openmic.social is an uncensored community. You may encounter strong language, controversial opinions, and mature or NSFW material. You must be 18+ to browse. Illegal content is prohibited and removed on sight — please report it. By continuing, you accept that you may see content you personally disagree with.
They bought an implementation of RCS, the standard is still open. They even sell there implementation to a few telcos.
You cant self host it because you need to be a telco, it has telco specific protocols. Also, this is one of the things that probably should be gatekept to telcos, if everyone were able to spin up their own instance, the spam problem would be unmanageable.
Your looking for a conspiracy/monopoly that for once, doesnt exist due to Google being malicious. It exists because telcos are shit.
Two entities can be shit, and also malicious, at the same time.
Google has historically done a lot of good things. Today they simply do evil, but pushing for RCS adoption when telcos refused to is one of those good things they did.
You can still hate Google and want them to disappear, I do, but that doesn’t mean you automatically hate everything ever touched by them. Their motivation may have been strictly to compete with Apple, but e2ee messages are a net positive if you must use it. Use signal and matrix when you can, use RCS when you must.