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.
You could use mailinator.com which allows you to create a free public mail box you can access. Just be aware anyone can access it if they figure out what address you used. Once you get in, go into your settings and then remove the email from your account (should still be optional in settings).
This sounds like a terrible idea! Why would you give out a security risk like this to anyone?
I never said it was a good idea, and I pointed out the major security concern.
Plus, you could use it to sign up, and then remove the email address completely in lemmy.world settings once you are logged in. The advantage: no need to sign up for any mail service.
Thanks for recommendation. This sounds just like temporary email except public. It’s good to know that lemmy.world allows you to simply remove an email without adding new one, but I wouldn’t rely on that behavior (to exist in future), and new user (that considers signing up but didn’t yet) may not know that that is even possible.
However, temporary email addresses and mailnator seem to contradict all the possible positive sides of required email address.
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.