Microsoft bought it, removed the encryption and decentralization, and started piping conversations directly to the NSA.

Yup, honestly this is a good argument for web3 as a substrate on which to build an encrypted chat app that's permanently decentralized and owned/funded by the community. (Once someone figures out the encrypted privacy aspect...)

This is coming to Matrix : https://arewep2pyet.com/

Woah, this happened almost two years ago and somehow I missed this.

I need to get more active on Matrix again.

Hasn't been for almost a decade at this point. The p2p protocol was deprecated in mid-2014.

Skype is also pretty much dead now. So the centralisation argument doesn't really benefit from Skype as an example.

Here is a series of headlines that give the best explanation of this architectural change that I've ever seen:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411779