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?
Pidgin’s XMPP support hasn’t been updated in more than a decade*. Please don’t use Pidgin for XMPP! It lacks so much more than just not supporting e2ee via OMEMO.
*apparently they recently started working on a full re-write of it for an upcoming version, but it is slow going.