One of the root causes for centralization is that we lost the ability to make our devices talk directly to each other.
Before the Internet, people could contact each other directly by just making phone calls, and the phone network was neutral, so any phone or any network could call any other (even internationally) provided they pay the fee. Same with SMS and MMS.
With the early Internet, every computer had an IP address and could send packets to any other one.
With the late Internet, because of NAT and unwillingness of ISPs to make progress on this issue, we've now lost that ability and now always require some kind of central coordination server for devices to be able to talk (through it).
There is no reason why Signal (or any other messenger) requires a central server if it wasn't for this. Provided you have the person in your contacts (by having their IP address + a crypto fingerprint for authenticity) they should be able to talk directly.
Until we solve this issue, decentralized alternatives (such as Matrix, Mastodon, and others) are just bad workarounds that will never catch on because people aren't willing (and shouldn't have to) host a server (or use a sometimes unreliable benevolent one or a paid one) when they've already got a smartphone and are paying their phone/Internet bill.
> Before the Internet, people could contact each other directly by just making phone calls, and the phone network was neutral, so any phone or any network could call any other (even internationally) provided they pay the fee.
the more you learn about SS7 and the traditional phone network the worse it looks. it's actually held together with the metaphorical equivalent of duct tape and string, and is highly centralized...
I'm not talking about the security or reliability aspects of it - you are right about those (though Internet isn't much better, see BGP). But when it works as intended, the telephone "world" offers something that the Internet world often no longer offers: end-to-end connectivity.
Even the cheapest phone plan will come with a phone number that's reachable from anywhere and can reach anywhere (provided you pay the call fee). Most consumer-grade internet plans come with a single, dynamic IPv4 and no IPv6 (or the IPv6 prefix is also dynamic). No end-to-end connectivity is possible unless you engage in some NAT traversal workarounds that require an external server.
That's a very good point, and if you look at ordinary residential end user broadband services in many developing nations, where the ISPs long ago ran out of IPv4 resources to assign each customer a /32 from a DHCP pool, you don't even get a real ARIN/RIPE/APNIC/AFRINIC/whatever dynamic v4 anymore but an IP on your WAN interface that's in carrier grade NAT IP space, already behind one NAT, before any small home/office routers for wifi are introduced into the setup.
Before the Internet, people could contact each other directly by just making phone calls, and the phone network was neutral, so any phone or any network could call any other (even internationally) provided they pay the fee. Same with SMS and MMS.
With the early Internet, every computer had an IP address and could send packets to any other one.
With the late Internet, because of NAT and unwillingness of ISPs to make progress on this issue, we've now lost that ability and now always require some kind of central coordination server for devices to be able to talk (through it).
There is no reason why Signal (or any other messenger) requires a central server if it wasn't for this. Provided you have the person in your contacts (by having their IP address + a crypto fingerprint for authenticity) they should be able to talk directly.
Until we solve this issue, decentralized alternatives (such as Matrix, Mastodon, and others) are just bad workarounds that will never catch on because people aren't willing (and shouldn't have to) host a server (or use a sometimes unreliable benevolent one or a paid one) when they've already got a smartphone and are paying their phone/Internet bill.