Fediverse

An instance not requiring email is going to be exploited by spammers and scammers, and probably defederated quite fast

If it concerns you this much you can run our own private instance. That way you know you aren't using anything you don't like.

I'd just make a new gmail, proton mail, or tutanota address you can provide with no other connection to other stuff 🤷🏻

The threadiverse really does have to be more guarded against spam and bad actors. The servers here are largely run by volunteers, and community projects with no full time sysadmins, fewer devs and moderators, and less fancy protections are a very appealing target for trolls and bad actors. If I remember right lemmy was actually hacked sometime early in my time using it and I think instances running a certain version went offline for a while while they tried to fix the vulnerability. And there's a well known bad actor who periodically shows up in a thread with like 50 accounts and makes hundreds and hundreds of comments drowning everything out with angry gibberish

Federation combined with an anonymous platform modeled after reddit makes it in some ways a lot harder to ban people. So all his accounts get banned and he just comes back.

This is all managed by volunteers being paid donations and occasionally sponsor money. Thats part of what allows it to be independent and resilient to enshitification (combined with federation, and being self hostable, and free license open source software) but it also means we don't have the same luxury of resources that reddit does.

Shamelessly promoting the instance which is run by a buddy of mine:

BlackNeon.net