this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
48 points (98.0% liked)

Technology

71517 readers
4451 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/40286422

Is UX/UI and marketing really the reason XMPP lags behind Signal/Matrix/Telegram?

Matrix is going Freemium 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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] BackYardIncendiary@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

I've run an XMPP server for a small online user group for about 7 years. It was relatively simple to get a basic server up and running.

One challenge came when my wife and I decided to use it as our everyday mobile messaging service. I had to learn about and configure a number of extensions to get Prosody working well with Conversations (Android) and Monal (iOS).

Another challenge was filtering spam. I posted my administrator XMPP address online and got hammered with spam. It took a while to figure out how to effectively combat it.

With respect to why it's not more popular, imagine if you were trying to sell people on email (with no business use-case). It's a generic federated protocol. I don't know if you can get much more bland.