this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
156 points (97.6% liked)

Selfhosted

39245 readers
270 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm looking into hosting one of these for the first time. From my limited research, XMPP seems to win in every way, which makes me think I must be missing something. Matrix is almost always mentioned as the de-facto standard, but I rarely saw arguments why it is better than XMPP?

Xmpp seems way easier to host, requiring less resources, has many more options for clients, and is simpler and thus easier to manage and reason about when something goes wrong.

So what's the deal?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 84 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

Xmpp is old and has no traction. Matrix is new and there are many people believing in it. There is a lot of money put on matrix. A lot of people want matrix to succeed. Especially companies, agencies and governments love matrix. Jumping on a train that already moves forward is easier than trying to push a standing train.

With xmpp, or signal I've got all my messages on my device. Distributing the info to other devices is difficult. With matrix everything sits on the server and distributes the info to the clients. That's like my file cloud, or my photo cloud or my music server, or my document server. Everything is saved centrally on a server and all is independent of the consumer device. I can use multiple devices and everything sits on the server. That's great for me as a user, it's easy.

Xmpp is scattered which is great on one hand but matrix development is moving very fast. Xmpp can't compete with that.

What's the advantage of xmpp over signal for the end user?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

It is true that Matrix follows a fat server model, but multi-device usage works perfectly well in XMPP these days.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

I can use my published PGP keys with XMPP, for starters. And I can use OMEMO. Matrix supports neither afaik.