Explanation was disappointing and missing the point. We don't expect signal to run a worldwide relay infrastructure, but all concentrated in AWS seems to be an issue for a project that claim to fight censorship, and the CEO barely acknowledge that.

You don't understand, we NEED to be on AWS, there isn't really another choice.

You don't understand, we NEED to have your phone number in our private messenger.

You don't understand, we CAN'T be on f-droid.

You don't understand, we MUST have centralized servers, federation CANNOT work.

Did I miss anything?

@Mer__edith@mastodon.world here you go, two lists of European alternative cloud providers:

• https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-platforms
• https://europeancloudproviders.com/

AWS might've been necessary 10 years, maybe even 15 years ago, but things have changed. Not everything is AWS, Google, Azure anymore. Multi-cloud also exists. (And maybe hiring outside of the US could also help).

I've been thinking about this for a bit, if all traffic is end-to-end encrypted, the server connecting two endpoints doesn't have access to the data, so as far as I can see there's no reason that this couldn't be implemented using federated services.

I would be surprised if such a service doesn't already exist, just waiting for widespread user adoption, which undoubtedly relies on mobile phone apps to pass a minimum threshold of viability, something which both Lemmy and Mastodon both struggle with.

The people here today are really part of the early adopters, once you start seeing mainstream media talk about the fediverse, you can expect traction.

Meredith Whittaker lies*

SimpleXchat & Cwtch were workings completely without AWS existing. Weird how self-hosting decentralizes the net, huh.

Whittaker notes that AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google’s cloud services are the only viable options that Signal can use to provide reliable service on a global scale without spending billions of dollars to build its own.

As long as they insist on being man-in-the-middle. Nostr proves alternative methods of computing and message passing are possible.