WhatsApp and Signal have threatened to shut down services in Britain if the Online Safety Bill includes restrictions that undermine encryption. The government is pushing it through anyway.
Element is just a front-end for Matrix - you can self-host Element and there’s nothing the government can do about it - short of a police raid to shut down your home server.
I wanted to avoid it if I could, so I could offer friends and family a good general solution not making them beholden to my tyrannical whims, and it looks like the main thing Element will be doing is withdrawing the app from the general app stores. Which seems like the very minimum required to comply. I’m not sure if matrix.org will still work in the UK but most instances should unless the government block them. In which case I can self-host.
It’s probably a good idea to avoid very big instances such as matrix.org anyways for the benefit of decentralisation. If matrix.org does become unavailable for the UK, it could become messy, since it’s unclear how well matrix will work without matrix.org as a reliable default instance for interoperation
Element is just a front-end for Matrix - you can self-host Element and there’s nothing the government can do about it - short of a police raid to shut down your home server.
I wanted to avoid it if I could, so I could offer friends and family a good general solution not making them beholden to my tyrannical whims, and it looks like the main thing Element will be doing is withdrawing the app from the general app stores. Which seems like the very minimum required to comply. I’m not sure if matrix.org will still work in the UK but most instances should unless the government block them. In which case I can self-host.
It’s probably a good idea to avoid very big instances such as matrix.org anyways for the benefit of decentralisation. If matrix.org does become unavailable for the UK, it could become messy, since it’s unclear how well matrix will work without matrix.org as a reliable default instance for interoperation