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?
You can easily do it for your Grandma. But your argument can be just as easily applied to Matrix vs. WhatsApp etc. If you use the centralized services of Matrix.org or Beeper then Matrix is just a very poor version of Discord.