I suspect you would have trouble hosting long term in China. I don’t recall the specifics now but IIRC every website hosted in China needs a special government ID which requires getting approval. My memory is hazy but it does feel like one of the poorer choices to host unless you live in mainland. There are many better options in the world that both do not restrict information as well as not requiring paperwork.

Isn't that the beauty of self hosting? How could anything be enforced on user-controlled servers? Practically everything self-hosted is open source and how would enforcing anything would even work?

The problem lies with people who are technical enough to self-host, but might not be confident enough to fork/make changes. Maybe you could switch services, but there's still just enough friction/soft-lock in to actually migrate.

You are right though, it gives significantly more control to users. It's just realising 100% of the benefits that might be trickier.

> How could anything be enforced on user-controlled servers?

New laws comes to mind. If a government decides to try to outlaw encryption again, cloud/hosting companies located there wouldn't have a choice but to comply, or give up on the business. The laws could also be made in such way that individuals are responsible for avoiding it, even self-hosters, and if people are using it anyways, be legally held responsible for the potential harms of it.

Matrix server backdoors aren't an issue though? It's about the client where decryption happens. If those aren't required to upload decrypted contents, you can always overlay some encryption protocol like OTR over any chat mechanism. I remember using it on MSN via Pidgin

Don't worry about the servers. Worry about mandated software on the client

> an article of how to rent a VPS in China would be interesting

Given that apparently it's quite difficult to even get a WeChat account without a national ID, I suspect that step 1 is "learn mandarin" and step 2 is "get a Chinese national ID".

Also your home modem/router is often tied to your ID and then there is ofc the firewall. IIRC You can get vos hosting and ICP code through Ali Cloud somewhat automagically. Agree it would be nice to give it a try some time.

I didn't have any problems creating wechat account. May be I was lucky, I don't know, I just typed my phone number and it went pretty smooth, like whatsapp. Also was able to connect my visa card. I did it in the Kazakhstan and then was able to pay in China, no problems. May be they got exception for Kazakhstan specifically, we recently got visa-free travels there.

Did you try? It's a few years ago when I had to create one, but it was just as simple as WhatsApp (just a few more CAPTCHAs). And no VPNs or whatever, straight from a Swiss IP.

Why would you rent a VPS in China?

Jurisdictional arbitrage.