Why not XMPP?
discuss.privacyguides.net
To be honest, I don’t quite understand why Matrix passes this hurdle and XMPP does not. Matrix is just as little designed for privacy as XMPP. Metadata is also generated, is also not E2EE (as far as I know) and is also distributed further by federation than in XMPP. The quality of the clients is also very differing. I also see the advantages of Matrix and use it myself, but I find it quite interesting how an extra category was recently created to keep Matrix in the recommendations, although it...

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/40286422

Is UX/UI and marketing really the reason XMPP lags behind Signal/Matrix/Telegram?

Matrix is going Freemium and WhatsApp is adding ads, which is sparking the annual “time to leave [app]” threads.

Users don’t care that much about privacy, but they do care about enshittification, so XMPP not being built for it shouldn’t be a problem.

Meanwhile, I’ve heard for years that XMPP has solved a lot of the problems that lead more popular apps to fail.

Is it really just a marketing/UX/UI problem?

If XMPP had a killer app with all the features that Signal/Whatsapp/Telegram has, would it have as many users?

If not, why does it keep getting out-adopted by new apps and protocols?

  • BackYardIncendiary@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    2·
    9 hours ago

    I’ve run an XMPP server for a small online user group for about 7 years. It was relatively simple to get a basic server up and running.

    One challenge came when my wife and I decided to use it as our everyday mobile messaging service. I had to learn about and configure a number of extensions to get Prosody working well with Conversations (Android) and Monal (iOS).

    Another challenge was filtering spam. I posted my administrator XMPP address online and got hammered with spam. It took a while to figure out how to effectively combat it.

    With respect to why it’s not more popular, imagine if you were trying to sell people on email (with no business use-case). It’s a generic federated protocol. I don’t know if you can get much more bland.