A permanent move to a decentralized server model would pretty much eliminate this problem for Signal.
https://signal.org/blog/help-iran-reconnect/
@shane I'm curious to how a decentralised server approach would help. How would Iran blocking e.g. jabber.at XMPP server in the decentralised Jabber community be resolved for jabber.at users? Moving to another server thus changing ID would only temporarily solve the problem, until Iran blocked the next one. Am I missing something?
@athanasio The main thing it would do is make it more difficult for the government to completely shut down access. New servers could replace blocked ones quickly. Iran would be playing whack-a-mole. Federation wouldn’t make the network immune to disruption, but by removing the potential for a single point of failure, it would keep the whole thing from being blocked easily.
@shane the same applies for Signal, they can change the servers too. You also rely on server admins, most of them volunteers, to put additional resources. I don't see Signal's approach as a single point of failure as they are already using a cluster of servers, while XMPP servers (at least Prosody) lack this feature AFAIK. If anything, I find the crowdfunded approach of community proxy servers more resilient. My point is, decentralisation is good, but in this case it wouldn't help.
