The Matrix.org network has great potential, but after years of dealing with glitches, slow performance, poor UX, and one too many failures, I’m done with it.
XMPP is significantly less decentralized, allowing them to “”“cut corners”“” compared to Matrix protocol implementation, and scale significantly better. (In heavy quotes, as XMPP isn’t really cutting corners, but true decentralization requires more work to achieve seemingly “the same result”)
An XMPP or IRC channel with a few thousand users is no problem, wheras Matrix can have problems with that. On the other hand, any one Matrix homeserver going down does not impact users that aren’t specifically on that homeserver, whereas XMPP is centralized enough that it can take down a whole channel.
Meanwhile IRC is a 90s protocol that doesn’t make any sense in the modern world of mainly mobile devices.
XMPP also doesn’t change much, the last proper addition to the protocol (from what I can tell, on the website) was 2024-08-30 https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0004.html
XMPP doesn’t change very very often, but there’s actually tons of XEPs that are in common use and are considered functionally essential for a modern client, and with much higher numbers than XEP-0004
The good news, though, is that mostly you as the user don’t need to care about those! Most of the modern clients agree on the core set and thus interoperate fine for most normal things. And most XEPs have a fallback in case the receiver doesn’t support the same XEPs.
I’m general XMPP as a protocol is a lightweight core that supports an interesting soup of modules (in the form of XEPs) to make it a real messenger in the modern sense. And I think that’s neat! But you can’t really judge the core to say how often things change.
The article author went back to XMPP, which does appear to be the best option currently.
In what universe is XMPP better than Matrix?
XMPP is significantly less decentralized, allowing them to “”“cut corners”“” compared to Matrix protocol implementation, and scale significantly better. (In heavy quotes, as XMPP isn’t really cutting corners, but true decentralization requires more work to achieve seemingly “the same result”)
An XMPP or IRC channel with a few thousand users is no problem, wheras Matrix can have problems with that. On the other hand, any one Matrix homeserver going down does not impact users that aren’t specifically on that homeserver, whereas XMPP is centralized enough that it can take down a whole channel.
Meanwhile IRC is a 90s protocol that doesn’t make any sense in the modern world of mainly mobile devices.
XMPP also doesn’t change much, the last proper addition to the protocol (from what I can tell, on the website) was 2024-08-30 https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0004.html
XMPP doesn’t change very very often, but there’s actually tons of XEPs that are in common use and are considered functionally essential for a modern client, and with much higher numbers than XEP-0004
The good news, though, is that mostly you as the user don’t need to care about those! Most of the modern clients agree on the core set and thus interoperate fine for most normal things. And most XEPs have a fallback in case the receiver doesn’t support the same XEPs.
I’m general XMPP as a protocol is a lightweight core that supports an interesting soup of modules (in the form of XEPs) to make it a real messenger in the modern sense. And I think that’s neat! But you can’t really judge the core to say how often things change.
IRC makes sense in a world where people register to bouncers, which allow people to connect to any IRC network they please.