There certainly are cloud competitors to AWS. How easy it would be to use them would depend on what services Signal uses in AWS. Some will have equivalents, some may not. AWS, being around for so long has a boatload of services and it’s not in their best interest to make them easily movable.
But I absolutely get why something like Signal would use a cloud provider. Could it be done entirely on-prem? Quite probably. However could they do it within a business model that would allow the scale of users to use it as they have today without charging significant fees to use it? I highly doubt it. This would hold true for anyone wanting to build a service like theirs that would operate on the their scale. The bandwidth and other infrastructure would be immense and super expensive to buy and maintain. The only folks able to provide that would be big telco, tech companies.
Could it be all decentralized ala the Fediverse? Sure and such services exist. But, much like the Fediverse, getting user adoption would be much more difficult and tour audience would be those tech savvy enough to use what’s already out there. I mean, for example, Matrix/Element exists. Quite secure, very decentralized. But it’s not for the general public.
