this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024

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why do you use xmpp instead of matrix? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

74 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I see the matrix is more popular than xmpp, but why?

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 7 months ago (5 children)

Don’t get me wrong but I just don’t get all these „why do you use messenger X and not Y?“ threads that occasionally pop up. The answer is almost always „because the people I want to talk to use X“.

I use messengers to talk to specific people. Friends, family, the people I game with. It’s not like lemmy or reddit which are more about topics than about people. I can join a community about my favorite hobby on any platform and get more or less the same experience. But with messengers that doesn’t work. Matrix can be a thousand times better than Discord or XMPP but if the people I need to reach aren’t there, it’s absolutely useless to me. And convincing them to switch over with me isn’t really an option. They rightfully ask why they should get yet another messenger just for me when everyone else they want to talk to is on one they already have.

It’s almost a miracle that so many people switched from IRC to Discord when that came out but I guess they just had a bunch of features that people wanted.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Well. I do it the other way. I would not install effing whatsapp just to reach someone. I tell then once where to find me, and, if they want to know, why this is and why i prefer it and why i wouldn't install app X. If they don't, then bad luck for me. Or not.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm the same way. I say they can use Signal, or just SMS. Or just wait until we see each other again, if ever.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Aye. SMS still exists. And for those boomers with their facebook and WhatsApp, it's not even a new thing ☺️

Added bonus: those who do install "your" app, show a minimum in interest. You're even worth the "effort".

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (5 children)

That's the reason I use matrix, I have bridges so that if someone messages me on ANY platform, it goes to matrix and I can respond there.

It's not the best solution, but it's worked well for me and I like having everything in one app

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Is that possible without self hosting?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

The internet switching from irc to discord has been a catastrophe.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

This is the right answer - you go where the people are.

I keep in touch with friends and family on WhatsApp, do gaming stuff on Discord and most of the Lemmy/Fediverse chat is on Matrix (partly helped by some degree of Matrix integration to provide secure messaging). I am in XMPP but no-one else I know is, so it just sits there unloved.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

The question makes more sense in the context of "our friend group is deciding to move to a new communication system" Which should we choose.

We narrowed it down to xmpp, signal and matrix. Signal looked terrible to impossible to self host because the clients might make it hard to choose another server.

Matrix looks good but slow and more like irc ? Also like signal, there's few clients.

Xmpp was just more mature, more diversity of clients. But missing new things like comment retractions, comment reaction, opengraph url previews, combine image+text messages and image albums.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Don't use either, they're unreliable services and not enough people use them. Stick to IRC.

https://xkcd.com/1782/

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

typical "my opinion is objective reality" comment. Matrix works well, as does XMPP. Looking over my own experience as user and admin as well as other users and admins, matrix has about the same reliability as the large IMs like Whatsapp and Signal.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Matrix does definitely not have the same reliability as WhatsApp or Signal. I've used it for around 3 years now with a group of tech savvy friends.

It's still a regular occurrence that we get cannot decrypt errors, sometimes the app doesn't show new messages in the chat but they are visible in the preview, also the app can be soooo slow.

Also, I know it's not user error. If you check the Matrix development and follow their blog posts they already acknowledged the issues and are working on fixes. But for now it's just wishful thinking when one calls them reliable alternatives for mainstream use. I'm not hating and will keep using the project because I truly think they are doing amazing work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I have had about three whatsapp outages in the last year I used it regularly. They have been regional/global outages, visible on outage tracking websites. I have had zero outages with matrix (bar one that I have caused myself by misconfiguring and the server restarting).

Depending on the time you have used matrix you will have a lot earlier experiences than I do. Yes, sometimes I cant figure out why something is not working but the service itself runs like clockwork.

The issue here is perspective. Whatsapp is proprietary software which runs on company servers. Matrix is a mostly community/non profit led effort and just doesnt have the manpower or money to develop in high speed. For that matter, the protocol is in its infancy.

Its just unrealistic to say whatsapp is „more reliable“.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I don‘t think you understand my point. Let me be a bit more high level. It's not about the three major outages WhatsApp had this year for like 30 mins. or whatever.

A perfectly set up Matrix server with more than enough resources allocated has issues decrypting messages when there's a few hundred people and that's without federation. This is still happening to today, fully updated server and clients.

As I said, I know they are working with a lot less resources than Meta. But at the moment the implementation doesn't even do the most basic thing, deliver messages reliably. I know their new encryption library is supposed to do a better job but it's just the cold hard truth that it's not up there with the big messengers yet. Denying that doesn't do the project any good.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Last I heard whatsapp was owned by Meta. I have an account for one vendor in Mexico for work. And I’m sure sucked as much web info I could offer in exchange.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

unreliable?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (7 children)

A more general chat platform will really want end-to-end encryption which IRC doesn’t have. Matrix & XMPP offer decentralized rooms so you don’t have to create an account & join each server to chat, but rather your server can connect to another server.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago (1 children)

XMPP used to be pretty popular until google EEEd it afaik. Matrix is kind of an attempt to build on XMPPs "fall from grace" if you will. It's still very good from what I hear and some say the server is vastly more efficient but I only tried matrix and it works pretty well.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Matrix's most feature complete server is synapse, which is written in python. Hence not very efficient and scalable.

It's mostly fine, but to really go big, one of the other server implementations will need to be used, but none of them achieve feature-parity with synapse as far as I know.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (4 children)

I agree that matrix isnt infinitely scalable, which is a great thing imo.

The reason being that most people, especially users, are brainwashed into thinking that centralization is normal or good. It is neither.

Ideally every small group of like 10-100 people has a small server which is one out of millions at some point. Thats the idea of the fediverse.

My server federates with some 8000 servers at this point which is great and matrix.org has like 30% of all users afaik (which are over 100mil in total at this point)

And before I hear the always same argument: yes, it is hard to find peeps on matrix sometimes (it is a lot harder on whatsapp). Be the change you want to see and help with sites like joinmatrix.org

Have a good one.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Do you self host? I read that the federation is where performance becomes a challenge?

Has resource usage gone up dramatically when you started federating?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Yes, I do. Federation is a joke in terms of resource usage. It really depends on your system and config of course but I host 4 fediverse services and a lot more stuff which doesnt even touch the 10% cpu utilization, doesnt touch 50% of my ram.

The information you find online is mostly outdated and people who dont self host dont have barely any real knowledge about the services.

I encourage you to try for yourself so you can see what works and what doesnt. Feel free to hit me up if you want to know anything about it.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Hosted my own xmpp server back when you could talk to facebook messenger and google chat users via federation. But when they closed their walled garden there were nobody to talk to so i stopped it.

Now with matrix i have again a homeserver. Bridged to messenger, google what the new thing is called, slack, and a few others.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Wait a minute... xmpp is federated? Like I can self host and then still message others?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Other xmpp servers that want to yes. But i have nobody that uses xmpp again.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I thought that was why matrix was made. Because it's federated... What's the got damn point of matrix?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

for a long time, no one was developing android apps for xmpp.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It’s faster and it’s not Synapse. I could serve hundreds of people on a single Pi while I would need to order a VPS with 4GB RAM to serve the same amount of people. I know there’s better server software out there, but it’s nowhere near Synapse. XMPP simply doesn’t care, clients and servers are well built and almost every client uses OMEMO and honestly I had a lot of decryption errors on Matrix and if you used something else than matrix.org you’d be screwed. It’s simply just better, because it’s faster and has a bigger ecosystem. The only thing that’s not cool about XMPP is that the federated userbase is kinda small. The biggest non-federated XMPP server is WhatsApp and that’s kinda sad. Also the protocol is nice, because most clients keep a socket open to listen for new messages and this is especially nice in the college WiFi environment some of my friends are in where a timer is set after bedtime which would wait until all sockets are closed which doesn’t include XMPP so messaging with my friends after bedtime is still possible.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Just the other day I got downvoted for posting that it's stupid that 8GB of RAM in laptops is not enough. Software like Synapse, trying to lift the load that it does in Python, is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.

the college WiFi environment some of my friends are in where a timer is set after bedtime which would wait until all sockets are closed which doesn’t include XMPP so messaging with my friends after bedtime is still possible.

The college tries to just shut off the WiFi at night??

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

more popular

That’s not true at all. There are a ton of business applications for XMPP from IoT messaging, to Nintendo’s user presence, to being a 90% chance your favorite online game’s chat back-end. Behind Jitsi & Zoom & WhatsApp is an XMPP server. Matrix by design will never scale to these demands if history needs to live forever & all servers need to duplicate data.

More trendy would be a more appropriate phrase since Matrix wants to chase after proprietary Slack & Discord, where as XMPP is extensible & more generalized for all sorts of applications. Even with all of these proprietary applications, there are plenty of open communities hosted for MUCs & also blog/community thru Movim/Libervia & as an alternative back-end for UnifiedPush, etc. With the server resource usage being much lower, it’s cheaper & easier to maintain an XMPP server alongside another application in a VPS or even on a home network with dynamic DNS. If you are inclined, set one up & test it out.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (6 children)

On a related note is anybody able to tell me why Matrix hosting is so darn expensive? It seems you need to self host to have bridges?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

There are quite a few stories of communities shutting down their servers since the costs of duplicating all messages & attachments for all rooms for all DMs for all users on the server. Add to the mix that the implementation server in Python consumes a lot more resources, it’s not a big surprise. As such, everything centralizes around Matrix.org where they get an unreasonable amount of the network’s metadata.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I believe the learning curve to have an XMPP server up and running is lower than a Matrix server, and from what I can see, a Matrix server won't run as well in a potato.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I use them all.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Damn, but are you reading them all?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Irregularly but yes.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

I tried getting on Jabber/XMPP before trying to get on Matrix, never got any traction of frieds who was intrested in switching to either long term. So at the moment I just use sms/iMessage and Discord.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Because XMPP shipped with my server OS and I can't be arsed to install Matrix for no apparent additional utility.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I guess I don’t use either because no one I know does. A few friends and I have a signal group chat but other than that 🤷

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

That's the reason I use matrix, I have bridges so that if someone messages me on ANY platform, it goes to matrix and I can respond there.

It's not the best solution, but it's worked well for me and I like having everything in one app

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You're welcome to use my hosted server for free XMPP.

It is way more secure and minimal than matrix. It has OMEMO encryption which is end to end encrypted.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Your SSL certificate expired 2 days ago

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