I’m not sure that Sublinks will happen. It was breathlessly announced as if it was coming soon with the promise of regular updates. But here we are eleven months later with no updates at all.

To me it’s just seems like Lemmy and the Threadiverse are slowly evaporating.

Generally, the reasons for a phone number are:

Account recovery 2FA

If you don’t want to use your number then consider a pre-pay sim. Depending what country you are in this will cost pennies per year.

I would suggest something like ProtonMail or most paid email services won’t require a number.

Don’t mean this rudely, struggling to find a way that doesn’t sound condescending because I know things can be different in different regions. Didn’t realise that still happened.

I hope so, good luck

In my experience all of this has been done wirelessly for several years.

The risk of malware means you aren’t allowed to plug in sticks. For business use you share a document or wirelessly connect to a display.

In fact our local library didn’t USB sticks eight years ago when I was researching our family tree.

Mould eats the fibres and dye, so it might be a permanent change I’m afraid. There are specialist mould removers but they might bleach coloured fabric.

An interesting point not touched upon is that the types of people using USB sticks has changed. Because the use of technology filters down from tech savvy, to general population, to people late to the scene or can’t change.

We are in that last stage now. They are buying by price and so easier to take advantage of.

But the UI hasn’t been finalised yet?

I’m uncertain about this. It doesn’t seem much different than things like Inoreader and seems to lack as comprehensive a search.

@[email protected]

Is there any news on Liftoff! I can see the other mods haven’t posted in at least five months.

It’s important you do it in the right order.

A fresh message is where you tap the New Conversation action button, enter the contacts name or number and then type the message (rather than open an existing chat)

So: Off, wait, on, wait, fresh message.

No it’s not and most people don’t know how to read the results anyway.

The first thing to do is to check the message centre number is correct. You should be able to get this from your carrier’s website.

If it is then turn the phone off, leave for a few minutes. Turn it on. Wait a few minutes.

Send a fresh message to the one of the people you’ve been having problems with. Do not reply to one of their messages, it MUST be a fresh message (it’s technical but I’ll explain if you want.)

If that shows the error then call or contact your carrier explaining that text messages are taking too long to send and arriving late.

SMS messages are sent through a message centre. It might be owned by your carrier or a third party. On Android in Messages if you look in settings under Advanced you’ll see SMSC followed by a phone number. That’s the number of the message centre your phone contacts to send an SMS

That doesn’t sound like SMS delivery receipts. They are slow (that’s one of the reason Google developed RCS)

I think you are actually seeing the message sending animation.

Just tried it on an Android, yes little clock is the phone sending the message it then changes when the message has been sent.

The fact that it’s taking up to a minute to send the message tells me that the fault is at the message centre.

It could still be if your or their carrier/network time is wrong.

Also, I’m a little confused when you mentioned the little clock under the message. SMS doesn’t support read receipts. Some carriers support delivery receipts but these don’t work well across different message centres.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-i-know-im-not-the-only-conscious-being-in-the-universe/

It’s impossible to prove that anyone else or anything else exists. It’s also impossible to know whether my brain is deceiving me.

I think this depends what country you are from. Generally, most countries it’s the normal thing to be pleasant and show an interest in people. It actually helps you as well because being insular ultimately ends in loneliness.

But no one should pressurise you into doing something you don’t want.

I’d say companies THINK they will make more money. That might be true with big, complex software that can be sold as a service that people will use (Photoshop, Windows, Office etc) or services that offer a lot (like the original version of Netflix or Amazon Prime)

But it’s not true for things you can take or leave. (Such as most mobile apps which now have to really on sales to boost conversion rates from Free tier to subscription).

Then you also have the issue of a fragmented market so even previously successful services like Prime are looking to get more money by adding extra costs (eg Prime Video will have adverts from the summer unless you pay $40 extra per year as a new top up subscription)

So it’s more of a theoretical reliable income.

Remember fuel cells? One tiny drop would power your phone for a week.