I’m probably older than many here and have used messaging systems since UNIX “talk” and “write”. Commercial IMs such as icq, msn, yahoo, google chat, WhatsApp, signal. Federated and open systems such as irc and Jabber.
I have tried to jump into Matrix, but it is terrible. The resource usage is crazy, the user experience (even for an expert like myself) is incredibly bad, I lose messages, federation breaks all the time, and it doesn’t even bring anything new to the table regarding features! I cannot recommend it to anybody, not even my nerd friends!
Curious, I dived down into its specifications, and it is clear that the people who designed it didn’t learn anything from past systems. They just wanted to create a new and shiny messenger: “theirs” — cue in XKCD 927
I understand the push for a “modern” messaging system (xmpp is from the late 90s, during the hype of xml, etc) but Matrix, while “modern” in the sense of recent, is definitely worse than the previous alternatives. It is plain unusable. I wish I was wrong. I have used it for 3 years waiting for improvements but it is simply broken by design.
Everything being an extension is a good feature. And given how the monolithic nature of the Matrix protocol has not solved the problem of client fragmentation and partial spec implementation that they originally pointed at being a problem in the XMPP ecosystem proves that this was an naive assumption.
As for XML: unless you are tying to shoehorn a chat protocol into HTML5 like Matrix does, json is a horrible format. There are many good reasons to use XML and from a client developer perspective you don’t really need to deal with it that much if the verbose syntax isn’t to your liking.
the actual unpopular opinion: xml was, and continues to be a good choice for a chat protocol
You’re right! I thought about it as I was typing, that having a mechanism to evolve in the future is important! And both protocols can evolve over time
Though I think that the “Matrix evolves, server implementors should follow the specification” model/mentality may work better (even if not all implementations follow it, but most probably will)
Than the mentality of “the base XMPP protocol only sends text messages, everything else is optional, before joining a server and downloading an app users are advised to check if they support images, encryption, federation, and chat history synchronization”