Funding and centralization.

Matrix has a for-profit, venture funded company (Element) that is effectively behind the reference/flagship server and client implementations.

xmpp is far less centralized. Virtually all of the modern clients are single developer projects that live off day jobs and grants.

There are different ways to look at it. Matrix has done a great job at organizing resources to push the platform forward. xmpp has an impressive ecosystem and some incredible client implementations on a shoe string budget, that would probably look/function better and have lots more features given funding parity.

I think as we've seen with other projects like Immich, organizing and recruiting resources is an important part of delivering the modern experiences that users expect today from open source projects. Open source and self-hostable can't be an excuse for missing features.

What do you think of a system like Delta Chat built on top?

Trying to build a secure system on top of email is a waste of time and energy. Even if you succeeded, it would only be by compromising all the things that make email useful.

I bought a new album on CD a couple of years ago. Badly scratched straight out of the case. Guess that wasn't really the right comparison though.

Scratched enough that it was not working any more? IME CDs work surprisingly well even with scratches, way way better than LPs though. You need to properly gouge the surface before things become problematic.

From what I remember, exact audio copy could not complete the rip on the final track or two.

There was a period of time when our university help desk was installing and recommending Firefox for students and faculty to use over ie6.

I remember friends of same age to also actually switch browsers by themselves, suddenly finding that their computer now used Firefox instead because it was simply faster. Same reason everyone switched to Chrome at a later point.

Not just moving very fast. Mobile is bigger than desktop, Google owns the platform, defaults probably matter more, and control is tighter.

T2D is not limited to "old, fat overeaters".

One thing I would note on the client side of xmpp - there does seem to be a lot of work happening under the surface. Snikket is working on an SDK to streamline modern client development. There are a couple of alpha stage clients written on it already, and maturatoin of the SDK should lower the bar for pushing clients forward.

Also independently, Movim keeps advancing and Libervia is doing a ton of cool work. I'm sure I am missing others.

I had only heard about Snikket as I was spinning down my xmpp experiment... maybe I can take a look nowadays (including moving and others). Thanks for sharing!

From my reading, the new API seems like a move in the right direction. But either way, Google is asking Nextcloud to silently break backup/sync-ing until users grant permission, and my guess is that many users won't notice until they discover data loss - the damage to trust and brand would be substantial. And I don't think it is fair for Google to demand in this case when the consequences are almost entirely felt by the users.

Laravel seems to get a lot of hate from within the PHP community as well. I suppose every framework in use has its detractors.

Who, the one guy pledging Trongate, or the people in the Symfony camp?

I assure you React gets plenty of hate from the JavaScript community - enough to spawn over a dozen competitors. At some point, community love/hate is irrelevant.

People in the Symfony camp want less magic. There is also a lot of activity around Tempest.

Is it really magic? I did some Java dev and that is full on "magic" especially Quarkus.

I think this could be a double edged sword. Slowing down new browser feature/"standards" could allow browser competition, yes. On the other hand, people don't explicitly need a web browser in 2025 like they did in 2015 - many operate mobile-only. Let's say browser features additions fall drastically behind native mobile, and content publishers progressively limit access to native clients only. The web browser market might be more free/open/competitive, but it doesn't mean much if the market just moves beyond the web.

Does the concept of an interoperable world wide web fade into obscurity? In other words, does separating Chrome from Google make the web better, or is Google's investment in the web holding back the death of the web?