This isn’t really specific to federated software. The client can go offline but the server can’t. Same applies to all centralized services. The only place this really applies is for decentralized (as in, no central points) systems, and those tend to have a lot of special sauce to make other people being offline less painful
Signal is too darn secure. Much better to have one dude who probably knows how to use a crypto library build the whole thing over again with a coat of ActivityPub on top