State actors have a much more direct route to killing secure chats like Telegram and Signal: they firewall the servers at the national level.

There've been several state actors that have done this to both Telegram and Signal already -- both of these apps employ different ways of avoiding it but this is already one of the arms races in the world of secure chats.

FWIW, my problems with Signal losing/delaying messages are all US-based, which AFAIK has never been accused of doing any sort of state-level firewalling of secure chat apps.

Yes but that's very obvious, the route just discussed is subtle and difficult to detect.

I just don't think state actors need to go that far. They can shut it down more easily than slowly trying to sink it through attrition.

And besides, if I were a state actor and I wanted to sink a program like Signal through such subversive means, I'd probably have someone start contributing to the project, and then start arguing in favor of bad UX choices; make it harder to use, not just unreliable, in favor of "security". Push it out of the realm of what a normal user could conceivably make use of.

That's the kind of long con I'd play -- play on techies' love of doing things on principle and for theoretical purposes, and general disinterest in UX.