 Today, I want to compare and contrast Matrix and XMPP. This is something I'm asked a lot about because I will occasionally tell people not to use Telegram or not to use some other spyware chat service, and I will usually recommend Matrix or XMPP. They are the federated free software equivalents of, you know, and encrypted equivalents of all this, you know, trash software that people use to communicate. Now firstly, the actual solution is talking to someone in real life. But if you can't do that, Matrix or XMPP, what's the difference between them? Because at the core of it, they sort of look the same, but there are a bunch of details in it. Now, I will go ahead and say that Matrix is easier to use, and that will mean, if you're trying to get your normie friends into some kind of private chat application, or element is the main client for it, is probably a better choice because of that. Earlier this year, I had some friends that wanted to move away from Telegram or stuff like this, so I moved them over to a Matrix server that I created, and lots of normies I know use it. It's, you know, for any normal human who doesn't know anything, but how to use an iPhone, they can still get it working very well. It's easy to use. It's not a big problem, okay? XMPP, however, and I'm going to say the good things about Matrix first, and then the bad things about it, which I think are more significant, I'll go ahead and say that Matrix is not really what you want to use, okay, even if it's easier, okay? Now, Matrix is much more streamlined. They have one application, they have one server, they have, you know, one client that basically works on every platform called Element, used to be called Riot, and it's federated, you can set up your own, you can talk to other servers. That's exactly what you want. Private chats are, by default, end-to-end encrypted. That is all the stuff, everything's great, right? That's fantastic, and in fact, it's pretty easy compared to any other standard, even to have public rooms that are end-to-end encrypted and stuff like that. I mean, that's overkill, but you can easily have private groups that are end-to-end encrypted, you don't really have to think about it. All you have to do is keep track of your private, I don't know if it's a key, if that's what they call it, they call it something, you just have to keep your recovery phrase or something when you create an account, and that'll be it. Easy to have multiple devices, stuff like that, and it's very sleek. Again, Normies can use it, my cousin's wife uses it without a problem, it's in general pretty, it just works, okay? Now, however, there are a bunch of massive drawbacks to Matrix, okay? Now, to be clear, all the good stuff I'm saying about Matrix is not necessarily true of XMPP. XMPP has the same kind of problem that Linux has, it's not a real problem, but realistically speaking, this is a turnoff for Normies in that it's fragmented. There are a million different clients, and most all of them work well, but it's a little confusing for people when you have all of these different applications, not all of them are cross-platform, in fact, basically none of them are, so you have to have a different program on your phone versus your computer and stuff like that. That is a little bit confusing for Normies, and they're a little bit different, okay? And also in XMPP, not all of the clients, not all of the programs are actually up to specifications, they don't all have all the abilities they should. Now, most of the ones that people use, they can do everything like encrypting and stuff like that, but I'll just say it's more of a Wild West in XMPP, so that can be a bad thing if you're trying to get Normies over it or your girlfriend over to it or something like that. So that's the way it is out there, but the first big advantage of XMPP is that it is actually very light on system resources, okay? Now, there are actually a bunch of different choices in server software, probably one of the bigger ones are things like Prosody or eJabberD. I think Prosody is probably the easiest one to get good documentation on. eJabberD is, I think, a little more complicated to set up. Either way, they are much lighter on system resources than Matrix, okay? You can, if you have set up your own website, if you have your own VPS or you have really basic things on it like an IngenX web server, maybe an email server, having an XMPP server with Prosody or some other server software like that is very easy. It's not going to eat up any kind of system resources. However, if you run the default Matrix Synapse server, which is SoifDware written in Python, that is extremely resource-intensive. Even if the server I have, I'm just talking to a couple people I know. I only have less than a dozen accounts on it. And of course, I'm talking to other servers as well, but it takes so much of my system resources that I really have to worry about, okay, is this VPS going to maintain Matrix and a bunch of other stuff? There was a period where I had a VPS that had both Matrix and a Cirque Search instance and that proved, I mean, it wasn't like it was doable, but it was a little iffy, okay? So Matrix is much, it's definitely SoifDware. It is very, it's much more intensive, whereas XMPP is absolutely not like that. You can spin up an XMPP server on your own VPS and you're not even going to notice that it's running. It's very minimal, even if you have a bunch of people connected to it. I mean, if you're doing like enterprise level stuff, you might need a bigger VPS, but either way, it scales better than Matrix. That's the point, okay? Now, what that means by definition is that more people are likely to actually use XMPP or start their own servers on it, okay? So the thing with Matrix is that most people use it as if it's like freaking Google Chat or something like that. They go to the main Matrix website, matrix.org, and they create an account. The vast majority of people on the Matrix system, they're not actually using the decentralized nature of it. They are using the central server that basically everyone uses. So by definition, they are going to have the metadata of everyone else, okay? That's just how it is, all right? So the big decentralized advantage of using Matrix, it's not at its full potential. Now, this isn't a huge problem. You can start your own Matrix server, but again, it's a little more processor intensive, and I sort of understand why a lot more people are using this default server. But this brings up the even bigger problem, okay? And that is Matrix, it does a lot of things by default, but one of the worst things that it does is, well, this sounds, okay, this sounds like a good thing. Now we'll go ahead and say by default, if you have an XMPP, well, most XMPP servers, they will have it so that if you log in with a new account or something like that, or on a new, let's say a new computer or something like that, you don't automatically get your chat history unless you have set it up for the server to save that chat history. That's a privacy liability. Even if it is end-to-end encrypted, that's still a problem because that chat history, by definition, has metadata about you. So that is not actually how XMPP works by default. Now, if you want that, it's easy to add it in. Well, in most servers, it's not that way by default, but well, I don't want to speak for most servers because I've only tried a couple. Either way, XMPP gives you sort of that choice. Matrix, however, does not. Matrix is not even really a protocol for sending chat messages. What it really is, it's more like what you really do is you update your local version of the chat history and then you sync that with the server. Really, what you're doing when you have a chat history or something like that is you have a bunch of people with right permissions to change this historical chat. What that means is if you have a chat room with a bunch of different people from a bunch of different servers, that chat history is being mirrored on all of those different servers. Now, again, Matrix, by default, it's fantastic. It starts with end-to-end encryption. It's not like server admins can get in there and look at what's going on. However, what that means is that Matrix, I mean, chat metadata is like a virus. It spreads from server to server. And because there are so many people on the matrix.org server, matrix.org, frankly, just has everyone's metadata. If you are in a chat with someone who has an account on matrix.org, matrix.org has that metadata. It has your account history. Now, you can change things. Now, Matrix, it has been worse in the past. You used to have to have centralized logins, which is absolutely stupid. Now, you have options, I think, whether to show, whether to federate, like, whether you're online or not. If you don't want people to know that, it's not going to sync that with Matrix's server. But in general, Matrix is sort of like a metadata centralization scheme that it's taking all of this data. And again, it's not, it's still encrypted, right? Your messages are still safe. But matrix.org just has a whole lot of metadata. Now, why this is really screwy, I guess the punchline to it, a lot of people have gone into widely debunked conspiracy theories that, of course, have, like, most widely debunked conspiracy theories. They haven't ever been debunked. But it has been noted that Matrix, Matrix, their original funding, was from an Israeli company that has ties to the Mossad, okay? Now, it's hard. You might say, oh, Luke, that sounds crazy. Well, look it up, okay? What is it? It's like Amdox or something like that. But the company, now, allegedly, they don't fund Matrix anymore. But just to be clear, they are, they're a telecommunications company that actually has a lot of metadata about American phone records. But they are a company that originally funded Matrix's development. And allegedly, they don't do it anymore. But given the way that Matrix is constructed, even if they have no, they don't have their fingers in it anymore, there's always that liability or there's always that thought that, okay, well, this was sort of constructed as, it may have been constructed as a metadata honeypot. And that's a big problem. Now, that said, all of this bad stuff about Matrix, it is still infinitely better than using something like Telegram, okay? Where your messages are not encrypted, where they don't even have a good encryption scheme, where it's proprietary server software, where it's not federated, federated, blah, blah, blah. Matrix is infinitely better than 99% of, you know, all the other chat applications out there. However, if you have a choice, if you're a technological person and you have a choice whether using Matrix or XMPP, I recommend using XMPP. It is harder to get working out of the box. It's a little harder to sell to normies because it's fragmented, but XMPP has been along for actually decades. You probably haven't known about it because actually a lot of the even proprietary chat applications out there, they're actually running XMPP, like low-key. They're built off of XMPP because it's such a great and extensible protocol. Now, it's harder to get started with. It's fragmented. There are different clients, but XMPP is a better choice. I've had my problems with it. I've had my problems with Matrix, I'll tell you about that. But it is lightweight. It's easy to start up a server. Actually, just the other day on my deep fake blackface channel, I actually put up a video of how to set up an XMPP server, a Procity server. So check that out. Either way, XMPP's good. Matrix is actually okay. I've heard people say really bad things about that, and I've said the worst thing you can say about Matrix, but it is still head and shoulders above the rest. So if you're trying to get your normie friends over, if you can't figure out XMPP, if you can't get them on that, try and get them on Matrix. I consider that an improvement. Either way, that's about it.