this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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I see the matrix is more popular than xmpp, but why?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

more popular

That’s not true at all. There are a ton of business applications for XMPP from IoT messaging, to Nintendo’s user presence, to being a 90% chance your favorite online game’s chat back-end. Behind Jitsi & Zoom & WhatsApp is an XMPP server. Matrix by design will never scale to these demands if history needs to live forever & all servers need to duplicate data.

More trendy would be a more appropriate phrase since Matrix wants to chase after proprietary Slack & Discord, where as XMPP is extensible & more generalized for all sorts of applications. Even with all of these proprietary applications, there are plenty of open communities hosted for MUCs & also blog/community thru Movim/Libervia & as an alternative back-end for UnifiedPush, etc. With the server resource usage being much lower, it’s cheaper & easier to maintain an XMPP server alongside another application in a VPS or even on a home network with dynamic DNS. If you are inclined, set one up & test it out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I have never used matrix but why would anyone design something that won't scale by design?

I understand scalability not being a priority but designing something to be poorly scalable by design seems odd.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

If you want the messaging to be resilient, this makes sense as a server can go down but anyone else connected has the whole history on their server.

But I think that is better suited for a forum where copying Slack/Discord’s lead & trying to preserve all history in a chat isn’t worth it as I see this sort of thing as better tasked for ephemeral communication. However, there is something communal & intuitive about chat apps that make folks interact pretty well so they can make decisions. This is a ‘good thing’ where forums don’t get the same engagement—but at the cost of you had to be there or worse, you need an account to see the discussion for that decision.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It’s faster and it’s not Synapse. I could serve hundreds of people on a single Pi while I would need to order a VPS with 4GB RAM to serve the same amount of people. I know there’s better server software out there, but it’s nowhere near Synapse. XMPP simply doesn’t care, clients and servers are well built and almost every client uses OMEMO and honestly I had a lot of decryption errors on Matrix and if you used something else than matrix.org you’d be screwed. It’s simply just better, because it’s faster and has a bigger ecosystem. The only thing that’s not cool about XMPP is that the federated userbase is kinda small. The biggest non-federated XMPP server is WhatsApp and that’s kinda sad. Also the protocol is nice, because most clients keep a socket open to listen for new messages and this is especially nice in the college WiFi environment some of my friends are in where a timer is set after bedtime which would wait until all sockets are closed which doesn’t include XMPP so messaging with my friends after bedtime is still possible.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Just the other day I got downvoted for posting that it's stupid that 8GB of RAM in laptops is not enough. Software like Synapse, trying to lift the load that it does in Python, is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.

the college WiFi environment some of my friends are in where a timer is set after bedtime which would wait until all sockets are closed which doesn’t include XMPP so messaging with my friends after bedtime is still possible.

The college tries to just shut off the WiFi at night??

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Yep, it's more like assisted living for autistic people though

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