I'm curious what you base this on. Without a doubt Matrix is gaining traction. It's a relatively newer project, has some new ideas, and there is a lot of buzz around it. But it has far to go before reaching XMPP's levels of achievement - millions of XMPP-connected users via Google Talk, and popular products such as WhatsApp and Zoom built on top of it. That many of these aren't, or are no longer, interested in interoperability or federation is not a protocol problem, and I don't see Matrix solving that.
XMPP continues to be widely used by individuals, organizations and governments who want more control over their communication. Across the XMPP projects and services I'm involved in, I continue to see plenty of new users and developers joining the community.
The reference client/server is definitely a pattern I agree with you on, however. It has served Matrix well, and others too. I've been a proponent of this approach for some time, and detailed my thoughts in the "Products vs Protocols" talk/post at https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/
But these aren't the protocol's achievements either. These people have so much money they could make IRC popular.
XMPP has succeeded in its other stated goals of being highly extensible and useful for derivative work, but I think that's in spite of the protocol. There are just a lot of solid implementations out there, like ejabberd (which afaik WhatsApp originally started on, and I worked with it in a startup).
XMPP is a protocol, not a product, so it's not surprising that it doesn't stand up as a product on its own. If someone can come up with a compelling federated messaging product, it's likely that they would base the technical part on XMPP, because virtually all of the protocol work is done, and it's much more elegant and easier to build upon than something like Matrix.
But that's not a protocol problem. The reasons why we still don't have good open federated messaging have absolutely nothing to do with the protocol used for that messaging. They're probably quite similar to the reasons why federation in email has regressed over the last 40 years, from personal/company mail servers back to massive centralisation in the likes of Gmail, despite the protocol remaining exactly the same.
It does have an intended use case, and more opinionation could have improved its chances of achieving that.
> federation in email has regressed over the last 40 years, from personal/company mail servers back to massive centralisation in the likes of Gmail, despite the protocol remaining exactly the same
Protocol not changing is a problem. Email is so outdated nowadays that you're way better off using Gmail for its added security, especially within a company so everything stays within Gmail. IIRC email has changed a bit, but the new security features haven't been uniformly adopted like with HTTPS, so it's too much of a mixed bag.
I've been self-hosting email for ~20 years. The new security features have close to 100% adoption in the real world, especially since most people are using one of the massive centralised email systems, all of which implement all the new security features.
The protocol not changing is not a problem. SMTP is as fit for purpose now as it was 40 years ago, and has been truly decentralised since the very beginning. The protocol is not the cause of the centralisation trend, neither in email nor in IM.
Well that's the thing, if they were self-hosting or using smaller providers, they probably wouldn't all have the new features. And I'm surprised emails from your server aren't being filtered out as spam going into Gmail inboxes.
An open protocol success story is HTTPS. Nearly everyone is forced onto fully-compliant new versions, and self-hosting is more viable than ever.
They are really not difficult to implement. Like, 10% extra effort on top of deploying a mail server gets you all the modern security features. They are really not relevant in the question of whether someone self-hosts or not.
> And I'm surprised emails from your server aren't being filtered out as spam going into Gmail inboxes.
Implementing modern SMTP security features helps with that, and keeping the same server for a long time. In the first year or two my mail used to occasionally get sent to spam (but that was also before several of the modern security features existed), but once your IP has been sending mail for two decades and has never sent a single spam message, you tend not to have a problem with reputation.
> An open protocol success story is HTTPS. Nearly everyone is forced onto fully-compliant new versions, and self-hosting is more viable than ever.
Notably, the decentralisation mechanism for HTTPS and SMTP is identical, and the transport security mechanism is identical. The effort to self-host mail is higher, but that would be completely solved by a modern 'plug & play' mail server implementation. Once again, the protocol is not the issue here at all.
My parents and their friends couldn't figure out Discord after 2 weeks of honestly trying to use it. Biggest sources of confusion seemed to be DMs vs servers, username vs username+number vs nickname, and the sheer amount of stuff onscreen. They reverted to iMessage.
Considering the way in which Matrix spreads unencrypted metadata (even rooms and participants in the rooms, let alone chat events) as far as possible across the network, this traction is quite insidious.
For this reason I'm somewhat uncomfortable joining Matrix rooms over bridges, since it leaks my XMPP address and participation to everyone forever.
A demo is worthless if experience doesn't prove it in the long run. And I have the latter, and it doesn't prove. Yes, I know it's probably me, or more likely my friends doing something wrong. One of them restricted Conversations from running in the background for example, non-techies do all sorts of silly stuff. But then again, it shouldn't break with non-techies either. Nothing breaks with them aside from XMPP. Not even WhatsApp which is based on XMPP afaik