This is essentially a discussion about XMPP and Matrix, two of the main contenders for "open chat standards" on the internet - standards that replicate modern chat interfaces and all of their...
This is essentially a discussion about XMPP and Matrix, two of the main contenders for "open chat standards" on the internet - standards that replicate modern chat interfaces and all of their features.
I have set up Matrix and XMPP servers before - in the latter case I was struck by a lack of solid iOS support, but there was at least one working option. Would the tildes community be interested in running a XMPP server to give the protocol a bit more attention?
I got blocked by Anubis, I know it sort of defeats the point but could you summarize? I've been away from XMPP for a while and might spin up a server again, but as far as I can tell Matrix seems...
I got blocked by Anubis, I know it sort of defeats the point but could you summarize? I've been away from XMPP for a while and might spin up a server again, but as far as I can tell Matrix seems to have significantly more active communities these days - at least surrounding software projects.
Sometimes you just do things for the sake of it. I think a community XMPP server could be kind of fun for a little while. Experiment with what clients are available these days, etc. You are right...
Sometimes you just do things for the sake of it. I think a community XMPP server could be kind of fun for a little while. Experiment with what clients are available these days, etc.
You are right that Matrix has more active communities on it. On account of it being the only fairly modern (security) federated protocol around that is open source.
I sometimes wonder if the complexity that comes with that federation is really worth it. Specifically how everything, as far as my understanding goes, needs to go through servers. Where, in my mind, I feel like things would be simpler if it is mainly client authentication that is handled through home servers but that clients directly talk with the server where a room is situated.
I am sure there are downsides to it, I am just "waffling out loud" so to speak. But for what a majority of communities use it for, effectively what IRC was used for, a lot of the federated parts seem like huge overhead and added complexity to me.
Yea, I mean with a smaller community like this one I would agree that the complexity of federation is probably not needed from the outset. I also don't think that we'd need any of the more...
Yea, I mean with a smaller community like this one I would agree that the complexity of federation is probably not needed from the outset. I also don't think that we'd need any of the more advanced features (e.g. voice calling), so a really simple deployment might be enough to establish a common area for Tildes.
I didn't read the whole thing but: but note that signal does make a decent amount of revenue. Wikipedia style fundraisers seem like a decent alternative. how much money do you need to make good...
I didn't read the whole thing but:
Again, nobody is going to make money on chat networks long-term – I could be wrong here, but nobody’s done it in the last 30 years. Discord, Telegram, and Signal are just the latest turn of the wheel.
Here’s my almost entirely emotionally reasoned thoughts on this topic from someone who has used neither of these for decades. XMPP sucks today because of Matrix. Nobody is excited about XMPP...
Here’s my almost entirely emotionally reasoned thoughts on this topic from someone who has used neither of these for decades.
XMPP sucks today because of Matrix. Nobody is excited about XMPP because Matrix sucked much of the air out of the project. People who could have been working on the things that XMPP implementations are lagging on have been lulled over to the “new sexiness” that was Matrix. And on that topic, I agree with the author that the new and sexy part of Matrix - the state sharing part - is not terribly useful and introduces unnecessary complexity to an already complex system. It really doesn’t seem to have been worth it.
I personally have never understood why developers hate on XML so much. Sure, I get that there’s a whole lot more text to write with XML than, say, JSON, but I feel that kind of misses the point. XML isn’t really something to write by hand; it’s supposed to be generated for you by your tools. As someone who is not coding professionally anymore and never was involved in big projects it seems like there are few programmers in general who appreciate the value of formalism in writing code and, in some cases, even composing architecture.
In any case, XMPP and Matrix both have the exact same fundamental flaw that prevents me from investing my time, effort, or even mindshare. They both lack the critical mass to make them worthwhile. What the author describes as chat, I think of as IM. I don’t care so much about chatrooms these days, so those don’t matter much to me. The thing that does matter to me is being able to contact the people I want to communicate with. People are on WhatsApp, or Snapchat, or Facebook Messenger, or Discord. Nobody I personally know face-to-face has an XMPP or Matrix account. Absolutely zero. So it’s an instant non-starter. What I actually use is the messenger I already have in my pocket and didn’t need to install any client to access; RCS, neè SMS.
Decades ago, the thing I wanted to happen so desperately is one communication standard becoming the standard. When Google adopted XMPP, it seemed like it was actually going to do it. Then they killed it and introduced ten thousand alternatives. Now I have no hope for anything except basic SMS. Because RCS is still a buggy mess which doesn’t work everywhere. 😮💨
Speaking as someone who was frantically seeking chat solutions in the time leading up to Matrix, you're not wrong, but you're not entirely right, either. Ten years ago, XMPP looked more or less...
XMPP sucks today because of Matrix. Nobody is excited about XMPP because Matrix sucked much of the air out of the project. People who could have been working on the things that XMPP implementations are lagging on have been lulled over to the “new sexiness” that was Matrix.
Speaking as someone who was frantically seeking chat solutions in the time leading up to Matrix, you're not wrong, but you're not entirely right, either. Ten years ago, XMPP looked more or less identically to how it does today, except with fewer protocol extensions. In the spaces that discussed these coordination issues, there was basically no interest in compromising on anything. Servers that supported specific XEPs refused to implement others, most clients were developed on the basis of "I'll implement a feature if I need it", and encryption was way, way more difficult to work with in any client other than Conversations...which itself had implemented a lot of the less popular protocol extensions, (for good reasons, but) which meant there was no decent desktop client that supported taking calls from someone using it, and didn't require fussing. On top of that, XMPP has never been great for public chatrooms, even if it's had its better times.
In 2014 Discord proved that millions of people would happily stop using anything that wasn't either as low effort as iMessage and WhatsApp, or capable of operating as a communication swiss army knife. What makes more sense, to hop on an energetic new trend with a solid plan for all the disparate features needed, or to try and convince the splintered and demotivated Jabberites to compromise, rearchitect their programs, and probably end up just doing it all yourself?
The trouble I have with Matrix is that the "energetic new plan" seems to have collected a lot of cruft rather quickly. I just want to be able to offer my friends a chat standard that is properly...
The trouble I have with Matrix is that the "energetic new plan" seems to have collected a lot of cruft rather quickly. I just want to be able to offer my friends a chat standard that is properly aligned with my beliefs. If it can have a small group-chat as well, that's great. But I really don't want to spend a lot of time hanging out in the digital space - I just want to use it so that I can better co-ordinate real world action.
I think that XMPP delivers on this principle better, and I'm happy to be the crazy person that says "if you want to chat with me online you must install this application you've never heard of before", so long as it has a UI that I can stand behind. That last bit is what I've been struggling with, though. I also know that ejabberd has Matrix integration, so it isn't really an either/or. There's even an on-going project to maintain XMPP gateways to common applications, so ideally people should be able to stay in contact with me even if they're not willing to install a custom application.
I'm emotionally invested in Matrix, having jumped on early and convinced a lot of people in my life to do so too, but XMPP is hardly a bad protocol, and will be happy if the ecosystem fixes its...
I'm emotionally invested in Matrix, having jumped on early and convinced a lot of people in my life to do so too, but XMPP is hardly a bad protocol, and will be happy if the ecosystem fixes its issues.
It just so happens that I helped moderate a close-knit community that formed on IRC circa 2012-2018, and watching the average usercount grow to 60 and daily passersby average around 12 leading up to 2015, only for discord to really hit it big, and watch that "random encounter" rate drop well below 1/day by 2016, seeing older members drift away without the community finding new people... At the time, I felt very strongly about the value of these casual online spaces. Still do. There were so many strangers who made what went on to be real friendships there, who helped each other through tough times, with no prerogative at all except wanting to talk to other people. Nobody wants to fill their life with idle "screen time", but those kind of spaces can be very much akin to a cafe you swing by most mornings and spend half an hour catching up, and that experience is what seems missing the most from typical internet usage patterns.
It's far too much of a dream, but the architecture of Matrix is one that supports not just chatrooms and voice and video calls, but even some not-explored room types that might mirror things like fediverse social media. That doesn't need to be built on the same layer as my instant messenger, but when I look at what people want from social media, and think how it might be ethically made, a federated platform where a single identity can be used for public chatrooms, to call your family members, host a local bulletin board, microblog, etc, or use separate identities for each of the above, Matrix very possibly might function as a sort of gravitational well as other proprietary social media platforms wax and wane.
The non-element clients have gone from motley and experimental to shiny and featureful in just the last few years, and I have faith that trend will continue as various development frameworks for Matrix come into maturity. It's just taken a while, for all the reasons the linked article implies. They don't go into that side of things, as they're focused on the basic user experience at the moment, and that's reasonable, but it is also a perspective which will intrinsically bias one towards the older and more stable option, even if the alternative is only slightly less convenient and on the cusp of fixing those issues. Totally fair, just a difference of priorities.
So I'm hardly thinking anyone who uses different chat platforms, let alone Jabber, is wrong for their particular network of relationships or preferences in application priorities. But I think that going from a spec to a fully functional discord competitor in under a decade is a reasonable rate of progress for a small organization with a limited profit motive, and get the feeling that the cruft they've picked up is mostly tech debt and other growing pains which seem very fixable. I'm personally happy to keep betting on a slim chance, as long as the cost is as minor as it has been. I'm also happy to set up an XMPP bridge or switch over entirely if it turns out bust.
Apologies for the rambling, I just get misty eyed when I think about lingering hopes for the open internet.
Nah, the rambling is cool. I'm personally not opposed to Matrix; I was using it before I ever found out what XMPP was. When I think about it, Matrix serves a different purpose from what I am...
Nah, the rambling is cool. I'm personally not opposed to Matrix; I was using it before I ever found out what XMPP was. When I think about it, Matrix serves a different purpose from what I am looking for.
Something that I've come to believe is that there is no way to approximate the bandwidth of in-person connection using digital tools. On that predicate, I've concluded that the best way for me to use digital tooling is by facilitating in-person connection. I know that plenty of people do use online spaces like these as the digital equivalent of a café, but I am in some ways beleaguered by my desire to prioritize people who might become real-world friends one day.
I know it's ironic to be saying this on a digital platform like this one, but I know that the demographic here skews Canadian. I want to make physically localized communities with online presence, rather than online communities with a physically localized presence, and I think XMPP is the right tool for the job in this case. I think it could integrate smoothly with the Matrix ecosystem but I'm not really concerned with global namespaces at the moment.
Yeah, no argument there. The only reason I'm concerned with the online-first communities is how many people in major cities are happy to surrender their lives to mindless scrolling and foster...
Yeah, no argument there. The only reason I'm concerned with the online-first communities is how many people in major cities are happy to surrender their lives to mindless scrolling and foster their own social disorders, combined with the realities of climate change and what feels like imminent strife and social reordering. I can't help but feel like genuinely good online spaces are the only way to bridge a lot of very disenfranchised people back into the fold of a better future.
I see no reason why a bouncer couldn't merge a stream from an XMPP server into a Matrix room, nor why Matrix would be a superior system to achieve the goals it sounds like you're talking about, to your point. It's a shame that these things always get collapsed into a competition, because sure, you have to pick one (or both), but they're both minority networks that connect people on their own terms. Neither is bad, neither deserves to be treated as a waste of time.
Regarding your first paragraph, I think you're onto something. However, I think there's a question that needs to be asked is: how do you re-enfranchise the people who you're bringing back into the...
Regarding your first paragraph, I think you're onto something. However, I think there's a question that needs to be asked is: how do you re-enfranchise the people who you're bringing back into the fold?
Giving people a really good online community still enables disconnect from the problems that we face in the world around us. Generally speaking, I use this website to cope with my lack of meaningful social interaction in my daily life. If I could spend this time getting facetime with people who made me feel seen and heard, I believe I'd choose that option instead almost every single time.
One of my ongoing projects is a free community café that I run out of my parents' garage. Part of the idea is to create an online platform where the only access is by visiting a physical space. In that way, I can make sure that everyone with an account is physically proximate enough to foster real-world connections. I plan on offering a chat application to help people keep in touch, but I've had trouble making the onboarding process simple enough for people to want to participate.
I suspect that in lieu of individuals like yourself (and myself, and hopefully many others) making those physical spaces, they would continue spending time in online spaces which do the opposite...
I suspect that in lieu of individuals like yourself (and myself, and hopefully many others) making those physical spaces, they would continue spending time in online spaces which do the opposite of allow free association and discourage communitymindedness, and that in lieu of those spaces, most of them would behave extremely antisocially and many would seek further escape, rather than reintegrate by force. We've made many places with the most people hostile to compassion and self-direction, relying on idle entertainments and the n-dimensional freedom of online interaction to buffer us from those hostilities, and thus (hopefully) temporarily enslaved millions to addiction to the shiniest baubles possible.
I think your cafe sounds like a great plan, and the kind of thing that needs doing. I also think that even in a utopia, there'd be value to a lot of the online infrastructure that is currently poised as a replacement for physical community. The design that Matrix currently uses to compete with Discord is such that I think would make societal rehabilitation more easily achieved in coordination with more significant changes.
Matrix sits in this spot between "somewhat more user friendly than IRC" and "still not as friendly and straightforward as discord is". It has come a long way, but it still feels clunky to me in...
Matrix sits in this spot between "somewhat more user friendly than IRC" and "still not as friendly and straightforward as discord is". It has come a long way, but it still feels clunky to me in may other ways.
More importantly, even though it is open, the lack of mature clients other than the official one (element) to me signals to an issue as well. If you go to the clients page and start filtering based on features you quickly end up with just Element. It has been 10 years since matrix was introduced, that is very little progress on client maturity in that time.
Personally I never liked a variety aspects of element whenever I used it. If we are comparing it to IRC, at least there I had the ability to chose between a variety of very mature clients.
I realize that Discord also has just one official client. But that one, on desktop anyway, works for the most part and doesn't have some of the UX choices that make element feel unfinished to me. I also realize that is all highly personal. But my main point is that it says something about the underlying protocol, specifically how transparent it is and how easy you can develop on top of it.
XMPP to me falls into a whole different eco system of almost a different era. I think the last time I used it was over 10 years ago where it was used for alliance communication in an alliance I was in for EVE online. Which was also the closest I have ever seen it being used in a similar role as IRC.
Before that, in my mind, it always sat in this spot where it was trying to compete with "messengers" like ICQ, MSN, etc.
From what I remember clients generally worked, but I also have some memories of them being sluggish, taking up a lot of resources and syncing issues between different servers. I remember that for the EVE online alliance I had a client for it on my phone and always had to kill it, otherwise it would make my phone very toasty and run out of battery quite quickly.
Besides Google there was another big player that did use XMPP initially if memory serves correctly. Whatsapp was originally based on XMPP with some bespoke stuff added around it. These days it no longer is, but I remember that back in the day some XMPP clients added in support for Whatsapp messaging.
While it never really "made it", I feel it is telling that for XMPP there is a wide array of clients some of which are still actively developed. Even webbased ones, like converse.js.
This is essentially a discussion about XMPP and Matrix, two of the main contenders for "open chat standards" on the internet - standards that replicate modern chat interfaces and all of their features.
I have set up Matrix and XMPP servers before - in the latter case I was struck by a lack of solid iOS support, but there was at least one working option. Would the tildes community be interested in running a XMPP server to give the protocol a bit more attention?
I got blocked by Anubis, I know it sort of defeats the point but could you summarize? I've been away from XMPP for a while and might spin up a server again, but as far as I can tell Matrix seems to have significantly more active communities these days - at least surrounding software projects.
Ah-ha, proof that Tildes is being taken over by AI! Seriously though, here’s an archive link for you. http://archive.today/yuG4Q
Sometimes you just do things for the sake of it. I think a community XMPP server could be kind of fun for a little while. Experiment with what clients are available these days, etc.
You are right that Matrix has more active communities on it. On account of it being the only fairly modern (security) federated protocol around that is open source.
I sometimes wonder if the complexity that comes with that federation is really worth it. Specifically how everything, as far as my understanding goes, needs to go through servers. Where, in my mind, I feel like things would be simpler if it is mainly client authentication that is handled through home servers but that clients directly talk with the server where a room is situated.
I am sure there are downsides to it, I am just "waffling out loud" so to speak. But for what a majority of communities use it for, effectively what IRC was used for, a lot of the federated parts seem like huge overhead and added complexity to me.
Yea, I mean with a smaller community like this one I would agree that the complexity of federation is probably not needed from the outset. I also don't think that we'd need any of the more advanced features (e.g. voice calling), so a really simple deployment might be enough to establish a common area for Tildes.
I didn't read the whole thing but:
but note that signal does make a decent amount of revenue.
Wikipedia style fundraisers seem like a decent alternative. how much money do you need to make good chat software?
Here’s my almost entirely emotionally reasoned thoughts on this topic from someone who has used neither of these for decades.
XMPP sucks today because of Matrix. Nobody is excited about XMPP because Matrix sucked much of the air out of the project. People who could have been working on the things that XMPP implementations are lagging on have been lulled over to the “new sexiness” that was Matrix. And on that topic, I agree with the author that the new and sexy part of Matrix - the state sharing part - is not terribly useful and introduces unnecessary complexity to an already complex system. It really doesn’t seem to have been worth it.
I personally have never understood why developers hate on XML so much. Sure, I get that there’s a whole lot more text to write with XML than, say, JSON, but I feel that kind of misses the point. XML isn’t really something to write by hand; it’s supposed to be generated for you by your tools. As someone who is not coding professionally anymore and never was involved in big projects it seems like there are few programmers in general who appreciate the value of formalism in writing code and, in some cases, even composing architecture.
In any case, XMPP and Matrix both have the exact same fundamental flaw that prevents me from investing my time, effort, or even mindshare. They both lack the critical mass to make them worthwhile. What the author describes as chat, I think of as IM. I don’t care so much about chatrooms these days, so those don’t matter much to me. The thing that does matter to me is being able to contact the people I want to communicate with. People are on WhatsApp, or Snapchat, or Facebook Messenger, or Discord. Nobody I personally know face-to-face has an XMPP or Matrix account. Absolutely zero. So it’s an instant non-starter. What I actually use is the messenger I already have in my pocket and didn’t need to install any client to access; RCS, neè SMS.
Decades ago, the thing I wanted to happen so desperately is one communication standard becoming the standard. When Google adopted XMPP, it seemed like it was actually going to do it. Then they killed it and introduced ten thousand alternatives. Now I have no hope for anything except basic SMS. Because RCS is still a buggy mess which doesn’t work everywhere. 😮💨
Speaking as someone who was frantically seeking chat solutions in the time leading up to Matrix, you're not wrong, but you're not entirely right, either. Ten years ago, XMPP looked more or less identically to how it does today, except with fewer protocol extensions. In the spaces that discussed these coordination issues, there was basically no interest in compromising on anything. Servers that supported specific XEPs refused to implement others, most clients were developed on the basis of "I'll implement a feature if I need it", and encryption was way, way more difficult to work with in any client other than Conversations...which itself had implemented a lot of the less popular protocol extensions, (for good reasons, but) which meant there was no decent desktop client that supported taking calls from someone using it, and didn't require fussing. On top of that, XMPP has never been great for public chatrooms, even if it's had its better times.
In 2014 Discord proved that millions of people would happily stop using anything that wasn't either as low effort as iMessage and WhatsApp, or capable of operating as a communication swiss army knife. What makes more sense, to hop on an energetic new trend with a solid plan for all the disparate features needed, or to try and convince the splintered and demotivated Jabberites to compromise, rearchitect their programs, and probably end up just doing it all yourself?
The trouble I have with Matrix is that the "energetic new plan" seems to have collected a lot of cruft rather quickly. I just want to be able to offer my friends a chat standard that is properly aligned with my beliefs. If it can have a small group-chat as well, that's great. But I really don't want to spend a lot of time hanging out in the digital space - I just want to use it so that I can better co-ordinate real world action.
I think that XMPP delivers on this principle better, and I'm happy to be the crazy person that says "if you want to chat with me online you must install this application you've never heard of before", so long as it has a UI that I can stand behind. That last bit is what I've been struggling with, though. I also know that ejabberd has Matrix integration, so it isn't really an either/or. There's even an on-going project to maintain XMPP gateways to common applications, so ideally people should be able to stay in contact with me even if they're not willing to install a custom application.
I'm emotionally invested in Matrix, having jumped on early and convinced a lot of people in my life to do so too, but XMPP is hardly a bad protocol, and will be happy if the ecosystem fixes its issues.
It just so happens that I helped moderate a close-knit community that formed on IRC circa 2012-2018, and watching the average usercount grow to 60 and daily passersby average around 12 leading up to 2015, only for discord to really hit it big, and watch that "random encounter" rate drop well below 1/day by 2016, seeing older members drift away without the community finding new people... At the time, I felt very strongly about the value of these casual online spaces. Still do. There were so many strangers who made what went on to be real friendships there, who helped each other through tough times, with no prerogative at all except wanting to talk to other people. Nobody wants to fill their life with idle "screen time", but those kind of spaces can be very much akin to a cafe you swing by most mornings and spend half an hour catching up, and that experience is what seems missing the most from typical internet usage patterns.
It's far too much of a dream, but the architecture of Matrix is one that supports not just chatrooms and voice and video calls, but even some not-explored room types that might mirror things like fediverse social media. That doesn't need to be built on the same layer as my instant messenger, but when I look at what people want from social media, and think how it might be ethically made, a federated platform where a single identity can be used for public chatrooms, to call your family members, host a local bulletin board, microblog, etc, or use separate identities for each of the above, Matrix very possibly might function as a sort of gravitational well as other proprietary social media platforms wax and wane.
The non-element clients have gone from motley and experimental to shiny and featureful in just the last few years, and I have faith that trend will continue as various development frameworks for Matrix come into maturity. It's just taken a while, for all the reasons the linked article implies. They don't go into that side of things, as they're focused on the basic user experience at the moment, and that's reasonable, but it is also a perspective which will intrinsically bias one towards the older and more stable option, even if the alternative is only slightly less convenient and on the cusp of fixing those issues. Totally fair, just a difference of priorities.
So I'm hardly thinking anyone who uses different chat platforms, let alone Jabber, is wrong for their particular network of relationships or preferences in application priorities. But I think that going from a spec to a fully functional discord competitor in under a decade is a reasonable rate of progress for a small organization with a limited profit motive, and get the feeling that the cruft they've picked up is mostly tech debt and other growing pains which seem very fixable. I'm personally happy to keep betting on a slim chance, as long as the cost is as minor as it has been. I'm also happy to set up an XMPP bridge or switch over entirely if it turns out bust.
Apologies for the rambling, I just get misty eyed when I think about lingering hopes for the open internet.
Nah, the rambling is cool. I'm personally not opposed to Matrix; I was using it before I ever found out what XMPP was. When I think about it, Matrix serves a different purpose from what I am looking for.
Something that I've come to believe is that there is no way to approximate the bandwidth of in-person connection using digital tools. On that predicate, I've concluded that the best way for me to use digital tooling is by facilitating in-person connection. I know that plenty of people do use online spaces like these as the digital equivalent of a café, but I am in some ways beleaguered by my desire to prioritize people who might become real-world friends one day.
I know it's ironic to be saying this on a digital platform like this one, but I know that the demographic here skews Canadian. I want to make physically localized communities with online presence, rather than online communities with a physically localized presence, and I think XMPP is the right tool for the job in this case. I think it could integrate smoothly with the Matrix ecosystem but I'm not really concerned with global namespaces at the moment.
Yeah, no argument there. The only reason I'm concerned with the online-first communities is how many people in major cities are happy to surrender their lives to mindless scrolling and foster their own social disorders, combined with the realities of climate change and what feels like imminent strife and social reordering. I can't help but feel like genuinely good online spaces are the only way to bridge a lot of very disenfranchised people back into the fold of a better future.
I see no reason why a bouncer couldn't merge a stream from an XMPP server into a Matrix room, nor why Matrix would be a superior system to achieve the goals it sounds like you're talking about, to your point. It's a shame that these things always get collapsed into a competition, because sure, you have to pick one (or both), but they're both minority networks that connect people on their own terms. Neither is bad, neither deserves to be treated as a waste of time.
Regarding your first paragraph, I think you're onto something. However, I think there's a question that needs to be asked is: how do you re-enfranchise the people who you're bringing back into the fold?
Giving people a really good online community still enables disconnect from the problems that we face in the world around us. Generally speaking, I use this website to cope with my lack of meaningful social interaction in my daily life. If I could spend this time getting facetime with people who made me feel seen and heard, I believe I'd choose that option instead almost every single time.
One of my ongoing projects is a free community café that I run out of my parents' garage. Part of the idea is to create an online platform where the only access is by visiting a physical space. In that way, I can make sure that everyone with an account is physically proximate enough to foster real-world connections. I plan on offering a chat application to help people keep in touch, but I've had trouble making the onboarding process simple enough for people to want to participate.
I suspect that in lieu of individuals like yourself (and myself, and hopefully many others) making those physical spaces, they would continue spending time in online spaces which do the opposite of allow free association and discourage communitymindedness, and that in lieu of those spaces, most of them would behave extremely antisocially and many would seek further escape, rather than reintegrate by force. We've made many places with the most people hostile to compassion and self-direction, relying on idle entertainments and the n-dimensional freedom of online interaction to buffer us from those hostilities, and thus (hopefully) temporarily enslaved millions to addiction to the shiniest baubles possible.
I think your cafe sounds like a great plan, and the kind of thing that needs doing. I also think that even in a utopia, there'd be value to a lot of the online infrastructure that is currently poised as a replacement for physical community. The design that Matrix currently uses to compete with Discord is such that I think would make societal rehabilitation more easily achieved in coordination with more significant changes.
Matrix sits in this spot between "somewhat more user friendly than IRC" and "still not as friendly and straightforward as discord is". It has come a long way, but it still feels clunky to me in may other ways.
More importantly, even though it is open, the lack of mature clients other than the official one (element) to me signals to an issue as well. If you go to the clients page and start filtering based on features you quickly end up with just Element. It has been 10 years since matrix was introduced, that is very little progress on client maturity in that time.
Personally I never liked a variety aspects of element whenever I used it. If we are comparing it to IRC, at least there I had the ability to chose between a variety of very mature clients.
I realize that Discord also has just one official client. But that one, on desktop anyway, works for the most part and doesn't have some of the UX choices that make element feel unfinished to me. I also realize that is all highly personal. But my main point is that it says something about the underlying protocol, specifically how transparent it is and how easy you can develop on top of it.
XMPP to me falls into a whole different eco system of almost a different era. I think the last time I used it was over 10 years ago where it was used for alliance communication in an alliance I was in for EVE online. Which was also the closest I have ever seen it being used in a similar role as IRC.
Before that, in my mind, it always sat in this spot where it was trying to compete with "messengers" like ICQ, MSN, etc.
From what I remember clients generally worked, but I also have some memories of them being sluggish, taking up a lot of resources and syncing issues between different servers. I remember that for the EVE online alliance I had a client for it on my phone and always had to kill it, otherwise it would make my phone very toasty and run out of battery quite quickly.
Besides Google there was another big player that did use XMPP initially if memory serves correctly. Whatsapp was originally based on XMPP with some bespoke stuff added around it. These days it no longer is, but I remember that back in the day some XMPP clients added in support for Whatsapp messaging.
While it never really "made it", I feel it is telling that for XMPP there is a wide array of clients some of which are still actively developed. Even webbased ones, like converse.js.