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...

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?

  • D06M4@lemmy.zip
    2·
    9 hours ago

    Me too, but at the same time I’m glad we don’t all use exactly the same thing as that usually means cyberattacks are funneled to just one option. You could also say XMPP has been the default for the longest time, but just as it still happens today using XMPP doesn’t mean everything is compatible. Each app has it’s own set of features, some only use OTR for encryption, others might use OMEMO but not the same version and mix up encryption keys… Matrix used to be more compatible between clients, but then 2.0 appeared and either some features aren’t handled the same or some servers don’t so federation breaks or gets laggy. My guess is the next widely adopted thing will probably be a freemium, falsely secure and not private at all centralized service based on FOSS software, already prebundled and preset together with whatever people use the most and with some “all-you-can-eat” offering (probably AI unless the fad fades out). So maybe an upgrade to Whatsapp or something else from Meta or Microsoft. Apple won’t do anything that’s crossplatform, Google can’t persevere on a single IM solution without releasing 3 more that add nothing new and scraping them all in a year, and Amazon will probably stick to backend.

    Still, nothing stops us from using whatever the hell we want. I have my XMPP account and I’m happy with it. I don’t have much use for it, but I don’t plan on deleting it anytime soon.