Comment by leetnewb

Funding and centralization.

Matrix has a for-profit, venture funded company (Element) that is effectively behind the reference/flagship server and client implementations.

xmpp is far less centralized. Virtually all of the modern clients are single developer projects that live off day jobs and grants.

There are different ways to look at it. Matrix has done a great job at organizing resources to push the platform forward. xmpp has an impressive ecosystem and some incredible client implementations on a shoe string budget, that would probably look/function better and have lots more features given funding parity.

I think as we've seen with other projects like Immich, organizing and recruiting resources is an important part of delivering the modern experiences that users expect today from open source projects. Open source and self-hostable can't be an excuse for missing features.