I have Dino installed on my PC, I like it. I wanted to install a XMPP client with OMEMO support and it was a toss-up between Dino and Gajim. Dino won out in the end, because it had fewer dependencies. One thing it doesn’t do well (yet?) is chat history. If you’re chatting on another app, like Conversations, and Dino isn’t open at the time, you won’t see the chat history when you open Dino up again.

As for the other questions: I guess never. All of my chat buddies are techies and know what XMPP is. No idea what an average user would think.

I would say that depends on what client you’re using, rather than the chat protocol itself. You have intuitive and less-than-intuitive apps for both protocols.

Dino is the only xmpp desktop client that doesnt look like its from 2005. Its simple to use, has a clean user interface and every feature you need to chat. The only other viable one is profanity, but thats tui. Hope that the big next update on gajim makes that one usable again.

I use xmpp on a daily basis. And also with “regular” people. There is quicksy.im , which lets people register with their phone number and then they have “<phonenumber>@quicksy.im” as their jabber id. That makes it very accessible to people that want a more “whats app” like experience when it comes to setup.

Matrix and XMPP are fundamentaly different. XMPP is at its core a messaging protocol, where the server primarly functions as the relay(Archiving on server side exists and is widely used though). Matrix is more like a cloud storage for your message, your clients sync with. I currently run both, a matrix and an xmpp server and the resource usage is completely different. You can easily host an xmpp server for 100 people with some bigger rooms on a super small vps, on matrix you can host at max 10 people and preferably no rooms on a vps the same size. So resource usage is very heavy on the matrix side. One thing that matrix has though is a shiny, feature rich webtech based client, which many people prefer and i get that. Yet they have millions in vc funding to develop such a client, which xmpp doesn’t have.

I like Dino, but in the end I usually use Gajim because it is a bit more fully featured. However, now that Dino supports video-chat that might work.

If you want to use XMPP with friend and family then Movim or Snikket are probably the easiest options.

I mostly use it to chat with gaming buddies and also to access IRC channels (with Biboumi).

But my plan is to add a Telegram gateway to my XMPP server and slowly get my family to switch over as well.

I have been unsuccessful in getting any of my friends to try XMPP. Nobody wants to leave Discord :(

I really like how Dino looks though! Even though I don’t use it (yet), I have it installed on both Linux Mint and OpenBSD.