when grand claims are made such as what social media could be, I expect attention to fundamental details. Madtodon and lemmy are failing for similar reasons, they polish and reimagine existing stuff and mistake that for originality. You can succeed in 2023 without asking users email. It is more accurate to title it "this improvement of social media is nice". ,"could be" implies a holistic imagination/disruption.
But I accept your downvotes nonetheless since in my anti-email rant, I was unfair to the OP.
I agree with you, my titling was unintentionally misleading from a fair few points of view and I apologize.
I wasn't specifically trying to solve for 'digital identity' thus email wasn't something I was problematizing with this go and my 'improvements' were more to do with design context and other interactivity but I get where you're coming from, badrabbit.
You have nothing to apologize for and you're doing great.
I didn't need a valid email to signup for HN,Reddit or even matrix.org in its infancy. That's where I'm coming from. There are better anti-fraud measures and it should be up to the user if they want a way to reset their account. Ideally, you'll have 2FA and the non-email 2FA recovery will also reset the password (such as one time codes you write down, or prove multiple external identity control such as a phone number and creditcard, or ID photo and phone number).
But as I admitted, I shat on your work because I ran into this pet-peeve. So, it is I who should apologize (and I do apologize).
But I accept your downvotes nonetheless since in my anti-email rant, I was unfair to the OP.