I have only a small group of friends who communicate via email, but in the end perhaps that’s actually the reality, all the connections in the social media were more like bookmarks in a large public phone book than real connections.
Indeed there’s no way to disregard the modern apps completely, so I have to change my phone number every now and again. People are surprised when I ask them not to save my phone number, and obviously some do it regardless, then happily share their entire phone list with whatever crap app they have. Though the number of spam calls have significantly dropped since I started asking people not to save my number, or rather the time-to-spam have increased, as eventually it’ll leak somewhere.
And of course we have to deal with the greedy tech surveillance. I’ve tried to comment on YT under a video of an old work colleague I lost contact with, but hey, forget, if you’re not on google already you can’t create a YT account without scanning a QR by a phone with google account! On one hand they’re perhaps trying to protect themselves against trivial spam traffic, but for me it’s already too much of privacy breach where pro spammers will get past this anyway.