XMPP has a variety of clients for about all platforms, is federated, can (optionally) be e2ee. Its most used client on Android is user-friendly and has built-in (optional, again) tor support. On a cheap vps you can easily run a server with many users. I think it deserves a little more love than it receives.
I think XMPP is perhaps the best example of what Moxie was talking about in The Ecosystem is Moving: it's a super fragmented experience. Most users do not (and should not need to) know the technical details of how their server, or their friend's servers, are configured.
May I suggest you give it another try? It has been steadily working for me for a few years now. (Conversations/gajim/dino/siskin-im/beagle for the clients, and prosody server side)
> because their server hasn't enabled the necessary XEPs
Changing to a server that does is not a big deal, since most (all?) XMPP clients allow multiaccounting.
> it's a super fragmented experience
What you call fragmentation I would call diversity, and I think it is a good thing.
> Most users do not (and should not need to) know the technical details
I agree that a certain level of abstraction is necessary to use complicated stuff. However, I think not having the slightest idea of things work is a problem, and leads to alienation.
For me, the biggest blocker on XMPP is that OMEMO and multiple devices don't seem to get along. Matrix solves this with cross-signing, but I don't believe the OMEMO XEP addresses the problem in any way.
I think Moxie's article is directly a response to XMPP. But on the other hand, Matrix has managed to have both federation and rapid evolution, so he's just empirically wrong.
Let's make using and building on internet standards popular again.
Random tangent: I feel like XMPP is everywhere but nobody really talks about it. It just quietly works and stays out of the way.
The wider audience wants to be able to hand out their contact details at a bar and know they'll be able to block the person if they turn out to be a creep.
Or they want to be able to block their annoying ex, that crazy QAnon fan cousin etc etc.
This is a 100% must have feature, and yet it's treated like an optional feature.
There's so many features like this - it's like people using XMPP have never looked at how most people use messaging.
However I doubt this is the reason why the most popular messengers do not comply with the XMPP standard today.
Whatsapp also originally (or maybe still?) used Jabber. The whatsapp protocol was Jabber with binary tokenised XML, iirc.
It is probably due to XMPP's lack of popularity, but FWIW I have been using my XMPP for about 4 years and have not received a single unsolicited message yet.
Care to elaborate?
It’s not as bad on mobile (I can only talk about Signal here, not Matrix), as clients are far more constrained, but once again Signal has a slow Android client (every action only happens after a noticeable delay) while the biggest XMPP client Conversations is instant.
[0]: I tried a beta version that felt like an alpha, but OTOH the last time I tried it, it seemed reasonably stable.