I recently saw Alex’s video about XMPP and I got curious.
I am using Element and Schildichat a bit, trying Element X and curious about the new Development here. It seems vibrant, they rewrite stuff in rust, the Apps are fancy and all.
But I tried Conversations and it seems based too, has transparent encryption, it is damn fast, usable, supports groups and files and all. Probably doesnt use the latest fancy Android SDKs but it seems solid.
I was surprised about how fast it was, as Matrix drastically varies per server. But also I found many dead communities, and in general I dont see XMPP at all, while many Projects (if not using Discord, bruh…) have a Matrix room.
How secure is OMEMO in todays standards? Or OpenPGP, compared to Matrix or Signal Encryption? I heard it also has rotating keys and all.
There are other things, like permission systems, chosen federation, privacy, bridge support and more, that are interesting. Are there advanced modern WebUIs for XMPP you like?
I saw that it uses up waaay less resources, why is that? Really, is “simply encrypted mail” somehow worse in an important way?
Similar to IRC, where I never found nice usable apps for my taste, I thought XMPP was deprecated, but that doesnt seem so?
What can you tell me about XMPP, is it modern, secure, privacy friendly?
I am hosting a two-person XMPP server now, and it’s pretty light on resources. Matrix, however, I am not even sure my VPS would even handle: I’ve seen multiple people talk about how their servers would explode when someone tries to join a large room. And also there’s an issue of every participating server storing chat history/media: my disk is small, I need it for the media on my site!
I am also concerned about how overly prevalent the central matrix.org server is.
all your first points are generally correct, as far as the last one however, that is the entire point in running your own instance. too many uses on matrix.org. all fedi platforms have this issue as well.
That was the point - it’s not supposed to happen yet it is there at least for the moment.
I share your concern - matrix is bloated as a protocol. I assume you tried synapse. I wonder how conduit (rust) or dendrite (go) would perform.
I didn’t try it, but I read about it and talked to people who did. Two of them ran Synapse and one tried Conduit. The result - Conduit does consume much less but still noticeably more than XMPP (plus the storage concern is still there).
Yes, Matrix.org is a huge problem. Even Mastodon is way more federated.
If you host Matrix through Dendrite or Conduit, it’s actually quite light on resources. Synapse, though, Synapse is a real beast.
The central server is one of the reasons Matrix gained popularity in my opinion. Most people don’t want to host a server or pick from a list of tiny servers. Lemmy shows that even without a central server, a federated system will end up with a few big servers that’ll host most of the accounts.
There are other big Matrix servers out there, but many of the ones that grew eventually struggle to meet the moderation requirements for a large chat server and end up either getting banned from other major servers or shut down eventually.
It kind of sucks how everyone flocks to Matrix.org, but I also don’t know where else I’d send new users.