So the hype around Matrix is no better than XMPP then. Oh dear.

Going to keep using the IETF XMPP Standard then.

Matrix has introduced some really neat innovations compared to XMPP:

- decentralized conversations instead of centralized ones

- MEGOLM

- Cross Signing

- monolithic protocol (i.e. one true way of doing things officially)

- easy sync of (encrypted) history between sessions

These are reasons why people use Matrix and not because of misinformation about how private it is

If there's anything that's overhyped these days, it's Matrix.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27557113 was so brilliant at capturing my own thoughts/concerns on it.

I think that bit of history shows what a false idol extensibility is. 20 years of extension and improvement has resulted in a chat system that is still staggeringly worse in practice than its competitors of 20 years ago. (Seriously, XMPP is still worse than AIM for actual day-to-day use).

Look at XML vs JSON for another example. A simple standard that has no improvement path except completely replacing it turns out to be much more usable than an extensible, upgradeable standard.

> Seriously, XMPP is still worse than AIM for actual day-to-day use

Have you actually tried the modern clients like Conversations/Dino? I've been running a private XMPP server for friends for the past couple of years and the only way to describe it is rock-solid.

I tried Conversations (admittedly a while ago) and found it a solid meh. Its features mostly worked, but it definitely felt clunkier than AIM.

Have you actually tried any alternatives at all?

Even Matrix with Element (which used to have quite a few issues with slowness and encryption), works way better these days

Not to mention any widely used centralized messenger...

Yes, in addition to my private XMPP server, I have been running a Matrix server for one of my clients for about the same amount of time.

Element desktop is... slow and terrible in comparison with all of its confusing options, and regularly kicks just a single person off the server for no apparent reason when their session becomes corrupted. I really want to use fractal but it doesn't do E2EE.

Synapse was a horrible resource hog, but conduit actually seems pretty good. Still prefer ejabberd.

> XMPP is still worse than AIM for actual day-to-day use

Care to elaborate? I used AIM back in the day and i have a much more pleasant and varied experience on modern XMPP, which supports many gateways to the networks i care for (including mobile phone like skype was doing! [0]).

> XML vs JSON

And yet the people who claimed XML was too complex have since then reimplemented the XML features into JSON, such as JSON schemas which are key to federated protocols (eg. ActivityPub) built on top of JSON message passing.

[0] https://jmp.chat/

Hype and (related) money is what open messaging needs at the moment. XMPP is fine, it’s stable, extensible and generally works, but average users have never heard of it.

Those parts of matrix needed for interop need to go through the spec change proposal process to land in the spec. But namespacing is used extensively. The spec reserves the 'm.' prefix, e.g. 'm.text', but everyone is encouraged to extend using reverse dns namespacing, e.g. 'com.ycombinator.news.our.extension'.