I am under the impression that Apple adopting RCS makes this kind of useless, now.

Neat. By the way my motto is Signal or don't talk to me.

So - can any other messenger other than Google one use rcs? I haven't seen any. I think Google kind of locked it for themselves

They did and it pisses me off every day. Every fucken day I look for a messenger to free me from the hell of Google Messages. Might just say fuck it and drop RCS altogether and use like Deku or something.

"I use Signal btw" has an Arch™ Linux vibe to it 🤣

I'm more of a self-hosted Matrix server myself, but understandable

Nope, unless Samsung's does it. I think it used to

I have a Cachy machine but currently doing a test run on Debian Trixie, so you're pretty spot-on there.

Cool

That's what I did. I just don't have the "fancy" RCS features any more. I'm much more interested in less google than more features. I also push everyone towards Signal when I have the opportunity.

Then they replaced it with the Google one officially

I could literally only get my 1 other neckbeard friend and the 4 other anarchists I personally know to use Signal. That would be the perfect replacement for texts for now. I'd prefer to not have accounts but I already fucken do on google messages so.

Yes, in my experience it is almost impossible to get normal people to move away from big tech. The only person I've successfully managed to convince is my partner, and that's because she's so lazy/disinterested when it comes to technology that she's very willing to let me setup and manage everything for her. Of course, just like me, she is still stuck with big tech when it comes to communicating with everyone else.

Personally, I have Signal, Matrix, IRC, and even XMPP ready to go (don't have an account for that last one, but I do have a client installed in case it is ever needed). If somebody wanted my contact, usually email is enough, but if that is not accepted, I cycle through the above.