I’m looking into hosting one of these for the first time. From my limited research, XMPP seems to win in every way, which makes me think I must be missing something. Matrix is almost always mentioned as the de-facto standard, but I rarely saw arguments why it is better than XMPP?
Xmpp seems way easier to host, requiring less resources, has many more options for clients, and is simpler and thus easier to manage and reason about when something goes wrong.
So what’s the deal?
You are basing your experience on Pidgin, which is the worst possible choice for an XMPP client that hasn’t been updated in over a decade. Other XMPP clients are relatively modern looking and easy to use, including encryption (probably easier than Matrix for most users).
I looked at Dino and another one mentioned here and they look dated. Windows 95 feel with better anti-aliasing, rounder corners, but same colors? Gtk 2 or something?
Pidgin was my messenger of choice to communicate with people on facebook, gmail, and a few other protocols back then.
But yeah, my experience with XMPP wasn’t good and if they don’t have bridges, there isn’t much of a reason for me to switch right now. It doesn’t seem to provide any advantages over Matrix.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Looks like a standard GTK4 app to me. Whether or not that is to someone’s tastes is obviously subjective, but it uses the same design language as every other GTK app under the sun.
GTK apps always look out of place on Windows though. Looks far more sensible in its native environment (i.e. *nix running GNOME).
🤔 maybe GTK4 apps look dated to me. Didn’t realise that’s what GTK4 looks like.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Dino has an intentionally simplistic design, but it doesn’t look “dated” at all. Gajim or Movim both look pretty modern and similar to Discord etc. these days.
And XMPP has bridges to pretty much all major commercial networks, it just doesn’t have a major centralized provider of them that in exchange siphons up all your personal data like Element & Beeper does. But you can easily self-host the available bridges for XMPP.
That’s highly subjective, but I’ve shown some Gtk3 apps to people at work and the most expressive first reaction I got was “ew”. Dino and others getting that exact reaction wouldn’t be surprising.
And this is another reason why it isn’t prominent. “Grandma, all you need to do is host an XMPP server. It’s incredibly easy”.
Anti Commercial-AI license
You can easily do it for your Grandma. But your argument can be just as easily applied to Matrix vs. WhatsApp etc. If you use the centralized services of Matrix.org or Beeper then Matrix is just a very poor version of Discord.