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?
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As unpopular as VC funding is in some circles, the Matrix community owes a huge debt of thanks to Element’s investors (Status, Notion, firstminute, Dawn, Automattic, Protocol Labs and Metaplanet) and Amdocs for funding over $50M of work on both Matrix and Element since 2017.
Ok. I lost track of their funding. Seems like they raised $30M in a series B round in 2021.
Still, look at the timeline. 2021 is not that long ago, and Matrix was already ahead of XMPP in mindshare by then. It’s not really fair to say that this money was only spent in marketing, and it is not fair to say that without it XMPP would be making some comeback.
I didn’t say it was only spend on marketing, but they sure send a lot of people to developer conferences everywhere and offered “free” services to many open-source projects with that money.
They were doing that before 2021. Even acquired gitter and ported it to Matrix.
Yes and they had plenty of funding from highly questionable sources before 2021 as well. Even if you only take the 20 million difference in two figures mentioned above, but Element also partnered with a really shady crypto-currency startup in 2018, which had its own sources of investor funding.
Sorry, but now this is starting to sound like sour grapes.
Ok, they got a good amount of funding. But that alone is not enough to justify how they managed to gain as much mindshare as they did in relation to XMPP.
Element’s funding in 2018 or 2021 did not steal any opportunity for (e.g,) snikket to work on their product. Element following the “cathedral” model allowed them to be faster in the development of multi-platform clients, while the XMPP devs were all fixed to the Bazaar ideal, and because of that absolutely failed to deliver a modern application in the platform that is used by half of mobile users in the US.
We (techy types) tend to ignore things that end users care about and we are a lot more forgiving with systems that we see as “technically superior”, but the market cares a lot more about things like “Can I send emojis without having to worry about what client people use?” then “synchronization model or disk space requirements”.
This is not just “marketing”, this is “having someone with actual business and product sense”.
If it was up to me, sure I’d wish that more people would be using XMPP. But in 2019 when I told my parents that I wouldn’t be using WhatsApp anymore and that we needed a different app if they wanted to have video calls and see their grandchildren, XMPP was not even a choice for my iOS-using father, and Element (née Riot.im) was at least usable.
Both Matrix and federated XMPP are irrelevant in the larger picture, but Element chose to reinvent the wheel to have a product they could more easily market to investors. Had they spend a similar amount of money and developer hours to improve existing XMPP based options we might have an actually working and popular alternative now.
But as it stands, we have a quite fundamentally broken Matrix protocol & ecosystem with some semi-usable but more modern looking clients and a working and well proven XMPP ecosystem that is extremely starved of funding and developers.
You can call this “sour grapes” all you want, but it is the sad fact and a direct result of outside investments screwing with incentives of developers.
Edit: and on an ironic side note: in 2019 Riot.im was using a fancy wrapper around Jitsi-meet for all video-calls which is internally using XMPP, so you were in fact using XMPP as that was the only usable solution back then.
Had they spend a similar amount of money and developer hours to improve existing XMPP based options we might have an actually working and popular alternative now.
And where would they get this money in the first place?
Venture-capital is not the only source of funding that they have, and only a tiny fraction would have been necessary to get to the same point if they had not wasted most of their funds reinventing a worse version of xmpp.
