Federated Signal servers!!!
Anyway, good luck getting Signal to federate with you until you have enough of a user base that they're losing users to your backend. They have zero reason to want to do this, and it introduces some privacy issues (what if your server doesn't respect deletions, etc?).
XMPP is just SMTP and some protocol addons on top. SMTP is just FTP with RFC 469 and others. Etc.