free software doesn’t necessarily mean federating with other services.

They have stated their reasons why they don’t wanna do it. You might disagree with them or not. But the technology they built is still open. Anybody could take what they created and use it as a foundation that does federate.

Would highly suggest you to stay away from Matrix and Element for now when it comes to using it with non techies. It‘s simply not there yet. It‘s slow, tedious to use, buggy and the ux is just bad. It‘s also not necessarily more private than the popular choices if used improperly which is imo very likely it you have your aunt use it lol.

Is there any feature of element that you need or why did you pick it? You could ideally just use Signal for group chat and group (video-) calls. Or even whatsapp.

I‘m not really a loner but I‘m also not willing to do much to be included socially if it requires me to do things that I don‘t believe in.

If your fancy night club requires me to be dressed in a certain way i have no interest of getting in. If your barbecue invitation requires me to install an app that I don‘t feel comfortable with I‘m eating potato salad at home.

No. It‘s the opposite of a new world order.

It‘s the old order doing everything to preserve its power.

What do you mean by built in?

Built in to the protocol? Built in to the application?

There is a couple of XMPP clients that implement omemo and/or otr encryption.

Matrix supports encryption on a protocol level. But it‘s relatively flawed.

You can totally build signal from source yourself or just use their verifiable builds.