

Disclaimer: I host and use XMPP. I like using it.
That being said: the question isn’t if there’s any client, the question is if there’s a good client.
And my god, do XMPP clients suck ass. At best, they’re decent (monocles comes to mind, for example), but I actively loathe interacting with Linux desktop XMPP clients. There’s not a single one that is competently designed, or rather, they are all so fucking bare-bones and ugly looking.
“But that doesn’t matter!” yes it does shut the fuck up.
99% of the population doesn’t give a shit if you support the latest OMEMO spec or are written in memory safe rust or whatever else.
It takes a a fraction of a second to realize “this client sucks” and at most an additional minute to figure out “…and it’s not suited to my use-case”.
I also host matrix and use it extensively on all my devices. There actually are nice clients, and even some Discord-likes. But a) the protocol is so horrible, I’m not sure reinventing the wheel can be called a bad thing, and b) I want to cry once a week at least when using it. Why do my old messages not load today? Why does my message show as sent two weeks ago (!), but only arrived now (!) despite having sent plenty of messages both directions in between? Why are all of my messages marked as “can’t verify authenticity” on about half my devices, but not the other, a bug that has been open for YEARS with hundreds of complaints and pleas to at least reduce the danger-signaling indicator since it indicates “insecure!” to non-expert users, with zero maintained response? And this is just for myself, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck supporting matrix for friends & family. I mean, I am doing that, but fuuuuuuuuck thaaaaat.
Fluxer allows us to tell friends and family “here try this, it’s just like discord but no corporate bullshit!”, and they can open the app and go “oh yeah that is like Discord. Ok, sure, we can try using that instead”.










If you want to avoid the gpg mess, you can actually also configure gut to sign with your SSH key.