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.

      • Oabeaw@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Thanks for recommendation. Tutanota does seem to be highly regarded privacy wise, however they technically don’t allow multiple emails for free [just like proton mail], according to their Terms and Conditions: https://tutanota.com/terms/

        4.7. Each natural person is prohibited to sign up for more than one free of charge Tutanota account for private use. For additional accounts a paid tariff must be selected which allows adding aliases and user accounts.

        See my comment under this comment about Proton Mail to see why this matters. (keeping the thread a bit more DRY (Don’t repeat yourself) since I did a lot of repetitions here already).

        • corm@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Yep you’re right, sorry I thought we were just talking about emails you could get without a phone number

          • Oabeaw@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            It’s fine, whole comment section is kinda like that anyway, and + someone will probably find this recommendation useful nonetheless.

    • Oabeaw@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for recommendations. Proton Mail does seem to be highly regarded privacy wise, however they technically don’t allow multiple emails (unless you pay), according to their Terms of Service (TOS): https://proton.me/legal/terms

      Authorized use of the Service You agree not to use the Services for any illegal or prohibited activities. Unauthorized activities include, but are not limited to: 7. Having multiple free Accounts (e.g. creating bulk signups, creating and/or operating a large number of free Accounts for a single organization or individual);

      So, this isn’t perfect solution as then you are forced to use the same email to sign up for multiple services, unless you: a) break the TOS b) use email aliasing service which also usually require payment to have unlimited amount of aliases, as free plans are usually limited to just few aliases.

      As for the temporary email services, that feels to directly contradict the whole idea of required email address. As whatever the possible positive sides of required emails are, they are likely nonexistent if users are able to sign up using temporary email services (correct me if I am wrong). It also adds just a bit of inconvenience to the user that is signing up. And your account may then be “bound” to that email provider, unless a) you change it to different email (which contradicts the use of temporary email in the first place) b) a site allows you to remove the email. Which does seem to be possible in case of lemmy.world, according to one of the comments here.

      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.