Edit: Matrix isn’t going freemium, it’s introducing premium accounts to fund the matrix.org homeserver. Thank you for the corrections in the comments.
Matrix is going freemium Matrix is introducing premium accounts 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?
Simply: XMPP is a protocol, and non-tech people don’t know “protocols”, they know “apps”, at best.
Plus XMPP has challenges (and I’ve used it since about 2000, on my phone in 2009).
E2E is possible, but problematic (in that it’s not simply just “on”).
Even worse, none of the apps look polished…it’s all clumsy, there’s no one app on all OS’s. And the names, FFS us geeks need to get a fucking clue.
And I use XMPP every day on my phone and laptop.
E2E is possible, but problematic (in that it’s not simply just “on”).
That’s just not true. All XMPP clients have support OTR out of the box for probably 15 years.
OTR is a janky kind of encryption that doesn’t have a modern analogue any more. It requires both (or all?) participants to be connected to each other simultaneously in order for messaging to work.
With mobile devices, this is very bad.
It’s also not doing great:
XEP-0364: Current Off-the-Record Messaging Usage
WARNING: This document has been automatically Deferred after 12 months of inactivity in its previous Experimental state…
It’s also one of three different encryption standards…
Simply: XMPP is a protocol, and non-tech people don’t know “protocols”, they know “apps”, at best.
They know SMTP, SMS, MMS, etc. (or at least how to use them). That’s not the problem.
E: if you reply to this comment without actually reading it, you’re going to be blocked.
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They know…how to use them
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I would be surprised if most people had desktop email clients. And of those who do, I imagine most of them didn’t even see “SMTP” on the setup screen, or have since forgotten.
Likewise, most people have no idea what the difference is between SMS and MMS, or even why phones will send one type vs the other. Mostly people just complained “my picture won’t send” even during the height of the protocols.
No, they don’t.
Go talk to people, they have no idea what you’re talking about.
Non-tech people barely know apps. They use email, or a given messenger. They have no idea the underlying technology - they only think in terms of functionality or use.
SMS/MMS just means “text messaging” to people. They don’t know the difference between that and Apple Messages, because they see both as apps.
Hell,most people don’t even know which SMS app they use on a daily basis - that’s how little they understand the difference between protocol and app (and SMS isn’t even really a protocol).
I’ve been explaining SMS to technical people since 1996, and they often struggled with it.
I’ve been in Enterprise IT since the 90’s, and have friends in the SMB space. In both worlds the user’s are clueless about underlying protocols, and only think in terms of the app itself.
They use email
They know…how to use them
Read more closelier
Generally they’ll know them as texting and email, they don’t know the names of the protocols underneath.
XMPP is hard to say and easy to forget for any who do not already care.
Is it really just a marketing/UX/UI problem?
The UI is definitely a problem. I’ve never seen a remotely modern-looking XMPP UI.
If XMPP had a killer app with all the features that Signal/Whatsapp/Telegram has, would it have as many users?
Well, first of all, these 3 all have vastly different amounts of users.
Secondly no, marketing is still a big deal. WhatsApp is leaning heavily on Meta’s other products for marketing and integration. They’re able to use these to make them convenient to sign up and get messaging. What I don’t get is why Meta doesn’t just unite all 3 under “Messenger”.
Cheogram, Monocles Chat and Movim have pretty decent UI’s, certainly on-par with Signal’s.
Disagree.
Matrix going freemium isn’t just inaccurate (they plan on adding a premium option only on their homeserver because they need the funds, which is reasonable since they’re not growing magical money in their backyard) but mentioning it beside Whatsapp’s ads is pure comedy. You don’t need to stage things this way to bring people to push the team behind Privacy Guides to accept a few XMPP apps in their recommendations list. Just look at what the developer of Conversations ended up working on. Aren’t you going to add that beside Whatsapp too? FFS, just support your favorite developers and stop trying to put down other developers of open source privacy focused software.
I’ll admit to misreading the Matrix news.
stage things this way to bring people to push the team behind Privacy Guides to accept a few XMPP apps in their recommendations list.
This is an amazingly bad faith interpretation of my post.
Then I’m glad if I’m wrong. Regarding your question, I believe we’re fortunate to have the options we have and to have found them and used them. I don’t think any of them are perfect just as I don’t think if any of them had one app to rule them all it’d make much of a difference. Most people stick to the worst possible options such as Whatsapp because it’s what’s shoved down their throats in the first place. You could have tons of cash lying around to burn on marketing your service and/or create something that makes lazy people even lazier. Whatsapp gained it’s userbase through the years and thanks to a what I see as a mixture of good funding, interoperability between different mobile OSs, and accounts linked to phone numbers everyone had but without the cost per SMS most were used to nor regional limitations. We already had tons of instant messengers back then, and apps were already available around 2008 or so that let anyone use any of their IM accounts at once from their smartphone. But I guess tons of people wouldn’t even have an email address if it wasn’t for Microsoft and Google, and that says a lot. I mean, just look at how OpenAI’s ChatGPT has blown up these past couple of years. Most people clearly don’t care about quality, reliability, security or privacy, they just want to use whatever requires the least amount of effort. I wouldn’t be surprised if people stopped using Tinder in favor of an app that booked hotel rooms for couples and groups based on all the data it learns about each user. 0% talking, 100% increasing cleaning personel’s workloads.
I wish we had a secure, private, FOSS messaging protocol as the default.
We need a good alternative to having our friend networks fragmented across six different apps.
Me too, but at the same time I’m glad we don’t all use exactly the same thing as that usually means cyberattacks are funneled to just one option. You could also say XMPP has been the default for the longest time, but just as it still happens today using XMPP doesn’t mean everything is compatible. Each app has it’s own set of features, some only use OTR for encryption, others might use OMEMO but not the same version and mix up encryption keys… Matrix used to be more compatible between clients, but then 2.0 appeared and either some features aren’t handled the same or some servers don’t so federation breaks or gets laggy. My guess is the next widely adopted thing will probably be a freemium, falsely secure and not private at all centralized service based on FOSS software, already prebundled and preset together with whatever people use the most and with some “all-you-can-eat” offering (probably AI unless the fad fades out). So maybe an upgrade to Whatsapp or something else from Meta or Microsoft. Apple won’t do anything that’s crossplatform, Google can’t persevere on a single IM solution without releasing 3 more that add nothing new and scraping them all in a year, and Amazon will probably stick to backend.
Still, nothing stops us from using whatever the hell we want. I have my XMPP account and I’m happy with it. I don’t have much use for it, but I don’t plan on deleting it anytime soon.
There are no good, trustworthy, full feature xmpp apps for iOS, at least as of a year ago. Either the apps aren’t full featured or they don’t support push notifications for whatever reason.
UI is not really a problem. Every time I hear complains about a given FOSS client of something “UI” not being “modern” it’s basically complaining “waaa waaa this does not look exactly like Discord, I can’t find a thing that is obviously labelled as a button!” or some such thing. Which is weird because, honestly, all chat apps like Signal, Telegram, Conversation or Gajim do basically have the exact same look: a pane for chatrooms, a pane for current chatroom, and a pane for typing. There: that UI was literally solved in the 90s.
Speaking of 90s, Winamp is from the 90s and the UI is doing quite well, to the point more modern programs intentionally want to look Winampy (eg.: Audacious).
UX however… it has quite a number of issues, such as there not being a practical way to know if all of the client, the server and service you want to use support the features you want, in particular encryption and message archiving.
Even the “beforehand” / “onboarding” UX is annoying: would anyone here be able to point to the “join-lemmy” equivalent of the XMPPverse? Or point to a generalist server with long-term lifetime, kinda like how freenode was (note: was) for IRC?
If I had to venture, I’d say if an important group actually put effort into setting up and servicing long-term XMPP infra in the style and generalism that freenode was, then probably it could gain some good traction. If anything, it could help doing the join between “upgrade people from IRC” and “upgrade people from modern silos”.
