I’m looking into hosting one of these for the first time. From my limited research, XMPP seems to win in every way, which makes me think I must be missing something. Matrix is almost always mentioned as the de-facto standard, but I rarely saw arguments why it is better than XMPP?
Xmpp seems way easier to host, requiring less resources, has many more options for clients, and is simpler and thus easier to manage and reason about when something goes wrong.
So what’s the deal?
Suggest your friend to give Eturnal a try maybe. I have it running on an Oracle free tier instance, and I use it daily to have video calls with my family using Synapse/Element (and Jitsi inside Element for group calls), and it works great. The documentation is very good too.
Edit: this is my Eturnal config, for reference:
eturnal: listen: - ip: "::" port: 3478 transport: udp enable_turn: true - ip: "::" port: 3478 transport: auto enable_turn: true - ip: "::" port: 5349 transport: tls enable_turn: true realm: turn.<MY_DOMAIN> tls_crt_file: /etc/letsencrypt/live/turn.<MY_DOMAIN>/fullchain.pem tls_key_file: /etc/letsencrypt/live/turn.<MY_DOMAIN>/privkey.pem tls_options: - no_tlsv1 - no_tlsv1_1 - cipher_server_preferenceAnd the compose file:
services: eturnal: container_name: eturnal image: ghcr.io/processone/eturnal:latest environment: ETURNAL_RELAY_MIN_PORT: 49160 ETURNAL_RELAY_MAX_PORT: 59160 ETURNAL_RELAY_IPV4_ADDR: <REDACTED> ETURNAL_RELAY_IPV6_ADDR: <REDACTED> ETURNAL_SECRET: <VERY LONG RANDOM STRING> volumes: - ./eturnal.yml:/etc/eturnal.yml:ro - /etc/letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt:ro restart: unless-stopped read_only: true cap_drop: - ALL security_opt: - no-new-privileges:true network_mode: host