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Why do so many services require email configuration?
(piefed.social)
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this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2025
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That is my point.
If you write software, and need a way for it communicate with the user outside of the app, implementing email is simple, just about everyone with internet access has an email address and it is free.
XMPP/Matrix is a lot of added work that will only benefit those who:
I think you will find that the groups of persons who all three critera fits is vanishingly small.
So, please tell me why a developer should focus their time doing that rather than building the core features of the app.
EDIT:
I write this as someone who has used Jabber/XMPP and Matrix in the past, they are great services and I wish they had a longer reach. This is not a hill for you to die on.
It's a whole lot less work than configuring email.
How much work do you think it is to add a toggle that makes email optional?
It's a crapload more work to support XMPP/Matrix/whatever messaging on any platform than just using a robust, reliable, resilient, widely supported good old SMTP. For you it might be easier to input your account (which at least on XMPP resemble quite a bit of email address) but for the developer it's totally different thing. Also practically everyone accessing a website has an email address and if they'd decide to support some mesaging platform it'd make more sense to use whatsapp than XMPP since it's vastly more popular.
For the minimal of sending out a message to their accounts, they are just as easy as each other. Heck, there are simple packages to send XMPP messages from the CLI.
It's absolutely not.
It'd make far less sense considering both the fact that it's a Meta-owned proprietary data collection and advertising product, and also that they simply don't support such a functionality.
And you know this since you've written code to manage both on different environments, right?
Also, whatsapp supports all kinds of "bots" and it has absolutely massive userspace compared to pretty much any other instant message application. It doesn't matter if you create the perfect protocol and platform for this kind of thing if there's 7 people globally using it.
You don't have to write code to configure Matrix/XMPP.
You keep saying this as if user adoption is the only thing that matters. 99% of self-hosted stuff has tiny "userspace" so I don't know what you're on about.
You do realize that the developers need to write code to configure a Matrix/XMPP module? The module doesn't just appear out your immagination.
Then it will need to be maintained as security holes are discovered.
Tell me again why developers should spend the time and resources to maintain a feature that at best will have a marginal impact on the userbase, over focusing on the core of the project.
How you imagine things send messages to reset your passwords, sending notifications and whatever is currently managed via email than some piece of code creating and sending messages, managing possible errors with them and potentially also monitoring/logging the message traffic for statistics or debugging?
User adoption matters if you want your thing to be actually useful for the actual users. And supporting any messaging system requires effort, so it makes sense to spend limited resources on a thing which has the biggest userspace. If you want to run matrix server which has you and your dog using it, go ahead, but don't be surprised if you want to contact your neighbor and he'll look like you have two heads when you start to explain how to reach you.
It makes zero sense to spend any resources on adding compatibility with proprietary and malicious protocols, regardless of "userspace".
I had a look at the system, and it is a commercial product, I would imagine that their customers have requested these features.
Since you are a customer, why not request your features to be added as well?
Or, better yet, since you have explained that creating an XMPP/Matrix module as an alternative to email requires no coding, and the plattform is open source, why not just slap it together yourself?