I didnt. sucks to hear that’s happening. the whole fucking internet is on such a failed witchhunt for bots that making anonymous accounts is a giant pain nin the ass now.

I have been using the shitty web client without an account. It’s a truly miserable experience.

For the Ukraine war, I mostly rely on /r/UkraineRussiaReport to aggregate the important posts for me.

If you already know the channels, there are some Telegram -> RSS conversion services on the web that I’ve used successfully for just observing.

When I had to use it at one point to get in touch with someone, I used a spare prepaid MVNO SIM card that had been bought with cash (hat + mask optional). Signed up a no-data plan so I had a phone number for 5$/mo to register and then cancelled the plan. Personally I switched to a client on F-Droid called forkgram if I recall which showed up as com.telegram.messenger.something on its app tile, but had all the “premium” features enabled somehow.

Btw, if you have an old phone lying around, odds are you hack it to can change its IMEI nowadays. And most MNVOs don’t use device IMEI allow-lists even though they’re reselling networks like AT&T which try that crap.

They want a real phone number. The system knows me anyways.

did they say you were banned for the voip phone number?

OK, so I have a janky but workable solution.

I am following the channels listed in this post: https://hexbear.net/comment/4885763

For some of them, I can get the RSS feed directly. For the ones that don’t have a feed, I have bookmarked the post above and go directly to the shit web client.

I hate Telegram’s requirement so I’m not gonna comply. Fuck it.