> we have zero fragmentation so far. some clients implement more features than others
The Matrix spec has many versions and many features. Clients implement and keep up with varying parts of it due to varying reasons usually involving varying amounts of manpower and funding. Same as with XMPP. I don't see the difference.
The difference is that Matrix is curated as a single spec (currently at v1.7: https://matrix.org/blog/2023/05/25/matrix-v-1-7-release/), which ensures that competing implementations for new features don’t fragment incompatibly but only a single one-true-way to talk a given feature exists. Anything else is a transient experiment. Meanwhile, we’ve never yet broken backwards compatibility in the spec, meaning that in theory any client can talk to any other client as long as it has implemented the required features. The inspiration here is HTML5 (albeit with versioned releases, and a clearer spec proposal process).
In other words, I’m defining fragmentation to be incompatible features - not just clients/servers which haven’t yet implemented a given feature (which is inevitable, just like browsers lag behind specced HTML and CSS features)
One way of putting this is that we’ve traded off the risk of fragmentation (but with free-for-all governance) for the risk of more centralised governance by the Matrix.org Foundation, with associated high drama when folks don’t agree with the curation decisions we make in what gets merged into the official spec.
Both are valid approaches with different tradeoffs; I was just trying to flag the confusion upthread accusing Matrix of being fragmented when it really isn’t (to a fault!)
Pretty sure I remember the AP spec author saying the whole thing works very much like XMPP. But they couldn't have built on top of XMPP for some unspecified reason.
Pretty sure the client feature parity problem is inherent to open ecosystems with many vendors with varying priorities and budgets. Just look at the web back when there were more browsers in the game, or email clients etc.
XMPP simply does not have enough Hype, it's just boring old technology that keeps working and getting better over time despite lack of funding and startups.
But most of all, users care about talking to their friends. You could have all the features and amazing UX but if their friends are using tin cans and wet wire, that's what they will turn to. Network effect trumps all. Features and UX are marketing, which at most can help you bootstrap to the point where network effect kicks in.
That's great. Probably too late to make an impact (And I say this as someone who uses XMPP regularly), but I would have killed for something like that 10 years ago. Weeding through clients was such a pain. 90% of the clients were either half-baked or well-baked, but super out-of-date, and without having certain XEP numbers memorized, finding the remaining 10% was super frustrating.
I don't think it makes sense to expect XMPP to "make an impact" ever, if by that you mean "to spontaneously become the next dominant network" (or it already is, under the guise of WhatsApp, bar the federated aspect). The forces in presence are too uneven and the modern internet is too consolidated to permit that to happen (even google cannot dislodge WhatsApp/Messenger).
IMO, what does matter for XMPP's future is that it remains appealing to a growing niche of users who want to be in control, for whom self/local-hosting is important (XMPP excels at that), who care about privacy (OMEMO is state of the art, and XMPP offers gentler alternatives where PFS isn't desired), and who understand the benefits of federation for resilience. This niche will grow naturally as more and more people get deceived by every monopolistic network being doomed to grow beyond a threshold of sustainability and implode as a result. By that time, it only matters that there are enough sufficiently well maintained and user-friendly clients on all platforms for those "super-users" to embark their peers (which is currently largely the case).
This is how I ended-up here, in fact. I refused to join WhatsApp because I was tired of previous forced migrations from protocols I thought were "too big to fail" (MSN, Skype, …), WhatsApp was already banned in some of the countries I was travelling to for work, and I so, after a failed errand with Matrix, I rediscovered XMPP 10 years after I had my first account on it. Today I have about a hundred contacts there, and the less tech-literate of my peers notice no practical difference in usability or features compared to something like WhatsApp: it just works.
By "make an impact" I was thinking maybe being more popular than either Matrix or IRC (both of which I use regularly, and both of which I would prefer XMPP to) not "spontaneously become the next dominant network"
Yes, the whole app will be Linux Mobile ready soonish, but priority was to have the main screen first and get everything ready in-time for Debian stable inclusion
The Matrix spec has many versions and many features. Clients implement and keep up with varying parts of it due to varying reasons usually involving varying amounts of manpower and funding. Same as with XMPP. I don't see the difference.