cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/639469
Or is this just your usual tech libertarian bros posting cringe?
I remember it being public a few years ago, that the Matrix team were trying to market it to european militaries and goverments, since it could be used as a secure comms system. It wasn’t explicitly said, but it could provide some autonomy from the US and UK’s prying eyes… at least more secure than email.
Of course its not cool of them to deal with cops, all they have to do is say no whenever police departments or militaries want demos. Or find other funding sources besides police departments. As open source devs, they should have more integrity than that.
But seeing as how matrix and element are buildable from source, and can be run in an entirely private way, there’s nothing to worry about w/ respect to the software. The warning signs would be what twitter or reddit did / are doing, which is to close off the source code, make it not-self-hostable, start charging for features, or start messing with the protocol.
None of that is happening, and if it did, matrix would be forked really quickly.
And this is why I love open source
Since my comment got sucked into the vortex…
Nobody has managed to think it is bait PR to gain more attention, and a way to get rid of blackboard screechers and whiners who whine about Matrix. They are selling encrypted messaging, NOT messages. They are selling a free service to governments for the commercial moniker.
I would be wary of using their flagship homeserver seeing how the org is devoid of spine but the software itself should still be fine.
Agreed. While Matrix may not be part of the so called “fediverse” like lemmy, people should never forget that Matrix is also a federated protocol with hundreds if not thousands of public homeservers.
As long as the Element App isn’t doing something sus, like storing unencrypted user messages locally or phone messages home to element.io despite being on a completely unrelated homeserver I don’t think there should be much concern. And even if any of these are the case it shouldn’t be hard to fork the thing and patch that stuff out. Or just use a more trustworthy client.
They are selling encrypted messaging to governments, NOT messages. I am surprised absolutely nobody has thought of it as them throwing bait PR to gain public attention. They just want to get rid of blackboard screechers on internet constantly bugging them I think, by using this tactic.
