Slightly rambling partial agreement ahead, sorry, I struggle with how I feel about this and need to write something longer somewhere:

I think there's a tendency to dismiss this argument in the XMPP community (but there's a lot of truth to it, I choose to use the XMPP desktop clients but none of them are as nice to use as any big commercial IM providers client), but also a tendency for people to make this argument without realizing that they're comparing open source projects run by one or two people to VC funded projects with a company backing them. Of course Discord or Element or whatever will be "better" in some ways, they have a team and millions of VC funding behind them. However, one of the many reasons I chose to use XMPP back in the day when I was first evaluating whether to use it or Matrix, and one of the big reasons I got more heavily involved in the community later, was specifically because the standards body wasn't strictly tied to a company looking for VC funding (and all the individual client/server projects I've contributed to are the same). But, this does mean there aren't really any clients that I'm in love with (but there are clients for every random niche platform imaginable, which I think is probably more important personally).

All that being said, try Snikket if you haven't. It's relatively new, but I think they're really doing a good job of creating a suite of clients that can be recommended to "normies" who don't want to sacrifice shiny graphics for the sake of using something that's a bit more free from VC influence.

I'm curious which apps you've tried and what the deficiencies are you find in them.

There are a number of companies in the ecosystem. Most have chosen not to pursue VC money in order to keep things going much longer. While a venture backed company can have success, most flame out eventually in my observation.

Is there an iOS app that supports push messages?

Yes. Snikket, siskin, and monal all make use of push messages (since that's required to work on iOS at all these days)

It looks like you need server support for that as well (makes sense), to bad Prosody doesn't have it in a released version but you have to build it manually.

No need to build anything, it's not a binary or anything like that. Prosody is just a very plugin-oriented project (plugins are written in Lua). For better or worse, we (the Prosody team) have certain standards for inclusion of community modules in the core codebase, and mod_cloud_notify doesn't quite meet them yet.

On Debian and derived systems, you can just 'apt install prosody-modules', and on other systems you can 'prosodyctl install mod_cloud_notify' or otherwise download it directly: https://modules.prosody.im/mod_cloud_notify (no configuration is necessary apart from adding it to the module list in your config).

Thank you, I was reading https://github.com/monal-im/Monal/wiki/Considerations-for-XM... and misread the requirements, 0.13 is required for SASL2, not for cloud_notify.

I really like Prosody because it was trivial to reuse the same user store I use for Postfix/Dovecot so every email account gets an XMPP account automatically.

Sure, Element syncs much faster than other clients (FluffyChat is unusable for Instant Messaging) but leaving the browser tab open still thrashes one CPU core.

I think its not only the clients...Rather its what the server side supports and to ensure clients align with that....And i think among a group of techy friends, well, they can coordinate the proper settings...but it becomes thorny when involving some not-techie buddies...Of course its possible, but, you know, the onboarding process is less than ideal. I say that not being an xmpp guru of coruse, so YMMV.

> I am really surprised there isn't a venture backed company pushing XMPP forward. Maybe people have tried and realized it's not viable.

Actually, WhatsApp would fulfill your definition there. They are/were a startup whose entire product/platform is an xmpp client (using their centralized server/instance). Now, whether they pushed "xmpp forward", or merely would be considered pushing a chat platform and who cares whats under the covers...well, that i leave as an exercise for you or others to decide/opine. ;-)

WhatsApp's contributions to the XMPP ecosystem are nil.

If you want to onboard a group of people you don't point them at "XMPP" the technology. You point them at a service or product that is built on XMPP, like Snikket.

Yes, agreed, i was more referring to whether a particular server instance for example implemented X or Y extension from the base xmpp protocol...and you'd want to ensure that whatever client and server combo is aligned to support those X and Y extensions. That's all i meant.

I'm trying to think of a way to add some value other than anecdotal disagreement, but I am just shocked at this statement because I can't think of a single piece of software I think Element is "better" than.