Is UX/UI and marketing really the reason XMPP lags behind Signal/Matrix/Telegram?
Is UX/UI and marketing really the reason XMPP lags behind Signal/Matrix/Telegram?
To be honest, I don’t quite understand why Matrix passes this hurdle and XMPP does not. Matrix is just as little designed for privacy as XMPP. Metadata is also generated, is also not E2EE (as far as I know) and is also distributed further by federation than in XMPP. The quality of the clients is al...
Edit: Matrix isn't going freemium, it's introducing premium accounts to fund the matrix.org homeserver. Thank you for the corrections in the comments.
Matrix is going freemium Matrix is introducing premium accounts and WhatsApp is adding ads, which is sparking the annual "time to leave [app]" threads.
Users don't care that much about privacy, but they do care about enshittification, so XMPP not being built for it shouldn't be a problem.
Meanwhile, I've heard for years that XMPP has solved a lot of the problems that lead more popular apps to fail.
Is it really just a marketing/UX/UI problem?
If XMPP had a killer app with all the features that Signal/Whatsapp/Telegram has, would it have as many users?
If not, why does it keep getting out-adopted by new apps and protocols?
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Matrix going freemium isn't just inaccurate (they plan on adding a premium option only on their homeserver because they need the funds, which is reasonable since they're not growing magical money in their backyard) but mentioning it beside Whatsapp's ads is pure comedy. You don't need to stage things this way to bring people to push the team behind Privacy Guides to accept a few XMPP apps in their recommendations list. Just look at what the developer of Conversations ended up working on. Aren't you going to add that beside Whatsapp too? FFS, just support your favorite developers and stop trying to put down other developers of open source privacy focused software.
I'll admit to misreading the Matrix news.
stage things this way to bring people to push the team behind Privacy Guides to accept a few XMPP apps in their recommendations list.
This is an amazingly bad faith interpretation of my post.
Then I'm glad if I'm wrong. Regarding your question, I believe we're fortunate to have the options we have and to have found them and used them. I don't think any of them are perfect just as I don't think if any of them had one app to rule them all it'd make much of a difference. Most people stick to the worst possible options such as Whatsapp because it's what's shoved down their throats in the first place. You could have tons of cash lying around to burn on marketing your service and/or create something that makes lazy people even lazier. Whatsapp gained it's userbase through the years and thanks to a what I see as a mixture of good funding, interoperability between different mobile OSs, and accounts linked to phone numbers everyone had but without the cost per SMS most were used to nor regional limitations. We already had tons of instant messengers back then, and apps were already available around 2008 or so that let anyone use any of their IM accounts at once from their smartphone. But I guess tons of people wouldn't even have an email address if it wasn't for Microsoft and Google, and that says a lot. I mean, just look at how OpenAI's ChatGPT has blown up these past couple of years. Most people clearly don't care about quality, reliability, security or privacy, they just want to use whatever requires the least amount of effort. I wouldn't be surprised if people stopped using Tinder in favor of an app that booked hotel rooms for couples and groups based on all the data it learns about each user. 0% talking, 100% increasing cleaning personel's workloads.
I wish we had a secure, private, FOSS messaging protocol as the default.
We need a good alternative to having our friend networks fragmented across six different apps.
Me too, but at the same time I'm glad we don't all use exactly the same thing as that usually means cyberattacks are funneled to just one option. You could also say XMPP has been the default for the longest time, but just as it still happens today using XMPP doesn't mean everything is compatible. Each app has it's own set of features, some only use OTR for encryption, others might use OMEMO but not the same version and mix up encryption keys... Matrix used to be more compatible between clients, but then 2.0 appeared and either some features aren't handled the same or some servers don't so federation breaks or gets laggy. My guess is the next widely adopted thing will probably be a freemium, falsely secure and not private at all centralized service based on FOSS software, already prebundled and preset together with whatever people use the most and with some "all-you-can-eat" offering (probably AI unless the fad fades out). So maybe an upgrade to Whatsapp or something else from Meta or Microsoft. Apple won't do anything that's crossplatform, Google can't persevere on a single IM solution without releasing 3 more that add nothing new and scraping them all in a year, and Amazon will probably stick to backend.
Still, nothing stops us from using whatever the hell we want. I have my XMPP account and I'm happy with it. I don't have much use for it, but I don't plan on deleting it anytime soon.