I’m guessing not a lot of users know about it. Their ActivityPub implementation is still only about half done.

It will be interesting to see of they promote it heavily when it’s more complete.

There’s nothing keeping them from scraping that kind of data now.

My (self-hosted) Mastodon server seems unable to view profiles on Threads. As far as I can tell, there’s nobody to talk to about that.

I don’t have high hopes about Meta having good intentions here, but I am eager to see platforms that would have previously been walled gardens open up to the federated model. I do think we have some work to do on the open source side to manage the potential massive increase in exposure once Threads users can follow users of other software.

Of course you can pick a server that blocks Threads if you just don’t want to deal with that.

I’m not surprised they could. I’ve worked on things that send SMS messages and I’m aware that carriers filter for spam and scams (perhaps not as effectively as one might hope).

I’m surprised to hear of messages being blocked for mere profanity.

Anyway, SMS sucks, default to something else and fall back to SMS as a last resort. Gently encourage your contacts to use Signal.

SMS fallback. A feature which you can use with any app on Android

SMS fallback is not a common feature of internet-based messaging apps on Android. Signal used to do it, but does not now. I don’t think WhatsApp or Telegram ever did.

I have no doubt about the part where iPhone fans waste no opportunity to tell someone else they should get an iPhone. It’s the other side of the argument that falls flat: Alice receives video from Charlie that’s perfectly fine, but Bob’s iPhone sends a pixelated mess, and Bob says the iPhone is better?

Interest in RCS is recent - newer than iMessage, which launched in 2011. RCS with Google’s proprietary extensions is just another proprietary messaging app, and I am not particularly excited about it.

even so far as “patch” a fix that was created to make it possible for their customers to communicate securely with Android users.

There’s no shortage of options for doing that. What Apple wants is tight control over all of its walled gardens, which should be no surprise given the company’s history. They’re very good at making it appear as if decisions made to increase their profits are aligned with the interests of users. It’s probably even true that someone would have exploited the technique Beeper Mini was using to send spam if Apple hadn’t closed it.

Just doesn’t seem plausible to me. If Alice gets low-quality images from Bob and higher-quality images from Charlie, her most likely assumption if she’s not sophisticated enough to be aware of the cause is that Bob’s phone has a bad camera.

It seems unlikely to have that effect when the recipient presumably communicates with people who have other brands of phone, from whom they receive better looking media.

It seems like an odd decision to me, as it would make the iPhone look like it has a substandard camera to someone receiving media from one by MMS.

MMS does have size limits that can hurt image quality, but I have the impression iOS applies limits of its own that are considerably lower. I’m not sure why anybody in 2024 wouldn’t have at least a couple modern messaging apps, but it seems a lot of people don’t.

Android doesn’t support iMessage

I think it’s the inverse: iMessage doesn’t support Android.

Those aren’t equivalent statements; the first implies that something about Android makes it impossible for Apple to produce an iMessage client for it when that is purely a business decision on Apple’s part.

Major privacy issues that come to mind include:

• App store lock-in on iOS combined with terms incompatible with the GPL mean that some of the most privacy-respecting software cannot be distributed for Apple’s mobile devices.
• Apple proposed, but ultimately did not implement client-side scanning for end-to-end encrypted cloud storage. That such a thing even made it to the public proposal stage shows either incompetence (unlikely) or a lack of serious commitment to privacy (more likely). Apple’s proposal may have emboldened EU regulators who are trying to mandate client-side scanning for encrypted chat apps.
• Browser engine lock-in on iOS means hardened third-party browsers are unavailable.
• The popularity of Apple’s platform-exclusive iMessage service in the USA may be hindering adoption of cross-platform encrypted messaging. On the other hand, without it perhaps most of its current users would use SMS, which is obviously worse.

would the government be able to find out that I own the anonymous e-sim on it if my other sim in my phone is another provider not silent-link

Yes. They can almost certainly tie the hardware ID (IMEI) of your phone to your identity through your non-anonymous service provider, and probably do through mass surveillance programs. Whether that’s a security problem for you depends on what you’re doing with it; surely you aren’t using SMS, standard phone calls, or unencrypted messaging services for anything you really want to keep private.

If you want phone service that will resist targeted surveillance by local authorities, even routinely turning on the cellular modem where you live, work, or study is a risk. This article detailing one person’s approach to securing a phone was posted to Lemmy today and should give you a clue about the possible threat models.

one with ads and the same vids without for premium user

If it worked that way, which others have already explained it doesn’t, that would break their business model of showing each person individually targeted ads.

TikTok is really popular operating on essentially the same principle. I, for one want nothing to do with that.

It’s most likely that the anti theft feature is based on a hardware identifier (IMEI) and won’t be triggered by installing a different OS.

It’s also illegal in most jurisdictions. My point isn’t that anyone should drive without insurance, but that allowing insurance companies to offer discounts for accepting spying will lead to the spying being effectively mandatory for most people.

I’m inclined to think this should be illegal because it could lead to a situation where insurance is unavailable to or unaffordable for anyone who doesn’t opt in to fairly invasive tracking.

Why do you have an app for that?