Several days ago, when I was making this account, I could register without email. Now if you check the sign up page you can see that they require an email.
I think it’s a shame because emails nowadays are hard/impossible to create privately (requiring phone number, etc) and annoying to manage (especially if you go rigorous about it, one email for every service you sign up for). The issue with this is that in many cases, you have to trust your email provider with the information that you signed up for a particular service and potentially even your username on the service. Moreover, that has potential to “link” your accounts on different sites.
No email required also allows people to create non-permanent throwaway accounts easier which are commonly used on reddit to ask sensitive questions or for other reasons.
Sorry if this posts seems too negative, I appreciate what the admins of the lemmy instance do, and I won’t leave lemmy.world just because of it. I am sure that admins had good reasons for this change. However, I still think that this could be important to bring up, because it’s about internet privacy, ease of sign up (especially for throwaway accounts), and possibly other reasons that I couldn’t mention right now.
Thanks for recommendation. Email aliasing do solve some of the concerns, however they aren’t the ultimate solution because many email aliasing services (firefox relay included) require payment for unlimited amount of aliases and not everyone can/wants to pay. As well as you still need to trust the email provider.
There probably just isn’t better “individual” approach than making email simply not required, simply because working around required email is already some “resistance”, whereas no required email is no “resistance”. By “individual” approach i mean that no required email approach is best if you consider it from view point of single individual, not considering the positive sides of required email.
It’s one dollar a month that’s affordable, and you’re supporting Mozilla two birds with one stone and what you get out of it is emence. What you get is email tracker blocking, throw away emails for spam, promotional blocking for when you need to sift through the spam, site email isolation: so what your alias (now called mask) has been leaked just change and disable, to enter the email (with the extension) you do a click and a click and you’re done this is faster the typing the whole thing, and you can host it your self https://github.com/mozilla/fx-private-relay