We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.
And now here I am, nostalgic for the good old days of having one chat app that could connect you to everyone over XMPP/jabber.
Please, don’t recommend pidgin, it’s a security hellhole, and a pretty terrible XMPP client at that. If you want something with a similar vibe, check-out https://dino.im/ or https://gajim.org/ if you are more on the “power-user” side of things :)
Indeed. Xmpp is lost as a general purpose chat app for everyone. I have many issues with matrix but it’s the best chance we have, particularly with bridges.
XMPP is the IETF Internet Standard while Matrix is just another custom IM protocol managed by a venture capital funded startup which keeps losing money.
Edit: Sorry, I responded to the wrong parent.
I don’t believe Matrix is better positioned than XMPP to succeed. On a technical aspect, Matrix hasn’t managed to stabilize its protocol, and they’ve been a decade into it. This has resulted in only a single organization being in charge of the protocol, the client and the server implementations. This isn’t sound, this isn’t sustainable. And now, unsurprisingly, this organization is in a financial crisis, has lost important customers, has no budget secured to maintain its staff in the next years, and recently underwent a major licensing change that we can only interpret as a shift towards an opencore model at the detriment of the regular user.
The license change is to a GPL variant from the Apache license. How does that affect the regular user? Wouldn’t it be better?
Neither XMPP nor Matrix will ever become “the next WhatsApp”: the current internet has seen too much consolidation for the tech majors to permit it (and open and federated protocols can’t compete, do not have the marketing budget nor the platforms to promote their software, but I salute the EU’s Market Act attempt to shake-up the status quo).
But that doesn’t really matter IMO. What (I believe) is important in the grand scheme of things is that such protocols remain alive, maintained and secure, so that:
-
small-scale instances can flourish and contribute to a more resilient/efficient internet (think of family-/district-level providers ; this is the kind of service I personally offer: family members and friends at large appreciate that the messages and data that we exchange aren’t shared over some cloud or facebook server for no good reason)
-
IM identities can persist over time: if you are a business or an individual, you may want to look into having a stable/lasting contact address, that will survive the inevitable collapse of facebook/whatsapp/instagram/… If you are old enough, your current email address probably existed before facebook. Why not your IM address?
And yes, I hear you, this is rather niche, but what got me there (and on XMPP in particular) is having been long-enough on the internet to become tired of the never-ending cycle of migrations from service to service. More and more people will have a similar experience as time goes, so this niche will only grow :)
WhatsApp started is an XMPP client, but they use lots of proprietary extensions (doesn’t matter since they don’t federate). You can build very robust and scalable messengers with it if you want to.
The open source implementations are developed by like 1-2 guys in their spare time and they’re not far behind (and sometimes even ahead) other federated messengers which received tens of millions in venture capital funding.
