The only reason I consider a smartphone a necessity is private and secure messaging and calls on the go. I can’t imagine having to be at my PC for longer calls with my family or non-gaming friends, and as a woman I absolutely refuse to go outside when it’s dark without a phone.

So since I already have to have a phone I use it for other things like Lemmy, music, podcasts, public transit and the odd entertainment app. It’s perfectly fine to not have a smartphone if you don’t need any of those things though.

SMS support

Completely irrelevant to any point you made previously.

There were desires to open up the platform prior

This article from Moxie himself in 2016 shows they had no intention of expanding/implementing federation at all. This was way before the current President took over.

hopping on a shitty bandwagon of features its competitors have

The fact that you don’t differentiate between objective degradations of a service and implementing a feature you don’t care about because you are not the target audience for it just show that you don’t argue in good faith but just want to push an agenda.

Which barriers to use has Signal implemented? How is the App more centralized now than before, and have they ever expressed interest in federating their service before under Moxie? And how is implementing an optional feature that a lot of people like an argument for an assumed “downward trajectory”?