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?
Conversations on Android looks and feels like any other modern messenger and supports basically all the XMPP features there are. And I found Monal on iOS to be pretty usable as well, when I tested it 3 years ago.
Yes, Monal is catching up to Siskin fast, but until recently didn’t support a/v calls which is why many people still prefer Siskin.
As for a unified system, have a look at https://snikket.org which offers a one-stop solution under a single brand similar to Element. It uses lightly modified versions of Conversations, Siskin and Prosody (as a server) under the hood.
Conversations on Android seems to be the default answer for “advanced client”.
But for everything else… look at Monal’s blog, they only added support to audio calls in October of last year. Nice to see it’s still being developed, but “too little, too late” seems fair.
The other XMPP client for iOS called Siskin has had a/v calls for many years now.
Yeah, I mentioned it in the first comment. But seriously, it looks like something built in 2009. It might be functional, but only a die-hard XMPP fan would be interested in using it.