Also do Twitter and whatever other socials you have. The only way to get them to help is public shame. It's sad, but we don't make the rules, we just play by them.
I'm not on any socials. At this point I'm more ashamed of myself, I'm technical enough to build a homelab, I was just delaying the migration until I had something a bit more solid with k8s and ceph that I could share with a nice UI.
Even a small job that would backup emails and data to S3 and a hdd once a day would have saved me all this embarrassment. Hopefully starting with 2025 will have something to share with HN that is more positive.
It's not, considering the scale. The projected image of reliability and trustworthiness can't be than more of a facade, with only 'some' humans shepherding an endless army of 'zalgorithms on crack'. If any of their spasms is hitting YOU for whichever reason, you're usually out of luck if the expectation is normal, casual means of interaction/recovery.
For me that began with the necessity of providing a SMS-capable mobile phone number for recovery, which I won't ever give them.
They have alternative e-mails, fully verified, which were sufficient for opening that account.
Depending on where you are, that behaviour could even considered illegal, because they are weasle-wording around that necessity in their TOS, letting you make an account without that in earlier times, then changing that somewhere in their TOS later, which you have to agree to, or else...
But still just not explicitely stating that necessity when you're opening some account somewhere in googleverse right now, instead weasle-wording around in some of their fora, and censoring questions about that in there. No matter if in german, or english.
(Imagine endless stream of CENSORED cusswords here...)
edit: If any of your services require a SMS-capable mobile-phone to operate, even if only for authentication/recovery, then F....... say so loud and clear, right from the start, for every service, any place, anywhere, any time!
After being locked out, given that box with options to restore.
Trying several, won't work. All leads to phone number, and not that obvious it has to be mobile, and SMS-capable.
Giving them the POTS/Landline, because even Amazon manages to give instant call-back on that. (In the middle of the night, very early morning even!)
Error like: 'This number has been tried too often.' WTF? That was the first time ever!
NOT this is no mobile-number, try that! Why do they even let me enter that, then?
Why do they insist on SMS, while some voicerobot could sing some f...... code to me on that landline, which I could enter into some form?
Why can't I switch OFF all of that hypersensitive security crap in account settings, because I know it's suspicious, sometimes not logging in for weeks, or even months, without any former cookies, on different devices, from locactions far away, in different timezones, physically, while using VPNs, too?
Do I have to say daily where I am, like a good android-sheepl? Do I have to upload a whitelist of devices with identifiers in advance? Can I authenticate with the imprint of my glans penis on the sensor, then?
