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?
I am hosting both XMPP and Matrix now, and my main concern with Matrix is storage. I am afraid it would eat up the very limited disk space I have on my VPS. Conduit offers no built-in way to clean files up, and media is stored in a weird way that makes it a PITA to see which ones can and cannot be deleted. I now know that neither the database files nor the media can be just deleted.
I sorta like the idea of a chatroom existing on more than one server, but that MUST have been opt-in or at the very least opt-out.