This is odd because I know a few mainland Chinese people that use XMPP without problems (and afaik without a VPN).

Sounds like your server got blocked for another reason?

Well, instead of leaking metadata to Signal, AWS, Cloudflare, Google/Apple and your ISP, like Signal does, RCS only leaks it to your ISP /s

You can easily redirect xmpp to port 443 which is not blocked by most firewalls. If you have problems with firewalls or public wifis your xmpp server is misconfigured.

The actual military grade (xmpp based) messengers implement security lables, meaning messages are tagged with the required security clearance and if you invite random people to a chat they can’t see the messages.

Most of human history…hmm checks notes… since the invention of capitalism about 400 years ago, yes.

Even serfs under feudal lords had significantly more free time and while basic child labor was common, it was mostly in family run farms.

The server can swap to a modified JS that exfiltrates the e2ee key and thus allows the server owner to decrypt the messages, or in more advanced encryption schemes add additional keys without you knowing and achieve the same thing.

Yes you can juryrig something like that with cookies, but it is highly fragile and browser based e2ee is basically a scam anyways as the server serving the website can always swap out the javascript that decrypts the messages.

e2ee is not really compatible with what you want due to necessary key management, and once you drop that there are so many possible options for what you want that I don’t want to list them all here.

Yes they have been trying to diversify income sources and so far mostly ended up with governmet (including military and law enforcement) contracts. But they are still burning money fast, as the entire company has a VC funded startup culture where being efficient with your resources counts little.

My personal guess is that Matrix as an open ecosystem will be mostly dead in 5 years, and Element will survive as a much smaller defense contractor.

Yes, in theory, but in praxis no because self-hosting the sync server alone still depends on the centralized auth server from Mozilla, and self-hosting that as well is possible but complicated. It’s sadly a mess, and you might be better off not using Firefox sync at all.

As for your other question, depends on the specific addon, but usually no.

The cheapest way would be to buy a domain from OVH and use their free offer of a 5gb single email address that is included with each domain.

You still need to log into their servers and thus provide them a lot of meta-data, like IP addresses, when and approximatly where you are using your browser, on how many devices etc.

Matrix is owned by a foundation only on paper. In reality it is all owned and driven by Element, which was very much VC funded in the past but seems to have reached the end of the VC re-financing cycle by now (hence increased enshittification speed).

Sorry, I don’t get you. Edit: ah, because the mod removed the original post? I didn’t see that.

It’s easy to mistake and yes indeed it came before like the other examples. I think the difference is that the roman salute is already culturally not-ok to use, so still using it is an intentional sign. The Ukrainian slogan on the other hand is quite commonly used without bad intend (although most Ukrainians also do not know much about the fascist history of Bandera to be honest).

Bandera’s fascist gang also used a red and black flag very similar to the anarcho-communist one (and which you can see today in western Ukraine quite often) and I kinda think it is still ok for Anarchists to use that flag 😅

Things are often not so black and white 🤷‍♂️

I could pretty effectively prevent it from being used for mass surveillance.

And a future you might decide differently.

Hmm yeah, I thought this is about organisation internal discussion. Of course if it is just a mailbox for outsiders to use, you could just configure some forwarders so that multiple people get the emails and can respond from their own account if necessary.

Selfhosting email specifically is quite hard. Not so much technically, but because of how a few large providers have cornered the market and drop most self-hosted emails reaching them with the excuse of fighting spam.

Hosting a forum that requires login credentials (incl. 2fa etc.) is quite easy though. But I guess that wouldn’t work as a way for outsiders to contact you.

I am confused why you would use a single email address instead of a mailinglist.

It is also possible to set up a private forum with mailinglist capabilities.

Generally speaking it is better to find a trust worthy host, or host on your own hardware than trying to repurpose some public service and hope e2ee alone is sufficient.

Igalia is currently working hard on making it easy to use Servo as an embeddable browser engine similar to how Chromium can be used.

The problems of doing that with Gecko, the browser engine that powers Firefox, is main reason why there are so few alternative browsers based on it.