This also is not entirely accurate. I checked the options, and only two exist: sms or authenticator app. Both phone based.
Mobile phones are the least secure device that you are likely to own, so using them as authenticators is unwise.
bashrc
joined 3 years ago
This is all about getting your phone number, since you can't enable a hardware token without giving them your phone number first.
Phone number then links to "real" identity, bank, home location and so on.
It's not the first time that I've seen a criticism like this article, so this might be a talking point amongst a certain crowd. The slight of hand is that they never mention the shared inbox, or the additional processing which the centralized systems do to serve ads and categorize users.
This is a rather disingenuous article trying to make the implication that the fediverse is comparable (or worse) in electricity use to cryptocurrency mining or to the centralized BigTech systems. That's far from being the case.
The centralized systems do more than just display a timeline chronologically. They also do data mining in the background to put users into advertising categories. On Facebook I think literally every keystroke is data mined. Plus of course there is the serving of ads which takes large amounts of bandwidth - something which doesn't happen in the fediverse to any significant extent.
I maintain an ActivityPub server called Epicyon, and being low on electricity use is one of its goals. You can run it on a Rpi and not have it make much of a ding in electricity bills. This type of system can scale horizontally rather than vertically like the BigTech systems do.
Sorry to hear about Elementary OS. Failing small Linux distro companies is not uncommon though. Also I'm not a fan of Lunduke, so there may be other sites where you can read about what's going on with Elementary without adding clicks to his content.
Have been using Emacs for over a decade, and I'm fairly happy with it.
For myself, the answer is no. Something lightweight and comparable to spactacles I might wear. Anything heavier which needs to be strapped on I would not use.