Edit: Matrix isn’t going freemium, it’s introducing premium accounts to fund the matrix.org homeserver. Thank you for the corrections in the comments.
Matrix is going freemium Matrix is introducing premium accounts and WhatsApp is adding ads, which is sparking the annual “time to leave [app]” threads.
Users don’t care that much about privacy, but they do care about enshittification, so XMPP not being built for it shouldn’t be a problem.
Meanwhile, I’ve heard for years that XMPP has solved a lot of the problems that lead more popular apps to fail.
Is it really just a marketing/UX/UI problem?
If XMPP had a killer app with all the features that Signal/Whatsapp/Telegram has, would it have as many users?
If not, why does it keep getting out-adopted by new apps and protocols?
Simply: XMPP is a protocol, and non-tech people don’t know “protocols”, they know “apps”, at best.
Plus XMPP has challenges (and I’ve used it since about 2000, on my phone in 2009).
E2E is possible, but problematic (in that it’s not simply just “on”).
Even worse, none of the apps look polished…it’s all clumsy, there’s no one app on all OS’s. And the names, FFS us geeks need to get a fucking clue.
And I use XMPP every day on my phone and laptop.
They know SMTP, SMS, MMS, etc. (or at least how to use them). That’s not the problem.
E: if you reply to this comment without actually reading it, you’re going to be blocked.
Generally they’ll know them as texting and email, they don’t know the names of the protocols underneath.