this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
137 points (100.0% liked)
Privacy
2054 readers
92 users here now
Icon base by Lorc under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Never understood this argument. Not everybody can be working on everything, and while Matrix is open source it's also got an official company maintaining it, so you'd have an uphill fight from the start. The obvious other choice is to use an alternative, which is what the author did by moving back to xmpp.
This exchange shows a clash of philosophies. While you are not wrong exactly, neither is your interlocutor. The "capitalist" mindset (as illustrated by your good-faith comment) is to treat this like shopping - "we'll just go elsewhere". But the whole point of FOSS is that we do the work, not "them". So while it's true that "not everyone can be working on everything", ultimately that's very much our problem and one that only we can solve.
But in this case, we have a choice between two FOSS solutions, so whichever choice we make, we're still going to be promoting FOSS. It's not like we're discussing leaving matrix for discord or WhatsApp.
OK. So this is just another XMPP-vs-Matrix debate. Assuming that the holy grail is a distributed, federated drop-in replacement for Whatsapp, then, as I understand it, Matrix is a far more advanced on that path. In any case, just as there are not competing protocols for email, the ultimate solution is clearly one protocol. Everyone jumping ship every 3 months will not get us there.