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Comment by pmlnr | Hacker News Reader

I'm one of them, and I love it. Desktop clients are lagging in support compared to Conversations[^1] on Android, but even Pidgin can be flogged into an acceptable state[^2] - no video or audio though, I couldn't get that working, unlike with Prosody and Conversations[^3].

The thing with XMPP vs Matrix is weight: and XMPP server is featherweight compared to Matrix due to their different nature, so I honestly believe that XMPP still has a future.

(And maybe one day, Pidgin 3 will see the light[^4])

[^1]: https://conversations.im/

[^2]: https://github.com/petermolnar/awesome-pidgin-plugins

[^3]: https://gist.github.com/petermolnar/10d815eae0b7cbda2b1e5948...

[^4]: https://pidgin.im/development/building/3.0.0/

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XMPP is featherweight compared to Matrix because it does less things than Matrix.

Having a gigantic group chat with hundreads of people, with encryption, history and media synchronized between everyone without relying on a centralized server is something that XMPP doesn't even try to solve. Matrix does.

Prosody is a great project, I used to run my own Prosody server before moving on to Matrix. But people shouldn't lose perspective of the state of the protocol.

XMPP is okay if you plan to chat with a few people individually that are willing to spend time choising the right client with the right plugins and if you don't care about modern features but anything beyond than that and it becomes a huge headache.

We care about modern features, and are adding new ones continuously.

You're right that Matrix focuses on a distributed design where no single server is responsible for a room. XMPP doesn't focus on this (though there are XEPs for it, I don't know of any use of them outside of military deployments).

The "everything everywhere" eventual consistency approach Matrix takes means it is resilient for sure, but it's not always a desirable feature. The IETF recently trialled Matrix and were caught out by this behaviour: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tools-discuss/bdGVrXm7...

It can raise questions about data ownership and retention.

I am happy both protocols exist, and bridges between them exist. For my use cases I am sticking with XMPP.

If you are going to post that specific email, then you should also post the mail in which Matthew Hodgson from Matrix addresses and clarifies some of the concerns there:

- https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tools-discuss/G4-c-2P9...

Yeah, for desktop I'd generally recommend Gajim (recent versions) or Dino (younger project, but progressing well). I personally use a console client (poezio).

XMPP has evolved a lot over recent years, but many folk still judge it by the state of Pidgin (where development is focusing on their big 3.0 rather than catching up with modern messaging features) or with the features XMPP had in 2006.

> and XMPP server is featherweight compared to Matrix due to their different nature

I agree that Synapse, the only currently available Matrix server is resource heavy, but I would not extrapolate this to the future of Matrix servers.

There is still quite some optimization possible.

Dendrite is the next big thing right? Written in Rust? I'd be curious to see how the performance is there with it being in Rust and a rewrite/new implementation that can learn from experience.

If popular rooms still can't be joined without consuming gigabytes of RAM then, I will probably give up on Matrix altogether.

Also Dendrite is Go, not Rust.

I've been trying Dendrite for a few days: a single user in the system - me -, being in two, federated, medium (<1k) sized rooms on matrix.org, the memory usage runs between 250MB to 1.5GB.

I'm going to give Prosody a serious look then, thanks for the feedback.

If you have any questions, we're friendly, feel free to reach out! :)

https://prosody.im/discuss

> Also Dendrite is Go, not Rust.

Ah, my bad. Thanks.

Conduit is the Rust implementation: https://conduit.rs/

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