MMS is the worst standard in telco and that's saying something. The spec is impossibly complex, so it's not properly supported by carriers or device manufacturers, and even basic cases like "send this photo" fail alarmingly regularly.
Verizon had the wackiest system with their vtext service where it really tried to customize more than the GSM carriers and they ran their own web portal. When they phased that out a few years ago it broke picture scaling for pretty much all non-iphone devices on their network. This is another big reason I wanted working RCS because if I send a picture to Android users on Verizon it ends up scaled down.
> kick them out: Send a new MMS message including all past participants except for the person you want to remove.
So far semi-extrinsic provided a list of features they think is uniquely enabling bullying in iMessage but I've just established those features are actually commonly available to everyone, so what other features does iMessage have that uniquely makes it enable bullying compared to MMS?
(a) create new group minus Becky and minus all previous messages, plus every participant has to migrate over (b) "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything and all the history and context is retained
I've been in plenty of MMS group chats where we've had to create a new group to add or remove someone (for non-bullying reasons) and it has always gone smoothly without issue. SMS/MMS apps tend to sort your list of groups by most recently received message, so as soon as people stop using the first group it will naturally decay to the bottom of your list where no one looks.
> "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything
"admin" creates a new group chat, no one else has to consciously do anything because they're just selecting the group that has the most recent messages and therefore is at the top of their SMS/MMS app.
There is one difference here in that with SMS/MMS there is no "admin" so anyone can create new groups, but if you're going to start evicting people without buy-in from the group then the dissenters are just going to form their own groups anyway regardless of platform.
> all the history and context is retained
That is a fair point, you wouldn't maintain the history/context but how important is that for bullying? My ultimate point here is that fastball is correct in that the iMessage platform isn't enabling bullying, it is just the kids preferred platform. We have all been perfectly capable of the same bullying since long before the iPhone existed, and I don't think losing history/context when forming new groups changes that.
I have sent exactly zero MMS messages successfully. They've always failed on some stupid carrier setting being wrong. I've also "received" MMS image messages - that were links to a carrier portal because the image could not be delivered.
It's a shit standard that nobody bothered to implement properly =)
All of that has been (and still is) available on everyone's phones since the dawn of time except for "name them": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service