Korthrun

Microsoft pivoted to Skype. Saved you a click and reading about 1000 words.

I must have been way out of it late last night. I totally missed that you were asking why people do it and not looking for recommendations. Sorry for the spammy nonsense response to your OP.

To the latter question, I’ve seen devices that do OTP and FIDO in addition to basically storing arbitrary strings (e.g. your cc number).

I get harassment scolding me for using Lemmy to advertise when I mention any of the products by name, despite having no affiliation with any of them outside of being a user, but they’re not hard to find if you look.

I’m curious why your listed options are all software that runs on the internet as opposed to a piece of hardware that you connect to your devices.

Is that just because this is the self hosting community?

Why not a piece of hardware instead of self hosting, cloud hosting, etc?

In addition to many of the fine points made in other comments I think it’s silly to overlook the power of celebrity worship and weird-ass parasocial relationships with famous people.

There exists a large number of people who aren’t really interested in discussing <topic_x>, they just want to know what <favourite celebrity whos life I have deluded myself into thinking is attainable by me> thinks about the topic so that they can regurgitate it and feel like they’re “the same”.

I’m sure if Chappell Roan or whatever “the kids” think is cool these days had jumped to Mastodon we’d be seeing something very different. TBH I’m mildly surprised that we didn’t see more record labels standing up instances. It’s always boggled me that people have just trusted the service desperately trying to be known as “X” as an authority on identity.