I'm still a little puzzled. How does this differ from the Riot Matrix application that some of us might already have?
Element *is* Riot. Riot was rebranded to Element.
It was a little worrisome to see this on the Element page: "Element is incredibly proud to build in the open, sharing almost all of our own code with everyone." Almost? -- dep
I don't know what they mean because the Element client is fully open-source. In fact, there are forks of Element such as SchildiChat.
Matrix is not like Telegram where the protocol is closed-source but the client is FOSS. Matrix and all the known clients for it are FOSS.