Sorry for the late reply. I agree completely. China is a state like any other and does good and bad things. People love to just make up garbage about China, and some people say the weirdest pro China shit you can imagine.

The top comment about an inoffensive cartoon vs a terrible person?

Traitor lunatics gonna traitor lunatic.

Yes, you can use their exact build environment straight from GitHub. You can also use Molly.im which is another app that i think is a fork? Im still investigating it.

That’s kind of a core tenet of libre/open software, innit? Independently verifiable software that you can change at your pleasure.

I was looking at Molly.im and it has its own f-droid repo. There are two options: with and without Google servicios.