Perhaps the &quot;federation&quot; that should evolve is not federation of the servers behind a single protocol or app, but federation between multiple apps. Applying the traditional definition of &quot;federation&quot; to Signal implies that any entity could host a Signal server, and any Signal client could talk to that server. Moxie mentions the main issue with this, namely that because of the &quot;evolving ecosystem,&quot; it&#x27;s impossible to keep all servers using the same protocol. Also consider that <i>trust</i> is another significant issue -- can you trust the operator of the Signal server you&#x27;re connecting to? Can you trust not only that the server software is up to date, but also that no malicious actor has modified it?<p>Because of these trust issues, the benefits of federation for users are unclear. Why connect to some random Signal server if you feel safer connecting to the official servers?<p>If the answer to that question is, &quot;because I can connect to <i>my own</i> Signal server, so I don&#x27;t need to trust <i>anyone</i>,&quot; then I posit this question: Do you need permission to build a federated service? Is it possible that federation can evolve without any central planning or permission to do so?<p>Consider the &quot;messenger wars&quot; of the early 2000s. There was no official &quot;federation&quot; of messaging services, and yet, people built clients that could interoperate with all of them. In fact, Microsoft itself wrote a client that was interoperable with AIM. [0]<p>Why can&#x27;t the same sort of &quot;grassroots federation&quot; evolve within the current ecosystem of chat apps? If somebody reverse engineers the whatsapp protocol and builds a &quot;whatsapp server,&quot; then modifies the whatsapp binary to talk to it (perhaps using something like theos-jailed [1]) instead of the official servers, isn&#x27;t that effectively accomplishing unsanctioned federation? Along the same lines, is there anything stopping somebody from reverse engineering Signal to talk to Whatsapp, and vice versa?<p>The &quot;walled gardens&quot; have made it harder to reverse engineer binaries and protocols, but there is no fundamental impediment to achieving cross-messenger interoperability. If developers are motivated enough to build third party clients, it will always be possible, although the requisite reverse engineering effort grows more complex with every release.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nplusonemag.com&#x2F;issue-19&#x2F;essays&#x2F;chat-wars&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nplusonemag.com&#x2F;issue-19&#x2F;essays&#x2F;chat-wars&#x2F;</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BishopFox&#x2F;theos-jailed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;BishopFox&#x2F;theos-jailed</a>