I see the matrix is more popular than xmpp, but why?
Don’t get me wrong but I just don’t get all these „why do you use messenger X and not Y?“ threads that occasionally pop up. The answer is almost always „because the people I want to talk to use X“.
I use messengers to talk to specific people. Friends, family, the people I game with. It’s not like lemmy or reddit which are more about topics than about people. I can join a community about my favorite hobby on any platform and get more or less the same experience. But with messengers that doesn’t work. Matrix can be a thousand times better than Discord or XMPP but if the people I need to reach aren’t there, it’s absolutely useless to me. And convincing them to switch over with me isn’t really an option. They rightfully ask why they should get yet another messenger just for me when everyone else they want to talk to is on one they already have.
It’s almost a miracle that so many people switched from IRC to Discord when that came out but I guess they just had a bunch of features that people wanted.
Well. I do it the other way. I would not install effing whatsapp just to reach someone. I tell then once where to find me, and, if they want to know, why this is and why i prefer it and why i wouldn’t install app X. If they don’t, then bad luck for me. Or not.
I’m the same way. I say they can use Signal, or just SMS. Or just wait until we see each other again, if ever.
That’s the reason I use matrix, I have bridges so that if someone messages me on ANY platform, it goes to matrix and I can respond there.
It’s not the best solution, but it’s worked well for me and I like having everything in one app
XMPP parlance calls it “gateways” https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0100.html
Yes, and with fresh new releases of the software.
This is the right answer - you go where the people are.
I keep in touch with friends and family on WhatsApp, do gaming stuff on Discord and most of the Lemmy/Fediverse chat is on Matrix (partly helped by some degree of Matrix integration to provide secure messaging). I am in XMPP but no-one else I know is, so it just sits there unloved.
The question makes more sense in the context of “our friend group is deciding to move to a new communication system” Which should we choose.
We narrowed it down to xmpp, signal and matrix. Signal looked terrible to impossible to self host because the clients might make it hard to choose another server.
Matrix looks good but slow and more like irc ? Also like signal, there’s few clients.
Xmpp was just more mature, more diversity of clients. But missing new things like comment retractions, comment reaction, opengraph url previews, combine image+text messages and image albums.
Don’t use either, they’re unreliable services and not enough people use them. Stick to IRC.
typical “my opinion is objective reality” comment. Matrix works well, as does XMPP. Looking over my own experience as user and admin as well as other users and admins, matrix has about the same reliability as the large IMs like Whatsapp and Signal.
Matrix does definitely not have the same reliability as WhatsApp or Signal. I’ve used it for around 3 years now with a group of tech savvy friends.
It’s still a regular occurrence that we get cannot decrypt errors, sometimes the app doesn’t show new messages in the chat but they are visible in the preview, also the app can be soooo slow.
Also, I know it’s not user error. If you check the Matrix development and follow their blog posts they already acknowledged the issues and are working on fixes. But for now it’s just wishful thinking when one calls them reliable alternatives for mainstream use. I’m not hating and will keep using the project because I truly think they are doing amazing work.
I have had about three whatsapp outages in the last year I used it regularly. They have been regional/global outages, visible on outage tracking websites. I have had zero outages with matrix (bar one that I have caused myself by misconfiguring and the server restarting).
Depending on the time you have used matrix you will have a lot earlier experiences than I do. Yes, sometimes I cant figure out why something is not working but the service itself runs like clockwork.
The issue here is perspective. Whatsapp is proprietary software which runs on company servers. Matrix is a mostly community/non profit led effort and just doesnt have the manpower or money to develop in high speed. For that matter, the protocol is in its infancy.
Its just unrealistic to say whatsapp is „more reliable“.
A more general chat platform will really want end-to-end encryption which IRC doesn’t have. Matrix & XMPP offer decentralized rooms so you don’t have to create an account & join each server to chat, but rather your server can connect to another server.
You don’t have to solve every problem in a single application. If you need privacy, use iMessage or Signal.
Public chat is by definition not secure, anyone can be sitting in the room logging, so it’s not that essential as long as client-server uses TLS. Modern IRC does have SDCC chat, but not all clients will use it, so stick to secure messengers.
iMessage doesn’t exist outside the US in practice. Signal is centralized, requires a SIM and a Android or iOS primary device (i.e. you must have a phone & it must use the duopoly OS) making it a low recommendation from me.
TLS is fine for an open, public room, but not all chat rooms are public tho. Folks DM each other too an a chat platform & their talks definitely shouldn’t be un-E2EE as it probably shouldn’t be the server operator’s business.
You don’t have to solve every problem in a single application.
I know what you are saying, but also why not? In the case of XMPP, it is meant to be extended to solve any communication task provided someone can engineer the theory into practice (which is usually a money limitation not a technical one).
XMPP used to be pretty popular until google EEEd it afaik. Matrix is kind of an attempt to build on XMPPs “fall from grace” if you will. It’s still very good from what I hear and some say the server is vastly more efficient but I only tried matrix and it works pretty well.
Matrix’s most feature complete server is synapse, which is written in python. Hence not very efficient and scalable.
It’s mostly fine, but to really go big, one of the other server implementations will need to be used, but none of them achieve feature-parity with synapse as far as I know.
I agree that matrix isnt infinitely scalable, which is a great thing imo.
The reason being that most people, especially users, are brainwashed into thinking that centralization is normal or good. It is neither.
Ideally every small group of like 10-100 people has a small server which is one out of millions at some point. Thats the idea of the fediverse.
My server federates with some 8000 servers at this point which is great and matrix.org has like 30% of all users afaik (which are over 100mil in total at this point)
And before I hear the always same argument: yes, it is hard to find peeps on matrix sometimes (it is a lot harder on whatsapp). Be the change you want to see and help with sites like joinmatrix.org
Have a good one.
Do you self host? I read that the federation is where performance becomes a challenge?
Has resource usage gone up dramatically when you started federating?
Agreed. The main advantage of something more efficient will be the ability to run instances on cheaper potato hardware.
Hosted my own xmpp server back when you could talk to facebook messenger and google chat users via federation. But when they closed their walled garden there were nobody to talk to so i stopped it.
Now with matrix i have again a homeserver. Bridged to messenger, google what the new thing is called, slack, and a few others.
Wait a minute… xmpp is federated? Like I can self host and then still message others?
Other xmpp servers that want to yes. But i have nobody that uses xmpp again.
I thought that was why matrix was made. Because it’s federated… What’s the got damn point of matrix?
It’s faster and it’s not Synapse. I could serve hundreds of people on a single Pi while I would need to order a VPS with 4GB RAM to serve the same amount of people. I know there’s better server software out there, but it’s nowhere near Synapse. XMPP simply doesn’t care, clients and servers are well built and almost every client uses OMEMO and honestly I had a lot of decryption errors on Matrix and if you used something else than matrix.org you’d be screwed. It’s simply just better, because it’s faster and has a bigger ecosystem. The only thing that’s not cool about XMPP is that the federated userbase is kinda small. The biggest non-federated XMPP server is WhatsApp and that’s kinda sad. Also the protocol is nice, because most clients keep a socket open to listen for new messages and this is especially nice in the college WiFi environment some of my friends are in where a timer is set after bedtime which would wait until all sockets are closed which doesn’t include XMPP so messaging with my friends after bedtime is still possible.
Just the other day I got downvoted for posting that it’s stupid that 8GB of RAM in laptops is not enough. Software like Synapse, trying to lift the load that it does in Python, is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.
the college WiFi environment some of my friends are in where a timer is set after bedtime which would wait until all sockets are closed which doesn’t include XMPP so messaging with my friends after bedtime is still possible.
The college tries to just shut off the WiFi at night??
