>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.