@mononoaware >yeah it really annoys me that projects that cost so little to migrate to, like silence.im or deltachat
Silence only works on 2 brands of tracking devices and deltachat is electron garbage primarily developed for tracking devices, so migrating to those are quite expensive.

irc and XMPP are real protocols that aren't an issue to use.

>in early 2010s we still at least were taught not to use our real names online, curious if it still is the case.
I don't believe schools teach students not to use their real names online anymore - some even push children to join social media sites with the real name.

Although, in most countries students go through an "electronic safety" course, which does teach a small amount of useful information, but not the real stuff.

>that a common purpose of pre-paid was and still is, being a throwaway solution
Unfortunately that doesn't work anymore unless you throw out the phone too - each mobile chipset has a unique IMEI and as soon as you put a SIM in, any identity on that SIM gets tied to the IMEI.

There are a handful of Android mobiles where someone on the XDA forums have worked out how to change the IMEI (it's software handled after all), but those are hard to find.