I get the reasoning behind the decision, and the developers have mentioned on Signal forums a few times over the past few years that the SMS part is a legacy feature that they don’t actively maintain, but for someone like me who used Signal as their SMS client to reduce the number of apps on my phone, it’s still quite sad to see.
You could reduce the number of apps on your phone even more if you switched to Beeper.
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they open-source all their bridges, it’s just the frontend that’s closed-source (or at least paid, idk if they give customers access to source). So if you don’t mind the bit of friction in using Element as a frontend for everything, you can just use their bridges on your own instance
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If the founder had not given me a free lifetime subscription, then I’d probably have done something like you are describing.