HACKER Q&A
📣 vagabund

Any way to use social media without sharing account with phone contacts?


Sign-up for a new account on Twitter, Telegram, Discord, Facebook, etc. and your phone contacts are automatically alerted to its existence. It seems everywhere there's an awareness/emphasis on the privacy of your online presence from the prying eyes of advertisers/authorities/prospective employers, but little attention paid to the privacy of pseudonymous accounts from one's real-world social circles. For reasons that should be obvious, not least of which is mitigating career risk, a large number of people share a preference for bifurcating their online persona(s) from their actual lives, yet few options exist for doing so, even for services that position themselves as privacy-forward (e.g., Telegram, Discord). Throwaway phone numbers are either caught and banned by spam filters, or present untenable security-risks to the account.

It doesn't seem like there's much appetite for this to change among social-network founders either: https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1403498766737444865

"@nikitabier If you’re building a social app and less than 70% of your users are granting access to contacts, your app is dead on arrival until that’s fixed. Network effects will never form if you expect users—who have a 5 second attention span—to find their friends by typing in usernames."

What options exist for being on populated/powerful networks truly pseudonymously?

  👤 devadvance Accepted Answer ✓
> Throwaway phone numbers are either caught and banned by spam filters, or present untenable security-risks to the account.

It seems like you might have already found your answer: establish a full-fledged bifurcated online identity. Instead of throwaway, create a bona fide secondary/tertiary/etc. number, email, and so on.

The challenge is that the networks are using these identifiers as both connection points and implicit proof of identity/existence. Throwaway/anonymous doesn't work well for the latter use case.

👤 theamk
You can get a secondary but not a throwaway phone number specifically for this purpose. Google Voice, Skype, Twilio can all provide you a US local phone number for free or very cheap.
👤 smoldesu
I like Mastodon, it encourages you to have multiple accounts/pseudonyms to fully take advantage of what it offers, and most clients have support for switching between several profiles.