this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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I don't see the reason we need a venture capital funded bloated protocol anyways. Just switch to XMPP. It's much more lightweight and it's the internet standard for instant messaging.
Let's clear something up:
You DO NOT NEED to pay a dime to Vector Limited for a Matrix homeserver, or use the Element client.
Meanwhile, XMPP is a "built by committee" nightmare, with a committee that didn't commit (pun intended) to basic features, leaving file transfer, audio, or video calls, to be defined as "protocol extensions" (aka: incompatible) by each client.
TL;DR: use Matrix, with the Element client or any other, leave Vector Ltd. for the businesses.
Reality shows that implementations can very well implement the same extensions. If you don't use extremely outdated clients you will find they do have compatible file transfer and A/V calls. ActivityPub works the same way.
Meanwhile Matrix Ltd. cooks up a completely new, incompatible protocol instead of building upon existing internet standards.
There is no "Matrix Ltd.", the Matrix protocol is being worked on by the "Matrix Foundation", a UK CIC (kind of NGO), with adoption by French an German governments.
XMPP clients "appear" to have compatible file transfer and A/V calls... until you try using them and find out they sometimes lose bytes from one client to another, but not the other way around, sometimes calls only work one way, and so on. That's the effect of not having a minimum common ground defined in the protocol spec.
The NGO is a decoy organization with exactly the same people (minus one) as the VC funded startup. Go look at the "core spec team" and find out which organization they belong to.
Your information on XMPP seems to be quite outdated. File transfer in XMPP is now mostly done by uploading the file via HTTP and sending the URL. Audio calls are done using WebRTC and work two ways.
I wish XMPP had stuck around. I used to run a Prosody server and it worked well enough but I think the E2E keys would occasionally need to be fixed. I used Conversations on Android as a client at the time. The things that makes me hesitate to dedicate too much effort to Matrix are:
When I stopped running an XMPP server I switched the only other user over to Signal and we've stuck there since. With how buggy the Element iOS client, Fluffy Chat and web client have been for me (app crashes when joining rooms, rooms don't exist when they in fact do), I don't want to risk an upset by trying to push people there since Signal is good enough. And these are all issues that exist when the company who makes Matrix (plus contributors of course) are the ones running the server.
At this point I'm just inclined to grab the export they provide and switch to matrix.org for the 1 or 2 rooms I care to have a presence in.