Nice tutorial.
I used to use XMPP but it appears that it lost the fight. Matrix has come along and has all of the momentum. There are technical reasons for this (more explicit about being a distributed synced log) and marketing reasons for this. However at this point it seems that Matrix is the better horse to bet on. I have moved some of my closest friends to Matrix and most of the rest of my friends are available in-Matrix via bridges. It is really quite nice.
Dunno, to me it seems the opposite. Back in 2018 or so I would have agreed, but more and more Matrix servers are shut down over huge technical issues with Synapse and 3rd party clients in the Matrix ecosystem are having a hard time catching up with specs.
XMPP on the other hand has really improved client wise in recent months, e2ee and video/audio calls (not using Jitsi Meet like Matrix does) is also getting quite good support across many clients.
It hasn’t really resulted in a big influx of users for XMPP though (other than a few Matrix refugees), but Matrix also seems to be quite stagnant with declining user/channel activity in my experience.
In my direct personal surrounding also no one moved to either XMPP or Matrix (despite best efforts). Sadly, Signal, Threema and Telegram seem to still attract most of the people moving away from WhatsApp.
I’m keeping a close eye on the Snikket project (which bundles Prosody as the server). They are trying to provide a suite of similarly-branded XMPP clients and server which provide a common set of features and experience across platforms. In other words, provide a more “product oriented” XMPP platform. So far it uses:
- Prosody as a server + a new web UI for managing users and handling invites to create accounts on servers,
- An adapted version of Conversations for their Android app,
- An adapted version of Siskin.IM for their iOS app.
While I’m a huge fan of what they’re trying to achieve, I’m a bit worried about the strategy. Using preexisting code for each component seems like a win, but they are all made with very different sets of technology. Lua, java, swift, and python projects all need to be worked on simultaneously to add support for any new XEPs because of how important it is to maintain parity of experience on the different platforms. That’s quite a heavy lift if you ask me, but maybe working with the maintainers of those projects is easier than I expect it to be.
Snikket
Does snikket also allow for calls / video calls?
No, and I don’t see any mention of it on their roadmap.
Do you know any XMPP options that allow for video calls and are easy to install? For reference re “easy”, I ran a matrix server which worked great as a family Whatsapp replacement until synapse v1.0 (didn’t get to migrate to python3). I also managed to get prosody working for messaging, but not for video calls…
