Most of the Lemmy instances seem to require an email to sign up. That’s fine, except most of the places you would go to sign up for email want you to… already have an email. And often a phone number. And almost always a first name, last name, and birthday.
I promise not to do bad stuff, but I don’t want that sort of information able to be publicly associated with my accounts where I write stuff, when everyone inevitably loses their databases to hackers. Pseudonymity is good, actually; on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog, etc.
Is anyone doing normal webmail registration anymore? Set username and password, receive email for free? I don’t even need to send anything to sign up for accounts elsewhere.
That’s a good point. My turbo-nerd values beep angrily when I find something I want can only be gotten by asking a real human nicely, and being likable enough to be accepted, and not, say, via a well-documented freely available API call. But sometimes that’s life.