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Is UX/UI and marketing really the reason XMPP lags behind Signal/Matrix/Telegram?
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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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UI is not really a problem. Every time I hear complains about a given FOSS client of something "UI" not being "modern" it's basically complaining "waaa waaa this does not look exactly like Discord, I can't find a thing that is obviously labelled as a button!" or some such thing. Which is weird because, honestly, all chat apps like Signal, Telegram, Conversation or Gajim do basically have the exact same look: a pane for chatrooms, a pane for current chatroom, and a pane for typing. There: that UI was literally solved in the 90s.
Speaking of 90s, Winamp is from the 90s and the UI is doing quite well, to the point more modern programs intentionally want to look Winampy (eg.: Audacious).
UX however... it has quite a number of issues, such as there not being a practical way to know if all of the client, the server and service you want to use support the features you want, in particular encryption and message archiving.
Even the "beforehand" / "onboarding" UX is annoying: would anyone here be able to point to the "join-lemmy" equivalent of the XMPPverse? Or point to a generalist server with long-term lifetime, kinda like how freenode was (note: was) for IRC?
If I had to venture, I'd say if an important group actually put effort into setting up and servicing long-term XMPP infra in the style and generalism that freenode was, then probably it could gain some good traction. If anything, it could help doing the join between "upgrade people from IRC" and "upgrade people from modern silos".