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.
Hell, I dealt with that all the way back in 2010/2011 with the Cliq XT. It was supposed to get Android 1.6, and Moto kept stringing everyone along until after Android 2.0 came out, when they quietly stopped saying an update would come. Worst part is, IIRC the Cliq (same exact phone hardware wise, except with a physical keyboard) received the promised update.
Ever since then, I’ve sworn off Moto aside from the Z2 Force which I managed to get new for like $250, and even that one became my rooted plaything until the charging port fried itself last year.
Moto, aside from the brief time they were part of Google, has always been awful about software updates, unfortunately.