We were late to the SMS game in the US as well, most European countries saw mass SMS adoption back in the late 90s and early 2000s, whereas it didn’t catch on in the same way till about 2005 or 2006 here. I still remember the days of being limited to 400 texts a month, and having certain friends growing up who I couldn’t text because their parents would not get a plan that had any buckets of them.

It’s an early adopter problem, and it could be much worse (looking at you, Tildes, where I swear I was one of less than 10 users who were not either well compensated professionals (tech or otherwise), or in school at the time to become one, at least before the latest Reddit exodus. At least most of the Lemmy instances, while tech heavy, don’t have the same smugness that a lot of nearly-exclusively highly compensated white collar worker spaces do. (Not that Tildes is unique in that space in the least, Hacker News is utterly insufferable, and the personalfinance and povertyfinance subreddit split arose for the same reasons)

Luckily I think Lemmy has more potential to get more early adopters who don’t work with tech professionally, especially on an instance like Beehaw. I haven’t felt like some kind of lower class interloper (as someone who is in lower level retail management for work) here, unlike many other super techy spaces.

Luckily for the few communities that I haven’t found elsewhere yet, Relay is still working. I’m almost certainly not going to go for whatever subscription the developer ends up setting up (although I did buy Premium years back for it), so once that’s live, I guess I’m out on my phone. I still can’t believe how trash the official app is, and how it has moments of stutter even on my Pixel 7 Pro.

Another for the get a laser printer train, I got a Xerox color laser printer 8 years ago for a ridiculously good deal (like $130). I finally had to replace the original toner last year, and it took my off brand cartridges just fine at a cost of like $50 for the full set of four. Came with Linux drivers even! Having color is nice too, means I don’t have to think about using another printer. We keep my boyfriend’s inkjet printer around solely for scanning things at this point.

I’m super jealous. At least I’m moving to a new apartment with fiber from CenturyLink at it, but even they are running $70/mo for gigabit. I’m living the T-Mobile 5G home internet life right now because CL only has DSL at my current place, and fuck Comcast in general.

Even worse is, the new place has honest-to-God fiber from Comcast to the unit–sadly paired with an RFoG converter, so despite it being more than capable of symmetrical gigabit, they still only offer 35Mbps up there. Leave it to Comcast to make FTTP suck.

Or they have and haven’t told you, as I’ve experienced multiple times now (as an adult in my thirties, no less). It’s why I fell out of my bar trivia group, they slowly forgot to send us Android users (aka my partner and I) texts separately, so we just drifted out of that circle.

It’s comical how petty so many adults get about the bubbles too, and absolutely refuse to consider using anything else. Luckily my partner was on the Pixel train like me before we met, so it’s not an issue there, but suggest Signal, Telegram, or hell, even Facebook Messenger (which they all have as well), and you just get befuddlement in response. Even my mother, who is in her fifties and is a department director at her job, gets perpetual shit from her coworkers re: the staff group chats that just can’t go into Slack for whatever reason, as she’s the lone Android user in that whole bunch. None of these people even grew up with cellphones of any type, and yet they’re just as petty about messaging as any socially-obsessed teen.

Oh well, no skin off my back, and if anything this petty behavior from a subset of iOS users is basically an anti-advertisement to me.

And there was a time when the same could be said for Reddit. Is Lemmy perfect? Of course not, but at least we have the ability to build something better instead of making the hippo dance to our beat, as it were.

Not to mention there’s a lot of those features that have been added over the years that we could do without. Nobody’s clamoring for an RPAN clone over here (I hope), or for three different ways to DM/chat with people.