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?
I think that the reason is the same for “why is XMPP mentioned more than IRC?”. IRC has more clients, it’s less resources hungry and simpler than XMPP.
I think that the reason is because it is old-fashione, and it’s clients feel outdated and (native) “lacking features” compared to more popular clients like Discord, WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram or Signal. 🤷♂️
I can imagine my cousins using any of the clients I mentioned before, but not IRC, XMPP, or any protocol from my era. Life and traditions, isn’t it?
From a quick look into XMPP’s clients for android, they seem nice and some have modern features too.
Is there any technical limitation that would prevent xmpp client from having a WhatsApp-like UI?? WhatsApp started out with XMPP and probably still uses a variant of it. If anything, I’d imagine its harder with matrix given the complexity of the protocol.
