I joined lemmy.one when people started moving from reddit to lemmy. In the early days there was not much choice, either this one or the woke beehaw and some other “just started” instances with one or two people. (and lemmingrad ofc) I have recently switched to another one.
Good luck if you have a laptop, where the manufacturer just shut down the servers with the drivers (Sony Vaio) and you have zero chance of getting Windows running properly.
That explains it, then. Here it costs around 11 US cents per message. So if you are messaging a lot, they will add up at the end of the billing period.
I could not wait to end university, so that I can stop using big tech products. Unfortunately people only use products they are familiar with. If they are always on facebook, they use that for groups. Good luck finding a local community uses anything but facebook groups.
Edit: at university, many pieces of info reaches you informally. If you are not talking to classmates, you might miss important news as well.
Don’t you get charged for every SMS message? Here in Europe I’m grumpy everytime I need to send an SMS, because I’m being charged for something that is completely free through the internet. Not to mention that due to our local characters, an SMS is only 70 chars long.
Can you create an account with a burner email? When I tried it about a year ago, plus some legitimate addresses, it never worked or it straight asked for a phone number. I gave them a temp number, received a code, it ‘ran into an unexpected error’.