I have lots of old friends who I only maintained sparse contact with. When I let my personal email address die (the address they would all have records of), I did not bother to update them with a new address.
They are all on the platform of some surveillance capitalist (e.g. Google or Microsoft). Google & Microsoft both refuse connections from self-hosted residential servers. And even if they didn’t, I am not willing to feed those surveillance advertisers who obviously don’t limit their surveillance to their users but also inherently everyone who makes contract with their users. I cannot support that or partake in pawning myself to subsidize someone else’s service.
I just wonder if anyone else has taken this step.
In that case would it not perhaps be practical to create a separate email address on pm to use just to email those friends and let them know how they can reach you? Maybe even setup a separate matrix account, or even better a separate simplex chat identity, then give them your "real" identity/username once they've contacted you, so that google and microsoft can't easily connect you to what you actually use.
It's obviously far from ideal, and I expect a lot of your friends to not bother because they might see it as needlessly complicated, but maybe it's worth a try?
that would be great, yeah