This is Microsoft enshittifying the platform they acquired to squeeze more revenue. But this is totally fine, because as user hostile and evil as the Microsoft corporation measurably is, they made a cute jpg few years ago about loving opensource or something (yeah, I know, those are different things, but I’m calling out their PR bullshit and the usual bootlickers)

I’ll bet people said the same thing when Intellisense started suggesting lines completions.

I’m sure many did, but I’m also pretty sure it’s easy to draw a line between code assistance and LLM-infused code generation.

Telegram never was private, group chats never were encrypted (and that’s not an opinion: the feature simply is missing). If anything, they are just removing their false and deceiving claims. That they remained there for so long is something I can’t wrap my head around.

I’d argue XMPP is less ideal than Matrix because groups are located on a single server, which makes them easier to take down than Matrix’ replicated state.

That is true, but it’s never been a problem in my relatively long experience with XMPP: some server software can be used as a cluster and distributed, making it highly available (basically, the whole of WhatsApp runs on a fork of ejabberd), and the comparatively tiny resource usage of XMPP contributes to its stability.

XMPP does have a spec for F-MUC (distributed rooms somewhat like Matrix, many years before Matrix) and my rationale as to why it never picked up despite a whole decade of “competition” from Matrix is that it’s a problem that just doesn’t need solving. The price to pay for it is hefty: Matrix resource usage (bandwidth, CPU, RAM) is insane, its protocol complexity makes it a single-vendor implementation (which is risky on very practical grounds), and it’s not even bulletproof for the niche use-case it set to tackle: in the end, your identity server on Matrix remains centralized.

You can tell that I’m partial to XMPP, but that’s only after having been a service operator for years, with my original expectations largely favouring Matrix.

You can host (tens? of) thousands of XMPP sessions on a RPi at the back of your router or in a field hooked to a PV panel and sim card, and none of “the wealthy” knowing or caring about it, though. The difference with signal is that everyone can do that, and everyone doing it expands the network and makes it more resilient for the benefits of all.

How it works (to simplify) is them giving up on matrix clients ever becoming performant and well behaving on handheld devices (because of the absurd complexity of the protocol), and, instead of doing something about that, just decided to shift the client logic onto the server and castrating the clients (esp. for offline features). It’s also good short-term business because it makes hosting Matrix even more cumbersome and expensive, giving a compelling reason for the type of midscale/corporate deployments previously on the fence about their self-hosting costs (due to poor design and scalability) to just pay Element for that (while probably contemplating an alternative future).

Matrix has the tendency to require all participants’s servers to replicate all of the room state (who joined when, who said what when, whose avatar changed to what when, …) practically forever, and is sucking a ton of bandwidth and CPU for the privilege. It’s pretty bad, unfixable, and, if you ask me, over hyped.

Speaking about XMPP, compared to centralized services, at least the “who talks to whom” and metadata concerns in general are partially mitigated by not having all the metadata converge towards a single host, being able to selfhost, and being able to host behind tor/i2p/…

Other options for what exactly? Telegram practically has the same privacy and encryption guarantees as late 90’s forums and bulletin boards. If you want to learn nothing from that, keep using a centralized nonstandard service deprived of end-to-end encryption!

With only one having your interests at heart. An easy choice.

I agree with the sentiment and everything, but the whole gaming console industry has gone to crap after they started putting hard drives/storage in them with the goal of needing you to be online and not owning anything anymore. They are all equally despicable for that. Which makes emulation even more essential, just for preserving those games into the future when the online front will inexorably shut down.

I do hope that the new torrent protocol will help with that, especially for “compilations of stuff” (e.g series, episodes, starring XYZ, …): as I understand it, seeding will become a global file-level thing that can cross torrent boundaries. The new trend of seeding and referencing over I2P might help with keeping the old stuff afloat too.

😂

The factor that is keeping me on Matrix is that I have all diffrent chats with people on different platforms in one client that is cross platform.

yeah, as I wrote above, that’s no different in XMPP (but probably much more secure and better maintained: till recently most of the bridging in matrix-world was leveraged by libpurple, which has an horrendous security track-record).
If you are getting into bridging in XMPP, I recommend giving slidge a try: https://sr.ht/~nicoco/slidge/

that is is against ToS for most apps

https://slidge.im/core/user/low_profile.html#keeping-a-low-profile

google kinda “killed it”.

And yet it has hundred folds more users than Matrix :) XMPP is ubiquitous (it props up google cloud/nintendo switch push notifications, if your online game has a chat system with million users that’s it, WhatsApp is using it, you have billions of IoT devices running it, …) so just like Linux it can’t really be “killed” at this point as a critical piece of software infrastructure. On the user-facing side, things are alive and kicking with great and well-maintained clients (which is more than can be said about matrix, being a single-source implementation held together by a single company constantly fighting financing issues).

Interesting, but I got past that hurdle…

I was thinking more of the “day to day admin” side of things rather than “getting it running for the first time”: ejabberd really runs like clockwork, demands no effort, no attention, packs all the features you need, and uses close to no resource.
By that time, I’ve been hosting services for communities for decades, and a good argument in favour of keeping XMPP, no matter how much adoption it would eventually get was that ejabberd is one of most “fire & forget” software I’ve ever deployed. Right now I have an instance running with 500 users and it barely ticks above 150MB RSS.

In comparison to that, synapse for a dozen users, especially in the early days, was a burning hot mess. The whole stack is rather fragile and I was always worried about something breaking up, or resources going wild. If you are solo admin with users across timezones depending on you, that might matter a lot.

You should definitely give XMPP a chance, but not feel bad about ending-up with whichever feels better: they are mostly fine, and largely preferable to the non-standard/non-federated alternatives.
XMPP is orders of magnitude lighter weight so that might factor in if you have associated costs to running in the cloud.
If you want to get started the easy way, go with ejabberd, it has sane defaults and lots of convenience (e.g. it embarks a stun/turn server to facilitate calling through NAT, acts as a ACME client to renew certificates automagically, …).
On Android, Cheogram is a good client to recommend for power-users, Quicksy/Conversations for those who want to use their phone number for contacts auto-discovery. Desktop has Dino/Gajim, (i)OS(X) has SiskinIM, BeagleIM.

Regarding the libera.chat drama, you can read more here: https://libera.chat/news/temporarily-disabling-the-matrix-bridge
IMO that tells a lot about the people behind Matrix and their overall attitude (I had the same “trust us”, “it’s gonna be soon, I swear!”, “that was bad luck but it’s gonna be fine!” vibes when interacting with the Matrix team members in the early days).

Yep, if you are on either, you are fighting the good fight, so keep it up :)

And if you self-host, you’ll find it dramatically easier to do on XMPP (that’s how I ended-up here, after giving up on Matrix’s shenanigans).

Absolutely, and an argument can be made about captive ecosystems controlling both clients and servers. They also represent a single point of failure, so there’s no magic bullet. In practice it’s also not that different than keeping up with your browser’s/OS’/phone’s updates and XMPP has that for itself that it has (unlike Matrix) a vibrant community of clients and servers supported by diverse parties (commercial and not).

No privacy nightmares compared to WhatsApp

My whole point was that between Signal and WhatsApp, none is intrinsically better than the other in this regard. Both are centralized and collect the same amount of privacy-sensitive data about you (your online presence and patterns, your IP, your network graph, the routing of your messages and their nature…), because they need that to function. Whether they log it (irrespective of what they advertise) is one thing nobody but themselves can verify and where opensource plays no role.

Matrix/XMPP are only better because you can self-host if you trust no one, or choose whom to trust, or change whom to trust along the way without incurring a total loss of your contacts, histories, assets, …

IMO, the sales pitch for XMPP/Matrix shouldn’t be “we are better/more secure/more privacy focused by design” (and it’s pretty clear that the tech-illiterate majority doesn’t care anyway), it should be “with us, you will no longer have to jump ship every 5 years in avg. because facebook/google/amazon/some oligarch/… broke their promise/used their absolute power over your account to their discretion”.

I’m selfhosting a Matrix server and have all my Chats from other apps also bridged to there.

Same here, but with XMPP in place of Matrix. For historical context, XMPP was invented about 25 years ago on the premise that people were already tired of having their instant messaging scattered over multiple protocols (rather than Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, iMessage now, it was Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ, … then), so bridging is very much front and center in the XMPP world. Over time, people also realized that bridging sucks in general (you either dumb down your client to the lowest common denominator which sucks for yourself, or your client isolates itself from the source protocol enough that it sucks for everyone else).
To add insult to injury, most modern protocols also forbid, by their ToS, the use of alternative clients (which very much includes bridges), and to the best of my knowledge WhatsApp, Signal and Discord will eventually suspend your account on this basis.
Matrix is still trying to carve a niche for itself in this space, and is failing IMO (judging by the quality/security of the bridges they have come-up with, and the recent libera.chat fiasco). I’d say that the situation in this regard in XMPP is only marginally better due to the fact that XMPP had a decade headstart to fail and try over, and I would not recommend using bridges on either of them if that can be avoided.

It XMPP better for group VC?

I’d say “it depends”. Fun fact, Matrix uses jitsi-meet under the hood (which is XMPP + a media transcoding/multicasting component that doubles as a relay), and jitsi-meet is my recommendation for this use-case: as long as the central server has good bandwidth, you can really scale up your VC to many attendees. On top of that, XMPP has support for peer-to-peer group VC, with the benefit that hosting is simpler, it doesn’t require any central component/relay (but the bandwidth cost is incurred on all participants and you won’t go beyond a handful of attendees that way).