My family has all switched to Signal, including family overseas in Europe (non-English speaking, varying age groups). It has all the features you mentioned, as well as gif responses my aunt and parents are into. Personally I find the look and feel of it to be preferable to whatsapp as well. It’s not as visually cluttered imo and has none of the spam/scams I had been getting on whatsapp.

I also use signal now as my primary messenger over sms or anything else. I love being able to edit responses and emoji react even tho I don’t have an iphone anymore. Plus all the added security of encryption of course.

404 accounts are free

Alt text - gif from adventure time of a robot made out of a toaster oven driving around in a circle on grass. Text over the image reads “why, creator? Does it please you to watch me struggle?”

I just made a free static site on neocities for my links. omg.lol looks like a cool option as well (open source but not free tho)

Neither of these are fedi/activity pub but they’re not so bloated/none of the tracking and privacy issues that linktr.ee has

Lol this is such a bizarre comment. Back then, AI wasn’t scraping everything humans made for the profit of a few. It was a non-issue, and therefore you have no standing in claiming that “that was the whole point.”

This works as well on my phone as it does on my computer, and loads faster than most modern websites making it that much more accessible to MORE humans.

The web designer isn’t limiting access, they are expanding on it - for humans. The people actually sentient and able to understand their words rather than just copy and recontextualize them.

Maybe a compromise could be including “US:” in the title, so others may scroll past