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this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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Ok. I lost track of their funding. Seems like they raised $30M in a series B round in 2021.
Still, look at the timeline. 2021 is not that long ago, and Matrix was already ahead of XMPP in mindshare by then. It's not really fair to say that this money was only spent in marketing, and it is not fair to say that without it XMPP would be making some comeback.
I didn't say it was only spend on marketing, but they sure send a lot of people to developer conferences everywhere and offered "free" services to many open-source projects with that money.
They were doing that before 2021. Even acquired gitter and ported it to Matrix.
Yes and they had plenty of funding from highly questionable sources before 2021 as well. Even if you only take the 20 million difference in two figures mentioned above, but Element also partnered with a really shady crypto-currency startup in 2018, which had its own sources of investor funding.
Sorry, but now this is starting to sound like sour grapes.
Ok, they got a good amount of funding. But that alone is not enough to justify how they managed to gain as much mindshare as they did in relation to XMPP.
Element's funding in 2018 or 2021 did not steal any opportunity for (e.g,) snikket to work on their product. Element following the "cathedral" model allowed them to be faster in the development of multi-platform clients, while the XMPP devs were all fixed to the Bazaar ideal, and because of that absolutely failed to deliver a modern application in the platform that is used by half of mobile users in the US.
We (techy types) tend to ignore things that end users care about and we are a lot more forgiving with systems that we see as "technically superior", but the market cares a lot more about things like "Can I send emojis without having to worry about what client people use?" then "synchronization model or disk space requirements".
This is not just "marketing", this is "having someone with actual business and product sense".
If it was up to me, sure I'd wish that more people would be using XMPP. But in 2019 when I told my parents that I wouldn't be using WhatsApp anymore and that we needed a different app if they wanted to have video calls and see their grandchildren, XMPP was not even a choice for my iOS-using father, and Element (née Riot.im) was at least usable.
Both Matrix and federated XMPP are irrelevant in the larger picture, but Element chose to reinvent the wheel to have a product they could more easily market to investors. Had they spend a similar amount of money and developer hours to improve existing XMPP based options we might have an actually working and popular alternative now.
But as it stands, we have a quite fundamentally broken Matrix protocol & ecosystem with some semi-usable but more modern looking clients and a working and well proven XMPP ecosystem that is extremely starved of funding and developers.
You can call this "sour grapes" all you want, but it is the sad fact and a direct result of outside investments screwing with incentives of developers.
Edit: and on an ironic side note: in 2019 Riot.im was using a fancy wrapper around Jitsi-meet for all video-calls which is internally using XMPP, so you were in fact using XMPP as that was the only usable solution back then.
And where would they get this money in the first place?
Venture-capital is not the only source of funding that they have, and only a tiny fraction would have been necessary to get to the same point if they had not wasted most of their funds reinventing a worse version of xmpp.
If that is true, then why can't the existing and current players in the XMPP space do it?
Because venture-capital funded grifters from Element are undercutting them for government contracts and offering "free" services to other organisations that would have otherwise likely funded some work on xmpp.
Now, that is quite a stretch. We had almost 15 years of zero interest rate economic policies, all the "cheap" capital available to everyone and you are telling me that none of the companies with a vested interest in XMPP managed to get resources to grow because Element was sucking out all the air from the room?
If getting XMPP to be in a state that could compete with the proprietary messengers were that much cheaper than the resources taken by Element, why is it that none of telcos pushed for it to have something to show in the OTT space? Or why couldn't Process.one/Prosody get any VC interested when there are so many firms that make a living of just copying whatever is trending?
You are trying to rationalize XMPP's failure to get more adoption by blaming Element, but this is not a zero-sum game. I've been to XMPP meetups, and absolutely no one ever talked about initiatives to make it more appealing to masses. Everyone just wanted to geek out and scratch their own itch. If the XMPP community never valued commercial success, fine, but then don't act like someone else robbed their lunch when all Element did was do the work that XMPP supporters didn't want to do.
Ok this is starting to get hilarious in how naive you are. Have you looked at the messenger space at all? There are literally hundreds of venture-capital funded grifters competing in that space and Element is only one of them. And they are all playing a losing game these days, as they are up against giants like Discord (and to a lesser extend incumbents like Microsoft, with their Teams).
That the established XMPP players chose not to be part of this grift is a very sensible choice that also makes business sense if you care about the longer term survival of your company. Most of their income is from embedded and IoT applications these days, like running the notification infrastructure of giants like Nintendo. However, this sadly does not fund client development and improvements in user interface. The only sustainable funding for that was from open-source organisations and government agencies, which Element decided to persue aggressively. None of the established XMPP players felt like getting in on that race to the bottom as they didn't have (and want) venture capital to burn. But now that Element has started to run out of funding they are turning to the "switch" part of the bait & switch grift and the ones really hurt by this is not XMPP, but all the organisations that naively trusted them with their communication infrastructure.
So, companies working on XMPP are healthy and thriving, but they can not afford to extend into the consumer space because... they don't want to go up against Discord?
Then you make a separate entity to take risks in that space, kinda like what Amdocs did with Matrix?
I'm sorry, you can't have it both ways. Either XMPP consumer XMPP is in a dire situation because Element beat ahead of the others due to their VC funding, or businesses working on XMPP are not interested in the consumer space because they don't see it as worth the risk. But it makes no sense to claim that Matrix has achieved bigger mindshare with no actual merit in making a more accessible product, and that XMPP is acceptable as is.
You are either arguing a strawman or are intentionally distorting what I said.
My argument is that venture-capital has enabled Element to snatch away the little sustainable funding that exists in the open-source messenger space and this directly reflects in the not great state of the remaining fully hobbyist developed clients for XMPP. However, the same time Element spectacularly failed at using these funds to actually create a competitive system thus in the end they poisoned the well and burned a lot of money. This is a common pattern of venture-capital funded endeavours that was easy to see coming but Element prioritized short term gains over their stated goals.
I am not trying to distort anything, I just don't agree with your "venture-capital has enabled Element to snatch away the little sustainable funding that exists" premise. I don't see what going after government contracts has to do with "open source funding" and I don't think that "using VC funds to give away free stuff for developers" is something to be held against them just because the XMPP companies are not willing to risk it.
If the XMPP business are thriving in the IoT space, good for them. But to me, as a consumer, this means nothing if they are not willing to compete in the space.
Also, as long as we are talking about Free Software for the end product, I honestly do not care about who is funding it. All I care about is that I can find some way for my parents to talk with me and see their grandkids without depending on Facebook/Google, and if doing it with Element/Matrix is easier than doing with XMPP/siskin, then I'll be using Element. I don't need any of them to pass some arbitrary purity test, I just need them to deliver something minimally usable.
They can't compete against "free" as enabled by venture capital funding. And you are being extremely naive if you don't see the issue with that or who is behind a product even if the code is nominally FOSS. Have you been living under a rock the last couple of years? There is even an popular term for it called "enshittification" and it doesn't matter much for that if the code is FOSS. This is not about purity, but rather about not shitting into your own water supply.
Again, if "venture funding" is some sort of cheat code, why can't XMPP make use of it? Do you want some moral high ground or some minimally useful product with mass reach?
Does it allow copying and redistribution? Yes
Can people fork it in case Element tries anything ridiculous like what happened with Elastic/MongoDB/Redis? Yes.
The thing is FOSS. This is what matters. Enshittification is being thrown around way too easily nowadays
And where is the water provided by the XMPP side? "if you are on iOS, use siskin" is not at all an acceptable answer on 2024. The mobile OS with the largest market share in the USA simply does not have a decent client. What is going to be the next line? "People shouldn't be using iOS anyway, so we shouldn't spend our resources on it?"
Honestly, we are going in circles now. I don't want to get in some type of flamewar over two separate open protocols. It starting to get ridiculous like discussing which branch of the Christian Orthodox Church is the purest one.
It's not a "cheat code" it is a self-defeating funding mechanism as clearly seen with Element. The venture-capital funders don't care what happens with the individual projects, all they care is to milk them dry at some point and hope that there is at least one that managed to capture the market and thus turns into a monopoly cash-cow.
There are good reasons for companies not wanting to play that game as it is a poisoned gift for most of them, and it is increasingly evident that this is true for Element as well.
P.S: Monal works fine now. But honestly, Apple is such a shit company for open-source projects that it is no wonder that people were not exactly excited about developing a client for it, and Element siphoned up all sustainable funding that might have paid for improving the commercially developed Tigrase iOS xmpp client (Siskin).
No, it doesn't. It is still far behind in features compared with Element. It still doesn't have things like reactions, which is pretty much standard in any messaging app.
That you think that Monal is an acceptable alternative makes me believe that your biases are clouding your judgment and make it very difficult to accept your premise about Element being "damned" because of its funding. But let's just agree to disagree, because I don't see how this discussion can go any further.