I wanted to find a proper Marxist Leninist instance/community to ask this, because everywhere else people may not care.

I’ve been slowly moving my close people and even the people I work with to Matrix for messaging, and I have been suggesting that they download Element for it. And for me this is beyond privacy reasons. It’s to stay away from Meta, Google, and the like.

But recently I’ve been doing some digging and Element has been proudly posting about it’s work with NATO, US armed forces, and German armed forces. They also have an “ethics” page that clarifies that they don’t just work with anyone. For example they said they don’t work with countries sanctioned by the US, EU, or UK. They’ve also mentioned they don’t work with governments that have “human rights issues”.

I’m feeling very conflicted about this whole thing now and I’m not sure what to do. It might have been even fine and I might have written off Element as a private entity and just switched apps if not for the Matrix Foundation also being closely working with Element, sharing resources, people, and also boosting each other on social media like Mastodon.

I even questioned the Managing Director of the Matrix Foundation on mastodon and they first said they don’t see how NATO is imperialistic, then said anyone using Matrix is a good thing because we need to fight “authoritarian enabling Big Tech”. Which I agree with if they weren’t actively collaborating with said authoritarians.

Please redirect m e if this is not the right place for this.

  • absurdity_of_it_all@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
    6·
    4 days ago

    As the other person who responded to you mentioned, things can get bad. At some level, trust is always going to be a factor with these things.

    1. Matrix.org is still the most popular server - if I just tell people to download Element, they’re going to pick matrix.org. Automatically, this builds a sort of lock in with the “default instance”. Even if I host my own server, that’s not something I can recommedn to everyone, nor do I have the resources to make it a public server.

    2. Already there’s trouble with hosting your own Matrix server due to how heavy the software is apparently. This coupled with point 1, things concentrating into the hands of the foundation is not a good thing.

    3. Following from that, for example, what if they suddenly decide there’s too many people with “radical” ideologies that are against their masters, the imperial powers? They have metadata (even if not content, because encryption) through the public servers they host that they can use to surveil.

    The issue is not just that it’s built by people with poor ideological rigour. It’s that it’s both a fragile structure that depends on trust and the people we’re trusting have poor ideological rigour. That seems like a bad combo to me.

    Imagine if they just wrote and worked on the protocol. That’s it. No official apps, no official public servers. Then I wouldn’t care coz it doesn’t matter. People can check the protocol for suspicious stuff but that’s it. Nothing else is in these organizations’ control.