Why not XMPP?
discuss.privacyguides.net
To be honest, I don’t quite understand why Matrix passes this hurdle and XMPP does not. Matrix is just as little designed for privacy as XMPP. Metadata is also generated, is also not E2EE (as far as I know) and is also distributed further by federation than in XMPP. The quality of the clients is also very differing. I also see the advantages of Matrix and use it myself, but I find it quite interesting how an extra category was recently created to keep Matrix in the recommendations, although it...

Matrix is going Freemium and WhatsApp is adding ads, which is sparking the annual “time to leave [app]” threads.

Users don’t care that much about privacy, but they do care about enshittification, so XMPP not being built for it shouldn’t be a problem.

Meanwhile, I’ve heard for years that XMPP has solved a lot of the problems that lead more popular apps to fail.

Is it really just a marketing/UX/UI problem?

If XMPP had a killer app with all the features that Signal/Whatsapp/Telegram has, would it have as many users?

If not, why does it keep getting out-adopted by new apps and protocols?

  • wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works
    42·
    2 days ago

    E2E is possible, but problematic (in that it’s not simply just “on”).

    That’s just not true. All XMPP clients have support OTR out of the box for probably 15 years.

    • LWD@lemm.ee
      4·
      2 days ago

      OTR is a janky kind of encryption that doesn’t have a modern analogue any more. It requires both (or all?) participants to be connected to each other simultaneously in order for messaging to work.

      With mobile devices, this is very bad.

      It’s also not doing great:

      XEP-0364: Current Off-the-Record Messaging Usage

      WARNING: This document has been automatically Deferred after 12 months of inactivity in its previous Experimental state…

      It’s also one of three different encryption standards…