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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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.
If that is true, then why can’t the existing and current players in the XMPP space do it?
Because venture-capital funded grifters from Element are undercutting them for government contracts and offering “free” services to other organisations that would have otherwise likely funded some work on xmpp.
