Selfhosted

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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Why is Matrix mentioned more often than XMPP in self hosted forums? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm looking into hosting one of these for the first time. From my limited research, XMPP seems to win in every way, which makes me think I must be missing something. Matrix is almost always mentioned as the de-facto standard, but I rarely saw arguments why it is better than XMPP?

Xmpp seems way easier to host, requiring less resources, has many more options for clients, and is simpler and thus easier to manage and reason about when something goes wrong.

So what's the deal?

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[–] ericjmorey 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm going to throw this out there not being sure how true it is, but I find it interesting to think about.

XMPP is much more widely used than Matrix if you count WhatsApp (Meta/Facebook). ActivityPub is much more widely used than AT Protocol and nostr combined if you count Threads (Meta/Facebook). So reasons why people aren't talking about XMPP include not wanting to recognize that Meta is hugely influential in this space and that most people don't talk about the underlying protocols of the services and tools they're use at all leaving a self selected group of people looking for alternatives with traction that don't depend on Meta. Outside of WhatsApp, there's not a lot of traction with any particular XMPP implementation. And none of the XMPP implementations have a Discord-ish organization of chat rooms that's popular and familiar right now. Matrix has both right now (although I don't think it will ever be more than a small niche in the mobile messaging space).

I'm fine with using Matrix for what it is. There are programming language communities that have been very helpful for me and a number of Lemmy related communities that have been nice to be a part of.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

WhatsApp is using a complete fork of the XMPP specifications and never had influence on XMPP. In the early days when Facebook messenger was using XMPP as a C2S interface they had a bit of influence but what you said used to be much more true for Google some years ago and what happened there is a major reason why people don't want Facebook to become influential in ActivityPub (which it isn't yet).