this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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What's the issue with Matrix? I've tried both Matrix and XMPP but stuck with Matrix because it just works. XMPP is also good but it lacks a good Android client (The available clients look very outdated, and honestly, pretty ugly). It's also kinda hard to know if your client or server even supports all the extensions that are needed.
And so did I but ended up with XMPP instead of Matrix. Self hosting my messaging was important to me, and the cost of doing so is prohibitive with Matrix, the protocol and its implementations are just that inefficient, and there has been no progress in this area for as long as I've been keeping an eye on it. In my eyes, Matrix is broken by design.
Now, Element is indeed a decent client, and above the average of all XMPP clients, but what matters is for XMPP to have at least one great client per platform, which is undoubtedly the case. In practice, all my daily messaging happens over XMPP, the people I interact with are far from the nerdy type, and to them it's pretty much equivalent to WhatsApp & al.
Back to Matrix, besides the fact that after a decade there hasn't been any progress towards diversifying implementations (it's so messy, complex and changing that it's basically the same people implementing both client and server sides, and there is only one viable implementation to this day, by one entity), which is a big fat red herring, the entity who's behind 95% of the code of Matrix is now facing severe financing challenges. The future of Matrix is all but certain because of that, and there are reasons for concern.
I don't "hate" Matrix/Element/the Foundation, I just don't understand why they painted themselves in the corner they are in today, and rode the pipe dream of their broken protocol for so long. Would they cease to exist, it would look like natural selection to me. They are just not competitive and sorry if it hurts.
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I already have