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Signal can pull a Durov and start hopping popular cloud hostings and CDNs, pushing latest server IPs via FCM. This worked for a year in Russia - they banned several large subnets of AWS and DigitalOcean, millions of IPs and smaller subnets, temporarily banned Google, but in the end still gave up after a year.

Signal has already tried similar approaches (domain fronting), and had to stop because the cloud providers do not want any of it.

The decentralization argument comes up fairly often in similar discussions. Assuming it was Matrix and not Signal, what advantage would there be in the current situation?

It'd be harder to ban existing installations I suppose.

> Add: and Signal's centralized server IPs banned. Signal is really weak here; shouldn't have been centralized to begin with.

Here is Moxie's talk about this very subject, and why he thinks that decentralized products can be much weaker products.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8

Then people will sideload it. Those who care, anyway, I don't know how many do.