Austin Huang ❤️

https://matrix.to/#/#offtopic-space:envs.net contains a list of off-topic/general rooms, most are not so big (less than 20 active users). See also https://joinmatrix.org/guide/popular-rooms/.

You can see Element’s paid service offerings at https://element.io/pricing; their use cases for police is at https://element.io/sectors/interoperable-blue-light-emergency-services. Yes, it’s a bit confusing to have both b2b and b2c under the same brand, but they do mean “the ability to encrypt communication within” and not your messages, similar to Slack’s model. I’d also expect the community to catch any call-home attempt.

This list (which I run) checks whether listed servers are open or not. As for communities, they are not dependent on homeservers (minus the abusive ones), you can find rooms to join through https://matrixrooms.info and join them with your account on any reasonable homeserver. As for slowness, refer to the physical locations of each server; additionally see User Guide (in header) for a list of the most used servers. However, do keep in mind that resources and experience of each server differs.

@Alb087 You do not have to (nor should you) use the default matrix.org, and there are other homeservers that do not require reCaptcha; see https://servers.joinmatrix.org .

Anyways. reCaptcha is specified in the Matrix spec, likely considering it being the “most popular” choice. However, since Matrix is moving authentication to OIDC (see https://areweoidcyet.com ), which further allows homeservers to customize their registration flow, the specification will eventually be made obsolete.

@Blaze matrix.org indeed is slow at times. You should consider moving to other homeservers: https://servers.joinmatrix.org

@shortwavesurfer @Blaze Were you on monero.social? I’m aware that matrix.org’s Cloudflare firewall may be blocking random homeservers from directly federating with it.