I'd been thinking Telegram would be a sufficiently secure alternative, but as Western intelligence gets their hooks into that system I think we need to go self-hosted. Element is the biggest name here, but I'm curious what options are the best for a combination of both security and feature maturity.
Just take note that Matrix was originally developped by Amdocs, an israeli multinational with ties to the state intelligence. They made a foundation to pursue further development, but apparently the staff is the same. It might not mean much, but many people don't know about it.
Matrix also also really, really bad when it comes to metadata. I would not trust Matrix when it comes to sensitive things or communication that can be used against you due to how much metadata it leaks. I also find the double standard here were people don't trust Signal due to funding but ignore funding issues in Matrix.
good to know. I still feel their open-source practices and lack of centralization puts them above signal in some ways, but yikes...