[dijit]

Signal would have had a better time if it had opened the idea that they don't have to be the ultimate authority and intermediate message broker..

Messaging your friends? What about your family?

One of you a nerd? Have one of those people stand up a server and federate it.

If Signal remains the "authority" here, then there can be mechanisms for spam reports across federated lines, distributed blacklisting and an appeal process.

That would alleviate their burden significantly, it would retire the notion that they have to always have perfect security and it would be in-keeping with their idea that "we don't want to have the information that could expose users". The easiest way to not have information at all is to not even relay it.

[nik_ca]

That's actually done already in XMPP (Jabber). Federativity, voice calls, E2EE, direct and offline file exchange, no sms verification and other bs, max privacy and convenience.

[dijit]

Sure, XMPP could go a lot further with a central body which set a minimum set of XEPs to standardise and maintained a blacklist of bad hosts though.

Signal could have helped a lot here (so could others, to be honest).