this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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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 If you don't use extremely outdated clients you will find they do have compatible file transfer and A/V calls.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Your information on XMPP seems to be quite outdated.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.