Matrix is a protocol, not a service. It's likely the UK government can enforce laws against content and accounts hosted on the matrix.org servers, but no single government has jurisdiction over the entire network.
That sounds more like a recipe for overreach than a method to escape the law, to be honest. Governments don't typically go "aw, shucks, you've caught us on a technicality" without getting the courts involved.
Clueless lawmakers will see this app called Element full of kids chatting without restrictions and tell it to add a filter. When the app says "we can't", the government says "sucks to be you, figure it out" and either hands out a fine or blocks the app.
There are distinctions between the community vibe Discord is going for (with things like forums and massive chat rooms with thousands of people) and Matrix (which has a few chatrooms but mostly contains small groups of people). No in-app purchases, hype generation, or kyhrt predatory designs, just the bare basics to get a functional chat app (and even less than that if you go for some clients).
I'd say being based in the UK will put matrix.org and Element users at risk, but with Matrix development being funded mostly by the people behind matrix.org that implies an impact to the larger decentralized network.
It would take some clever crafting to outlaw Matrix clients without also outlawing web browsers and conventional email clients. Let's assume they did though. The best they can do is block it from app stores, which won't stop anyone but iOS users.
More likely, it just won't become popular enough for lawmakers to notice because the UX is a little rough, and people have very little patience for such things anymore.
Google has backed away from that, stating that an "advanced workflow" with more warnings than the current settings toggle will remain available. We should all be concerned they even considered such a thing though.
(Non-Android) Linux phones often aren't GNU; PostmarketOS is one of the more popular options, and that's based on Alpine Linux which uses musl and Busybox.
It's not really a method to escape the law, or a technicality - it's that people other than Matrix.org are operating chat services, and the law applies to those people, but those people are not Matrix.org.
This won't save Matrix.org if legislators throw stupid at it, of course, but Matrix.org has the opportunity (though maybe not the resources) to engage with UK legislators to ensure they feel respected and that honest efforts are being made to comply.
There are a number of alternate Matrix clients, and nothing is stopping a non-UK dev from forking any of them at any time, including Element. And many are not “apps” that can be blocked from a “store”, they are desktop or web clients.
> Governments don't typically go "aw, shucks, you've caught us on a technicality" without getting the courts involved.
That might happen here, but I don’t think that principle holds generally. If that were true, wouldn’t every component of the service provider chain be sued for people e.g. downloading pirated or illegal stuff? The government cracks down on e.g. torrent trackers and ISPs, but they haven’t seriously attacked torrent clients or the app stores/OSes that allow users to run those clients. Why not?
Governments go after websites that don't host anything illegal all the time. Torrents don't contain any illegal information yet torrent websites are taken down routinely through legal challenges, by court orders, and in some countries where the government is at the behest of the entertainment industry, by special anti-piracy organisations with ridiculous censorship powers.
Apple and Google have both been forced to take down apps and ISPs block IP ranges all the time. Usually without much of a fight. Apps for reporting ICE, for instance, have been taken down without any clear legal precedent and without much judicial challenge. The entire chain is already being threatened, sued, and censored.
The trick is usually to escape the jurisdiction of countries that care by hosting serves in foreign countries, to host app executables and such off-platform, and maybe adding a CDN like Cloudflare to the mix to protect against getting arrested too easily. For this to work for Matrix, the company developing Matrix needs to leave the UK and move to a place where this age verification bollocks isn't necessary. I don't think that kind of behaviour is good for a company currently financed in large part by government contracts.
It's just a reality that law is harder to enforce when you cannot target a given server and take out an entire service. Regardless of what you think of the law.
This is why to this day torrenting of copyrighted material is alive and well.
I thought it was both and their hosted service is in the UK. Is it not? I know people can host their own but I have had very little success in getting people to host their own things. Most here at HN will not do anything that requires more than their cell phone. Who knows maybe Discords actions will incentivize more people to self host.
That's why the bittorrent protocol is in such dire straights /s
Bittorrent actually has fewer real uses than Matrix. The former is useful for Microsoft and others trying to roll out big patches, but the latter is used by NATO, the German Armed Forces, and the French government
