It wasn’t my intention to state that an extensions of certain big software is always better or should get all the credit. No. First of all, I consider Molly protestware and second of all, the thing about being able to do federation and whatnot with much smaller funding was not about Molly. It was about simplex, matrix, XMPP, E2EE for Fedi and handful other decentralized/federated projects. Signal already has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times according to App Store/Play Store and received countless endorsements. And they did in fact face outages after receiving one from Elon Muskrat. So, they needed to find ways to scale better. Their server software could in theory be self hosted, but unlike Matrix or XMPP, it won’t federate so in a way it’s even worse than e-mail when it comes to this. One would thus think that it’s implicit that they would finally add the possibility to let people run their own servers or even devolve towards more P2P-oriented design. But instead they’ve decided to partner with a pump and dump shitcoin scheme whose privacy-friendliness was absolute trash, though granted, that was also at a time when every tech company was trying to join the Web3 hype. Now their reach is even bigger, but has grown at a steadier pace. I won’t try to go more tinfoil here with any unsubstantiated suspicions and begging the question but even though decentralized or federated systems are harder to design in a way that makes them secure, centralized ones are more abusable and create a single point of failure that can affect a large share of the user base.