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SMS is just terrible though, and is just not worth using. It is plain text, limited in size and simply has less features.

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What anyone means when they say SMS post ~2010 is SMS/MMS

It didn't get better.

That's just like, your opinion, man. SMS/MMS is decentralized, open, and works on every modern mobile phone out of the box. No other text messaging technology does this yet.

Open for Verizon to read/modify, you have no way of knowing the other half’s identity (was their number given to someone else in the meanwhile), no encoding is specified/due to non-ASCII characters taking more SPACE (in 2022) so auto-SMSs still today will just force ascii text, making it often unreadable. Like, it is literally a single digit number of bytes difference.

Also, you need like.. a carrier plan to access, wouldn’t really call that open. Any network based messenger can work over my home or even McDonald’s wifi, without any third-parties

I get what you’re saying but your home or McDonalds wifi is decidedly a third party, although encryption may mitigate that.

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