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?
Tinode and Snikket should be discussed too. They’re server and clients, built upon XMPP and including the many extensions, “XEPs” that an admin would want in order to give their users a modern experience.
From their repo. it has AFAIK nothing to do with XMPP, they just use it as an SEO term.