Don’t get me wrong but I just don’t get all these „why do you use messenger X and not Y?“ threads that occasionally pop up. The answer is almost always „because the people I want to talk to use X“.

I use messengers to talk to specific people. Friends, family, the people I game with. It’s not like lemmy or reddit which are more about topics than about people. I can join a community about my favorite hobby on any platform and get more or less the same experience. But with messengers that doesn’t work. Matrix can be a thousand times better than Discord or XMPP but if the people I need to reach aren’t there, it’s absolutely useless to me. And convincing them to switch over with me isn’t really an option. They rightfully ask why they should get yet another messenger just for me when everyone else they want to talk to is on one they already have.

It’s almost a miracle that so many people switched from IRC to Discord when that came out but I guess they just had a bunch of features that people wanted.

Don't use either, they're unreliable services and not enough people use them. Stick to IRC.

https://xkcd.com/1782/

XMPP used to be pretty popular until google EEEd it afaik. Matrix is kind of an attempt to build on XMPPs "fall from grace" if you will. It's still very good from what I hear and some say the server is vastly more efficient but I only tried matrix and it works pretty well.

Hosted my own xmpp server back when you could talk to facebook messenger and google chat users via federation. But when they closed their walled garden there were nobody to talk to so i stopped it.

Now with matrix i have again a homeserver. Bridged to messenger, google what the new thing is called, slack, and a few others.

It’s faster and it’s not Synapse. I could serve hundreds of people on a single Pi while I would need to order a VPS with 4GB RAM to serve the same amount of people. I know there’s better server software out there, but it’s nowhere near Synapse. XMPP simply doesn’t care, clients and servers are well built and almost every client uses OMEMO and honestly I had a lot of decryption errors on Matrix and if you used something else than matrix.org you’d be screwed. It’s simply just better, because it’s faster and has a bigger ecosystem. The only thing that’s not cool about XMPP is that the federated userbase is kinda small. The biggest non-federated XMPP server is WhatsApp and that’s kinda sad. Also the protocol is nice, because most clients keep a socket open to listen for new messages and this is especially nice in the college WiFi environment some of my friends are in where a timer is set after bedtime which would wait until all sockets are closed which doesn’t include XMPP so messaging with my friends after bedtime is still possible.

more popular

That’s not true at all. There are a ton of business applications for XMPP from IoT messaging, to Nintendo’s user presence, to being a 90% chance your favorite online game’s chat back-end. Behind Jitsi & Zoom & WhatsApp is an XMPP server. Matrix by design will never scale to these demands if history needs to live forever & all servers need to duplicate data.

More trendy would be a more appropriate phrase since Matrix wants to chase after proprietary Slack & Discord, where as XMPP is extensible & more generalized for all sorts of applications. Even with all of these proprietary applications, there are plenty of open communities hosted for MUCs & also blog/community thru Movim/Libervia & as an alternative back-end for UnifiedPush, etc. With the server resource usage being much lower, it’s cheaper & easier to maintain an XMPP server alongside another application in a VPS or even on a home network with dynamic DNS. If you are inclined, set one up & test it out.

On a related note is anybody able to tell me why Matrix hosting is so darn expensive? It seems you need to self host to have bridges?

I use them all.

I believe the learning curve to have an XMPP server up and running is lower than a Matrix server, and from what I can see, a Matrix server won't run as well in a potato.

I tried getting on Jabber/XMPP before trying to get on Matrix, never got any traction of frieds who was intrested in switching to either long term. So at the moment I just use sms/iMessage and Discord.

Because XMPP shipped with my server OS and I can't be arsed to install Matrix for no apparent additional utility.

I guess I don’t use either because no one I know does. A few friends and I have a signal group chat but other than that 🤷

You're welcome to use my hosted server for free XMPP.

It is way more secure and minimal than matrix. It has OMEMO encryption which is end to end encrypted.