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Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive
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this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Technology
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Indeed. Xmpp is lost as a general purpose chat app for everyone. I have many issues with matrix but it's the best chance we have, particularly with bridges.
XMPP is the IETF Internet Standard while Matrix is just another custom IM protocol managed by a venture capital funded startup which keeps losing money.
I don't disagree with that statement; however, that doesn't make it something the general public will embrace. Its mess of extensions are top little too late. That ship has long sailed. And I say this as someone that prefers using XMPP for 1:1 chats
Edit: Sorry, I responded to the wrong parent.
I don't believe Matrix is better positioned than XMPP to succeed. On a technical aspect, Matrix hasn't managed to stabilize its protocol, and they've been a decade into it. This has resulted in only a single organization being in charge of the protocol, the client and the server implementations. This isn't sound, this isn't sustainable. And now, unsurprisingly, this organization is in a financial crisis, has lost important customers, has no budget secured to maintain its staff in the next years, and recently underwent a major licensing change that we can only interpret as a shift towards an opencore model at the detriment of the regular user.
The license change is to a GPL variant from the Apache license. How does that affect the regular user? Wouldn't it be better?
I can't pretend to know the future, but if you read between the lines and the justifications provided, this isn't really about AGPL per se, but about Element brokering AGPL exceptions. Practically we can expect all kinds of forks with opencore options that might enshittify the user experience in different ways, and further solidification of Element's single-handed control over Matrix (which had been a prime concern for many years). Matrix is by the day closer to the closed-source centralized silos it was first pretending to oppose.
And don't forget the CLA!
I hear what youre saying, I don't like the license exceptions. I just hope it doesnt go that route.