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?
It’s not a “cheat code” it is a self-defeating funding mechanism as clearly seen with Element. The venture-capital funders don’t care what happens with the individual projects, all they care is to milk them dry at some point and hope that there is at least one that managed to capture the market and thus turns into a monopoly cash-cow.
There are good reasons for companies not wanting to play that game as it is a poisoned gift for most of them, and it is increasingly evident that this is true for Element as well.
P.S: Monal works fine now. But honestly, Apple is such a shit company for open-source projects that it is no wonder that people were not exactly excited about developing a client for it, and Element siphoned up all sustainable funding that might have paid for improving the commercially developed Tigrase iOS xmpp client (Siskin).
No, it doesn’t. It is still far behind in features compared with Element. It still doesn’t have things like reactions, which is pretty much standard in any messaging app.
That you think that Monal is an acceptable alternative makes me believe that your biases are clouding your judgment and make it very difficult to accept your premise about Element being “damned” because of its funding. But let’s just agree to disagree, because I don’t see how this discussion can go any further.