Isn't the first problem that mr Marlinspike has been holding off federation of the Signal protocol? If anyone could run a server and join the Signal network (li

Isn't the first problem that mr Marlinspike has been holding off federation of the Signal protocol? If anyone could run a server and join the Signal network (like Riot/Matrix, who got it right), the problem of circumventing censorship would be a lot easier. Any one of these federated servers could use whatever tricks they like to circumvent censorship, and yes they'd risk getting banned themselves if their circumvention measures are violating TOS of where they're hosted, but they wouldn't have to demand special treatment in the light of that, like Moxie Marlinspike did, because it doesn't happen to block the entire Signal network at once. Their lack of federation is their censorship weak spot. I haven't heard a single reason for holding off federation from Moxie (and the "best" reason I currently can come up with is that he has issues letting go of "his baby", other reasons being more nefarious). There's a lot of strongly principled wording about why Signal should or should not do certain things, because Signal doesn't want to rely on anything but the protocol itself to guarantee its security, privacy and censorship resistance. But really, what are these principles worth if Signal is in fact reliant on a third party (Amazon) closing their eyes to violation of their own TOS? They shouldn't be, and federation allows for that property. And to add one more reason, it's not entirely fair to Amazon. By using the load balancing trick, the only thing that Signal risks is getting banned from Amazon, they can rent another server from someone else and set up shop there. However, by allowing Signal to continue to use their load balancing service in this manner, Amazon is risking having their entire service banned by an oppressive regime. It's not really cool of Signal/Moxie to ask Amazon to take this risk for them.