I second the controversy, owners of the program kinda suck (like Lemmy really) but mainly I was using a fork of Conduit for my server called Conduwuit but the single maintainer got bullied off the internet and they couldn’t hack the abuse, so they had to retreat and stop maintaining everything to recover their health. Here is their statement. They were open about having a furry/puppy kink and so constantly got people attacking them, spreading rumours and accusing them of bestiality and paedophilia.

Anyway, as my favourite fork was no longer maintained, and as Matrix the devs were working on proprietary modifications (Element X) that were basically already invented, plus some security issues alongside trusting them, the first of which being that some of my traffic between my server and my client was routed through them, I chose XMPP.

Speaking of Matrix, there is a recent vulnerability for federated servers that needs to be addressed by hosters.

XMPP does have its downsides, though. No pretty desktop clients, and the OMEMO verification with no backward decryption meaning when you use a new client, your previous encrypted messages are never readable… In this Matrix trumps.

It’s just really hard to stay mindful of ethics, privacy and stuff.

I just learned that Conduwuit has been officially taken on by both a stable team of developers under a fork called Tuwunel, and an unknown amount of volunteers under the name Continuwuity. The whole situation is messy as fuck. I might migrate back.