I think they’re now broadly free on all but the most restrictive plans- but when iMessage came to be they weren’t - and most phones wouldn’t split 160 characters into multiple messages. You were literally limited by that.
They used to charge extra if you were roaming too. I think T-Mobile was the first to stop and everyone followed.
This is so comically wrong I don’t know where to start. SMS was fucked from the get go, especially in the US where it was common to charge by the message for SMS. Seriously. It was $0.25 to send and $0.10 to receive them on a lot of people’s plans.
The wireless carriers fucked SMS, and will absolutely fuck up RCS - along with all the various providers out there. It’s a dogshit standard that isn’t broadly interoperable still.
iMessage was a breath of fresh air for people who did use SMS.
Not just any keyboard and display, looks like they are gutting old Blackberry Bolds and slapped a pi zero in it.
Pretty sure they know and are making joke.
What nonsense is this. The airline checks your ticket against your passport prior to departure. If airlines board anyone without the proper passport or visa and are rejected on arrival, it’s the airlines’ responsibility to fly you home on their dime.
No airline lets you book an international ticket and board it without a valid passport and appropriate valid visas that match the name on the ticket.
You can of course fly domestically without ID (even getting through TSA, it’s onerous but TSA has a process for that).
Your information on that ticket is also electronically sent by the airlines to the next port of entry for a huge percentage of countries.
If that doesn’t match the passport you have, you’re going to have problems at immigration wherever you’re going.
You can see this is action on any boarding pass you get for international travel.
It will say something like DOCUMENT CHECK REQD or DOCS OK right on your boarding pass.
Not for nothing, but pork bun has been great for me.
And most of them aren’t anonymous at all. You can correlate transactions pretty quickly, because every transaction is on the chain. You can track where every bitcoin went. As soon as you break one link you can follow the chain.
Good luck doing that with cash.
Blockchain has a few - really only a few - somewhat compelling use cases. Currency isn’t one of them.
I don’t know that much about aether, but I have a hard time imaging a voting system of governance that can’t be gamed.
True decentralization is nice but not a big deal for me. Given the open nature of Lemmy, the bar to moving instances is significantly lower than leaving Reddit. It would of course be very inconvenient, but so, it sounds, is aether.
Ultimately, to be accessible to average users, you need some amount of centralization it seems. Everything else is pretty science-projecty.
If you could migrate a community from one instance to another and have subscriptions update automatically, it makes the rogue instance admin a little less scary. But still a risk of course.
Isn’t aethers big thing that everything is ephemeral? If you look at reddits value from my perspective, it isn’t that.
It’s that there’s a huge amount of actual human experience and information available to me through google. Sure there’s a lot of astroturfing happening, but if I wanted a quick glimpse of what people thought about a product, my google search was “$product Reddit” to get a pulse. And then join those communities if I bought the product.
I don’t care about censorship resistance. Though I think the governance model improvements are a great thing that Lemmy could implement.
Mostly the people running and modding it are insane.