Is XMPP any good? Also, let's write a client in Tcl, maybe
As someone who has been working with XMPP for a long time, I can safely say that most of the criticisms here simply have no material effects in practice. Yes, an ack packet can be 19 characters long. Is that terrible?<p>It would be just as easy to write a post like this about JSON, Matrix and so on. Both have many warts.<p>But I really don&#x27;t much care. No technology is perfect, and there will always be people who dislike choices that other people have made. What matters is what we do with the technology. XMPP has proven itself able to evolve over more than two decades, during which the internet and the way we use it has shifted dramatically, and yet it continues to be relevant as new people discover and adopt it.<p>It&#x27;s unfair to describe things like multi-device sync as &quot;afterthoughts&quot; when XMPP was one of the first real-time messaging protocols to have support for multiple concurrent connections of the same account built in, at a time before the iPhone was released, and most people had a single device with wired access to the internet only.<p>Support for multi-device sync is part of the suite of protocol features required by modern XMPP implementations, these requirements are updated every year to account for the changing technology landscape: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xmpp.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;compliance-suites&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xmpp.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;compliance-suites&#x2F;</a><p>I personally like the simple delivery model of XMPP compared to the &quot;distributed database&quot; model that Matrix pursues. I think there are use-cases for both approaches. Both XMPP and Matrix have bridges between each other and third-party protocols (proprietary and open ones), which makes any attempt to create false competition between them an unhelpful effort. What&#x27;s important is that both provide openly-documented protocols with open-source reusable implementations, and (in my opinion) most important of all: decentralized open communication networks.<p>The problems facing the broader adoption of open networks for modern messaging are not protocol problems.