It doesn’t paint a very good picture of the matrix protocol. Does the comparison have any merit?
404.city is obviously a large XMPP hoster and not a neutral source, but regardless of that I agree with the conclusions made.
also doesn’t mention matrix’s decentralization efforts, which would largely eliminate the weak federation concerns
From what I have seen, their p2p hybrid approach (while theoretically interesting) is a hot mess of technically totally inadequate stuff jumbled together and promoted as a band aid to solve (among other stuff) the issue of difficult selfhosting, which only exists due to problems with Matrix’s design in the first place (as also mentioned in the original comparison).
Matrix has working demos of p2p matrix with their dendrite server, which is matrix where servers are light enough to run on a non server device. That is the ultimate goal and it’s very possible we’ll see it within a few years.
Matrix is more than anything an open spec for how devices talk to each other.
Dendrite, a Golang program, compiled with WASM to run in a browser to make the browser act like a mini server and thus connect to other Matrix servers. Its honestly a wonder they got that hot mess working at all, and IMHO this will require a complete re-implementation to ever be anything worth considering.
Please tell me this is a parody. Matrix was already kludgy around encryption and authentication, especially for rooms. And very kludgy in integrating with other protocols.
I see. Thanks for your input. It’s hard to draw conclusions with these sites sometimes.
Yes I’d also say that is a bit biased. Both are good and secure but it is often said Matrix is a bit more complex for non-tech users to set up the trust etc for fully encrypted chatrooms and verification of devices. I’d say XMPP could have a slight edge there on just ease of use. Matrix is normally accepted to be more secure though in terms of advanced options.
One thing I do like with XMPP’s ‘extendable’ options is the XEP-0060 pubsub standard which is not in wide use but allows proper blogging with formatted title, body, etc and Atom feeds. This makes a really good blog whereas Matrix is still largely stuck with the chatroom format, which XMPP also has and which lacks formatting for blogging.
That was really biased. They claim that matrix isn’t open spec or open source (both of which are false), not extensible (false), and has no third party clients (false).
I thought as much. There’s a clear bias towards XMPP, though some statements seem objective and factual. Some others are just strange, like the one where it just says “OLM” on a yellow background. Is that good? Bad? Some extra words would have been nice.
The Matrix side of the “Open, extensible protocol?” is borderline incoherent.
This has to be understood with the history of Matrix developers badmouthing XMPPs expandability approach ;) They are basically just turning around the argument to show that there are very much two sides of the coin.
Huh? None of that is written in that comparison as far as I can tell.
