Why not XMPP?
discuss.privacyguides.net
To be honest, I don’t quite understand why Matrix passes this hurdle and XMPP does not. Matrix is just as little designed for privacy as XMPP. Metadata is also generated, is also not E2EE (as far as I know) and is also distributed further by federation than in XMPP. The quality of the clients is also very differing. I also see the advantages of Matrix and use it myself, but I find it quite interesting how an extra category was recently created to keep Matrix in the recommendations, although it...

Matrix is going Freemium and WhatsApp is adding ads, which is sparking the annual “time to leave [app]” threads.

Users don’t care that much about privacy, but they do care about enshittification, so XMPP not being built for it shouldn’t be a problem.

Meanwhile, I’ve heard for years that XMPP has solved a lot of the problems that lead more popular apps to fail.

Is it really just a marketing/UX/UI problem?

If XMPP had a killer app with all the features that Signal/Whatsapp/Telegram has, would it have as many users?

If not, why does it keep getting out-adopted by new apps and protocols?

  • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    34·
    2 days ago

    UI is not really a problem. Every time I hear complains about a given FOSS client of something “UI” not being “modern” it’s basically complaining “waaa waaa this does not look exactly like Discord, I can’t find a thing that is obviously labelled as a button!” or some such thing. Which is weird because, honestly, all chat apps like Signal, Telegram, Conversation or Gajim do basically have the exact same look: a pane for chatrooms, a pane for current chatroom, and a pane for typing. There: that UI was literally solved in the 90s.

    Speaking of 90s, Winamp is from the 90s and the UI is doing quite well, to the point more modern programs intentionally want to look Winampy (eg.: Audacious).

    UX however… it has quite a number of issues, such as there not being a practical way to know if all of the client, the server and service you want to use support the features you want, in particular encryption and message archiving.

    Even the “beforehand” / “onboarding” UX is annoying: would anyone here be able to point to the “join-lemmy” equivalent of the XMPPverse? Or point to a generalist server with long-term lifetime, kinda like how freenode was (note: was) for IRC?

    If I had to venture, I’d say if an important group actually put effort into setting up and servicing long-term XMPP infra in the style and generalism that freenode was, then probably it could gain some good traction. If anything, it could help doing the join between “upgrade people from IRC” and “upgrade people from modern silos”.