Denys Nykula

Many thanks for such a detailed answer. I agree that blocs and federations are a good thing, and hope to see Asian, South-Eastern Asian, African, and South-American alliances similar to EU form around democratic values. I also hope that they don’t turn into rival fortresses with armed borders and migration restrictions between them. As someone from former USSR (Ukraine), I’m quite sure that Russia on its own, without Chinese government assistance, especially technologic, wouldn’t at their current economic state be able to wage war and suppress internal movements to democratize and/or truly federalize (in the North, particularly); but I read, admittedly not extensively, about Chinese history and recognize how dangerous it is not to have strong allies when empires are nearby - without strong allies, it’s a must to have mostly autarkic production and strength in numbers.

Plushies rock.

Since you’re Chinese American, I have a question that’s doubly offensive but I’m actually interested in hearing your opinion. Should borders the size of China and the U.S. continue to exist at all? IMO one president or central government can’t legitimately represent hundreds of millions of people.

Yes, setting up YunoHost on a new Debian VPS was a couple of commands, and having it install Synapse and Element was a few clicks in the UI plus a lot of waiting.

However. I thought of Element as an alternative to Slack or Telegram the way OP thinks of it as an alternative to Discord. I was wrong. Element competes with IRC. This is the only platform from which I’ve seen actual groups of people (FOSS projects) switch to Matrix. I think Matrix focuses on different usage needs than Discord, and trying it with willing Discord users will be an interesting exercise in seeing what perspectives they bring and what issues that raise, but the solution to their problem will be somewhere outside Matrix, and it will be in somewhat distant future, not with the current state of FOSS tools.