Matrix is so laggy and clunky and slow and annoying. XMPP was just perfect. And the “Conversations” client, for XMPP, is so fucking fast.

I’ve noticed that as well, XMPP has never been laggy in my experience, it’s very snappy. Matrix is hit or miss, sometimes fine, sometimes a bit slow, especially in larger rooms.

How does XMPP’s E2EE compare to matrix’?

As far as I know, XMPP’s OMEMO encryption is modeled off of Signal’s encryption, but modified to function without a centralized server. It’s generally regarded as a very solid, strong encryption, even better than openPGP.

Matrix’s encryption uses Megolm or olm, which I believe is also regarded well as far as the encryption itself. The issue is that Matrix’s inherent design means it’s spreading copies of the metadata of those messages (though the contents of the message itself is encrypted) far and wide to many servers unnessesarily. Seeing as a lot can still be gleaned from metadata (when a message was sent, to who it was sent to), it’s a concerning model considering how big the main Matrix server is, which means that it usually always receives a copy of all metadata activity on the protocol, unless a self-hosted server completely kills federation (which defeats the point of it).

A good comment from an older reddit thread summed it up well:

matrix.org is unique because it hosts so many user accounts. As a result, it becomes a metadata honeypot for the entire matrix network. It’s kind of a design flaw in my eyes. Matrix is great. But it would be even better if it didn’t have this issue.

Xmpp is federated, but you have the option of not sharing chat metadata with other servers on the network. Matrix doesn’t give that option. matrix.org is effectively a central server due to the fact that a majority of accounts are hosted there, AND all metadata associated with those accounts, which includes metadata from other servers they communicate with, accumulates on matrix.org. I would suspect a very high percentage of matrix metadata, ends up on a single server. Xmpp just does not have this problem.

Matrix because it seems like the most logical choice - largest platform that’s federated/decentralised and has end-to-end encryption.

Personally I’ve had consistent problems with messages not un-encrypting in Matrix, requiring frequent re-sending of messages. I’m also not a fan of how much Metadata is shared across the Matrix network even with encryption, nor am I fan of the history of the group (Amdocs) who developed and funded it, or the willingness of the Matrix/Element team to sell their services to law enforcement (They had purchased a booth at a police convention).

Movim has all of the same features as Matrix without those downsides, if you’d like to give that a try instead.

The fascist noose is tightening the world over thanks to proprietary big tech. We have to escape now while we can to open-source alternatives.

Currently the best (in my subjective opinion) self-hostable, encrypted and federated (like lemmy/piefed) alternative is Movim.

It offers 90% of the features of Discord, including group video calls, group texts, and even screensharing with audio (must use a Chromium based browser currently to share the audio). The only feature missing is discord-style rooms, which the dev is currently working on to release as fast as possible.

It doesn’t even require an email to create an account, and runs right in your browser, so it has an extremely low barrier to entry. Give it a try with a friend to see if it can meet your needs! :D

For a more complete guide to swapping proprietary apps for safe open-source ones, I suggest referring to this post: https://lemmy.cafe/post/18663514