I remember it being public a few years ago, that the Matrix team were trying to market it to european militaries and goverments, since it could be used as a secure comms system. It wasn’t explicitly said, but it could provide some autonomy from the US and UK’s prying eyes… at least more secure than email.

Of course its not cool of them to deal with cops, all they have to do is say no whenever police departments or militaries want demos. Or find other funding sources besides police departments. As open source devs, they should have more integrity than that.

But seeing as how matrix and element are buildable from source, and can be run in an entirely private way, there’s nothing to worry about w/ respect to the software. The warning signs would be what twitter or reddit did / are doing, which is to close off the source code, make it not-self-hostable, start charging for features, or start messing with the protocol.

None of that is happening, and if it did, matrix would be forked really quickly.