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?
Yes it does. It really is just a pre-configured Prosody server, made by one of the core Prosody developers.
Snikket does not mention XMPP intentionally as their entire reason for existing is that it is supposed to be XMPP for people that don’t care what XMPP is. They laid out that reasoning in a blog post a while ago.