Edit: Matrix isn’t going freemium, it’s introducing premium accounts to fund the matrix.org homeserver. Thank you for the corrections in the comments.

Matrix is going freemium Matrix is introducing premium accounts 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?

  • LWD@lemm.ee
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    4 days ago

    XMPP’s problem is it got stuck in the federated protocol mire a long time ago, and never escaped it.

    The protocol was never made for most modern things:

    • Depending on how you look at it, there is either no encryption standard, or there are roughly three encryption standards with varying levels of completeness.
    • Multi device support got approved as “stable” last year, but there’s no reason to assume clients all implement it evenly.