can go any further.