To be fair, it has already been years

That’s a great idea! You can check your salt levels while at work or on vacation. You could even have your salt shaker automatically order more salt from Amazon when the level got too low. Or how about you program your maximum daily salt intake so it closes up when it’s reached.

So much potential!

This is a well known issue for a lot of people and signal has been promising to fix this for years. Using a phone # for verification reduces spam and bot accounts, but like you said it drastically reduces anonymity.

That said, anonymity != privacy. You could anonymously place a note on a car telling the owner to learn to park, but it’s not private since anyone walking by could read it. Likewise you can send an encrypted signal message to another user who knows who you are, so it’s private, but not anonymous.

That’s called hearsay.

Did you look at the linked post?

Yep Catima is great and gets frequent updates

Internal Combustion Engine

It’s free

I’ve been happy with duck

https://duckduckgo.com/email

I think you need to use duckduckgo browser to set it up, but afterwards you can use the API with something like bitwarden and generate email aliases from there. They also have a chrome extension that will allow you to generate addresses from email fields in your browser.

It’s free and addresses are all through the shared duck.com domain. Worth checking out.