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Comment by vcccgjuf | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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