I dunno what tech experts could corroborate from what is said in this article, but it might be interesting in the context of searching for a sane Discord alternative
A good article, but as a millennial, I was completely unprepared for the 2 psychic damage I took from this sentence:
Even based boomerware like IRC has to play second fiddle to them.
GenX. I used IRC back in the early 90s, but by the mid-90s I’d moved on. Probably to ICQ. I can’t recall.
Then, in the mid-noughties my millennial work colleagues were going crazy for Mirc. I was shocked to discover it was just IRC with a pretty face but all the same issues that caused me to leave it 10 years before.
And it’s still going. Although, no longer flavour of the month.
What is ICQ ?
Heh. Thanks for making me feel old 😂
As much as I like XMPP it is not a suitable Discord alternative at all.
Discord has dozens of permissions that can be tied to user specific roles (or users directly) and that allow you as a space (bc I refuse to call them servers) owner to hand craft which role / user can do what. On Matrix there are a lot fewer permissions than on Discord but it has the basics. On arguably the most advanced XMPP apps Cheogram & Monocles (if you know a more advanced one I’d love to test it) you can allow/deny anyone to edit the topic of a room/channel/group and allow/deny anyone to invite others.
Also the reason why i.e. no lemmy community links their XMPP group but those who do have spaces operate them via Matrix is because it offers invite links, or even spaces to begin with. All it can do is single separated groups.
Atm Commet (which feature & ui wise I would say comes closest to Discord alongside Cinny and Element/Schildi) features Text rooms, voice rooms, media rooms and calendar rooms. Whilst Monocles and Cheogram (who are both forked from Conversations and one is maybe forked from the other by the looks of it - idk who was first) both have experimental Threads support, not to mention that you can cross sign Matrix sessions to sync which messages you can read whilst on XMPP you either manually export and import a backup or just live with the fact that you cannot see previous messages. Oh, also on Matrix based messengers you can usually see which device sessions have access to your account and you can throw them out. I haven’t seen something similar on XMPP messengers.
Now there are some cool features that “Conversations” based clients offer like little RTC web apps (only on the forks) and the possibility to run your traffic via Tor.
And the protocol XMPP could certainly do much more than even Monocles/Cheogram offer atm but Matrix clients just are much further ahead in having their protocol’s features implemented (which yeah, probably comes from the fact that Armdocs, the German and French military and some regional governments have poured some money into Matrix (& Element and the company behind it).
But even with these (sometimes dubious) links Matrix is the more full fledged experience that is open source and self hostable. And on the centralization part I am pretty certain most XMPP users use either conversations.im or monocles.eu and the amount of Matrix providers is much broader than the amount of XMPP providers too.
Also the article goes into deep length about the pros of XMPP from the pov of a server host. Not from the pov of the average user. Whilst it is important that servers are running well and optimized the average user is more concerned with WHAT THEY CAN DO WITH THEIR MESSENGER and not how a protocol is more lightweight on a server (as long as there are no lags/downtimes that is). So from the average user’s viewpoint Matrix atm clearly wins the race.
Now to make one thing clear: I don’t want to hate XMPP. I like it and it deserves better. But realistically it is not there yet. Mayyybe if you really wanted you could replace WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal with it (tho I am not sure if I’d recommend replacing Signal with an XMPP based messenger atm) but to replace Discord they’d need to catch up to Matrix first in feature adaptation and userbase.
So which do you advocate?
For XMPP I my favourite messenger is “Monocles” because it is the most advanced and on Linux it is “Dino” for the same reason. “Movim” (a web client) has a nice touch to it by having a small microblog added to it but it doesn’t support encryption so not something I’d use for important stuff. “Kaidan” is another promising Desktop client but it doesn’t have encryption and group chats yet.
For Matrix I use FluffyChat & Commet on Android and Cinny & Commet on Desktop. FluffyChat is kept in a more traditional messenger layout whilst Cinny and especially Commet take inspiration from Discord. The backside of Commet is that it can be laggy/buggy due to being in an alpha version state but overall for me it is useable whilst Cinny is more stable but doesn’t have voice chat yet. (all other previous examples - XMPP examples included - have at least some form of voice chat even if some only have 1 to 1 calls or have hid the feature as “experimental” in the settings (FluffyChat)).
Other examples I’d like to mention are Nheko since it is liked by some peops I chat with and even Element/Schildi are worth mentioning since they technically offer the most features and aim for a more Slack like appearance. But they are also the solution that get’s pumped with money from their “partners”.
Tl;Dr:
XMPP Android: Monocles
XMPP Linux: Dino
Matrix Android: FluffyChat, Commet
Matrix Desktop: Cinny, Commet
Commet aims to mimic Discord but is in an alpha state so bugs/lags are to be expected - tho I’d say it is useable.
I did not try iOS/macOS bc I don’t own an iPhone/mac
Very interesting answer, thanks! It’s not the first time I’m being told of Commet, it sounds very interesting as well
It is feature wise but it is an alpha so lags & bugs are there but it was useable for me and seems promising.
Seems more like it’s aimed at people who wants to choose between Matrix and XMPP. I really appreciate XMPP, but its server management features were nowhere near Discord level last time I checked.
I’m glad people are now speaking about alternatives. The collective ignorance was so unbearable before now.
I think Luke Smith is a
covertovert antisemite, which is something you might notice in this article when you get here:🇮🇱 Matrix is linked to Israeli intelligence! 🇮🇱
Then he links to a “dancing Israelis” conspiracy theory implying Jews… Sorry, “Israelis,” did 9/11.
(Of course, we all know that this is a baseless and widely deboonkted anti-semitic conspiracy theory as Our Greatest Ally® Israel would never do anything bad to us at all.)
Okay Luke.
I read a headline a while ago about how matrix is affiliated with Israel. After looking into it, I found that there is indeed a company called matrix that could be linked to Israel, but it’s different than the matrix we know and love.
(Citation needed, this is all from memory of a few months ago)
A Lukesmith article ? Here ? What treachery is this ‽‽
The author makes some pretty strong claims about Mossad involvement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)#Beginning–2018
matrix was created by Amdocs in 2014 and it wasn’t until 3 years later that it spun off to a separate company.
Amdocs was founded in 1983 in Israel but since ~2000 has been a huge multinational and their current HQ is in USA. I was not able to find anything other than conspiracy blogs that link Amdocs with Mossad and in 2000 an FBI investigation turned up nothing - https://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/06/us/israeli-spy-inquiry-finds-nothing-officials-say.html
There has been a ton of water under the bridge since then so it’s probably just a normal soulless corp with no specific ideology or agenda other than money.
Luke Smith is an antisemite, which is why he’s making such a big deal about it.
Well Tor was made by the US-Navy I think ?
xmpp
