there are more than 200 countries in the world. do you expect me to hire 200 people, one in each country? and then they do what? should they have access to my servers? if not, what's even the point? to act as a translator? i am ok with having to follow local laws be able to provide services to a country. but if i have to hire people in every jurisdiction just to allow people there to use my free service, then i can't even afford to offer that service anymore.

apparently matrix is not in the ban list. i wonder how they managed to comply.

If you are offering some free service just out of the kindness of your heart, and a country decides they don’t want to let their people take you up on it, I wouldn’t stress too much about it, right? I mean, it is a shame for them if your free service is really useful, but there are people all around the world without access to it…

Lots of countries seem to be scrutinizing large social media companies more aggressively than small volunteer projects. These sort of companies definitely can afford local representatives. They are businesses, if they aren’t making enough money in the country to justify the representatives, they can make the business decision to pull out.

nobody asked Matrix to comply with this (as far as I know). like Mastodon/ActivityPub, it's a bit of a lost cause to try to block a decentralised protocol in practice.