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?
Parsers have already existed for so long in every major language. Why need to worry about parsing?
And why need to worry about transports working differently if they achieve the same thing? They seem similarly convenient if I understood what you said correctly
Additionally, libraries for XMPP exist in most languages, there is a varying degree of completeness, but they all do a good job of hiding XML from the programmer