[kuschku]

Forking and using your own servers is exactly one of the things about XMPP Moxie hated si much that he created Signal in the first place!

The whole point why Moxie created it is so that everyone is on the same one, to avoid federation issues.

> stributing apps that interface with OWS servers despite their demand that you do not (which is certainly not okay in the EU).

I'm not a lawyer, but:

EU law very specifically allows you to create software interfacing with third party software or services, even if they tell you not to do so, and you can even decompile their software to learn how to do that interfacing (compare §69d UrhG), as long as you don't have to break their ToS doing so. (Which I don't, the only ones possibly breaking the ToS would be the users, and there's also a legal argument that you can't prevent users from modifying the software they use to access your service (see the AdBlockPlus vs. BILD case, LG Hamburg)).