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?
Thos, exactly this. Whenever I ask the question OP asked, it’s always some people who used some ancient client in 2008 and never bothered to try again. And then Matrix came to existence with their marketing and they happily started using it, even though it didn’t have any better features