2G is dead, stop beating a dead horse.

It will only be dead when I am dead, and no sooner. If you really wish to see the end of 2G, perhaps you can come to one of our in-person public outreach events, point a gun at my head and pull the trigger. I will be dead, you will probably have to serve a life sentence for murder, but it would be a fair price for you to pay to ensure that 2G is truly dead, wouldn’t it?

A little data point on the whole marriage thing… I and my life partner have been together for 20 y, will be 21 in September. We never got married and we don’t have any rings. I keep hearing that a lot of marriages these days don’t last this long.

We do informally call each other “my wife”, but still, no formal marriage was ever done.

I live in USA as a non-citizen permanent resident. I cannot vote, hence I only watched that election from the sidelines. My personal theory is that the reason why Trump won over Harris in 2024 is because a large number of people wanted accountability and justice over crimes against humanity that happened under Biden, and which Harris seemed to fully support. But here we are, a year and a half into Trump 2.0, and yet absolutely nothing was done on that issue, while the orange man made life hell for those who live in post-sex-change bodies (I happen to be one), made the economy even worse, and started a new war of choice.

Now bring on the downvotes…

I might have and old iDEN handset knocking around somewhere.

I am a GSM gal through and through… Someone else recently developed a “full stack”, RF to core, implementation for CDMA (see 1xBTS), but I am not aware of anything for iDEN.

I wouldn’t have thought the spectrum for 2G would still be available for public use.

In major metropolitan or otherwise densely populated areas, every bit of spectrum is claimed and spoken for, nothing left. However, USA is a large country, and some very remote and rural areas (the kind that would be called “middle of nowhere”, “god-forsaken place” or BFE) have spectrum vacancies. My non-profit company seeks to deploy and operate in some of those areas.

Update: our Treasurer Ms. Shannon Hogan discovered yesterday that she already has a personal account on Reddit from years ago which she had forgotten about. Last night she used that account to send modmail to /r/vintagemobilephones moderator team, briefly informing them of the present situation and including a link to this post here. We shall now wait and see if they respond.

Convincing anyone to “switch” is indeed not realistic, but many users of GSM/2G phones in USA are mad-pissed about T-Mobile artificially blocking said phones from their network. The only way to get around said block is to connect to TMO in roaming mode, with someone other than TMO themselves (or an MVNO hosted by them) as your “home” operator from which you receive your SIM card and to which you pay your monthly bill.

Creating a brand-new cellular phone company specifically tailored to the needs of Retro Mobile Phone users, compliant with all relevant FCC rules so we can not only operate without getting shut down, but also use FCC rules to compel T-Mobile into letting us roam on them, is an undertaking that is not for the faint of heart. The situation with TMO artificially blocking 2G users goes back to at least 2019, people have been crying and lamenting about the situation for years, but I am the only person so far who stepped forward to actually do something about it. I put my knowledge and skills as a professional telecom engineer to use, I recruited additional people (physically local to me) to serve as the needed officers and directors (a non-profit org requires more than one person), I spent hundreds of hours poring over incredibly complex FCC rules until I finally got them figured out, and between me and other founding members, we got many thousands of dollars invested into this venture already. So whether Reddit admins or subreddit mods or whoever else like it not, there is no one else right now who can actually satisfy the real needs of GSM/2G phone users in USA.

And if the only team/company/group who actually does something to provide a real service to GSM/2G phone users in USA has its chief technical talent banned from Reddit by AI - then going to Lemmy would be the only way for interested parties to reach the necessary technical content…

Unless ITX trademarked the community name itself, I don’t see any legal issue with reusing the community name one-for-one.

Moral thresholds tend to be higher than legal ones.

Still, if it’s a concern even alternatives such as c/retrophones or c/retromobilephobes (‘retro’ sounds less dated than ‘vintage’ in any case) would be catchier than c/gsm_phones_na from the standpoint of community growth.

My current plan is to make every reasonable effort to bring this situation to the attention of _ITX_ and negotiate with him in good faith. If he doesn’t care, brushes me off or whatever, then I will make a new post here delivering said news, and solicit input of this community for better naming. I assume the actual rename should be easy, just create a new community and make the old one read-only, right?

Reddit shadowbans comments linking to Lemmy,

Ouch - I didn’t know they scooped this low, thank you for alerting me so I can avoid that false path! I knew there were and are evil of course, but apparently I was far too naive in not realizing just how evil…

With this shadowban situation, two follow-up questions arise:

1. If a non-sitewide-banned human sends modmail to a subreddit mod team - kind of a special form of PM - will the presence of a Lemmy link inside cause that modmail PM to be blackholed without reaching its intended recipients?
2. What about links to resources which then contain further links to Lemmy? Suppose we get our website up at www.usa2g.org, include a link to this Lemmy community in there, and post comments on Reddit linking to usa2g.org - will those comments also get shadowbanned?

so the best case scenario (assuming community mod cooperation) is probably what r/piracy does in designating Lemmy as an alternative,

I see the wording they use: “Should this sub ever get taken down, we have a Fallback Forum”… Given the subject matter of piracy, such “Fallback Forum” advertising seems (and actually is) appropriate. But Vintage Mobile Phones are not a law-skirting topic like piracy, no one is threatening to shut down forums or subs about this harmless hobby, hence the same or any similar wording won’t fly, even with community mod cooperation. But I feel that community mods should have every right to link to the website of a retro-phone-oriented cellular carrier - and if that carrier uses Lemmy…

If your company has three employees

Change “employees” to “founding members serving as officers”, but otherwise correct.

your account was banned for posts unrelated to your involvement in that community

Correct, I made a separate post detailing everything that happened.

perhaps another employee could create an account to represent the company for that purpose?

We are looking into this route currently!

Our (A2GC as a company) current plan is to hire some paid labor (involving real, actual cash) for some non-Reddit-banned human to do the necessary outreach to the original VMP community.

I would need permission from _ITX_ (founder of original VMP) before I do what you suggest. And since there does not appear to be any way to contact him other than through the site from which I am banned, and since no one seems to be volunteering to be the needed non-banned human bridge, we (A2GC) are now looking into hiring someone to do so on a paid basis. Many people do need extra cash these days…

if you really want to build the community, try and convince others to join from reddit.

And how would I do that when I am completely banned from posting anything on Reddit, and their AIs are so good at detecting new accounts created by “ban evaders” that it is basically impossible? What is needed is for some other human(s), someone who is not subject to the same Reddit site-wide ban as I am, to spread the word in “enemy territory” about this new community.

also, the mods over at reddit have zero ownership of anything there.

There is a world of difference between ban-zealous Reddit site-wide admins (or power-mods of giant popular subs) and the individual human who founded /r/vintagemobilephones and his (I hope I got the gender right - I seem to recall him posting something about taking time off from VMP activities due to fatherhood) chosen trusted lieutenants. I have absolutely no desire to do anything that would alienate those good folks - I want them on my side in what is now shaping to be a battle (perhaps even in court) between American 2G Cooperative, GSM cellular network operator in USA beloved by VMP community, and ban-zealous Reddit corporate HQ.

How is this helping anyone when phones no longer support 2G?

Our service is absolutely not intended for any “modern” phones or users thereof - instead it is intended for those who still have their old Nokias, old Motorolas, old Ericssons and so forth, have been using them on T-Mobile’s network despite all of TMO’s anti-2G hostility in recent years, and wish to keep using them. Here is the original community where people feel this way, the community for which the service is intended:

https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagemobilephones/

And here are some of my posts in that community - see upvote counts and engagement by other community members:

https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagemobilephones/comments/1n9rh3z/american_2g_cooperative_new_hope_on_the_horizon/
https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagemobilephones/comments/1qrnl8a/update_on_american_2g_cooperative/
https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagemobilephones/comments/1s32wsh/a2gc_update_equipment_acquisition_and_bringup/
https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagemobilephones/comments/1t0ibi9/a2gc_update_full_speed_ahead_with_nokia_tower/

But then a fuck-up occurred… I will make a separate post explaining exactly what happened, but the end result is that I can no longer post anything on Reddit (site-wide), and in order for our non-profit company to continue engaging with the community that loved our work and presumably still does, we will have to undertake an extra expense of paying someone else to post our content, someone who can do so without being accused of ban evasion. The approach we are currently exploring is to post our new in-depth content on Lemmy and cultivate a new community here, and have our non-banned partners repost it in the original community, either via links or by copy-n-paste as they prefer.