The interop was a nice feature implemented by their engineers, but it violated the lock-in operational principles of the gatekeeper services, so it had to be abandoned. Let's see if the EU Digital Markets Act will bring back XMPP interfaces to the big ones... ;)

So far it looks more like walled gardens are the real winners.

What you maybe see as overengineering, I see as a prerequisite for wider adoption.

These days aren't the old days any more, when you only ever used a native app without e2ee on a computer.

Pardon my pedantry, but Facebook Chat was never XMPP-based. They ran an XMPP gateway into their proprietary messaging system, but there was no S2S.

What are the reasons Matrix is the winner? Are they inherent to the protocol itself or something else?

Funding and centralization.

Matrix has a for-profit, venture funded company (Element) that is effectively behind the reference/flagship server and client implementations.

xmpp is far less centralized. Virtually all of the modern clients are single developer projects that live off day jobs and grants.

There are different ways to look at it. Matrix has done a great job at organizing resources to push the platform forward. xmpp has an impressive ecosystem and some incredible client implementations on a shoe string budget, that would probably look/function better and have lots more features given funding parity.

I think as we've seen with other projects like Immich, organizing and recruiting resources is an important part of delivering the modern experiences that users expect today from open source projects. Open source and self-hostable can't be an excuse for missing features.

Matrix has a pretty comprehensive featureset with clients across a broad range of platforms.

The accusations of it being overengineered come typically due to the Synapse server implementation being slow. This is basically an artefact of Matrix being quite complicated to provide a byzantine fault tolerant decentralised equivalent to WhatsApp or Slack etc - and time has gone into fixing stability and usability rather than performance. Meanwhile performance is getting better, but progress is slow due to tragedy-of-the-commons related funding challenges. We will get there in the end, though.

Thanks for the response Matthew! But please go to sleep!

Yes it's unfortunate how much Synapse's unperformant implementation has decreased general confidence in the protocol itself. I'm confident it will get better

Just by what people seem to use.

My main problem with matrix is that it feels sluggish. I'm told the experience can be improved by running your own homeserver so I'll be trying that sometime this year.

In my limited experience, running a homeserver sucked. Really hard to do on limited resources. Then again, that was a long time ago so maybe things have improved and perhaps Dendrite has come along. But Synapse sucked to run IME.

Synapse has improved; Dendrite has stagnated due to lack of funding; meanwhile there are also rust-native homeservers like Conduit which are beta but smaller footprint. The plan on the Element side is to keep optimising Synapse - the main win to be had is https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pKtLl4vCV3-8xz8crvxW...

Those slides were interesting! And I use Claude similarly... kinda like Rubber Duck debugging except it's like Rubber Human debugging.

LOL if using a chat app requires running a server maybe better just use something that doesn't suck like XMPP?

I am vaguely reminded of running my own irc bouncer...