On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat. Unmentioned by Whittaker, this budget shortfall results in large part due to the US intelligence community, which lavishly financed Signal’s creation and maintenance over several years, severing its support for the app.
Signal has been forked already, including the back ends. Session is demonstration of this. They changed the architecture. But there’s no reason you yourself could not stand up your own independent signal compatible back ends
Signal the protocol is not going to die. It’s very open source and resilient. Anyone can stand up their own signal compatible servers today and reproduce the network. It’s a critical mass problem, so you would need some reason for a bunch of people to switch signal networks.
Signal the foundation, and the signal foundation servers may die at any time it’s unlikely but it’s possible.
Could some project like Molly.im stand up their own signal servers, and federate with normal signal for people who aren’t on the Molly servers? Absolutely. They could make the signal clients network agnostic, talking to different contacts on different networks. They could do this today. But, running those servers is going to cost money.