Overall, I would pick XMPP over Matrix at this point. it is rather bloated and the clients are a little bit obtuse for newbies. I do wonder what the DAU for Matrix is at this point. as I suspect that 32 Million number might be a little overstated.
Based on the phone-home stats in Synapse there's around 300K DAU currently on the network, but this is a major underestimate given other stats which suggest only about 30% of public servers enable phone-home.
Does Matrix support OMEMO for e2e encryption?
(Although the bifrost bridge doesn't currently implement E2EE - and it would have to reencrypt anyway to turn the Matrix event payloads into XMPP stanzas and vice versa)
I want to test this claim. After an hour of google searching I'm none the wiser:
1. Can I bridge private messages, or just MUCs? I use XMPP only to keep in contact with friends that use XMPP. I would love to integrate them into a single client, but afaict it does not appear possible.
2. Do I have to run my own XMPP bridge, or is there some automatic integration service I'm completely missing? For comparison, the experience of bridging a matrix room to IRC was as easy as clicking "add new bridge" in the Element UI.