> It doesn't matter what country you run your server in or where your company is based; if you're providing public signup to a chat server then the countries (UK, AU, NZ etc) which require age verification will object if you don't age verify the users from those countries. (This is why Discord is doing it, despite being US HQ'd).

Whether it matters depends very much on what sort of organization you are.

Discord is a multinational for-profit corporation planning an IPO. It takes payments from users in those countries, likely partners with companies in those countries, and likely wants to sell stock to investors in those countries. Every one of those countries has the ability to punish Discord if it does not obey their laws, even if it does not have a physical presence there.

The situation is likely quite different for most of the 23,306 Matrix servers that federate widely. The worst thing Australia, for example could do to one of their operators is make it legally hazardous for them to visit Australia.

The Matrix server is open source. https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse The Element client is also open source. https://github.com/element-hq/element-web

It does not actually need to be configured in a federated state and frankly scales better when it's not. The login can be tied to anything or use it's own. From a modern SAML SSO to an old school forum.

You can run one for a few friends and it scales just as well as a private discord for a few friends. Just need persistent storage for media uploads if people are sharing video a lot.

I appreciate that answer, it makes sense that it is based on the country. What I'm hoping to avoid is having to give my actual identity to all services on the internet. It will just allow terrible monitoring and oversight that isn't helpful for democracy. I don't trust the current us administration to know everything I say, everything I do, I don't really trust any government to have that power (and I want to stop crime and abuse..). I like some privacy. We are heading to that already with the Texas and Florida age requirements on the internet today.

This matrix discussion here is missing the point - many people don't want ubiquitous tracking of everything we do on the internet. You and matrix are seemingly not honestly addressing that point, because matrix doesn't seem different discord (in the requirements).

We're taking it for granted that people do not want to be tracked on the internet, and certainly don't want everyone to have to verify themselves on every site they use. I personally spent ages of time campaigning against the legislation (and lost) - e.g. https://matrix.org/blog/2021/05/19/how-the-uk-s-online-safet... and https://element.io/blog/the-online-safety-bill-an-attack-on-... etc.

The difference with Discord is that Matrix is a protocol, not a service. It's made up of thousands of servers run by different people in different countries. Public instances may choose to verify users in affected countries to abide by the law; others may choose to run a private instance instead.

For hosts in the US, wouldn't this apply? https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118565/witnesses/...

tldr, means for American firms to sue due to burdonsome regulations, also some contitution stuff.

I think the internet needs to get much more comfortable with protest through noncompliance.

We need more stuff hosted through obfuscated channels (Tor, I2C, etc) and more user friendly access to those networks.

The internet was built on noncompliance with laws. The hens are coming home to roost that is all. Sovereign countries can only let social media and tech companies poison their societies so much before it becomes a real threat to the nation.

It was all fun and games while it was a few geeks and early adopters having (mostly) fun. Now it is corporations making billions while destroying the mental health and productivity of their "users".

That’s insane. Discord should just ban UK users instead of forcing this garbage on all of us.

And NZ and AU? And all the EU countries if the EU legislation passes? [0] And a handful of current US states and possibly all of them soon? [1]

At some point you don't have a business model if you don't have users.

[0] https://europeannewsroom.com/to-ban-or-not-to-ban-eu-countri...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...

The fact people don’t see the chilling effect this will have on privacy is beyond me.

(Tangential to your comment but apropos of the Discord news...)

Have any of the Matrix/Element teams seriously considered taking advantage of current events by offering a gamer-focused class of premium account, for Discord refugees who want to redirect their Nitro budgets to fund Matrix gaming features? (Perhaps on a separate homeserver, to avoid the lag during times when matrix.org is overloaded.)

If it were positioned as Patreon-style crowdfunding rather than selling a finished product, and expectations were set appropriately, I wonder if it could end up a nontrivial source of income with which to develop features that Matrix deserves but corporate/government customers won't pay for.

The idea of crowdfunding Discordish features for Matrix from disaffected Discorders (e.g. using the premium acct system we've built for matrix.org) has come up a bunch.

The problem is more that Element team is seriously stretched (particularly after the various misadventures outlined here: https://youtu.be/lkCKhP1jxdk?t=740) - so even if there was a pot of money to (say) merge custom emoji PRs... the team is more than overloaded already with commitments to folks like NATO and the UN. Meanwhile, onboarding new folks and figuring out how to do the Discordy features and launch a separately Discordy app under a Discordy server would also be a major distraction from ensuring Element gets sustainable by selling govtech messaging solutions.

So, we're caught in a catch-22 for now. One solution would be for other projects to build Discordy solutions on top of Matrix (like Cinny or Commet), or fork Element to be more Discordy (and run their own crowdfunders, perhaps in conjunction with The Matrix Foundation). Otherwise, we have to wait for Element to get sustainable via govtech work so it can eventually think about diversifying back into consumer apps.

> (This is why Discord is doing it, despite being US HQ'd)

Right, but also the US isn't far behind on the same legislation wave. It's a lot less likely to be US federally regulated in the same way that the EU is debating EU-wide legislation, but a handful of US States have a version of this legislation already on the books and about to be enforced, or considered about to be on the books (some of which like South Carolina's partially passed bill written to be enforceable Day 1 with no grace period).

The US landscape is shifting rapidly on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...

Hello!

Did you mean ~15,000 servers and ~2000 federating? Because those are the numbers on etke.cc's matrixrooms.info (still really good in my opinion and keeps going up over the weeks), but I can't find your numbers anywhere! Would be great to have a source to point to if that's actually the case!

Thanks!

Hello, Aine here, one of the etke.cc developers.

The stats of the matrixrooms.info instance is what matrixrooms.info instance sees - it is not whole Matrix Federation. Here is the documentation in the MRS repo about that endpoint: https://github.com/etkecc/mrs/blob/main/docs/stats.md

Also, at the moment of writing, there are ~15k *federated* online servers visible by matrixrooms.info, and from them, ~4k servers publish their rooms directories over federation ("indexable").

You can read more about the MRS project (matrixrooms.info is just a demo instance) in the repo: https://github.com/etkecc/mrs/blob/main/README.md

Thanks for the reply.

This makes sense, but is there any reason MRS would see such a drastically smaller number compared to, what I assume to be, matrix.org instance numbers? My understanding based on the documentation provided is that MRS seeks federation-enabled, published rooms to index, and is the initiator of the connect. It doesn't expect other servers to reach out to it.

Or would this difference essentially be from servers that decided to disable indexing BUT still federate with matrix.org?

Yes, that's the difference. Loads of Matrix servers have nothing exposed to index, and steer clear of public rooms, and so wouldn't show up on MRS's stats.

Whereas I literally select count(*)'d from the destinations table on matrix.org, filtered on servers which had been federating in the last week(?) in order to get the specific stats above. (And then count(*) of all time for the 150K figure).

Thanks! This makes much more sense now!