How the fuck they decide what is a burner vs a phone owned by people who don't like getting raped by the likes of AT&T is beyond me.
Edit: Per suggestion below, one option is textverified.com. I have verified this works. You can pay with crypto. As little as 75c
Just like with zoom during covid, Discord is now 'the' thing to use for normies along with WhatsApp. I'm old enough to remember back in the day when it was Facebook and MySpace the normies all used and before that MSN messenger. It's extremely annoying because in order for you to even contact them they expect you to download that shit software and they'll refuse to use anything that's actually good and so you're practically forced to use it to communicate with them at all.
God I fucking hate normies and the joke is about 2 - 3 years down the line something new will come along and the fucking fad chasing conformists will go and download that making you have to deal with all that yet again. I am at the point where yes, I would literally go and live in a fucking desert over this than interact with other people RL and it's really bad lol.
Yep it is pain, But is also a point in showing that the computer literacy of people are really going down the drain, since they need something to be a button press in order to operate it, nope cannot setup their own or even use IRC, gotta have it as dumb as possible.
How much do you want to bet that next "communication program" will be something that require digital Id that the normies will jump on :D
That's when I'm just going fuck it and into the middle of nowhere and not care anymore.
This is the story of the internet. I was in on the ground floor of the blogosphere in the early 2000s, and many tech savy conservatives my age cut their teeth on blogs.
Then came social media, and Twitter, which sucked the wind out of the sails of the blogosphere.
And then Apple introduces the iPhone, and once social media introduced mobile apps to reach that audience, that cemented an app for normies as the central user base any developer has to keep in mind when creating software.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The one argument I have against having dozens of messaging apps where everyone wants a different app is that each one takes processing power and memory to monitor for messages. This is especially a problem on mobile phones
I was able to run 4 different IM programs and an IRC client with no problems on a desktop with a Celeron measured in mhz instead of ghz and 128 MB of RAM that was probably 1/10th as fast as modern RAM 20 years ago and I could still browse webpages that were more responsive than modern web designs.
That's before websites used 10s of MBs of just JavaScript and every app is no less than 50MB with most being hundreds.