I still haven't found a way to make my parents use Signal, so either I stop communicating with them (which is tempting sometimes) or have this compromise
Can you get that to work with all messages or only a few groups you have to setup manually? Was looking into it before I started self hosting but didn't find it desirable at that time and just resorted to do what anon did.
While you are technically correct, most people vastly overestimate the cost of self hosting a (matrix) server. Mine costs like 5€ a month with domain and we use it as a group of 5 people.
It's a virtual server, so not really a hardware server, but no container either. It's when multiple servers share RAM, CPU and other things on a big cluster, but each behaves like a normal server.
The 5€ in this case even includes the domain. So it's more like 3-4€.
I just don't communicate with anyone that insists on using products that have user agreements I don't agree with. The amount of bullshit user agreements are getting overloaded with makes them dangerous legal contracts that can have serious implications on your rights. Just ask the family whose daughter died at a Disney theme park and when they tried to sue Disney tried to force them to arbitration because their son had tried Disney+
Well evidently you're not in charge of anyone's healthcare: when you have a parent that has to be taken care of, you have to compromise if they're not able to adapt