Nice first approximation. The cloth has no momentum, a piece of cloth that clearly would swing down, past vertical, and then swing up just damps down and stops at vertical.
Also the falling pieces don't accelerate downward, which looks unnatural
Just because it's not perfect, does not mean it useless.
A central signal message service receives millions of messages, I've seen claims of 40M active users a month. If each user sends 25 messages a day, that's 12,000 ish a second.
Drawing conclusions about who is talking to each other out of a 12,000 message per second stream is far from trivial since both signal users are just sending and receiving encrypted packets to a central service. Much depends on how much you believe about how signal handles things on the server size.
Not sure federation or pure p2p would improve things, especially since some fraction of the service could be malicious.
Signals mission seems to be something along the lines of helping the most people increase their privacy. Better to help millions resist the dragnet of surveillance by ISPs, governments, and large organizations then to have perfect security for a few. This requires a very easy to use client (i.e. click on signal in the app store and launch), features users want (send receipts, typing notifications, emoji, video, calls, etc), and making wrong choices hard. Like say installing a random compatible with signal client from an untrustworthy source.
So Moxie is fine with people forking the open source client, but wants them to use their own servers.
Distributed/decentralization isn't some magic pixy dust that makes everything better.
So sure federation can work, but it's harder, and you run into things like XMPP. Are there secure XMPP servers out there, sure, but how do you tell? Which XMPP server supports which extension? How many people use XMPP for their chat/calls on a daily basis?
Seems kind of weird to pick on signal for doing things well and getting popular. Could it be more secure/private, sure. Could it do so AND be more popular, not so sure.
Signal seems pretty good, not sure it could be better and have evolved so quickly and gained so many users. Sure it could be more resistant to traffic analysis. What do you use?
I've pondered writing a p2p client that uses the signal encryption (double ratchet) and bounces fixed size packets off 2-3 other clients before delivery. All packets would be the same size, including those for the upkeep of the DHT.
To help make traffic analysis more difficult forwarding would include a random delay, DHT traffic would be indistinguishable from message traffic, and chaff would be added to allow for plausible deniability. Your client would talk to at least 3x as many other peers with similar timings and frequencies.
However the inherent compromises of P2P like increased CPU, network, and battery usage combined with higher latency and startup time seems like the adoption would be lucky to hit 0.1% of signal and then it's less useful since using it would raise flags.
Signal is so valuable because it has good e2e, it's popular, and whoever you want to talk to is likely to have at least heard of signal if not already running it.
The network issue is the windows driver, only relevant if you are running windows. There is a work around by pinning the old version and I believe there's a new driver that works, but isn't the final driver.
What's worse is that the email is often delayed at the sender (cheap bulk email services) or the receiver (gray listing), but for no reason I can fathom have a short expiration date.
What's worse they are often unique AND delivered out of order AND have no timestamp or sequence number. So you get to guess which is the newest, using any other fails, and the ones that succeed often time out before they can be used.
Having an expiration date as short as 15 minutes seems insane and counter productive.
Only if you are in a hurry, say an advanced civilization has been around for 1M years (0.07% faster than us). It might well be worth sending out millions of drones to the most promising areas at 1% of the speed of light, their advanced sensors and telescopes and science would likely be able to pick the most likely stars based on metal content, vicinity (i.e. stable of 1B years), water, temp, etc.
Not to mention they could send probes closer and further from the galactic center to take advantage of the slower and faster rotation rate to see new stars.
As for the nuclear fission blast I have my doubts. Ham radio folks brag about 1000 miles a watt, in a lossy atmosphere and multiple bounces that reflect less than 1% for each bounce. Using advanced things like tubes of transistors and a copper cable thrown over a tree branch.
Using the 1 watt per 1000 miles the largest nuclear explosion would be 22 light years, and clear line of sight through space is going to transmit quite a bit better than bouncing off the atmosphere then off the ground several times.
An advanced civilization could make say a square km array (which us lowly humans have managed) and would understand nuclear bombs enough to know their likely signature, decay rate, shape of the curve, etc. Much like how astronomers use supernovas as standard candles for distance, despite crazy different red shifts.
Seems quite reasonable for a civilization to keep track of anything going on in their fraction of the galaxy.
"People for some reason refuse to comprehend just how hard is it to send a speck of dust over light years of distance" It's only hard if you are in a hurry, in fact we have 3 rocks come through our solar system from well more than a light year away.
Also the falling pieces don't accelerate downward, which looks unnatural