At least on iOS, Mona has this.

Oh, I agree and would love to do the same. However, moving any of my family who currently uses Android over to any other platform is impossible. I can’t tell my wife I won’t text her anymore unless she uses it. That won’t go over well hahah

Where possible, I use encrypted communication, but if doing so would result in me cutting off a friend or family member, I won’t do so.

However, I would love to be able to text Android users without crappy quality and the other limitations of SMS/MMS.

RCS would still be a benefit to incorporate without the E2E solution, as it would improve nearly every other aspect of communication over SMS/MMS.

If you’re willing to do the full VPS route like it seems, check out Hetzner. In my experience, it has higher resources at a lower cost than other providers like DO.

If something like multi-reddit comes about in Lemmy, I believe it could solve that issue. Just make a multi-reddit of what is the same community (roughly) over multiple servers. It won’t solve the problem of duplicate posts though. But Reddit had the same issue at times, where multiple subreddits for the same topic existed, although generally it merged down into a single subreddit that was actually useful.