| I'm a Tor user. It's also hard to determine because so much of the web is read-only or downright inaccessible via Tor. Most big sites use a chain of reputation like this: 1. To have an account on our site, you need a reputable email. Mailinator doesn't count.
2. To get a reputable email (GMail, Outlook, etc.) you need to sacrifice a phone number to receive texts to prove you aren't a bot.
3. There are no free VoIP services. Or they're blocked. Reddit usually lets me create accounts without email, but I'm guessing they will cut this off soon. I'm on a friendly Mastodon instance, but I had to offer a bogus email to register, which is technically dishonesty. YouTube sometimes works. I had a Discord account for a while. One of my ERP partners was willing to take the hit and set up a GMail account and Discord account for me (Discord wouldn't even let me in, I had to have him create the account and then give me the password.) But I didn't log in to Discord for a while, and recently it said "Hey check for a confirmation email". I went to log in to GMail and it said, "Hey this is suspicious, please give us a phone number." So there's no point re-joining, if I can only talk to people and have a "free" email address for as long as I can cyber-fuck someone into letting me borrow his phone. And I won't buy a burner phone because it's likely to have the same problems, plus all the PITA of real-life opsec. The gratis web is fading to nothing. Everyone wants something. None of it is truly free. The fediverse instances will run as long as they get donations, but charities are subject to a tragedy of the commons. They will eventually close up registrations if enough humans join for the parasite bots to follow them. People ask me why I bother. I must admit the payoff is not big. I bother _on principle_. Anonymity is something that I _should_ have. I don't look at CP or anything. I do this because I like to learn, I like to practice, I like to know. You may as well write it off as religion and ask a Christian why they attend church or a Jain why they don't eat onions. I simply believe it is worth doing. |
You blame "everyone wants something" but it's more clear in your last sentence: abuse by unverified users.
Lots of folks will provide services for free (actually free, no data collection etc.) but very few folks have the disposable income to _pay_ for someone to handle abuse.
So folks who provide popular services long-term have to find some way to pay for it. OMG, imagine that.
With the caveat that cryptocurrencies are usually rubbish, cryptocurrencies have allowed folks to anonymously pay for anonymous access to services. This won't work for most mainstream services (in large part because of government opposition), but it's an option. At some point which I hope to live to see, we'll go back to the old days of anonymously paying for anonymous access. (Cash was awesome.)