[stevenwalton]

I'm just curious, why not build ontop of another app like Signal?[0] My understanding is that there's nothing stopping anyone from using the same app and creating their own server and nodes. My understanding is that you can even hook into multiple nodes with a custom fork of the app. Wouldn't this give a big advantage of not requiring people to have a whole new app and you can work synergistically with a company with similar/compatable goals?

The thing I see is that if you really want to make a huge P2P network, you need a reason to have the app installed for reasons other than P2P. The problem I've always seen with FireChat was that I'd never get anyone to talk to me and then when there was an emergency no one would be able to download. So we need to have the features built into something with more normal day-to-day utility.

[0] https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-airdrop/37402

[martinbaun]

Not up, but most of the times it is a lot easier to build something from scratch. Signal is notoriously hard extend and use - they have a lot of custom tech. I gave up looking through their documentation. Now, the reason is that they actually have end-to-end encryption and most do not implement it in a secure and nice way. They basically had to build everything from scratch themselves.

TLDR it is often harder to reuse