pantalaimon VS Movim

Well, if you want end-to-end encryption, then obviously that's going to be hard to write from scratch(!) - especially if you want it to be secure. However, we make it trivial to get up and running by piping your client through a proxy like Pantalaimon (https://github.com/matrix-org/pantalaimon/) which takes your normal traffic and makes it E2EE.

Not sure which "any of the other tablestakes features" you have in mind... obviously if you want loads of features, then you're going to have to write a whole bunch of code to implement them in your client, or build on an existing SDK like matrix-bot-sdk, matrix-rust-sdk, matrix-js-sdk etc. Not sure that's a disadvantage of Matrix though(!)

I've tried to set up some Matrix projects. The Client-Server API is easy to work with, but as soon as encryption is involved, things start getting messy. Many libraries have a hard time working right with E2EE enabled, because suddenly you need to keep track of all manner of things that aren't always documented well.

I tried to hack E2EE in by using Pantalaimon [0] but running that on a server with the necessary management capabilities is very tricky and doesn't do cross signing, so I've come to the conclusion that it's effectively useless for my use cases.

Every now and then I check back on the current state of E2EE in libraries and it does seem to be improving. Hopefully the entire process becomes easier next time I get the time to work on my proof of concept code.

[0]: https://github.com/matrix-org/pantalaimon

It takes a bit more configuration, but possible via pantalaimon

When https://siskin.im/ is seriously touted as the best iOS client for XMPP, you already lost 50% of the market share in the US. And if you don't have any usable app for 50% of your users in one of the most important markets, you can not really claim "interoperability", can you?

Don't get me wrong, it would be great if more people were using XMPP. Now that I am more involved in the Fediverse space I'm learning how many wheels are being reinvented and XMPP has already solved. If more people learned about https://movim.eu I'd be able to shut off Communick and move on to do something else to do with my life, but the reality is that XMPP failed to achieve critical mass because it never had someone to complete control the protocol.

Let me put it in another way: of all the existing projects out there, which one does actually bring material benefit to the users and publishers compared with, e.g, Mastodon, Matrix, Movim or Nostr?

Any Thinkpad will do the job. I'm working daily on a T430 and X220 for both my personal and professional web dev work. I've been developing Movim for more that 10years on the same computer https://movim.eu/

For social networking atop XMPP, see https://movim.eu/

Combined with the in-development ActivityPub gateway from Libervia, interop with Mastodon, Pleroma and others becomes possible too. The decentralized social web space is quite active at the moment.

If you don't care at all about poluar figures and just want to share content with people you actually know, https://movim.eu would be a much better alternative.

> No registration needed for group members

This one is the most troublesome I think.

Usually this is in a conferencing solutions though, so no such thing as chat rooms, I think.

Otherwise I would suppose something like XMPP with a web frontend, eg https://movim.eu/

ejabberd supports anonymous users, though I can't say if movim or any else web-client supports that natively

https://www.ejabberd.im/Anonymous-users-support/index.html