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Yet Matrix is gaining traction while XMPP is not. Maybe the key was to have funding, build and run a reference server and quickly iterate with a reference clien

Yet Matrix is gaining traction while XMPP is not. Maybe the key was to have funding, build and run a reference server and quickly iterate with a reference client for all major platforms.

olah_1 4y ago
> Yet Matrix is gaining traction while XMPP is not 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.
- wusspuss 4y ago
  How much worse than XMPP is Matrix in this regard? On XMPP your and your interlocutor's server can see who you talk to
  - zaik 4y ago
    Not a lot better, but in public MUCs your JID is hidden to everyone except the server the MUC is hosted on. Also MUCs can be configured to only send a limited amount of history to new participants. For this reason I'm somewhat uncomfortable joining Matrix rooms over bridges, since it leaks my XMPP address and participation to everyone forever.
Zash 4y ago
Maybe the key is network effect and enough marketing to bootstrap it?
- ajconway 4y ago
  It doesn't look like Matrix has reached the point where there is any significant network effect. What I'm saying is that they are building a product, and the protocol is just one component of that product.
  - zaik 4y ago
    The key to interoperability is agreeing on standards. XMPP being about creating a proper Internet Standard and not a product is what made me choose XMPP over Matrix (also simplicity).
- wusspuss 4y ago
  Not losing messages is pretty key too. But yeah, given enough marketing you can pull anything off. WhatsApp basically doesn't support multi device to this day and is more popular than either (free) XMPP or Matrix could ever hope to be. There's a web version but it only works if your phone is connected. So I guess the phone acts as a server then? Does that mean they found it easier to set it up like that than to make xmpp (which WhatsApp is said to be based on) reliable with multiple devices?
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    WhatsApp first penetrated countries where people's primary computing devices are phones, and they maybe don't even own PCs. It's not surprising that it became super popular despite its lack of multi-device support (at least until recently). Wasn't just marketing.
  - memen 4y ago
    That is not true anymore. The latest version of WhatsApp Web can be used without your phone connected. Not sure if it is rolled out globally for everyone yet, as it was fairly recent for me (couple days now).
  - Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
    XMPP working on multiple devices is a problem long solved. Not losing messaging is a solved problem too. I can schedule you a demo if you wish.
    - wusspuss 4y ago
      It is not a long solved problem if it takes a demo to prove. If it were long solved it'd be self evident. This argument wouldn't exist to begin with. 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
mnd999 4y ago
WhatsApp has traction, discord is gaining it. Matrix isn’t really anywhere.
- IgorPartola 4y ago
  After trying Matrix as a Discord replacement with a couple of different clients it was pretty terrible. My Discord usage is fairly simple but I run a community for non-technical people. Matrix UX was pretty shit between confusing clients and just the overall clumsiness. I would have loved to introduce a whole community to it but instead I went back to Discord instead.
  - mypalmike 4y ago
    I hardly spend any time using it, but when I do, I find discord's UI to be complex and confusing.
    - IgorPartola 4y ago
      I run a server for a non-tech community with roughly 300 members ranging in age from 20 to 65. Some of them are extremely non-technical, to the point that they say “hey Siri turn on flashlight” instead of finding the button on their phone. Every single one was able to figure out Discord in a matter of minutes and use it daily with zero complaints. I would say that’s a customer success story right there.
      - mypalmike 4y ago
        The main server I'm on is for after hours gaming with coworkers at a company I contract with. I can certainly find my way to a room and chat. But I can't use my actual name, though requested to do so, because it's too common (names don't have to be unique in discord, for some reason there can only be so many of each. Silly limitation.). And I'm not categorized in the same way as my coworkers in the user list. And then some rooms seem to be for text and others for watching one person broadcast video. The experience is just kind of all around disjointed feeling. Perhaps curation and community style has a lot to do with that though.
MattJ100 4y ago
> Yet Matrix is gaining traction while XMPP is not. 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/ https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/
- wusspuss 4y ago
  >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. But these aren't the protocol's achievements either. These people have so much money they could make IRC popular.
  - zaik 4y ago
    So when does a communication protocol achieve something?
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      One big goal of XMPP was federated messaging (compare to email), and I'm not really seeing it. At best I'm seeing companies building on top of it, resulting in something hardly resembling the open version. Companies are benefitting from XMPP's freedom to build their own platforms, but that freedom isn't being passed onto end users in the vast majority of cases. Because XMPP, with its amorphous nature, doesn't stand up well enough as a product on its own. 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).

Yet Matrix is gaining traction while XMPP is not. Maybe the key was to have funding, build and run a reference server and quickly iterate with a reference client for all major platforms.

olah_1 4y ago

> Yet Matrix is gaining traction while XMPP is not 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.

wusspuss 4y ago
How much worse than XMPP is Matrix in this regard? On XMPP your and your interlocutor's server can see who you talk to
- zaik 4y ago
  Not a lot better, but in public MUCs your JID is hidden to everyone except the server the MUC is hosted on. Also MUCs can be configured to only send a limited amount of history to new participants. For this reason I'm somewhat uncomfortable joining Matrix rooms over bridges, since it leaks my XMPP address and participation to everyone forever.

Zash 4y ago

Maybe the key is network effect and enough marketing to bootstrap it?

ajconway 4y ago
It doesn't look like Matrix has reached the point where there is any significant network effect. What I'm saying is that they are building a product, and the protocol is just one component of that product.
- zaik 4y ago
  The key to interoperability is agreeing on standards. XMPP being about creating a proper Internet Standard and not a product is what made me choose XMPP over Matrix (also simplicity).
wusspuss 4y ago
Not losing messages is pretty key too. But yeah, given enough marketing you can pull anything off. WhatsApp basically doesn't support multi device to this day and is more popular than either (free) XMPP or Matrix could ever hope to be. There's a web version but it only works if your phone is connected. So I guess the phone acts as a server then? Does that mean they found it easier to set it up like that than to make xmpp (which WhatsApp is said to be based on) reliable with multiple devices?
- hot_gril 4y ago
  WhatsApp first penetrated countries where people's primary computing devices are phones, and they maybe don't even own PCs. It's not surprising that it became super popular despite its lack of multi-device support (at least until recently). Wasn't just marketing.
- memen 4y ago
  That is not true anymore. The latest version of WhatsApp Web can be used without your phone connected. Not sure if it is rolled out globally for everyone yet, as it was fairly recent for me (couple days now).
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
  XMPP working on multiple devices is a problem long solved. Not losing messaging is a solved problem too. I can schedule you a demo if you wish.
  - wusspuss 4y ago
    It is not a long solved problem if it takes a demo to prove. If it were long solved it'd be self evident. This argument wouldn't exist to begin with. 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

mnd999 4y ago

WhatsApp has traction, discord is gaining it. Matrix isn’t really anywhere.

IgorPartola 4y ago
After trying Matrix as a Discord replacement with a couple of different clients it was pretty terrible. My Discord usage is fairly simple but I run a community for non-technical people. Matrix UX was pretty shit between confusing clients and just the overall clumsiness. I would have loved to introduce a whole community to it but instead I went back to Discord instead.
- mypalmike 4y ago
  I hardly spend any time using it, but when I do, I find discord's UI to be complex and confusing.
  - IgorPartola 4y ago
    I run a server for a non-tech community with roughly 300 members ranging in age from 20 to 65. Some of them are extremely non-technical, to the point that they say “hey Siri turn on flashlight” instead of finding the button on their phone. Every single one was able to figure out Discord in a matter of minutes and use it daily with zero complaints. I would say that’s a customer success story right there.
    - mypalmike 4y ago
      The main server I'm on is for after hours gaming with coworkers at a company I contract with. I can certainly find my way to a room and chat. But I can't use my actual name, though requested to do so, because it's too common (names don't have to be unique in discord, for some reason there can only be so many of each. Silly limitation.). And I'm not categorized in the same way as my coworkers in the user list. And then some rooms seem to be for text and others for watching one person broadcast video. The experience is just kind of all around disjointed feeling. Perhaps curation and community style has a lot to do with that though.

MattJ100 4y ago

> Yet Matrix is gaining traction while XMPP is not. 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/ https://snikket.org/blog/products-vs-protocols/

wusspuss 4y ago
>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. But these aren't the protocol's achievements either. These people have so much money they could make IRC popular.
- zaik 4y ago
  So when does a communication protocol achieve something?
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    One big goal of XMPP was federated messaging (compare to email), and I'm not really seeing it. At best I'm seeing companies building on top of it, resulting in something hardly resembling the open version. Companies are benefitting from XMPP's freedom to build their own platforms, but that freedom isn't being passed onto end users in the vast majority of cases. Because XMPP, with its amorphous nature, doesn't stand up well enough as a product on its own. 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).