Thats the norm, not the exception. Back in the early days that was the only way these services operates: AOL IM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, IRC, Yahoo! Messenger, Goo

Thats the norm, not the exception. Back in the early days that was the only way these services operates: AOL IM, MSN Messenger, ICQ, IRC, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, Skype, MySpaceIM etc. Even now you have Discord, Slack, Steam Chat… and that’s before you start taking federated services like (Matrix and XMPP) or other social networks (like Twitter, Reddit, etc) into account. This shift to using mobile numbers is a recent change. And not one I’m particularly fond of either.