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Ask HN: SMS Alternatives?

2 points by istingray ↗ HN
Given Apple's recent surveillance push, I'm moving off the platform. What have folks here found a suitable alternatives to SMS?

Signal etc seem great but requires the other person use it. So it's not good as a fall back for everyone.

Is there any long term solution to this in the works?

2 comments

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mikecoles
voip.ms works for me. There are other sms/mms providers in the field. Email is the only other solution, that I can think of, that avoids all of the "walled gardens". Federated XMPP appeared to have a great start. Matrix is the current best-hope in my eyes though. With companies doing their best to restrict users to their platform, it's going to be difficult to get users onto a system that is as open as email or SMS.
istingray
That's an interesting way to go about it. With Signal, why can't we simply have an open standard like email for our texts? What if texts were just emails?