so get an anonymous pre-paid number

That’s not something that exists in many countries. SIM-cards have to be attached to a real world identity by law.

Why is that a problem?

Why are you posting as artyom@piefed.social and not <real name>@<home address>?

OK, well buy a burner SIM card

Illegal in many countries. SIM cards are attached to your real world identity.

Multiple-accounts and pseudonyms. It’s like the 101 of interacting on the Internet. With a phone number requirement that’s automatically made impossible.

Also SIM-cards/phone numbers are required by law to be attached to your real world identity in many countries.

The crux is that all the alternatives suck. I don’t have a problem going App hopping, I just have a very hard time finding ones that don’t fundamentally suck, and I am not talking about little implementation issue, but garbage like Signal that violates the GDPR, wants your phone number and is proud of it. Always grinds my gears when that gets celebrated as the “alternative”. Same with the Fediverse, where user owns nothing and server operator controls everything, how again is that different from Reddit, Facebook and Co.?

Nostr and Tox seem ok so far, but really the amount of true alternatives that improve on the original in significant ways is pretty damn rare.

Actually, kind of not. FSF has a weird blindspot when it comes to backend stuff. They care about what runs on your computer, e.g. Javascript, but stuff running on a server that you don’t own they don’t really care about. The AGPL had to come from an outside third party, not the FSF themselves. The FSF has been pretty silent when it comes to making licenses to regulate the whole “cloud” space.

It’s one of the big reason why the FSF has been slowly driving away into irrelevancy. The modern computing world is all about servers and data flowing between them. And the FSF is continuing doing licensing like it’s the 1980s. They are so far behind that politics got there first with the GDPR. There is still no “GNU GDPR” that you can slap on your software to give people outside Europe similar rights.