Reddit account for 13+ years. Constantly prompted to provide email. Have no desire to have any personal information in it whatsoever, so never provided any. However, it is the only account I've ever used for extensive long term discussion and community involvement. Thousands of comments in discussions with other folks on topics I'm interested in. Logged in from many different locations and platforms over the years. Opted to never enter an email. Have never forgotten password, never needed to reset password. Didn't care about recovery. If the account is lost, so be it. Logged in recently to a banner saying my account has been "suspended for suspicious activity security reasons" and the above message. The only way to recover the account is to "reset the password by entering an email". Created a random anonymous email online, entered it as a fresh new email never provided before, reset link shows up in email, reset password, back in the account.
If I had to make a cynical skeptical guess - looks like an obvious stunt in advance of the IPO to grab a bunch of emails for accounts that didn't have emails in order to drive up account metrics used for valuation. Side note, I did receive the IPO invitation.
I spend more time on Lemmy now because the phone apps are awesome. I only hang on to Reddit because there are some communities that exist there that don't have Lemmy equivalents. But I have been thinking about running one of those account comment / post scramblers and then deleting. This is bringing me closer to that decision.
I avoided all this by creating a unique Gmail address ages ago and set the Reddit account just to that email. Then set up two factor authentication on everything.
It's a pain but whenever I jump into a new social media account I create separate emails and separate authentications to everything.
If the account ever gets compromised, I don't really care because it was setup as a standalone account. If the service gets weird like what happened to Reddit, I was able to just delete the account content, delete the account and none of it was directly identified or connected to any of my actual services I use.
I've done the same with Lemmy and every other service I want to try out but am unsure of.
I had Reddit for ten years and I felt safe and happy dumping my account.
Hopefully the same won't happen to Lemmy but no one ever knows how these things will pan out.
there's also mozilla relay thingy