I have been using XMPP couple years ago pretty commonly, I would say It was my main communication platform that I have been on. I had couple friends on and people I knew. But I have switched to Matrix because of it having better clients.
My experience with Matrix is kinda mixed. I like a lot that it has more clients and even better ones than XMPP does. It also has more communities and people on it. But the issue is, that it feels overengineered sometimes, dealing with the encryption system is quite annoying often. Even after I understood how it all works, it just was pretty random sometimes with decryption. Having bigger rooms with encryption is not that great because you need to deal with random bugs and also have to babysit new Matrix users on how to manage the keys.
Another annoying thing about Matrix I found is that with more users come more skids that lack their parents’ attention, doing dumb things like spamming rooms with gore, porn and even cp. That’s why I try to keep my rooms private and add people to them manually. But it was also because of some people being quite weird and larped with the “plural” mental illness thing.
Will I use XMPP as main chatting solution?
Altough I would love it, I probably won’t be using XMPP as much as I would like. I will still be on Matrix, but maybe not as often as I used to. I want to keep track of both platforms. But I will consider XMPP as my primary chat option.
I will be adding my OMEMO and JID address to the contact page and keeping my device list updated, so you can know when to trust my messages.