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?