this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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Yes. There's also an experimental third-party client for desktop Linux called Flare. I've used Flare on some devices that the official client doesn't support and found it adequate. With some more maturity, I'll probably prefer it to the official client. Signal officially discourages third-party clients because it cannot guarantee their security but does not attempt to block them except in cases where specific clients are known to be compromised.
Account creation on the mobile app is recommended before using these as it relies on SMS verification. I don't like that, but it probably cuts down on spam; I've received exactly one spam on Signal in over 10 years of use.
Signal encourages installing from Google Play and uses Firebase messages by default, but does work without them. Given your set of preferences, however, you would probably prefer the third-party client Molly, which is on F-Droid and supports UnifiedPush.
That sounds like it ends up with properties similar to federation, but the client has to do all the work. The client would also need some means of identifying itself to all those random servers where there's a cost to creating new identities, or people would need to do key exchange when they exchange contact information. Without that, this proposed system would be overrun by spam as soon as it got popular.
Server-side federation solves a lot of problems. Why wouldn't you want that?
You can do that. The download with images is over 100gb compressed, and it expands to several terabytes. It's not hard to imagine why most people don't want to use it that way.