this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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Matrix is essentially secure XMPP.
For fast and secure communications, I’d expect Fediverse mods and admins to be using it, as it doesn’t take much more to set up and use than less secure XMPP variants, and lines up with the ActivityPub worldview.
But I guess people go with what they know, and some people know standard XMPP or Discord.
XMPP has quite good encryption nowadays, and at least according to our sysadmin, it's quite a bit lighter on system requirements. I think there was also some concerns about the matrix foundation being pretty corporate oriented.
Problem is most of the xmpp clients don't have support for the latest encryption versions
Matrix has absolutely bonkers resource requirements relative to the end user experience it delivers, and can be much more complex to deploy. Some of that is intrinsic to federation or to its protocol; some is related to Synapse specifically. I'm not sure whether competing server implementations will catch up before Synapse gets a rewrite in a more performant language, but I'm eager for one or the other to happen.
I admin a public Matrix server, so I'm not by any means against the product, but IMO there's a reason it hasn't meaningfully displaced XMPP yet.
Synapse is a mess, which is why Element is looking to eventually drop it for Dendrite. There's also Conduit.
Are Dendrite and/or Conduit feature complete/comparable yet?
Not yet, but Conduit is fairly close if I'm not mistaken.
https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite/issues/3413
The problem with XMPP is its encryption UX is dreadful, Matrix got it right with comparing emoji to verify. Also Matrix, despite everything does try to keep its encryption up to date and so all the clients try to follow suit, the same cannot be said for xmpp