> It seems because you haven't seen people already adopt it, you believe it must not be good.
On the contrary, I have been hearing about it for so long, I believe there must be something there.
But maybe there is something fundamental in the fact that because it is actually interoperable, it's a lot harder for it to get traction. If a client gets a lot of traction, it probably quickly gets tempted to leave the interop world and do whatever they want (and lock the users in). In other words, XMPP sounds like a success story of diversity, but the cost of that is that normies don't even know what it is. Similar to Linux in a way: if someone gets interested in Linux, the next thing they see is a gazillion different distros and people arguing about them (disclaimer: I have been a Linux user for 15 years).
Matrix is different in the sense that it does not look like a success in terms of diversity. Matrix is pretty much Element. And Matrix seems to be about converting everybody to Matrix: I have seen bridges to IRC that made the IRC experience so bad that people would move to Matrix. Not because Matrix was necessarily better, but because Matrix was killing the IRC experience.
In a way, I find it interesting that those "interoperable protocols" (both Matrix and XMPP) are all for diversity, as long as it is their protocol. XMPP wrote a blog post about the EU Digital Markets Act, saying something along the lines of "the DMA is a good idea, the only thing that they miss is that they should force everybody to use our protocol, XMPP". Matrix has a similar stance: "we don't consider it interoperability if we can't make it work with our protocol, no matter how much we destroy the experience on the other platform". Because the end goal is not really interoperability: it's interoperability under their conditions.
On the contrary, I have been hearing about it for so long, I believe there must be something there.
But maybe there is something fundamental in the fact that because it is actually interoperable, it's a lot harder for it to get traction. If a client gets a lot of traction, it probably quickly gets tempted to leave the interop world and do whatever they want (and lock the users in). In other words, XMPP sounds like a success story of diversity, but the cost of that is that normies don't even know what it is. Similar to Linux in a way: if someone gets interested in Linux, the next thing they see is a gazillion different distros and people arguing about them (disclaimer: I have been a Linux user for 15 years).
Matrix is different in the sense that it does not look like a success in terms of diversity. Matrix is pretty much Element. And Matrix seems to be about converting everybody to Matrix: I have seen bridges to IRC that made the IRC experience so bad that people would move to Matrix. Not because Matrix was necessarily better, but because Matrix was killing the IRC experience.
In a way, I find it interesting that those "interoperable protocols" (both Matrix and XMPP) are all for diversity, as long as it is their protocol. XMPP wrote a blog post about the EU Digital Markets Act, saying something along the lines of "the DMA is a good idea, the only thing that they miss is that they should force everybody to use our protocol, XMPP". Matrix has a similar stance: "we don't consider it interoperability if we can't make it work with our protocol, no matter how much we destroy the experience on the other platform". Because the end goal is not really interoperability: it's interoperability under their conditions.