I have been using Matrix since 2016 now and it has considerably improved over time, coming from “barely usable” to “let’s host my own homeserver”. Even is its current state, lots of things are to be improved such as communities or custom stickers but everything is on the right way. From now on, everything can only improve, we are seeing new server implementations, new clients, bots, communities moving to Matrix.
At this year's (virtual) Open Source Summit Europe, Oleg Fiksel gave an overview talk on the Matrix decentralized, secure communication network project. Matrix has been seeing increasing adoption recently, he said, including by governments (beyond France, which we already reported on in an article on a FOSDEM 2019 talk) and other organizations. It also aims to bridge all of the different chat mechanisms that people are using in order to provide a unified interface for all of them...
Governments protect their own data using end-to-end encryption, precisely because they do not want other governments being able to snoop on them. So not only is it hypocritical for governments to argue for backdoors, it immediately puts their own governmental data at risk of being compromised. Moreover, creating infrastructure for backdoors sets an incredibly bad precedent to the rest of the world - where less salubrious governments will inevitably use the same technology to the massive detriment of their citizens’ human rights.
