Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

So can VPN's! There is a reason why Opera still has market share in some countries.

I can't see how it would matter for home assistant. It's not a CPU-bound application.

Using a VPN given to you by a service provider from whom you are trying to hide your IP seems to not achieve the goal.

Letting users select their own VPN before using your service is too much friction. The advantage of Tor is that it's run by multiple parties and does not need any interactive setup.

Sure, but what about in 1992?

How much did you need to understand about TCP/IP when you got AOL? Very little.

And what happened when you got online? You could communicate online, suddenly reaching millions and then billions of humans. So learning just a little bit about IP (let's be real, you didn't need to know shit about TCP)

Compare that to a VPN or Tor. What do you need to understand to use it, and what is the payoff for knowing it? It's nowhere near the same situation as IP and the beginning of consumer internet.

I think a half-way point is needed for something to be truely durable. I agree with the criticisms of P2P in that you need to make some privacy tradeoffs. But durability is another concern (as we've seen recently with the takedown of Element from the Play Store). Is it possible for somebody else to spin-up a new centralised Signal server? Why isn't the server code-base open source?

Signal would grow immensely in my eyes if they made the server code open source [SEE EDIT], and allowed an easy way to set the centralised server address in the Signal app. The current server would be the default, and perhaps changing the server would be hidden in Advanced Options for now. But the capability would be there. That way, if x government chooses to go after Signal's servers, the availability of all the code needed to run a replacement is already available.

As it stands, we are placing a lot of trust in the Signal Foundation for communication (assuming we rely on the Signal app/service). I have no problem with a central server being used for communication if I can communicate data in a zero-trust way. But I want assurance that that server can be quickly and easily replaced in the event it goes down.

EDIT: I stand corrected. Server code is here: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server Unfortunately, you cannot change the server address in the app as downloaded from any app store, so my criticism remains.