Joined the Mayqueeze.
I fear there won’t be a solution that doesn’t cost money somewhere. Please don’t buy 3 burner phone numbers at once. I would feel bad if it didn’t work and/or you get suspected of being a criminal.
Check your current phone subscription if you have one. There might be a way to get an additional number for free or very little extra. And it might be a good backup emergency service to have just with your parents maybe even if you go down a different route for the rest.
Anything other than Signal seems unadvisable from a privacy POV. Do you have a way of talking to them live on the phone, at the same time? You can try and register their Signal on a burner phone wherever you are. As they sign up, you sit on the call and give them the phone number and security code when it comes through. Unless having Signal on the phone is itself a reason to get arrested in Russia, which frankly wouldn’t surprise me either.
I don’t know if this will work. I did it on a different service using the number on a dumbphone to register for use on a tablet once.
One thing that what they call agenetic AI will undermine might be a lot of the subscription based biggies of the industry. I’m thinking about Adobe in particular. They charge a monthly premium for having user-friendly, low learning curve software that often has become industry standard. But there are open source alternatives for many of their big hitters (Inkscape, GIMP, etc.). If the agenetic model needs a tool to design a logo or expand an image - and you probably already pay for the privilege of using the agent model - this may prove to be a boon to the open source development of these intermediary software tools. Because the relative difficulty to use them as we hear from Adobe heads all the time won’t matter to the computer. And they are free (with a request to donate). So a chunk of interest and probably money and effort will move from those subscription services to open source alternatives and their development. This is just one positive effect so-called AI could have for some open source projects.
Sadly, at the same time we squander resources and kill polar bears.
It turned out to be a Twitter clone from ten years ago and I realized I didn’t need that any more. If I didn’t need to reach some people who cannot overcome the hurdle the fediverse proper puts up before being enjoyable, I would not be using it today. But media popularity post-Elon-Twitter and relative ease of setup have given the platform relative heft. But it’s not open and not really federated so it’s masquerading and we don’t really want you know whose money is paying the bills behind the scenes either. If anything, the fediverse can learn from Bluesky a thing or two about onboarding people who cannot be asked to invest the time to make Mastodon enjoyable. It will take time, much more time, to get people, especially non-techy ones, to the new normal of being your own algorithm. I see Bluesky as a stepping stone in that direction that will survive in its own niche.
My review came with an asterisk. I mainly wanted to point out how to get it free so you can make up your own mind.
I don’t remember if I bought it on Google Play so I don’t know if you would need to. You can though test drive it guaranteed for free if you sideload the F-Droid app store and get it from there.
I stopped using it about two years ago because it felt it took forever loading feeds and switched to Tusky, which has less functionality (e.g. no post scheduling) but loads faster, I think, and works well for my limited needs. Fedilab’s menus never put me off. But I never went back.
So that’s a review that needs a pinch of salt or two.
Which is it?