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Comment by PunchyHamster | Hacker News Reader

It makes sense. It's old, crufty mix of extensions, which nobody actually wants to be that modular for a chat client, because that just gets you into mess of what server/client supports

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Matrix is nearly as old today as XMPP was when the Matrix project was started, and Matrix is still such a pile of shit standard that there's STILL only one server implementation and one client. That's actually not how the standard was designed; if Matrix had been a successful project, according to their own goals, the ecosystem would look a lot more like XMPP than it does.

Comparing XMPP at 11 years old to Matrix today makes it abundantly clear that the main thing Element LLC does is waste European public grant funds

Actually, Matrix has a series of server and client implementations.

Servers: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/servers/

Clients: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

Also, imho Matrix is a better standard than xmpp, because of what PunchHamster said and the better feature set. Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion :)

I think GP was speaking hyperbolically, because most new features hit Element/Synapse first and other clients lag behind implementing them. If you care about more than the basics working, it's kind of just the illusion of choice.

Probably, and also from the fact that although there's a plethora of matrix clients and servers on paper, none is as feature complete (or feature-complete to the point of usefulness, I might say) as "the one". XMPP has about one decent-to-great client per platform and multiple fully compatible and interoperable server implementations, and every single one of them is by different groups.

I mean for alternative servers, 10% of people use Continuwuity and it looks pretty spec-complete [0] and more than enough to be useful.

[0]: https://forgejo.ellis.link/continuwuation/continuwuity/issue...

Last I checked (couple years ago?) it was ill-advised to use anything but Synapse, because:

- you would be at the mercy of very real and frequent federation problems (Matrix being so implementation-dependent and centred around Synapse ; like, the json serialization format is better described as "whatever order and structure python's stdlib is doing"¹)

- there is no non-destructive way back to another server (the open federation would just reject you, and you would have to "start anew"). Interestingly, that last one pushed some servers over the fence and into XMPP, and they could then switch implementations (e.g. from prosody to ejabberd) effortlessly.

¹: https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07#:~:text=matrix%20hom...

1) solved by canonical Json many years ago, see https://spec.matrix.org/v1.19/appendices/#canonical-json (goes back to at least matrix 1.1 which was released 2021)

2) Why would open federation reject you? Given you don't throw away your private key

1) That hasn't been a problem for at least half a decade.

2) What do you even mean? I've literally deleted my entire database and then spun up a new server on the same domain before, it does not matter, other servers do not care! The worst that could happen is messages from the original server can no longer be verified as valid - and even that isn't a problem in practice.

Define what you think are more than the basics?

Spaces, voice and video calls, custom emoji or stickers. Basically the stuff people coming from Discord are used to but the people coming from IRC/XMPP aren't used to.

At 11 years old, XMPP had 0 usable clients (I was there and tried them). That's one less than Matrix.

XMPP at 11 years old would place us in the year 2010. Requirements were different in those times. Psi on my desktop and Bombus (a J2ME client) on my Nokia E71 worked great. The transition from that into the mobile-first age was rough though. The article says that too. It only improved in 2014-2015.

Everyone says this and so I believe them, but I used xmpp as my primary communication tool through the whole thing and it worked ok on my first android phone (HTC magic) and amazingly on my n900 followed by acceptably on my BB10 device and never had any issues

Matrix is in the same place wrt feature mismatches. It's a quality of the problem, not of the solution. I actually think XMPP does a better, more structured job here.

XMPP leans heavily on capability negotiation and service discovery which makes it straightforward to degrade gracefully when feature mismatches occur. Matrix is significantly lacking in this regard.

Unfortunately, some of the features that can degrade are things like "the chat is actually secure."

I strongly prefer that with XMPP I can disable the encryption when it breaks to tell my friend I'm trapped under a boulder and bleeding out. With Matrix our chat is encrypted, I can't turn it off ever, if it stops working I can't communicate, my only option is to make a new room with encryption disabled and invite my friend hoping he sees the invite and accepts in time.

I want to see this movie

Edit: now I can't stop thinking about correlation vs causation - you being under the boulder bleeding out at the same time XMPP encryption suddenly stops working.

Physical hardware certificate thinggy which got crushed?

It's funny because I remember having an issue where my friend was sending me messages, and he couldn't read my messages, and my mobile client (Siskin) didn't let me turn off encryption for outgoing messages.

Recommendation: if you're trained under a boulder, use the device you're running an XMPP chat client on to call 911.

That's how RCS's Universal Profile is too though as far as I understand with the new encryption standards.

Id rather someone be able to reach out to me with a note the chat is insecure, rather than be unreachable at all

> Matrix is in the same place wrt feature mismatches.

not it isn't - still today there's no choice between incompatible room types or incompatible encryption algorithms and whatever else.

Calls are implemented differently across clients, threads only sometimes work. And, apparently from your comment, there's only ever going to be one encryption algorithm, because cryptography is a solved problem now?..

Don't Element Continuwuity, Synapse, Sable, FluffyChat and more all implement Matrix RTC, because this is most likely the future of video calls in Matrix (while not even officially part of the spec at this point)?

> And, apparently from your comment, there's only ever going to be one encryption algorithm, because cryptography is a solved problem now?..

That's not from my comment. If there will be another one it likely will be integrated into THE specification such that it will NOT divide the ecosystem into "I prefer MEGOLM" and "I prefer to implement new thing".

I don't have a horse in this race, but "incompatible room types" is precisely an issue i encountered on a selfhosted server. Agreed, that was for S2S federation and not C2S, but that was an issue.

> mess of what server/client supports

If you allow for independent implementations of the protocol this will always happen. Also, inventing another non-standard protocol creates even more incompatibility between clients and servers.

IRC and email worked out pretty well I think.

e-mail stuck in time still not enceypting by defaul

Yes if you never add new features eventually everyone crystallizes

"Oh, I'm sorry, did you want it to work? You should have installed the 'it actually works' modules."

Working with XMPP gave me a whole new appreciation for why people keep inventing their own chat protocols. I don't think this is an unsalvageable situation, but the protocol is desperately in need of an "XMPP: the Good Parts" doc.

> the protocol is desperately in need of an "XMPP: the Good Parts" doc.

It exists! https://docs.modernxmpp.org/

XEP-0479: XMPP Compliance Suites 2023

https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0479.html

Daniel (the author of the linked article) was one of the people to define profiles for human chatting: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0479.html

That just means the protocol is old enough to have accumulated that much technical debt, which is a sign of resilience.

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