You currently need a phone number to sign up for Telegram. Add an option to sign up using an email address or another method, like some messengers do (e.g., Wire, Matrix, Threema, Session).
Potential spam issues could be mitigated by:
Only allowing addresses from major email providers at first and slowly expanding reach if it's manageable.
Automatically limiting such accounts from contacting strangers until their perform some additional actions.
Allowing group admins to prevent such accounts from posting by default.
Use Cases
Avoiding an identifier tied to your identity, hiding identity from governments or people who know your number.
Workaround
Use a virtual phone number.
Warning: Do NOT use temporary numbers to connect to your account, as you may lose access to your account when you lose access to the number.
And there was a suggestion, to use a temporary phone number, just to register to Telegram. Don't do that. Phone numbers, after some time, are given to other people, that means, your Telegram account, can be compromised, if your phone number will be unregistered and assigned to someone else.
Tantoo{d}en
Probably add other ways to register and make them private as you can do with your phone number. I guess that you can settle who can contact you as well who can search for you and even add to groups.
М
Мерхольг Ан-Сорвейт
Linking a telegram account to a phone creates a direction of cyberattacks especially effective when intelligence services that control communication providers dump data on the black market.
М
Мерхольг Ан-Сорвейт
Those who think that linking an account to a phone number will save them from spam should pay attention to the troll farms sponsored by some regimes. These organizations have an almost unlimited number of telephone numbers provided by dependent telecom operators.
R
Ray
To reduce the risk of spammers, Telegram could make the new user pass a captcha test, and then require they pay $10 (non-refundable). Payment could be done via cryptocurrency or Visa/MC (which could be an anonymous prepaid card they bought for cash at a convenience store).
Spammers can easily register and flood channels, groups, etc. Making distributions for other contacts. Also registering with email address is possible with temp mails, so there is no guarantee of identification.
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I guess that you can settle who can contact you as well who can search for you and even add to groups.