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?
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For Linux and Windows, gajim works very well and is easy to use. It definitely doesn’t have an interface from 1995. If you need something easier for people on Linux, dino is even more streamlined and is extremely easy to use. I think there was an effort to make a Windows build too, but I don’t know how far along that is or if they are still working on it.
For Android Conversations is the gold standard. On macOS there’s Sikin and Monal, but I’ve never used them since I’m not a Mac or iPhone user. But all these clients support a wide variety of features including encryption.
I’m not sure I follow you on this point. XMPP has had MUCs (Multi-user Conferences) which function similarly to chat rooms/IRC channels for a long, long time. The channels are accessible regardless of what server you’re on as long as your server is federating with the wider XMPP network. There’s even a searchable list of public MUCs at search.jabber.network covering a variety of topics. Most servers allow creating new channels if you want to start a new one, and anyone can join regardless of their server.
I fully admit its probably a me issue, but I couldn’t get Gajim to work properly through either the flatpak or the aur, which meant I wasn’t going to ask anyone else to try. Dino was was fine but unless I missed it, it hasnt had an update in a while and didn’t seem like it was actively being worked on. Dino 0.4 came out over a year ago. Conversations was fine though.
As for multi-user conferences, I want to invite friends and family to “My Cool Server”, which has rooms they can join for topics like “Books” and “Music”, but I don’t want these to be publically accessible. I want them to be able to join them on their own as long as they are a member of " My Cool Server", which is how Discord works with role bots and how Matrix works with Spaces and Rooms. If that makes more sense.
Voice and video are also important, which are honestly not great in Matrix either, but they did recently add “Video Rooms” to Element that are persistent voice/video chats people who are members of a Space can join and leave at any time like you can in Discord. “Group calls” doesn’t fit the bill for this if it needs to be manually initiated.
Happy to hear if I’m wrong about any of that though.
Not sure what the problem with Gajim was. There’s a distro package already in Arch, although I usually use the AUR packages from git. I haven’t had any problem with either of them, though.
You should be able to limit MUCs so that they’re only for local users of a server and not accessible to people outside the server. Or, you can make them invite only, require a password, etc. So there are options there.
One-to-one video and audio chat works pretty well with XMPP. I don’t think group video/audio works, but I’ve never tried. I know that’s a really popular thing on Discord, so it’d be nice if XMPP had that too. I think there’s some work toward it, but I don’t know where that’s at.
Dino and Conversations weren’t good enough?