I am friends with the captains of these teams and the people running these events. I’m not talking about big 1000-person things. These are groups of a dozen people who get no money or monetizable data from it.

I always ended up ban after a fews days because of “suspicious activities” (probably because of VPN or PiHole)

I remember trying to make a fake account with friends for fun many years ago when we I learned about thispersondoesnotexist. Got ID-blocked within a few hours for sus acts, probably less because of the VPN and more because we started friend requesting dozens of strangers and set our birthplace to a food court.

but you do have to provide your phone number.

I managed to used a non-KYC SMS service to register a FB account, only took 2 tries and they refund the failed one. If I’m lucky, I won’t get pinged after a few days like @borokov did.

Just out of interest: what’s on FB messenger

It’s the first line of the post ;)

use alternatives, like Signal, [Fedi alteratives], Matrix, etc

I do. There are some social situations I want to be a part of where that’s just not possible to demand.

if you sign-up using a VPN

If this is the case for FB, I can try a public WiFi for signup and hopefully it won’t bother me if I switch to a VPN after (it will already be obvious which city I live in from the people and events I interact with, the VPN would just be for a small extra layer of isolation)

I assume fake AI-gen faces won’t work?