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?
Yes and they had plenty of funding from highly questionable sources before 2021 as well. Even if you only take the 20 million difference in two figures mentioned above, but Element also partnered with a really shady crypto-currency startup in 2018, which had its own sources of investor funding.
Sorry, but now this is starting to sound like sour grapes.
Ok, they got a good amount of funding. But that alone is not enough to justify how they managed to gain as much mindshare as they did in relation to XMPP.
Element’s funding in 2018 or 2021 did not steal any opportunity for (e.g,) snikket to work on their product. Element following the “cathedral” model allowed them to be faster in the development of multi-platform clients, while the XMPP devs were all fixed to the Bazaar ideal, and because of that absolutely failed to deliver a modern application in the platform that is used by half of mobile users in the US.
We (techy types) tend to ignore things that end users care about and we are a lot more forgiving with systems that we see as “technically superior”, but the market cares a lot more about things like “Can I send emojis without having to worry about what client people use?” then “synchronization model or disk space requirements”.
This is not just “marketing”, this is “having someone with actual business and product sense”.
If it was up to me, sure I’d wish that more people would be using XMPP. But in 2019 when I told my parents that I wouldn’t be using WhatsApp anymore and that we needed a different app if they wanted to have video calls and see their grandchildren, XMPP was not even a choice for my iOS-using father, and Element (née Riot.im) was at least usable.
Both Matrix and federated XMPP are irrelevant in the larger picture, but Element chose to reinvent the wheel to have a product they could more easily market to investors. Had they spend a similar amount of money and developer hours to improve existing XMPP based options we might have an actually working and popular alternative now.
But as it stands, we have a quite fundamentally broken Matrix protocol & ecosystem with some semi-usable but more modern looking clients and a working and well proven XMPP ecosystem that is extremely starved of funding and developers.
You can call this “sour grapes” all you want, but it is the sad fact and a direct result of outside investments screwing with incentives of developers.
Edit: and on an ironic side note: in 2019 Riot.im was using a fancy wrapper around Jitsi-meet for all video-calls which is internally using XMPP, so you were in fact using XMPP as that was the only usable solution back then.
And where would they get this money in the first place?
Venture-capital is not the only source of funding that they have, and only a tiny fraction would have been necessary to get to the same point if they had not wasted most of their funds reinventing a worse version of xmpp.
If that is true, then why can’t the existing and current players in the XMPP space do it?
Because venture-capital funded grifters from Element are undercutting them for government contracts and offering “free” services to other organisations that would have otherwise likely funded some work on xmpp.
Now, that is quite a stretch. We had almost 15 years of zero interest rate economic policies, all the “cheap” capital available to everyone and you are telling me that none of the companies with a vested interest in XMPP managed to get resources to grow because Element was sucking out all the air from the room?
If getting XMPP to be in a state that could compete with the proprietary messengers were that much cheaper than the resources taken by Element, why is it that none of telcos pushed for it to have something to show in the OTT space? Or why couldn’t Process.one/Prosody get any VC interested when there are so many firms that make a living of just copying whatever is trending?
You are trying to rationalize XMPP’s failure to get more adoption by blaming Element, but this is not a zero-sum game. I’ve been to XMPP meetups, and absolutely no one ever talked about initiatives to make it more appealing to masses. Everyone just wanted to geek out and scratch their own itch. If the XMPP community never valued commercial success, fine, but then don’t act like someone else robbed their lunch when all Element did was do the work that XMPP supporters didn’t want to do.
Ok this is starting to get hilarious in how naive you are. Have you looked at the messenger space at all? There are literally hundreds of venture-capital funded grifters competing in that space and Element is only one of them. And they are all playing a losing game these days, as they are up against giants like Discord (and to a lesser extend incumbents like Microsoft, with their Teams).
That the established XMPP players chose not to be part of this grift is a very sensible choice that also makes business sense if you care about the longer term survival of your company. Most of their income is from embedded and IoT applications these days, like running the notification infrastructure of giants like Nintendo. However, this sadly does not fund client development and improvements in user interface. The only sustainable funding for that was from open-source organisations and government agencies, which Element decided to persue aggressively. None of the established XMPP players felt like getting in on that race to the bottom as they didn’t have (and want) venture capital to burn. But now that Element has started to run out of funding they are turning to the “switch” part of the bait & switch grift and the ones really hurt by this is not XMPP, but all the organisations that naively trusted them with their communication infrastructure.