That’s called ‘peer-to-peer’, not ‘hosting’.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be enforcable to deter most people. At minimum, with such a ban there’s zero chance to communicate with government agencies with E2EE.

Kinda is, though - regular people have a lot more trust in centralized services, and Signal has a very large userbase compared to anything selfhostable. And IME they really, really hate installing new messengers.

Plus, selfhosted E2EE would still be just as illegal as Signal. Many people won’t be willing to participate in illegal activity, and if you just don’t use E2EE on your selfhosted solution the usefulness seems rather dubious.

No way in hell my relatives are going to use a messenger I selfhosted. My brother doesn’t even use Signal for whatever reason, even though even my grandmother has it.

Are you the only one who decides that? My grandparents have a bunch of children and grandchildren, if I tried to take their smartphone away the others would just call me an asshole and give them a new one.

That’s just pedantry. ‘Selfhosted’ never meant that every single user has to host it themselves.

Let’s hope they’ll be able to continue to use it. It (and all other messengers with proper E2EE) is already on track to be outlawed in Sweden and France, and the new government in Germany will be pro mass-surveillance, too.