I can’t speak for them, but personally I’ve been moving away from matrix entirely for a few reasons.

Element was always a buggy mess on my phone, and a shitty electron app on my laptop.

It was too difficult for normals and while I disagree, they wouldn’t use it. What’s a chat app without contacts after all?

While element was bugging and I was awaiting an update, I found out that the Matrix [.] org foundation was started as a project at Amdocs, then when it was defunded the lead of the project created the foundation. Amdocs is fucking sketchy, they’re associated with mossad and have infiltrated the US telcom networks. Now look, I’m not saying they backdoored matrix, but they did do the other thing and backdooring a chat app would be right in line with their entire schtick, and I’m just too fucking paranoid for that, straight up. It also leaks metadata like piss to any server that federates with yours so if mossad is working with the matrix org, they get all of it just by your server federating with the largest, “official” server. To some degree, metadata seems inescapable, but almost anyone is better than mossad.

They also have a bit of a CP problem in their public rooms so stay out of those, but don’t worry due to that problem they removed searching for public rooms so you have to know the addr to join, so they make it hard to stumble into them, but also now you can’t search for public rooms which is a hinderance if you did want to join, say, the rasberry pi room, despite the risk of cp being posted.

BUT they don’t require phone numbers!

So for now I’m trying out Delta Chat, seems alright so far. No video calling though.

But yeah maybe that whole Amdocs connection to the “official server” is what they were referencing, but if not I’d like to know their reason!