Is Matrix a good choice?

[Max Mehl]

~ Dr. Trigon [2022-03-10 09:58 +0100]:
> The thing I wonder is; we have a quite good solution XMPP - now why
> follow the hype just to get something that may be very dubious...?

I see multiple problems with your statement.

First of all, "may be very dubious" cannot be the foundation for a
decision. Can you provide facts to support your doubts that take the
most recent developments of Matrix/Element into consideration?

Furthermore, while the FSFE has decided to set up a Matrix instance, it
did not discontinue XMPP at all [^1]. Teams can freely decide which
communication channel to use. Some moved over to Matrix, some stay with
XMPP. 

As every software, it is imperfect. What's important is that Matrix is
Free Software and offers additional value for our community, and
therefore it is not fully overlapping with XMPP.


On a personal and general note, I sometimes wonder about the energy some
people put into badmouthing certain projects in lengthy posts because of
personal taste or disliking a person behind the project. This did not
happen in this thread or by the initial poster, but I recently see it a
lot with Matrix or of course also systemd.

Is that helping Free Software? I don't think so. Sure, we should have a
close look at software solutions, criticise them based on facts if we
see defects or bad developments, but let us also try to fix these
issues. If they are unsolvable, one should at least try to make the
competing software solution (in this case XMPP, but also sysinit etc)
better than the one one is criticising; there have to be valid reasons
why users and projects switched to the newer software apart from "hype".
With this, we could achieve much more for the benefit of user freedoms
as a community.

Best,
Max

[^1]: https://fsfe.org/news/2022/news-20220202-01.html

-- 
Max Mehl - Programme Manager -- Free Software Foundation Europe
Contact and information: https://fsfe.org/about/mehl -- @mxmehl
The FSFE is a charity that empowers users to control technology
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