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by WarOnPrivacy 899 days ago
> I used twilio for years until in August of 2023 they started blocking all my text messages,

New telco industry texting requirements came into play. In short, US biz are required to register with The Campaign Registry and pay regular fees if they want to do any (as in 1+) software text comms.

It can be onerous for not-large biz. Twillo took point early-on (inserting themselves into the administration, IIRC) and Twillo then got a lot of heat from their users - even tho the requirements originated from the telcos.
1 comments
danenania 899 days ago
Somewhat surprising/disappointing to me was that now you can't even send SMS to a number that initiates the conversation--this would seem to be a pretty clear opt-in indicator. Because of that, I couldn't find a way (through Twilio) to get around the registration requirements just to send SMS to my own number for development purposes to try some things out. The registration workflow and UX is also comically terrible and confusing.

It's a shame as I think there are some legit non-spam use cases for SMS as a messaging platform, but considering you now seemingly need to pay, fill out a bunch of annoying/buggy forms, and wait for days to who-knows-how-long before sending a single message in development, I'd say it's been pretty well destroyed as anything a dev would ever play around with. Who's going to do all that before writing a line of code?

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jijji 898 days ago
The time I wasted waiting for twilio to deny my reasoning for sending an SMS message to One of my customers, paying them to do this mind you, was about the same amount of time it took me to write an Android application that sent out SMS messages by reading from a custom API on one of my servers... I probably should have done that in the beginning it would have been a lot less money in the long run.
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WarOnPrivacy 899 days ago
I think your frustration is reasonable. The telcos are favoring major marketing companies by unreasonably imposing big biz requirements on small biz and indy devs (through platforms like Twillo)

That bad UX is being supplied by The Campaign Registry org.

I do recall Twillo performing TCR's tasks in the beginning (applications, registration, etc) but only until TCR was spun up. It's all on TCR now.

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