I didnt. sucks to hear that's happening. the whole fucking internet is on such a failed witchhunt for bots that making anonymous accounts is a giant pain nin the ass now.
I just don't use any apps that require a phone number. Or reject a Protonmail email address for that matter.
protonmail itself requires you verify with a more reputable method if you want to use it to sign up for 3rd party services. It's annoying. Big tech has everyone by the balls ngl
Thanks for mentioning that, but I'm already aware. Even with that, I've encountered apps that will flat-out refuse to continue their sign-up processes without a Gmail email address or a Facebook account. That's when I just write those apps off as data-harvesting trash and move on.
if you wait 12ish hours before using it for anything you don't have to provide verification
No they don't lol. You just have to wait a set period of time from making your proton mail to signing up
I have been using the shitty web client without an account. It's a truly miserable experience.
For the Ukraine war, I mostly rely on /r/UkraineRussiaReport to aggregate the important posts for me.
I manually type in the URL for the account I want to see. (t.me/s/<account>)
If you already know the channels, there are some Telegram -> RSS conversion services on the web that I've used successfully for just observing.
When I had to use it at one point to get in touch with someone, I used a spare prepaid MVNO SIM card that had been bought with cash (hat + mask optional). Signed up a no-data plan so I had a phone number for 5$/mo to register and then cancelled the plan. Personally I switched to a client on F-Droid called forkgram if I recall which showed up as
com.telegram.messenger.somethingon its app tile, but had all the "premium" features enabled somehow.Btw, if you have an old phone lying around, odds are you hack it to can change its IMEI nowadays. And most MNVOs don't use device IMEI allow-lists even though they're reselling networks like AT&T which try that crap.
I also use Forkgram, too bad they don't remove the ads like Nekogram
They want a real phone number. The system knows me anyways.
