There are certainly people who want to use Signal without Google services.

I don't know how legitimate a complaint it is since Moxie et al have said that they would accept a well written pull request which provides similar functionality. But this just hasn't been forthcoming.

What I dislike about Signal mentions on HN is that aggressive posters conflate a number of different issues people have with Signal - lack of federation, reliance on Google push notifications, lack of SMS support, etc - and somehow lump them in together.

[Just to be clear - I am not saying you are doing this].