It’s mostly to combat spam. I created a lemmy account with an obviously bogus e-mail account, hopped on matrix and reached out to the instance admins and they activated my account manually after I asked nicely.

I love how features like these are quickly adopted by some dev in some basement, resulting in support built in the OS and automatically supported.

For example, I recently got myself a brand new Lenovo Legion 7, and the intention was always to nuke the windows install and get Linux up and running. I was curious about the hotkey too adjust the fan/cooling schema, as it seemed to rely on some proprietary Lenovo windows program.

Less than an hour after picking it up at the post office I had a basic Linux Mint ip and running with the GPU drivers working well, and the hotkeys worked out of the box.

I prefer the left road. The right one leads to a perception of being awkward AND stupid.