Are you from the global south? Because it’s still a common thing for SMS to be chargeable in many countries. And no one should be using SMS anyway. It’s horribly insecure. At least use RCS.

no one was actually on it

It might feel that way at first, but my Mastodon feed is very robust nowadays. You just need to follow more people.

You can just open the Pixelfed links using your Mastodon instance:

Open URL in Mastodon