Unfortunately France is only lagging behind, but on the same authoritarian path.
First thing done after terrorist attack: declare emergency state, a tool designed for cases where the state is at risk of collapsing because of invasion by a foreing country or violent insurrection…
The police gains the power to assign people considered at risk at their residence. Very first use: assign climate activists at residence during the COP.
Emergency state is reconducted multiple times without any rationale, other than vague “terrorist threat”.
One of the first actions from Macron once in power was to make it permanent, by passing its key elements in the law.
Protests against anti-social policies or for climate are now systematically met with a violent response. People come out with an eye or a hand missing due to flashballs and lacrymo grenades. Answer from the government is something like “they had it coming”.
Cases of activists and journalists intimidation by law enforcement are multiplying.
Give it a bit of time, and France will catch up.
I do 1:1 videocalls on XMPP. Quite some clients implement that now. But there were no videoconferences until very recently. That’s changing, though. See Movim right now, for example.
Main 2 issues with XMPP are inconsistent clients (in terms of GUI but also features wise) and the incredibly, astonishingly, ridiculously sloooooooooooooooow evolution of the protocol through the XSF. Nothing can get in there until it’s “perfect”. Clients devs are reluctant to implement things until the extension is stable. And the best part is this approach hardly work: the best way to figure if something works is to deploy it in larger and larger scales and improve it on the way as you identify corner cases you didn’t think about. Not to review the description for months/year until it qualifies as literature…