this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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Whether you're really passionate about RPC, MQTT, Matrix or wayland, tell us more about the protocols or open standards you have strong opinions on!

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Matrix came 15 years after XMPP, so the question should be: why is Matrix preferable? Does it bring anything to the table, other than fragmentation?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I don't believe that its existence causes more fragmentation than it remediates. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36939482 explains why I consider Matrix fundamentally superior most (if not all) uses, although in practice it's because the clients (Element and FluffyChat primarily) are cross-platform and support a generally uniform set of features, in comparison to the aged (but glorious) Pidgin, and its counterparts.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Your hackernews post and the fact you mention Pidgin shows that you haven't used xmpp in the last 10 years. By the time Matrix was first released, xmpp had history sync.

Which is why I can't wrap my head around why a second protocol with no features that didn't already exist in XMPP took over.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I used it yesterday, via Pidgin. I'm [email protected]. Why else would I have referenced it? Don't tell me what I've done. That's not a way to have productive conversations.

Regardless, I can't provide any more technical insight than that - I know solely that the clients provide so much more functionality that irrespective of the protocol, it's better in practice. Fedora, openSUSE, the Bundeswehr, NATO, and Beeper - all chose Matrix over XMPP, not least partially because of Element (which they also all chose).