with mass services requiring mandatory phone number binding I think being in user mass is a viable option - you cannot get reliable “secondary” email anymore and people don’t look through data leak dumps by eyes anyway, script doesn’t care about email address string - it all becomes hash anyway. Whois protection is pretty reliable to divert snooping 3rd-parties.
As for expensive… yeah, sad state of affairs is that there’s nothing cheap about hosting your own infrastructure. Price of not really trusting anyone or having obscure technical requirements.
of course it’s ‘elitism’ and not just a bunch of people volunteering to code shit that’s interesting/relevant for them.
To provide ‘non-elitist’ desktop experience people need to sit down and fix bug backlog for hardware that’s nowhere around them, prioritize features that are relevant to users (even if they are absolutely ass to work on) and etc, etc, etc. You know how it’s called? A job.