More than one account should be able to use the same telephone number.

[RokeJulianLockhart]

Your use case

What would you like to do?

I want to be able to use my telephone number with more than 1 account.

Why would you like to do it?

I change accounts occasionally because I am unable to replace the username of my account. Consequently, migration is necessary. However, I want to retain my ease of access to my previous accounts and backup methods of access, because 2FA is enabled for all of them.

How would you like to achieve it?

Allow usage of a telephone number with more than 1 account.

Have you considered any alternatives?

Yes. 0 exist.

Additional context

Per element-hq/element-meta#893 (comment), this has been reported here.

[turt2live]

Phone numbers often provide an anti-abuse mechanism against spammers and other types of content: allowing multiple accounts to have the same phone number (or email, for that matter) would largely circumvent this mechanism, increasing abusive content on the network, I think.

[RokeJulianLockhart]

@turt2live, I rather doubt, due your comment, that you are familiar with the actual methodology employed to prevent spam, because if this restriction is a method of preventing such, it is useless.

Many tools exist which allow easy spoofing of telephone numbers. If I were a malicious actor, this would not dissuade me whatsoever from mass creating accounts.

[turt2live]

I'm actually very familiar with the methodology, and can say that when the mechanism is disabled we see 10-100x more spam from that server.

No method is perfect, and nothing will prevent spam, but this method reduces the amount of spam significantly.