I’ve been running a matrix server for about 2 years for family. It’s… ok. Clients are bad. Right now nobody on iOS can send images because there is a bug in fluffychat preventing it. Kinda defeats the purpose of a chat for sharing baby pictures. Synapse is a beast. It’s basically taken over my entire VPS.

Joining rooms of various FOSS projects has been nice, but honestly I wish they’d all just stick to libera.chat

This article makes me wonder why we collectively ditched xmpp for matrix when it seems like the protocol is still miles ahead?

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jamiemallers 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The XMPP vs Matrix question is really about where the complexity lives.

XMPP puts complexity in extensions (XEPs). The core protocol is simple but you need to cherry-pick which XEPs your server and clients support, leading to fragmentation. Two XMPP clients might support completely different feature sets.

Matrix puts complexity in the protocol itself - the DAG-based event graph for federation is elegant but expensive. Synapse eating your VPS is the direct consequence of that design choice. Every room maintains a full causal history, which is great for consistency guarantees but terrible for resource usage.

The ejabberd comment in this thread is telling - "just works, takes close to no resources, needs almost no maintenance" for almost a decade. That's the XMPP experience when you accept the tradeoffs.

I think we ditched XMPP not because Matrix was technically better, but because Matrix arrived with a better story at the right time: a single reference client (Element) that actually worked, a clear spec (not 400+ optional XEPs), and federation that felt more like email than like "hope your server supports the same extensions."

The irony is that both protocols now face the same existential problem: your contacts won't switch. The network effects of WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage are the real enemy, not protocol design.

	▲	singpolyma3 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Two XMPP clients might support completely different feature sets. This is of course true of Matrix as well. Just because you document everything in one place doesn't mean every app will support it all. Or that every app will even want to support it all. If every app were exactly the same there would be no point in having multiple apps, after all. > The network effects of WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage are the real enemy, not protocol design. Absolutely.
	▲	zadikian an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Don't know if it's still this way, but I had the exact same experience with the XEPs a decade ago. Even message history is an extension, but at least it has broad support. File transfer was much harder to get right. The servers (ejabberd included) also all defaulted to a simpler but less secure config, so I would've appreciated a writeup like this post back then.

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dannersy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I am genuinely interested in hearing why we collectively ditched XMPP. I would love to hear someone who has been in the weeds on the development or even just following closely.

Edit: Seems someone beat me to it with a good reply.

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zajio1am 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

XMPP had rather bad name. Well-known design issues causing message losses, fractioned ecosystem due to varying implementation of extensions, unsuitability for mobile clients, absence of synchronization between clients, absence of end-to-end encryption. Most of these issues were (much) later fixed by extensions, but Matrix (or Signal for those who do not require federated one) was already there, offering E2EE by default.

Even today, E2EE in XMPP is rather inconvenient compared to Matrix due to absence of chain-of-trust in key management.

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singpolyma3 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I am genuinely interested in hearing why we collectively ditched XMPP

We didn't. It was never very popular, and is today more popular that it has ever been.

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zadikian an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Depends if you mean just the technology or using it in the small federated spirit. Google Talk and Facebook Messenger were XMPP all the way through and worked with vanilla XMPP clients. Slack wasn't XMPP but supported it via a gateway until it was dropped.

Not sure how popular the small federation was back then, but I know Mac OS X Server touted an XMPP server and that was a first-class feature of iChat.

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WD-42 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It wasn’t popular? I remember using pidgin to talk to friends on google chat, facebook and my work contacts. It was glorious.

I haven’t had a reason to use an xmpp client in over a decade.

	▲	kombine 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Same! Pidgin was such a great piece of software

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toastal 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Decent overview (& more broadly but the heart is about XMPP & good ol’ capitalist corpo greed): https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo...