I see the matrix is more popular than xmpp, but why?

  • It’s faster and it’s not Synapse. I could serve hundreds of people on a single Pi while I would need to order a VPS with 4GB RAM to serve the same amount of people. I know there’s better server software out there, but it’s nowhere near Synapse. XMPP simply doesn’t care, clients and servers are well built and almost every client uses OMEMO and honestly I had a lot of decryption errors on Matrix and if you used something else than matrix.org you’d be screwed. It’s simply just better, because it’s faster and has a bigger ecosystem. The only thing that’s not cool about XMPP is that the federated userbase is kinda small. The biggest non-federated XMPP server is WhatsApp and that’s kinda sad. Also the protocol is nice, because most clients keep a socket open to listen for new messages and this is especially nice in the college WiFi environment some of my friends are in where a timer is set after bedtime which would wait until all sockets are closed which doesn’t include XMPP so messaging with my friends after bedtime is still possible.

    • Just the other day I got downvoted for posting that it’s stupid that 8GB of RAM in laptops is not enough. Software like Synapse, trying to lift the load that it does in Python, is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.

      the college WiFi environment some of my friends are in where a timer is set after bedtime which would wait until all sockets are closed which doesn’t include XMPP so messaging with my friends after bedtime is still possible.

      The college tries to just shut off the WiFi at night??