Interesting, could be because it’s something you’ve had to do often enough that they’re trying to rate limit you

Gotta be honest, I am kind of curious to try this.

Hm I have made at least 3 gmail addresses and didn’t have to do this. And in fact their apps support account switching pretty easily, which seems to indicate that they don’t really disapprove of making multiple accounts.

In fact the only thing they asked for was a backup email address in case you get locked out or they need to send security alerts, and that was optional.

Thanks.

So not too dissimilar in terms of total numbers of users… however considering the growth of the whole internet’s user base…

760 million total worldwide internet users in 2003, vs 4.7 billion today.

Based on these sources, then, 1.3% of all internet users were using XMPP in 2003, and 0.26% of all internet users in the fediverse in 2023. As a proportion of all users, that makes XMPP roughly 5x more popular back then than ActivityPub is now.

Are there numbers to back this up? I remember Pidgin being a contender to replace AIM for a time.

Wait - what kind of proof of identity do Gmail, outlook, Yahoo, etc require to make an email address?

Is this a bad thing? I thought kind of, curating who you associate with is one of the benefits