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Comment by erinnh | Hacker News Reader

My first thought was: „my question would be the reverse“. I have no idea why I’d use XMPP, so I will tell you what I like about Matrix.

- modern chat solution with features people have come to expect from Slack and Discord

- many bridges that have kept me from having to use more than one chat client for multiple protocols (think pidgin)

- lots of great communities are on matrix

- pretty good voice chat

- open source

- selfhosted

Those are my main reasons why I like Matrix. My question to you would be: what do you like about XMPP?

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XMPP is well-defined open source selfhosted easily extendable federated standard for exchanging data containers (messages) in a sequential manner. I have zero experience with Matrix, but have experience developing Jabber clients (both mobile and desktop), developing XMPP server, services and VoIP gateways back in mid 2000th. I can say that XMPP with it's all-covering XEPs can satisfy needs of anyone today. Why would people need something else like Matrix ? I'm trying to understand what motivated Matrix development. Can Matrix provide anything that is completely missing in XMPP beside bad PR ?

XMPP gained bad publicity as overcomplicated XML based protocol which was abandoned by Google in favour of their proprietary solution somethere in 2011. Till then it had been worshipped as one of the best open standard ever developed.

Matrix has well maintained clients and the overall experience is smooth especially for non technical people.

Source: I use XMPP and Matrix daily.

What XMPP client(s) are you using that are not well maintained? And why?

Dino and Gajim both crash frequently on Wayland (Sway in particular) due to GTK issues that I'm not expecting to be fixed any time soon. Gajim also gets very slow the longer it's open, can't recall if Dino was the same. Dino also has the usual GNOME-y issues of being over-simplified and lacking in customization and features. When I changed from Dino to Gajim I was shocked at all the stuff I could suddenly do, was weird to think both were XMPP clients.

Something with Gajim's features but using Qt would be pretty great potentially. GTK stuff also often has this horrible thing where it fades the window when unfocused, which gets really awful and unresponsive when things get laggy, also ruins screenshots. Never figured out how to turn it off. Part of the theme apparently, but GNOME also doesn't want you customizing/changing your theme. I'm just using Adwaita-dark usually.

Matrix clients aren't great either, but overall Nheko gives me less trouble and pain than Gajim, using both daily. irssi (IRC client) is kind of my gold standard for stability/performance/features with weechat being mostly okay too.

If you're an irssi/weechat person, I use poezio as my primary client (and profanity is another console client, but I've never tried it). Obviously console clients lack some features (calls, avatars [usable ones, anyway]) but it does the job for me. I do use a Conversations fork on my mobile for communicating with family while I'm out and about, as it's nice to have calls and such then.

Pidgin?

I used to use Pidgin and as for the why: I had used Pidgin for many years to AIM, MSN, etc.

Yeah, Pidgin has fallen behind significantly with regards to modern XMPP compliance. The developers are still working on Pidgin actively, but the focus is on a big rewrite of the foundations right now (3.0) so they can more easily support modern IM features.

I wish them luck, but considering their lack of manpower, by the time 3.0 comes out for "modern IM features", we'll probably have telepathic computers.

I was there when they had the famous video-voice branch.

Heck, I just checked: https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/vvAPI?version=1

It was 15 (!) years ago :-)

Dino.im crashes too frequently for my tastes. It also doesn't have an official Windows version. Gajim looks outdated and the update procedure broke several times (I know the authors are working hard to modernize it though).

iOS story is sad. Family used Snikket (thanks for your work on it) but it still dropped notifications even after following with issues and Prosody modules needed. (Monal seems to be okayish now).

Even Conversations.im seems stuck. I know everyone has their favorite missing feature but for me no reactions is the biggest.

https://matrix.org/docs/legacy/faq/ there are some answers to "why not xmpp"

> „my question would be the reverse“. I have no idea why I’d use XMPP

> My question to you would be: what do you like about XMPP?

Same things & more:

- modern chat solution with features people have com to expect from WhatsApp

- many bridges that have kept me from having to use more than one chat client for multiple protocols (think pidgin)

- many great messengers have discovered XMPP as a great base for their system

- lots of great communities are on XMPP

- realistic participant counts in public chat rooms - no counting dead (former) members

- pretty good video & voice chat

- open source

- selfhosting possible

- fewer concerns about data protection and privacy

- more resource efficient (less memory required, lower CPU utilization)

And:

- The use is possible and allowed everywhere where e-mail is in use.

What are your favorite clients? My issue with XMPP is that many clients lack modern conveniences, and it's not easy to get people on board for that reason.

Which modern conveniences do you find are lacking, out of curiosity?

- modern, clean and pretty UI

- simple encryption support. should be able to set it up with a couple clicks and don't have to worry about it

- seamless synchronization between devices

- quick push notifications that don't require me to have something cluttering up my notification bar forever

these are just some of the points I could think about at the top of my head. the majority of clients have one or a couple of them, but there's no client to my knowledge which has all of them.

I have yet to find one that doesn't have awkward push notifications. like come on, do you really think I want an ugly notification turned on at all times watching for messages?

edit: formatting

> what do you like about XMPP?

- plenty of fast native clients

- server resource usage

- simplicity of the protocol, especially the encryption

> plenty of fast native clients

And God help you making all of them talk to each other properly...

I have used conversations (and derivatives), gajim, dino, converse.js, and movim to have omemo encrypted xmpp conversations; and I talk to people on Siskin and have used profanity in the past. Seems to work properly, unless I'm missing something.

Now try to make a voice and/or video call.

I do/have, with conversations, siskin, movim, and I think dino. Can you expand on your experiences?

gajim, pidgin, dino... none of them worked when I tried to call from my desktop to my Conversations' app on Android.

Does any Matrix client support voice/video calls other than Element (including Hydrogen as it shares Element Web's codebase)?

Fluffychat supports it too. Check out https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/, you can click the clients for a feature list.

Hydrogen does not share a single line of Element Web’s codebase.

I must have got it confused with another client then. Wasn't there another lightweight one made by Element-the-company that reuses the react SDK?

nope.

Before XEP-0459, every client implement their own subset of standard and seldom talks with clients that implement a differnt subset.

> - simplicity of the protocol, especially the encryption

only simple for developers though - due to the lack of Cross Signing it is very difficult to keep communication secure.

What is cross siging in the messaging context?

implicitly verifying all (including future) of somebody's devices although running through the verification process only once.

Without it, e.g. if you log into a new session, you have to verify with all your contacts before you can safely use that session for communication

What is a good way to discover great communities on Matrix?

https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/matrix/#chat-rooms

This is the way to go:

https://matrixrooms.info/

My 2c might not crush the scale, but FWIW I'd expect XMPP clients to be easier to work with if I had existing PGP keyrings that I wanted to re-use, favoring consistant identities and protocols over more stringent avoidance of key re-use. Could be a key on a smartcard, or the key your employer kept a revocation certificate for.

Conversations has great support for OpenKeychain on Android, and I'd love to see that come to competing protocol Deltachat but the devs are focusing on cross-platform behaviors atm. Android-specific fork Deltalabs might be willing to be upstream for it if anyone knows where to start with that.

xmpp did most of that first before it fell off :(

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