Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat [LWN.net]

Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 12, 2015 23:44 UTC (Thu) by jlargentaye (subscriber, #75206)
In reply to: Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat by Cyberax
Parent article: Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Huh, my initial thought following your previous comment about this being the straw to Google's XMPP efforts was that it was a silly anecdote to make a decision on... but it actually was a good illustration of the state of the XMPP client landscape.

On the other hand, Pidgin was never a good XMPP client, IMHO Psi was always much ahead, but Pidgin definitely benefited from more widespread use for being a multi-protocol client. Also Psi's stagnation and semi-fork in Psi+ didn't help it.

As a former XMPP advocate, I can only sigh.

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Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 20, 2015 21:25 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

Pidgin is an ego-stroking exercise, Psi is growing cobwebs and its UI is straight out of the 90s, Jitsi is stereotypical enterprise software... I gave up on desktop clients and now do my IMing from Xabber.

Most of the features I want in an XMPP client are completely missing there (there's space reserved for your avatar, when you can't *set* it), but at least its complexity feels proportional to what it *does* provide. I can send/receive text and it handles Unicode properly. It's even actively developed these days, after considerable pressure from the users.

Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 23, 2015 5:29 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> after considerable pressure from the users.

They went through all the work to GPL it and then it seemed to just…die. I've seen updates go by in F-Droid, so I had guessed something picked back up. Good to hear, but I've since moved onto Conversations (which is also Android 5-ish in appearance).

Matrix: a new specification for federated realtime chat

Posted Feb 23, 2015 16:54 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I've tested the Xabber 0.10 versions in F-Droid - the UI has finally caught up, but there's zero new functionality besides that and I also ran into tons of bugs using it. (And then Google's idea of OS package management helpfully destroyed a year of chat history when I tried to downgrade...)

I might switch to Conversations for the time being, or at least keep it around as a backup client.