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 [email protected] 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.

The biggest problem with Scheme as config language is that it is sloooooowwwww. Nix is already quite sluggish when it comes to configuration changes, in Guix it’s a lot worse, and it’s unlikely to change anytime soon, given that Scheme allows macros and other hacks that might make it difficult to properly cache or index the package database.

Technically they are correct. None of the Open Source licenses really regulate what happens on the server. When it’s not you running the binary, all the licenses are basically useless. AGPL is one of the few that address this a little bit, but even there you only get the source code itself, when the value in most online services is in the databases and backend stuff that you still don’t get to access with AGPL.

The Free Software world hasn’t figured out what to do with services running on computers you don’t own. GDPR is so far the only thing does something about the server side, but that’s EU law, not a license you can slap onto your software.