Hey man, I didn't mean no offense. I don't disagree, I respect people who want privacy. It just seems like you are a person who takes their privacy "extra" seriously, and I just wasn't sure if it was a joke or not (most people on the internet have an email address). There is nothing wrong with people who go the next level of privacy, just don't encounter them very often so kudos to you on that front.

I understand your frustration from a privacy perspective. But I did not create mastodon. You may want to submit an issue on mastodon's github to ask for a non-email registration setting, and make your case why its important for privacy.

https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon

But I also want to say that you are an outlier of the average user on the internet (most of whom have an e-mail address). I am sure that the guy who created mastodon, didn't add e-mail in the registration out of spite for privacy. He was following a common patter for registrations that works for 95% of people on the internet.

Going back to the discussion of creating anonymous email address. I didn't know that proton mail requires phone number (haven't used it before, just heard good things about it). I did not realize the state of email registrations across the web (haven't had create a new email account in a while). Your last option would be to just use those throw away email services, that generate a random email address, and let you receive some emails on that address.

Here is an example: https://temp-mail.org/