Comment by AlienRobot

I wouldn't want to be new to the Internet these days.

Everything requires your phone number, sometimes photo or even ID. You can get flagged as a bot randomly and they won't even tell you.

When I signed up for Instagram, I was banned before I could even log in, but they didn't tell me about it, so I thought the sign up process had just failed. I only found out after googling it.

I had similar problems creating a Twitter account. On Reddit, you can't even post threads on most subreddits at first.

Conversely, signing up on Tumblr, Pinterest, Bluesky, and Mastodon was pretty easy and didn't require a phone number or app.