Ya, I don't use gmail either. I host my own email on my own email server with my domain anonymousgreen.com. I'm not being fake. It just seems like for a social media protocol based on generating a key pair for your identity, it should be as straight forward as that. Complaining about complaining seems ironic. The LN option is fine, I use LN for a lot of my daily purchases. I've used some paid relays in the past with Nostr, so that's not really any different. But that's only going to on-board bitcoiners for now, though I suppose non-bitcoiners also likely don't care about giving out their phone #.