This was my experience with matrix.org, mostly pedos and far right extremists or other weird anti social characters . Turned me off from these kinds of platforms big time.
if you’re talking about the wider network - yes, there’s a subset of abusive users… just like on the web, or the internet, or email, etc. Unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about; it comes with the territory of being an open network where anyone can participate.
My experience of Matrix is more that it’s full of FOSS projects like Mozilla, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, GNOME, KDE etc… as well as lots of government users. But ymmv. If you are still seeing abusive rooms as a matter of course, please route details to abuse@matrix.org, where we do actually act on them (if they are on servers we control)
Though I suppose if you search for other stuff you can find it.
Though it strikes me as a little odd, I never really associated matrix with anonymity, more with federation, end to end encryption, self hosting.
Perhaps hosting matrix servers as tor hidden services could serve that purpose.
Complaining that bad people are using Matrix is about as meaningful as complaining that bad people are driving on the highways or are filling their bathtubs with from the local water supply.
I wonder how someone must be using the platform, or how they're looking for rooms that might interest them, to get the impression that it's "mostly pedos and far right extremists or other weird anti social characters."
In that context the decision to avoid a chat application if you feel it is likely to put you at unnecessary risk where there are alternatives that will not is perfectly reasonable.
There are a lot of excuses for bad policy with the deflection of "at least I am not a far-right unperson".
A chat application usually cannot put me in any risk at all. Public personas might have different problems here, but the rules of PR aren't that new and these cases build a poor general case.
Fair to have the choice of a supervised chat app as long as people don't try to enforce all chat apps to adhere to arbitrary rules due to the latest outrage or panic over certain people, opinions, politics, bubble tea or whatever can be the source of ire.