On 03/08/2021 05:10, M Mn wrote:
Is there truly any way to text free over the internet? With one simple app without having to download a bunch of extra stuff that needs configuring too?
I assume by free, you mean except for what you are already paying to access the internet, and the references to extra stuff and configuration refer to stuff not included by your OS supplier and configuration you wouldn't have to do to use the internet in the first place, which are somewhat variable items. What services you get as part of the standard bundle, with the OS, depends on what the OS developer things the market wants, as moderated, by any commercial interests they may have in operating infrastructure.
The biggest obstacle to point to point operation is actually that most people don't have a first class connection to the internet, but rather go through network address translation with an unstable public address.
In the early days of the internet, email would have provided this, and some early mass market ISPs (e.g. Demon in the UK) worked in a way where their customers had a first class connection to the internet, including for email. However, with the mass market, came a move to storing mailboxes centrally and consumer mail programs only having second class access, using a single relay for all outbound traffic, and sucking incoming traffic from centralised mailboxes, rather than sending outgoing mail directly to the recipient's system, and accepting pushes of incoming mail direct from the sender. The advent of spam supported this trend, as people started not to trust point to point routed email.
SIP, as used for VoIP, and also capable of text messaging, is similar. The protocol is quite capable of working point to point, but nearly everyone uses it via an internet telephony service provider, and uses phone numbers for addressing, not full user@domain addresses. SIP implementations do tend to have some support for address translation, but can have trouble if the public address isn't stable.
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